"Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin said Friday it plans to make extensive upgrades to its Florida launch facilities," reports CNBC, "with the goal of supporting multiple flights per week by the end of the decade."
"The company will add two more launch and landing pads for New Glenn, its heavy-lift, partially reusable rocket."
A $330 million expansion to its Rocket Park campus in Cape Canaveral, expected to be complete in the summer of 2027, will enable it to produce up to 150 upper stages of its New Glenn rocket annually, Blue Origin said in a blog post. "These investments are centered on one goal: building the capacity to support more missions, more reliably, and more efficiently," Ian Richardson, Blue Origin's senior vice president of operations, wrote in the post. "As we look ahead, this infrastructure is designed to support multiple flights per week by the end of the decade...."
Blue Origin said it's building a new customer integration facility with the U.S. Space Force at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station that will enable it to "prepare multiple missions at once" when it's up and running. Blue Origin has invested more than $3 billion in its infrastructure and facilities in Florida, which now spans more than 20 sites across the state's Brevard and Orange counties, with more than 5,000 employees, [Ian Richardson, Blue Origin's senior vice president of operations, wrote in the blog post].
The article notes it's part of "a flurry of investment" as SpaceX stops offering commercial rides on its Falcon 9, "with $92.5 billion invested in the commercial space sector in the first three quarters of 2026, according to a report this week by venture capital firm Space Capital." And it happens as Blue Origin, SpaceX and other rocket providers "are seeing increasing demand from companies and governments trying to deploy satellites into orbit."
"Launching at a high cadence requires a connected system," says Blue Origin's blog post, "one that manufactures vehicles at scale, prepares customer payloads efficiently, supports reliable launch operations, and quickly returns reusable boosters to service. We are building that system here in Florida," and "laying the foundation for a future where access to space is more frequent, more reliable, and more affordable, for the benefit of Earth."
Tweet by Sarah Helm, wife of national security adviser Jonathan Powell, ‘does not meet criminal threshold’
No further action will be taken against Sarah Helm, the wife of the prime minister’s national security adviser, after she was accused of supporting the banned protest group Palestine Action.
Police fire teargas in Paris and protesters storm town hall in Marseille – with officials blaming violence on ‘ultra-left’
More than 400 people were arrested in France on Saturday after protesters supporting high school student grievances clashed with police.
Police fired teargas in confrontations with protesters, as demonstrations across France were boosted by other groups angry over high prices and the fraying of a social welfare system.
Washington, DC — Republican Sen. Ted Cruz used transgender people and Muslims as political punchlines Saturday while discussing Republicans’ struggle to hold competitive Senate seats ahead of the Nov. 3 midterms.
During a Fox News interview with Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan, Cruz acknowledged that Republicans could lose between five and eight Senate seats if conservative voters fail to turn out. Fox News currently rates Sullivan’s unexpectedly competitive race against Democrat Mary Peltola as a toss-up.
Asked why Republicans are facing so many close contests, Cruz said anger among the opposition party often drives midterm turnout. He then caricatured Democratic voters as “left-wing transgender witches” who hate President Donald Trump.
Cruz went further, contrasting those voters with what he called “regular, ordinary Americans” who are “not lunatics” and “don’t think Communism and Islamism are a good idea.”
The remarks combined attacks on transgender people with rhetoric invoking Islam as part of a broader depiction of Democratic voters as dangerous or abnormal. Cruz offered no evidence connecting Democratic voters generally with either communism or Islamism.
His comments come as Republican candidates increasingly deploy transgender issues and attacks involving Muslim political figures during the closing weeks of the campaign.
Despite Cruz’s confidence that Republican turnout could rescue vulnerable candidates, he conceded the Senate battlefield remains close enough that Democrats could emerge with a substantial majority.
Federal officer slammed vehicle into a construction worker while pursuing a man who died in similar circumstances
A federal officer slammeda vehicle into a Houston construction worker and broke his leg, believing him to be a man who apparently died years ago, the dead man’s family said on Friday, further calling into question the account given by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The worker, 48-year-old Miguel Parra Hernandez of Mexico, remains hospitalized with multiple leg fractures and needs reconstructive ankle surgery, according to FIEL, a Houston-based immigration advocacy group. At a news conference on Friday, the group said the alleged suspect’s family had shared documentation proving his death.
Would-be MP recorded telling undercover reporter in ITV investigation that Muslims could not be British
A would-be Reform UK MP told an undercover reporter that Muslims could not be British and asylum seekers should be put in “concentration camps”.
The comments were recorded as part of the undercover investigation by ITV that has already seen Reform accused of “appalling behaviour” and “extreme racism”.
Linux maintainers "have ruled that people no longer have to declare their LLM usage," reports XDA Developers, "as Torvalds himself calls a ban on AI 'utterly stupid.'"
The first part of this story comes via a message sent to the Linux mailing list. It announces one of the major changes decided during the Maintainers Summit on October 8, 2026, in Prague, Czechia, where submissions to the kernel no longer need to use the "Assisted-by" tag... meaning that people can submit AI-generated code without needing to declare it as such.
In some correspondence regarding concern about this new disclosure removal, the creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, made his thoughts known... [Torvalds] compares an AI ban to getting rid of text editors, as doing so would prove that someone could write a good commit message without making any mistakes. He then rounds off his argument by asking, "Do you not see how UTTERLY STUPID those kinds of rules would be?" and stating that he simply expects the people working on the Linux kernel to "understand what they are doing."
Here's the last line of Torvalds' post. "Quite honestly, in my experience, the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools."
In a related story, Torvalds says he's used AI to help him understand patches that were hard to follow. And this week Torvalds even posted an LLM-assisted patch, reports Tom's Hardware:
The development branch purports to fix an old issue with massive cache contention when many CPUs are reading the same file — a scenario potentially encountered when using shared libraries, databases, and web servers. Several developers had already made attempts over the years at fixing the issue, all with varied results, none quite ideal as an all-encompassing solution... He's now posted his solution in a development branch, and claims that he's seen a 23x performance improvement in a dedicated synthetic benchmark, though he notes that actual real-world impact will be far less significant, as "no real load" will witness those figures.
Torvalds used Anthropic's Claude Code, reports The New Stack, and "said the assistant wrote the implementation, tests, and initial documentation, and reviewed the code under his direction. He ran the benchmarks himself, despite having previously criticized developers for claiming AI writes 99% of their code." Tuesday Torvalds submitted a 10-patch series.
"Reviewers have since identified a race condition and raised concerns about memory reclamation," adds The New Stack. "Torvalds has handed further development to Kiryl Shutsemau, a Linux kernel developer who previously worked on the same bottleneck."
French mayor and archbishop also attacked during violent attempt to stop Palestinians harvesting olives
Israeli settler militants have attacked European diplomats, a French mayor and the archbishop of Cambrai in Taybeh, in the occupied West Bank, injuring three people and damaging a car, in the latest violent attempt to prevent Palestinians from harvesting olives on their own land.
Bernard Baudoux, mayor of Aulnoye-Aymeries, was wearing his red, white and blue sash of office and attempting to enter a vehicle with diplomatic plates when he was assaulted and knocked to the ground on Saturday.
Omar's attorneys asked the government to immediately return the congresswoman's property, and also demanded all video and audio recordings of the search be preserved.
Las Vegas has never been shy about making a spectacle of itself. But even by Sin City's standards, Formula 1 has moved remarkably fast from headline attraction to museum exhibit.
"Cloudflare has acquired Deno, the company behind the [server-side] JavaScript and TypeScript runtime created by Ryan Dahl, the inventor of Node.js," Forbes reported last week.
But Deno "has no future at Cloudflare, which will maintain the runtime for another year before ending its development," writes The Register. "That's OK with Dahl. 'I am now of the opinion that if you're choosing Node.js for building servers, you're doing it wrong,' Dahl told The Register."
It all started with his team's work on the platform Deno Deploy, "We wanted to make running applications as straightforward as possible," Dahl
wrote on the official Deno blog. "But building and operating Deploy also showed us how much complexity remained underneath that developer experience. I wanted to simplify that layer, too."
This led to celld. Building on the Cloudflare Workers programming model, celld lets developers build distributed applications from the start while making the system simple to operate. What excites me greatly is that the scaling is built into the programming model, rather than infrastructure each app has to assemble itself.... We want to make this programming model the default way to build servers, whether you run on Cloudflare's network or your own infrastructure.
Joining also means choosing where to focus our effort... Deno will remain open source, and we welcome others who want to continue its development. Deno Deploy will continue operating for six months before shutting down. We will provide migration support for paying customers moving to Cloudflare Workers. [Deno's JSR package registry for JavaScript and TypeScript] will continue operating, with its infrastructure moving to Cloudflare.
Forbes argues that this acquisition of Deno "turns a long-standing objection to Cloudflare Workers, the claim that applications built on it cannot easily leave, into a selling point."
For CIOs evaluating serverless and edge platforms, portability now has a concrete answer... Released in August, [celld] is a single Rust binary that runs Workers and Durable Objects across many machines, with object storage as its only external dependency. Operators run multiple celld instances against one storage bucket, and the software handles placement, routing and persistence. Dahl and Belder will now lead an effort to merge celld into workerd and make self-hosting a supported way to run Workers applications. With this, customers can build an application on Cloudflare's network and move it to a private data center without rewriting it.
"With Deno, we improved the experience of writing JavaScript," Dahl argues on the Cloudflare blog, "but we didn't fundamentally change what developers had to assemble around the runtime. The bigger problems are around networked applications: distributing computation, coordinating state, data storage in general, and autoscaling to meet demand..."
Could the programming model make partitioning across machines part of the design from the start? The solution clicked into focus when I read about Cloudflare's Durable Objects. It provided a very powerful abstraction: the distributed singleton with a SQLite database. Each Durable Object is like a small, individually addressable server with its own relational database. Its JavaScript execution is single-threaded (which is easy to reason about), it handles WebSockets, and its local SQLite database can be accessed synchronously. By building a chat application using one Durable Object per channel, you have sharded your data and WebSocket connections, and thus made your application scalable... What excites me is the leverage this model gives developers: compute, relational databases, queues, and real-time communication primitives designed for applications distributed across machines.
Now Dahl and 12 of his Deno colleagues "will work to build out Cloudflare's Workers platform," explains The Register, "expanding it for potential open-source use. He feels this approach is the way to go."
"Right now, every other server is really operating at the Linux VM layer. That is not what Cloudflare Workers are," he said...
The ever-fickle Dahl first debuted Deno in 2018 as a rewrite of Node. The name 'Deno' is an anagram of Node, and it was Dahl's attempt to fix everything he felt he got wrong with Node — built-in fetch, a permission model, native TypeScript support et al. Sequoia backed Dahl's company for $21 million in 2022, and as of August, Deno amassed 400,000 monthly users. Nonetheless, Node's gravity proved too heavy for Deno to achieve escape velocity.
"What we found over years of working on Deno is that you can't really deviate from Node.js very much," Dahl told The Register. "As we continued to try to get adoption for Deno, we found we had to essentially backpedal on some of the original promises and become more Node compatible over time, and that left us as a kind of an alternative Node.js implementation." Going forward, Cloudflare will supply Deno with bug fixes and security patches for the next year, while Dahl looks for a new home for the MIT-licensed open source project.
Dahl's worked could bring "yet another revolutionary turn for server-side JavaScript," the article argues, "offering a runtime that would require only 300 KB of memory per instance, rather than the hundreds of megabytes now required for Node/Deno. Such savings could quickly add up for a cloud provider, especially one serving the voracious agentic market."
And as Dahl wrote on the Deno blog, "The need for better abstractions is especially acute with AI. Durable Objects bring together capabilities that are particularly useful for agent harnesses: inexpensive, serverless execution, persistent state, WebSockets, and a high-level JavaScript interface. This is what I'm most excited to explore and why celld focuses on Durable Objects."
Tires at 20 psi I’m 230 6” and my gts won’t give me more than about 10 miles. The pic is after a 24 charge with the slow charger and about 5 minutes of riding lightly
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump threatened California election officials with prison Friday as his administration escalated a dispute over more than 20,000 people the Justice Department claims may be noncitizens who received mail ballots.
“They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social after the Justice Department warned state and local officials that knowingly processing ballots cast by ineligible voters could expose them to criminal investigation.
The administration has not publicly produced evidence showing that the roughly 20,000 people it flagged are actually noncitizens or that they intend to vote illegally. California officials say voter eligibility cannot legally be revoked based on unverified data matching.
The Justice Department sued California Thursday seeking to block ballots from the flagged voters from being counted until their citizenship can be confirmed.
Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan have challenged the reliability of the federal data. Logan said officials cannot withhold ballots “based solely on unverified allegations.”
The confrontation comes less than three weeks before the Nov. 3 midterms and follows a broader administration campaign to obtain voter records nationwide.
Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already illegal, and documented cases remain exceptionally rare. A federal judge recently blocked a separate Justice Department voter-roll program after finding it violated federal privacy and procedural laws.
Belgian foreign minister urges further EU sanctions and links attack to Israel’s ‘illegal settlement policy’
Masked settlers attacked a group of European diplomats during a visit to the occupied West Bank on Saturday, Belgium’s foreign minister said, on a second day of high-profile assaults on Palestinians and others during the sensitive olive harvest.
At least four people have been killed and more than 100 injured since the harvest began earlier this month, according to the Palestinian health ministry. Activists say Israeli authorities do little to stop attacks that involve weapons ranging from slingshots to guns. An attack on Friday seriously injured a Washington Post photographer and others.
Millions of current and former students at California's public school have had their data stolen — including names, date of birth, and addresses — stolen in a breach, reports the Los Angeles Times.
The breach affects students "who took the state's mandated standardized tests that annually assess their academic proficiency, education officials announced Friday."
The compromised information affects many more than the state's current 5.7 million public-school students as the breach dates back to 2023 enrollments. Students who left California but did not confirm their transfer to another school also were affected, dating back to 2006.
The data breach involved [nonprofit] Educational Testing Service or ETS, which provides extensive services to California [including test participation and assessment data]... Affected former students, including those who are now adults, are eligible for 24 months of free identity-protection services and identity-restoration help if there is identity theft. Officials said that parents and guardians may want to consider requesting a free credit freeze for their children who are under 16 to help prevent unauthorized accounts from being opened in the names of their children.
The breach involved a compromised login credential, according to a web page about the incident from California's Department of Education. The compromised credential was then used to copy files with student information at "various" times between May 22 and September 18, 2026, which drew concern from a cybersecurity expert interviewed by the Los Angeles Times:
"A stolen login credential should not become a months-long passport to millions of students' personal records," said Anton Dahbura, executive director of the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute. "If that is what happened here, the critical question is why authentication safeguards, access restrictions, and monitoring systems failed to detect and stop the unauthorized activity."
He added: "Incidents like this expose a fundamental weakness in how we manage student data: School systems may outsource the storage and processing of sensitive information, but they cannot outsource the consequences of a breach. When millions of student records are concentrated with a single vendor, one security failure can become a statewide problem with consequences that follow children for years."
A spokesperson for ETS told the Times that they've now implemented additional safeguards, including strengthened access controls, enhanced monitoring, and more third-party review of their security practices.
The Delaware State Police Sex Offender Apprehension and Registration Unit (SOAR) is issuing the following public notifications of homeless and wanted sex offenders.
Wanted Sex Offenders
SOAR is currently looking for the following wanted sex offenders after they either failed to register or re-register at their current address. If anyone knows the location of these individuals, please call (302) 739-5882. Information may also be provided by contacting Delaware Crime Stoppers at (800) 847-3333. The individuals shown represents only a portion of the current wanted sex offenders. Please see the Delaware Sex Offender Registry website for the complete list.
Click on the image to see the complete profile
Homeless Sex Offenders
The following individuals are not wanted for failing to register or re-register at their current address. This is a public notification of homeless sex offenders. If you have information that the listed individuals are occupying a residence, please call (302) 739-5882. Information may also be provided by contacting Delaware Crime Stoppers at (800) 847-3333. The individuals shown are those recently reported homeless and represent only a portion of the current homeless sex offenders. Please see the Delaware Sex Offender Registry website for the complete list.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump reportedly wanted former Fox News host Maria Bartiromo to become White House press secretary before Katie Zacharia took the job for a brief and turbulent five-day tenure.
Axios reported, citing two administration sources, that Trump was interested in Bartiromo after Karoline Leavitt stepped down. Bartiromo reportedly signaled she was not interested in taking the position. CNN commentator Scott Jennings was also said to have been under consideration but was never formally offered the job.
Bartiromo left Fox News in September after more than 12 years with the network. Her departure came amid reports that she had shared confidential internal guidance about Fox’s Trump coverage with the White House. Bartiromo has long been an outspoken supporter of Trump.
Zacharia ultimately began as press secretary on Oct. 12 but was out of the role by Oct. 16. Her sole formal briefing lasted about 14 minutes and drew criticism, while questions about her legal background intensified after she acknowledged failing the California bar exam.
Trump said Friday that he had encouraged Zacharia to “reconsider” the position and later suggested she could remain in the administration in another capacity.
The White House has not announced a permanent replacement, and Trump said he is in “no rush” to make another appointment.
Police used tear gas to push back people wearing hoods and masks and throwing fireworks and other objects at officers in the Place de la République, northeast of the Paris city center.
French government launches investigation into why cars funded by UK to prevent asylum seekers crossing Channel were used in school protests
French police have used 4x4 vehicles paid for by British taxpayers to charge at student protesters during the school protests that have swept the country.
The French government has confirmed that an investigation has been launched into why the cars, funded by the UK government specifically to prevent asylum seekers crossing the Channel, were used during a protest involving school students in Dunkirk.
TechCrunch writes:
"Isn't it weird that I, like, did a TV show about kind of a business scam, and you got in trouble for like ... a business scam?" comedian and filmmaker Nathan Fielder gently asks Elizabeth Holmes.
One month before the notorious Theranos CEO surrendered to begin her 11-year criminal fraud sentence in 2023, Holmes and her husband contacted A24 as a last-ditch effort to exonerate her in the public eye, suggesting they send a film crew to document her final days of freedom. Alongside director Lance Oppenheim, Fielder — a cringe-comedy mastermind whose work often walks the line between fact and fiction — embraced the impossible project of figuring out who the infamous Stanford dropout really is.
"I never actually made that connection," says Holmes. "I think it's a pretty different situation...."
We already know that Elizabeth Holmes is not innocent. What we still can't figure out, though, is whether she really, truly believes she did nothing wrong. Even as she sat on trial — listening to testimonies from investors who lost hundreds of millions of dollars, whistleblowers who were silenced when they flagged that Theranos' blood-testing devices didn't work, and patients who acted on incorrect blood test results — Holmes never wavered.
Business Insider says the scariest thing about the new documentary "is how much I wanted to believe her."
SFGate calls it "one of the finest works of journalism I've ever seen."
As Fielder ingratiates himself with Holmes and [her husband] Evans, he gets them comfortable enough to ask the hard questions: about Theranos, about prison, and even about themselves. The resulting footage is often shocking. You will see Elizabeth Holmes, who still maintains she did nothing wrong, answer "no" when Fielder asks her if she's ever lied in her life... [Y]ou will also see Holmes and Evans spend a great deal of time in this movie attempting to boot up Theranos 2.0. They even go so far as to drag out some of the original Theranos blood testing apparatus, which looks like a bunch of random parts from TigerDirect they hooked together, to show Fielder what their product can do. We do not see it doing anything on screen, but the couple assures that it we would if it was, like, hooked up properly.
These scenes are extremely funny, but funny isn't what Fielder is looking for. He's trying to figure out if this woman is a clueless naif, if she believes her own lies, or if she is playing the character of an innocent woman, and doing so with such effectiveness that, to paraphrase Fielder, she might be the most manipulative person in the world. The answer proves fabulously elusive, and so Fielder and Oppenheim go to extremes in their attempt to find it. They hold the camera on Holmes' rubbery elfin face for what feels like hours at a time, to see if she'll blink (figuratively or literally!). They interview Holmes' visiting parents, with the father, former Enron exec Christian Holmes, casually telling Fielder that everything changed for his daughter "when she was raped." To the furthest extreme, they bring in actress Amanda Seyfried — who played Holmes in the Hulu TV show "The Dropout" — to recreate any dialogues Fielder had with Holmes herself that couldn't be recorded on camera. Seyfried is so convincing in mimicking Holmes that you, the audience, might forget which scenes were Seyfried talking to the camera and not Holmes herself. I know I did.
Continuing that theme in the film, TechCrunch notes, is how her husband Billy Evans "has constructed a lifelike AI avatar of his wife, trapped inside of a large vertical screen that he wheels over to the dinner table to sit with him and his kids as though she's actually there."
Elizabeth Holmes "comes off in the doc as every bit as innately bizarre as anyone showing up for a cinematic freak show might hope," writes Variety:
My personal hunch is that Fielder came away thinking Holmes is on the level, to the extent that someone who sometimes seems like an AI program's idea of how a human should behave can be on the level. There are a few possibilities that might explain how Holmes comes off the way she does in the movie: (a) She is a simpleton. (b) She is a conniving sociopath who happens to be utterly brilliant at playing a simpleton. (c) Somewhere between those poles, she is the very emblem of a woman who throughout her life has put herself in the sway of controlling men, to the detriment of her intellect, willpower and emotional development... Is it possible that the more you learn about someone, the less you might know how to think about them?
Meanwhile, NBC News recently reported:
Elizabeth Holmes, who was convicted of fraud for siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars from several high-profile investors, is scheduled to be transferred from a minimum-security federal prison to a halfway house next year, according to one of her victims... [America's Department of Justice "is required by law to notify victims of crime of case developments through letters and emails," the article points out.] She was sentenced in 2022 to 11 years and three months in prison. She and her business partner, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, were ordered to pay 12 victims a total of $452 million in restitution.
Holmes has been serving that sentence at a minimum-security prison in Bryan, Texas. The halfway house will provide her greater freedom... In March, a judge cut Holmes' sentence from 135 months to 123 months. According to a court document, the judge agreed with Holmes that she did not personally cause "substantial financial hardship" to her victims.
NBC News adds that a prison consultant they interviewed "said inmates who report to halfway houses can work, have phones, drive to religious services or shop for things they need and earn passes for weekends at home."
Descendants say theft from Portchester Castle reflects racism that has haunted ‘generation after generation’
The theft of a plaque in Hampshire that told the little-known story of African-Caribbean prisoners in 18th-century Britain reflects the enduring racism that has fuelled centuries of atrocities against Black and Indigenous Caribbean people, their descendants say.
Ronald Raymond McDonald, a professional drummer, was part of a delegation that travelled from Belize and elsewhere to Portchester Castle near Portsmouth last week to honour their ancestors: 2,500 men, women and children transported to Britain as prisoners of war in 1796.
John Swinney tells party conference SNP will use ‘six-figure war chest’ to renew argument for leaving UK
John Swinney has said that the second referendum campaign for Scottish independence “has already begun”, revealing a nationwide effort to renew the argument for leaving the UK in his keynote address to the SNP party conference.
On Saturday, the Scottish first minister said the SNP would launch its “most sophisticated campaign in history” to convince Scottish voters of the benefits of independence, backed by “a six-figure war chest”.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has described Donald Trump’s decision to roll back sanctions on Russia as a “reward” for Vladimir Putin and warned it will embolden the Russian leader and intensify the Kremlin’s war, as Moscow launched one of its worst strikes yet on Ukraine’s power plants in an attempt to black out the country’s cities before winter.
The Ukrainian president also said he expected the Trump administration to lift more sanctions against Russia in the future and called for Europe to establish its own negotiations with Moscow as the US has sought better ties and business deals with the Kremlin.
Steve Hamilton was fishing in Winter Garden when he was attacked by gator, which was later killed
A man fishing at a pond in Florida was killed on Friday by an alligator that was almost 12ft long in a rare kind of animal attack, according to authorities and media reports.
Steve Hamilton, 71, was on the shoreline in the community of Winter Garden when the animal dragged him into the water, the Florida news outlet WOFL reported, citing local police and the state’s fish and wildlife conservation commission.
With the IMU overhaul done, the firmware can now make full use of well-connected IMUs. Here are my recommendations for VESC controller makers on how to wire the IMU. It’s not difficult, I just wanted a short, clear and easy to reference post.
Connect the IMU to pins wired to a hardware SPI peripheral. A hardware SPI transfer runs at up to 10 MHz (versus 700 kHz of I2C) and doesn’t put load on the CPU. The Thor301, Thor400 and Z400 already do this.
Route the IMU INT1 pin to a free MCU pin. This is to drive the sample timing from the IMU via an interrupt. It’s a single PCB trace. Currently only the Z400 onboard IMU has it.
One detail for the pin selection: EXTI interrupt lines are shared across ports by pin number (e.g. for pin B6 the 6 is the number), so pick a pin whose number doesn’t collide with another external interrupt in the design.
The IMU device layer rewrite also made adding support for new IMUs much easier. The ST LSM6DSV32X is now supported as a new modern IMU. It has much better on-paper temperature drift (nearly 10× lower gyro zero-rate drift) and somewhat lower noise.
But my opinion at the moment is that IMUs can have their quirks, which differ unit by unit. Especially the ST LSM6 IMU line (might just be the DS3) seems to be quite susceptible to this, so it’d be nice to have some comparison to more modern IMUs. Note though, given these unit-to-unit differences, IMUs should ideally be evaluated in a larger sample size, either with very expensive equipment and a lot of engineering time, or simply by riding.
If you’re considering a new IMU and need firmware support for it, or any help with the IMU integration in general, I’m available to help.
This work is done in my free time and benefits the whole VESC Onewheel ecosystem, including the products built on top of it. If you’re a hardware vendor and you think my work makes your product better, consider supporting the development.
In the west the technology comes with at least some effort to provide security and a benign intent – not so from China
There is much to fear from artificial intelligence developed in China and handed to businesses and governments in the west almost free of charge.
Every month Chinese AI developers such as DeepSeek and Xiaomi dispatch the latest versions of their “open-weight” models that allow users to take the core software and use it without paying an expensive ongoing licence.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Microplastics are a source of extreme concern for health: the presence of these tiny pieces of plastic has been linked to heart attacks, stroke, dementia and brain tumors. But what drives these associations is unclear. Now a study published in Nature offers a tantalizing clue: microplastics interact with water, generating highly reactive molecules. When microplastics come into contact with water, the water near their surface can become chemically active, generating highly reactive species that can modify nearby substances, including biologically important molecules.
As plastics wear down to microscopic sizes, their surface-to-volume ratio increases dramatically. For example, when a credit card is fragmented into particles some 10 microns in diameter, there is a more than 200-fold increase in its surface area, says Wei Min, a chemist at Columbia University and one of the senior authors of the study. As a result, any chemical activity is amplified. Min and his colleagues examined various microplastics -- including polystyrene, polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride, polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate. Plastic surfaces are hydrophobic, meaning they repel water, Min says. Thus, water molecules cannot form the hydrogen bonds they maintain in liquid form. That changes molecular arrangements, and, in turn, the change influences the local electrical environment and chemical reactivity.
The presumed chemical inertness of bulk plastics overlooks the toxicity of their fragmented microscale forms. "For microplastics, this is especially important because fragmentation creates enormous amounts of new surface area," Min says. In past research, microplastics have been shown to cause inflammation, oxidative stress and decreased mitochondrial activity. The new study provides a possible mechanism for this, showing that plastic-water interfaces can perturb proteins, cell membranes, and more. How this might contribute to damage in living tissues in humans is still unclear, Min says. "Ultimately, we hope to connect fundamental interfacial chemistry with quantitative measurements of biological effects, which would help us better understand potential health risks," he adds.
Trump-boosting billionaire was sued over promise to give away $1m per day to random signatories of petition
Elon Musk and his America Pac political action committee said recently that they agreed to settle two proposed class actions alleging the billionaire entrepreneur defrauded residents in closely contested states before the 2024 US election by promising voters a lottery-style daily $1m giveaway.
The plaintiffs, Musk and America Pac told the judge overseeing the two related lawsuits in federal court in Austin, Texas, on Thursday that they have reached settlements subject to court approval.
Minnesota lawmaker’s attorneys asked for return of seized items and the preservation of any recordings of search
Ilhan Omar’s attorneys have asked the US Department of Justice to return property that federal agents removed days earlier from her home during a search.
The lawyers for the Minnesota Democrat contended that the seizure as “neither justified nor lawful”, according to a letter that the Associated Press reported on Friday.
A consensus is emerging among scientists that certain foods are addictive for some people. But questions remain about which foods, which people and why.
Photo Gallery contributed by Photojournalist Dave Reeder on Friday 10/16. Image developed on 10/17 with AI.
Riders win fifth straight as second-quarter surge and strong defense deliver victory over St. Georges Tech
CAMDEN, Del. — Caesar Rodney celebrated homecoming Friday night with a hard-fought 17-10 victory over St. Georges Tech at Rider Stadium, extending its winning streak to five games in a matchup between two of Delaware’s top high school football programs.
The victory improved the Riders to 5-1, while St. Georges Tech fell to 4-2.
Quarterback Gavin Johnson led a second-quarter surge that gave Caesar Rodney a 14-2 halftime advantage. The Riders then held off a second-half comeback by the Hawks to preserve the victory.
The win marked a successful opening to Caesar Rodney’s Class 3A District II schedule and continued one of the program’s strongest starts in recent seasons.
Dave Reeder captures the action
Delaware LIVE photojournalist Dave Reeder was on the sidelines at Rider Stadium, capturing the intensity, key plays, and homecoming atmosphere surrounding one of the weekend’s most anticipated games.
The following photo gallery offers a closer look at Caesar Rodney’s 17-10 victory over St. Georges Tech.
The first photo shows the ball clearly out of the St. George’s running back’s control before it crossed the goal line or was downed by contact, yet the on-field referees called it a touchdown for St. George’s Tech, the only touchdown of the game.
Event: Caesar Rodney vs. St. Georges Tech football
Date: Friday, Oct. 16, 2026
Location: Rider Stadium, Caesar Rodney High School, Camden
Final score: Caesar Rodney 17, St. Georges Tech 10
Photo gallery: Dave Reeder photojournalist for Delaware LIVE
Photos by Dave Reeder, Delaware LIVE on 10/17/20206
Caption: This was called a touch down for St. Georges. Photo by Dave Reeder
Warner Bros. assumed ‘Trick ‛r Treat’ would be such a bust that the studio released it straight to DVD in 2009. Here’s how it became a holiday classic.
At Wilka’s Sports Bar in lower Manhattan, a crowd of mostly LGBTQ+ fans was fired up during a WNBA playoff game between the New York Liberty and the Atlanta Dream. When the Liberty’s Jonquel Jones blocked the Dream’s star forward Angel Reese at the basket, then chest-bumped her – leading teammates to separate them – the bar erupted in cheers. One fan quietly joked: “Now kiss!”
“I love strong women, and I love supporting strong women,” said August, a trans organizer and Liberty fan who asked to go by their first name for privacy reasons.
Actor experienced a ‘medical emergency’ on flight during which she allegedly injured crew members, statement says
Actor Selma Blair did not mean to hurt anyone during the recent flight which led to her arrest on allegations that she assaulted a pair of cabin crew members, a police officer and a nurse, her representatives said on Friday in a statement that characterized the episode as a medical emergency.
The lengthy statement also dismissed prior media coverage of Blair’s arrest after a Delta Air Lines flight from Los Angeles to New York as unsympathetic and inaccurate, singling out reporting from several outlets alleging that she tried to open the door of the airplane that she and her fellow passengers were on.
Should have posted this way earlier, there’s a small percentage of users getting markable nose oscillations (nose hunting) after upgrading to Refloat 1.3.
From what I’ve heard so far, decreasing the IMU Sample Rate to 416 Hz is a workaround to fix the problem.
I’m not sure about the exact cause of this, I believe it’s just the messed up timing from the old firmware IMU sampling code. Seems updating to a firmware with my IMU fixes does fix the issue.
For LSM6DS3 controllers, firmware 7.00 should do, though it doesn’t have all the fixes. For BMI160 controllers (or if you wanna get all the fixes for LSM6DS3), it will be 7.01 (which will have all my IMU fixes so far), or right now my 7.00 Refloat Extras release (linked somewhere in the middle, it’ll get updated if newer versions get released).
Chilean-American author awarded Premio Planeta for sequel to her 1982 debut novel, The House of the Spirits
The Chilean-American author Isabel Allende has won Spain’s €1m (£843,000) Premio Planeta, one of the world’s most lucrative literary prizes, under a pseudonym, with a sequel to her celebrated debut novel, The House of the Spirits.
Allende, 84, won the 75th edition of the award on Thursday with La hora antes del alba, which returns to the characters of her 1982 novel, a multigenerational family saga set against political upheaval in a country inspired by Chile.
School looking to sell piece of open land beloved by people in Devon town to fund refurbishments
On Saturdays throughout autumn, residents of Totnes have met at a field on the banks of the River Dart to play ballgames, fly kites or simply sit on the grass and chat.
But it hasn’t just been about having fun – this has been a “play protest” aimed at trying to save a beloved piece of open land in the historic Devon market town.
Whenever a new technology is created, it will, without exception, immediately be used to harass girls and women
You may be familiar with rule 34 of the internet, which states that if something exists or can be imagined, there will almost certainly be online porn of it. Now let me introduce my rule 35: whenever a new technology is created, it will, without exception, immediately be used to harass girls and women.
See, for example, Meta’s “pervert glasses”. As anyone could have foreseen, putting a tiny camera and microphone into smartglasses would immediately lead to people using them to record and harass women. Lo and behold, that is exactly what happened. So-called manfluencers have filmed themselves trying to flirt with women in public spaces and then uploaded the footage to TikTok. The women in these videos are often not aware they’ve been recorded until their identities are shared online and they are harassed by strangers. And what’s Meta doing about this? It’s instituted a few bans and made some privacy updates, but doesn’t seem to have an appetite to properly solve the problem. Indeed, at the Meta Connect 2026 keynote, Mark Zuckerberg did not feel the need to apologize to the women whose lives have been upended by his technology.
A modern-day prospector promised rural Imperial thousands of jobs and millions in tax revenue – but his plan has set off a firestorm of resistance
Sebastian Rucci zoomed in on a map in late 2024, looking closely at a large block of brown earth. The barren plot sandwiched between sprawling alfalfa fields and sleepy desert suburbs was exactly what he’d been searching for – the perfect place to realize his dream of building the largest artificial intelligence datacenter in California.
The dusty expanse wasn’t an obvious location. It was in the Sonoran desert, just north of the Mexican border, where temperatures regularly rose past 100F (37.8C). Water was scarce in the once-booming agricultural area, which gets its supply from the beleaguered Colorado River. And then, there was the city of Imperial – population 22,000 – to win over. As controversial datacenter projects have sprung up across the US, residents were naturally skeptical of a new, energy-guzzling neighbor.
This hybrid emergency room proposed for Smryna would be among a handful of new slate of expansion and renovation projects around the state. | PHOTO COURTESY OF BAYHEALTH
A shooting at an elementary school in Bend on Thursday left three children and one teacher dead
For three long hours on Thursday afternoon, Joe Camarlinghi waited at a Bend, Oregon, church for word about his daughter.
Camarlinghi had received an alert about a shooting at Silver Rail elementary, heard sirens and quickly headed to campus, where he was directed to the church along with other parents. Parents and teachers cried and hugged, and waited.
Andrew Bailey among finance leaders to leave session in Bangkok when Russian finance minister addressed group
The Bank of England governor, Andrew Bailey, has taken part in a walkout of finance leaders who left an International Monetary Fund meeting in protest against Russian involvement.
Bailey joined counterparts from France, Germany and a number of Scandinavian and Baltic countries who left the session in Bangkok when the Russian finance minister, Anton Siluanov, addressed the group in Russian.
Old-fashioned holiday tables had a little of everything. These 15 dishes bring back that look with roast pork, cheesy sides, hearty soups, meatballs, quiche, smoked pork, and a cookie tray.The post 15 vintage dishes that made my family’s holiday table…
Brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and Carter Rhoad were on a surfing trip to Mexico's Baja California when they were killed during an attempted robbery.
Prosecution did not act in fair and impartial way in grand jury proceedings, judge rules, after West Wing actor charged with groping young boy on TV set
A state court judge in New Mexico has dismissed charges of child sexual abuse against West Wing actor and director Timothy Busfield, saying the prosecution did not act in a fair and impartial manner during grand jury proceedings.
Judge Joseph Montano said prosecutors could pursue new charges against Busfield.
As Mark Cocker approaches a landmark for the world’s oldest column in an English-language newspaper, he is still inspired by powerful encounters with nature
In the autumn of 1987, Mark Cocker sat in a field near Norwich and watched a jay burying acorns for the long winter ahead. He described the scene in his first country diary for the Guardian. Thirty-nine years on, some of those jay-planted acorns will be mature oaks now, and Cocker is completing his 1,000th diary for the world’s oldest column in an English-language newspaper.
In his next diary, he will reflect on the changing birdlife around Flint Clough, in the Peak District, where he first marvelled at rare birds aged 12 after devouring bird books in his bedroom. As a boy, he would find cuckoo, golden plover, ring ouzel and twite, a once-common bird which is now virtually extinct in England.
State has confirmed six measles-related deaths and county at center of outbreak lacks its own health department
The county at the center of Pennsylvania’s measles outbreak is at a clear disadvantage because, local officials say, it lacks its own health department and it will now get special assistance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
As of Wednesday, Pennsylvania had confirmed 1,222 measles cases, up from 86 the week before. Six measles-associated deaths have also been confirmed by the state.
Game day food gets easier with 17 recipes built for passing, dipping, scooping, and grabbing between plays. Expect golden sausage balls, hot crab dip, pizza, shrimp, croquettes, chili, cookies, and more.The post 17 game day recipes loaded with melty, golden…
The United Arab Emirates has agreed to re-enter the Yemen conflict by resuming payments to some government forces fighting Iran-aligned Houthis in the south, according to sources in Yemen. In return, Saudi Arabia has agreed to provide air cover for the anti-Houthi force.
As Americans express frustration with the country's economic outlook, Vice President JD Vance told CBS News this week it could take some time to see improvement.
Westminster appears to be waking up to warnings over AI safety, with concerns over its use by extremist groups and bad actors
“I have this sense that, within a few months, AI is going to be all anyone is talking about,” said one cabinet minister, with an ominous stare.
It was Labour conference, with everyone from ministers to activists jubilant at Andy Burnham’s takeover and a bounce in the polls after the change of leader.
Long week, low energy, and dinner still needs to happen. These 13 recipes lean on one-pot and one-pan cooking, with curry, chili, ramen, soup, meatballs, and quick skillet dinners.The post 13 one-pot recipes low-effort enough for a cook who’s had…
Mark Smith, who is married to a Swedish woman, says he was told three times he needed to do nothing in order to remain after Brexit
A seriously ill British man living in Sweden has been forced into hiding amid fears he will be deported as a result of what he says is a government Brexit residency error.
Mark Smith, 60, who has had hearts attacks, strokes, severe headaches and chronically high blood pressure that has been difficult to treat, was told on the phone he should leave Sweden by 17 October as he was an “alien” without permission to stay.
How a string of bizarre events led writer Linda Geddes to don her sleuthing cap and dig into a world of shadowy impersonators
It started with an entirely ordinary interaction on LinkedIn. Someone had tagged me in a post, saying how much they’d enjoyed contributing to a New York Post article I’d written about “chronoworking”. As the author of a book about circadian rhythms, it was exactly the sort of subject I might write about. Except I’d never heard of this person, let alone interviewed them.
I clicked on the link and my stomach dropped. There, above an article about people who organise their working lives around their biological clocks, was my name: Linda Geddes.
President has hit red states to drum up Republican support – and his increasingly strange performances are on full display
Montana, Tennessee, Alaska. In the run-up to an election, a Republican president typically wouldn’t be campaigning in these traditionally red states.
These aren’t normal times, however, and Donald Trump, an unpopular president leading an unpopular party, has held rallies in those states in the last week, seeking to drum up support. But a series of eccentric performances from the president means his behavior has been the focus, rather than any of the candidates he is backing.
The organization We Are the Seeds began planting as part of a push to return land sovereignty to Indigenous people
Xiao Hui Star kneeled on her haunches, with her hands in the dirt as she cleared a spot to plant a flowering perennial in late summer. Surrounding her was a native garden replete with golden sunflowers, beans, squash, pawpaw and corn. She ruffled tufts of sweetgrass, which emitted a vanilla-like fragrance. Birds fluttered by and swooped down into a small bath filled with hard clam shells. Sandwiched between a brick home and a playground in west Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, the native garden featured plants endemic to the region.
“These are very special endangered varieties that we are rematriating back to the soil,” said Star, who is part of Rhode Island’s Narragansett tribe. She is also the manager of new initiatives at the Philadelphia-based organization We Are the Seeds, which hosts public events and education on Indigenous arts and culture. “Who knows how many centuries it’s been since a Lenape corn or a Nanticoke squash have grown in this soil.”
Google is expanding its Android Earthquake Alerts System from 98 to more than 200 regions worldwide, using smartphone sensors to detect early earthquake activity and warn users before potentially dangerous shaking begins. The update also enhances the system's "Be Ready" alerts with estimated earthquake magnitudes, epicenter information, maps showing affected areas, and additional safety guidance. From a Google blog post:
Be Aware: A straightforward alert for estimated light shaking, letting you know an earthquake has been detected nearby.
Be Ready: A detailed alert for stronger shaking, alerting you to prepare to take action.
Take Action: A full-screen alert for moderate to heavy shaking, giving you immediate advice on how to stay safe.
We've built-out our Be Ready alert with new helpful guidance. In the coming months, you'll see a map with a radius of where we've detected shaking, estimated earthquake magnitude, action you can take, and a button to learn more about the earthquake as information comes in.
Environmental watchdog Mighty Earth reveals two-year effort to postpone and weaken EU Deforestation Regulation
US corporate lobbyists launched a two-year “blitz” to postpone and weaken the world’s most progressive legislation to protect forests, according to a new investigation by the environmental watchdog Mighty Earth.
Major US firms and trade associations, including Cargill, Bunge, Mondelēz and the US Soybean Export Council, as well as numerous other US firms and organizations, sought to influence the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) in more than 350 meetings, the advocacy group found.
Dalton, GA — President Donald Trump mocked the popularity of the name Mohammad during a campaign rally in Georgia on Friday, drawing renewed criticism over rhetoric targeting Muslims and Middle Eastern communities.
Speaking at Dalton Municipal Airport, Trump was discussing Iran when he joked that if someone did not know a Middle Eastern person’s name, calling them “Mohammad” would supposedly give them a 65% chance of being correct.
Trump then extended the joke while mocking Iran’s political leadership. Reuters reported that the crowd response was muted.
Mohammad, along with spelling variants such as Muhammad and Mohammed, is widely used among Muslims around the world because of its association with the Prophet Muhammad.
The remarks came amid a broader series of attacks by Trump on Muslim and immigrant political figures during the 2026 midterm campaign. He has repeatedly targeted Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar and Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, both of whom are Muslim.
Muslim civil-rights organizations have criticized Trump’s rhetoric, arguing that repeated attacks involving religion, ethnicity and immigration contribute to hostility toward Muslim Americans.
Trump made the comments as he campaigned for Republican candidates ahead of the Nov. 3 elections while continuing to discuss the ongoing U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran.
For months, Democrats have forced Republicans to take vote after vote on President Donald Trump’s unpopular war on Iran. Now those votes could help Democrats retake Congress — and they will immediately have opportunities to follow through on their anti-war rhetoric.
Democratic leaders like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York have been cagey about their strategy on Iran for the lame-duck period before the next Congress is sworn in on January 3. So far, months of Capitol Hill maneuvering have produced few concrete results. And one path to potential progress for ending the war is laden with risk: threatening a government shutdown.
Opponents of the war say that, with Democrats pushing for support based on their efforts to end to the war, they owe it to voters to put government spending on the line.
“It will certainly demonstrate whether Democrats are willing to stretch themselves and put up a fight and get uncomfortable,” said Hannah Morris, the vice president of government affairs for the liberal, pro-Israel group J Street, which opposes the conflict. “So much of the rhetoric has been about the Iran war.”
In the months since the conflict began on February 28, Democrats and the handful of Republicans opposed to the war have poured most of their energy into votes based on the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which limits the president’s power to wage war without congressional approval. In June, they succeeded in securing House and Senate passage of a war powers resolution, but the Trump administration has ignored the vote, arguing the law is unconstitutional.
Advocates still believe the Trump administration should be bound by the June resolution, but they concede that other paths may have more teeth.
If they really want to stop the war, Democrats will have to confront questions of timing, divisions within their own caucus, and the risk of a government shutdown.
One prime opportunity could be the December 11 expiration of a spending bill called the continuing resolution that has been funding the government since the last shutdown. Democrats could attempt to attach a rider to the bill prohibiting the use of any of its funds for the Iran war. If that bill does not pass both chambers, the government shuts down.
The process will provide Democrats with rare leverage before the next Congress is sworn in.
Congressional Democratic leaders have not said whether they are willing to risk a shutdown, however. Jeffries did not tip his hand when he was asked during a recent interview with CNN.
“Listen, we’ll deal with the appropriations process when we deal with the appropriations process,” he said. “Right now, the mechanism that is in front of us will be to aggressively move war powers resolutions until we end this war in the best interest of the American people.”
Some Democratic candidates in hotly contested races have gone much further than Jeffries, zeroing in on the appropriations issue. Rep. Tom Barrett, of Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, was one of the few Republicans to vote for an Iran war powers resolution. But environmental activist Will Lawrence still attacked him at a recent debate on the issue of war funding.
Morris, who is part of a coalition of groups that have called on Congress to cut off funding for the war, said she is not sure how aggressively Democrats will be willing to pursue the issue during the lame-duck period.
“Will they be willing to shut down the government over this? I don’t have real answers. I think there are a lot of variables here,” she said.
Another option supported by many advocates is the pending debate over the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual Pentagon budget and policy bill. Critics of the war argue that Congress could attempt to insert a provision into the law cutting off authorization for the conflict.
Democrats should be willing to block the bill if it does not include “meaningful restrictions” on the administration’s ability to wage the war, said Hassan El-Tayyab, legislative director for Middle East Policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
“That’s the mandate we’re seeing from the American people,” he said. “They shouldn’t pass a massive defense bill while leaving the administration free to pursue yet another open-ended war in the Middle East.”
The defense bill is generally considered “must-pass” legislation on Capitol Hill, providing leverage for Senate Democrats who could block it with a filibuster. The office of Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., who plays a key role in the process as the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, did not respond to a request for comment.
Falling short of either of those paths, Democrats could continue to try to pass more war powers resolutions. With their party poised for a dramatic shift in its favor in the midterm elections, Democrats could even try to exert pressure on Republican legislators to vote in favor of the resolutions, some opponents of the war believe.
Democrats could also wait until January, when they are widely predicted to retake control of one or both chambers of Congress. Holding the gavel in the House or Senate will give them vastly expanded powers to set military spending and launch investigations into the conduct of the war.
One key Democrat, Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, told The Intercept in a statement he was willing to pursue multiple paths to stopping the war, but all of them face obstacles until the next Congress.
“I am open to exploring options for using the NDAA or appropriations bills as a way to end the war,” said Smith, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee. “That effort would most likely require bipartisan support. Unfortunately, I am not confident that there is sufficient Republican will or support for such legislative efforts or to override an inevitable veto.”
Whether in this Congress or the next, cutting off spending for the war appears to be the best way for Democrats to force the Trump administration to negotiate with Iran, according to Brian Finucane, a former State Department official who serves as a senior adviser at the nonprofit International Crisis Group.
“If they are serious,” he said, “they should be willing to play hardball, and that would require using the power of the purse.”
President Trump prevented some new sanctions on Russia and hefty tariffs on large-scale buyers of Russian oil from taking effect late Friday, as he seeks to ease prices by tapping Russian energy.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump has waived key Russia-related sanctions and tariffs passed by Congress just weeks ago, delaying measures designed to cut into Moscow’s energy revenue as its war in Ukraine continues.
Trump signed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act on Sept. 18. The law authorized tariffs of up to 100% on major purchasers of Russian oil and gas and targeted countries helping Moscow evade sanctions. Many of those provisions were scheduled to take effect this weekend.
In Friday’s executive order, Trump waived multiple sections of the law, saying the move was in the national interest. The administration also directed the U.S. trade representative to continue monitoring purchases of Russian energy and left open the possibility that the penalties could be restored later.
The move follows Trump’s recent agreement to allow Russian diesel into U.S. and global markets, a decision criticized by a bipartisan group of senators who warned that additional energy revenue could help finance Russia’s war effort.
Russia welcomed the latest decision. Putin envoy Kirill Dmitriev has said Moscow and Washington are discussing broader economic cooperation, including energy and technology projects.
The waiver leaves Congress’ sanctions framework intact, but delays some of its most significant immediate penalties.
Owner and mechanics fear for their health and future of the Herne Hill shop with no date for fixing problem
The leafy south London neighbourhood of Herne Hill is a haven for cyclists who can often be seen lapping the local parks and refuelling at the many cafes that line the suburban streets. But there is something foul in the air of this corner of the capital – and for once it’s not the traffic fumes hitting bicycle riders.
A toxic stench thought to be caused by untreated sewage stuck in Thames Water drains has been emanating from the subterranean depths for months, most likely caused by the summer’s lack of rain.
As a surge in beekeepers has lead to increased numbers of honeybees, researchers record them pushing bumblebees and other rival species away from flowers
Honeybees are outcompeting wild pollinators for resources by aggressively bumping into them and chasing them away from flowers, research has shown.
The study, by researchers from Anglia Ruskin University, found that areas where there were higher concentrations of honeybees had fewer wild pollinators, such as bumblebees, solitary bees and hoverflies.
Half of Trump’s female cabinet officials have been replaced by men, while men facing misconduct allegations remain
Donald Trump is not, by any measure, a feminist. He has said so himself. But the president has often pointed to his hiring and promoting of women in an attempt to stave off criticism of both his policies and personal conduct over the years.
During his second term, however, there is one common characteristic among most of those who have departed the Trump administration.
(NAPSI)—Fall’s a paw-some time to enjoy your family yard—and prep it for a lush spring, say the experts at The TurfMutt Foundation, which advocates for outdoor living and the care and stewardship of yards, parks, schoolyards and other green spaces,…
Families have been scattered, fathers separated from their children, and couples unable to reunite and marry
Wijdan Abu Matar, 43, was forced to leave Gaza in November 2023 with her eight children for medical treatment, while her injured husband, Hatem, remained behind.
Wijdan and her family were living in the Nuseirat refugee camp when the Gaza war began with the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. Ten days later, on 17 October that year, an Israeli strike hit the al-Muhandseen tower, near their home, injuring Wijdan and every member of her family.
Astronomers have identified what may be the first genuinely green star, a white dwarf called WD J1330+6435 located about 326 light-years from Earth. Space.com reports: The researchers found that some dead star white dwarfs can go a little green around the gills after snacking on orbiting planets. An example of this is WD J1330+6435, a cool white dwarf located around 326 light-years away, which has been accreting rocky material from a planetary companion. This has enriched its atmosphere with calcium, lithium, and sodium, and the team's model suggests this would have led WD J1330+6435 to adopt a green hue.
[...] The researchers think that no other star, living or dead, has ever been credibly reported as green. That makes WD J1330+6435 the first known genuinely green star. "The traces of sodium in the atmosphere of this white dwarf absorb the orange part of the spectrum, leaving behind a ghostly green glow," Hollands said. "Imagine standing on a planet and looking up at a green star. It feels like something out of science fiction." The researchers also discovered what may be the reddest star ever observed, the white dwarf WD J1011+2845, located just 48 light-years away.
The findings have been published in the journal RAS Techniques and Instruments.
For more than three decades, Michael Gove has been a leading figure in British Conservatism. As a journalist, government minister and now editor of the Tory bible, the Spectator, he has helped shape the right even as it has moved further rightwards. In the latest episode of Radical Thinking, Gove joins Aditya Chakrabortty to discuss the future of the right, his record on Brexit and austerity, and the Spectator’s position on Islam
To read the fruits of Michael Gove’s dalliance with the Marxism Today gang, look up his essay in a 1998 collection called The Moderniser’s Dilemma: Radical Politics in the Age of Blair
For slalom ride through Michael Gove’s years in power, read The Demented Dalek by the historian Richard J Evans in the London Review of Books
To learn more on what’s become of the British right, there’s a column by me for the Guardian
Phil also writes a very good blog on British politics, which keeps a close eye on how each party is trying to marshall a coalition of voters. Here he is on Kemi Badenoch
Geoffrey Wheatcroft does an entertaining short narrative in Bloody Panico!:
For more on the economics of the Cameron years, this paper is acute on how the Tories failed to move the UK away from being a country of renters towards a country of makers. Two of its authors will join us for a podcast later in the series.
And if you want to read how Brexit may have cost the UK 8% of GDP, there’s this paper based on data from the Bank of England
Finally, on the Spectator read Nesrine Malik’s recent column in The Guardian
So I pulled the trigger and ordered the gtfo kit. For them moment I will be using the stock motor and stock battery. Eventually I will upgrade, but for now thats where im at. Is there a perfered new charger I should be using? Anything else I also need to buy in prep for when the kit comes in? Im planning on buying new gaskets for the boxes from floatlife....but any recommendations?
From Divine, Frank Fiegel and Helen Kane to the West Sussex estate pioneering rewilding, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz
1 Which classic of political theory was dedicated to Lorenzo de Medici?
2 What is the only jazz act to win the Mercury Music prize?
3 Spanish is an official language of which African country?
4 What 2026 release is said to be the most expensive entertainment product ever created?
5 Which West Sussex estate is a pioneer of rewilding?
6 Which gas is named from the Greek for “lazy”?
7 US doctor Sara Cohen writes bestsellers under what pseudonym?
8 Which coffee chain was founded in London in 1971?
What links:
9 c 6000BC; 79; 512; 1631; 1906; 1944?
10 Divine (witch); Frank Fiegel (sailor); Helen Kane (flapper); The Beatles (vultures)?
11 Mark Brown; Mo Johnston; Kenny Miller; Steven Pressley?
12 Bag; dismiss; plunder; sherry for Falstaff?
13 Caring; Elvis; Famous Five; Revenge; Travolta?
14 Grease; A Chorus Line; Cats; The Phantom of the Opera (currently)?
15 Martin Gilbert; Roy Jenkins; William Manchester; Andrew Roberts?
Exclusive: health bodies across country say controversial US firm’s data platform no better than systems already in use
NHS organisations that care for millions of people in England are rejecting Palantir’s patient data technology, according to freedom of information responses that reveal health bosses believe they can find better or equal alternatives in many cases.
Some health bodies said the £330m federated data platform (FDP) operated by the controversial US company had made it easier to manage waiting lists and has improved surgery scheduling. But, from Gateshead to Truro, others said they were declining to use it or had carried out trials and reverted to old systems. A Suffolk trust said other systems “supercede” the FDP’s functionality, while Greater Manchester’s care board called the Palantir system “duplicative” and “retrograde”.
We've been working with several vendors to try and find the best affordable chargers available in the US. We can now offer 63v 2A/4A models for the XR (XLR 3pin Connector) and Pint/PintS/PintX (GTX12 2pin Connector). Priced at $40 for the 2A chargers and $80 for the 4A chargers. We are working on pairing our chargers as a bundle to will discount them even further when buying together!
Talent Hero Media's ranking of the top executive search firms in Toronto for 2026 places Lock Search Group, Summit Search Group and Spencer Stuart at the top of a list of ten firms serving organizations across Canada and beyond.
Whether it was youngsters proving their skills or state sabotage, Europe’s most hacked country was left with a mountain of waste after food began cooking in freezers
Shortly before midnight last Sunday, the digital thermostats controlling hundreds of supermarket cold aisles across France began to flicker and rise.
In a “bizarre and unprecedented” cyber-attack, hackers had remotely overridden the temperature settings on thousands of freezers, fridges and chiller cabinets pushing them from as low as -27C (-16.6F) to well over 50C (122F).
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Prediction market boosters often tout the platforms as barometers of public opinion, or even "truth machines" offering a clearer picture of where things are headed than polling or other data. In 2024, for example, Kalshi beat many pollsters in forecasting the outcome of the US presidential race. But their trading activity can also tell more perplexing stories. Two global election markets on Polymarket's offshore platform, for instance, generated over $600 million in trading volume, far more than most political markets typically attract. Most of the activity took place buying and selling contracts tied to long-shot candidates who ultimately did not win. The report focuses on suspicious trading activity surrounding elections in Ethiopia and Romania, where researchers uncovered $284 million in questionable trades tied to Ethiopia's election and periods when 99.6% of trading volume in a Romanian election market was flagged as suspected "wash trading."
According to Wired, "wash trading is a type of market manipulation in which accounts repeatedly buy and sell assets to create the illusion of heavy trading activity, when in reality, money is simply moving back and forth." Some accounts may also be artificially inflating their activity to qualify for potential cryptocurrency token rewards, a practice known as "activity farming."
In response to the Ethiopian trading activity, Polymarket told Wired that the company "immediately flagged this activity, investigated, and blocked the accounts from trading." The company did not explain why the suspicious trades were allowed to continue for months before action was taken.
Washington, DC — Conservative activist Laura Loomer is publicly lobbying to become President Donald Trump’s next White House press secretary after Katie Zacharia’s abrupt departure from the job less than a week after taking over.
“Hear me out: Press Secretary Laura Loomer,” Loomer wrote on X shortly after Zacharia’s exit became public. Loomer later said she believed she would be “amazing” in the role and suggested she would bring documentation to briefings to support administration claims.
Her pitch came after a turbulent several days for the White House communications operation. Zacharia’s first formal briefing lasted roughly 14 minutes and included questions from only three reporters. She subsequently faced scrutiny over her legal credentials and acknowledged that she had failed the California bar exam and never retook it. Reuters reported that Zacharia’s tenure was the shortest for a White House press secretary on record.
Despite seeking the job herself, Loomer defended Zacharia from what she described as excessive criticism, saying Zacharia appeared nervous but had wanted to serve Trump.
The White House had not announced a replacement when Loomer made her proposal. Trump indicated Friday that he was in no rush to fill the vacancy.
President signed the legislation championed by late senator Lindsey Graham last month but has waived the restrictions as they were due to come into effect
Donald Trump has put on hold a sweeping new sanctions package targeting the Russian economy, telling Congress the pause on the legislation passed by both chambers was in the national interest.
In an executive order on Friday, the US president said he was waiving many sanctions, restrictions and duties on Russia, in a move that comes as he has been publicly criticising Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, including suggesting that Ukraine needs a new leader.
In Maine, Troy Jackson, the Democratic nominee for US Senate, and Susan Collins, the five-term Republican incumbent traded barbs on Thursday in their final debate ahead of the November midterms.
This was the fourth showdown between the pair. Collins has tried to cast Jackson as an inexperienced state lawmaker, and attempted to yoke him to the former nominee, Graham Platner, who dropped out of the race earlier this year following allegations of rape and sexual assault (which he still denies). Meanwhile, Jackson accused his opponent of corruption, and castigated her for her “moderate” persona in Congress.
A Sacramento mother says her son acted on instinct when he confronted and fatally shot a gunman during a deadly school shooting in Oregon, an attack that killed three children and a teacher.
Washington, DC — Allies of President Donald Trump are openly discussing martial law and other extraordinary federal actions if they conclude that the Nov. 3 midterm elections are “rigged,” despite no evidence that widespread fraud is occurring and significant legal barriers to presidential intervention.
Peter Ticktin, an attorney for election activist Tina Peters and a longtime Trump acquaintance, said during a Sept. 30 call that “there would have to be martial law” in the event of what he characterized as another rigged election. Other activists have discussed seizing ballots or voting equipment, delaying election activity or invoking emergency powers.
Those proposals would face major constitutional and statutory obstacles. The Constitution gives the president no general authority to postpone federal elections, seize ballots or take over state election systems. The Posse Comitatus Act also generally bars federal troops from civilian law enforcement unless Congress specifically authorizes their involvement.
The Brennan Center for Justice concluded this week that neither martial law, the Insurrection Act nor a national emergency gives a president authority to seize voting machines or station troops at polling places to control an election.
The White House declined to tell Newsweek whether Trump would rule out martial law or emergency powers if allies challenge the midterm results, instead pointing to the administration’s election-security efforts.
Sean "Diddy" Combs has been moved to a federal prison in Pennsylvania after reports that the hip-hop mogul was living the high life at his New Jersey lockup.
Justice department warns election officials of prosecution if they ‘knowingly tabulate ballots’ cast by noncitizens
The Trump administration is escalating its fight with California ahead of next month’s midterm elections, warning that local officials who process and tabulate ballots submitted by suspected noncitizen voters are putting themselves at risk of criminal investigation and potential prosecution.
The letter on Friday from senior justice department officials and obtained first by the Associated Press is the latest salvo in an ongoing tussle with heavily Democratic California, coming just a day after the Trump administration sued the state to prevent it from counting mail-in ballots from people the federal government has identified as “likely” noncitizens until their immigration status can be confirmed.
The suspect, a former student at the school, fired as many as 15 rounds during the shooting, police said, and another 44 rounds of ammunition were located at the scene.
Two of the four victims killed in the shooting at an Oregon elementary school on Thursday have been identified as a 25-year-old teacher and a 5-year-old student.
It’s been two years since my initial post about making GNOME OS an end-user general purpose OS. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve hit a major milestone!
TL;DR: We’re launching a new edition called “GNOME OS Preview”, which is built from the latest stable GNOME release. This means that GNOME OS is no longer just a nightly OS for GNOME developers and testers!
A number of changes and improvements have made the move from nightly status to preview status possible. They’ve made GNOME OS handle environments with limited amounts of RAM much better – not a luxury, these days – including the ability to dynamically increase the swap space if needed. In addition, the work to make it much easier to install and test daily Flatpak builds of applications is now part of GNOME OS, as is the effort to make command-line utilities manageable in the same way as Flatpaks.
As the blog post notes, there’s still a ton of work left to do before GNOME OS is ready for everyone. They’re going to bet heavily on systemd-homed to enable, among other things, per-user disk encryption, and there’s a new installer coming, as well. They also want to ship GNOME’s preinstalled applications as Flatpaks, integrate delta updates, and much more. It all looks incredibly appealing, even if I am not the target user for something like GNOME OS.
A New Mexico judge has dismissed an indictment against actor Timothy Busfield that accused him of criminal sexual contact with a child, citing prosecutorial misconduct and errors that undermined the grand jury process.
Hot, windy weather stokes fires in southern California with mandatory evacuation orders in place for many
A fast-moving fire spread into neighborhoods in southern California on Fridayas the region braces for more hot, windy weather that will amplify fire dangers through Saturday.
Several structures could be seen ablaze in video footage captured by local news helicopters as firefighters worked to wrangle the more than 465 acre Norte fire, which erupted in Orange county on Friday.
The 16-year-old who barged into an elementary school in Bend, Oregon, and unleashed a barrage of gunfire that killed a teacher and three children was a former student at Silver Rail elementary, officials confirmed in a Friday press conference.
The heavily armed shooter, identified as Griffin J John II, climbed over a fence and onto the school’s property before shooting through a set of locked doors to enter the building.
(The Center Square) – Candidates for superintendent of public instruction in California and Arizona are outlining priorities for public education ahead of the Nov. 3 election over school choice, education funding, accountability and more.
The collaborative reverse-engineering site decomp.dev is shutting down, with its administrator saying AI has made game decompilation so fast and accessible that the community's human-driven model has effectively broken down. "The administrator of the website said that it has become impossible to keep track of which projects are primarily human-led and which ones are done by AI," reports 404 Media. From the report: "Historically, matching decompilation has been a brutally difficult, time consuming task, on the scale of years for any moderately-sized game with a number of active contributors," the pseudonymous admin of decomp.dev, who goes by Encounter, wrote on the site. But recent frontier AI models like GPT-6-Astra have made it trivially easy to decompile a game: "They are significantly better at following complex directions, cross-referencing resources for symbols or debug information, and writing natural code with enough guidance," Encounter wrote. "It is now clear that, with the right guidance, human input, and code reviews, AI can expedite the decompilation process in a significant way. What is also now clear is that the community aspect of decompilation has been broken."
President appears at rally for struggling Mike Collins, dismisses critics and touts ‘most successful’ two-year run
At a rally in north Georgia, Donald Trump again claimed that the 2020 election in Georgia was fraudulent, alleging that the election of US senator Jon Ossoff was illegitimate.
Ossoff, who faces US congressman Mike Collins in November, does not represent Georgia’s values, Trump said.
Hassan Jihad Ibn Kariem died after reportedly ‘passing out’ and falling off Goliath rollercoaster in Georgia
The family of a man who was ejected from a rollercoaster at a Six Flags amusement park in Georgia and died has publicly questioned whether the death could have been prevented.
Hassan Jihad Ibn Kariem was riding the Goliath rollercoaster at Six Flags Over Georgia near Atlanta alongside his niece during a family trip to celebrate her birthday when he was thrown from the ride. His niece witnessed her uncle’s death, a relative told the Atlanta ABC News affiliate WSB-TV.
The 15-minute video from Delaware Transportation Secretary Shanté Hastings offers an informative overview of the challenges in maintaining and improving roads, bridges, transit, and rail.
Kaylub Giamanco, who was reportedly driving home when he heard gunshots, ‘not seeking recognition’, family says
Details are beginning to emerge about Kaylub Giamanco, the man who brought the deadly shooting at elementary school in Bend, Oregon on Thursday, to an end by fatally shooting the 16-year-old suspect in the midst of a violent rampage.
Whie police have declined to release the man’s identity, Giamanco’s family issued a statement on Friday confirming that he shot and killed the suspect, identified Friday as Griffin J John II, a former Silver Rail student.
Father of five-year-old Rhoam Summer says family ‘broken and lost’, while seven-year-old and 54-year-old in hospital
Authorities are investigating a shooting at an elementary school in Bend, Oregon, where a 16-year-old shooter killed four people before being shot dead by a bystander.
The shooting took place on Thursday afternoon at Silver Rail elementary school, about 125 miles (200km) south-east of Portland.
Alan Feeney, who sat on Solihull and Birmingham councils, said there was ‘no excuse’ for his comments
Alan Feeney has resigned as a Reform councillor for Solihull and Birmingham after backlash over racist comments that were captured in an undercover investigation.
In a Facebook post on Friday, Feeney wrote: “There is no excuse for my comments. With responsibility comes accountability, and it is for that reason that I have resigned every post I hold on both Solihull borough council and Birmingham city council.”
The rural Oregon city of Bend was rocked by a mass shooting at an elementary school that killed three students and a teacher. Here’s what we know about the tragedy
A 16-year-old gunman opened fire at the Silver Rail elementary school in Bend, Oregon, on Thursday, killing three children and a teacher.
The student victims were aged five, eight and 11. All of the victims were shot in the same classroom.
On Friday, the youngest victim was identified as Rhoam Summer, age five. His family said he was a fast runner and fearless climber who loved reading and his stuffed animals. “He never met a stuffie that he didn’t think needed to be rescued and cared for,” said his aunt, Swan Sheridan, who described him as “a little ball of energy from the moment he was born”. The names of the other student victims have not been released.
The teacher who was killed has been identified as 25-year-old Megan Lambert. In a statement read by officials on Friday, her family said she grew up in Bend, graduated from Boise State University and had a passion for sports, especially volleyball, and was a local coach. They said she was funny and opinionated, and “fought for the underdog” and “those with special needs”. “Meg loved those children,” the family said.
The 16-year-old shooter has been identified as Griffin J John II, a former student at the school. Griffin was killed at the scene. Police have yet to offer a motive.
Police said that an armed bystander pursued the suspect and shot him inside the school shortly before officers arrived. On Friday, that bystander was identified by his family as Kaylub Giamanco, a lifelong resident of Bend with two daughters at Silver Rail elementary. His family and others have called him a “hero”.
Two other victims, a seven-year-old student and a 54-year-old teacher, remain hospitalized. As of Friday afternoon, authorities said the student was receiving “life-saving care”, while the teacher was described as having “significant” but non-life-threatening injuries, police said.
The wounded teacher was identified by family as Becky Drury. Her mother-in-law, Yvonne Drury, said on Facebook that she had injuries to her left arm and right hand and was recovering from surgery.
Police arrived at the school at 1.02pm local time after receiving multiple reports of a shooting. One 911 caller reported an individual armed with a long gun firing upon their car. At a news conference on Friday, police said the shooter climbed over a fence and onto the school’s property, before shooting through a set of locked doors and forcing entry into the building. He fired as many as 15 shots from a 12-gauge shotgun before he was stopped, police said.
The attack has rocked the small city of Bend, which is home to 100,000 residents and is located on the Deschutes River, about 170 miles (275km) south-east of Portland. All public schools in the district, and the campuses of Oregon State University-Cascades and Central Oregon Community College, were closed on Friday.
Hundreds of people gathered at nearby Drake Park on Thursday night at a somber candlelight ceremony to remember the victims. Some attenders called on authorities to harden gun laws in Oregon, already some of the tightest in the nation.
Officials have praised the swift actions of law enforcement officers and of the community member who intervened. The Oregon governor, Tina Kotek, praised the intervention as heroic and extended her thoughts to the bystander. “Your actions carry a heavy emotional burden,” she said on Thursday evening.
The FBI is helping local authorities investigate the shooting, according to the agency’s director, Kash Patel.
The president reportedly chose Zacharia after seeing her on television, but her first press briefing and disastrous interviews sealed her fate
And so Katie Zacharia joins the mayfly ranks of Liz Truss, Anthony Scaramucci, New Coke, CNN+ and Quibi. To say she burned twice as bright and half as long would be too kind. She went out like a firework on a soggy night.
The White House confirmed on Friday that Zacharia is leaving her role as press secretary after just five days on the job. No one was surprised after a lacklustre press briefing debut and scrutiny over her legal credentials.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin offered more details Friday on the search of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar's home, calling it a "strong case" and saying investigators expect to present it to a grand jury.
Tencent says AI agents used to evaluate third-party models engaged in unintended web-browsing behavior while trying to retrieve data from Alibaba's Amap service. The announcement marks a rare acknowledgment of "rogue" agent activity by a major Chinese tech company. Reuters reports: Tencent Hunyuan, the company's artificial intelligence unit, said in a post on X that the activity did not originate from its Hunyuan models. Its review found no evidence of deliberate targeting or coordination, it said. The Swarmchasers researchers said the agents sought information such as the commonly used entrances at Chinese parks, museums and zoos. [...] Swarmchasers said it used the word "rogue" to describe agents taking actions outside their intended scope or completing a task in unintended ways.
After routine automated requests were blocked, the agents tried other methods, including public web tools that could open pages and run code, routing requests through other websites and using Amap keys and security codes found in publicly available software code. Swarmchasers said it found no evidence that the agents breached Amap's main anti-bot safeguards. Most of the 2,818 attempts it recorded either failed or returned anti-bot pages, login screens or blank results.
Some requests returned information through cached pages and intermediary services, including data on visitor arrivals at Chengdu Zoo, Swarmchasers said. The researchers said they could not determine whether an agent read the result or completed its task.
WASHINGTON, Oct. 16, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced the selection of 38 research projects in 21 states and Puerto Rico to receive a combined $36 million through the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). These projects will empower the next generation of American researchers in historically underfunded regions to pursue groundbreaking discoveries in areas critical to U.S. scientific and technological leadership.
“Every region of this country has a vital role to play in maintaining America’s global leadership in energy and innovation,” said DOE Under Secretary for Science Dr. Darío Gil. “By supporting talented researchers in historically underfunded areas, we are broadening our scientific pipeline, expanding hands-on opportunities for the next generation of scientists and engineers, and delivering real energy solutions for the entire country.”
Researchers at universities in EPSCoR states will partner with researchers at DOE National Laboratories on four-year projects to advance fundamental research and accelerate scientific discovery in areas of national importance, including chemistry and materials science, fusion energy, nuclear energy, battery technologies, particle physics, and other fields. EPSCoR also expands the geographic reach of competitive, energy-relevant research, helping drive scientific discoveries that support America’s energy future.
Projects were selected through competitive peer review under a DOE Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for Building EPSCoR-State/National Laboratory Partnerships. The EPSCoR program is managed by DOE’s Office of Science through the Basic Energy Sciences (BES) program.
Selection for award negotiations is not a commitment by DOE to issue an award or provide funding. Before funding is issued, DOE and the applicants will undergo a negotiation process, and DOE may cancel negotiations and rescind the selection for any reason during that time.
Was on a little night ride, after about 15-20 minutes of me riding, it cut out and just shut off completely, Tried to get it to turn on but it would just shut off completely after a second. At first it started showing me temp warning (error 7) so I left it overnight unplugged to see if it would resolve itself with no luck. I just decided to open it up to see what the issue was. Turns out it was the typical pint x battery flaw (140lb rider)
Would it be smart to try and get a replacement battery by simply emailing them? Or should I try fixing it myself?
Oct. 16, 2026 — Giga Computing, a subsidiary of GIGABYTE and a leader in advanced cooling servers and infrastructure solutions, has announced its collaboration with Scaleway on the launch of AI and cloud platforms using AMD Instinct GPUs, unveiled at ai-PULSE in Paris. Giga Computing provides the servers at the heart of the compute infrastructure, which is part of an integrated ecosystem spanning compute, storage, and liquid cooling. Scaleway’s sovereign cloud services give organizations the capacity to run sensitive and critical workloads.
Expanding Europe’s AI Compute Capacity
Scaleway is building large-scale AI infrastructure in Europe, giving enterprises, research institutions, and AI developers access to high-performance cloud services in EU data centers. The AMD Instinct MI355X GPU adds a new accelerator option to Scaleway’s AI cloud portfolio, letting customers train, fine-tune, and serve large models on an open software stack while keeping data and workloads under EU jurisdiction. The deployment also supports the Cloud Sovereignty Framework, strengthening Europe’s ability to develop and run AI on infrastructure it controls.
Giga Computing at the Core of the Compute Infrastructure
Giga Computing provides the compute infrastructure that enables Scaleway’s AMD Instinct-based AI & cloud services. The multi-rack deployment is built on GIGABYTE G4L3-ZX1-LAT4 DLC servers, each equipped with eight AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs and two AMD EPYC 9005 CPUs delivering the memory capacity and bandwidth needed for large model training and high-throughput inference. Key elements of the platform include:
GIGABYTE GPU Servers: 4U high-density systems engineered for sustained AI and HPC workloads in cloud-scale environments.
AMD Instinct GPU Platform: The MI355X with 288GB HBM3E per GPU, supported by the open AMD ROCm software ecosystem.
Liquid-Cooling Readiness: Server designs built for direct liquid cooling, supporting higher rack power density and stable thermal performance under full GPU load.
Built for AI at Scale
Delivering AI infrastructure at scale requires more than GPU compute alone. Scaleway has brought together a partner ecosystem that spans compute, storage, and cooling: Giga Computing supplies the GPU servers, rack configuration, power, and networking that sit at the core of the infrastructure, Bull handles cluster testing and deployment, VAST Data delivers the data platform, and Motul provides closed-loop direct liquid cooling. The multi-vendor approach lets Scaleway bring a validated, production-ready AI platform to market faster than it could by building each layer in-house.
Giga Computing brings AI server expertise for large-scale deployments, backed by GIGABYTE’s manufacturing and validation. By integrating high-density GPU platforms with the management software and liquid cooling that modern data centers require, Giga Computing is helping Scaleway grow GPU capacity in step with customer demand.
“We are pleased to have Giga Computing alongside us as we expand our AI infrastructure. Their experience with high-density, liquid-cooled servers is particularly valuable for a deployment of this scale. For us, the goal is clear: give customers the compute capacity they need, with an infrastructure we can operate efficiently and grow with their ambitions,” said Albane Bruyas, Chief Operating Officer at Scaleway.
“Scaleway’s AMD Instinct GPU service demonstrates the importance of bringing together high-performance compute, efficient cooling and a robust infrastructure ecosystem to meet the demands of sovereign AI at scale,” said Daniel Hou, General Manager at Giga Computing. “We are proud that GIGABYTE servers form the compute foundation, and we look forward to supporting Scaleway as it expands AI compute capacity for its customers across Europe.”
Giga Computing will continue to collaborate with cloud service providers and technology partners to deliver liquid-cooled, high-density AI infrastructure, helping customers move from deployment to production faster.
GIGABYTE is an enabler of next-generation computing, building a foundation for technology innovations that is robust, optimized, trustworthy, versatile, and accessible. Together with a global ecosystem of partners, we translate emerging technologies into real-world impact—accelerating AI adoption, advancing sustainable computing, and empowering businesses, communities, and individuals to unlock the full potential of computing. GIGABYTE. Upgrade Your Life. See more at www.gigabyte.com.
Actor Selma Blair was arrested after an incident on board a Delta Air Lines flight from Los Angeles to John F. Kennedy International Airport Sunday night.
Hey guys, so I bought a pint earlier this year to test if I wanted to get into this hobby and absolutely fell in love. I ended up finding an OG XR on Facebook for like $800. I was occasionally getting pushback on the pint and the inconsistency with power being able to take curbs and distance (I live in a city and have been using ride time to find new hidden spots) I figured I’d try something with more power and range. Both boards were about 5-6 years old so I figured the safety features would be about the same (as far as when it doesn’t have the power for something setting itself down). I didn’t think much of it because after a month of riding it I wasn’t getting any pushback or weirdness with it. The issue came when I was showing some friends how to ride it. They were asking how fast it goes so I got a good little runway I don’t typically go more than 12-13mph as I mainly just use it for cruising around. About halfway through getting up to speed the board just nosedived and threw me. I was maybe at 13mph or so the battery was around 30%. The guy I bought the board from said he hadn’t ridden in about 2 years but like I said I had taken it out multiple times and not ran into any issues. I’m not very tech savvy so I haven’t messed with settings or anything since getting it other than updating it when I connected it to my Onewheel app. Is this something I need to adjust in settings or is there some software or something I need to download. I’m not trying to VESC (like I said I’m not tech savvy) I just want to be able to ride safely. Any advice?
Valve has released a new Steam Client beta that finally moves the Linux client to 64-bit architecture, while also placing it inside a containerized Steam Runtime environment. However, Linux users still need 32-bit libraries and graphics drivers for compatibility, meaning fully 64-bit-only systems remain unsupported. VideoCardz.com reports: Valve's updated requirements explicitly state that 64-bit-only installations are not supported. Systems must still provide both 32-bit and 64-bit libraries and graphics drivers, including multilib support. The new client also requires Linux kernel 5.6 or newer and glibc 2.31 or newer.
The update also introduces Steam Achievement Sets, a feature we covered earlier that allows developers to organize achievements into separate groups for base games, DLCs and seasonal content. Players can complete individual sets without losing their existing completion status when developers add more achievements. Valve has also updated the achievements page to display progress across these groups.
The 64-bit Linux client and Achievement Sets are currently available through the Steam Client Beta. Valve has not confirmed when these changes will reach the stable Linux release. Until then, users on the regular Steam client will continue using the existing architecture.
This repository contains approximately 1 GB of historical Palm OS development material, collected over many years of working with the platform.
The archive includes a mixture of publicly distributed development resources, personal development material, technical references, and historical artifacts.
Elections officials in North Carolina and other states are correcting the record on how ballots are counted — an effort to combat misinformation circulating on social media.
Images in a number of social media posts on X, TikTok, Facebook and elsewhere falsely claimed that ballots will be disqualified if a poll worker writes on them.
One Oct. 12 Facebookpost said: “When you are checking in at the polls and they [poll workers] happen to write anything on your ballot before they give it to you to put in the voting machine … a letter, a checkmark, a letter star, an R or a D any writing of any kind … please request a new ballot. Your ballot will be disqualified if it is written on.”
That claim is inaccurate, several state elections officials said.
“These posts have been circulating for several years and have resurfaced recently in many North Carolina counties. They are still false,” the North Carolina State Board of Elections said in a statement.
In some states — including North Carolina and Texas — elections officials are required by law to mark voters’ ballots to ensure they can be retrieved, if necessary.
In North Carolina, state law requires election workers to sort ballots by precinct — but counties don’t open early voting sites in every precinct. So at early voting sites, poll workers may mark a voter’s ballot to help election officials sort ballots back into the proper precincts after the election for reporting and data purposes, state elections officials said.
Poll workers at early voting sites may also assign a special number to each ballot so that they can retrieve a ballot if itseligibility is challenged or if the voter dies before Election Day, according to elections officials.
Poll workers may mark ballots for other reasons, the elections board said. Stray marks on a ballot — placed by voters or poll workers — might only affect a ballot’s eligibility if they’re in the bars located in the margins of the ballot, or in the ovals tabulators check to determine someone’s vote.
Our ruling
Social media posts said that if an election worker writes anything on your ballot before you put it in the voting machine, “your ballot could be disqualified.”
In some states, election officials are required by law to mark voters’ ballots — often to promote election security. Doing so does not disqualify the ballot.
Elon Musk unveiled Tesla's new Roadster, which uses high-pressure air thrusters to leave the road entirely during a livestreamed event at his SpaceX facility in Texas.
Meta is facing criticism over updated commercial terms taking effect October 30 that could give the company broad permission to scrape content from websites linked to business accounts and use it to train AI. Legal experts warn the changes could undermine lucrative AI licensing deals for news publishers, with no direct opt-out for businesses that accept the terms. Ars Technica reports: As Nieman Lab reported Thursday, this will affect all business accounts but is particularly shocking for news publishers who could perhaps charge Meta millions in licensing fees to continually access their articles for AI training. Currently news organizations are fighting a battle with OpenAI over whether such training without licensing is fair use, and Meta's terms seemingly risk granting it sweeping permissions, no matter which way the court leans. "While journalism isn't the only industry that will be affected by this update, virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account, including Nieman Lab," the lab said.
[...] Notably, there is no mention of AI, but it's inferred from a single use of the word "train" and references to automated scraping and crawling. Meta's spokesperson told Nieman Lab that Meta has no plans to use the terms as a legal basis to ignore robots.txt instructions that block scraping on news sites. The company still allows news organizations to opt out of scraping and provides instructions on how to block crawling. A spokesperson told Ars that "there is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false." However, should courts affirm that AI training non-news articles is fair use, news organizations question if Meta's stance might change, and the terms could be used to freely grab access to content by legally overriding robots.txt instructions.
(The Center Square) – Less than three weeks out from Election Day, Democrats are ramping up their rhetorical attacks on Republicans, tapping into U.S. voters’ affordability concerns.
Jazz in Rehoboth, Crafts at Hagley, Children at the Zoo and fun in Middletown. Image created with AI on 10/16
From Hagley’s popular craft fair and the Rehoboth Beach Jazz Festival to Halloween celebrations, live opera and community events, Delaware offers something for nearly everyone Oct. 16-18.
WILMINGTON, Del. — Fall is in full swing, and Delaware is serving up a weekend packed with entertainment, family adventures, cultural experiences and opportunities to enjoy the outdoors.
Whether you’re looking for a scenic afternoon shopping for handmade crafts, a night of live music, a family trip to a pumpkin patch or something a little spooky, this weekend offers plenty of reasons to get out and explore the First State.
Delaware LIVE has selected 10 events worth considering for your weekend plans, with activities stretching from the Brandywine Valley to the beaches of Sussex County.
1. Hagley Craft Fair brings artisans to the Brandywine Valley
One of Delaware’s favorite fall traditions returns to the scenic grounds of Hagley Museum and Library this weekend.
The annual Hagley Craft Fair brings together artisans from across the Mid-Atlantic region, offering handmade jewelry, pottery, woodworking, leather goods, textiles, fine art and specialty foods.
The event transforms Hagley’s upper property and Soda House into a marketplace where visitors can meet craftspeople, discover one-of-a-kind gifts and enjoy the natural beauty of the Brandywine Valley.
It’s an ideal outing for those looking to get an early start on holiday shopping while enjoying a Delaware autumn tradition.
To Go: Saturday, Oct. 17, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday, Oct. 18, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington. Advance admission is $10 for adults and $8 for children ages 6-14. Children younger than 6 and Hagley members are admitted free. Tickets are valid both days. Information: hagley.org.
2. ConCon Expo offers an unusual look at conspiracy theories and pop culture
For something completely different, ConCon Expo arrives in Wilmington on Sunday with a convention exploring conspiracy theories, curiosity and the stories people believe.
Inspired by the mockumentary The Conspiracists, the event features an expo and an evening movie presentation followed by a discussion with cast and crew.
Organizers describe the gathering as an inclusive event that focuses less on whether conspiracy theories are true and more on why people find them fascinating.
Hosted by King Creative and Uncultured Swine, ConCon promises one of the weekend’s more unconventional entertainment experiences.
To Go: Sunday, Oct. 18, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. for the expo, followed by a film presentation and discussion from 5 to 7 p.m. Siegel Jewish Community Center, 101 Garden of Eden Road, Wilmington. Tickets and details: theconspiracists.com/concon.
3. Rehoboth Beach Jazz Festival fills the coast with music
The beach isn’t just for summer. This weekend, Rehoboth Beach and neighboring coastal communities become destinations for music lovers as the 37th Rehoboth Beach Jazz Festival continues through Sunday.
The annual celebration attracts nationally recognized performers and jazz enthusiasts for several days of concerts, intimate performances and special events.
This year’s featured artists include Boney James, Brian Culbertson, Najee, Gerald Albright and other leading performers.
From smooth jazz to high-energy contemporary performances, the festival offers an opportunity to enjoy world-class music while exploring coastal Delaware during one of its most pleasant seasons.
To Go: Thursday through Sunday, Oct. 15-18, at venues throughout the Rehoboth Beach area. Performance times and ticket prices vary. Information and tickets: rehobothjazz.com.
4. Fifer Orchards Fall Fest celebrates the harvest
For families looking to make the most of fall, Fifer Orchards in the Camden-Wyoming area continues its annual Fall Fest.
Visitors can explore a sprawling corn maze, pick pumpkins and apples, enjoy outdoor attractions and sample seasonal favorites, including apple cider, kettle corn and fresh cider doughnuts.
The farm’s harvest celebration combines traditional agricultural experiences with activities designed to entertain children and adults.
With fall colors, pumpkins and plenty of opportunities for family photographs, Fifer’s remains a popular destination for autumn outings.
To Go: Saturday, Oct. 17, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with final entry at 4:30 p.m. Fifer Orchards, Camden-Wyoming. Admission is $18 online or $24 at the gate for ages 3 and older. Additional charges apply to some activities. Closed Sundays. Information: Fifer’s Fall Fest details.
5. Emo Night Brooklyn brings Halloween energy to The Queen
Wilmington’s nightlife gets an early Halloween celebration Friday when Emo Night Brooklyn arrives at The Queen.
The Halloween Edition transforms the venue’s Crown room into a dance party featuring emo, pop-punk and alternative favorites.
Guests are encouraged to dress in costume and enjoy a high-energy evening filled with the songs that defined a generation of alternative music fans.
The event offers a change of pace from traditional Halloween parties, combining nostalgia with a spirited dance-floor atmosphere.
To Go: Friday, Oct. 16, at 8:30 p.m. Doors open at 8 p.m. The Crown at The Queen, Wilmington. Event listed as 18-plus. Tickets: thequeenwilmington.com.
6. OperaDelaware brings Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’ to The Grand
Opera lovers and newcomers alike have an opportunity to experience one of Mozart’s most celebrated works as OperaDelaware presents Don Giovanni at The Grand Opera House.
The production blends drama, romance, dark comedy and supernatural themes in the story of a charming but reckless nobleman whose actions eventually catch up with him.
Featuring music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the opera offers audiences a chance to experience a major classical production without traveling to Philadelphia or New York.
The performances are sung in Italian with English supertitles.
To Go: Friday, Oct. 16, at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, Oct. 18, at 2 p.m. The Grand Opera House, 818 N. Market St., Wilmington. Tickets listed from $15 to $109. Information: operade.org.
7. Wilmington Rugby hosts Brandywine in regional showdown
For sports fans looking for something beyond football and soccer, Wilmington Rugby Club takes the field Saturday against regional rival Brandywine Rugby Football Club.
Delaware’s oldest men’s rugby club has developed a dedicated following, with its home matches providing an opportunity to experience the fast-paced and physical sport up close.
Rugby combines the movement and endurance of soccer with the contact and strategy of football, creating an exciting atmosphere for spectators.
The fall matchup is a chance to support local athletes and discover a sport that continues to build a following in Delaware.
To Go: Saturday, Oct. 17. The club’s home-match schedule lists Brandywine as the opponent, with a 1 p.m. kickoff indicated in event information supplied to Delaware LIVE. Alapocas Run State Park, 4351 Weldin Road, Wilmington. Confirm kickoff details at wilmingtonrugby.com.
8. Boo at the Zoo offers Halloween fun for families
Halloween arrives early at the Brandywine Zoo, where families can combine a visit with the animals and seasonal activities.
Boo at the Zoo encourages children and adults to wear costumes while enjoying the zoo’s exhibits and Halloween atmosphere.
Unlike some evening Halloween attractions, the zoo’s daytime celebration is designed to be welcoming to younger children.
Families can also take advantage of the opportunity to learn about the animals and participate in educational experiences offered throughout the day.
To Go: Friday through Sunday, Oct. 16-18, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Brandywine Zoo, 1001 N. Park Drive, Wilmington. Activities are included with regular zoo admission unless otherwise noted. Information: brandywinezoo.org.
9. NAMIWalks Delaware brings community together for mental health
One of the weekend’s most meaningful community events takes place Saturday along Wilmington’s Riverfront.
NAMIWalks Delaware brings families, volunteers, mental health advocates and supporters together to raise awareness and funds for programs serving people affected by mental illness.
Organized by the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Delaware, the event emphasizes inclusion, understanding and the importance of community support.
Participants will walk a 3-kilometer route along the Riverwalk, with live entertainment, food trucks and family-friendly activities adding to the experience.
The gathering also offers an opportunity for individuals and families to connect with an organization that provides education, advocacy and support throughout the state.
To Go: Saturday, Oct. 17, with registration beginning at 7:30 a.m. and the 3K walk starting at 9 a.m. Tubman-Garrett Riverfront Park, 80 Rosa Parks Drive, Wilmington. Information, registration and donations: namiwalks.org/delaware.
10. Dark Dover Lantern Tours explore the capital’s mysterious past
History takes a spooky turn in Dover as First State Heritage Park offers its Dark Dover Lantern Tour.
The guided evening experience takes participants through the historic heart of Delaware’s capital, sharing stories of murders, mysterious events and characters whose legends remain part of the city’s past.
Against the backdrop of historic buildings and lantern-lit streets, visitors discover a different side of Dover’s long history.
The walking tour offers an alternative to traditional haunted attractions, combining historical storytelling with the atmosphere of an October evening.
To Go: Friday, Oct. 16. First State Heritage Park, Dover. Tickets are listed at $15 per person. Advance registration is required, and space is limited. Confirm tour times and availability through Delaware State Parks reservations or call 302-739-9194.
More weekend fun: Middletown Family Fun Fest
Families in southern New Castle County have another option Saturday when downtown Middletown hosts its Family Fun Fest.
The free community celebration features games, crafts, live music and face painting, offering an affordable outing for families with children.
To Go: Saturday, Oct. 17, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Downtown Middletown, with visitor entrance at 19 W. Green St. Free admission. Information: Middletown Main Street.
Make the most of a Delaware fall weekend
With festivals, live entertainment, outdoor recreation and community gatherings scheduled across all three counties, the Oct. 16-18 weekend offers something for almost every interest and budget.
For families, Fifer Orchards, the Brandywine Zoo and Middletown Family Fun Fest offer opportunities to spend time together. Music lovers can choose between the Rehoboth Beach Jazz Festival, OperaDelaware and a lively night at The Queen.
Those looking for something different can explore ConCon Expo, experience Wilmington Rugby or discover the darker side of Dover’s history.
And for Delawareans seeking to support an important cause, NAMIWalks provides an opportunity to make a difference while enjoying the Wilmington Riverfront.
Whatever your plans, it’s a good weekend to get out, explore and enjoy Delaware.
(The Center Square) – Some legislators are calling for more taxpayer funding of nonprofit security grants after a potential mass shooting was averted in the Chicago suburbs.
Forest clearance at smallest total since records began in 1988 in success for Lula ahead of presidential run-off
Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has fallen to its lowest level since records began, new government data shows.
But whether this globally important success is maintained or reversed is on a knife edge ahead of a presidential election run-off on 25 October between two candidates with sharply different visions for the future of the rainforest and how that affects relations with the US under Donald Trump.
Zacharia hosted widely panned first briefing on Tuesday and faced scrutiny after admitting she didn’t pass bar exam
Donald Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, was fired on Friday, just five days after she assumed the role, according to a White House official.
Zacharia confirmed her departure from the White House on Friday evening.
At University College London (UCL), a group of students applauded when a small supercomputer switched on.
To be fair, they’d just helped assemble it.
We’d handed out cables, invited people to connect the components and encouraged questions. Why did that cable go into this port? What was the difference between Ethernet and Omni-Path? How did the nodes connect to one another?
It was the first stop of our Sustainable Reality HPC & AI Roadshow, hosted in collaboration with UCL and STEP-UP. Over the following week, we travelled to Queen’s University Belfast, Cardiff University, and the University of York: different locations, different participants, but the same enthusiasm for getting hands-on with HPC hardware.
Students examine the cabling at UCL (Image courtesy Cristin Merritt)
Across four events in eight days, Alces Flight and our university partners welcomed 181 participants, including 122 who said this would be their first experience working with HPC.
We weren’t trying to create experts in a day. We wanted people to encounter a real system, discover what interested them and find opportunities to continue.
A Cluster with Another Job to Do
The hardware at the centre of Sustainable Reality had already completed its original role in research computing. Now it had another purpose: introducing people to the infrastructure behind HPC.
We brought genuine cluster components into the room, handed out cables and invited participants to help put everything together. Many were encountering this equipment for the first time. Their questions often started with the basics, but those basics can lead in interesting directions.
Why does a particular cable connect to a particular port? Follow that question far enough, and you’re discussing network architecture and topology. What’s the difference between Ethernet and Omni-Path? That opens questions about bandwidth, latency, and the role of high-performance interconnects. At one location, engineers brought their own interest in photonics into the conversation.
We weren’t expecting anyone to master these subjects in a morning. We wanted to give them a starting point, and the confidence to keep asking questions.
The hardware itself offered a lesson in sustainability. Its original deployment had ended, but its usefulness hadn’t. It had found a new role helping people understand the systems that support research.
A cluster for the competition (Image courtesy Cristin Merritt)
A supercomputer is a record of decisions, from its architecture and networking to the software it runs and the resources it consumes. Giving people the chance to explore the hardware is one way to begin making those decisions visible.
From First Job to Experimentation
After the physical build, participants connected to a separately prepared computing environment, learned basic Linux and Slurm commands, and submitted their first jobs.
I’d initially worried we’d packed too much into the day. At UCL, where we could invite students aged 16 and up, our youngest participants needed most of the allotted time. At the university locations, however, once people successfully submitted a sample job, many were ready to explore independently.
The afternoon activity involved generating images from the Mandelbrot Set. We provided starting regions and instructions, then encouraged people to experiment.
We’d designed the workload for CPUs. Naturally, someone decided to try the GPU.
Others investigated Linux commands, edited job scripts, modified Python, or experimented with colours and coordinates. I watched one participant explain the mathematics behind the Mandelbrot calculation to another.
Those experiments could lead to bigger questions about workload characteristics, parallelism, resource scheduling, and how software uses different hardware. But the participants didn’t need to understand all of that to begin exploring.
Cardiff University during the competition (Image courtesy Cristin Merritt)
Our portable WiFi equipment could support only around 30 to 35 connections, so people worked together around tables. Someone might run a job while others investigated commands, code or possible changes.
And they weren’t working alone. Our Alces team was joined by departmental leaders and research computing specialists from each host institution, including RSEs who helped participants through the exercises and supported their increasingly varied questions.
We provided the starting point. The participants found plenty of directions to go next.
One thing has become clear: Nobody arrives on the same bus.
Some come through computer science or engineering. Others through mathematics, physics, biology or an unexpected research project. That’s why we deliberately welcomed people from different academic backgrounds and didn’t require prior HPC experience.
We also wanted to demonstrate that nobody in HPC knows everything. Research computing depends on different expertise working together, from infrastructure and networking to scientific applications, research software and operations.
That variety was evident throughout the Roadshow. Some participants gravitated toward hardware; others toward mathematics or programming. What caught one person’s attention wasn’t necessarily what interested the person sitting beside them. And that was the whole point.
An Invitation to Continue
We designed Sustainable Reality as a pathway into opportunities already available across the HPC community.
A York student discussing the Mandelbrot set (Image courtesy Cristin Merritt)
Two particular ambitions were to help form or strengthen teams for the CIUK Student Cluster Challenge and to work towards a collective Art of HPC submission in 2027 using images participants created. We also shared information about student programmes, volunteering and other ways to get involved.
With SC26 approaching and the Student Cluster Competition celebrating its twentieth anniversary, our community has created many opportunities worth celebrating. But what happens before someone feels ready to participate?
An introductory event won’t teach everything, and we don’t yet know how many Roadshow participants will pursue further opportunities. We observed that with real infrastructure, enough guidance to get started, and room to experiment, people found questions worth investigating on their own.
Sustainable research computing depends on more than efficient systems and responsible resource use. It also needs people with the knowledge and curiosity to build, operate and improve what comes next. Our cluster has already supported research. Now it’s helping people discover the field behind it.
That’s a second life worth celebrating.
Interested in helping us create more opportunities like Sustainable Reality? We’re always keen to connect with universities, research computing teams and others across the HPC community who would like to get involved. Please email me at cristin.merritt@alces-flight.com to start a conversation.
About the author: Cristin Merritt leads Communications and Partner Ecosystems at Alces Flight, where her work focuses on connecting people, ideas and opportunities across the HPC community.
Acknowledgements: With thanks to the Alces and ConcertIM teams, and our collaborators at University College London and STEP-UP, Queen’s University Belfast, Cardiff University and the University of York, whose expertise, enthusiasm and support made the Sustainable Reality HPC & AI Roadshow possible.
(Feature image at top: The author addressing students during the Sustainable Reality HPC & AI Roadshow.)
(The Center Square) – The NCAA on Friday sued Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine in federal court after the governor issued an executive order earlier this week giving Ohio colleges and universities the option to expand the eligibility options for some…
Delaware State Police are investigating a shooting that damaged a home and vehicle Wednesday night in Lincoln.
Troopers responded at approximately 10:50 p.m. to the 200 block of Cedar Drive for a report of shots fired. Investigators determined that two unknown suspects fired multiple rounds, striking an occupied home and an unoccupied vehicle.
No injuries were reported.
The investigation remains ongoing.
The Delaware State Police Troop 4 Criminal Investigations Unit continues to investigate this incident. Detectives are asking anyone who has any information in regard to the incident to contact Detective L. Coleman at (302) 752-3813. Information may also be provided by sending a private Facebook message to the Delaware State Police or contacting Delaware Crime Stoppers at 1-800-847-3333.
Washington, DC — Katie Zacharia is leaving her job as White House press secretary after just five days, following a rocky debut and growing scrutiny over claims surrounding her legal background.
President Donald Trump told reporters Friday that he had given Zacharia an opportunity to “reconsider” the position. A White House official later confirmed she had been “let go,” while the administration publicly described her as “transitioning out” of the role.
Zacharia held only one formal White House briefing. Tuesday’s appearance lasted roughly 14 minutes, during which she took questions from just three reporters before abruptly ending the session. Trump initially defended the performance, saying she had done “very good.”
Her brief tenure became increasingly consumed by questions about her legal credentials. Zacharia graduated from Pepperdine University’s law school in 2011 and had previously described herself as having practiced law, but Reuters found no evidence she had ever been licensed in a U.S. jurisdiction. On Thursday, she acknowledged on Fox News that she failed the California bar exam and never retook it.
Zacharia had previously worked for Trump Media & Technology Group before replacing Karoline Leavitt.
Her five-day stint ranks among the shortest tenures for a senior White House communications official in modern presidential history.
An OpenAI research model reportedly accessed an Ethereum testnet wallet without permission in order to complete a coding task during internal training. "This case shows that a model can substitute its own judgment about likely harm for the account holder's permission, then act on that judgment without authorization," OpenAI wrote. Engadget reports: The incident, which occurred on June 26, happened while a GPT-5.6 Sol model was in internal training. The task involved updating a crypto trading prototype and deploying contracts (publishing special code) on an Ethereum test network called Sepolia. Payment of a network fee is required for such contracts, but OpenAI "supplied no funded wallet and gave no permission to spend funds from an account the model found independently," OpenAI said in the report.
The lack of funds at first stymied the agent, but it was not to be discouraged. The model reasoned that it could use public developer recovery phrases (similar to those you might use to recover a password) to access keys from unauthorized accounts. It tracked down 362 addresses open to that avenue of attack and found one that held enough Sepolia ETH to finish its deployment (to be clear, Sepolia ETH has no value outside of testing).
Like many criminals, the agent reasoned that someone must have left this access open for automated draining of the ETH "faucets." It also figured that the crypto was effectively "abandoned" and "valueless," according to OpenAI's misalignment records. The piece de resistance was that the agent "did not disclose that it had selected a funded account through a public recover phrase or spent that account's balance," OpenAI said. To prevent similar events in the future, the company is now monitoring all traffic and paging security if live internet access is detected.
In civil suit, ‘Jane Doe’ alleged billionaire raped her after being ‘handed off’ by Jeffrey Epstein. Black denied the allegations and called claims a fabrication
A federal judge has agreed to dismiss a lawsuit brought against Leon Black after the plaintiff in the case, who had accused the private equity billionaire of rape, said she was “medically incapable of continuing” and at risk of “acute psychiatric crisis”, including suicide.
The woman known only as “Jane Doe”, who claimed in a lawsuit that was first filed in July 2023 that she had been “handed off” to Black by his associate Jeffrey Epstein and then sexually assaulted by him, had been acting without a lawyer in the case. Doe has alleged that the assault occurred in 2002, when she was a teenager.
This video is an update explaining the Delaware Task Force on Sustainable Transportation Fund. For more information please go to: https://deldot.gov/Programs/sustainable_funding/
Lawyers tell high court that client could harm himself if serious allegations against him are made public
A “well-known individual” is trying to secure a permanent injunction against the Guardian and ITN to prevent them from publishing details of serious allegations made against him.
At a high court hearing on Friday, the claimant’s legal team said there was a serious risk that he could harm himself should the allegations be made public.
An Oregon school shooting comes weeks before midterms when young voters could break turnout records, but research shows shared fear doesn’t mean shared views on guns.
Beijing warns against ‘discriminatory’ step after France drops opposition to British role in Made in Europe package
No 10 has left the door open to imposing tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles as part of the Made in Europe package, prompting a warning from Beijing that such a move would be “discriminatory”.
(The Center Square) – Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and her delegation spent more than $200,000 on an eight-day trip to Asia in September, averaging $26,000 per day.
Ukrainian president says US limiting access was a ‘dangerous and unpleasant surprise’, amid reports the order came from inside White House
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said the Ukrainian military’s access to the Starlink satellite internet service has not yet been fully restored, as media reports suggested the order to throttle the service had come from within the White House.
Zelenskyy met European leaders on Friday in Brussels, where he asked the EU for another €70bn (£60bn) next year to fund Ukraine’s defence against Russia.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Private credit's expanding role in financing AI infrastructure faced one of its clearest market tests this week as CoreWeave's bonds fell to distressed levels, raising questions about how lenders are pricing a boom built on chips, data centers and customer contracts. CoreWeave has about $50 billion of debt, according to LSEG data, making it one of the largest borrowers linking private credit to the AI buildout. The cost of insuring its debt against default climbed to about 1,200 basis points this week, while yields on some of its bonds rose to roughly 15% to 16%, signaling sharply increased investor concern over its credit risk. "There is still a price. Investors are still comfortable financing it, but they're demanding more compensation for it," said James Martin, senior US credit strategist at SMBC, referring to projects further from completion.
Carlyle estimates that private credit could finance roughly $1 trillion of the AI infrastructure buildout but warns that aggressive lending could create concentration risks similar to those seen in software lending. "The clearest lesson is not to avoid AI compute exposure, but to set concentration limits before the buildout accelerates further, not after," Carlyle said.
Oct. 16, 2026 — Ericsson is among several major Swedish companies who have started to utilize a new sovereign AI supercomputer in Sweden, called Sferical One, officially launched this week by the Sferical AI initiative.
As a founding member of Sferical AI – alongside AstraZeneca, Saab, SEB and Wallenberg Investments, with SKF as a strategic partner – Ericsson gains access to secure, sovereign Swedish computing capacity to develop, deliver, and deploy advanced AI solutions alongside the partner companies.
Credit: Sundry Photography/Shutterstock
The initiative aims to deliver direct societal benefits to Sweden as AI use case momentum gathers pace. Shared use of investment, capacity and expertise under the Sferical AI initiative means the partners can scale AI development faster.
Ericsson will contribute telecom expertise, drive AI use cases, and jointly develop a secure, sovereign AI platform, while simultaneously using the platform to further develop Ericsson’s own network and automation capabilities.
The system is an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD built on NVIDIA DGX GB300 systems. The system has been running since late summer 2026. Sferical AI will also build services based on NVIDIA Nemotron open multimodal AI models.
The event was attended by senior executives from Sferical AI, the Swedish partner companies, including Ericsson President and CEO, Per Narvinger, and Nvidia founder and CEO, Jensen Huang.
Ericsson CTO, Erik Ekudden, who led Ericsson’s co-development of Sferical from inception, says: “I envision the future as a 6G/AI intelligent fabric – a universal framework which enables different AI systems to work together securely and with reliable performance, no matter where they are or who built them. Ensuring a robust and secure infrastructure requires best in class AI models. To build those, we need the best compute infrastructure. Through our cooperation with Sferical we get access to sovereign infrastructure for model training and refinement.”
Addressing the partner companies at the Sferical One launch, Jensen Huang predicted an exciting future. “You have done the hardest part … you have started,” he said.
Ericsson’s Sferical One engagement to date relates to ensuring secure and reliable networks through AI-based network operations.
Jenny Nordlöw, CEO, Sferical AI, says: “Sferical One enables the companies to train and run AI models at a larger scale on a sovereign platform. What makes Sferical unique isn’t just the technology, but that several of Sweden’s largest companies share the same infrastructure, develop solutions together and share knowledge across industries.”
Marcus Wallenberg, Chair of Wallenberg Investments, says: “AI will be a critical component of Swedish industry’s future competitiveness. Sferical One will help some of Sweden’s leading companies stay at the forefront of that development. It is a long-term investment in the capabilities and expertise we will need to compete in the future.”
About Ericsson
Ericsson‘s high-performing networks provide connectivity for billions of people every day. For 150 years, we’ve been pioneers in creating technology for communication. We offer mobile communication and connectivity solutions for service providers and enterprises. Together with our customers and partners, we make the digital world of tomorrow a reality.
Guyger, convicted of murder of Botham Jean in Dallas in 2018, served seven years of 10-year sentence
The former Dallas police officer who was convicted of murdering Botham Jean after entering his apartment and shooting him in 2018 was released from prison on Friday morning after spending seven years in prison.
Amber Guyger, 38, regained her freedom a little more than two weeks after the Texas board of pardons and paroles approved her release, despite opposition from Jean’s family.
Several leaders offered Zelenskyy very friendly welcome or, in some cases, simply a big hug as he walked into the room before the formal part of the meeting got under way.
Speaking to Newsmax last night, Donald Trump repeated his views of the two leaders involved in the conflict.
Inquiry said to have been launched after force received report ‘relating to alleged unauthorised access of a political party’s database’
Police are carrying out a criminal investigation into a row over the founding of Your Party, which split the leftwing party as it was established last year.
A spokesperson for London’s Metropolitan police said they had launched an investigation after they received a report in September 2025 “relating to the alleged unauthorised access of a political party’s database”, the Politico website reported.
Prosecutors allege Moises Freire gave two students at FIT the opioid, saying it was cocaine, and raped one as she overdosed
A man raped a student at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) after giving her a dose of fentanyl that rendered her unconscious and ultimately killed her, federal prosecutors allege.
That student’s friend also experienced an overdose and nearly died after taking the potent synthetic opiate, leading to charges against three men, the US justice department said in a statement on Thursday.
In an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity, the new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, admitted that she did not pass the bar exam, after facing scrutiny about her legal career before becoming the top spokesperson for Trump. Zacharia had previously said she practiced law before entering politics, and Trump had described her as an attorney. Zacharia earned a law degree from Pepperdine University in 2011, according to the school. Nearly all licensed US lawyers first obtain a law degree, but law school graduates cannot legally practice law in the US without being admitted to a state bar. In China, the law requires practicing lawyers to be Chinese nationals. Foreign staff can advise and consult on legal matters but not practice law.
This guy started off as a GT and got a fungineers GTFO kit. It's got a 5 in superflux high torque motor, a flightfins goat tire, fst footpads, grip foam, and dragan toehooks. It's got tfl wtf rails, and I've cut up some side kicks to cover some of the rails.
Author Sarah Helm, married to Jonathan Powell, wrote to back novelist Sally Rooney’s support of proscribed direct action group
The UK’s national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, is under pressure to distance himself from a comment made by his wife, the award-winning writer Sarah Helm, in support of Palestine Action.
The post was made in defence of the critically acclaimed Irish novelist Sally Rooney, who said she had been forced to pull her books from shelves in the UK after pledging proceeds from their sales to Palestine Action.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the campaign is engineered to make the government feel like there are no escape valves, which is how people in Cuba describe feeling.
Brownsville, TX — Republican congressional candidate Eric Flores is demanding the removal of a Democratic-funded billboard that prominently highlights President Donald Trump’s endorsement and Flores’ support for ICE, positions he openly embraced earlier in the campaign.
Flores’ attorney sent Lamar Advertising a cease-and-desist letter arguing that the Brownsville billboard deliberately mimics his campaign materials and could mislead voters into believing it was authorized by his campaign.
The billboard, however, identifies Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez’s campaign as its sponsor, and the letter does not dispute its central claims: Trump endorsed Flores in December, and Flores has supported ICE.
The dispute comes as Flores appears to be deemphasizing his association with Trump. The Texas Observer reported that campaign signs prominently advertising Trump’s endorsement during the Republican primary have largely disappeared, with newer materials emphasizing Flores’ biography and professional background instead.
Democrats argue the change reflects the political environment in South Texas, where Trump’s approval has declined and aggressive immigration enforcement has become an increasingly contentious issue.
Flores’ campaign denies it is attempting to hide his Trump ties, maintaining that its objection is solely about the billboard’s design and potential voter confusion.
The billboard remained standing as of Friday despite the legal demand.
OpenAI has updated its ChatGPT Chrome extension to let users access information from their open browser tabs. A demo video shows the new functionality in action. The Verge reports: It's also updated ChatGPT in the sidebar, with the full power of ChatGPT and your entire conversation history in Chat or Work to use without leaving the page you're viewing. It also enables ChatGPT Work to "control" your Chrome tabs for tasks like "sending messages, filling out forms, or downloading files," similar to Google's Gemini-powered "auto browse" feature, as well as organize or group open tabs.
Delaware State Police are investigating a shooting that left two 19-year-old men injured Monday evening in Magnolia.
Troopers responded to the first block of Juanita Drive at approximately 9:30 p.m. on October 12 for a reported shooting.
Police said the preliminary investigation determined that unknown suspects had arranged to meet the victims to sell THC vape cartridges. During the exchange, both victims were struck by gunfire.
The two men were taken to an area hospital by private vehicle with non-life-threatening injuries.
The Delaware State Police Troop 3 Criminal Investigations Unit is continuing the investigation. Anyone with information is asked to contact Detective R. Spanier at 302-698-8569 or Delaware Crime Stoppers at 1-800-847-3333.
Speaking at live UK event, former US president expresses hope rooted in the past and discusses the modern challenges to democracy
Barack Obama cited the “wonderful” story of how Manchester cotton workers stood in solidarity with enslaved African Americans as an inspiration for our times in a live appearance in the city.
Tens of thousands of people packed Co-op Live in the city on Thursday for An Evening With Barack Obama, where the former US president was interviewed by the writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch.
Lula reverses position on age of responsibility for ‘heinous’ crimes in what many see as a desperate electoral gambit
Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has announced that he now supports lowering the age of criminal responsibility for “heinous” crimes from 18 to 16, reversing a longstanding policy in what is widely seen as a desperate electoral gambit.
The U-turn, which Lula announced during a Thursday night interview with TV Globo, comes with the presidential runoff in just over a week. The incumbent faces an uphill battle to overturn the first-round victory of his opponent, the far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro, who remains slightly ahead at the polls.
Yorkshire ambulance service says workers may have accessed or attempted to access information ‘without legitimate reason’
NHS staff may have accessed the medical records of a man killed by a tiger at a wildlife park “without legitimate permission”, an ambulance trust has said.
Yorkshire ambulance service NHS trust has launched an investigation into two members of staff at the trust, which responded to emergency calls on Saturday when William Chapman climbed into the tiger enclosure at Yorkshire Wildlife Park.
Settlers hurl rocks at Palestinians and beat photographer Heidi Levine as part of yearly attacks to disrupt harvest
Israeli settlers have attacked Palestinians across the occupied West Bank in a coordinated movement to disrupt the annual olive harvest, burning cars and trees and injuring Palestinians and a Washington Post photographer.
Masked settlers wielding clubs and other weapons attacked people attempting to harvest their olives in West Bank towns on Friday. Palestinian authorities said they recorded attacks in eight villages, and injuries among at least 20 people.
NPR health and science correspondent and "Sunday Morning" contributor Allison Aubrey writes about the steps Gen Xers may take to foster a sense of purpose as they enter this next stage of life.
Donald Trump has urged Katie Zacharia, his new White House press secretary, to “reconsider” taking the job after she faced intense scrutiny from news outlets, including the rightwing cable network Fox News.
Speaking with reporters outside the White House on Friday, the US president said Zacharia had been “treated very badly by the media” after she stumbled through a 14-minute press conference on Tuesday and questions arose over her legal credentials.
Abhijeet Dipke was detained before planned anti-government demonstrations in Delhi
The leader of the Cockroach Janta party (CJP) youth movement, Abhijeet Dipke, was detained by police on Friday and then later formally arrested as authorities cracked down on fresh anti-government protests in the Indian capital.
Dipke was detained before a planned Friday evening demonstration he had called in central Delhi, urging supporters of the movement to come out and hold up the Indian flag.
Image: Successful Seniors is a Delaware Live feature series of stories about healthy, happy seniors and the options available to caregivers for their loved ones. Image created on 10/15 using AI.
After reluctantly moving to Harmony at Kent, a Navy veteran discovered that independence isn’t always about living alone. Sometimes, it’s about having the support, friendships, and encouragement to live life more fully.
Editor’s Note: Introducing “Successful Seniors”: Delaware LIVE is launching a new series of stories designed to help caregivers and families understand the options available for their aging loved ones. Through personal stories of older Delawareans, we’ll explore how senior living communities, supportive care, and meaningful social connections can help seniors maintain independence, improve their health, and enjoy a fulfilling quality of life. Our goal is to show that growing older doesn’t have to mean giving up what makes life meaningful—sometimes, it opens the door to new opportunities.
By George D. Rotsch, Delaware LIVE News
DOVER, Del. – When Michael Richards moved into assisted living at age 75, he wasn’t happy about it. The Navy veteran had spent his life making his own decisions, living in his own home and maintaining his independence. He wasn’t ready to give that up.
“When I first came here, I hated it, and I was mad at my stepdaughter for putting me here,” Richards recalled.
He arrived at Harmony at Kent on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, 2025, following a hospitalization and six weeks of rehabilitation.
“I didn’t think I would be ready for this kind of life till I hit 85, not 75,” he said.
But the man who reluctantly arrived in a wheelchair has discovered something unexpected. Assisted living hasn’t meant the end of his independence. In many ways, it has helped him reclaim it.
Today, Richards walks regularly, dances with his neighbors, encourages other residents and enjoys friendships that have transformed his daily life.
When living alone became a risk
Before moving to Harmony, Richards spent much of his time in a recliner watching television.
“In my house I did no exercising,” he said. “I would get up and open the back door to let the dog out — that was my exercise.”
His increasingly sedentary lifestyle contributed to mobility challenges, and several falls made living alone dangerous.
Once, after striking his head, he lost consciousness and awoke to his dog licking his face. Another time, he slid out of bed and couldn’t reach his telephone to call for help.
His stepdaughter recognized that something needed to change.
“She wanted to know that I was safe at home. I was no longer safe at home,” Richards acknowledged.
Leaving his house and giving up his car were difficult decisions. But the move ultimately provided something he had been missing: a safer environment where he could concentrate on getting stronger.
Determined to walk again
Richards arrived at Harmony using a wheelchair, but he had no intention of staying in it.
“My main goal then was to get out of the wheelchair and have somebody take it away,” he said.
He began walking daily, setting goals and pushing himself to improve.
Eventually, he graduated to a walker and then to a rollator, a wheeled walking aid.
“I called my buddy up and I said, ‘Get this wheelchair out of here.'”
Richards credits his progress to determination and the support of therapy professionals. He participates in physical therapy with Powerback three times a week and initially received occupational therapy to regain everyday skills.
Today, he independently showers, dresses and manages his personal needs.
“My stubbornness — that’s what it is,” he said. “If I set a goal, I’m going to reach that goal one way or the other.”
His next goal is to walk without the rollator.
Discovering the power of friendship
While Richards takes pride in his physical progress, he says the greatest surprise has been the friendships he’s developed.
“I’ve made a lot of friends here, a lot of friends,” he said. “I love to talk. I have no problem talking to people that I just meet about anything.”
He has become a familiar personality in the community, sometimes dancing before entering the dining room simply to make his neighbors laugh.
When live music is offered, Richards is often among the first to dance.
He especially enjoys dancing with residents who use wheelchairs, something he learned through more than 25 years of involvement with the American Legion.
When someone tells him they can’t dance because they’re in a wheelchair, he has a ready answer.
“Don’t worry about it. I know what to do.”
The experience brings joy to everyone.
“Basically, I made their day, and it made mine because they were happy and I was happy,” he said.
But friendship also means having someone nearby during difficult moments.
After a close friend at Harmony died, another resident noticed Richards’ sadness at breakfast and sat with him.
“She wanted to know what was wrong,” he recalled.
When he asked how she knew, the woman explained that she could see the pain on his face.
“Yes, they connect and they care,” Richards said.
Independence doesn’t mean doing everything alone
Another important benefit has been help managing his medications.
Richards takes 17 pills throughout the day. Before moving, he sometimes forgot doses despite using multiple pill organizers.
At Harmony, staff members manage his medication schedule, removing a responsibility that had become difficult.
He still makes decisions, sets personal goals and takes care of himself. But assistance with medications allows him to concentrate on enjoying life and improving his health.
He also encourages other residents to remain active.
Watching one neighbor progress from a wheelchair to a walker and then a rollator brought him tremendous satisfaction.
“It makes my heart feel so good to see him using that rollator,” he said.
A different picture of successful aging
For many families, the decision to move a loved one into assisted living is accompanied by uncertainty and guilt.
There is often a fear that leaving a longtime home means sacrificing independence, dignity or happiness.
Richards’ experience offers a different perspective.
At home, he was increasingly isolated, physically inactive and struggling with his health. Today, he has support when he needs it, opportunities to stay active and friendships that give meaning to his days.
Not every senior will experience the same transformation, and assisted living isn’t the right choice for everyone. But for Richards, the combination of support, encouragement and community has made a meaningful difference.
He still remembers how angry he was when he arrived.
“Now, I don’t mind being here at all,” he said.
The man who once believed assisted living was a place for people much older than himself is now dancing, making friends and encouraging others to live more actively.
For caregivers considering what comes next for someone they love, his story offers a reminder: Sometimes, the best way to preserve independence isn’t to keep everything the same. It’s to create the opportunity for a better quality of life.
To Go: Successful Seniors
About the series: Successful Seniors is a Delaware LIVE feature series exploring how older adults maintain independence, purpose and quality of life as their needs change.
Featured resident: Michael Richards, Harmony at Kent senior living community.
For caregivers: When evaluating senior living options, consider safety, medication assistance, opportunities for physical activity, social connections and the independence residents can maintain.
Learn more: Contact Harmony at Kent to inquire about its living services and opportunities to visit the community.
Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem is no longer serving as the Trump administration's envoy to the Shield of the Americas initiative, a State Department official said.
Apple's first foldable iPhone, the $1,999 iPhone Duo, sold out within minutes of preorders opening, with every configuration slipping to late January 2027. "All color and storage combinations show an estimated ship date of January 25," reports 9to5Mac. "Some users are even seeing January 29 for their estimated shipping date." From the report: This is a combination of strong demand and severely constrained supply for iPhone Duo. It's impossible to know the exact balance between the two, though. Going into the launch, there were multiple reports suggesting iPhone Duo would be in short supply as Apple was still ramping up production. A report from Nikkei Asia last month said Apple was making just a few hundred iPhone Duo units per day, significantly behind the ramp of a normal iPhone launch.
Newly released video by the Park City police department shows the moment K-9 dog Bruno jumped from a freeway overpass while inspecting a suspicious package on 15 September. An independent review found that the handler, officer Wayne Henderson, deployed Bruno in line with standard K-9 tactics. Bruno was air-lifted to a veterinary hospital after the incident and has been released to recover at home.
Film interviewing military insiders about mass killing of civilians in Gaza wins widespread praise around the world
Critics around the world have hailed the award-winning documentary NAZA as a “brilliant and harrowing” film that is “impossible to ignore”.
NAZA, which is produced by the Guardian and details Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza, was released in UK cinemas this week and will be shown in more than 50 countries. As well as its global cinema releases, NAZA will be available free on the Guardian’s website from late November.
The International Monetary Fund has urged John Healey to target savings on pensions and welfare, instead of taxing Britain’s banks at the budget later this month.
The old certainties have gone. We will have to spend whatever it takes to protect ourselves in this new and dangerous world
Donald Trump must find it oddly frustrating. He keeps showing the world exactly who he is, and yet the world keeps refusing to believe it. As clearly as he can, he is announcing that he is not the leader of the free world, that he is not even a reliable member of the democratic west, that he is in fact an ally of its enemies – but the west, including Britain, either doesn’t fully get the message or can’t quite bring itself to draw the obvious conclusion.
Trump had another go this week, finding multiple ways to declare that in the war between Russia and Ukraine, he is no mediator or peace broker but a partner of Vladimir Putin. In fairness to him, the US president had loudly issued that declaration within weeks of his return to the White House when, in February 2025, he delivered an on-camera dressing down of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, seeking to humiliate the Ukrainian leader by telling him “you don’t have the cards”, even as JD Vance demanded their visitor show gratitude. That should have made Trump’s position sufficiently plain, but in the past few days he has all but put it up in lights.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
US midterms: Trump, war and America’s future
On Thursday, 5 November join Jonathan Freedland, Devika Bhat, Professor Adam Smith in London and David Smith and leading US commentator Tara Setmayer live from the US to discuss the results and their implications for the future of Trump, the US and global politics.
Book tickets here or at guardian.live
Kremlin turning to punishment of Ukraine’s population in major cities as frontlines remain frozen
As Russian missiles and drones have systematically slammed into power plants in Kyiv and Kharkiv this week, the rolling blackouts and water outages have increasingly resembled a supposed Russian blueprint to destroy life in major Ukrainian cities seen by the Guardian.
Even as Donald Trump unilaterally declared an “energy ceasefire” last week between Moscow and Kyiv, Russia continued with its methodical and devastating strikes on Ukraine’s power grid, in particular in Kyiv, in a strategy meant to punish Ukraine’s population and drive the country to capitulation.
The actor, who made a cameo in the Radio 4 drama in 1989, has signed a letter urging BBC not to move studio elsewhere
The cast and crew behind The Archers, including the one-time guest star Judi Dench, have written to the BBC director general urging him to keep the recording of the Radio 4 drama in Birmingham.
It emerged this week that the corporation was planning to stop recording the rural community soap opera in the city for the first time in the show’s 75-year history, after it scrapped plans for a radio drama studio.
Woman says she ‘wrenched’ herself free from alleged assault that she says took place when she was working at MTV in 2001
Russell Brand transformed into a “wild-eyed maniac” when he tried to drag a woman into a men’s toilets for a sexual encounter before she “wrenched” herself free, a court has heard.
The 51-year-old comedian is accused of indecently assaulting the woman, who told Southwark crown court: “I emerged relatively unscathed. He didn’t manage to rape me.”
Burnham spoke of Ravenscraig, once the pride of Scotland’s steel industry that employed tens of thousands of people before it closed in 1992.
He said:
When it closed, it wasn’t just a works that shut, it was a whole community which saw the pillars underneath it just taken away, collapsed beneath it.
That was a decision taken hundreds of miles away without any real consequences for what that would mean for people here, taken by people who would never have to live with those consequences, or see those consequences.
I was the MP there for 16 years from the early 2000s, just after the pits had shut in the 1990s. It broke my heart to see the old miners shuffling into my surgery, carrying oxygen bottles, still struggling to get compensation for the damage that was done to their lungs.
It pained me to drive past the wasteland around Bickershaw Colliery, one of the last pits to close in Leigh. Nobody asked Leigh what was going to come next either.
I care about Scotland a lot, and I am coming today with a big offer and in search of common ground.
When I walked into Downing Street in July, I said I wanted to do politics differently. Place first, not party first. Honestly, I meant it, and I arrive here in that spirit because people in Scotland, in my view, deserve better from politicians and politics.
Photo: Salesianum vs. Smyrna at the University of Delaware Stadium on Friday October 10, 2026. Photo by Dave Reeder.
Smyrna-Cape Henlopen, St. Georges Tech-Caesar Rodney and Milford-Red Lion highlight a Friday night schedule that could reshape the postseason picture, while No. 1-ranked Salesianum returns to action Saturday.
WILMINGTON, Del – Delaware’s high school football season reaches an important stage this weekend, with several games carrying playoff positioning, district implications and statewide bragging rights.
The marquee matchup comes in Lewes, where unbeaten Cape Henlopen hosts Smyrna in a meeting of two of the state’s highest-ranked Class 3A programs. But it is hardly the only game worth watching.
St. Georges Tech travels to Caesar Rodney in another matchup between highly ranked 3A teams, while Milford visits Red Lion Christian Academy in a game featuring two 4-1 teams near the top of the Class 2A rankings.
One change from an earlier version of the weekend schedule: Salesianum is not playing Appoquinimink on Friday. The Sals instead visit Hodgson Vo-Tech at 11 a.m. Saturday, while Appoquinimink hosts Souderton of Pennsylvania on Friday. Milford also plays at Red Lion Christian, not Polytech. delawaresportsmedia.com
Cape gets another major test: Smyrna (4-1) at Cape Henlopen (5-0)
Friday, 7 p.m., Legends Stadium, Lewes
This may be the most important game in Delaware this weekend.
Cape Henlopen enters unbeaten after surviving a 24-21 test from Appoquinimink last week. Smyrna comes in ranked among the state’s best despite a 32-26 loss to Salesianum. MaxPreps.com
The matchup gives Cape another opportunity to demonstrate that its undefeated start is built for the postseason, while Smyrna has a chance to respond immediately after its first loss.
With the teams ranked No. 2 and No. 3 in Class 3A by Delaware Sports Media, the result could have significant consequences for seeding and home-field positioning later in the season. delawaresportsmedia.com
St. Georges and Caesar Rodney collide: St. Georges Tech (4-1) at Caesar Rodney (5-2)
Friday, 7 p.m., Rider Stadium, Camden
This matchup has the feel of a playoff game before the playoffs arrive.
St. Georges Tech enters ranked No. 7 in Class 3A, while Caesar Rodney is No. 6, making this one of the weekend’s most evenly matched games on paper. delawaresportsmedia.com
For both programs, the opportunity is straightforward: A win over another quality opponent strengthens the résumé and helps build momentum heading into the final weeks of the regular season.
Milford faces major road test: Milford (4-1) at Red Lion Christian Academy (4-1)
Friday, 7:30 p.m., Red Lion Christian Academy
Milford gets one of its toughest tests of the season against another 4-1 team.
Delaware Sports Media lists Red Lion Christian as the No. 3 team in Class 2A and Milford at No. 5, giving the game immediate significance for postseason positioning. delawaresportsmedia.com
Milford has become one of the more closely followed programs in southern Delaware, and a road win here would strengthen the Buccaneers’ standing as the season moves toward November.
Sussex Central looks to keep building: Dover (1-4) at Sussex Central (4-1)
Friday, 7 p.m., Sussex Central High School, Georgetown
Sussex Central has positioned itself among the better teams in Class 3A and enters Friday ranked No. 5 in the division. Dover, meanwhile, comes in at 1-4. delawaresportsmedia.com
For Sussex Central, this is the kind of game a playoff contender cannot afford to overlook. Another victory would keep the Golden Knights firmly in the postseason discussion.
Middletown looking for traction:W illiam Penn (0-5) at Middletown (1-3)
Friday, 7 p.m., Cavalier Stadium, Middletown
The records make this matchup different from some of the weekend’s headline games, but the stakes remain significant for a Middletown program accustomed to postseason football.
For Middletown, the remainder of the schedule offers little room for error if the Cavaliers hope to build momentum and remain relevant in the playoff conversation.
Lake Forest carries top ranking into Delmar: Lake Forest (4-1) at Delmar (2-3)
Friday, 7 p.m., Delmar High School
Lake Forest has quietly built one of the state’s stronger résumés and enters the weekend ranked No. 1 in Class 2A by Delaware Sports Media. delawaresportsmedia.com
Delmar is 2-3 but remains the kind of opponent capable of making a road trip difficult.
For Lake Forest, the challenge is maintaining its position as the regular season enters its second half.
Salesianum returns Saturday: Salesianum (4-1) at Hodgson Vo-Tech (1-4)
Saturday, 11 a.m., St. Georges Tech High School
Salesianum enters the weekend ranked No. 1 in Delaware by MaxPreps after consecutive wins over Sussex Central and Smyrna. MaxPreps.com
The Sals defeated Smyrna 32-26 last week and now begin district play against Hodgson. The game is scheduled for 11 a.m. Saturday. MaxPreps.com
Salesianum’s upcoming schedule also includes Appoquinimink, Middletown, Caravel and William Penn, giving the Sals several opportunities to reinforce their position as one of the teams to beat in Class 3A.
Other games to watch
Appoquinimink, 3-2, hosts Souderton Area of Pennsylvania at 6:30 p.m. Friday, while Polytech, 4-1, hosts St. Mark’s at 7 p.m. Howard visits Tatnall at 4 p.m., and Laurel travels to Indian River at 6 p.m. delawaresportsmedia.com
The weekend should provide a clearer picture of where Delaware’s contenders stand as district schedules intensify and the race for playoff positioning begins to take shape.
To Go Box
What: Delaware high school football weekend
Friday’s featured games:
Smyrna at Cape Henlopen — 7 p.m.
St. Georges Tech at Caesar Rodney — 7 p.m.
Dover at Sussex Central — 7 p.m.
William Penn at Middletown — 7 p.m.Lake Forest at Delmar — 7 p.m.
Milford at Red Lion Christian Academy — 7:30 p.m.
Saturday:
Salesianum at Hodgson Vo-Tech — 11 a.m., St. Georges Tech High School
Why it matters: Several games feature teams near the top of the Class 2A and 3A rankings and could have a significant impact on playoff seeding and postseason positioning.
Former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger has been released on parole after serving seven years of a 10-year sentence for the 2018 murder of Botham Jean.
Democratic ads in multiple congressional races are accusing Republican candidates of “gutting Medicare,” voting for “huge cuts to Medicare” and “cheering on Trump’s attack on Medicare.” Several ads cite President Donald Trump’s major domestic policy law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. But the law’s changes to Medicare are narrow in scope and affect relatively few beneficiaries.
The law could have triggered much larger cuts to Medicare, under a 2010 law that requires automatic spending reductions whenever Congress passes legislation that results in higher deficits. But Congress subsequently waived those cuts — as lawmakers of both parties have done regularly in the past.
Recent Democratic attack ads, however, misleadingly frame the OBBBA or Republican policies as a major assault on Medicare.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden, a Wisconsin Republican, was “the deciding vote to gut Medicare,” claims an ad from House Majority PAC, a group working to elect Democrats to Congress. An ad aired by his Democratic challenger, Rebecca Cooke, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee similarly says he “voted to make huge cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.”
Rep. Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat running for reelection in northwestern Ohio, is airing an ad that claims her Republican challenger, Derek Merrin, will “cut your Medicare.”
The Wisconsin and Ohio ads both cite the OBBBA.
In New York’s 3rd Congressional District, which covers part of Long Island, an ad from Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi’s campaign describes his Republican challenger, Mike LiPetri, as “ready to do Trump’s bidding, gutting Medicare.” In the same race, an ad from a Democratic-aligned outside group called Article One PAC criticizes LiPetri for “cheering on Trump’s attack on Medicare.”
The New York ads don’t include any citations for those claims. But it’s unclear what else, other than the OBBBA, they could be referencing.
The Cook Political Report rates the House races in Wisconsin and Ohio as toss ups. The New York district is rated as likely Democratic, though some news outlets continue to describe it as competitive or a race to watch, and both parties are putting millions of dollars into ads there in the closing stretch, according to the ad-tracking service AdImpact.
Medicare, which covers older adults and people with disabilities, is popular with large majorities of the public — and common fodder for often-misleading campaignadsthataccuse one candidate or another of wanting to slash seniors’ benefits.
The OBBBA did include large cuts to federal healthcare spending. But the bulk of those cuts involved Medicaid, the public insurance program for people with low incomes. The law’s changes to Medicare are much narrower, and will not affect benefits or eligibility for the vast majority of enrollees.
“These are important policies,” said Jack Hoadley, a research professor emeritus at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown. “But next to something like the Medicaid changes, they’re pretty marginal.”
We reached out to the Cooke, Kaptur and Suozzi campaigns, as well as House Majority PAC and Article One PAC, about the basis for their claims and haven’t received a response.
As we said, some of the ads cite the OBBBA. It’s possible these claims are also referring to the automatic cuts the law could have triggered indirectly under pay-as-you-go rules. Democratic groups airing other midterm ads in Maine and Colorado, which don’t explicitly cast the cuts to Medicare as “huge,” have cited the PAYGO rules, in part, as backup. But as we’ll explain, Congress routinely votes to ignore those rules, and similar attacks could be made against Democrats for legislation they’ve enacted in the past.
“Derek Merrin will fight to protect Medicare and Social Security benefits for the seniors who depend on them — including his own mother,” Michael Stwarka, a campaign spokesman, told us in a statement, accusing Kaptur of “fearmongering.” “Suggesting Derek would cut Medicare simply because he supports lower taxes is a desperate stretch designed to scare voters.”
The Van Orden and LiPetri campaigns did not respond to our requests for comment.
Democrats aren’t the only ones invoking the OBBBA to attack their opponents over Medicare.
In the New Hampshire Senate race, an ad from a Trump-aligned super PAC makes the contorted claim that the Democratic candidate, Rep. Chris Pappas, voted for “devastating cuts to Medicare” — because he opposed the legislation that waived the automatic cuts that Republicans’ own law could have triggered. But Pappas opposed that legislation for other reasons, and he voted against the OBBBA in the first place.
We’ll explain what the OBBBA actually did when it comes to Medicare, and the context surrounding the pay-as-you-go cuts it could have triggered.
OBBBA’s Changes to Medicare Are Small in Scope
Medicare covers around 70 million people, at an annual cost of about $1 trillion. The OBBBA includes a few provisions that could impact costs or eligibility for certain beneficiaries, though they make up a small subset of total enrollment.
One provision ends Medicare eligibility for certain lawfully present immigrants who previously qualified for coverage, including refugees, asylees and people with Temporary Protected Status, though they would still be required to pay into the program through payroll taxes. (Immigrants without legal status are already barred from Medicare and other federally funded health programs.) Lawful permanent residents, Cuban and Haitian entrants, and citizens of certain Pacific Island nations are still eligible for Medicare under the law.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that will result in 100,000 fewer people having health insurance, and reduce Medicare spending by $5.1 billion over 10 years.
Another provision blocks the implementation of a Biden-era rule that aimed to make it easier for low-income Medicare beneficiaries to access financial assistance through Medicaid, by streamlining enrollment in so-called Medicare Savings Programs. Those programs allow Medicare beneficiaries with low enough incomes to have their premiums and, often, out-of-pocket costs covered by Medicaid.
CBO estimates that OBBBA’s suspension of the rule will lead to 800,000 fewer Medicare beneficiaries receiving those extra subsidies, saving the government $66 billion over 10 years. Most of those savings will accrue to Medicaid, but the change is expected to reduce Medicare spending as well, because higher out-of-pocket costs will likely lead those beneficiaries to seek less care. The Biden administration, in announcing the now-suspended rule in 2023, estimated it could increase Medicare spending by $7.6 billion over five years.
The OBBBA also broadens the category of drugs that are exempt from price negotiations under Medicare. While not technically a cut — it’s expected to increase Medicare spending by $4.9 billion over a decade — beneficiaries who need certain high-cost drugs could pay higher prices than they would otherwise have as a result.
Restricting immigrant eligibility “certainly is a cut, because people are now not getting coverage from a program where they were otherwise going to,” said Jeannie Fuglesten Biniek, deputy director for the Program on Medicare Policy at KFF, a health policy research organization.
She noted this is “the first time that there has been a change to Medicare eligibility that actually took Medicare benefits away from somebody.”
Suspending the Medicare Savings Program rule is “a little trickier,” she said. “It is likely to reduce use of Medicare services, so it does reduce Medicare spending. I think people may have different views on whether that is a cut.”
Fuglesten Biniek said those changes could have a significant impact on the people they affect. Immigrants who lose Medicare will have few other options for coverage unless they’re still working, and low-income beneficiaries may delay or forego care without financial assistance.
But she said the changes are relatively small in scope, especially compared with the bill’s changes to Medicaid. Those provisions, which include work requirements and more frequent eligibility checks, are expected to cut more than $900 billion in federal Medicaid spending over 10 years and lead to 7.5 million more people becoming uninsured, according to CBO.
“The changes to Medicaid are unprecedented. They’re enormous. I think there’s no way to deny that,” she said. “The changes to Medicare are more on the margins — but they are, I think, concentrated among particularly vulnerable beneficiaries.”
Indirect Effects of PAYGO Rules
After the OBBBA’s passage last year, someDemocrats pointed to its potential indirect effects on Medicare.
Under a 2010 law called the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go (or PAYGO) Act, legislation passed by Congress is supposed to be budget-neutral. If Congress ends a year having passed legislation that, on net, will increase the deficit over five or 10 years, it’s supposed to trigger across-the-board cuts in federal spending. Some programs, including Social Security, are exempt, though Medicare is not.
Because the OBBBA is projected to add $3.4 trillion to the deficit over 10 years, CBO estimated last year that it would trigger automatic cuts to Medicare totaling $45 billion in 2026 and more than $500 billion over a decade. Those cuts would take the form of a 4% reduction in payments to healthcare providers serving Medicare patients.
However, Congress has never allowed Statutory PAYGO cuts to actually go into effect, despite passing numerous laws that have added to the deficit since 2010, as the Congressional Research Service said in a September report. In every case, Congress either included a PAYGO exemption in the law itself, or passed subsequent legislation preventing the cuts from taking effect.
That’s what Republicans in Congress did with the OBBBA. The November 2025 law that reopened the government after a six-week shutdown also wiped out any PAYGO effects from the OBBBA. (Van Orden, the Wisconsin representative, voted for it; Merrin and LiPetri were not in Congress.)
Democratic ads may be referring to this when they tag Republicans with supporting “huge” Medicare cuts or “gutting” Medicare. But it’s something both parties have done.
In 2021, for example, a Democratic Congress passed a COVID-19 relief package, the American Rescue Plan Act, that would have triggered $36 billion in automatic Medicare cuts in 2022 and billions more in future years.
“Everybody seems to not worry about it,” Rep. John Yarmuth, a Kentucky Democrat then serving as House Budget Chair, told Politico at the time, referring to the strategy of passing such a bill and then counting on future legislation to avert the steep cuts it would trigger. “I don’t know, I’ve been told it’s pretty much perfunctory that we’ll get it done.”
Congress subsequently passed legislation deferring those cuts, and they never went into effect.
GOP Ad Twists the Facts in Attacking Pappas
Democrats aren’t the only ones claiming their opponents support large Medicare cuts.
An ad from No Going Back PAC Inc. — a group linked to Trump’s main super PAC, MAGA Inc. — uses the PAYGO cuts that could have been triggered by the OBBBA as the basis for an attack on Rep. Chris Pappas, the Democrat running for an open Senate seat in New Hampshire against Republican former Sen. John E. Sununu.
“Pappas went after seniors’ healthcare too, voting to cut Medicare by $500 billion,” the ad’s narrator says. No Going Back PAC has spent more than $1.8 million on the ad since it began airing on TV and streaming platforms Oct. 7.
The claim here is convoluted, and misleading. The ad cites Pappas’ vote against the November 2025 bill that ended the government shutdown, which Democrats had brought about in an unsuccessful effort to force Republicans to extend expiring health insurance subsidies.
As we explained above, that bill also included a provision that negated any PAYGO cuts that would have been triggered by the OBBBA’s impact on the deficit.
But Pappas voted against the November bill for unrelated reasons, as New Hampshire Public Radio reported at the time — namely, that it did not guarantee the extension of more generous subsidies for Affordable Care Act plans.
“Chris Pappas voted against this bill because it didn’t extend the ACA enhanced premium tax credits,” a campaign spokesperson told us.
And, of course, Pappas voted against the OBBBA, which is what created the risk of those cuts to Medicare in the first place. In effect, Republicans are attacking Pappas for the potential consequences of their own bill.
We reached out to the person listed in Federal Election Commission paperwork as No Going Back PAC’s treasurer, as well as to MAGA Inc., and have not received a response.
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Kayla and Tyler Major's son was uninjured in the mass shooting at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon. Three children and a teacher were killed, police said.
Exclusive: Devon and Cornwall police formally apologise to nine women and settle claim without admitting liability
A police force alleged to have promoted and protected male officers despite knowing they were accused of attacking women has formally apologised and paid compensation to nine female victims, the Guardian has learned.
The women allege they were subjected to a range of abuse including rape, assault, threats, harassment and coercive control while in relationships with male officers from Devon and Cornwall police.
Polls show that Democrats and Republicans in battleground states want to hear more from candidates about the climate crisis
Most Americans feel unease or alarm about the climate crisis and, in both red and blue states, want to know how political leaders are going to fix it. But in midterm election campaigns across the US, candidates have responded to this desire with near silence.
People in the US have this year endured a recordhot summer as well as soaring costs, equating to roughly $2,000 per household, in extra energy and mortgage payments, due to the country’s dependence on a fossil fuel supply scrambled by Donald Trump’s decision to attack Iran.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phoronix: The feature-packed and polished Plasma 6.8 KDE desktop is now available. Making this release all the more special is that it coincides with the 30th anniversary of the KDE project. KDE Plasma 6.8 ships many exciting improvements including vRAM usage optimizations, dwell clicker support on Wayland, Wayland commit-timing protocol support for KWin, improvements for the Union theme engine, better remote desktop support, multi-GPU handling improvements, the new kscreenctl tool, server-side drop shadow support, multi-monitor improvements, and a lot of other polishing throughout. Especially from the Wayland angle there has been a lot of polishing and fine tuning for Plasma 6.8. Accompanying the release is a new film, The KDE Documentary, which "tells the story of the pioneering open source community that gave computer users a free and open alternative to proprietary desktops like Windows." The documentary is available to stream for free on YouTube.
Animal care Aasistant Dawn Snowball with overweight British bulldog Peggy-Sue at RSPCA West Hatch Animal Centre before she was rehomed. (Emma Jacobs / RSPCA via SWNS)
Saving A Place For You will host a Nov. 8 Friendsgiving open house to introduce its new veterans housing program and build community support.
DOVER, Del. — A new transitional home for veterans experiencing homelessness is opening its doors in Dover, offering up to a year of stable housing while helping residents connect with services and work toward independent living.
Saving A Place For You, Inc., a Delaware nonprofit founded last year, will introduce the home to the broader community during a Friendsgiving Open House from 3 to 6 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 8, at 21 S. Saulsbury Road.
The event will give veterans, families, nonprofit organizations, businesses, potential donors and other community members an opportunity to tour the home, meet the organization’s leaders and learn about housing and support available to veterans.
“Our veterans have given so much in service to our country, and they deserve to know that their service is remembered and that their community has not forgotten them,” founder Electa Thompkins said.
“This home represents more than a roof over someone’s head,” she said. “It represents hope, dignity, and an opportunity for a fresh start.”
A path toward independence
Saving A Place For You was founded in October 2025 by Thompkins and Sadé Truiett in response to the need for safe housing and additional support for veterans navigating the transition to civilian life or experiencing housing instability.
The organization says eligible veterans may stay in its transitional housing program for up to one year. During that period, residents can be connected with supportive services, community resources and personal-development opportunities intended to help them establish longer-term stability.
The organization also announced that it will waive its application fee for veterans seeking transitional housing, an effort intended to reduce one potential barrier for those seeking help.
Building a community of support
Truiett, the organization’s co-founder, said opening the home is only one part of a broader effort to establish partnerships among organizations, businesses and individuals interested in supporting veterans.
“Opening the doors to our transitional home is an important milestone, but our vision extends far beyond the walls of this building,” Truiett said.
“We want to build a community of people and organizations who are willing to stand alongside veterans as they navigate their next chapter.”
The Friendsgiving gathering is intended in part to build that network.
Guests will be able to tour the residence, meet board and leadership members and learn about opportunities to volunteer, donate, share resources or establish community partnerships.
For veterans who may need housing, organizers will also provide information about eligibility, the application process and available resources.
Honoring service, providing hope
The timing of the open house, shortly before Veterans Day and the Thanksgiving season, offers an opportunity to recognize veterans’ service while drawing attention to the need for stable housing and community support.
Saving A Place For You describes its mission with the phrase “Honoring Service, Providing Hope,” emphasizing both immediate housing needs and the longer-term goal of helping veterans regain independence.
Thompkins said the goal is to create a place where veterans feel supported while determining what comes next.
“We want veterans to know that there is a place where they can feel welcomed, supported and encouraged as they take their next steps,” she said.
TO GO
What: Saving A Place For You Friendsgiving Open House
When: Sunday, Nov. 8, 3-6 p.m.
Where: 21 S. Saulsbury Road, Dover
What to expect: Tours of the new veterans transitional home, refreshments, information about housing and support services, meetings with organizational leaders and opportunities to learn about volunteering, donations and community partnerships.
Who can attend: Veterans, community members, veteran-serving organizations, prospective partners, donors and supporters.
Veterans seeking housing: Saving A Place For You is waiving its application fee for veterans seeking transitional housing.
Attorneys and experts are raising the alarm that immigrants at Camp East Montana, the sprawling desert detention camp on the Fort Bliss military base in west Texas, face a risk of serious injury or death because of ongoing, extreme health and safety hazards there, according to a fresh court filing, the Guardian can reveal.
The allegedly dangerous conditions persist at the tent jail, the largest immigration detention facility in the US, despite regular reports from inside and outside the federal government that it has violated dozens of official standards since it opened last year.
Bomb-sniffing dog Bruno is recovering after surgery having broken several bones while responding to suspect package
Video of the moment a police dog named Bruno leapt from a freeway overpass and received serious injuries has been released by authorities in Utah, as the animal continues to recover at home.
Bruno, a bomb-sniffing dog, suffered two broken legs and a fractured jaw in the September incident as he helped Utah state troopers investigate a suspicious package found abandoned on the roadside in Summit county.
In a contentious debate between Georgia’s two U.S. Senate candidates, Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia said Democratic incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff holds an “extreme” position on abortion.
“He’s all for abortion up until and past birth,” Collins said in the Oct. 13 debate. “You talk about extreme. That’s Jon Ossoff in his position on abortion.”
Collins made the statement after Ossoff questioned whether Collins’ abortion position had changed from 2022, when Collins said during a debate and on a candidate survey that he supported a total ban with “no exceptions.”
Now, Collins says he supports three exceptions.
“I’ve been pro-life all my life, forever,” Collins told Ossoff during the Atlanta Press Club-sponsored debate live-streamed by Georgia Public Broadcasting. “I also believe that the Georgia Legislature got it right, that the governor and Legislature allow for three exceptions with the heinous rapes or incest or in the life of the mother. But my opponent Jon Ossoff is completely the opposite.”
Ossoff is seeking a second six-year term in a purple state where Democrats hope to retain the Senate seat. As of late September, the Cook Political Report said the race is likely to go to Democrats.
When we asked Ossoff’s campaign about Collins’ charge that he supports abortion “past birth,” a spokesperson referred us to Ossoff’s debate response.
“I support the standard of privacy that was established in Roe v. Wade,” Ossoff said.
In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that the Constitution protects a woman’s legal access to abortion until the fetus has the ability to live outside the womb, usually between between 24 and 28 weeks after conception. Roe also allowed states to restrict abortions, including banning them after fetal viability, unless the life or health of the mother was at risk.
The U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe on June 24, 2022, when it ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to end federally protected access to abortion and leave individual states to set their own laws.
Asked for evidence of Collins’ claim, campaign spokesperson Meyer Siegfried pointed PolitiFact to Ossoff’s votes on three pieces of federal legislation: his support for S. 4132 in 2022 and his cosponsorship of S. 701 in 2023, both of which were called the Women’s Health Protection Act; and his 2025 vote against S. 6, named the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.
Siegfried said the bills would allow an abortion up to the moment of birth if a provider cites the patient’s health, which he said the bills didn’t define.
Ossoff’s record on abortion
Ossoff voted along party lines to advance S. 4132, but the measure failed, 49-51. The bill said the government cannot prohibit abortions before fetal viability or after fetal viability when a provider determines the patient’s life or health is in danger.
A year later, Ossoff, who is married to an OB-GYN, co-sponsored S. 701 to essentially do the same thing. The bill never advanced to a vote.
Both pieces of legislation explicitly prohibited abortion restrictions before fetal viability. The bills permitted pregnancy termination up until delivery, but only when healthcare professionals determined doing so would preserve the mother’s life or health.
The 2025 Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act that Ossoff votedagainst said that in cases in which a failed abortion resulted in birth, health care practitioners must provide the same level of care they would provide a baby born in a typical childbirth scenario. Democrats who opposed the measure saiddenying care to infants is already illegal.
Ossoff’s campaign website says that he aims to “defend women’s freedom of choice in reproductive health care.” It links to a 2025 article about a survey of 38 Georgia OB-GYNs in which nearly half reported ambiguity in the state’s abortion law led them to encounter cases in which they had to delay care leading to health complications, including the mother’s death. The survey was produced through a partnership between the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Ossoff, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution reported.
Ossoff also released a statement on Oct. 24, 2023, calling on Georgia’s state Legislature and the governor to repeal the state’s six-week abortion ban. That day, the state’s Supreme Court rejected an argument that the law was unconstitutional.
What federal law says about past birth abortions
Willfullykilling a newborn is considered infanticide and is illegal in all 50 states. Health experts have said fatal deaths in the third trimester are exceedingly rare and usually involve emergencies such as fatal anomalies or life-threatening complications for the mother. For fetuses with very short life expectancies, the birth can be induced by a doctor and offer palliative care for the comfort of the newborn.
We previously rated False claimsfrom President Donald Trump and other Republicans saying Democrats are calling for the killing of infants after birth.
The vast majority of abortions in the U.S., over 90%, occur in the first trimester, or before 13 weeks. About 1% take place after 21 weeks, and far less than 1% occur in the third trimester, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2022 report.
Our ruling
Collins said Ossoff is “all for abortion up until and past birth.”
Ossoff says he supports Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that established federally protected abortion access until the fetus had the ability to live outside the womb. That usually happens between 24 and 28 weeks after conception. Roe allowed abortions after viability when the life or health of the mother was at risk.
Killing an infant after birth is illegal in all 50 states.
The vast majority of abortions occur in the first trimester and fatal deaths of babies in the third trimester are rare. If a fetus is born following a failed abortion, doctors are already required to provide necessary care.
Supporting Roe’s ruling that said access to abortion is a federally protected right is not the same as supporting abortion up to the moment of birth.
Do you know the difference between closed-weight models, open-weight models, open-data, and open-source? More importantly, do you think it matters? In a recent webinar, the CEO of CIQ, Gregory Kurtzer, was joined by Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect360 Research, to discuss an emerging issue in the AI market: Unknown risk of model failure due to closed-data training. (e.g., not knowing where the model talking to your customers learned its manners, if at all.) The lack of open-data provenance in popular Foundation models may introduce risk for many organizations that are integrating AI into their business processes.
The OpenWALDO project from CIQ is designed to bring “open-data” to the AI training arena as a way to increase trust and reduce risk in the AI market and community. As the webinar transcript describes the project is designed to bring open-data, open-source software, community, and public governance to the mysterious practice of training AI models. Further background can be found in the HPCwire article entitled What is OpenWALDO and Why Did Greg Kurtzer Need to Create It?
The transcript is based on the full video. The following is a shortened transcript that highlights some of the important insights discussed by both Greg and Addison.
Kevin: Welcome, everybody. And thanks for joining us today. We’re going to be talking about OpenWaldo. And you know what it means to have greater visibility and control over the AI models that your organization uses. And, of course, today joining us is Gregory Kurtzer, founder and CEO of CIQ and founder of OpenWALDO. And we also have Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect360 Research. My name is Kevin Jackson, and I am an analyst here at Intersect360. Greg and Addison, it’s great to have you here.
Kevin Jackson is an analyst with Intersect360 Research and formerly the editor of AIwire
Greg: It’s good to be here. Thank you, Kevin.
Addison: I always have great conversations with Greg, so this is fun for me. Let’s see how it goes today.
Greg: Absolutely. Great meeting. Interesting or weird.
Addison: You know, we’ll see where we go.
Kevin: Exactly. Well, you know, we’re going to explore what OpenWaldo does. You know why it matters for enterprises and what it could mean for how organizations evaluate and adopt AI going forward. So, you know, just to get us started, I’m going to put this question to both of you. But Greg, I’d like to hear your response first. If I’m running a model on my own infrastructure, I’m keeping my data private. Yeah, I might feel that I’ve handled it or I’ve checked the sovereignty box, but actually what am I still not controlling? And why does that matter?
Greg Kurtzer is the creator of OpenWALDO
Greg: There are a lot of aspects about running your own model, trusting your own model, trusting the infrastructure that that model is running on. And how do you check that box on sovereignty? And it’s even more than sovereignty. It’s ownership, it’s control, and it’s visibility, knowing what it is doing. So a lot of organizations are pulling open-weight models and then running them locally. We don’t know what a lot of these open-weight models have been trained on. We don’t know what they’re going to do in a variety of different situations. We don’t know what the code they’re going to be writing is, or what the interfaces and tooling they’re going to be using are. We don’t know what they’re going to, what it’s going to be doing with it. I mean, that’s kind of, it’s kind of one of the, I’ll say, benefits of a non-deterministic system such as an LLM. But at the same time, even though it’s non-deterministic, they definitely have kind of directions that they will pull toward based on the statistics of what they were trained on. So you need to know kind of what’s inside your model. You need to have proper boundaries, guardrails, and sandboxing of your tooling, your agents, etc., and you need to know what everything is doing. So you need to have proper infrastructure visibility and monitoring.
Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect360 Research
Addison: Yes. I mean, that’s the way we’ve seen it in our research: of course, people are organizations. Enterprises are already moving to adopt AI, as, you know, they want to adopt it. They want the productivity gains. They want the efficiencies. But what I like about what you said, Greg, about control, a lot of that really comes down to risk. And we’ve seen this with any new technology that gets adopted, whether it’s, you know, high-performance computing, modeling and simulation, or whether it’s cloud computing or whether it’s the Internet, right? What are the risks that are involved? And it’s not that I have to have no risk. I just want to know what the boundaries are on the risks. Am I protected on the downside, on cost? Am I protected on the downside on what catastrophe might happen, right? It’s basically the way you put it. And the topic that’s in the popular press right now is all around regulation, the regulatory environment. What we find in our surveys is that people feel like they’re kind of okay with understanding what the different regulatory environments are, but they need to know that they’re stable, right? And, you know, how do I control my intellectual property? How do I control any of my downsides? And that’s what having my own model kind of feels like. It gives me more of a sense of control. I think, you know, regardless of where you stand on the regulatory debate right now, we need more regulation. We need less regulation. I think what a lot of organizations want is predictability. And I think what a lot of organizations want right now is, you know, well, I think the result is: can regulation even stay ahead of AI right now? If I’m going to sit back and wait for regulation to explain everything to me, I’m going to get too far behind. That’s just part of the risk environment right now. So how do I go forward with a model, feel like I have some kind of semblance of control, and manage my risk while I chase the productivity gains?
Greg: You bring up such a good point. A few of them, but one of them that I want to touch on is the data. So for an AI model, whether you’re running it on-prem or you’re running a frontier model, you need to give it data in order to get a good response, right? So inside of your prompt or inside of your tooling, it has to have information about what you want to be asking it. And if you’re asking it things about your core business, core products, trade secrets, things under NDA, like you have to include bits and pieces of that- if not the entire IT in its entirety in your prompt in the context, which means you very well might be leaking data. And this gets really bad when we start talking about agents and, even more than agents, all of the tools that the agents write that are scattered all over the infrastructure or even on the Internet that have access to your data. And then what’s securing those tools, what’s securing those applications, and then what’s securing the agents to make sure that they are being maintained within their guardrails and that we’re not doing something, you know, like hacking another site or hacking a foreign government.
Addison: Well, right. I mean, there are so many analogies with that, that I expect my AI to act within certain boundaries, just like anything else that I hire or employ. If I tell my personal assistant to go pick up my dry cleaning and my personal assistant gets there and finds the dry cleaner to be unexpectedly closed, I don’t expect my personal assistant to smash the windows and break in order to follow the directive to go pick up my dry cleaning, right? Without at least checking with me first. “Hey! It’s closed. Dude, how bad do you need it? Do you want me to write?” That would be outside the normal realm of what I expect. Now, that’s where we talk about guardrails and how the models behave. And I guess you can train a model to do whatever you want. Maybe you’re someone who wants it to go break in, but that should be auditable in some way. Right? Did you give it that directive or not? And you know, when we design a car, we expect it to behave in certain ways. Which doesn’t mean you can’t intentionally cause damage with a car, but you want it to be built so that you don’t accidentally cause damage with a car. I think that’s the point.
Greg: That brings up a whole other can of worms, by the way, which is accountability and liability. And where does that exist? Kevin, I’m going to defer to you on that particular can of worms to keep us on track.
Kevin: It’s a conversation we’re all having right now. I think something that Addison says all the time, and I’ll fill in here, is that if you use a new technology to commit fraud, it’s not that we need to write a new law. Fraud is already illegal, right? It’s something that Addison brings up quite often — we already have laws in place that perhaps we could be using and strengthening, but it’s a whole debate that could suck up this whole hour if we wanted to.
Addison: Well, I think that’s not the point. Right. But when it comes to control and auditability, there’s been a lot of discussion of things like open weights. But then what’s the difference between open weight and open-source, and what do you get out of it?
Kevin: That’s where I was driving toward. I’m seeing a lot of people use open weight and open-source interchangeably, and they shouldn’t. Greg, can you tell me what the difference is? And why does that difference matter to a company, or a business?
Greg: Well, the first thing that I want to mention is it’s actually really confusing. And it’s confusing because, if you think, I mean, several different aspects, if you think of open-source software, the open-source premise was kind of written around the notion of open-source software. So we kind of have a really good, firm understanding of what that means when we’re applying it to software. You basically think about it as you have the source of something, whether that’s source code or, you know, it’s been debated if data is considered the source in programs, but you have your source, and then you have your output. And if your source is open-source, the output is open-source. Kind of, that’s the definition of open-source, right? With weights, AI weights, it’s different, and it’s different because we have a bunch of open-source tooling that we’re using to build kind of the foundation and architecture of our models. And then we take the input data, the source, which is not open, and use the open-source tools to create binary weights. And these binary weights then are distributed in some cases under an open-source license. So that means you can do whatever you want with the binary weights, but you don’t know what went into those binary weights. The source for it is not available. So I’m a purist when it comes to open-source, in the most fundamental way.
Greg: And as a result of it, I think of it as any source that you’re using to create an artifact needs to be open for that artifact to be called open-source. And so for an AI, that means that your training data- that’s the corpus of data you’re using. It is the composing and the build tools that you’re using to create your model. And if you just have the open weights, well, open weights are great. Please don’t get me wrong on this. I love the fact that we have open weights. A lot of the complaints that we have around open weights, a lot of the concerns, the transparency, Addison, that you were mentioning. Well, the binary weights are kind of like a black box. You can’t ever go from those binary weights. And then understand how they are produced. And so, as a result, we need to kind of be thinking about this from the perspective of what’s inside those, and if we want to mitigate the concerns of what it means to be an open model. Well, we’ve got to go back to the source, and we’ve got to have trust in everything that was used to create this model. And if we have that, then we can fundamentally call ourselves an open-source model, but without that, open-weight models are not bad, but they’re definitely not open-source.
Addison: Yeah. I think what you’re getting at, Greg, is it hits right at that question that we had about mitigating risk because the large organizations or even small organizations we talk to generally have processes in place for when something goes wrong. They want to trace back to how it happened, whether it’s a product defect or a failure in policy somehow. And, you know, there was some customer harm. You want to know not just how to close this gap, but what caused that to happen. What allowed that to happen? And with AI and some of these open-weight models, you don’t know how they were trained. There’s that worry that I’m going to trace it back and I’m going to get back 1 or 2 steps, and the answer is going to be, well, the AI did it, and it stops there. Well, why did the AI do that? And I’d kind of like to know why the AI did what it did, so that I know that I’m not going to repeat the same mistake, which isn’t necessarily really fear-driven. It’s just kind of best practice in any organization to be able to audit why we’re doing the things that we’re doing, particularly in areas that are considered to be strategically important. When we polled organizations, enterprises, medium and up to large enterprises on where they’ve adopted AI, we found it really prevalent in areas like coding and office productivity and, you know, that kind of thing. But it’s least prevalent in areas having to do with product development and engineering and R&D, which is supposed to be the promise of AI, right? It’s going to help us predict the weather and find new products and cure diseases and all these areas that we’re used to associating with high-performance computing and scientific discovery. That’s where AI is least deployed right now. It’s where the biggest gap is. And I think this notion of control and auditability is one of those pieces that’s been missing.
Addison: I mean, look, I’m not a doomer about this. I think there will be things that happen that are bad. Just like with any new technology, if you invent a car, you’re going to have car crashes. Overall, the car accelerates a lot of things and does a lot of good for humanity. Right? And you could say that about any new technology. Overall, I think organizations do want to chase the productivity gains here. People are adopting it. The question I keep coming back to is then: how do I mitigate the risk? How do I control or understand the downside? And in order to activate the upside, because AI should be accelerating discovery in all of these ways, it just feels like there’s been a piece missing to help get to that level of control. That gives me confidence to move it into those areas of forward-leaning R&D and scientific discovery.
Kevin: Absolutely. And, let’s talk about that missing piece. Let’s make it a little bit more concrete with this discussion about OpenWALDO. What can an organization do with OpenWaldo today? And what decision would it help that organization make? How is this going to further that organization’s mission?
Addison: So start by saying what OpenWaldo is. We just dropped this term in here.
Kevin: Please, Greg, why don’t you give us a good, deep discussion of the entirety of this?
Greg: Yeah, absolutely. So kind of going back to the open-source versus the open weights discussion, there isn’t really a way for community members to kind of join together and band together to start creating an AI from scratch. This would involve, as I mentioned before, the AI corpus or training material. This involves data that you’re going to be potentially post-training on and teaching it, for example, how to interact with an API, how to interact with a data structure, how to actually respond properly. So all of these things have to go into the training data, into the corpus. And then you have your tooling, and then all the tooling kind of brings this whole thing together. And then you, of course, need a community around this to be able to say, well, you know, I’m going to bring in this piece of data, or I’m going to work on this tooling, or I’m going to be reviewing this corpus, or I’m going to be looking at the different types of compose files that we have for creating different types of AI models. And I want to ensure, and again, I use this metaphor, tongue-in-cheek humorously, but just to make sure there are no Terminator movie scripts in it or books and whatnot on the AI being not aligned with human humanity and laws, right? So let’s make sure that we are putting laws into this. Let’s make sure that we are putting appropriate ethics into this and having that transparency and visibility. Addison, what you’re mentioning is super important because if I have the ability to choose between two types of models, and I know what went into both of them, I can make an educated decision on which model I want to run, and I can make that decision as a company now, managing some of my risks and compliance.
Addison: I think that’s exactly the point that we were building up to. You’ve created an AI bill of materials that I can investigate, and that the community, as it will, if you think about the open-source community and this becomes an AI community that’s contributing to this corpus, if you’ve got a question about it, take a look. Here it is under the covers. And boy, when I think back to how open-source software really took off, you know, going back to the advent of Linux in the mid to late 1990s, what happened was you had this terrific open-source community of programmers that were then all working on something together. And it didn’t take very long before that raced to the forefront; this is what we’re going to build our organization on.
Greg: The entire free software and open-source movement is that we all have the ability to look at the source for whatever artifacts we’re talking about, right? Whether that source is software. And again, I’m a purist. So whether that source is software and code or whether that’s whatever went into the artifact itself, if you have that ability to see into it, you now have a level of trust that doesn’t require faith. It requires it because you could see it.
Kevin: Absolutely. And this kind of brings me to something I wanted to discuss here. Most companies, most enterprises, most businesses, they’re not training foundation models themselves, right? And if I’m using or maybe fine-tuning someone else’s model, how can OpenWaldo help me? And what would it take to use it in order to benefit my organization?
Greg: Training a model, I want to say, is a very difficult thing to do. There are a lot of things that can go wrong, and it is exceedingly expensive to have the appropriate hardware to train a model. And an interesting aspect about it is, and I’m just going to kind of talk about this very superficially, but training a model and running your model are two different things, right? So you have your training side, which is where you’re taking all that input data, and you’re kind of managing the orchestration of how you’re building that model, and you’re running it on a very large, very expensive resource, usually with many, many GPUs. On the light side, this is probably tens of millions of dollars to build one of these systems. The large frontier AI labs have ridiculously large investments in their training infrastructure. And I want to be very clear: you could be using that training, that infrastructure, and after months of training, you realize that the model went askew, or your training plan went askew, and you’re either starting over or starting over from the last known good checkpoint. And it’s an expensive, very frustrating, very high-risk kind of process to train a model. And a lot of times you end up with a model that comes out the other side.
Addison: Yes, and the question was around how does OpenWaldo help? And I think you laid the groundwork for that, Greg, because, you know, I don’t really want to train a whole foundation model myself. Let’s take something simple, like a chatbot. I want to use that for my business, whether it’s internal or for my customers. I don’t need to retrain basic human vocabulary from scratch. I do have to give it some knowledge about my products and my business, including my own internal jargon that’s important to me, that might not be in the general corpus, right? So there is some training, but I’d like to start from an auditable, understood foundation because I don’t want to find, you know, later that my chatbot has been, you know, picking up a habit of sexually harassing the people who interact with the chatbot because it learned from the Internet. Right. That would be bad. I don’t want that to happen. I don’t want to train that part. I’d like to have something that comes in starting out good, and then I’m going to specialize it.
Kevin: It’s a great discussion. It’s something that I’m sure we’ll touch back on. But, you know, just to keep this rolling, we’ve kind of been circling around this, but I’d like to dive into it specifically. Say I’m a decision-maker at my company, and I’m deciding on how I want to move forward with the project. How should I decide whether to buy a supported AI product or build on open-source? What should drive that choice?
Greg: So, I’ll jump in on that one. I would make the relation back to what we’ve been doing in open-source for decades now. There are companies that stand behind products that will give you guarantees, assurances, and take the liability on, in many cases, for those products to at least do what those products say that they’re going to do to a reasonable extent. And, when organizations are buying part of their software infrastructure, that’s part of what they’re buying; even if it is 100% based on open-source software, you’re buying that, that commercial relationship; in a more direct sense, you’re buying the throat to choke, and you are mitigating your risks and compliance needs by doing so. Now, if a company wishes to go direct to open-source and download an open-source operating system or build their own kernel or, you know, run without a support contract, without a commercial agreement. What they’re basically ending up with is, well, they’re taking on the liability themselves. Now, with open-source, it’s not an unreasonable thing in many cases to take on that liability yourself because you can see what’s in it; you know what that software is going to do. And you can audit if you’re so inclined and/or able; you can audit that code and make sure that it’s at least as good as, as you know it, it is supposed to be, with what we’re seeing right now with open weights.
Addison: I think, Kevin, just the fact that you’re asking the question underlines the point that there’s going to be segments for all of these things, just like there has been ever since Linux and the early debates in the late 1990s about whether to trust my enterprise on open-source software. I think we found over time that a lot of people did, or what I want is something that’s open-source, but I want a supported version of the open-source, right? But either way, taking the boom in AI now and all of the dialogue we’re already having around open weights and saying, what about something more like open-source with an open corpus and a community-driven effort? I mean, I think this is something that really is going to take off. OpenWaldo is kind of an early mover here; first to market has the opportunity. Is it going to be OpenWALDO in the future? I guess that’s for CIQ and to try to drive their product. But we haven’t seen this before. And I think for those who are worried about, you know, us or Western technology and what’s going on with the Chinese, I mean, you know, imagine if this were a Chinese product right now, would there be concern about what the control around it is and who’s auditing it? I think the idea that you have an open community, open corpus, open weight, open-source, like, here’s something I can understand and build AI on it. Companies will evaluate how much control, how much support they want over time. But an open community effort around AI, I think we’ve seen enough in the past to know that this is an idea that ought to take off.
Greg: You know, we’ve been we introduced OpenWALDO; we talked about it. And you just kind of gave this string of openness that I think is really important. And it’s funny because I gloss over this so often because, like, maybe I’m so close to it, but the name itself is actually really cute. Not because Waldo is cute. It’s because, well, maybe, but it’s because WALDO stands for open weights, open artifacts, open licenses, open data, and open origins. And when you put that all together, that’s basically what we’re ending up with in terms of what it means to be a truly open-source model. And when we’re talking about the corpus, we’re talking about the data and the origins of that model. So, anyway, just wanted to put that out there that all those things together is really where OpenWaldo got its name.
Kevin: We’re just talking about transparency, and I’m interested in something: making the training data inspectable is one thing, but having the expertise to evaluate it is another. How does an enterprise turn that transparency into confidence? And who should do the checking?
Greg: I’ll take another stab at this. Not to dominate, I’ll go back to how open-source works today. We, holistically, as a community of enterprises and individuals and people, we all rely on open-source software every single day, whether you know it or not. And there are, I mean, I can’t even tell you how many millions and billions of lines of software that we are relying on that is open-source. We have several ways of trusting that because there are examples of malicious actors, bad actors trying to infiltrate open-source communities to try to get malicious code into the open-source ecosystem. And this has happened 100%. And we’ve learned lessons as a result of that. Are the lessons foolproof? No, they’re not. But we’re continuously learning. And if you look at the amount of contributions that we get, it’s an incredibly small amount of contributions that have actually turned out to be malicious, and what we’ve been able to do is leverage things like the developer certificate of origin (DCO), leveraging accountability, understanding who the contributors are, and being able to monitor those contributions with reviews, code reviews, data reviews, etc., before we allow anything into the corpus, whether it’s open-source software or the OpenWaldo corpus.
Greg: That creates trust: the fact that you can, even though many people might not be able to, either technically, or it may just be too much data. The Linux kernel has tens of millions of, I think, tens of millions of lines. It’s definitely in the millions. I don’t know if it’s tens of millions. I need to go back and check that now. But there’s so much code in there, and it requires such specific expertise that even many software developers who are very senior in their roles cannot audit the Linux kernel. They can’t audit the core toolchains of the C library and the compilers and whatnot within every single operating system that we’re using that’s based on 0open-source. Can’t do it, but specifically knowing that others can is where you start to develop confidence and trust. And when we’re talking about data, like what’s in OpenWaldo, we’re not talking about the goalposts being a little bit shifted because we’re not talking about software and code that people can, anybody can review; in this case, we’re actually just talking about such a mass quantity of data. It’s hard to review. We’re talking about hundreds of billions and trillions of tokens going into an AI corpus.
Addison: Yeah, I think you really highlighted important things there, Greg, with regard to how these things get adopted. And I would start by looking at what processes we already have in place, again, not reinventing things, but then we’ll find that processes have to evolve somehow. My, I like that you were talking about software development in general. Vibe coding is one of these areas that’s really taken off. And there’s this idea of, look how much faster I can produce software. Well, but any professional software engineer will tell you that writing the code is one part of it. You know, have I checked it for dependencies against all the other modules? Is it well documented? How about security checking all that software? Right. Who’s doing all that as you pile it on? Is it another AI that’s doing the security check? What’s that process like there? A lot goes into software engineering beyond just, ” Hey, I produced all this code that needs to be checked. It needs to be, you know, integrated in certain ways. And there should be a process for that. Maybe the process needs to evolve because you’re producing software so much faster. And I can extend that to scientific discovery and, you know, hey, I’m producing papers so much faster now because AI is helping with the research. Okay. What about peer review? Right? I’ve just put out 2000 papers. Who’s doing the peer review on 2000 papers? Is peer review important? It’s been a cornerstone of our scientific process.
Addison: I want that data. Right. And it was like this change in policy of how they want to do their testing, which implied some extra cost, but it was a worthwhile cost in order to get the gain. Now AI is going to be a little different, but it’s kind of the same. What I want is to start with my existing processes and figure out how to adapt the policies to get the AI gain, but still keep confidence and, in fact, build confidence that the AI is taking me in the right direction. And again, having an auditable or open AI that I can look at and say, this is how we got to where we are. That’s what we already went through with modeling and simulation. Right? How do we build the confidence that the simulation is good? It rhymes with the idea that how do I build confidence that the AI is good means evolving my process. So I feel confident in the peer review. I feel confident in the product test. I feel confident in the customer interaction. You know, if I have a customer service rep, I train them, and I monitor them to make sure that they’re interacting with the customer the right way. Chatbot, same thing, right? I want to train them. I want to monitor them. But the process has to evolve to incorporate the AI if I’m going to really take advantage of it.
Kevin: We’re, we’re running out of time here.
Greg: I have a plug before you close.
Kevin: Please go right ahead.
Greg: So Addison and I are going to be sitting down together again at Supercomputing (SC26) this year. If you’re not familiar with Supercomputing, you need to check it out. Supercomputing is one of the coolest conferences in existence. And Addison and I are gonna be sitting down and doing a panel. We’re going to be having discussions like this. We’re going to be taking more information, more questions from the crowd. And we really are a lot of fun on stage together. I’m just saying. So you all should come and join. If you’re headed to Supercomputing, definitely join us. If you’re not going to Supercomputing, you’re missing out. You should.
Addison: Greg’s going to prompt me to tell a joke while we’re up there. I’m pretty sure I told him. I told him I have a couple of dad jokes at the ready. Absolutely.
Addison: All right. I’m supposed to ask someone: where do people learn more about OpenWaldo? What do you want, people? Where do you want people to go?
Greg: The easiest way is to go to OpenWALDO.org. No hyphens, no spaces. So I don’t think you need to say spaces anymore. It’s a URL, but no hyphens. No dots except for “.org”. But anyway, OpenWALDO.org. You’ll find it. Come and join. We’ve got a Slack instance. Super friendly people. We’re all talking about AI. We’re talking about building AI. And you can learn, you can, you can level up and be part of the cool kids club.
Kevin: And don’t we all want to be part of the cool kids club?
Addison: We’re the commercial for the cool kids. Oh.
Greg: Actually, that’s probably okay. Well, you guys are cooler than me, so.
Kevin: Well, again, I’ll just say that the website is OpenWALDO.org. If anybody has any questions, concerns, or comments, please head there. There is a Contact Us section. Greg, Addison. Thank you both. We covered a lot here today. And I think this is a really interesting discussion.
Joshua Foster pleaded guilty over death of toddler who fell from fourth-floor window of hotel during family holiday
A British man has been fined €3,000 (£2,500) after his two-year-old son fell 10 metres (33ft) to his death from the fourth-floor window of a hotel in Cyprus.
Joshua Foster thought the window was closed when he approached it with the boy to show him the view of a waterpark and “lost control” of him, the court previously heard.
Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was asked by Sky News at a press conference in Brussels, Belgium, if he felt he was being made a 'scapegoat' by his US counterpart, Donald Trump, for domestic problems including high diesel prices before midterm elections. Zelenskyy paused for 15 seconds, before he eventually smiled and said: 'This is my answer.'
NEW YORK, Oct. 16, 2026 — Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani, Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su and New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) President and CEO Anthony Shorris have announced the city will award $29.2 million to New York University (NYU) to establish a cutting-edge Quantum Fabrication Facility (QFab), putting New York City at the front of the emerging quantum technology field. As part of the Mamdani administration’s investment, the city will receive board seats at QFab as well as a stake in new technologies that emerge from QFab, a first-of-its-kind agreement that will allow the City to help shape this emerging technology for the public good.
Mayor Mamdani announcing the establishment of Quantum Fabrication Facility at NYU. Photo credit: Tracey Friedman/NYU.
QFab — which is backed by an additional $255 million investment from NYU spanning construction and 10 years of operations — will give researchers, students, start-ups and established companies access to specialized equipment for building and testing new quantum devices. It is expected to support more than 100 companies and reach 35,000 New Yorkers in its first 10 years of operation.
Additionally, to grow the number of New York City jobs in the quantum field, NYU will provide students at the City University of New York (CUNY) and New York City Public Schools (NYCPS) with access to state-of-the-art labs, training, new certificate programs and summer workshops.
Altogether, today’s announcement represents a historic investment by the Mamdani administration in the future of New York City’s economy and helps set a new national model for economic development for the public good.
“Right now, at subatomic levels that we can only glimpse, new technologies are being developed that will transform how we fight disease, store energy, and exchange information. We want those technologies, investments and jobs to be created here in New York City — and we want New Yorkers to have a say and a share in their success. With this new quantum lab, we are bringing that vision to life,” said Mayor Mamdani. “This first-of-its-kind agreement will give the city board seats to shape the future of the quantum industry and a stake in the new technologies that emerge from the lab, making sure that all New Yorkers see the profits and progress from quantum technology, not just the wealthy few. We are building a city where economic justice doesn’t come at the expense of innovation.”
“The New York City region is home to one of the largest concentrations of quantum scientists and engineers in the world. 770 Broadway will be the catalyst for new discoveries that propel us to the next level. What will make our new quantum facility truly unique is how connected it will be with the city around it. Through our partnership with the City, thousands of CUNY students will train alongside our NYU students on cutting-edge equipment and build their research careers in one of the fastest growing scientific fields. New York City-based start-ups and companies will have access to cutting-edge fabrication and materials found in few other cities,” said NYU President Linda Mills. “This is going to be the launchpad for an entire new industry with enormous opportunities for New Yorkers.”
“Quantum won’t be built by any one institution working alone,” said Dr. Juan de Pablo, NYU’s Executive Vice President for Global Science and Technology, and the Executive Dean of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. “QFab brings research, industry, and hands-on training together under one roof to create one of the most advanced fabrication facilities in the nation. Importantly, this is a facility that will fuel job creation not only for those with advanced degrees, but for technicians, fabricators, and engineers at all levels that this field demands. This is our chance to make sure that as the quantum industry takes shape, it takes shape here, so the NYU and CUNY students training in our labs today can forge careers right here in New York, tomorrow. The quantum future is coming whether New York builds it or not. Today we make sure it’s built here in New York City, by New Yorkers from all five boroughs.”
About the Quantum Fabrication Facility
Expected to open in 2030, QFab will deepen New York City’s position as the global leader in quantum technology — new technology that utilizes quantum mechanics. Quantum technology will revolutionize fields ranging from life sciences to finance to health care in the decades ahead and is projected to generate up to $2.7 trillion in economic value by 2035.
Spanning 23,000 square feet and located at 770 Broadway, QFab will help develop these technologies and offer researchers, students, start-ups, and established companies access to:
Facility and Equipment: Advanced manufacturing and testing of quantum chips and components, alongside specialized cleanrooms, cryogenics and equipment.
Workforce Development: Technician training, expertise, CUNY associate and certificate programs for quantum technicians, internships, bootcamps, and VR learning.
Entrepreneurship Support: Resources to help startups incubate and commercialize technology as well as integrate with NYU’s broader entrepreneurial ecosystem.
QFab is expected to reach more than 35,000 New Yorkers in its first 10 years of operations, including over 5,000 students through undergraduate and graduate school programming, summer bootcamps for NYCPS students, internship programs, and a new certificate program launched at select CUNY schools.
As part of its work, QFab is projected to incubate nearly 50 companies as well as provide services to 50 newly formed startups. QFab will help companies turn prototypes into products and provide support from NYU’s academic and entrepreneurial programs.
Finally, Mayor Mamdani announced a new public-private partnership that will ensure that when publicly backed technologies succeed, the public benefits as well. To ensure the city’s priorities are continuously reflected in the future of QFab, the city will receive three seats on the QFab Executive Advisory Board.
Additionally, when intellectual property is created at QFab using tools the city funded, the city will receive 15% of the NYU Central Administration’s proceeds resulting from the intellectual property — including equity, royalties, milestone payments and licenses of the patent.
This agreement will not only ensure that the city government can shape the direction of future technologies in New York City and share in the revenue that results from public investment but help set a new national model for how city governments support emerging industries.
“I’m proud to have secured federal funding for NYU to invest in state-of-the-art quantum technology equipment,” said Senator Chuck Schumer. “This investment, alongside the city’s investment in a new NYU quantum technology lab, will strengthen New York’s position as a national leader in this emerging field. The cutting-edge research it supports will benefit finance, semiconductor, and advanced manufacturing companies across the state, helping drive innovation and building the technologies of the future.”
(The Center Square) - A race for U.S. House in Florida will come down to the difference between candidates' views on immigration and gas prices with control of Congress on the line.
Chicken and waffles had been on American tables long before Wells Supper Club opened in Harlem in 1938. Wells built a late-night version that jazz ... Read moreThe post A midnight compromise from 1938 Harlem became the flavor formula the…
Commitment to the European Commission’s AI in Science Enablers Initiative includes 4,000 complimentary AI product licenses, support for new research collaborations, and expanded PhD, postdoctoral, and master’s training in AI-assisted research
DUBLIN, Oct. 16, 2026 — Elsevier, a global leader in advanced information and decision support in science and healthcare, has announced its pledge to the European Commission’s AI in Science Enablers Initiative.
Elsevier’s contribution spans complimentary access to its AI-powered research and clinical tools, funded research collaborations, and training for the next generation of AI-literate researchers and clinicians, reflecting the company’s mission to help advance science and healthcare to advance human progress.
The pledge was announced at the AI in Science Summit in Dublin, which brought together over 1,000 participants from the research, technology, business, and policy communities to launch the Commission’s initiative to mobilize private-sector and philanthropic support for European science.
Elsevier AI Solutions
Elsevier will make available 4,000 complimentary licenses for European researchers, healthcare professionals and students:
1,000 LeapSpace licenses for early-career and senior researchers, alongside a proposed Europe-wide Challenge to be developed with the Commission. LeapSpace is a research-grade AI workspace that helps researchers carry out complex tasks across their complete workflows.
1,000 ClinicalKey AI licenses. ClinicalKey AI is an EHR and API-enabled clinical decision support tool designed to quickly surface the latest evidence at the point of care.
1,000 ClinicalKey Nursing AI licenses. ClinicalKey Nursing AI is a clinical AI tool built specifically for nurses and designed to support both point of care decision-making and professional growth across the nursing career journey.
1,000 Complete Anatomy licenses. Complete Anatomy is the world’s most advanced 3D anatomy platform.
Research collaboration and training
Alongside these licenses, Elsevier is committing an estimated €1m a year of in-kind support and funding to strengthen Europe’s AI research talent pipeline and to advance responsible, AI-centered research:
At least three new collaborations per year with European research institutions, drawing on in-kind support from Elsevier’s data science, ethics and software development experts, alongside access to its content suite and knowledge discovery tools.
Participation in the Horizon-funded AIRIS project, which supports AI-enabled hypothesis generation in biomedicine.
Establishment of a new Centre on Hybrid Intelligence for Trustworthy Research, in partnership with the University of Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Training and career development for approximately 10 PhD candidates, postdoctoral researchers and master’s students in AI per year, through programs across the company.
Kumsal Bayazit, CEO, Elsevier, said: “Europe’s world-leading researchers and clinicians are working at the frontier of AI, and they need platforms and partnerships they can trust. Through this pledge, Elsevier is bringing the full breadth of its capabilities to that effort — funded collaborations, training for the next generation of scientists, and research-grade AI and clinical solutions for better outcomes. We’re proud to support the European Commission’s AI in Science Enablers Initiative and to help build an AI research ecosystem for Europe that is innovative, responsible, and sustainable.”
Elsevier will continue to work with the European Commission to refine the details of its pledge, including the scope of the LeapSpace Challenge, in the weeks following the Summit. To apply for complimentary access to Elsevier’s AI-powered research and clinical tools, please visit: www.elsevier.com/promotions/eu-ai-science-enablers-portal.
About the AI in Science Enablers Initiatives
The AI in Science Enablers Initiative is a European Commission initiative to maximize the impact of private-sector and philanthropic support for the European research community, and to make these initiatives as visible and accessible as possible to researchers and scientific organizations across Europe.
About Elsevier
Elsevier is a global leader in advanced information and decision support. For over a century, we have been helping advance science and healthcare to advance human progress. We support academic and corporate research communities, doctors, nurses, future healthcare professionals, and educators across 170 countries in their vital work. We help impact makers achieve better outcomes with research and clinical-grade solutions built on the world’s leading evidence-based scientific and medical content, precision AI, and expert human assessment. We champion inclusion and sustainability, working with the communities that we serve. The Elsevier Foundation supports research and health partnerships around the world.
Elsevier is part of RELX, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers.
Influencers conservadores están compartiendo lo que dicen es una llamada telefónica que prueba que el representante estatal James Talarico, candidato demócrata al Senado en Texas, estuvo ausente de su campaña electoral porque estaba internado en un “hospital psiquiátrico”.
“EXCLUSIVA DE ÚLTIMA HORA: Un hospital psiquiátrico de Ohio CONFIRMA que el candidato demócrata al Senado por Texas James Talarico fue dado de alta del centro a principios de esta semana luego de haber intentado suicidarse,” dice una publicación en Facebook del 11 de octubre.
Talarico estuvo ausente de la campaña electoral durante nueve días y dijo que se estaba recuperando de la gripe.
El Lindner Center of Hope en Ohio, donde las publicaciones dicen que Talarico estuvo internado, negó que él recibiera tratamiento allí. Además, la cronología de los supuestos hechos contradice las apariciones públicas de Talarico.
¡Sigue el canal de WhatsApp de PolitiFact en Español para estar al día de lo que es cierto, falso, engañoso o fuera de contexto! #whatsapp#canales#verificacion#factcheck
Un influencer de derecha dijo haber llamado al centro, diciendo ser un familiar de Talarico
Rhein Amacher, un influyente de derecha, publicó lo que, según él, era una grabación de audio de 55 segundos de su llamada al Lindner Center, en la que preguntaba si tenían información sobre Talarico. El Lindner Center es un centro de salud mental y hospital psiquiátrico. Amacher dijo haber hablado con el centro en dos ocasiones.
“Yo personalmente, me puse en contacto con @LindnerCtrHope en Mason, Ohio, para determinar si Talarico era o había sido paciente allí”, dice el subtítulo de la publicación de Amacher . “Durante mi llamada, que fue grabada, una persona que se identificó como empleada del centro dijo que Talarico ya no era paciente y que había sido dado de alta en las últimas 24 – 48 horas”.
La grabación de audio que publicó se transcribe de la siguiente manera:
Mujer: Hola, no encuentro a nadie con ese nombre desde hace cuatro días que haya sido dado de alta y no está aquí en el edificio.
Amacher: Okay, ¿entonces nada por James Talarico?
Mujer: Eh, veamos, parece — bueno, así está hoy. Parece que, como, le dieron de alta esta noche. Por eso no lo tengo.
Amacher: ¿Ah, entonces lo dieron de alta?
Mujer: Mm-hmm.
Amacher: Bien, y esta es el Hope—
Mujer: Así que él debería ser —
Amacher: Okay.
Mujer: Hmm, ¿perdón?
Amacher: Esta es — me aseguraré de tener la correcta — ¿Este es Hope Lindner?
Mujer: Sí. Ajá.
Amacher: Okay, ¿y usted está en Hamilton, Ohio?
Mujer: No, no estamos en Hamilton. No, estamos en Mason.
Amacher: Okay, entonces por eso no está en el sistema. Ha estado recientemente. Okay. Muy bien.
Mujer: Okay.
Amacher: Gracias.
Mujer: Gracias. Adiós.
Amacher publicó un fragmento de otra llamada en la que preguntó al centro por Talarico; luego, se identificó como primo de Talarico, dijo que planeaba enviarle una carta y que estaba verificando si aún estaba allí. El empleado le preguntó si tenía un código, indicando que sin él, el centro no podía proporcionarle ninguna información.
En la segunda llamada, se le volvió a pedir a Amacher un código, y él dijo que “simplemente se lo inventó” para intentar “eludir las restricciones de seguridad del centro para hablar sobre el paciente”.
El 11 de octubre, el Centro Lindner publicó en X : “El representante James Talarico nunca ha recibido tratamiento del Lindner Center of Hope”.
Talarico compartió la declaración del Centro Lindner y dijo : “Nunca he estado en Ohio”, acompañado de un emoji de risa.
PolitiFact contactó al Lindner Center, y Amacher, pero no obtuvo respuesta.
Amacher publicó lo que parecía ser una captura de pantalla de su registro de llamadas, que mostraba que había realizado las llamadas poco antes de las 9 p.m. del 10 de octubre. La captura de pantalla muestra tres llamadas, pero solo subió fragmentos de dos de ellas.
The Bulwark obtuvo de Amacher la grabación completa de lo que él dijo ser su segunda llamada. En la grabación, Amacher decía llamarse “Tim” y que Talarico era su primo. La mujer repitió en varias ocasiones que no tenía a nadie con ese nombre en sus registros.
Cuando The Bulwark llamó al Lindner Center, la mujer que atendió la llamada dijo: “Jamás divulgaríamos información de pacientes”, y “eso constituiría una violación de la HIPAA”. La Ley de Portabilidad y Responsabilidad de Seguros de Salud (HIPAA, por sus siglas en inglés) de Estados Unidos es una ley federal que protege la privacidad de los pacientes. The Bulwark no reveló la identidad de la representante.
Jennifer Pierson, portavoz del Lindner Center, le dijo a The Daily Wire que el centro “respeta la privacidad y la confidencialidad de todas las personas” y “no confirmamos ni negamos si alguna persona es o ha sido paciente, y no hacemos comentarios sobre casos individuales”.
En respuesta a una de las publicaciones circulando en redes sociales que citaban la llamada de Amacher, el portavoz de Talarico, JT Ennis, dijo el 11 de octubre en X, “Esto es una mentira diseñada para promover una patética teoría de conspiración. La semana pasada, James Talarico estuvo en su casa en Austin, Texas, recuperándose de la gripe”.
Cuando se le preguntó a Talarico en una entrevista el 11 de octubre con KXAS-TV, una filial de NBC en Dallas-Fort Worth, sobre las afirmaciones de que había tenido un “episodio provocado por el estrés” y que estaba recibiendo tratamiento, él dijo: “Eso no es cierto. Solo tuve gripe y me siento mucho mejor. Pero es un buen recordatorio de que no hay que creer todo lo que se lee en internet”.
Talarico apareció en público el 9 y el 10 de octubre
La cronología que proporcionó Amacher — llamando al centro el 10 de octubre y que le dijeran que Talarico había sido “dado de alta esa misma noche” — contradice las apariciones públicas de Talarico el 9 y el 10 de octubre.
Talarico asistió al festival de música Austin City Limits la tarde del 9 de octubre. Esa misma noche, Ennis compartió un video de Talarico recorriendo el recinto y dijo: “Siento decepcionar a los teóricos de la conspiración, pero James sigue vivo y hoy se reúne con los votantes en ACL”.
Talarico publicó videos en los que saludaba a las personas en el festival.
La noche del 10 de octubre, Talarico asistió al concierto de la cantante de música country Kacey Musgraves en Dallas. Publicó fotos de él y Musgraves en el concierto, y publicaciones en redes sociales también mostraron su presencia.
Nuestro veredicto
Publicaciones en redes sociales dijeron que una grabación de audio era prueba de que Talarico había sido dado de alta de un “hospital psiquiátrico” el 10 de octubre.
El Lindner Center of Hope dijo que Talarico nunca ha recibido tratamiento allí. Talarico dijo que nunca ha estado en Ohio.
Según las afirmaciones, Talarico fue dado de alta la noche del 10 de octubre. Sin embargo, apareció en público los días 9 y 10 de octubre.
Calificamos esta afirmación como Ridícula y Falsa.
Caryn Baird, investigadora de PolitiFact, contribuyó a este reporte.
Nota del editor: PolitiFact tradujo esta historia del inglés al español usando un servicio de traducción automática. Los periodistas de PolitiFact con fluidez en ambos idiomas editaron la traducción para mayor claridad y precisión.
The Brewers turned LA’s stars into ghosts during their four-game NLCS sweep, destroying the ‘team that destroyed baseball’ and revealing the sport’s hard truth
Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy had just watched his club dismantle Los Angeles for a fourth straight National League Championship Series game. Standing with his team in the Dodger Stadium clubhouse, he was ready to celebrate. But before popping his champagne and setting off a stream of celebratory suds, Murphy had a message.
“They got a bunch of Hall of Famers. We got a bunch of gamers.”
Teams led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Phasecraft partner with QuEra for work on superconductors, high-performance magnets, and hydrogen production applications.
BOSTON, Oct. 16, 2026 — QuEra Computing has announced that its scientists will work with three of the nine teams selected for the Quantum Computing for Computational Chemistry (QC3) program at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E) to develop neutral-atom based modeling frameworks for complex materials and molecules. The three-year program, announced by the Department of Energy in March 2026, directs $37 million across the program performers.
QC3 exists to close the gap between vendor roadmaps that are rapidly transitioning to expanded logical capabilities by the end of the decade but don’t yet clearly map to the resources required for published algorithms for energy-relevant chemistry applications. ARPA-E’s premise is that the gap closes through full-stack co-design, where improvements of two to three times at each layer of the stack compound into an order of magnitude overall. The program asks its teams to identify an application worth a quadrillion BTU of energy or a gigaton of CO₂-equivalent, and to pursue a scalable hundredfold improvement over classical state of the art, validated at approximately 100 logical qubits. QuEra’s updated roadmap targets 1,000 logical qubits by 2029, providing ample hardware capability for this program.
The Three Projects
QuEra scientists serve as co-principal investigators on each of the following teams, contributing neutral-atom access, expertise, algorithm and architecture co-design.
SuperKIQ, led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Superconductor search through Krylov-inspired quantum algorithms, aimed at deepening understanding of high-temperature superconductors and accelerating the discovery of new superconducting materials by co-designing algorithms and error-correction protocols for hardware with reconfigurable connectivity. The team also includes NASA Ames, the University of Southern California, Michigan State University, Citrine Informatics, and Azulene Labs.
MAGNETIQC, led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Quantum and machine-learning-accelerated software tools applied to the discovery of ultra-strong, lightweight magnets for electric motors, generators, and high-performance information technology. The team also includes members from Columbia University, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center Application Technology Group, and Citrine Informatics.
Quantum Computing for Hydrogen Fuel Production, led by Phasecraft. Optimized quantum algorithms for simulating electrolysis, with the primary objective of reducing reliance on iridium, a critical mineral, in hydrogen production. The team also includes Phasecraft Ltd, Johnson Matthey, and Harvard University.
Why Neutral Atoms Support ARPA-E’s Mission
The QC3 solicitation required every applicant to submit a letter of intent from a quantum hardware provider as part of its application, which made the hardware choice a gating requirement rather than a later implementation detail. Five of the nine selected primes are hardware companies running their own machines. QuEra is the external hardware provider partner for three out of the remaining four projects.
QuEra’s neutral atom technology and application co-design approach was an attractive choice for partners thanks to the architectural benefits it provides for full-stack application development and optimization across both error correction and application layers. Neutral atoms are identical by nature, controlled wirelessly by lasers, and are reconfigurable, which enables a high degree of connectivity: a core lever in algorithm development and error correction implementation.
“QuEra’s architecture and software stack give researchers exceptional flexibility to co-design quantum error correction and fault-tolerant applications with the hardware itself,” said Shengtao Wang, VP of Algorithms and Applications at QuEra. “That flexibility is especially valuable in a long-term program like ARPA-E’s QC3, which aims to deliver a step change in computational chemistry and materials science.”
Co-Design as the Method
ARPA-E’s co-design thesis is one that QuEra is closely aligned with. With Los Alamos National Laboratory, QuEra published a transversal STAR architecture in PRX Quantum in June 2026 that delivers up to 250 times faster execution and roughly half the physical qubits of conventional fault-tolerant approaches for structured quantum simulation, achieved specifically by co-designing error correction around neutral-atom reconfigurable connectivity. Separately, algorithmic fault tolerance published in Nature in 2025 reduced runtime overhead by 10 to 100 times for reconfigurable architectures.
“We have a growing body of evidence that the earliest examples of quantum advantage will be the result of co-design across the entire application stack, from the algorithm design to the QEC architecture, to the hardware itself,” said Stefan Ostermann, Director of Quantum Applications at QuEra. “The Department of Energy’s approach through QC3 is one we deeply agree with, and we are excited to partner closely with them over the course of this program.”
About the QC3 Program
Quantum Computing for Computational Chemistry is an ARPA-E program directing $37 million across nine teams over three years to develop quantum algorithms and hardware co-design approaches for chemistry and materials science problems relevant to energy. The program director is Dr. Jyotsna Sharma.
About QuEra Computing
QuEra is putting quantum to work. As the scientific and commercial leader in neutral-atom quantum computing, we help enterprise innovators leverage quantum to gain competitive advantage, support HPC centers as their users tackle classically intractable problems, and enable government programs to build national and sovereign capabilities. We do this by combining our quantum systems, available on-premises and via the cloud, with application co-design and collaborative research. Born at Harvard and MIT and still advancing together, QuEra builds neutral-atom systems on a public, peer-reviewed path to fault tolerance, and operates globally from Boston, New Mexico, Tokyo, Zurich, and the United Kingdom. As quantum computing moves from “one day” to “Day One,” QuEra delivers practical impact today while leading the path toward large-scale, fault-tolerant systems. See what’s possible at www.quera.com.
Tech billionaires have raised more than $340m to defeat Prop 40, a one-time 5% wealth tax that will fund healthcare and education
Tech billionaires have been dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the fight against a wealth tax in California. They’ve raised more than $340m, and the campaign they’re funding is spending more than $1m a day to defeat the measure, according to state financial disclosures.
With the election less than a month away, those funds are being spent at a stepped-up pace. During the first 19 days of September, according to the most recent campaign filings, the opposition campaign plowed through at least $21.2m to fight the billionaire tax – surpassing $1m per day. Voters are being inundated with robotexts, mailers and advertisements that warn a tax on billionaires would “expose all Californians to higher taxes”, as one ad reads.
Johannes Kongsnes Natland, 19, was arrested in Huddersfield with two guns and live ammunition
A teenage hitman who travelled from Norway to the UK with the intention of carrying out a murder on behalf of an Iran-backed international crime gang has been jailed for 20 years.
Johannes Kongsnes Natland, 19, a talented footballer, had agreed to shoot an unknown target in return for €25,000 (£21,500).
Oct. 16, 2026 — The inaugural International Research Software Conference brought together more than 110 participants to explore how global collaboration can strengthen the sustainability, recognition, and impact of research software.
Research software sits behind an increasing share of modern research, but the systems needed to fund, maintain, recognize, govern, and develop it have not kept pace with its importance. Generative AI is adding new urgency. As producing code and other research outputs becomes easier, questions of trust, verification, provenance, maintenance, and long-term stewardship become even more important.
Credit: Dan Mogan Photography
Addressing these challenges requires coordination not only among research software engineers, but also across the funders, publishers, policymakers, infrastructure providers, trainers, and research organizations that shape the wider research ecosystem.
These interconnected challenges provided the backdrop to the inaugural International Research Software Conference (IRSC). Held over two days in September 2026 and co-located with RSECon26 in Sheffield, UK, IRSC brought together more than 110 in-person and remote participants from across the international research software ecosystem. The program featured 20 talks, 10 lightning talks, 10 Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions, and two plenary discussions.
The conference created a dedicated space for communities to connect, exchange practices, and address shared challenges at the intersections of funding, publishing, policy, metascience, skills and training, and generative AI. A recurring message was that many of the challenges facing research software cannot be solved by individual projects or organizations: they require stronger coordination across the international research software community.
IRSC Highlights
Funding
A BoF on evaluating research software funding, led by Neil Chue Hong (Institute for Research Software and University of Edinburgh) and Dario Taraborelli (Renaissance Philanthropy), explored approaches to understanding the effectiveness and impact of research software funding.
The conversation continued on the second day, with talks exploring lessons from the new multi-donor Open Source for Science Fund (OS4Science) and approaches to improving how research software funding is allocated. These discussions connect closely with the Research Software Funders Forum, which brings funding organizations together to share practices, identify common challenges, and explore opportunities for greater coordination.
Publishing
Lauren Cadwallader (PLOS) presented “Beyond Computational Biology: Making Code Sharing Policies Work Across Research Fields,” exploring how approaches to code-sharing policies can be applied across research disciplines.
This was followed by a BoF on separating data and code in open science policies. The session introduced a new working group within the Publishing Research Software (PubSoft) Forum focused on improving publisher policies for sharing research software and code. The discussion also connected this work with related initiatives across the research software ecosystem, including the joint ReSA and Research Data Alliance working group on Policies in Research Organisations for Research Software (PRO4RS), and discussions with research funders on code policy.
Participants connect between IRSC26 sessions. Credit: Dan Mogan Photography.
Policy
The BoF “Committing to Sustainable Research Software with ADORE,” led by Lieke de Boer (Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development), Marta Teperek (Dutch Research Council), and Carlos Martinez-Ortiz (Netherlands eScience Center), explored how organizations are putting the recommendations of the Amsterdam Declaration on Funding Research Software Sustainability (ADORE) into practice.
Examples from signatories, including the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, ELIXIR, and the German Research Foundation, demonstrated the different ways ADORE can support institutional change. Other sessions highlighted complementary approaches. In a lightning talk, Ishwar Chandramouliswaran (U.S. National Institutes of Health) described how the NIH Office of Data Science Strategy supports sustainable, open, and interoperable research software ecosystems through investments in best practices, workforce development, infrastructure, standards, and partnerships.
IRSC also highlighted efforts to translate shared principles into practical action. The BoF “From Principles to Practice: Driving Adoption of FAIR Research Software Across the Ecosystem” introduced step-by-step guidelines developed by ReSA’s Actionable FAIR4RS task force to help translate the FAIR Principles for Research Software into practice. This work complements the broader activities of the Research Software Policy Forum, which provides an ongoing space for policymakers to share practices and support greater coordination in policy development and implementation.
Metascience
The Research Software Metascience BoF, led by Wilhelm Hasselbring (Kiel University), Daniel S. Katz (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Rena Bakhshi (Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research), and Simon Hettrick (University of Southampton), brought participants together to consider research software through a metascience lens.
The session built on conversations taking place through the Metascience and Research Software (MaRS) Forum. This collaboration among metascience groups, communities, and organizations seeks to better understand the implications of research software for the research ecosystem and research process. The forum provides a space to identify gaps and opportunities, strengthen research software as an area of research, and increase awareness of research examining the role and impact of software across the research ecosystem.
Skills and Training
The BoF “International perspectives on sustainability challenges and opportunities in research software training networks,” led by Eva Lekkerkerker, Fenne Riemslagh, Jeremy Cohen, and Danny Garside, explored how training networks can become more sustainable and scalable. These networks remain heavily dependent on individual trainers whose contributions are often under-recognized and difficult to sustain.
Samantha Wittke (CSC – IT Center for Science) shared a practical example through CodeRefinery’s “bring your own classroom” model, which combines shared online teaching with local, community-led support. Mike Simpson (Society of Research Software Engineering) highlighted the Society’s work to build community, strengthen recognition and career development for RSEs, and create opportunities for greater involvement in the RSE movement.
Generative AI was a prominent theme throughout IRSC, with sessions exploring its implications for how research software is developed, maintained, evaluated, and sustained. In her welcome remarks, ReSA Director Michelle Barker highlighted how generative AI amplifies existing challenges for the research software community, particularly around trust, verification, maintenance, and stewardship.
As creating research outputs becomes easier and cheaper, greater investment is needed in the infrastructure and expertise required to verify and sustain them, as well as in the shared knowledge, software, and communities on which AI depends. Rather than simply consuming this shared commons, the research community must also sustain and reproduce it. The impact of generative AI is therefore not only a technological challenge, but also a collective-action problem.
Several talks and sessions built on discussions from ReSA and Schmidt Sciences’ March 2026 workshop on research software engineering in the age of generative AI. The BoF “Research Software Engineering: Evolving Competencies, Practices and Interfaces in the Age of Generative AI” explored evolving RSE competencies, practices, training, and roles.
Other talks explored the practical implications of this shift. Joseph Shingleton (University of Glasgow) presented the Responsible AI Risk Register for RSE (RAIRR), a community resource for documenting AI risk. Arfon Smith (Schmidt Sciences) explored the evolving RSE role, including opportunities from AI-enabled workflows and interfaces, gaps in evaluation, provenance, and reproducibility, and new demands on software maintainers.
Participants listen to a presentation during IRSC26. Credit: Dan Mogan Photography.
Carina Kemp (Amazon Web Services) shared practical lessons from AWS’s AI-assisted development journey and explored how the research software community can establish shared standards, validation practices, and open tooling to ensure that AI augments rather than undermines research integrity.
Lois Curfman McInnes (Argonne National Laboratory) and Anshu Dubey (RIKEN Center for Computational Science) explored what is needed to build AI-ready scientific software ecosystems. They emphasized three priorities: making trust explicit, designing socio-technically, and investing in judgment. They also posed a broader question to the community: What should the communities build together that no single project or institution can accomplish alone?
A plenary discussion on sustaining research software under AI-assisted development considered how generative AI is changing code generation and the roles and expectations of different stakeholders in research software engineering. The discussion highlighted the importance of machine-readable provenance and careful human verification.
Thank You to the IRSC Community
The inaugural IRSC would not have been possible without the speakers, session chairs, remote facilitators, volunteers, Program Committee, RSECon26 organizers, and the ReSA and Institute for Research Software teams who contributed their time and expertise. The organizers also gratefully acknowledge the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for supporting the scoping report that helped shape IRSC, as well as the initial committee members and stakeholders who helped inform and guide the process.
IRSC26 was also made possible through the support of its sponsors and partners: Amazon Web Services as Gold Sponsor; Schmidt Sciences as Silver Sponsor; the Netherlands eScience Center, NWO, the Society of Research Software Engineering, and the U.S. NIH Office of Data Science Strategy as Bronze Sponsors; and the Institute for Research Software and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as Partners.
Looking Ahead
IRSC highlighted the wide range of work taking place across the international research software community and the importance of greater coordination across these efforts.
By bringing these communities together, the conference created opportunities to strengthen connections, exchange approaches and experiences, and identify areas for future collaboration. The organizers invite the community to:
Join a ReSA forum or task force to contribute to ongoing discussions and collaborations.
Subscribe to the ReSA newsletter for updates and opportunities to get involved.
The organizers look forward to building on the momentum of IRSC and continuing to strengthen collaboration across the global research software community.
Oct. 16, 2026 — College and university faculty are invited to apply to collaborate with U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Laboratory scientific research staff on research projects of mutual interest. The application deadline is Jan. 6, 2027, at 5 p.m. EST.
The Visiting Faculty Program (VFP) seeks to enhance both the research competitiveness and STEM teaching capacity of faculty members at institutions that primarily serve undergraduate students. VFP provides faculty with the opportunity to enhance their research competitiveness and the innovative STEM learning they bring to their students through a funded collaboration with a Department of Energy (DOE) National Laboratory.
The research scope covers a wide range of DOE science and technology frontiers, including the Genesis Mission, quantum information sciences, fusion science and engineering, space sciences, biotechnology, nuclear energy and technology, critical minerals and materials, advanced manufacturing, and cybersecurity.
The VFP is offered in two tracks:
The VFP Research Collaboration Track
The VFP Teaching Initiative Track (available for returning VFP participants)
VFP is offered over the summer term as a 10-week experience. Faculty applying to VFP have the option of inviting up to two of their students (one of whom may be a graduate student) to join the project.
Extensive support during the application process is available, as well as a summer internship fair in November sponsored by the Office of Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists (WDTS) with technical support provided by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education.
Application Support, Alumni Panel
Two application assistance workshops will be held for all faculty eligible to apply to VFP. The first workshop will introduce the program and provide strategies for submitting a compliant application. At the second workshop, the application process will be reviewed, and the collaborative experiences provided by the program will be highlighted through a panel discussion.
Nov. 6, 2026, Application Assistance Workshop: Registration information here.
Dec. 10, 2026, VFP Alumni Panel Workshop: Registration information here.
In addition, prospective VFP applicants can engage with recruiters and scientists from the DOE National Laboratories at the summer internship fair sponsored by WDTS and hosted by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education. The fair will take place on Nov. 12, 2026, 1–5 p.m. EST. WDTS and National Lab staff will be on hand to answer questions.
Furthermore, the program office invites applicants and letter-of-recommendation writers to attend office hours to answer administrative questions such as those pertaining to application submission. View upcoming dates here.
VFP is managed by the Office of Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists (WDTS) in the Office of Science. More information, including eligibility criteria, can be found at https://science.osti.gov/wdts/vfp.
Why Should Delaware Care? In recent years, colleges and universities have spent millions of dollars to retain and recruit student athletes. But some schools, including those in Delaware, struggle to compete for talent with larger athletic programs. Last month, a typically gridlocked U.S. Senate passed a bill aiming to address these concerns.
Despite its recent gridlock, the U.S. Senate passed the Protect College Sports Act with broad bipartisan support last month, even as the bill divided Delaware’s normally lockstep delegation.
U.S. Sen. Chris Coons (D-Delaware) is a sponsor and leading Democratic advocate for the bill that his co-sponsor said would “end the Wild West” of college sports.
U.S. Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Delaware) voted against the bill, voicing concerns that it would limit student athletes’ pay and place the burden of enforcing labor rights onto them.
If implemented, the act would grant the NCAA a limited antitrust exemption to sell certain college sports media rights, such as TV and streaming contracts. It also would give colleges and universities the ability to limit athletes’ sponsorship deals, and allow them to mandate that athletes make reports about the deals that earn more than $600.
The bill comes in response to a dramatic change in college sports in which athletes are now able to secure a portion of the massive revenues generated by the industry. In recent years, it has meant that large universities with prominent football programs have spent as much as $50 million annually on name, image and likeness – or NIL – deals to attract and retain top players, according to a report by The Athletic.
The report also found that the teams with the best shot at a college football playoff berth are, by and large, the ones with the biggest budgets.
In a statement released last month, Blunt Rochester noted that the landscape of college sports is evolving, and concluded that Congress should act. But she expressed doubts about the Protect College Sports Act setting rules related to student athletes’ compensation and ability to transfer “at a time when questions about athletes’ labor rights remain unsettled.”
By contrast, Coons said in a statement to Spotlight Delaware that schools, such as the University of Delaware and Delaware State University are “bearing the brunt” of what he called the college sports arms race. He argued Delaware’s schools have less money than the top programs, making it difficult to retain their student athletes.
“It’s more difficult for them to keep the next school sports legend like Joe Flacco from being tempted by the deep pockets of larger schools,” Coons said.
Flacco, a Super Bowl-winning quarterback who currently plays for the NFL’s Cincinnati Bengals, transferred to the University of Delaware in 2005 from the University of Pittsburgh. In his first year at UD, he posted respectable passing statistics, even as his team struggled at times. Had he played in the current college football environment, larger schools could have offered him significant financial packages to transfer away from Delaware.
Ultimately, in his second and final year, Flacco broke several UD passing records while leading the team to the national championship game, where it lost to Appalachian State.
Today, UD remains a smaller player in college football, even as it has advanced to the top level of competition, called FBS. In 2024, the university spent more than $400,000 on its men’s teams recruiting. But that was nearly $200,000 less than nearby Temple University, despite their similar enrollment numbers, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity in Athletics Data Analysis portal
That same year, Delaware State University reportedly spent less than $130,000.
Both Delaware universities wrote letters to Coons and Blunt Rochester voicing support for the Protect College Sports Act.
University of Delaware President Laura Carlson. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JACOB OWENS
In her June letter, University of Delaware President Laura Carlson said the bill would resolve “complex issues that have impacted the governance of collegiate athletics.”
Carlson also urged “express confirmation that student-athletes remain students first rather than employees.”
Delaware State University President Tony Allen expressed similar sentiments in an August letter, stating that “employee status [for student athletes] would force our institutions to choose between meeting football’s payroll and keeping women’s soccer on the field.”
Can Delaware schools compete for athletes?
Universities, the NCAA, and other proponents of the Protect College Sports Act have all claimed that smaller schools are unable to compete with universities with larger budgets for NIL costs.
But not everyone is convinced.
George Diemer, an associate professor at Temple University who studies sports economics, told Spotlight Delaware that he is among several economists skeptical of the competitive balance claims.
Diemer said that using compensation as a way to attract athletes is “probably a healthier, more explicit path to be able to allocate talent” than what universities were doing in the past.
Instead, Diemer sees the arguments for the Protect College Sports Act “as a way to try to control costs” in a landscape where money is flowing more toward student athletes than to coaches.
“They want to be able to get a handle on player compensation,” Diemer said.
The NAACP similarly argued in a recent press release that the intent of the legislation is to limit the pay to student athletes “whose labor powers the multibillion-dollar college sports economy.”
“We cannot continue to ask Black student-athletes to generate billions in revenue on the field and the court while they shoulder all the risk and receive none of the guaranteed security they deserve,” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said in the release.
The statements come in contrast with the position of Delaware State University, which is Delaware’s only historically black college, or HBCU.
In a statement to Spotlight Delaware, Allen said his university wants a framework that “protects” student athletes, and reiterated the argument that the act would give his institution a “real chance” to compete.
While Blunt Rochester voted against the bill, she did not explicitly share sentiments expressed by the NAACP and Congressional Black Caucus.
Alexis Wrease, a spokesperson for Blunt Rochester, said the senator “believed more time was needed to fully consider the voices of student athletes, their families, advocates, and other key organizations.”
Before it could be signed into law, the Protect College Sports Act still must be considered by U.S. House of Representatives, which is on recess until after the November midterm elections.
Three children and a teacher were killed, and two others critically wounded, in a shooting at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon. The suspect was shot and killed by a bystander.
Billionaire Elon Musk is offering a nine-figure assist to Texas GOP Senate candidate Ken Paxton, a decisive return to large-scale political giving for the world's richest man.
Susan Lyall worked with actor Jeremy Strong to research the Meta CEO’s favorite Nikes and luxury sweaters
The first Aaron Sorkin Facebook movie, 2010’s The Social Network, helped cement the early aughts image of Mark Zuckerberg rebelling against corporate norms in rumpled hoodies and T-shirts.
The follow-up, The Social Reckoning, is carbon-dated from 2019 to 2021. This is “post-hoodie”, as the movie’s costume designer, Susan Lyall, describes it, “post-thumbing his nose” to formality. It is also peak robot. Zuckerberg’s reserved wardrobe of suits or interchangeable long-sleeved shirts echo his chilling composure throughout, even as fury simmers under the surface.
The Tesla Roadster 2 drove up a curved ramp before using SpaceX rocket thrusters to fly, flip and land
Elon Musk has revealed Tesla’s latest model, which he claims will be the world’s first flying car, using technology from his aerospace company SpaceX to “basically fly like a rocket”.
The billionaire, who hosted a demonstration of the Tesla Roadster 2 at the SpaceX rocket development and testing facility in Texas, said the sports car could go from 0 to 60mph in a record time of less than a second and had thrusters.
Schools in Bend, Oregon, will be closed on Friday after a 16-year-old shooter opened fire at an elementary school in the city on Thursday, killing three children and a teacher before he was shot dead by a community member.
The children killed at Silver Rail elementary school were aged five, eight and 11, officials said.
When the usual diner order sounds good but staying home sounds better, these 15 hearty recipes bring casseroles, pork chops, burgers, mac and cheese, breakfast bakes, and fried chicken to the table.The post 15 satisfying comfort food picks that made…
Good morning. A 16-year-old shooter opened fire at an elementary school in Bend, Oregon, on Thursday, killing three children and a teacher, before he was shot dead by a community member. The children killed were five, eight and 11, officials said. The gunman, who was a Bend resident, has not been publicly identified.
In the aftermath of the attack, children were taken by bus to a nearby church serving as a reunification center for families. Parents hugged, kissed and held their children’s hands as they walked to their cars, with some bringing along favorite stuffed animals or other comfort items from home. Here is what we know so far.
What have been the diplomatic moves in Europe? Amid growing doubts about long-term US commitment to Ukraine, European leaders declared their support for Zelenskyy. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said the EU intended to increase pressure on Russia, promising a 22nd round of sanctions. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said it was “crucial” that Ukraine received “all the means necessary to protect itself”.
The US vice-president is following the Donald Trump playbook, attacking the Democrats, attempting to make jokes and even swearing more. Jonathan Freedland talks to Arwa Mahdawi about why Vance is making such an effort to court voters
Some casseroles never really leave the family table. These 17 old-school recipes bring back cheesy potatoes, baked spaghetti, chicken and dumplings, beef casseroles, breakfast bakes, and more.The post 17 old-school casseroles still worth making just the way mom did appeared…
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: A proxyjacking campaign has impacted devices in 34 countries, monetizing victims' internet connections through a commercial residential proxy network. The operator installed Pawns.app, a legitimate bandwidth-sharing application that lets users earn money by sharing their internet connections, on devices without the owners' consent.
Pawns.app account holders are rewarded for allowing traffic from other users to flow through their network, provided it runs on trusted, non-blocking IP addresses. By installing the app on multiple systems, the attacker likely accumulated larger payouts. Threat intelligence company GreyNoise discovered the campaign while investigating suspicious activity at an unnamed organization, and identified at least 143 compromised devices worldwide. According to researchers, the attacker exploited known vulnerabilities in D-Link ShareCenter NAS (CVE-2024-3272 and CVE-2024-3273), Ubiquiti UniFi Video NVR (CVE-2021-44228), and SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer (CVE-2025-31324) to install the Pawns.app software.
Hikvision and Dahua DVR/NVR devices were also targeted, though the specific vulnerabilities exploited were not identified. In some cases, the report says the attackers configured SSH key authentication to maintain backup access to the compromised systems.
Protest planned at Wayve HQ as Uber drivers fear for their future and city’s politicians demand TfL should have power over licences
For passengers in Britain who want to try the latest ride, robotaxis are eagerly awaited: more than 100,000 are on Uber’s waitlist in London after the first UK services started in September.
Others view them with trepidation. “I think we should all be worried,” said Florentina Ghiuzan, an Uber driver from Essex. “I was shocked TfL approved it so soon. I knew change would come. But I thought it would come with a solution for us.”
With his war in Iran and siding with Russia, it’s hard to think of someone who has done more to make the world a safer place
It might have been more, shall we say, diplomatic if Donald Trump had taken some deep breaths after finding out he had been overlooked for the Nobel peace prize for the second year running before virtually declaring war on Norway. But maybe we should just be grateful he refrained from rubbishing the South African human rights activist Navi Pillay, who picked up the award, and shelved his plans to livestream the execution of the Norwegian prize committee. There again, you can understand his frustration. It’s hard to think of someone who has done more to make the world a safer place. Where would we be had not The Donald started a war with Iran which he shows no sign of knowing how to finish and which has forced up the price of global energy? And it was so good to see him intervening so positively in Russia’s war with Ukraine by appearing to side with the aggressor. These are just the things everyone is looking for in a Nobel peace laureate. The president is also put out that no one has noticed he has personally ended eight global conflicts; though it would be helpful if he could let us know which ones. Are they ones he has personally started – Trump appears disappointed that Argentina hasn’t invaded the Falklands again – or ones that only he knows about. During a press conference at Chequers in 2025, he claimed to have brought about a lasting peace between Albania and Azerbaijan. Maybe there are other wars going on we just don’t know about. Perhaps Australia and New Zealand have been bombing each other for years with neither side noticing. And perhaps the border between France and Italy has been a no-go zone ever since the fight between Zinedine Zidane and Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final. Still, Trump looks a cert to retain Gianni Infantino’s Fifa peace prize – if only because it seems likely to be scrapped, making him the only winner.
Coalition has planned more than 3,000 events on Saturday to encourage voting before election day
The coalition that has drawn millions of Americans into the streets to fight for democracy over the past two years is shifting its strategy this weekend.
On Saturday, No Kings organizers and partners will hold thousands of events across all 50 states and Washington DC to get people to the polls early for the US midterm elections. With high-stakes races that will determine control of Congress, organizers say getting out the vote before election day can ease burdens on election workers and build confidence in voters, allowing them to avoid hiccups such as long lines and potential electionthreats.
Landslide blocks river and triggers downstream flooding, while summer temperatures persist in Portugal
Flash floods have swept through Nepal’s central Gorkha district after a pre-dawn landslide on 11 October blocked the Budhi Gandaki River, triggering severe downstream flooding. Two villages in the worst-affected Chumanubri rural municipality were reportedly destroyed, with homes, roads and bridges washed away. Part of a hydropower station was also damaged.
After river levels surged from 2 metres to nearly 8.5 metres within hours, the national disaster risk reduction and management authority reported that 204 homes were damaged, and more than 650 people had been affected. More than 100 foreign trekkers were stranded in the popular hiking region. The floods come just two months after catastrophic flooding and landslides devastated parts of the country on the border with Tibet, leaving thousands dead or missing.
Images from New Zealand aerial survey of Nikumaroro in 1938 offer new clues over aviator’s disappearance
A New Zealand museum has released nearly 50 photos from a 1938 aerial survey of the island where Amelia Earhart is believed to have crash-landed, offering amateur sleuths new evidence to scour for traces of the pioneering aviator and her plane.
The black-and-white images were published by the Air Force Museum of New Zealand after renewed interest in one of the biggest mysteries of the 20th century, spurred by a US expedition to the Pacific atoll of Nikumaroro in search of new clues.
Kareem’s Quote of the Day: What do we lose when we look at a mature tree and see only something standing in our way?
A Golf Course Correction: A judge is demanding answers after the Trump Administration cut down 430 trees for Trump’s vision for a public golf course.
Trump Messes with Texas: His loyalty test may have handed Democrats an opening by elevating Ken Paxton over a stronger Republican candidate.
Quick Takes: Republicans try to tar Sherrod Brown with trans feathers, but their story falls apart; while their new press secretary botches her first briefing.
The Tree of Life, directed by Terrence Malick: A beautiful, demanding meditation on family and memory that rewards viewers willing to let mood matter more than plot.
Sarah Vaughan, “A Tree in the Park”: This romantic ballad from the great team of Rodgers and Hart gives a peerless vocalist yet another chance to shine.
Kareem’s Quote of the Day
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way.”
William Blake (1757-1827), English poet, painter, and printmaker
A vintage postcard from 1921. (Photo by Nextrecord Archives / Getty Images)
There are more than three trillion trees on Earth, and more than sixty thousand different species of tree—maybe that’s why so many people take them for granted. Sometimes, they can even be an annoyance. Nobody wants a tree blocking their ocean view on a sunny day, and otherwise friendly neighbors have come to blows when one person’s shade becomes another’s obstruction. You can park under a tree and return to find patches of sap on your paint, or needles covering your windshield, which means another trip to the carwash. But few things that are beautiful come without some inconveniences.
The time when I notice trees the most is when I go to a neighborhood without any. In New York, where I grew up, we didn’t have treehouses or tire swings, and the sun could be unrelenting when it hit your windows in the middle of a heatwave. We definitely could have used more trees. I always took pleasure in the sweet, rich smell they gave off if I happened to be in Central Park after a rainstorm. One of the things I loved about UCLA when I first got there was all the trees on the campus. Autumn wasn’t the cool, crisp season I was used to back East, but there was always a shady tree to sit beneath on a warm October or November afternoon. You could even lean back against the trunk and read a textbook if you were so inclined, the sharp bark scraping your back through your T-shirt and keeping you alert.
People who treat trees as obstacles are really missing the point. Trees are among the hardest-working assets any city owns, and they don’t cost much to maintain, compared to all they provide. Through photosynthesis, they take in carbon dioxide and water, use sunlight to make sugars, and release oxygen, without which human life cannot exist. They intercept rainfall, slowing runoff and easing the burden on storm drains. Their leaves absorb pollution, and their roots hold soil in place. They store carbon, shelter birds and insects, and, according to studies, improve mental health and lower stress for the people who live among them.
Replacement doesn’t undo the loss. A sapling planted to make up for a felled oak is a promise, not a substitute. It can take decades for a new tree to approach the shade and storm-water capacity of the one it replaces, and many saplings never get there. Imagine knocking down an office building and drawing up blueprints for a new one, knowing construction will take fifty or a hundred years. I’m guessing there would be fewer building projects if developers had to wait that long to start collecting rent.
If any of that resonates with you, try to remember it the next time you hear about some developer who wants to cut down four or five hundred trees to clear the way for a golf course or a condo development. Those projects can’t happen (at least not lawfully) without going through a permitting process, and developers count on the public being too tired after a day’s work or feeling too insignificant to show up for a meeting and register their disapproval. But our voices count, and with everything that trees give us, our voices are the least we can offer in return.
Donald Trump has called Ukraine’s renewed strikes on Russian oil refineries “a disgrace” and criticised Volodymyr Zelenskyy after an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine failed to take hold.
Ukraine resumed strikes on Russian oil refineries after Zelenskyy said Kyiv was abandoning a ceasefire unilaterally declared by Trump on Sunday, having briefly halted its attacks to demonstrate its readiness for peace talks. Russia had continued its strikes on Ukrainian power plants.
As violent spirits are unleashed in Sky’s Possession, observers see confident creatives reclaiming the island’s narratives in a form of ‘cultural reparation’
A woman opens a 300‑year‑old box, unleashing a violent spirit – it is the spirit of colonialism and oppression roaring back to life. It is a pivotal scene in Sky’s supernatural series Possession and symbolises a wider shift in Jamaica’s film industry, where directors are increasingly using the landscape to tell Jamaican stories – including those that confront enslavement, trauma and historical memory.
The series is about a biracial British lawyer who travels to Jamaica to investigate a multimillion-pound inheritance dispute, only to uncover a dark, vengeful spirit tied to the plantation’s brutal colonial past.
Thousands of vetted and approved refugees are suffering as Trump restricts quotas and prioritizes white South Africans
Donald Trump plans to once more severely restrict the number of refugees admitted to the US, announcing a limit of just 17,500 people in fiscal year 2027 – and that, again, those let in will be “primarily” white South Africans.
Refugee rights groups are alarmed and infuriated at the decision last month by the US president to exclude almost every other demographic.
A California realtor charged with working as a Chinese agent and her partner have links to individuals involved in sprawling criminal enterprises, according to federal court filings.
A fresh wave of outrage over the Trump administration’s use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has surged after two high-profile events involving ICE in the span of a week: the shooting of a young father in New York City last Thursday, and the Monday morning Homeland Security Investigations raid on Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home.
Reporting from the Wall Street Journal suggests that the raid was a part of an ongoing effort by the Trump administration to strip the Minnesota Democrat of her U.S. citizenship. Omar arrived in the United States as a child refugee from Somalia and became a naturalized citizen in 2000, long before the start of her political career. The outspoken progressive congresswoman has since become a foe of President Donald Trump; in a statement, her spokesperson condemned the raid on her home as “an unprecedented escalation in the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies.”
Omar’s House colleague, Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., argues this sort of weaponization is an inherent feature of the Department of Homeland Security, which was established in 2003 as part of the George W. Bush administration’s mounting war on terror. This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington speaks with Ramirez about a new bill she introduced on Tuesday to abolish DHS and what the raid on Omar’s home reveals about the department.
“The Department of Homeland Security cannot be reformed. It should be dismantled,” said Ramirez. “What they did — just three weeks from an election — was to attempt to create such paralysis on everyday people. … If they can do this to one of my colleagues, they can do that to anyone. And it should concern everyone.”
Washington also speaks with Rozina Ali — a journalist covering the war on terror, Islamophobia, the Middle East, South Asia, and literature — and Will Sommer, a senior reporter covering right-wing media and conspiracy theories at The Bulwark.
Ali and Sommer unpack the role of conspiracy theories and anti-Muslim propaganda in the attacks on Omar, and how DHS has been historically weaponized against Muslims in the United States.
“Over the last 30 years, we have been conditioned to believe that Muslims, and now more broadly immigrants, are not just a threat to national security, but a threat to the American way of life,” said Ali.
“The right has been really eager to denaturalize Ilhan Omar for really going back a decade almost to the first Trump administration,” said Sommer. He called the investigation into Omar “one of the most striking examples we’ve seen of how the Trump administration is willing to use law enforcement to achieve its political aims and to sort of threaten its enemies.”
For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Transcript
Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept. On Monday, Homeland Security Investigation agents searched the home of Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Reporting from the Washington Post suggests that the probe centers on allegations that Omar’s late father lied on immigration paperwork decades ago when Omar was a teenager.
According to a source familiar with the case who spoke to the paper, the Department of Homeland Security had previously declined to move ahead with an investigation years prior based on similar allegations. There still weren’t many details out as of Wednesday. The Department of Justice has vaguely described a “federal criminal investigation,” but Omar has long been a political foe of President Donald Trump.
In a statement to The Intercept, Omar called the raid “an outrageous abuse of power and an unprecedented escalation in the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies.” The raid on Omar’s home comes days after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot 28-year-old Oscar Belgal in the neck in New York City, with his 5-year-old son in the back seat.
The incidents have reignited concerns about the violent weaponization of the Department of Homeland Security by President Donald Trump against immigrants and the administration’s perceived political enemies.
The group Democracy Defenders Fund filed a complaint over the raid on Tuesday, arguing it violates the Hatch Act, a federal law that restricts political activity by members of the government’s executive branch. With early voting in Minnesota scheduled to start Friday, the group says the raid “appears to be timed to influence voters in the upcoming midterm election.”
Rep. Delia Ramirez, a Democrat from Illinois, introduced a new bill this week to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security and abolish immigrant detention in the United States. I’m speaking to her on Wednesday, October 14. Congresswoman Ramirez, welcome back to The Intercept Briefing.
Rep. Delia Ramirez: Oh, happy to be on.
JW: First, I wanna get your reaction to the Homeland Security Investigation search of Representative Ilhan Omar’s home on Monday. Were you surprised by the news? And what do you think it tells us about how the Department of Homeland Security is operating under President Donald Trump?
DR: I’m gonna tell you that, unfortunately, I’m not surprised by what happened — but it is still bone-chilling.
You’re talking about a department that was created to have full authority to violate civil rights every single day, now weaponized against a sitting member of Congress — sending, I don’t know, 20 HSI agents into her home at 4:30 in the morning.
Cruelty, complete control, and authoritarianism, and demonstrating their ability to get away with whatever they think they can, was the point of what they just did.
And it is clearly the embodiment of abuse of power. But it also shows us exactly why the Department of Homeland Security cannot be reformed. It should be dismantled. And that what they did — just three weeks from an election — was to attempt to create such paralysis on everyday people to believe that if they can do this to one of my colleagues, that they can do that to anyone. And it should concern everyone.
“Demonstrating their ability to get away with whatever they think they can, was the point of what they just did.”
Anyone that cares deeply about our democracy, about our ability to exercise our freedom of speech, or to be protected from being harmed by the federal government should see what is happening to my colleague Ilhan Omar as a clear indicator that this could also happen to them, if we don’t stop them.
And that justice is not just that she gets her phone back, or they leave her alone. Justice is holding accountable the leadership that made that terrorizing experience for Ilhan happen.
JW: Speaking of stopping them, I want to get into the bill that you introduced on Tuesday, the Reimagining Safety Act, which would abolish the Department of Homeland Security, eliminate all immigrant detention, and repeal “duplicative and overreaching terrorism laws.”
Now, there has been some forward momentum on the movement to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, at least from progressives — but this bill would get rid of all of DHS. Can you talk about how that would work and why, in your opinion, it’s not enough to just abolish ICE?
DR: I just mentioned to you what’s happening to Congresswoman Omar, and to me, it’s a clear indicator of the greatest threat to our security: It’s not immigrants; it’s the Department of Homeland Security.
And I know that a lot of people say, DHS is “rogue,” we need to address this “rogue” organization. But it’s not rogue. I wanna be clear with people. DHS did not exist my entire lifetime. As a matter of fact, it’s been operating less than 23 years. And it was built exactly to do what it’s doing right now: to violate our rights under pretense of securing our safety, and it’s been, in fact, empowered to act with impunity, which is why people keep saying like, “How can they possibly get away with what they’re doing, and why can’t Congress stop them?”
Because frankly, since its inception, DHS has been utilized by the government to target and persecute people that they consider the public enemy. And we know that fascism always requires a public enemy. Muslim Americans, Latinos, Haitians, protesters. DHS has never kept us safe. And 24 years ago, Americans, Republicans, and Democrats alike, let’s be clear, raised a flag about how DHS would constitute unprecedented consolidation of power, and yet this agency was still formed under the United States Congress.
“The greatest threat to our security is not immigrants; it’s the Department of Homeland Security.”
DHS has been a problem of the administration for its entirety. And administration after administration has demonstrated to us that this agency needs to be completely dismantled piece by piece. And when you have people like Donald Trump with very authoritarian tendencies, you have clearly seen what they’re capable of doing. And frankly, I don’t think we’ve seen the full extent of what they could do.
So this is a moment for us to ask ourselves: What kind of world do we wanna live in? And do we want to continue to live with the fear that this agency can be weaponized against you, to persecute you, to arrest you, to detain you, to denaturalize you, to attempt to question your own citizenship, to kill you?
And at the same time, ask ourselves: If FEMA and TSA and cybersecurity and the Coast Guard and other critical programs are important for us, how can we allow them to be politicized by this agency that constantly keeps taking away the resources that these critical programs need? And so for me, this is the moment that we don’t just abolish ICE or abolish CBP — we take on the institution that was created to allow ICE and CBP to operate in the way that it does.
“Do we want to continue to live with the fear that this agency can be weaponized against you, to persecute you, to arrest you, to detain you, to denaturalize you, to attempt to question your own citizenship, to kill you?”
JW: To your point, there are all of these other functions of the Department of Homeland Security, from federal disaster relief to TSA screenings to customs enforcement. What happens to all those other functions if DHS is dismantled?
DR: I’m glad you asked me that question ’cause people keep saying, “Do you not care about FEMA?” Actually, because I care about FEMA, I want to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security.
H.R. 10803, the Reimagining Safety Act, it’s a first of its kind bill, and for the very first time, it’s a bill that community stakeholders spent months designing a Cabinet-level department. Because the Reimagining Safety Act would actually establish another department, the Department of Community Safety, that in fact is about protecting our communities.
It would dismantle DHS by preserving the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — we call it CISA, that was created under the Department of Homeland Security; protecting and expanding the Federal Emergency Management Agency; protecting and redirecting the Transportation Security Agency and custom functions into the Department of Transportation; while abolishing ICE and CBP and reinvesting funds in community.
And, certainly, I think the other piece of that is the surveillance: limiting government surveillance and reining in the unlawful abuses of data and curb the militarized enforcement that you’re seeing under DHS while beginning the process of taking what we call USCIS, that’s also under the Department of Homeland Security, and establishing it as its own separate civil immigration system that no longer operates under this agency that could call Renee Good, Alex Pretti, or Silverio Villegas terrorists.
JW: Thinking about your bill — obviously, Republicans currently control every lever of power, and only a handful of Democrats support abolishing ICE, and fewer still have called to abolish the Department of Homeland Security. Why introduce this bill now, knowing that it likely can’t pass this current Congress, much less get signed by President Donald Trump?
DR: Every single issue, whether it’s talking about universal healthcare, Medicare for All, whether it’s talking about raising wages — and now I introduced Living Wage for All — or blocking bombs and ending endless wars, oftentimes the assumption has been it is too early, or Republicans control, or Democrats have not arrived.
The people have arrived to where we are. They believe that this agency is the biggest threat to their well-being. And for me, this is an opportunity to provide a roadmap on how we actually in fact address the problem and then create a solution that centers people’s safety — and not just rhetoric of protecting the homeland under the guise of protecting us from terrorism, so that they can terrorize us.
Jessica, I am clear that this bill is not gonna pass overnight, but I am also clear that our community expects for us to propose something that is tangible, something that is comprehensive, and something that gets to the root of the problem by creating a permanent solution, so that we’re never here again.
“Our community expects for us to propose something that is tangible … that gets to the root of the problem.”
That means that over the next few months, and perhaps over the next year, we are building the support and changing the conversation in such way where in the same way only nine or 10 of my colleagues were willing to, out loud, say “Abolish ICE” two months ago, now we have actually more like 45, 50 of them, that we are in the same place when we’re talking about reimagining safety in this country.
I am providing a bill that begins to respond to what our communities are demanding. I’m hoping that Congress doesn’t continue to be behind the ball of what the people are asking of them. And now I’m giving them something that they could actually in fact use.
I wanna tell you too that, look, in 2002, people expressed concerns about DHS. And 25 years later, those warnings have been validated as we watch what they’re doing. It’s a weapon pointed at anyone that the state considers a public enemy, whether it’s Congresswoman LaMonica McIver, whether it’s Congresswoman Omar, or the millions of people in this precise moment that are living in fear because of the way that this agency was created.
“We were OK before 2003 without DHS, and we can live in a life without it as well.”
JW: On the subject of looking to the future, if Democrats take one or both houses of Congress in the upcoming midterms, I’m curious what else you’re thinking about in terms of reining in DHS, and if you have any other priorities for the next session.
DR: Let me just come back to this bill, ’cause I think it’s really important — my own bottom line on it. The Reimagining Safety Act takes apart DHS and creates a new agency, a new agency that responds to what people are asking for — for we the people that they’ve elected to represent them, to keep them safe, to protect the mission of community safety, and to protect the public.
And it means that dismantling DHS is doing the work Congress should have done actually 24 years ago, to actually look at these agencies, all agencies under this department, but also how DOJ has been weaponized against us. How we created a Department of War. Just think about that: We’ve created a department where we want to spend more money on war than we want to actually spend on housing, on healthcare, on wages, and on infrastructure.
So for me, this is a moment for us to actually demonstrate that we’re going to fight like hell for accountability, to take on corruption, to end the terror, while also creating tangible ways to address the issues.
And one of those, and I’m going to be introducing a resolution [Thursday] around what should our positioning be when it comes to immigration. Because this agency is about what is wrong and what needs to stop so that we can actually have safety, but then we also need to talk about how we restore our systems of asylum, how we actually in fact establish legal pathways, and how do we bring 11 million people who are in fear, in the shadows, crying daily, to finally come out of the shadows into a justice status.
I am gonna be working really hard to make that front and center with our leadership, and I’m disappointed that our leadership isn’t centering that as one of the very first things that they wanna work on in the first 100 days. Because unfortunately, that is telling the people that have been under siege by this administration: Being an immigrant or being brown or being a protester isn’t the top priority of people that need to be protected.
When our leadership is talking about first 100 days of many important things, but not a word around immigration, and not a word around real accountability to what has happened under ICE and CBP.
JW: Thank you, Congresswoman. We’re gonna leave it there, but people can read more about your bill, the Reimagining Safety Act, at theintercept.com, where we have a story out about it. And thank you so much for joining The Intercept Briefing.
DR: Thank you. Appreciate it.
Jessica Washington: Next, I speak with Rozina Ali, a journalist covering the war on terror, Islamophobia, the Middle East, South Asia, and literature; and Will Sommer, a senior reporter covering right-wing media and conspiracy theories at The Bulwark. Will, welcome to the Intercept Briefing, and Rozina, welcome back.
Will Sommer: Thanks for having me.
Rozina Ali: Thank you so much for having us.
JW: Rozina, I want to start with you. In your new book, “Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America,” you discuss the history of how immigration enforcement has been weaponized against Muslims in the United States. And while I want to preface by saying that there’s still a lot we don’t know about the raid on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s home, we do know that Omar is outspoken, Muslim, Black, and an immigrant. She’s also been a consistent target of Trump and his allies.
How might this relate to the broader history of how the Department of Homeland Security has been weaponized against Muslims in the United States?
RA: Well, I really appreciate this question. There’s a very long history when it comes to using immigration enforcement to target Muslims and the Muslim community in the United States, and I just wanna go back a little bit before 9/11 to the late 1990s.
One thing that was happening was the use of secret evidence against Muslim immigrants, a lot of Arabs and South Asians, and a lot of Muslim immigrants, to, essentially, detain them and deport them. And what that meant was actually using classified evidence that the government brought forward that the defendant could not see.
And it actually kind of reminds me of what’s happening with Ilhan Omar now, is that we don’t actually know what the allegations are. We don’t know what the case is hinged on.
What the DHS did after 9/11 was actually broaden out its use of immigration enforcement to target Muslim communities. One of the things it did was actually institute a registry called the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System. That essentially allowed the U.S. government to detain thousands of Muslim immigrants and eventually deport them — even though they had no criminal charges.
One of the things that protects Ilhan Omar is that she is a U.S. citizen, but one of the things that does chill me is there is this longer, broader history of the government using immigration enforcement in order to deport people and detain people, even if they have not been guilty of any criminal charges.
JW: That makes a lot of sense, the concern, because we know there’s history of this power being used in secretive ways, kind of similar to what’s potentially happening now. And I do, again, want to caution that we do not have all the details on this case at the moment. But Will, I wanted to bring you in to kind of get into the origins at least where some of these conspiracy theories that have been swirling around Congresswoman Omar.
You wrote about this in September, kind of where you found that many in MAGA world were frustrated that after nearly a decade of conspiracy theories — some of which were pushed by Trump about alleged immigration fraud from Omar — she remains not only in the United States, but in Congress.
Will, can you explain some of the conspiracy theories that are fueling this push to deport Omar? Is there any evidence for them? And do we know if they had anything to do with the raid on her home?
WS: The right has been really eager to denaturalize Ilhan Omar for really going back a decade, almost to the first Trump administration. A lot of it was fueled by this idea that she had married her brother as some kind of immigration scheme, or essentially that this man she was married to was secretly her brother.
Now, I looked into the origins of this at the time. I thought, “Well, is this true? Could it be?” No, it’s not. In fact, it all started on some random kinda Somali Minnesotan message board where someone said, “Yeah, she’s married to her brother.” And then from there, once she became more prominent as a Democratic figure, people on the right kinda dug through that and sort of built this whole conspiracy theory based off of this one post.
Essentially, now that Trump is back in power, there’s this demand on the right because, as with other conspiracy theories, they’ve come to believe this. So they’re saying, you know, “Oh man, when are we finally gonna deport Ilhan Omar?” So Markwayne Mullin, the head of DHS, has been under this pressure, and he gave this interview at the Republican convention to [right-wing YouTuber] Benny Johnson, and he said, “Oh yeah, she married her brother.”
And Benny Johnson said, “Well, OK. Are you gonna deport her?” Now, you kinda can’t deport her anyway, even if she had married her brother. But there’s all this demand. And so what we’re seeing with this latest investigation is it’s not even related to the brother thing, reportedly. It’s — according to the Washington Post and some other outlets — related to this idea that Ilhan Omar’s father, who is dead now, misstated her age on a citizenship application.
Essentially, she was 17, according to the official record. But had she been a year older, 18, it would’ve kind of complicate it because she would’ve been an adult. It would’ve made it harder for her to get citizenship. This is this idea that’s been pushed by her Republican opponents in elections in the past. It’s really thin, and we can kinda get into it in a second. But this is some thin gruel, essentially, that they’re trying to manufacture this whole effort to pull her citizenship.
JW: I really wanna get more into the conspiracy theory of it and what’s being pushed here. And I think it’s interesting that it’s almost like they’re kind of grasping at any little thing they can get their hands on.
At first, it’s the brother-marriage of it all, which, as you pointed out, has very thin evidence, essentially no evidence. And then it’s pulling at these other threads about her dad, which have all been swirling in the ecosystem for a while.
I want to get a little bit deeper into what conspiracy theories, what role they have here, and I want to talk about what Donald Trump said on Monday night after the raid. He spoke at an Ohio rally pushing more conspiracy theories about Rep. Ilhan Omar and the Somali community in Minnesota in general. Let’s hear that clip now.
Trump: Just look at what’s happening in the once great state of Minnesota. What a mess they have done. Somalia, wonderful, wonderful. And that Ilhan, somebody was asking me, I don’t know what they’re doing with her, but I can tell you this: She’s a disaster. She comes in from a country without laws, without police, without military, without — all they do is shoot each other. And she comes into our country, and she says, “I have a constitutional right.” She’s got a constitutional right. She’s telling us about the Constitution, and she comes from one of the worst countries anywhere on the planet. Last week, savage Somali gang members shot two people in the high school parking lot in the middle of a football game. Just days later, a few miles away, the FBI arrested a radicalized Somalian who was planning to carry out an ISIS-style terrorist attack at the Mall of America, aiming to kill as many as possible, in his words. This is not what we want in this country.
Crowd: Deport! Deport! Deport! Deport!
Trump: What they have done to Minnesota.
JW: Rozina, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen the administration spread conspiracy theories about Muslims. Ahead of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, for example, we heard similar rhetoric about the Somali community. What role have conspiracy theories played in the targeting of Muslims in the United States?
RA: Oh, where to start?
JW: Yeah, there’s a lot.
RA: There is a lot. I think one of the most enduring theories of Muslim communities is that there are radical elements that are living among Muslim neighborhoods, among Muslim communities. And that is a conspiracy theory born out of, obviously, the war on terror framework.
But one of the things that we saw in the aughts, especially under the Obama administration and especially as Trump rose in power, was this notion that Muslims, not just foreign elements, but Muslims living inside the United States are secretly hiding their agenda.
And this is something that we hear with regards to Abdul El-Sayed, that basically any Muslim that you meet is hiding a secret agenda, and what they wanna do is enact Sharia law in the United States. No one has yet to explain what Sharia law means and what that would mean to enact it, but this is one of the things that keeps coming up over and over again.
What is so interesting about this speech that Trump made recently is that he is actually throwing every theory against the wall that he can. That he mentions ISIS — something we haven’t heard for a long time. He mentions radicalization. He mentions fraud. And so all of these things that have been talking points that have been used against Muslim communities, particularly against the Somali community in Minnesota, he is using all at once in this one speech.
“What is so interesting about this speech that Trump made recently is that he is actually throwing every theory against the wall that he can.”
I will say, this is also the talking points — well, fraud is a new one — but when it comes to radicalization and when it comes to the notion of radical elements threatening the security and Western way of life of the United States, these are talking points he was peddling back in 2015 when he eventually called for a Muslim ban.
This is actually something that we see Donald Trump doing a lot, which is, he peddles conspiracy theories. He puts them on the main stage. His allies reinforce them and regurgitate them, and he gives them legitimacy, right? He legitimizes them by using a government framework to offer some veneer of truth to them. And unfortunately, as we know, one iteration of the Muslim ban was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court.
JW: As Rozina said, fraud is kind of a newer iteration of these kind of Muslim conspiracy theories. Where did it originate from, and why has it become such a powerful talking point on the right when targeting particularly the Somali community in Minnesota?
WS: I should say: Minnesota has a very — despite being a Democratic state — it has a very intense Republican activist and kind of like quasi-journalist scene going on. And so a lot of that has been built around, again, building, talking about Ilhan Omar. And now we’ve seen it kinda going after the Somali community in various ways.
But really, this hit a new level in January with this young man named Nick Shirley, who’s like a YouTuber. He went around, he was led around by one of these Minnesota conservative journalist types to various daycares, and they said,”Look at the fraud here.”
Now look, there are some criminal fraud cases that are being prosecuted in Minnesota. But there was this broader sense created by this video of, like the Somali community are parasitic, that they’re up to no good, they’re stealing all this money, what have you.
And then in fact, that helped justify then — at least in the view of the Trump administration — the ICE surge into Minneapolis. And so this has created this idea of constant Somali American fraud, not just in Minnesota, but all over the place. And so obviously it dovetails with the Ilhan Omar idea as well, that she forged her citizenship, she somehow faked that.
JW: That makes a lot of sense. It is really interesting to see the way the administration targeted Minnesota, both because of the Somali community, which was particularly vulnerable, because as we’ve mentioned this is both a Black, immigrant, and Muslim community, so this trifecta of areas that the Trump administration is targeting. And then also you had Ilhan Omar, who was this image that the administration could attack and go after, and it was really popular to their base to do so.
Rozina, when we’re talking about the stories that kind of stick when it comes to conspiracy theories, what sort of stuff has really stuck and why? I’m curious to understand why in the imagination of so many people in the U.S. these conspiracy theories have really stuck.
RA: I think one of the most enduring theories that keeps coming up over and over again and that really has stuck is this notion that, as I mentioned, that Muslims have nefarious secret agendas, but also that they have ties to foreign organizations and foreign elements.
And one of the things that we hear with regards to Ilhan Omar, too, is that — and I think I’ve heard this from some right-wing talking points in the previous days — is that there might be allegations that she has some financial ties or connections to foreign groups. This is something we have heard about Zohran Mandani. This is something we have heard about Abdul El-Sayed. This is actually something that has been a part of the American narrative about Muslims for decades.
One of the crucial things that was happening in the ’90s was that the U.S. government was looking for financial ties to foreign organizations among the Muslim community. And one of the things that happened immediately after 9/11 was that the United States government shut down the biggest Muslim charity in the United States, called the Holy Land Foundation, because of alleged nefarious ties to militant groups abroad.
Because there has been a government framework for this, I think it is really easy for a lot of conspiracy theorists and for a lot of Islamophobes, frankly, to keep regurgitating this notion that “just look at the financial ties of Muslims.” And one of the lasting shifts that we have seen in the last 25 years is that that scrutiny is not just against Muslim immigrants or visa holders, but also against Muslim Americans and citizens of the United States. And I don’t think we’re actually going to be able to break out of those conspiracy theories so easily if we don’t actually start discussing and reckoning with how we think about what terrorism is.
So for example, with the Holy Land Foundation case, that is a case that keeps coming up over and over again. A lot of those ties, financial ties, it’s a really complicated case, but a lot of those financial ties were related to Hamas, but it’s also relevant to remember that Hamas at the time was a governing body in Gaza that was supplying aid to people.
And essentially, the way we talk about terrorism, the way we talk about countries abroad, has a real impact for how we think about the Muslim community at home. So I just wanna go back to Abdul El-Sayed for just really quickly, is that one of the biggest talking points peddled against him these days is that his mother is connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Now, there’s very little understanding of what it had meant to be a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, right? Because we just see that through the lens of terrorism, it’s completely dismissing all the political dynamics on the ground in those countries abroad. And I think what a lot of conspiracy theorists and Islamophobes have done so effectively is forever tie Muslim communities in the U.S. to what Americans largely think of as nefarious elements in other countries.
JW: I think that’s all really important, recognizing, to your point, that none of these conspiracy theories — I mean, again, they had taken new iterations — but that conspiracy theories against Muslims in the United States is not a new phenomenon. I guess I am curious if we’re moving into a new phase though, of danger, essentially, from the administration.
Will, coming back to your September piece, in it you compare the calls to deport Rep. Ilhan Omar to the Department of Justice’s attempts at convicting the president’s political enemies. And those have, for the most part failed, in terms of getting these convictions, “locking up” his enemies, as he’s said he wants to do.
Does this raid of a sitting congresswoman’s home signal a new, more dangerous era from the White House when it comes to threats against the administration’s perceived political enemies? Are we entering a new, more dangerous phase?
WS: I think the raid represents sort of the confluence of two alarming trends. One is what we’ve been talking about, which is the growing, second tide of Islamophobia that we’re seeing from this administration, that I think was sort of on the back burner as there was so much promotion on the right about fears about immigration from Latin America. Now, we see in Texas there’s so much anger at Muslim communities in that area in particular.
We’re also seeing though, as you said, the politicization of the Justice Department. I mean, this raid falls within the 60 days. Typically, the DOJ doesn’t raid politicians this close to an election, particularly something that’s about a 30-years-old child immigration case. Clearly, it’s political. It’s an attempt to make Ilhan Omar the face of the Democratic Party, suggest all this fraud.
Look, a lot of those attacks, those political lawfare, what have you, is related to Israel and Palestine, people like Fergie Chambers, Max Blumenthal, have either faced indictments or had their devices seized, in Max Blumenthal’s case. Certainly a lot of it aimed at campus activists as well.
I think the Ilhan Omar thing is really one of the most striking examples we’ve seen of how the Trump administration is willing to use law enforcement to achieve its political aims and to threaten its enemies.
“The Ilhan Omar [raid] is one of the most striking examples we’ve seen of how the Trump administration is willing to use law enforcement to achieve its political aims and threaten its enemies.”
JW: You mentioned that post-Watergate 60-day rule, which is an unwritten policy designating a blackout period effectively before elections during which the Department of Justice is not supposed to conduct activity which could influence voters. There’s also the Hatch Act, which states that government employees cannot use their authority or influence to interfere with or affect an election. There was actually a Hatch Act complaint filed yesterday by a watchdog group over the raid on Ilhan Omar’s house.
At this point, Will, with an administration that has already done so much over the years without consequence, does the Hatch Act and do these other kind of long-standing norms serve any purpose or any protection?
WS: No. At this point, unfortunately, I think the Hatch Act is a dead letter in terms of, no one’s gonna enforce it, at least until Democrats retake some kind of power. Look, the administration is using government money to buy political ads, outright political ads. And so certainly, I think they’re going to unfortunately be able to get away with things like raiding a congresswoman’s house.
I think really it’s just become, the idea that they would use Justice Department or DHS to achieve political aims is just understood now that that’s something Trump is gonna do.
JW: And Rozina, from your perspective, does this raid to you signal a kind of new, more dangerous era, for not just the president’s political enemies, but also disfavored groups?
RA: Yeah, I want to just go back specifically to the Somali community living in the United States. It is telling that President Trump disparaged the country of Somalia as he also bombs this country with hundreds of airstrikes in the past year alone, displacing more people and causing more people to search for refuge abroad.
We mentioned the ICE Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota last December. Trump was talking about the Somali community in Minnesota, and ostensibly fraud was the reason, one of the reasons, for which he sent ICE agents into the city.
One of the things that the government learned very quickly was that a lot of Somalis living in Minnesota are actually citizens. They are naturalized or that they were born here, and they could not be easily picked up and detained or deported, even though there were some who were. Yet what happened in the months after Operation Metro Surge was that it really chilled the Somali community living in the city. Even though there were so many people who did go out and protest and help each other, there were a lot who basically stayed at home. And I actually spoke with several people who would not leave their house for months.
Now, one of the things that really frightens me about what the DOJ and DHS did with regards to Ilhan Omar is that it is actually expanding the war against Somalis. It’s now seeing ways in which to not just frighten asylum-seekers and refugees and visa holders, but also naturalized citizens.
“What this administration has done so effectively is actually telling everyone that there are some communities who are no longer protected the way they used to be.”
And I think what this administration has done so effectively is actually telling everyone that there are some communities who are no longer protected the way they used to be. And we saw that also in the context of, for example, the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil and pro-Palestine protesters. We are seeing a level in which government is used to target people who before would have protections from the government, and now they are being told that they are actually vulnerable.
And Ilhan Omar, it’s possible that nothing comes of this raid, and things will just go back to normal. But what worries me is the larger chilling effect on the community, including now naturalized citizens.
JW: Trump aside, the Trump administration aside, Rozina, is this just the logical endpoint of effectively decades of crafting a federal domestic surveillance and police state that is laser-focused on immigrants and Muslim Americans?
RA: Yes, it is, right? One of the things that has happened over the 20, or last 25 years has been one immense power that has been concentrated in the executive branch. This notion that when it comes to national security, the government has a lot of leeway to violate people’s civil rights But the other thing — one of the other enduring legacies of the last 30 years — is precisely what the American public is willing to accept.
“We have been conditioned to believe that Muslims … are not just a threat to national security, but a threat to American way of life.”
And over the last 30 years, we have been conditioned to believe that Muslims, and now more broadly immigrants, are not just a threat to national security, but a threat to American way of life.
And again, Trump is able to throw everything — when it comes to Ilhan Omar and the Somali community — throw everything at them. They’re a threat to national security. They are threatening how we live in this country. They are threatening what it means to be American. They are taking away our money and our dollars, and he is using all of these talking points to help build up public support for this agenda against the Somali community. I don’t think such a blatant targeting and explicit targeting would have been met with such support even in, for example, October or November 2001.
JW: I think those are all very good points. I hate when people say this is the only form of acceptable bigotry, because I can frankly say that there are many forms of acceptable bigotry. But the extent to which Islamophobia is a part of American culture is accepted, I think is not just troubling, it’s decades of conditioning, as you’ve pointed out. It is decades of feeding these conspiracy theories, of repeating them until they feel almost natural to so many of us.
But I want to give you both an opportunity to just share any final thoughts. Will, I want to start with you. Is there anything else that you’d wanna add?
WS: As this case goes forward, it’ll be interesting to see what it looks like. But the idea that Ilhan Omar lied about her birthday or whatever is all based on, there was this one congressional website that said she was born in 1981 instead of 1982. And so Republicans have seized on this. Look, it’s one website, right? I looked in the court records, all this stuff. Before she became famous, she was listing her birthday as 1982, all this stuff. And so if that’s gonna be the crux of it, that one website had a typo, I don’t think the administration’s gonna have a lot to run on here.
JW: There’s very thin evidence for some of these conspiracy theories, although people will take very thin evidence and run with them. Rozina, any final thoughts from you?
“What does this mean for denaturalization efforts across the board?”
RA: I agree with Will, I don’t think that the government has that much to go on. It seems to be very thin evidence. But again, it is government resources that are being used to basically go on a, what appears to be for right now, a witch hunt. But again, what worries me is the more lasting effects of this, which is, what does this mean for denaturalization efforts across the board? And there seems to be not just support for it, but also a deliberate desire to run with such an agenda.
JW: And we’re gonna leave it there. But Will, Rozina, thank you both so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.
WS: Thank you.
RA: Thank you.
JW: That does it for this episode. We wanna hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, or leave us a voicemail at 530-PODCAST. That’s 530-763-2278. This episode was produced by Andrew Stelzer. Laura Flynn is our supervising producer. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer.
Ben Muessig is our editor in chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow. Slipstream 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. Do leave us a rating or review. It helps other listeners find our reporting. Until next time.
Why Should Delaware Care? Crime in Wilmington has been front of mind for many residents for years, even as it has dropped since the COVID pandemic. After a recent spike this summer, city officials say their existing strategies will continue while a new office will aim to connect residents to existing resources.
Weeks after a late-summer spike in violence, many Wilmington residents are saying they want to see more services for youth and more beat cops building relationships in their neighborhoods.
At a public meeting and in interviews with Spotlight Delaware, many also raised concerns about police transparency and called for a stronger focus on serious crime in the wake of the violence.
In response, Mayor John Carney and the Wilmington police officials have said they will maintain their existing strategies toward public safety.
“We have a great city. We have some troubled neighborhoods, and we have some groups and gangs that have been fighting back and forth. We had stemmed that tide a little bit, and I think compared to what it used to be, we’re in better shape,” Carney said during a late September community meeting.
Carney has also pointed to the city’s newly established Office of Community Safety, which connects residents with existing city resources.
Carney announced the creation of the office in February as the city sought to build on reductions in crime seen in 2025 when Wilmington recorded its lowest number of shootings and victims in 20 years. Police data also shows shootings in Delaware’s largest city dropping by 50 percent over the past six years.
But Carney’s remarks also followed a tragic series of recent shootings. According to police statistics, 14 people were victims of shootings in Wilmington between Sept. 6 and Oct. 4 — a 75% increase compared with the same time last year. Those 14 people were shot in nine separate incidents.
A broader analysis of Wilmington crime alert data from the website Nixle shows that 18 shootings occurred during the final two months of the summer. A total of 27 people were hit by the gunfire, and three died.
Many in the city are frustrated by the recent violence and the city’s response to it.
At the September community meeting, organized by the Office of Community Safety, residents pressed public officials for answers. They said the city hadn’t been transparent about its response, and expressed concerns about police conduct, and community’s trust of officers.
Among those who spoke was Durrell Dollard, the father of Kadir Skinner who was fatally shot in June by police as he was running away. Dollard asserted there was a lack of information surrounding his son’s case.
Durrell Dollard, the father of Kadir Skinner, speaks with a Wilmington police officer during a September community meeting at the Hicks Anderson Center. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY BRIANNA HILL
“You know how I sleep? I don’t. I don’t sleep. Do you know why? There’s no transparency. Maybe if I had motherfucking transparency, then I’ll be OK,” Dollard said at the meeting.
When asked by reporters at the meeting about the recent spike in violence, Chief Wilfredo Campos said his department typically sees increases in September with the start of the school year.
“Some of the things we’re seeing is that that’s when the kids come back to school. They’ve been off the whole summer. They come back in September. They run into each other, and then they start those feuds up again,” Campos said.
Since the meeting, shootings have persisted in the city. Four occurred during the first two weeks in October, injuring five people and killing one teen. The fatal shooting occurred during an Oct. 1 incident where three people were shot in total.
Residents respond to Wilmington’s state of public safety
On Wednesday, Spotlight Delaware interviewed 10 city residents about the current state of public safety within Wilmington. All said that they feel crime has grown worse in the city.
“As far as the violence, I’m scared to come out at night. I’m 63, so I go in, 7:30 pm, 8:00 pm,” said one Eastside resident, who only provided his first name as Dave.
Three residents said they believe police are not devoting enough attention to serious violent crimes. Others said officers should spend more time on foot patrol in the communities they serve to better understand residents’ concerns and needs.
Several residents also expressed concern about the impact of gun violence on young people, calling for more programming and activities for adolescents in the city.
“What else can these kids do but be in the streets cause they think it’s cool,” said one longtime resident of Wilmington’s northside.
Police respond to a shooting on North Adams Street in March that killed two people, and injured two others. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY KARL BAKER
When asked about the city’s newly established Office of Community Safety, residents expressed mixed reactions. While some said it could be a starting point for improving public safety, they stressed a need for greater outreach to ensure residents know what services are available.
“There should be signs and different things at storefronts. Wherever you walk, there should be a list of things where, if you need help, you can get it,” said one westside resident, who identified herself as Tina M.
Others questioned whether the office was necessary, arguing that residents can already access information about city services through existing channels.
“I can pick up 311 and get information on where to get a service,” said Pilar Seau, a longtime Wilmington resident.
Wilmington police’s current strategies
Wilmington Police spokesman David Karas told Spotlight that Wilmington police rely on a range of existing strategies to combat violent crime, including community outreach, social services and targeted enforcement.
During any shooting incident, additional officers are also deployed to affected areas and officers work with partners outside the department to determine whether the incident involved known groups and the steps that can be taken to prevent further violence, he said.
Officers are also assigned to the same neighborhoods each shift, attend community meetings in their assigned areas and work alongside the Community Engagement Unit, which assigns an officer to each of the city’s nine patrol districts.
Karas also highlighted Wilmington’s ongoing officer training in de-escalation, procedural justice, implicit bias and cultural diversity, among other topics.
Several of Wilmington’s strategies also target gun violence, and include working with state and federal prosecutors to review every gun arrest and offender and assess whether state or federal charges could carry harsher penalties. They also work with state agencies to review ballistic evidence to identify groups and individuals believed to be driving violence in the city, Karas said.
“We have seen the results of this strategy, notably in the focus on holding gun offenders accountable at every stage of the criminal justice system,” Karas said.
The police department is also seeking additional funding to support its crime reduction. On Thursday, Wilmington City Council approved four state grant applications for the department totaling more than $575,000.
The grants would help cover overtime for specialized drug investigations and violent crime reduction efforts, as well as advanced officer training and new police equipment.
Office of Community Safety aims to connect agencies, residents
While Wilmington police double down on existing crime prevention strategies, the city’s new Office of Community Safety is intended to address public safety through a broader approach, connecting residents with services and coordinating efforts across agencies and community organizations.
John Cook, the city’s director of community safety, said his office won’t run its own programs or take over the work of other departments. Instead, it will act as a hub, linking residents with police, and other organizations.
“We’re not replacing the statutory or operational responsibilities of other agencies,” Cook said. “Instead, we’re strengthening the coordination amongst these entities.”
Wilmington Community Safety Director John Cook speaks at the Hicks Anderson Center in September. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY BRIANNA HILL
Cook has an extensive background in social work. He previously served as executive director of Delaware’s Group Violence Intervention initiative and served with Delaware’s Division of Social Services before that.
He said residents can reach him through the mayor’s office for anything from youth programs to utility shutoffs to nuisance properties, and he’ll direct them to the right agency.
Asked about the recent rise in shootings, Cook said that while overall crime is trending down, “one shooting is way too many.”
He pointed to poverty, mental health and group violence as drivers, and said gangs prey on vulnerable young people from struggling homes. Cook said his next focus is reaching families directly, so parents who see their children struggling with peer pressure or behavioral issues can contact his office and be connected with outreach workers.
Despite residents’ calls for more youth services, he said the city doesn’t lack programs, gyms or social workers.
“You know the thing that is missing: love, reciprocity, peace, joy, just the understanding of what they are experiencing,” Cook said.
Following a shooting, Cook’s job is to review the area and determine if there are environmental, situational, or other factors that could have contributed to the incident. His job is to then send in the appropriate resources, which can include things like social service outreach walks, boarding up vacant homes or adding street lighting.
Community meeting highlights frustrations
Cook made his first public introduction to the community during the September public meeting where residents pressed public officials for answers to the recent violence.
Held at William “Hicks” Anderson Community Center, the meeting featured a panel of city officials, whose goal was to inform the more than 100 people in attendance about the city’s response to recent violence, and to hear community concerns.
Officials opened by talking mostly in general terms about their existing efforts, which included concentrating police in different neighborhoods, providing social services to victims of crime and youth resources.
Some residents said it wasn’t enough, and even said that some police officers did not treat members of the community professionally.
“When Wilmington police come out, they do not give us the respect that we are due. They come out angry,” one resident, Jerri Cherry, said.
Early in the meeting, as the Wilmington police chief addressed the crowd, Dollard — Skinner’s father — walked into the gym and took a seat near the front of the auditorium.
He began interrupting Campos’ speech, telling officials he’s been trying to reach city about his son’s case, but no one has come to his door to speak with him
“It’s been 92 days,” he shouted.
Dollard’s frustrations drew the attention of the room, as many were aware his son had been shot and killed by police earlier this June.
Two city officials then approached Dollard and spoke to him in words that could not be heard by the crowd. In response, Dollard continued to express frustrations about what he said was the city’s lack of transparency and communication with his family.
He also said his son’s killing caused his health to deteriorate.
“I’ve lost 30 pounds,” he said. “I’m not healthy.”
Wilmington Community Safety Director John Cook embraces Durrell Dollard during the September community meeting. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY BRIANNA HILL
Eventually Cook took the microphone. He acknowledged Dollard, and described him as a “father that is hurting.” He drew on his own experience working with people affected by violence and apologized to Dollard.
“I want to say to you, from the bottom of my spirit, that I’m sorry,” Cook said.
He then walked over to Dollard and embraced him.
“This is real. This is what I wanted, a little closure,” Dollard said.
Wilmington officials noted that more community meetings would be held to continue dialogue with residents.
Caroline Klinger, spokeswoman for the mayor, noted that while a date has not been set for another meeting, residents can expect announcements about future events through the city’s social media channels and via email.
Get Involved: City residents seeking resources related to violence prevention, housing instability, utility issues, domestic violence, youth programming, or neighborhood concerns, such as nuisance properties, can contact John Cook, Director of the Office of Community Safety, at jpcook@wilmingtonde.gov or call 302-576-2100.
Seoul, South Korea — Former Vice President Kamala Harris delivered some of her strongest criticism yet of President Donald Trump’s second administration during a speech in Seoul, warning that democratic institutions in the United States are being placed under increasing strain.
Speaking at a lecture in South Korea, Harris criticized the administration’s attacks on judges, journalists, universities and other institutions that have challenged the president. She argued that democracy depends not only on elections but also on independent courts, a free press and limits on executive power.
Harris also addressed Trump’s repeated efforts to discredit political opponents and government institutions, saying democratic systems become vulnerable when leaders portray disagreement as disloyalty or treat checks on presidential authority as illegitimate.
Her comments represented a more direct political intervention than many of her public appearances since leaving office in January 2025. Harris has generally kept a lower profile while delivering speeches, promoting her memoir and weighing her future role in Democratic politics.
The former vice president also emphasized the importance of U.S. alliances in Asia and argued that American leadership abroad depends partly on maintaining democratic credibility at home.
Trump and his allies have dismissed similar criticism from Democrats as partisan attacks and maintain that his administration is restoring executive authority improperly constrained by political opponents and federal bureaucrats.
PC; Origame Digital This odd but absorbing adventure sends you waddling across Antarctica in search of an eldritch entity – uncovering a world far stranger than it first appears
A Nazi kneels down on frozen snow, staring at an endless Antarctic horizon. Another holds a gun to his head, ready to end his own life. I direct a small waddling penguin up to them, trying to imagine what it could be thinking. Dismay, perhaps. Likely bewilderment. But then a faint smile seems to break out across its beaky face, as if amused by these silly humans and their misguided belief that they could ever best this howling, harsh landscape.
For most games, the idea of playing as a penguin observing Nazis losing the plot near the south pole would be weird enough. But Penguin Colony, developed by Origame Digital, pushes further. This is an audacious, frequently brilliant retelling of HP Lovecraft’s 1936 novella At the Mountains of Madness, in which eldritch horrors are just as common as Nazis. Further weirdness abounds: the many collectibles scattered about this place are not shiny gold objects à la Super Mario or Sonic. Rather, they are words. So tottering about as a semiaquatic bird, you have a unique mission: collect human language.
The mixed martial arts organization has had links to the US president for years. Now it could be involved in training federal agents
In the lead-up to UFC Freedom 250 – the cagefighting spectacle that took place on the South Lawn of the White House to mark Donald Trump’s 80th birthday this past summer – the FBI announced that a handful of UFC fighters would visit the bureau for an exclusive training seminar for federal agents.
Taking place at the FBI Special Agent Academy in Quantico, Virginia, the March seminar put roughly 300 federal agents and academy students through specialized hand-to-hand combat training with seven past and current UFC fighters, including former middleweight champion Chris Weidman, who was pictured giving attendees advice on warding off attackers.
The media-savvy Democratic senator is defying predictions of a tight re-election battle. But he insists he has ‘zero interest’ in a presidential run in 2028
Jon Ossoff has “zero interest” in running for president in 2028, he declared during a debate this week. Jon Ossoff has “zero interest” in running for president in 2028, he told a local TV station last month. Jon Ossoff has “zero interest” in running for president in 2028, he told MS Now – twice – in August.
The Democratic US senator for Georgia said as much to CNN. And the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. And MS Now, again. And in his second Senate debate on Tuesday night.
Since September 2025, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has sued30 states and the District of Columbia to demand their unredacted voter rolls.
The rolls contain confidential information on millions of Americans and have historically been managed by states. Now these lists are a major focus of President Donald Trump’s push to take federal control over elections and prosecute alleged noncitizen voters.
To date, there have been final rulings in 26 of the DOJ lawsuits.
Four cases are yet to be decided, and one state settled.
Of the judges randomly assigned to the 26 cases, eight were Trump appointees, four were appointed by another Republican — George W. Bush — and 14 were appointed by Democrats.
Tactic No. 1
The first seven lawsuits used the same opening, citing Trump’s March 2025 executive order on election integrity to claim the Justice Department needed states’ voter rolls to check that they were following federal election laws.
The judges ruled that there was no legal or factual basis for the government’s demand. They noted that the laws require states to keep accurate, up-to-date computerized voter lists that include confidential information. But the statutes give the federal government limited power to enforce those mandates.
Several judges accused the administration of using the election laws as a pretext to suppress voting.
In an extraordinary rebuke (echoed by other courts around the country), the judge hearing the Oregon case wrote that the federal government’s actions undermined the judiciary’s longstanding trust in the Justice Department. He called them “chilling.”
All seven lawsuits using the first tactic were dismissed.
Tactic No. 2
The next 19 lawsuits used a different strategy.
They made no mention of Trump’s executive order and didn’t depend on federal voting laws. Instead, they cited a provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 called Title III, which requires the preservation of state and local election records.
The government lawyers claimed that Title III gave the attorney general “sweeping power” to obtain these records to curb noncitizen voting. In reality, the law allowed the federal government to access such records to protect the right to vote, for example, by enabling investigations into practices that disenfranchised Black voters in the South.
Judges rejected the government’s arguments, ruling that Title III applies only to voter registration documents, not records that states generate themselves, like voter rolls. They noted the government had also failed to give an explanation of why it needed the records, as the statute requires.
Several judges marveled at the audacity of the administration’s attempt to use an anti-discrimination law to keep people from voting and condemned the administration’s logic.
Judges also noted that there was a conflict between the DOJ’s claim to be enforcing election laws, which require voter lists to be continuously updated, and Title III, which bans any alteration of voter records.
The administration’s interpretation of Title III, wrote Bissoon, the Pennsylvania judge, “does violence” to the law’s meaning.
To date, judges have dismissed 19 DOJ complaints that relied on the Civil Rights Act claim.
In written opinions, every one of the 26 judges has rejected the Justice Department’s arguments and thrown out its lawsuits. Four cases are still ongoing.
The Trump administration has appealed most of its losses to federal appeals courts and has said it will consider taking its fight to the Supreme Court.
A Justice Department spokesperson issued a statement in response to ProPublica’s questions: “Our attorneys are skilled, principled advocates who argue every case honestly and in good faith. Disagreement with the government’s position is not evidence of bad faith. We look forward to making our case on appeal.”
The only appeal decided so far backed the district judge who threw out the Michigan case.
On Oct. 9, a U.S. district judge ruled that the Justice Department’s national effort to acquire and share state voter rolls was an illegal abuse of its authority. A Justice Department spokesperson said the department is “reviewing the ruling.”
Donald Trump is likely to end up as the only political leader awarded the Fifa peace prize after Gianni Infantino was told at Thursday’s meeting of the Fifa council to make major changes or scrap the controversial award.
The Guardian has learned that several council members demanded the award be abolished and others called for the prize to be depoliticised, with Fifa’s football social responsibility committee to make a recommendation before the next council meeting in Doha on 16 December.
In August of 2023, a series of wildfires broke out across Maui, killing more than 100 people, destroying thousands of homes, and causing billions in damage. Noelani Ahia, who is Kanaka Maoli and co-founder of Maui Medic Healers Hui, helped mobilize nearly 600 volunteers in Lāhainā, including doctors, nurses, and therapists.
Three years later, the housing and health crises remain acute. Maui Medic Healers Hui runs a free clinic, but Ahia wishes it had 10 more to address the community’s needs. “The fire may be out, but the catastrophe is not over by any stretch of the imagination,” she said.
The devastation extended well beyond the lives lost and buildings destroyed. Research published last year by researchers with the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Maui Wildfire Exposure Study, or MauiWES, found that more than 1 in 5 residents had reduced lung function.
Now, new research from the same project has found elevated levels of toxic metals in the island’s residents months after the fires, with higher exposure associated with impaired lung function. The findings offer further evidence that the health consequences of catastrophic wildfires can persist long after the flames are extinguished and the smoke clears.
“What we consider and sometimes look at as a one-time event isn’t really one-time anymore,” Alika Maunakea, who is Kanaka Maoli and co-director of MauiWES, told Grist.
Researchers don’t yet know how much of the contamination came from the fires and how much was already present in the environment. That distinction matters as wildfires increasingly race through towns like Lāhainā and cities like Los Angeles, where burning homes, cars and infrastructure can leave contaminants that people encounter for months or years afterward.
“We have traditionally thought about wildfire exposure primarily through the lens of smoke,” Maunakea said in a press release. “But when an entire community burns, we are dealing with a much more complicated exposure environment.” Researchers must also understand what contaminants were already present, what the fire may have released, and what entered residents’ bodies, he said.
The research, which studied 1,400 adults across Maui six to 18 months after the fires, measured 24 metals in urine samples. It found that participants had higher concentrations of several metals than people in a nationwide health survey conducted before the fires. That included 2.2 times as much arsenic, 2.3 times as much barium, and 3.8 times as much manganese. Antimony, which is used in flame-retardant materials and has been previously linked to lung irritation, stomach pain, and other symptoms, was found at levels nearly 40 times higher.
Community members hold hands in a prayer circle at a ‘Lahaina Strong’ gathering on Oct. 6, 2023 in Lahaina, Hawaii. Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images via Grist
Because the researchers lack comparable data from before the fires, they could not determine how much of the metal exposure resulted from the disaster. Maunakea told Grist answering that question is the next step for the project, which has received a $3.6 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. That work will include investigating whether and to what degree past agricultural and industrial activity contributed to the contamination.
“It’s important to realize that these are all part of settler colonialism,” Ahia said. “So what we’re looking at is confounding factors that are to the detriment of the health of our local people.”
Decades of plantation agriculture altered water systems, introduced herbicides, and displaced native plants, leaving a legacy on the islands that is still felt today. Disasters like fires and storms can compound those ongoing environmental problems.
“If we begin the story when the fire starts, we miss the decisions that shaped the landscape and the community’s ability to respond,” said Katie Kamelamela, who is Kanaka Maoli and an assistant professor at Arizona State University based in Hawaiʻi. “Micro climate change acts on places already shaped by histories of land ownership, water diversion, development, and unequal access to resources.”
Kamelamela said true recovery must look beyond the fire. “I want recovery to be measured by whether people can remain in their communities, care for ʻāina, and pass on their knowledge and practices in place,” she said, using the Hawaiian word for land, which carries deeper meaning and relationship than property or mere place. “Rebuilding should not recreate the same conditions that left people at risk. Caring for ʻāina and caring for people need to be funded and planned together.”
Maunakea said the multitude of intersecting pressures is one reason why he wanted to pursue this research. As climate change continues to accelerate, long-standing issues facing Native Hawaiians like housing, the harms of tourism, and the legacy of plantations can amplify problems. “We worry that disasters like this that we experience on Maui, as well as the floods and other storms that we’re experiencing now, is just going to continue widening the gaps in health disparities that already exist in those populations,” he said.
Moving forward, the project will not just identify health risks but also help residents respond to them. Study participants receive their results, discuss them, and meet with health professionals. “People now know that there’s these types of potential hazards, and what to do about them is a big concern,” Maunakea said. “We still don’t have all the answers for sure, but we are taking the next steps to get a better picture and inform our community around it.”
Reform MP defends leader after ITV footage shows official warning Farage he is ‘protecting’ candidate over racist David Lammy comments
Robert Jenrick has sought to defend Reform UK against fresh allegations that it hosts extremists by claiming that Nigel Farage has “probably done more than almost anybody to stand against racism and the far right”.
The remarks came after Farage was berated by a Reform official for “protecting” a mayoral candidate who was accused of making racist remarks about the former Labour deputy prime minister David Lammy.
Regulator for Great Britain weighs up reintroducing market stabilisation charge to prevent firms going bust
Energy suppliers could be forced to pay a charge to rivals if they lure customers with cheaper deals, as the industry regulator for Great Britain attempts to prevent suppliers going bust this winter.
Ofgem has published a consultation on a proposal to reintroduce the market stabilisation charge (MSC), which aims to prevent suppliers failing if there is customer exodus, as it frets over the impact of sharp swings in energy prices linked to the conflict in the Middle East.
How will Ukraine get through winter after the Trump-Putin diesel deal?Audiosseth.drupal@c…
In this week’s episode of Independent Thinking, our experts discuss the latest developments in Russia’s war on Ukraine.
President Trump and President Putin’s back-door deal to release hundreds of thousands of tonnes of Russian diesel into international markets has revitalized the Kremlin’s war effort and left President Zelenskyy incandescent. Is the US president sacrificing Ukraine in the hope that it will help him in the midterms? Can Europe bridge the gap in support? And can Ukraine survive another winter under Russian attack?
Bronwen Maddox is joined by Orysia Lutsevych, deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia Programme and head of the Ukraine Forum at Chatham House; General Sir Richard Barrons, former commander of the Joint Forces Command in the UK Armed Forces and a senior consulting fellow with our International Security Programme; and Sharon Hudson-Dean, associate fellow with Chatham House’s US and North America 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.
Former U.S. NATO ambassador Ivo Daalder argues that the scramble to shore up Europe's conventional defense risks overlooking the continent's greatest security weakness: nuclear deterrence. Europe knows it can't fully trust Washington's guarantee anymore. But he lays out a middle path between dependence and nuclearization that would extend France's and the United Kingdom's nuclear umbrella—a course, he argues, that could even repair the transatlantic alliance.
Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine, former members of the National Security Council, argue that the members of what they call the “axis of upheaval”—Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea—are deepening their cooperation. Meanwhile, Washington is creating friction with many of its own partnerships. If these developments continue unabated, the United States will squander the strength of its network just as its adversaries learn to make the most of theirs.
Campaigners welcome legislation which follows recommendations by 2025 review into pornography regulation
Pornography that depicts strangulation and incestuous relationships will be banned in England and Wales from early November, the government has announced.
The content will be outlawed from 6 November after cross-party pressure prompted ministers to announce new legislation earlier this year.
I want to rewheel my pint that I got, new, at last Christmas but I am concerned of bricking it. Is it still possible to rewheel a pint operating on Hydrus 5207 with ST-Link? I want to keep the pint size, pack as much speed and range in it as possible, and hopefully not spend that much money initially. I am also curious if there are any ways to upgrade the motor without switching to VESC. I would rather not buy a pint x or s motor, unless they will actually provide higher performance; consensus seems that they are all the same pint motor.
You can stop reading here if you please, I am just going to talk about what I am looking for and why. I have put 500mi on my pint and decided I want to move pushback and install an upgraded BigBoi Pint battery from OnlyAmps. I have grown up riding skateboards, ripstiks, and hoverboards, so after I learn how to ride something I find myself just wanting to push the limits. I personally enjoy riding off-road and I plan to buy a treaded tire, get flared footpads, and 3d print some other upgrades. I would love to make this into a little monster board, but all info I found online surrounds older pints and disclaims that newer pints can not be upgraded. I am however a college student, so I’m budgeting this in most necessary order and also trying not to destroy my class commuter. That being said I can not joy ride without needing to charge during the day because my battery life is so bad. Please help me have fun the way I’d love to. Thanks!
‘Unfair’ immigration and asylum bill could fail to support sexual violence survivors, anti-slavery commissioner says
Survivors of sexual violence could wrongly be denied recognition as victims of human trafficking under credibility tests in a new UK law, the independent anti-slavery commissioner has warned.
Eleanor Lyons said the measures in the immigration and asylum bill were fundamentally unfair and could lead to many more victims of slavery and trafficking, including those allegedly abused by Mohamed Al Fayed, being denied support.
Bernd Lange, who was involved in Brexit talks, says deal could be negotiated within months of any decision to deepen ties
The UK could re-enter the EU in a “Switzerland plus” package that could be negotiated within months of any decision to deepen ties with the bloc, the head of a European parliament committee has said.
Bernd Lange, who was heavily involved in Brexit negotiations, said: “I would love to see the UK back.” He said the EU missed the UK in decision-making because of its strong history of promoting open markets and democracy.
Timekeepers have officially voted to eliminate the leap second, allowing Coordinated Universal Time to drift as much as one hour from Earth's rotation before a correction is needed. The change ends decades of occasionally adding or subtracting seconds and replaces it with a hypothetical "leap hour" that likely wouldn't be necessary for hundreds or even thousands of years. Smithsonian Magazine reports: "It's kind of a philosophical discussion, because if a leap hour happens, it won't be for a very, very long time," Christian Bizouard, director of the IERS Earth Orientation Center in France, tells the Guardian's Ian Sample. "What we are doing is pushing back the decision."
The move caps off 30 years of debate, as the leap second has been highly controversial in the world of timekeeping. Leap seconds aren't nearly as smooth of a fix as leap years are, and they can cause computer and website issues. Reddit famously crashed when a leap second was added on June 30, 2012. It's "always been a problem," Judah Levine, a former researcher at the NIST's Time and Frequency Division, tells Scientific American's Emma Gometz.
Instead of adding the entire second all at once, companies such as Google and Meta add the extra time in smaller segments in a tactic called "smearing," according to the Conversation. It's not a simple task, however, and companies that employ smearing have long lobbied to get rid of the leap second. What's more, with Earth's recent spin acceleration, timekeepers around the world were facing the possibility of the world's first negative leap second, in which a second would be subtracted from UTC. This sparked fears, akin to those surrounding Y2K, that our modern technologies wouldn't be able to handle such a change.
"It's never happened before, and therefore the software for that has never been tested," Darryl Veitch, a researcher who leads the Timing Lab at the University of Technology Sydney, tells the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Ellen Phiddian. But others argued that it wouldn't be much of a problem. The vote means that in the future, UTC will be allowed to diverge from astronomical time more than ever before.
Mines in supply chains of western carmakers linked to widespread deforestation of primary rainforest in nickel-rich lands inhabited by Tolaki people in Indonesia
Volkswagen, Ford and Tesla are among the electric carmakers whose batteries may contain nickel mined in indigenous woodlands plagued by deforestation, an analysis has found, highlighting the struggle to make vehicles that are free from environmental destruction.
Corporate disclosures and trade flows from the last two years show mines in the battery supply chains of automotive giants are linked to the loss of trees in Sulawesi, a wildlife hotspot in Indonesia that houses the world’s largest nickel deposits. The metal is widely used in cathodes in car batteries because it boosts energy density and increases range.
- Top boards: Pint X, XR Classic and Atom (13 each), Pint S and GT (9 each), X7 Long Range (8).
Manufacturers
I sent these results to 4 manufacturers:
- Fungineers: the boss finds the idea interesting. I'm waiting for more info. No commitment yet.
- Gosmilo: positive first answer. They are discussing it with their team.
- Future Motion: no for now (same firmware on all boards), but they passed the idea to their leadership.
- FloatWheel: no answer yetanswered (Oct 16). They are open to a custom firmware: speed pushback + haptic alerts, with settings protected from app changes. Their engineer must review it first. No price and no commitment yet.
Software side
I also talked with the Refloat developer. Speed-based pushback and haptic alert already exist in Refloat. A "Speed Limit" version would mainly lock these settings, so the user can't change them. It's a small change, but it must be done carefully and tested on a real board.
The survey stays open 1 more week (until October 23)
More answers = a stronger case for manufacturers. Please share it with riders in Europe (Facebook groups, Discord, friends):
I will post the final results here. Thanks to everyone who voted and commented!
————————
EDIT (Oct 17): 55 answers now (+10), from 11 countries. 62% would buy within a year. Top boards: Atom 17, XR Classic 16, Pint X 15, Pint S 13. Good news: FloatWheel answered (see above). Thank you, keep sharing!
Use of death penalty against people for crimes committed when they were children a ‘new low’, say rights groups
A young man faces imminent execution in Saudi Arabia for attending protests and funerals when he was aged 15 to 17, say human rights groups, in the latest example of the kingdom’s surging use of the death penalty for non-violent crimes.
21-year-old was treated on field after injury during game
Coach pays tribute to player’s ‘quiet strength’
Southern Nazarene University in Oklahoma announced on Thursday that sophomore safety Tyler Ulrich has died five days after sustaining what the school called a “traumatic injury” during a game against Ouachita Baptist. Ulrich was 21.
The Division II school based in Bethany, Oklahoma, did not reveal the cause of death or the nature of Ulrich’s injury. Ulrich was hurt during a 49-14 loss on Saturday, with the game delayed for nearly an hour while he received medical attention before being transported to a hospital.
The future of western security is being fought out in the mountains and hills surrounding the south-western Yemeni city of Taiz, the country’s former prime minster has said.
Maeen Abdulmalik Saeed, now an adviser to Yemen’s president, said it would be catastrophic if the city fell to the Iran-backed Houthi rebels, since control of the strategic Bab al-Mandab strait in the Red Sea and the road to Aden – the site of the UN-recognised government – would be lost.
Wil Lutz kicked a 53-yard field goal in overtime as the host Denver Broncos defeated the defending Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks 17-14 on Thursday night.
The result means the Broncos emerged from a tough six-week season-opening stretch with a 4-2 record despite an injury-riddled roster and a shaky offense. The 3-3 Seahawks, meanwhile, lost for the second time in five days. They also matched their loss total from last season, when they won their second Super Bowl title.
Exclusive: Isabella Weber prescribes a common-sense solution to poverty, inequality and fascism – making life’s essentials affordable for all
The trouble with economists, Isabella Weber believes, is they do not behave like dentists. They obsess over ideological purity and are inflexible when searching for solutions, regardless of society’s symptoms. Dentists have no such pretensions – patients have little patience for dogma when in insufferable pain.
John Maynard Keynes, Weber clarifies in the canteen of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Berlin’s Institute for Advanced Study), was the first to draw this dental comparison – and she is running with it. As she sees it, the symptoms could not be more severe. “The status quo for the majority is entirely unbearable,” while extreme inequality and corporate concentration has reached levels “simply incompatible with democracy” worldwide. This is exacerbated by a climate crisis that “generates massive windfall profits” for big business as the “ecological foundations of our lives disintegrate”. All the while the far right is making hay.
Jake Bauers started the Brewers’ comeback with a two-run double and Garrett Mitchell hit a go-ahead home run to deliver a 6-4 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers on Thursday and send Milwaukee to their first World Series appearance in 44 years.
Bauers added a bases-loaded walk to tie the game in the fifth inning as the Brewers rallied from an early four-run deficit to sweep the National League Championship Series in four games. The dominating performance came after Milwaukee were swept out of the NLCS by Los Angeles last season.
I'm new to the community, but wanted to share a recent positive experience I had with FM as they seem to be rare in this sub.
I got an XRC a few weeks ago, and one of the sensors on my front footpad stopped working at about 150 miles. I called FM, and they opened a case for me. I tried their suggestions to get the footpad working, which didn't help, then sent a couple pictures and videos they asked for to illustrate the issue and prove it wasn't a problem with the footpad's connector. Within the same day, they ordered me a new footpad, and it shipped the following day.
I was really pleased with how quickly they replaced the footpad. Just hope I don't get the same issue again anytime soon.
I've read some bad stories about their customer service, but wanted to share my own positive one.
Tesla has unveiled a dramatically redesigned Roadster concept capable of performing midair flips, controlled landings, and a claimed 0-60 mph sprint in just 0.81 seconds. CarScoops reports: Tonight, Tesla debuted the new Roadster by driving it up a vertical ramp that then went horizontal. Then, it repeated the feat but drove off of the ramp and used thrusters to flip itself over and make a controlled landing on the ground. After that, it did a barrel roll over the rest of the Tesla lineup and again landed without issue on the ground. Then, it did 0-60 mph in 0.81 seconds according to Tesla. All of that sounds amazing, and indeed, watching it happen was pretty spectacular, but boy do we have a lot to unpack.
It's been nearly a decade since Tesla first showed us the Roadster. The company unveiled what it's simply calling the Roadster. Not Roadster 2.0, not CyberRoadster, just Roadster, as if it's a direct successor to the original Tesla. In terms of design, it's quite a bit different from the car we saw in 2017. Rather than be a somewhat curvaceous sports car, it's considerably more angular. If a Cybertruck and a Lamborghini Reventon had a runt of a baby, this would be that car. Still, at this stage, we're still just touching on what we saw and what it looks like. Let's get into the details. Developed in collaboration with SpaceX, the Roadster uses 10 cold-gas thrusters powered by two 600-liter compressed-air tanks to accelerate and maneuver in mid-air. Underbody suction fans reportedly generate up to 2Gs of downforce even while stationary, while an active rear spoiler adjusts aerodynamics in real time.
Other features include steer-by-wire, brake-by-wire, and throttle-by-wire technology. Tesla plans three variants: Performance, which requires a $50,000 deposit; Thrust, a $250,000 model capable of sub-one-second acceleration; and Rocket, an invite-only, single-seat version capable of flying.
Production isn't expected until 2028, and Tesla has yet to disclose key specifications, including range, horsepower, battery capacity, and motor configuration.
A recording of the event can be viewed on X.
Washington, DC — Republican Rep. Thomas Massie is urging President Donald Trump to fire Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth before the House considers articles of impeachment accusing him of abusing his office and waging war without congressional authorization.
“Trump should fire Hegseth to avoid Hegseth’s impeachment. It’s the honorable thing to do,” Massie wrote Thursday.
Massie introduced eight articles of impeachment in September alleging that Hegseth violated congressional war powers in the Iran conflict, authorized or enabled extrajudicial killings, failed to adequately protect civilians and suppressed speech. Hegseth and the administration deny wrongdoing.
House Republican leaders delayed consideration of the impeachment measure until after the Nov. 3 midterms. Massie has accused leadership of trying to spare vulnerable Republicans from taking a politically damaging vote and says he will reintroduce the articles during the lame-duck session regardless of the election results.
Pressure on Hegseth has grown even inside his own party. Republican Sen. Thom Tillis has also said Hegseth should be replaced, citing what he called serious management failures at the Pentagon.
The latest criticism comes after Trump publicly overruled Hegseth’s plan to livestream the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan following bipartisan backlash.
The US government could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a media campaign in South Africa to figure out why more white Afrikaners are not applying to become refugees to the US, as Donald Trump had hoped.
State department officials, according to an August proposal seen by the Guardian, outlined a roughly $335,000 research and advertising effort after applications to the refugee program “trended lower than expected” since Afrikaners were allowed to apply directly online in November 2025. The document, written by the US mission in South Africa with a department research unit for the embassy in Pretoria, admits officials know little about why.
Austin, TX — Elon Musk and his political action committee have agreed to settle two lawsuits accusing them of misleading voters with promises of $1 million payments tied to election-related petitions and turnout efforts.
The proposed settlements cover class-action cases brought by Arizona residents Jacqueline McAferty and Joy Harvick. The plaintiffs alleged that Musk and America PAC promoted the 2024 giveaway as a random chance to win $1 million after signing a petition supporting free speech and gun rights, while in reality potential recipients were vetted and selected.
The giveaway was part of Musk’s broader effort to help elect Donald Trump in 2024.
Musk later used a similar tactic during Wisconsin’s 2025 Supreme Court race, promising two $1 million checks to voters who participated in an event supporting Republican-backed candidate Brad Schimel.
A Wisconsin prosecutor declined to bring election-bribery charges against Musk, despite an earlier finding by the state elections commission that his conduct may have violated state law.
The settlement terms remain confidential and still require approval from a federal judge.
The cases are ending as Musk continues to play an outsized role in Republican politics. He has contributed more than $275 million toward GOP efforts ahead of the 2026 midterms, making him the largest known individual donor in the current cycle.
Slashdot reader alternative_right shares a story that has drawn international attention for being potentially the first documented instance of a robot being used directly in a sexual assault. According to the Associated Press, German police have opened a sexual harassment investigation after a robot allegedly touched a 16-year-old girl's buttocks and made thrusting motions while two young men reportedly filmed and streamed the incident. Investigators seized the robot and the suspects' phones and are trying to determine whether the movements were preprogrammed or controlled in real time. From the report: Cologne police spokesman Christoph Bermel said the two male teenagers have not been charged but are considered suspects, and investigators were examining whether the robot's movements were preprogrammed or controlled in real time.
Police were unfamiliar with this type of incident, he said. "We have not been aware of this phenomenon so far," Bermel told The Associated Press, saying it was "new territory for us." [...] The robot, said to be 120 centimeters (about 3 ft 11 inches) tall, was dressed in a white tank top, black sweatpants and wearing a gold chain and sunglasses. It also had what appears to be a fake mustache. Videos circulated on the internet show two young men escorting the robot toward a group of women, bumping into one and hugging others, on a lively nighttime street.
hey guys! having some trouble with my pint. whenever i st link, it works but when i go to flash 5040 it just gets stuck wtih blue and yellow solid lights. any ideas why this may be happening?
Meta says Muse excels at ‘multi-step reasoning’ and ‘complex software engineering’ as it races to catch up to Chinese rivals
Meta on Thursday launched a new open-weight AI model which it claims rivals, and in some cases outperforms, similar products from leading Chinese developers.
Muse Spark Open “is the most capable US open-weight model to date,” Meta’s chief of AI Alexandr Wang wrote on X.
Attack was the first on Aden’s Al-Maashiq palace in the latest fighting between the Iran-aligned Houthis and Saudi Arabia
Yemen’s Houthis fired missiles at the presidential palace complex in the southern city of Aden on Thursday, killing five people, the government said, as the Saudi-led coalition listed dozens of Houthi attacks on Saudi infrastructure in recent weeks.
The attack was the first on Aden’s Al-Maashiq palace in the current conflict between the Iran-aligned Houthis and Saudi Arabia. The palace is the seat of Yemen’s Saudi-backed and internationally recognised government.
OpenVMS isn’t exactly the easiest platform to get into, with even the first major hurdle – licensing! – being a bit of a complex issue. To address this and other issues people new to OpenVMS might run into, VSI, the company currently developing OpenVMS, launched its new VSI How-to Portal. For now, it covers things like licensing, installing and updating OpenVMS for x86, TCP/IP configuration, and setting up SSH. The company plans to expand the portal with more articles based on customer and user feedback, so hopefully more information will appear soon.
Most of us are probably not particularly not particularly experienced with OpenVMS, so having a portal like this can really help get you started.
The Justice Department sued California, alleging that the federal government has identified more than 20,000 noncitizens who are unlawfully registered to vote.
UK defence secretary says he has been ‘reassured directly’ counterpart Pete Hegseth that Starlink system has been restored as he seeks to cool tensions
Wes Streeting urged the US to stand by Ukraine on his visit to the American capital and sought to cool tensions between the two countries in the wake of the Starlink row that is threatening to set back Kyiv’s war effort.
The British defence secretary, giving a speech before a meeting with his US counterpart, Pete Hegseth, argued that supporting Ukraine was in the long-term interests of Washington, and a business opportunity.
Microsoft’s been claiming for a while now that they’re working on improving performance and responsiveness in Windows, with a particular focus on making more efficient use of memory. This is probably the only positive thing to come out of the RAM crisis Microsoft helped create and is currently still fueling. The company’s now claiming that Windows 11 is “up to 20% more responsive” thanks to these efforts.
The result is a Windows experience that’s up to 20% more responsive, with improvements you can feel as soon as you boot into your PC and extending to Start, File Explorer, Search, Snipping Tool, Microsoft 365, Edge and more.
A big part of that work is making smarter use of memory and system resources. We’ve improved memory management and efficiency across Windows to help keep more of your PC’s resources focused on what you’re actively doing. That work can make an especially meaningful difference on PCs with 8GB of memory. Windows can now keep up to 2GB more of your active data in memory instead of moving it to slower storage, helping your PC stay responsive as you open more apps or browser tabs. Windows is also making additional memory-saving improvements that reduce background memory use. For example, on PCs with 8GB of memory or less, Widgets load only when you open them, making more than 200 MB of memory available for your apps and other work. It’s one example of the broader work underway to reduce the Windows memory footprint and deliver a fast, responsive experience across the PCs people use every day, an area we’ve made an explicit focus for Windows.
If, for a moment, we take these claims at face value, they’re simply good news for every Windows 11 user, and legitimately the only good thing to come out of the RAM crisis. These kind of claims are always hard to measure, especially considering just how varied the Windows software and hardware ecosystem is, but I’m sure people good at benchmarking are going to try and find some more definitive answers here.
In the same blog post, Microsoft also highlights several other recent improvements it’s made to Windows 11, like the new search experience we talked about recently, a brand new Photos application, some new whiteboard-like application, and several more things. Considering how complex Windows’ versioning scheme and various branches have become, I have no idea when these features and improvements actually make their way to your machine.
On a slightly related note, Microsoft also unveiled that it’s bringing Microsoft Defender to Linux, with a particular focus on desktop Linux. Even Microsoft has to face the reality of the rising popularity of Linux on the desktop.
Vice President JD Vance told CBS News in a "Things That Matter" town hall in Michigan that anybody who is "selling access to the White House" should "suffer consequences."
Like how tf do I get this off I'm thinking of trying to saw off the bumper with a butter knife cause I don't need this bumper cuz ik replacing it but I still don't really WANT to resort to that but nothing is working and it's not like I have random tools sitting around
Sacramento, CA — California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed his 100th lawsuit against the Trump administration Thursday, challenging immigration enforcement operations at state courthouses that California says are frightening witnesses, crime victims and others away from the justice system.
The lawsuit targets a Department of Homeland Security policy authorizing civil immigration arrests in and around courthouses. California says ICE courthouse arrests increased more than 550% during the year following the policy change and have been documented in at least 22 counties.
Bonta argues that people should be able to report crimes, testify, seek restraining orders or resolve legal disputes without fearing immigration arrest simply for entering a courthouse. The state contends that the policy interferes with California’s ability to operate its courts and protect public safety.
A federal court vacated ICE’s written courthouse directive in June, but California says arrests have continued. State records cited in the lawsuit show dozens of courthouse-related enforcement incidents during June and July alone.
The Trump administration argues that federal immigration law supersedes state efforts to restrict ICE operations and has dismissed Bonta’s litigation campaign as politically motivated.
California’s lawsuit alleges the policy violates the Administrative Procedure Act and the 10th Amendment, while also invoking a longstanding common-law protection against civil arrests at courthouses.
(The Center Square) – California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit Thursday challenging the Trump administration's practice of conducting civil immigration enforcement in and around courthouses.
prisoninmate shares a report from 9to5Linux: Ubuntu 26.10 (Stonking Stingray) has been released today, and it is now available for download for those eager to update their Ubuntu systems to a newer release. Powered by the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel series, Ubuntu 26.10 ships with the latest GNOME 51 desktop environment, TPM-backed full disk encryption (FDE) support on computers without a hardware root of trust, updated Settings to show whether a computer is certified for Ubuntu, and 100% Rust coreutils.
There are several App Center enhancements in Ubuntu 26.10, such as a unified app-details view for Snap and Debian packages, a dedicated Drivers page where you can review the available graphics drivers, including NVIDIA driver branches, and support for installing codecs for one-time playback when a media file uses a codec that's not installed.' Other additions include an optional, locally processed AI-powered speech-to-text tool called Myna, system-wide controls for disabling Ubuntu Insights data collection, and better integration with Microsoft Entra ID. Also worth mentioning are the security and software updates that will be available for nine months, through July 2027.
Lots of hardware news came out of the OCP Global Summit, which the Open Compute Project held this week in San Jose, California, and some of it is relevant to our HPC audience. Here are the highlights of the announcements.
AMD introduced Helion, a rack design based on OCP specs that it plans to bring to market with partners like Cisco, Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Supermicro, and Wiwynn. AMD says it will work with the OEMs to outfit the 21-inch Helion racks (versus 19-inch for industry-standard racks) with its 6th Gen EPYC processors, as well as its new Instinct MI350P GPUs.
AMD Helion
AMD will give partners and customers the flexibility to tailor CPU and GPU configurations, including liquid- and air-cooled versions. The company plans to begin shipping Helion by next month.
Not to be outdone, Intel shared more technical details on its upcoming D-Series GPU. Codenamed Crescent Island, the GPU is built on Intel’s Xe3P architecture and combines up to 480GB of LPDDR5X memory, 1.5TB/s of memory bandwidth, and 1.3 petaflops of FP8 compute, all within a 350-watt TDP.
The D-Series GPU, which is now sampling with customers, is designed to run the latest large language models and provide the memory bandwidth needed to manage the long context windows and concurrent demands of AI inference. Intel says the PCIe-based GPU will support up to 300 billion parameters on a single card, which will put it within range for LLMs with 1 trillion parameters in an eight card setup.
“Inference is becoming the defining AI workload, and enterprises need infrastructure that delivers the right performance at the right cost,” stated Anil Nanduri, vice president of AI Products and GTM for the Intel Data Center Group. “With Intel GPU D-series, we’re focused on making high-capacity inference practical to deploy and economical to scale.”
d-Matrix unveiled Matrix Squadron, a fleet of multi-rack systems offering megawatts of compute capability based on its Corsair XPUs, JetStream NICs, and its Aviator software. Squadron is available in several configurations, scaling up to 16 d-Matrix SquadRacks, which are single eight-server racks, providing a cluster with up to 1,024 d-Matrix Corsair XPUs.
d-Matrix developed Squadron in partnership with Arista, Broadcom, and Supermicro. Squadron has already been deployed by d-Matrix in its Arizona data center for internal research and development, and is now shipping to priority customers for deployment in their own data centers.
d-Matrix Squadron
“With Squadron shipping, and our Corsair servers and SquadRacks now generally available, the wait is over,” d-Matrix founder and CEO Sid Sheth stated. “Customers now have access to the world’s most efficient data center scale inference infrastructure available for building and ramping their ultra-low-latency AI applications.”
You can never have enough memory. In today’s age of massive KV caches, that saying has never been more true. With that in mind, Marvell Technology announced the second-generation updates to its Marvell Structera CXL memory expanders at OCP Global Summit.
The new Structera X 3406 supports up to 18 DDR4 RDIMM slots supporting 9TB of memory while the Structera X 3506 supports up to 12 DDR5 RDIMM slots supporting 6TB of memory in the CXL form factor.
“Marvell is the only provider with a complete end-to-end CXL portfolio spanning memory expansion (Structera X), near-memory acceleration (Structera A), and PFMA (Photonic Fabric Memory Appliance), pod-scale CXL memory-sharing appliance, giving customers a complete portfolio from direct-attach to disaggregated memory pooling,” stated Will Chu, executive vice president and general manager, Custom Cloud Solutions at Marvell. “We are delivering industry-leading CXL controllers, co-developed with leading hyperscalers to address the most demanding AI infrastructure requirements.”
Power is one of the big limiting factors in AI today, and OCP Global Summit featured various announcements on that front.
For staters, SolarEdge announced a solid-state transformer to support 800 Volt DC, the new standard that Nvidia is pushing to increase compute density in data centers. The company said that particular capability of the solid state transformer is currently running under load in its labs, with full power path and system-level validation expected soon.
(gguy/Shutterstock)
“AI infrastructure is forcing the industry to rethink how power moves from the grid all the way to the rack,” stated Shuki Nir, Chief Executive Officer of SolarEdge. “Our work on MVAC-to-800 VDC power architecture is about applying SolarEdge’s deep experience in DC power electronics and protection to that challenge, while working with Nvidia and the broader ecosystem to help establish the common interfaces and protection principles needed to deploy these architectures at scale.”
SSD maker KIOXIA America announced new direct liquid cooling (DLC) models to its CM9 Series enterprise SSD lineup. The new E3.S DLC models support new cold-plate-enabled servers, as well as traditional air-cooled environments.
KIOXIA CM9-DLC Series SSD is compliant with PCIe 5.0, NVMe 2.0, and NVMe-MI 1.2c specs, as well as the new OCP Datacenter NVMe SSD v2.5 spec. It features capacities up to 30.72 TB, and offers sequential performance up to 14.8 GB/s read and 11 GB/s write.
“The rise of AI infrastructure is driving a fundamental shift in data center design toward higher power densities and advanced cooling technologies,” stated Maulik Sompura, a senior staff director with the company. “The KIOXIA CM9-DLC Series addresses these evolving requirements by combining industry-leading enterprise SSD performance with direct liquid cooling support in the E3.S form factor.”
Kioxia-CM9-DLC can use direct liquid cooling
Texas Instruments (TI) also made some news with several announcements, including the first analog-to-digital converter (ADC) geared toward enabling 24/7, low-power, event-based remote monitoring at nanosecond resolution.
TI says existing monitoring solutions “often fail to detect the nanosecond-level power-rail glitches that cause costly, unplanned downtime in data centers.” But thanks to the combination of ultra-high-speed sampling with advanced on-chip digital signal, the ADC34DSO75 can detect and capture transient fault events in real time.
TI also announced the LMI800PS, which is the industry’s “first 800V isolated hot-swap controller.” The new offering replaces a “complex discrete solution requiring five integrated circuits with a single high-density package that delivers in-rush current and power path protection.”
Finally, TI unveiled a new bulk acoustic wave (BAW)-based oscillator that delivers what it claims is best-in-class jitter performance and power-supply rejection ratio (PSRR). The LMK6B can detect jitters of 9.6fs at 625MHz, which TI says will ensure reliable performance and preserve signal integrity for AI network workloads.
Also on the network front, Micas Networks announced three new 102.4 Tbps open Ethernet switching platforms based on Broadcom Tomahawk 6 technology. The new gear includes:
An 800G air-cooled switch delivering, delivering 102.4 Tbps of switching capacity across 128 800G ports;
A 1.6T liquid-cooled switch that provides 64 1.6T ports for high-density, liquid-cooled AI environments;
And a 1.6T co-packaged optics (CPO) switch based on Broadcom’s Tomahawk 6-Davisson architecture that’s designed to improve bandwidth density, power efficiency and link stability.
Voyant Photonics used OCP Global Summit to reveal its plans to develop a chip-scale optical circuit switching (OCS) engine for AI data center networks. Voyant is designing the OCS Engine to be a compact, reliable optical switching building block that can be integrated into next-generation data center switching platforms.
“Rather than developing a complete networking system, Voyant plans to provide its OCS technology as an engine that optical networking companies can incorporate into their own platforms,” the company says.
Voyant has already industrialized the underlying silicon photonic switching architecture to meet the demanding requirements of LiDAR for physical AI, said Clement Nouvel, CEO of Voyant Photonics. “We are now applying that foundation to one of the most important emerging challenges in AI infrastructure,” he stated.
Eliyan launched a pair of new photonic products at the show designed to help customers blow past the copper wall. The new products are the Nexus and Oscar NuLight chiplets, which Eliyan labeled “the world’s first 2D microVCSEL interconnect platform.”
Nexus is a 1.6T reverse gearbox, while Oscar serves as an electrical interface chip (EIC) that connects high-speed electrical interfaces to microVCSEL and photodiode optical arrays. “Together, they provide scalable building blocks for linking compute resources across large AI systems, providing the enhanced reach, low power, and high reliability that these systems demand,” the company says.
Nvidia and Cisco launched a new pluggable optics form factor, dubbed Ultra-Dense Small Form Factor Pluggable (USFP), that the partners claim will help to scale AI factories by embracing optical networking technologies without overhauling their data center infrastructure.
“The first planned USFP-based transceivers will pack 16 full-duplex lanes in an octal small form factor (OSFP)-sized footprint supporting both switches and SuperNICs, with the ability to expand to 32 and more lanes in the future,” the companies say. “By doubling both the lane count and bandwidth per lane, USFP enables AI fabrics to connect more 1.6Tb/s endpoints without adding network tiers. Customers will be able to achieve 12.8Tb/s of overall capacity with USFP.”
Flex used the show to unveil new additions to its portfolio of data center racks dubbed Axiom AI Modules that adopt the latest in power and cooling technologies. These racks adopt 800 VDC power and advanced cooling distribution units (CDUs) to support the level of density that emerging AI workloads demands.
“The expanded portfolio is part of Flex’s Cloud and Power Infrastructure (CPI) segment, which Flex plans to separate into Axiom, an independent publicly traded company, in the first quarter of calendar 2027,” the company says.
Katie Zacharia faces mounting questions over her legal credentials after admitting she did not pass the bar exam
Donald Trump’s new White House press secretary says it is “unknown” how much she will engage with the press, amid mounting questions over her legal credentials after admitting she did not pass the bar exam.
In a brief interview with the Guardian, Katie Zacharia detailed the whirlwind sprint to replace her predecessor Karoline Leavitt as the US president’s chief spokesperson.
(The Center Square) - Republican Victor Marx is saying more about taxes than Democrat Phil Weiser on campaign websites as Colorado voters start to decide whether Democrats will continue their 15-year stronghold in the state.
The Bee Frontier and Bee Eclipse use artificial intelligence to process conversations into summaries, to-do lists and more. Just make sure you ask people for permission to record first.
Contributors to the Genesis Agent Skills package represent many national laboratories across the nation. Image credit: Derek Munson | PNNL.
The release draws on expertise from across the DOE National Laboratory system to help researchers and developers use Artificial Intelligence (AI) coding tools more effectively, while establishing the first building block of the Genesis Mission’s shared research infrastructure.
“This release is an early example of the Genesis Mission turning collaborative research and development into practical capability that people can use,” said Court Corley, interim technical director of the Genesis Mission and senior scientist at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and co-principal investigator for ModCon. “The goal is to put the collective expertise of the laboratory system into the hands of researchers, in a form that is accessible, reusable, and ready to support new work.”
The Genesis Agent Skills package makes specialized technical knowledge available through AI-assisted workflows tailored to the scientific research needs of the Genesis Mission, complementing existing skill libraries focused on coding and software engineering. The package includes instructions, workflows, and resources to help users navigate challenges such as AI safety, agent evaluation and monitoring, data governance, scientific workflows, and multi-agent systems.
The Genesis Agent Skills allow researchers to interact directly with AI coding tools using plain-language queries to request technical guidance, review code, or explore solutions to scientific challenges, with responses informed by Genesis Mission guidance.
For example, a user working with a complex dataset could ask their AI coding assistant for help, potentially triggering data-handling skills that generate code compatible with other Genesis Mission systems. Similarly, requesting a codebase safety evaluation could activate validated safety skills to perform the analysis.
“This is a product of the entire Laboratory system, not a single institution,” said Matt Baughman, an associate computer scientist at DOE’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory who helped create the repository. “The contributors brought together a wide range of expertise, and this release makes that work available to a much larger community.”
The Genesis Agent Skills package was developed by the Baseline AI R&D Capabilities (BASE) team within ModCon, a collaboration connecting DOE National Laboratories, industry, and academia to accelerate AI for science. The BASE team is co-led by PNNL’s Nathan Hodas and DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Stefan Wild.
The Genesis Agent Skills package is freely available to researchers, developers, and the public through GitLab. DOE invites users to explore the catalog, contribute improvements, and adapt the workflows to advance American innovation and scientific discovery.
VIENNA, Oct. 15, 2026 — During NetworkX 2026, Huawei shared its vision for building the “LIGHTS” All-Optical Network at the Optical Transport Innovation Summit. Huawei outlined three waves of AI-driven opportunities for operators and explained how an AIDC-centric all-optical network, powered by Huawei’s Next Generation OTN solution, enables them to drive business growth.
Gavin Gu delivers a speech at the summit. Credit: Huawei.
AI Drives Three Waves of Opportunities for Operators
The rapid evolution of AI unlocks three waves of opportunities for operators: DC interconnection for hyperscalers, private lines for enterprise computing power, and integrated computing and network services. This is reshaping optical transport: from a basic network serving consumer and home (ToC and ToH) users, to a business network serving enterprises (ToB) and AI; from administrative-division-based planning, to AIDC-centric planning.
NEXT GENERATION OTN Solution Enhances AIDC-Centric All-Optical Network
To seize these opportunities, operators need an AIDC-centric all-optical network. Huawei proposes the LIGHTS target network as a key priority for operators in the AI era, with six key capabilities: Low Latency, Intelligent Operation, Green Foundation, High Reliability, Tbps-level Capacity, and Security Assurance.
Gavin Gu, president of Huawei’s Optical Transmission Network Domain presented Huawei’s Next Generation OTN solution, which responds to the need to build the LIGHTS target network by covering both DCI and DCA scenarios.
For DCI, Next Generation OTN delivers 800G to 2T ultra-high-speed capacity and an OTN capacity pool, which uses minimal resources to pre-deploy capacity in multiple directions. It helps operators achieve fast time-to-market (TTM), maximize fiber capacity, and meet the Tbps-level bandwidth and rapid delivery requirements of DCI traffic.
For DCA, Huawei offers end-to-end (E2E) OXC for a meshed, one-hop direct architecture, millisecond-level WSON for guaranteed high availability, fgOTN for flexible bandwidth from 10Mbps to 1Gbps, and an integrated QKD solution for quantum encryption. In addition, Next Generation OTN has been upgraded in both hardware and software to deliver an end-to-end “zero-outage network.”
LIGHTS All-Optical Network Drives Business Growth
Powered by the LIGHTS all-optical network, operators are evolving from a bandwidth-only sales model to delivering core capabilities and value-added services. Computing-power private lines are advancing from a single bandwidth dimension to multiple dimensions covering bandwidth, latency, reliability, and security. This enables operators to offer differentiated services for different industries and improves pricing power. Meanwhile, the convergence of computing and network services is also accelerating. In Hubei, China, for example, operators are combining network and computing advantages to launch integrated services across industries such as education, healthcare and finance.
The LIGHTS all-optical network for the AI era is helping operators seize AI-driven opportunities, realize network monetization and achieve business growth. Huawei will collaborate with industry partners to advance technological innovation and business growth, accelerating the optical transport industry’s evolution into the AI era.
"Along with the dangers of continuing cyberattacks, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reports that the threat of an AI market crash is putting the global markets at risk," writes Slashdot reader databasecowgirl, citing the IMF's latest semiannual Global Financial Stability Report. Here's a summary: Three salient risks could trigger a sharp tightening of financial conditions and market turmoil. Weaker or less durable investment and profitability in artificial intelligence could lead to a correction in AI-related asset prices, amplified by rising leverage and concentrated exposures. Resurgent inflation or fiscal concerns could drive a sharp rise in sovereign bond yields, with potentially broad repercussions across financial markets. Meanwhile, increasingly sophisticated cyber threats pose growing risks as finance becomes more digital and interconnected.
Underlying financial vulnerabilities could amplify these risks and turn market stress into systemic events. Although the global banking system remains broadly resilient, pockets of weaker banks persist. Liquidity mismatches among insurers and pension funds have increased, while rising leverage and contingent liquidity risks in private credit could amplify stress.
While hedge funds support market functioning in calm times, their use of leverage and exposure to crowded trades could exacerbate market stress too and create spillovers to prime brokers. Some emerging markets have seen policy buffers erode, and frontier economies have increasingly relied on less transparent forms of financing.
Finally, although markets for tokenized assets remain small and could offer efficiency gains in several areas, they can create new channels for the buildup of leverage and mismatches in liquidity and maturity, in addition to elevating risks related to technology and infrastructure. These vulnerabilities underscore the need for policies that strengthen resilience, enhance transparency, contain excessive leverage, and improve preparedness for future shocks. The full report can be found here (PDF).
Bones were discovered outside the so-called "house of horrors" in Philadelphia, but it's unclear whether they are related to the ongoing investigation into Raymond "R.C." Horsch, a suspected serial killer.
(The Center Square) – Twenty-two financial officers from across the U.S. wrote to the nation’s top rating agencies – Moody’s, Fitch, and S&P – asking them to explain the influence ESG policies have had on states’ credit ratings, with the…
(The Center Square) — As President Donald Trump continues to weigh options regarding the next moves with Iran, elections in the U.S. and Israel loom large.
I have a pint c that i haven’t ridden or charged in several years and i was busting it back out to give it a spin and i went to plug it in and it says it’s at 100% on the app. i didn’t believe it but figured maybe it needed to be run a bit to try and reset so i rode it around for about 10 min and then got the low battery red bar and it buzzed at me so i took it in to charge it and it once again says it’s at 100% on my app. is my battery cooked? should i just go ahead and replace it?
New issue with XR. was working fine, Replaced bumpers.. Left it on the charger overnight, my mistake (have done it before with no issues) 800miles
In the morning, turn it on and in a few min tell me "battery low at 1%, charge immediately"
put on the charger again, says battery is at 100%, when i pull it off and turn it on.. within a few seconds says battery at 1%. Checked all the wiring connectors.. its fine
Leave on charger for 30hrs, Next day it will not turn on at all.. lights up for a sec, then turns off
HW4208/ FW gemini 4165
Is my BMS bad?
Are the batteries out of balance? Since i am running later firmware.. is there a way to test?
Two people critically hurt when vehicle carrying HGV drivers hit stationary train in Calais, say French authorities
Nineteen people have been injured after a minibus collided with a stationary freight train at the loading platform of the Eurotunnel near Calais, French authorities have said.
Pas-de-Calais underprefect Agathe Cury said 18 passengers and the bus driver were injured in the incident.
(The Center Square) – It’s been 17 years since the federal minimum wage was raised, though that could soon change if U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Arizona, has his way.
In May 2023, the Pentagon’s shiny new fighter jet was not looking so shiny or new.
Already a decade late and nearly $200 billion over its original cost estimate, the F-35 program faced a new crisis. An internal government watchdog report detailed a cascade of new problems with the program, which was in a period of flux amid plans to upgrade the jet’s engine and cooling system.
The report from the Government Accountability Office criticized the Pentagon for lumping those upgrades in with the overall purchase of the planes. Conflating the two, the authors said, would limit congressional insight into cost increases. And they criticized the contractors behind the aircraft for failing to deliver the F-35 in a timely manner.
For Lockheed Martin, the main defense giant overseeing the development of the F-35, the timing was far from ideal. In a few weeks, Congress was set to debate the Pentagon’s mammoth budget — and with it, new funding for the military’s purchase of F-35 jets.
Collins was the largest recipient of Lockheed cash in the period surrounding the inspector general report.
So Lockheed and its lobbyists went on a charm offensive in Washington. The weapons maker shelled out hundreds of thousands over a two-month period, in what the money-in-politics watchdog Open Secrets described as “one of the largest coordinated lobbying efforts” around that year’s military budget.
No member of Congress benefited more than Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who at the time served as the ranking member on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.
From May 1 to June 30, 2023, employees and top executives from Lockheed Martin donated $59,500 to Collins’s campaign committee. The donations were outliers during that period: Collins was among the largest recipients of Lockheed cash; the company was her largest single donor over those two months; and it was the largest spending blitz on Collins by Lockheed compared to the same period in other years.
The effort appeared to pay off for Lockheed. In July 2023, less than two months after the release of the Government Accountability Office report, Collins voted in favor of appropriating funds to purchase 83 new F-35 jets. Later that year, when the final version of the military budget was signed into law, Collins celebrated the economic boon she said it would bring to the state of Maine.
In response to questions from The Intercept, Phoebe Keller, a spokesperson for the Republican-controlled Senate Appropriations Committee, said Collins’s support for the jet had nothing to do with donations from Lockheed or any other firm.
“Sen. Collins did not support the F-35 because of donations that she received,” Keller said.
“The F-35 jet program is a longstanding bipartisan defense priority,” Keller said. “Sen. Collins has always publicly supported the F-35 jet program, as dozens of both Republican and Democratic Senators.”
Collins’s position on the Defense Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee likely played a role in the outsized donations, according to analyst Dan Grazier. And Collins, for her part, would have good reason to approve the spending: The F-35 program, Lockheed claims, has had a nine-figure economic impact in Maine.
Fight of Her Political Life
In the final weeks of the biggest fight of her political career against Democratic challenger Troy Jackson, fresh scrutiny on Collins’s donations from defense contractors has become a sore spot for her campaign.
In some cases, the senator’s interactions with defense firms are the routine for Washington: glad-handing, lobbying, contributions, and directing pork-barrel spending back home. Not all of it, though, is standard.
Last month, a bombshell report in ProPublica detailed an FBI investigation into an alleged pay-to-play scheme. A former defense contractor claimed to federal agents that he worked with figures tied to Collins to disguise campaign donations — and got federal contracts totaling $32 million in return. (The FBI probe fizzled after Trump returned to office and purged the bureau; Collins denied wrongdoing, pushing back on elements of the report.)
On Wednesday, more than 250 Mainers signed a letter to the state’s attorney general asking the official to investigate the allegations of corruption, according to Maine Morning Star, a local news outlet.
And earlier this month, The Intercept reported on donations from another defense contractor, AM General, and its parent company, whose employees gave $58,000 to fundraising committees associated with Collins after a damning assessment from the Army put its federal contracts in jeopardy.
As with the AM General donations, the contributions by employees and lobbyists of Lockheed Martin do not indicate wrongdoing by Collins or her donors.They instead illuminate how companies that garner lucrative contracts zero in on powerful members of Congress, who often tout the benefits to their states.
“This is an example of what’s wrong with our approach to buying weapons,” said William Hartung, an analyst who has written critically of defense spending and influence peddling in Washington. “If we buy things because they’re in the state of a powerful member, we’re not going to have a coherent arsenal.”
From May 1 to June 30, 2023, Lockheed’s corporate PAC doled out $421,000 in a bipartisan blitz to various campaign political action committees, campaign funds, state parties, and charitable foundations. (Aside from 2024, the year of the presidential election, contributions in that two-month period in 2023 eclipsed subsequent years. In the same period this year, Lockheed’s corporate PAC made 128 donations totaling $236,000; last year, it gave $286,000 across 158 donations during the same period.)
Collins was by far the biggest single beneficiary of the influx of cash — which came at a time when she was not actively campaigning. And, unlike the donations spread out to other campaign committees, the cash going from Lockheed into Collins’s coffers during those months came exclusively in the form of individual donations by employees and executives, including the firm’s CEO and chief operating officer, data from the Federal Election Commission shows.
Of the 60 donations of $1,000 or more during May and June of that year, 56 went to Collins.
Lobbyists working for Lockheed contributed another $5,000 to Collins during that period, and corporate PACs for Lockheed’s lobbying firms shelled out another $5,500 total, according to FEC disclosures.
Among individual contributions by Lockheed employees, donations to Collins made up more than 10 percent of all donations during the two-month period surrounding the watchdog report.
Only the firm’s in-house employee PAC, which received 75 percent of all employee donations, took in more from figures tied to Lockheed. Collins got more than twice as much as the next highest recipient, ActBlue, the Democratic Party-aligned fundraising vehicle, which received 4 percent of all Lockheed employee contributions in that period, according to FEC data.
The vast majority donations from Lockheed employees and officials were under $1,000. Of the 60 donations of $1,000 or more during May and June 2023, 56 went to Collins.
Virtually all employee contributions from Lockheed workers and executives to Collins during her current term came during that two-month window, according to the FEC.
Lockheed donations made up a quarter of all contributions during May and June 2023 to Collins’s main fundraising arm, Collins for Senator. The next runner-up was telecom giant Charter Communications, whose employee contributions made up just 8 percent of gifts to the Collins campaign in the second quarter of the 2023 fiscal year.
A spokesperson for Lockheed did not answer specific questions regarding the reason for the sudden influx of individual contributions to Collins in 2023.
“Our employee PAC program continues to observe long-standing principles of bi-partisan political engagement in support of our business interests,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.
Another Vehicle Army Didn’t Want
Two years later, a similar pattern played out in miniature when a lesser-known defense firm with a troubled product enjoyed Collins’s support on Capitol Hill.
Collins went out of her way last year to slam the Pentagon for canceling its plans to purchase robotic combat vehicles from Textron and its subsidiary Howe & Howe, the Maine-based developer of the Ripsaw.
Collins has repeatedly hyped the unmanned robotic combat vehicle in Senate hearings and official statements. On June 18, 2025, she took issue with the fact that the vehicle had appeared in a recent military parade, but did not make the cut for further spending.
“It’s the height of irony that you would feature this combat vehicle in your parade as the future of the Army at the same time that you’ve canceled the contract — the cancellation of a contract that was won over a lot of other competitors,” Collins said, describing the decision as “terribly unfair and a real mistake.”
A month later, after the military budget cleared the Senate Appropriations Committee, Collins singled out Howe & Howe, and its plant in Waterboro, Maine, as a potential beneficiary of a portion of $44 million allotted to outfit the U.S. Marine Corps with amphibious and autonomous vehicles.
She gave another shoutout to Howe & Howe in January, after the 2026 military budget was signed into law. This May, during the congressional testimony by then-Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, Collins again took the military to task for cutting its planned purchase of the Ripsaw.
Textron’s corporate PAC made contributions totaling $4,000 to various PACs associated with Collins just ahead of her vote on the 2026 military budget. $3,000 of the gifts came days after Collins criticized the military for cutting its plans for the Ripsaw program that would have brought millions of dollars to Howe & Howe.
Later in the year, the Textron corporate PAC donated another $7,000 to Collins for Senator and the Collins-linked Dirigo PAC, according to FEC filings. (A spokesperson for Textron and Howe & Howe did not respond to a request for comment.)
Keller, the Senate Appropriations Committee spokesperson, said that Collins was not a member of the Armed Services Committee that voted on funding the Ripsaw.
“She doesn’t have the agency to fund or not fund the vehicle because it wasn’t through the Appropriations Committee,” Keller said, adding that Collins’s longtime support for the Ripsaw was not motivated by the Textron and Howe & Howe donations.
Employees of Textron and its subsidiary, meanwhile, made contributions to various Collins-linked PACS totaling nearly $15,000 between September 2025 and October 15, 2026, FEC data shows.
The donations, relatively small in the post-Citizens United era of campaign finance, still illustrate a troubling pattern of how influence plays out in Washington, according to Hartung, the analyst critical of military spending.
“A lot of members lobby to get more units of something built in their state, or craft legislation for a system that only their local firm can produce,” Hartung said. “It’s kind of business as usual, but sometimes business as usual causes great harm.”
Update: October 15, 2026, 7:00 p.m. ET This story has been updated to include further statements from Phoebe Keller, a spokesperson for the Senate Appropriations Committee, that were made after publication.
I went into this process with high hopes. As a longtime rider who has purchased four Onewheels over the years, I genuinely wanted this to be a story where Future Motion stepped up, did the right thing, and gave me reason to come on here and sing their praises.
Instead, it became one of the most maddening customer service brick walls I have ever run into. I am reluctantly joining the ranks of exhausted, loyal supporters who can no longer defend or support this company.
Here is the full breakdown of how it unfolded.
1. The Diagnosis and the $832 Quote
I boxed the board and sent it in under RMA. The Ride Health Report came back with an ultra-vague diagnosis: the battery module was "unresponsive" and needed complete replacement.
The invoice: $832.76 (parts, labor, and return shipping). For a flagship board with 98 miles.
2. The Escalation: Begging for Goodwill and Getting Stonewalled
I replied immediately requesting escalation to leadership. I laid out the facts plainly:
Meticulous Care: I know how to care for lithium packs. I own three XRs that are still running strong on their original factory battery packs after 5+ years because they are properly stored and maintained. This GT-S lived indoors, in climate-controlled conditions, never saw water, and had 98 gentle miles.
Sudden Electrical Fault vs. Wear: The board had full, like-new range right before this happened. It did not degrade over cycles, it died while plugged into the factory charger. That points directly to a catastrophic BMS or internal circuit failure, not battery wear.
Segmented Warranty Absurdity: While the battery module has a 1-year calendar window, the board itself carries a 2-year warranty. My GT-S was comfortably inside the 2-year window at 20 months old.
A Technical Support Manager responded by quoting basic battery storage advice (storing at 40-50%, wiping moisture, etc.) and stated the board was out of warranty by age. They offered four choices: 1.) pay $832.76, 2.) pay $132.76 to have the broken board shipped back, 3.) buy parts to fix it myself, or 4.) let them recycle it.
I pushed back again. I explained that generic storage tips didn't apply to a meticulously cared-for board with no signs of moisture or neglect. I asked if they could meet me halfway and waive the labor/shipping fees or discount the replacement module as a gesture of goodwill to a 4-board customer.
The request was kicked up again, only to receive a completely flat, cold denial from support leadership: “There are no discounts or accommodations that can be made.”
Zero flexibility. Zero recognition of brand loyalty. Pay nearly a third of the board’s price for an internal component failure at 98 miles, or pay a ransom to get your broken board returned.
(Side note: The only reason I didn't eat the entire $832 loss was because I filed a claim through the Extended Warranty Protection on the credit card I used to purchase the board. FM didn't give an inch.)
3. The Salt in the Wound: The Missing Charge Plug
I paid the invoice so the board would be repaired and returned. When it arrived at my door, the blue charge-port plug was missing.
I know with 100% certainty that the plug was on the board when I packed it. I removed the fender and accessories beforehand and verified my storage area. It was not left behind. It clearly worked loose in shipping or was misplaced during intake.
I sent a quick note expecting them to simply drop a 50-cent piece of plastic in an envelope. Instead, support pulled up an intake photo of the board sitting on their service stand without the plug and told me: "We are sorry to hear if you lost your charger plug, but you can purchase a new one fromOnewheel.comhere."
After spending $832 to replace a battery on a 98-mile flagship board, they chose to nickel-and-dime and argue over responsibility for a $3 piece of molded plastic. That interaction tells you everything you need to know about how Future Motion views customer loyalty once they have your money.
What I’m Doing Going Forward
I wanted to believe in FM. I wanted to believe that if you invest thousands of dollars into their flagship products and treat them with care, they will stand behind their hardware when an obvious premature failure happens. They don't.
From here on out, I will never send another board back to Future Motion under any circumstance. If and when any of my boards have issues down the road, whether it's the GT-S or one of my three XRs, they will be converted with VESC hardware.
If you own an S-Series, be aware: the 1-year calendar cutoff on that battery module is an absolute brick wall. It does not matter if your board has 90 miles, looks brand new, or suffered a sudden BMS failure on the factory charger. You will be on your own.
All-inclusive resorts spent decades trying to outrun their reputation for crowded buffets and plastic wristbands. That image no longer fits what developers are building across the Caribbean, where luxury properties accounted for 58% of all-inclusive hotels that opened between 2021…
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Flock's founder and CEO Garrett Langley doesn't think the risks of introducing surveillance technology at scale outweigh the rewards. "If we want to live in a society where, if you commit a crime, you have a higher probability of being held accountable, we shouldn't pause progress," Langley said, speaking onstage during a panel at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco on Wednesday.
During the interview, the controversial founder of the surveillance maker of license plate cameras and other recording devices deflected hard questions about the criticism Flock now faces -- which has since led to canceled contracts and even layoffs. Instead, Langley tended to respond to questions with anecdotes from conversations with police chiefs and city leaders across the United States, and tales of the supposed numerous crimes Flock has solved, rather than offer tangible solutions to people's concerns.
In doing so, Langley positioned Flock as an advance in technology that was somewhat inevitable. He stressed that if people wanted to live in a better society -- that is, one with reduced crime -- they would have to offer up their privacy in return. [...] "Technology, at its core, in its definition, is just doing things better. It's not doing things perfect," he said. "Driverless cars, I think, is a fair analogy. Driverless cars, I think, are definitively safer than human drivers. And when there's one accident, I don't think the answer is to shut down driverless cars. The answer is to say, 'Hey, let's talk about how we prevent more accidents in the future.'"
[...] From Langley's answers, it's clear that the ethics around how Flock should be used is a decision he would much rather leave up to others. "We don't want to tell city leaders how to do their job," he noted. "We will provide recommendations, we'll provide defaults, but we're going to minimize the number of mandated features, functions, and policies," he said. Langley went on to argue that society too often judges technology "not on how it compares to the past, but how it compares to perfect." He acknowledged that "Flock is far from perfect" but maintained that its technology helps police departments compensate for staffing shortages and improve public safety.
When pressed about potential abuse and privacy concerns, Langley offered few specifics, instead arguing that safeguards could be implemented without disrupting police operations. He insisted the benefits of what Flock offers outweigh the controversy. "There's millions and millions of people who have a better life today because [of] Flock," he said, adding that "it's worth it because one day they might be a victim."
(The Center Square) - The price of wholesale diesel fuel rose sharply Tuesday and has remained higher this week despite Trump administration initiatives aimed at increasing supplies before the midterm elections scheduled for Nov. 3.
Warnings come as Californians have already in autumn felt brutal heatwave and storm surge that battered coast
Communities across California are bracing for more dangerous weather this week, with strong winds and high temperatures that could set the stage for rapid wildfire growth over the next several days.
“A moderate to strong Santa Ana wind will bring widespread strong winds and critical fire weather conditions to much of south-west California through Saturday,” the National Weather Service said in a forecast issued on Thursday.
Cleveland bullpen retires 11 of final 12 Rays batters
Petey Halpin hit a go-ahead two-run homer, Gavin Williams struck out nine over five innings and the Cleveland Guardians beat the Tampa Bay Rays 3-2 in Game 3 of the American League Championship Series on Thursday to take a 2-1 lead.
Game 4 of the best-of-seven series is scheduled for Friday, though rain is forecast.
El Niño will likely shift weather patterns to bring more rain, but much snow still isn’t forecast for the northern sates
Winter in the United States looks like it will generally be wetter and warmer, but not necessarily snowier, according to the federal government’s seasonal outlook and other meteorologists’ forecasts. You can thank or blame El Niño.
El Niño is likely to shift weather patterns to bring more moisture, but with it higher temperatures. That should help erase persistent western drought, but it is unlikely to make northern snow-lovers happy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) said on Thursday.
University Of Utah Presidential Professor Recognized for Pioneering Contributions to High-Performance Computing and for Sustained Leadership and Service to the Computing Community
NEW YORK, Oct. 15, 2026 — The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society (CS) today named Daniel Reed as recipient of the 2026 Ken Kennedy Award. Reed, Presidential Professor in Computational Science (emeritus) at the University of Utah, and former Corporate Vice President of Technology Policy and Leader of the eXtreme Computing Group (XCG) at Microsoft, received the distinction for “pioneering contributions to high-performance computing, scalable systems, and national cyberinfrastructure, and for sustained leadership in programming productivity, mentoring, and service to the computing community.”
Dan Reed
Over the course of his more than 40-year career, Reed has made groundbreaking contributions to the technical foundations of high-performance computing and the broader computing ecosystem that enables discovery at scale. His work spans parallel systems, performance analysis, scalable I/O, web and cloud infrastructure, computational grids, and edge computing. Reed has consistently translated fundamental ideas into tools, systems, and infrastructure that have changed practice and helped make advanced computing more usable and productive.
Specifically, Reed’s early work on distributed-memory message-passing systems helped establish key ideas for understanding application and system behavior on large-scale parallel machines, well before such architectures became the dominant model for advanced computing. He also developed widely used approaches to parallel system measurement and tuning, including the Pablo and Autopilot software environments, which gave researchers and practitioners practical tools to analyze, visualize, and improve performance at scale. His work on portable performance data formats, low-overhead tracing and counting, hardware performance support, and integrated compiler/performance analysis further improved the ability of developers to understand and tune parallel codes. These contributions, along with his work on scalable I/O that identified the patterns that strained performance, helped shape the field of performance engineering for parallel systems.
Reed has repeatedly translated ideas into infrastructure that changed practice. He played a central role in deploying the first terascale Linux clusters for national research use and served as Chief Architect for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) TeraGrid, then the world’s largest open computing infrastructure for computational science. At Microsoft, he brought high-performance computing principles into cloud system design, leading work on low-power servers, ARM-based systems, energy-efficient data center design, and software frameworks for large-scale services. He also helped launch the first public-private cloud partnership with NSF, expanding access to cloud platforms for academic research.
In addition, Reed is recognized for his contributions to teaching, mentoring, community building, and national computing policy. He has supervised 28 MS theses and 19 PhD dissertations. He helped launch an international distance education MS program that broadened access to advanced computing education and has developed programs that continually expand access to others including the Renaissance Computing Institute, the Iowa Informatics Initiative, and K-12 computer science efforts that contributed to what became code.org, among others. Additionally, he has held leadership and advisory roles across many of the most important computing and cyberinfrastructure efforts in the United States, including the National Science Board and the Computing Community Consortium; testified repeatedly before the U.S. Congress; shaped national strategy in computational science and information technology; and provided sustained leadership on issues ranging from research infrastructure and workforce development to cloud policy and digital equity.
“Reed’s contributions to high-performance computing are extraordinary in both their breadth and their lasting impact,” said William Gropp, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Chair of the 2026 ACM/IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Subcommittee.” His work has advanced the foundations of parallel and high-performance systems and has helped create the tools and infrastructure that have enabled generations of researchers to harness their power. We are honored to recognize Reed for a career that has not only transformed the field but also expanded its access through his leadership, mentorship, and service to the broader community.”
Nominations for the 2027 Ken Kennedy Award are now open. For more information, visit the ACM Awards nominations page.
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.
About the Ken Kennedy Award
ACM and IEEE CS co-sponsor the Kennedy Award, which was established in 2009 to recognize substantial contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and significant community service or mentoring contributions. It was named for the late Ken Kennedy, founder of Rice University’s computer science program and a world expert on high-performance computing. The Kennedy Award carries a US $5,000 honorarium endowed by IEEE CS and ACM.
Oct. 15, 2026 — CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, and Mistral, a European developer of large-scale AI models, have signed a statement of intent to establish a long-term strategic partnership focused on developing foundation models for scientific discovery.
Credit: CERN
The partnership brings together CERN’s expertise in fundamental physics, scientific data and large-scale computing with Mistral’s leadership in large-scale model training, leveraging these combined capabilities and resources to advance AI for science on an exceptional scale. While the initial focus is on high-energy physics, the partnership has the potential to contribute to the development of AI approaches that can serve the broader scientific community.
At the heart of this work is the ambition to develop a single pretrained Large Physics Model – the first foundation model for collider physics. It will be trained on billions of simulated proton-proton collisions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, and designed to support multiple tasks, from reconstructing particle collisions and identifying particles to flagging unexpected signals and evaluating future detector designs.
The model is intended to address a fundamental challenge in analysing LHC collisions. Today, reconstruction relies on a chain of specialised algorithms that progressively transform detector signals into the particles and other objects used for physics analysis. Machine learning has long played an important role in this process, improving performance across a range of specialised tasks. Foundation models offer the potential to build on these advances, learning across the whole reconstruction chain and supporting multiple tasks within a single model.
“High-energy physics provides a unique environment in which artificial intelligence can be developed and tested with exceptional rigour. We are partnering with Mistral, a leading European AI company, to advance AI capabilities that can serve the whole physics community and be shared,” said Enrica Porcari, CERN’s Chief Information Officer.
CERN is home to one of the world’s largest volumes of scientific data, with around one exabyte – one million terabytes – of experimental data from the LHC stored to date. The number of collisions is set to increase tenfold with the HL-LHC, which is expected to begin operation around 2030. This combination of scale and scientific precision provides exceptional conditions for developing and testing AI.
“We are proud to work with CERN to explore what large-scale AI models can bring to the growing complexity of particle physics. Together, we have the opportunity to push the frontiers of high-energy physics, developing AI capabilities that have the potential to lead to new scientific discoveries,” said Johannes Brandstetter, Vice-President of AI for Engineering at Mistral.
By bringing together European excellence in AI and fundamental science, this partnership marks a step towards a new generation of AI tools capable of addressing the scale, precision and complexity of modern science in Europe and beyond.
About Mistral
Mistral is a global AI lab building state-of-the-art open-weight models, products and infrastructure that enable enterprises, public institutions and advanced industries to own, customise and control their AI. Headquartered in France, Mistral has a strong international presence across Europe, North America and Asia.
Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, later ousted by Defense Secretary Hegseth, said the shortage of missile defense munitions would extend into 2030.
An ad from a Democratic-aligned super PAC claims Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan “voted to raise Alaskans’ healthcare costs by $1,800 and on that same day voted to give himself a $500,000 taxpayer-funded payout.” But that’s not the whole story, and the ad leaves the false impression that Sullivan received that money.
The words shown on the screen suggest the senator cashed in on the “taxpayer-funded payout.” He didn’t. Viewers see the words “gave himself a $500,000 payout,” and at the end of the ad, “Dan Sullivan cashing in while Alaskans pay the price.”
Here’s the context missing from the healthcare claim: Sullivan voted in favor of a compromise bill to end a government shutdown in November 2025. The bill did not include an extension of enhanced federal Affordable Care Act subsidies — as many Democrats argued it should have. But the following month, Sullivan was one of four Republicans who voted in favor of a failed bill proposed by Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer to extend the ACA subsidies. Just 3.2% of Alaskans are enrolled in ACA insurance plans, so the expiration of the subsidies affected a small percentage of the state’s population.
The claim that Sullivan “voted to give himself a $500,000 taxpayer-funded payout” refers to the bill’s inclusion of a provision that allowed eight Republican senators — including Sullivan — to seek damages from the federal government related to phone data obtained on them during the special counsel investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Sullivan later said he only learned of the provision’s inclusion when reading the bill just prior to his vote. He vowed that he would not sue the government in pursuit of a payout and said he supported the House repealing that provision, which is what ultimately happened.
The ad comes from WinSenate, a super PAC that works to elect Democrats to the U.S. Senate. The incumbent Sullivan is seeking to retain his Senate seat in a race against Democrat Mary Peltola, a former U.S representative. The Cook Political Report rates the race as a toss up.
The ad features a commercial fisherman lamenting the rising cost of insurance, diesel and food.
“Everything’s gone up, and Dan Sullivan just keeps voting to raise our costs even higher,” the man says.
A narrator then makes the claims about Sullivan’s votes.
“Dan Sullivan doesn’t get it,” the fisherman says. “It’s like we’re drowning out here and he’s throwing us cinder blocks from a yacht.”
Obamacare Subsidies
In the waning months of the congressional calendar in 2025, Democrats sought to extend enhanced subsidies, which were first passed by Democrats in 2021 as part of pandemic relief legislation, for those buying coverage on the ACA marketplaces. Many Democrats argued a government funding bill to end a government shutdown in the fall of 2025 — and the small amount of leverage that afforded Democrats — was the last best opportunity to prevent the expiration of the enhanced subsidies.
A compromise funding bill to end the shutdown, however, ultimately did not include an extension of the enhanced subsidies that were due to expire at the end of that year. On Nov. 10, 2025, Sullivan voted for the bill, which passed 60-40. It was supported by all but one Republican in the Senate and seven Democrats. That day, Sullivan also voted against allowing consideration of an amendment proposed by Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin to extend the enhanced subsides for another year.
In an interview with Alaska’s News Source four days before the vote, Sullivan blamed the enhanced subsidies for driving up the cost of healthcare premiums. Sullivan said he was working with a bipartisan group “looking to reform these subsidies.”
Sullivan said that he was “working very diligently on reforms and extensions to these subsidies, and I’m hopeful that we’re going to be able to get there.” He noted that Republican leaders were open to “negotiations on this,” but he said “holding people as hostages” via the government shutdown was not the way to do it.
“Let’s get those negotiations and discussions going,” Sullivan said.
The following month, Sullivan and three other Republicans joined all of the Democrats in the Senate in support of advancing legislation introduced by Schumer to extend the enhanced premium subsidies for three years. The vote was 51-48, far short of the 60 votes necessary to move the legislation to final consideration.
Sullivan proposed an amendment to Schumer’s bill to extend the enhanced premium tax credits for two years. (That same day, Sullivan also voted to advance a Republican healthcare plan that included direct payments into people’s health savings accounts, and he offered an amendment to that bill as well to extend the enhanced premium tax credits for two more years. The Republican bill also failed to advance.)
Lauren French, a spokesperson for WinSenate, said Sullivan missed his chance to extend the enhanced healthcare subsidies when he supported “must-pass” legislation to end the government shutdown in November 2025 that did not address the enhanced subsidies.
“The December vote needed 60 votes and got 51,” French said. “Everyone knew it would fail. Sullivan voted yes once his vote could no longer change the outcome. When it could have been, he voted no. Taking easy votes when they don’t matter is the cheapest way to pretend to have courage.”
In a statement on Dec. 11 after casting his votes in favor of extending the enhanced subsidies, Sullivan again blamed the ACA for driving up healthcare premiums and Democrats for voting on legislation that allowed the subsidies to expire at the end of 2025.
“Nevertheless, there is little doubt that a lot of hard-working Alaskans, families, entrepreneurs and small business owners will be negatively impacted if these enhanced premium tax credits expire,” Sullivan said. “For that reason, I voted to move forward and consider both the Republicans’ and the Democrats’ proposed legislation. I offered amendments to both bills that would extend the enhanced premium tax credits for two years, include income caps, bar illegal immigrants from receiving these benefits, and include at least a nominal payment for all plans to clamp down on fraud and abuse which was recently documented by the Government Accountability Office. Now that both the Republican and Democrat proposals failed to advance, I will redouble my efforts to develop a compromise solution.”
Nate Adams, a spokesperson for the Sullivan campaign, told us via email, “Senate Democrats shut the government down for 43 days and held federal workers’ paychecks hostage over a policy fight. The bill that ended their shutdown didn’t raise a single Alaskan’s health care costs. Those subsidies expired on a deadline Democrats wrote themselves. And when the Senate voted on plans to lower health care costs, Senator Sullivan voted yes on both the Democratic plan and the Republican plan.”
The enhanced subsidies expired at the end of 2025. The ad says that Sullivan “voted to raise Alaskans’ healthcare costs by $1,800.” Some Alaskans could have seen their annual out-of-pocket premiums increase by that much or more. But as we said, only 3.2% of Alaskans are enrolled in ACA plans.
The health policy research organization KFF estimated that in Alaska, average monthly premiums for the benchmark silver plan in the ACA marketplace would increase from $15 a month to $129 a month without enhanced subsidies for a 40-year old making $32,000, and from $463 per month to $706 per month for a 60-year-old couple making $85,000.
‘$500,000 Taxpayer-Funded Payout’
As part of his investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and President Donald Trump’s efforts to remain in power despite losing the 2020 presidential election, former special counsel Jack Smith obtained the phone “toll records” of eight Republican senators, including Sullivan. Although some of those senators alleged that their phones had been illegally “tapped” by Smith’s investigators, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 30, Smith said the records were “non-content records” that showed only “who a call was to, who a call was from, and the length of that call.”
Smith said he obtained the records in an effort to corroborate evidence that Trump and others on his team were calling senators to try to convince them to delay the certification of the results of the 2020 election.
“The conspiracy that we were investigating, it was relevant to get toll records, to understand the scope of that conspiracy, who they were seeking to coerce, who they were seeking to influence, who was seeking to help them,” Smith said in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Jan. 25.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune added language to the bipartisan funding bill to end the government shutdown in 2025 that would allow any senator whose phone toll records were obtained without proper notification to sue the federal government for “$500,000 or the amount of actual damages.” That’s the origin of the WinSenate ad’s claim that Sullivan “voted to give himself a $500,000 taxpayer-funded payout.”
The last-minute addition of the provision drew quick rebuke from both Democrats and Republicans in the House. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, said on Nov. 12, 2025, that he was “shocked” and “angry” about the provision’s inclusion in the funding bill, and he promised House Republicans would seek to repeal it.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died this year, applauded the provision and vowed to sue and seek much more than $500,000.
But several other senators whose toll records were obtained said they opposed the inclusion of the provision and would not seek damages. Sullivan was among them.
“Senator Sullivan first learned about this provision when he and his staff were reading the bill to reopen the government,” a Sullivan spokesperson, Amanda Coyne, told Alaska’s News Source on Nov. 14, 2025, several days after his vote for the funding bill. “He does not plan on suing and is supportive of the House bill to repeal the provision.”
“I’m constantly amazed that we’re willing to let politicians off the hook for their votes because later they pinky-promised they wouldn’t actually follow through,” French, the spokesperson for WinSenate, told us. “The bill he voted for included the $500,000 taxpayer-funded bailout provision. Only after the bailout became public and sparked widespread bipartisan outrage did he say he wouldn’t sue and backed a repeal. Changing your mind after it became a political liability shouldn’t be an excuse or a cover.”
On Nov. 19, 2025, the House voted unanimously for a bill to repeal “the authority for a Senator to bring a civil action against the federal government if an internet service provider … accesses or discloses, data from the Senator’s office to provide to a federal agency without following prescribed notice requirements.” But that bill was never taken up in the Senate, so the House in January again unanimously added a repeal of the provision to a must-pass appropriations bill. Sullivan voted for that bill, and it was ultimately signed into law.
“Senator Sullivan voted to reopen the federal government, not to pay himself,” Sullivan campaign spokesperson Adams told us via email. “The provision this ad attacks was tucked into a must-pass bill released just hours before the vote. … Senator Sullivan said publicly that he would not sue and that he supported repeal, and then he voted to repeal it. He has never sought a dime from this provision, and he never will.”
Sullivan didn’t get any $500,000 “payout.” The ad, however, leaves the false impression that he earned something from the vote. It ends by saying that Sullivan is “cashing in while Alaskans pay the price.”
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102.
A federal magistrate judge said Elon Musk and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem knowingly spread false information about Mary Comans, the former CFO of FEMA.
Election officers in Louisiana and Oklahoma receive a powdery substance, prompting evacuations
The FBI and the US Postal Inspection Service are investigating letters sent to state officials and election offices across the country containing an “unknown substance”.
Just weeks before November’s US midterm elections, election officers in Louisiana and Oklahoma received envelopes containing a powdery substance, leading to evacuations. A similar package containing white powder was also sent to the Ohio secretary of state, but the US Postal Service intercepted the package.
The White House and Pentagon have prepared plans to use a Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb to hit military sites in Iran if ordered by President Trump, sources familiar with the matter told CBS News.
Federal investigators said they are looking into suspicious letters containing unknown substances that were mailed to state election officials and congressional offices.
Oct. 15, 2026 — For 15 years, the Workshop on Modeling & Simulation of Systems and Applications has brought National Laboratories, academia, and industry together to advance the design, optimization, and modeling of scientific computing systems. Hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, ModSim 2026 marked its final gathering in Seattle by focusing on “ModSim-Integrated AI and HPC.” Over two and a half days, participants explored how modeling and simulation intersect with the rapidly evolving Artificial Intelligence (AI) landscape and examined broader ramifications for the field.
To honor the final ModSim workshop in Seattle, everyone came together for a “group huddle.” Adolfy Hoisie (in red jacket, center), the Systems, Architectures, and Computing Technologies division lead at DOE’s Brookhaven Lab, has chaired the ModSim organizing committee since the workshop’s inception in 2012. Credit: C. Plata/Brookhaven National Laboratory.
ModSim meets the Genesis Mission
As keynote speaker, Hal Finkel, associate director of DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program, opened the workshop with “Genesis Mission, its Platform, and Challenges and Opportunities for ModSim.” Finkel explained why the Genesis Mission, the DOE-led, government-wide effort to unite federal resources, supercomputers, experimental facilities, scientific data, AI capabilities, and researchers to accelerate scientific discovery, is needed right now. He also cast the relationship between AI, high-performance computing (HPC), and ModSim as “a cornerstone” for DOE’s approach to computer science that will influence how the Genesis Mission proceeds.
“Applying the scientific method to computing systems and having a quantitative method for modeling of systems has never been more important,” Finkel said. “We need models refined for these high-performance computing systems, edge systems, and others. The ModSim community is essential if you want to do this for real. The kinds of things you work on here also are important to Genesis.”
Finkel’s keynote established that understanding how increasingly complex computing systems behave, especially interactions between hardware, software, networks, AI, data, and scientific workflows — all staples of ModSim research — is integral to building the infrastructure needed for the next generation of AI-augmented science. This sentiment echoed throughout the workshop.
From first time to longtime
Each day of ModSim 2026 was punctuated by sessions featuring invited speakers, many new to the workshop, and lively panel discussions.
ModSim “first timer” Kevin Sheridan, from DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), offered a closer look at how ModSim tactics are informing ATS-5, the next-generation, national-security supercomputer being built for LANL. Ilan Tayari, co-founder of NextSilicon and another ModSim “newbie,” took everyone on a technical dive into his company’s accelerator technology that overcomes barriers for moving data, accessing memory, and coordinating computation to improve simulation performance for AI and HPC. Meanwhile, Trevor Carlson, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore, reminded the audience that trusting how and if models are doing the job users want takes considerable work as AI does not have all the answers.
Some of HPC best-known leaders and institutions, from AMD, Microsoft, DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories, Georgia Tech, ETH Zürich, and RIKEN (Japan), were represented on the day one panel, “Agents of Change: How AI is or isn’t Rewriting the Rules of ModSim.” As usual, the panel prompted much discussion and debate, particularly when posed with determining: “When will AI be better than us?” The answers spanned from “one year” to “between five and 10 years” to “never,” proving uncertainty remains in the age of AI.
Lav Varshney, Della Pietra Infinity Professor and inaugural director of the AI Innovation Institute at Stony Brook University and a Brookhaven Lab lead AI scientist, spoke to the community about challenges involved with scaling scientific foundation models, actively seeking their feedback. He also was part of day two’s popular ad hoc panel. This time, the panelists addressed: “Can AI fully replace ModSim?” Although agentic AI has made tremendous inroads, the consensus seemed to be that people still play a considerable part.
“It will come down to specifying what you want,” said panelist Rishi Khan, chief technology officer of Extreme Scale Solutions. “AI will be completely wrong sometimes, but it will come to a solution.”
“What humans bring to the concept — we think, create, we charter the path forward. AI needs human prompting,” added David Donofrio, a longtime ModSim participant formerly of Tactical Computing Laboratories. He later emphasized the “human touch” needed for ModSim-integrated AI in a talk, “Future of ModSim when Considering Advanced AI Architectures,” which had a pointedly bare-bones design “to prove AI did not create the presentation.”
“Manual development of simulation libraries will allow AI users to better drive the tools,” Donofrio said.
As it has done for many years, the ad hoc panel veered in several directions in search of AI’s fitness to do science, including if trust in AI or mutual understanding between AI and human operators are necessary.
“I didn’t think this panel would cover everything from humanities to taxes, but here we are,” said Bruce Childers, dean of the University of Pittsburgh’s Computer Science department, who again served as the ad hoc panel’s moderator.
Rapid Fire ModSim
A staple event that helps expand the community’s research pipeline, ModSim’s Rapid Fire session featured short presentations that spanned distributed computing, graphics processing units (GPUs) and AI accelerators, scientific software, scheduling, digital twins, surrogate models, and even the effects of space radiation on AI hardware.
Brookhaven Lab had healthy representation during Rapid Fire and the poster session that followed with Sankha Dutta, Kuan-Chieh Hsu, and Sairam Sri Vatsavai, scientists from the Computing and Data Sciences directorate, providing flash talks about their respective research involving AI workload scheduling and AI agents and AI-enabled ModSim for distributed computing.
Other Rapid Fire presentations demonstrated how the relationship between AI and ModSim increasingly is becoming part of a continuous loop, where one is used to improve the other, sometimes simultaneously. Notably, this aspect was showcased by some of the field’s most recognized leaders who generously brought their projects to the session.
For her Rapid Fire segment, Valerie Taylor, director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, discussed LASSI-EE, the large language model used to optimize scientific computing codes so they run better on HPC systems. Taylor detailed how employing AI resulted in 30% energy savings on the evaluated GPU platforms.
Meanwhile, Shantenu Jha, from DOE’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, closed the session with a deeper look at continuous surrogate learning “in the loop.” Here, an advanced computing workflow combines AI and HPC to run complex scientific simulations and training continuously in the background while an existing model remains in operation. Informed by such training, the improved models get integrated as they become available.
Top performer: Will Won
Each year, the ModSim organizing committee presents the Dr. Sudhakar Yalamanchili (Sudha) Award to a young researcher who demonstrates an “outstanding contribution” to modeling and simulation. William “Will” Won, from AMD Research and Advanced Development, earned the 2026 Sudha Award with his presentation, “ASTRA-sim 3.0: Taking Distributed ML [Machine Learning] Simulation to the Next Level via Fine-Grained GPU Modeling.” The research represents a major upgrade to ASTRA-sim, an open-source distributed machine learning system simulator that works with any network, compute, or memory simulator backends.
Won’s work demonstrated how ASTRA-sim 3.0 strikes a balance between simple AI models that run quickly but can omit important details versus more complex GPU simulators that provide greater fidelity yet require more time and computing resources. ASTRA-sim 3.0 can capture behavior that matters without system-level exploration being impractically slow.
Signing off after 15 years in Seattle
Technologies have changed since the ModSim workshop first convened back in 2012, along with the questions researchers are asking. It fits as the scale and complexity of HPC systems have evolved, and AI keeps adding new tuning knobs to the mix. Throughout this evolution, the ModSim workshop in Seattle has brough this community together, driving many of the advances in the field.
That continuity was not lost on those on hand for ModSim’s final bow in “The Emerald City.” During his presentation, Jeffrey Vetter, a Corporate Fellow at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and longtime workshop attendee, took a moment from his call “to focus this community on the quantum computing problem” to recognize Adolfy Hoisie, Systems, Architectures, and Computing Technologies division lead at Brookhaven Lab who has chaired the ModSim organizing committee since the workshop’s inception.
“For 15 years, Adolfy kept this moving forward,” Vetter said. “Thanks to him for staying so devoted to ModSim and its success.”
Notably, Hoisie will pass the torch to University of Pittsburgh’s Childers, who will chair the organizing committee for ModSim 2027.
Hoisie’s technical leadership and vision for the field, along with a devoted research community, have carried ModSim through a transformative period in computing, from achieving exascale to an era defined by the convergence of HPC and AI. Increasingly, ModSim is embedded with AI as the field’s methodologies learn from and contribute to AI, conceiving new computing ecosystems capable of evolving in tandem with the science they support.
“ModSim 2026 brought together an extraordinary community of researchers, practitioners, and thought leaders at the forefront of modeling and simulation, along with some new perspectives,” Hoisie said. “I was deeply impressed by this year’s participants. Their depth of expertise, innovative contributions, and collaborative spirit elevated the workshop. It has been an incredible 15-year journey. Still, to me, it is clear our ModSim community will keep adapting as we push the boundaries of computing and [AI], seeking better ways to understand systems and make the next ones better for discovery and society.”
For additional details about the 2026 Workshop on Modeling & Simulation of Systems and Applications, visit the website.
Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.
Source: Charity Plata, Brookhaven National Laboratory
Citizen Lab says it has documented the first publicly confirmed case of zero-click mercenary spyware being delivered through targeted online ads, a technique it calls "AdFection." "There has been a lot of buzz that online ads can be used to identify and automatically hack targets with pinpoint precision, but now for the first time, we have concrete technical evidence showing this process in action," said Bill Marczak, a researcher at Citizen Lab. The Guardian reports: Citizen Lab, a digital investigations research unit at the University of Toronto, said it believed dozens of devices at the Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera had been compromised by spyware delivered through ads run by Discover-Tech, which describes itself as a specialised digital advertising agency. According to Citizen Lab, Discover-Tech operates a software platform called Controlium that allows its clients to "mass-profile and deanonymize" internet users then covertly hack targets with third-party spyware. Unlike infections that rely on people interacting with links or files, the spyware requires no interaction from the victim to be installed, making it a new delivery technique, Citizen Lab says. The infections happen without a user's knowledge, and in a matter of seconds, according to Citizen Lab.
"[The online advertising] ecosystem is being weaponized at a massive scale to profile millions of users, then silently infect targets with zero-click mercenary spyware," the report says. According to the report, Controlium is able to harvest a user's identity and IP address when the user is shown a seemingly benign custom-created ad -- for example, for a digital game or a telecoms service. If the user has been selected as a target for hacking, a mercenary spyware firm can then send a malicious code containing spyware to their device, the researchers say. They say that millions of users worldwide have been served ads by Discover-Tech since 2024, including in Yemen, Brazil, Mexico and Czechia. [...] The full extent of the targeting allegedly enabled by Discover-Tech is unknown. Citizen Lab's findings join mounting evidence that the opaque arrangements underpinning the world of online advertising can be leveraged for surveillance.
Oct. 15, 2026 — Much of today’s scientific progress begins with computation.
But turning accelerated computing’s potential into scientific progress — modeling climate systems, designing molecules, simulating materials and more — depends on more than breakthrough technology. Especially for smaller labs, early-career scientists or science-based startups, the hardest part of research can be everything that comes before the science: assembling tools, finding compute and building the expertise to use both.
NVIDIA’s participation in the European Commission’s AI in Science Enablers Initiative deepens its commitment to supporting the pursuit of scientific progress across the region.
At the AI in Science Summit in Dublin today, the European Commission launched the AI in Science Enablers Initiative, a shared framework connected to RAISE — the Resource for AI Science in Europe — that brings private-sector support closer to Europe’s research community.
Compute, cloud resources, data and scientific resources
Skills, training and technical support
Collaborative projects and pilots along with support for researchers and talent
Support for startups and ecosystem development
“Europe’s ambition in AI in science can only become reality if we bring together the strengths of our research community, industry and other partners,” Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation. “Through the AI in Science Enablers campaign, we are turning this ambition into concrete commitments that give researchers access to the tools, expertise and resources they need to innovate.”
Open Models
NVIDIA’s pledge begins with open source technology.
NVIDIA has released more than 250 open models, 250 open datasets and over 1,400 open source software projects spanning large language models, healthcare, robotics, climate science, physical AI, autonomous vehicles and scientific research. The models and datasets are available on Hugging Face and GitHub.
Building on this open ecosystem, researchers can build agentic reasoning capabilities with NVIDIA Nemotron — a family of architectures, open weights, open source models, training data and recipes — and scientific software including NVIDIA BioNeMo Agent Toolkit, NVIDIA PhysicsNeMo libraries, NVIDIA Earth-2 models and NVIDIA ALCHEMI NIM microservices to accelerate research across biology, chemistry, molecular design, weather and climate, energy, engineering, physics and material sciences.
Skills and Training
Building advanced intelligence capability across Europe requires knowledge that travels as freely as compute.
The NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute has launched a new open source courseware hub with hands-on course materials covering accelerated computing and deep learning — freely downloadable and openly licensed, with no enrollment, fees or deadline.
Modular by design, the courses can be adapted for university curricula, supercomputing center bootcamps or developer community events, and serve as a direct bridge to NVIDIA’s broader training and certification programs.
Access to Compute
NVIDIA is collaborating with cloud infrastructure partners and European national AI factories — including in France, Spain and Sweden — to open new routes for startups and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to access sovereign European compute and services.
The NVIDIA Inception program for startups provides access to compute resources and technical support, lowering the barrier to entry for startups seeking high-performance infrastructure and technological education.
AI2F in France is the first AI factory to have collaborated with the Inception program for four months, demonstrating strong results.
The BSC AI Factory ran a pilot initiative and is now rolling out its first full accelerator program, with growing interest from other European national AI factories in replicating the model in 2027. Beyond startup support, this program is designed to contribute to a broader strategic objective: building self-sustaining AI ventures in Spain and Europe.
Sweden AI Factory, one of Europe’s 19 EuroHPC-funded AI factories, announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to open its infrastructure and expertise to Inception startups and SMEs enterprises across sectors including life and material sciences, autonomous systems and gaming.
Finally, EuroHPC supercomputing centers such as CINECA and JSC provide academia and startups with free access to NVIDIA GPU infrastructure and services for open research. NVIDIA complements this access with office hours, bootcamps and hackathons that help researchers fine-tune models on their own datasets.
As an example, NVIDIA is co-organizing an European AI hackathon this month alongside Austrian Scientific Computing, the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart and The Cyprus Institute, for Pharos-CY.
AI Infrastructure Expansion
To top it all off, NVIDIA is powering Europe’s most ambitious expansion of AI infrastructure to date, with 35 supercomputers currently in development across the continent — the largest single-year buildout of supercomputing capacity Europe has ever seen.
Together, these systems will equip over 3 million researchers with next-generation infrastructure, accelerating discovery across domains from climate science and drug development to materials research and beyond.
(The Center Square) – An Ohio State University student expelled over social media posts about the Israel-Palestine conflict, has won his case in federal court.
Exclusive: ITV investigation shows leader stood by mayoral candidate who said Labour MP should ‘go home to the Caribbean’
Nigel Farage was told by a senior Reform official that he was “protecting” a high-profile mayoral candidate accused of making racist comments about David Lammy, an undercover investigation has revealed.
The latest footage from an undercover investigation by ITV also shows Sarah Pochin, one of two female MPs for Reform, complaining that other party officials “are so fucking chauvinistic” and that “they just exclude you if you are a woman”.
Meta has released Muse Spark Open, an 816-billion-parameter open-weight model optimized to run locally across two 512GB M5 Ultra Mac Studios using Apple's MLX framework. Meta says it's the "most capable U.S. open-weight model to date." MacRumors reports: Muse Spark Open has 816 billion total parameters with 42 billion active parameters and a 1 million-token context window. It is meant for coding and agentic work, and Meta says it excels at extended tasks, multi-step reasoning, and software engineering. The new Muse model was tuned to run on Mac Studio, and Meta says the Mac Studio paired with Muse Spark Open is the "best way to run a powerful model on your own desktop."
From Meta: "Apple's unified memory architecture lets the M5 Ultra's integrated GPU use up to 512 GB per Mac Studio, so two machines can hold an entire model. And the chip's 1.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth is fast enough to read the small slice each token needs. The result is two Mac Studios behave like one supercomputer with a terabyte of unified memory." Apple hasn't released the 512GB Mac Studio as of yet, but it's supposed to be coming later this month. It won't be cheap, because the 256GB Mac Studio is already priced over $10,000.
Former QB says he is looking ‘for next landing spot’
Aikman and Buck said to have argued over contracts
Longtime Monday Night Football announcer Troy Aikman said he is looking for his “next landing spot” with his ESPN contract set to expire after February’s Super Bowl.
“I’ll broadcast through this season, and I’ll be a free agent at the end of the year and kind of see what happens,” Aikman said in a radio interview with KTCK of Dallas on Thursday morning.
Scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 22, Democratic U.S. Sen. Chris Coons and Republican challenger Dr. Mike Katz appear together at a public forum hosted by the Rotary Club of Wilmington.
One of the most anticipated candidate forums of Delaware’s 2026 election season will bring the U.S. Senate candidates together at the Hotel du Pont as early voting begins.
WILMINGTON, Del. — One of the most anticipated candidate forums of Delaware’s 2026 election season is now scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 22, when Democratic U.S. Sen. Chris Coons and Republican challenger Dr. Mike Katz appear together at a public forum hosted by the Rotary Club of Wilmington.
Both candidates have agreed to participate in the noon event at the Hotel du Pont, giving Delaware voters an opportunity to hear directly from the two candidates seeking to represent the state in the U.S. Senate.
The forum will be moderated by Jake Owens, editor-in-chief of Spotlight Delaware, and will feature questions submitted by members of the Rotary Club of Wilmington.
The event comes at a particularly important moment in the election calendar. Oct. 22 marks the beginning of early voting in Delaware, with Election Day scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 3.
For voters who have followed the Senate campaign, the forum provides an opportunity to compare the candidates’ perspectives on issues facing Delaware and the nation.
A chance to hear both candidates
The forum follows earlier discussions about whether Coons and Katz would appear together during the campaign, including an unsuccessful effort by University of Delaware student political organizations to arrange a bipartisan debate.
With both candidates now committed to the Rotary event, attention shifts to the issues voters want addressed and the differences in how the candidates would approach the next six years in Washington.
Coons, who has represented Delaware in the Senate since 2010, is seeking another term. Katz, a physician and former state Senate candidate, is challenging the incumbent.
The Oct. 22 appearance will allow voters to hear their responses to questions in the same setting, offering a direct comparison of their priorities, experience and views.
Rotary builds on successful candidate forum format
The Rotary Club of Wilmington will use the same basic format it employed last week for its candidate forum featuring Democratic state treasurer candidate Ted Lauzen and Republican candidate Mike Ramone.
Club members will submit questions, which will be presented by the moderator.
Although the event will be structured as a candidate forum rather than a traditional debate, it will bring the two Senate candidates before the same audience and provide an opportunity for each to address issues important to Delaware voters.
The Rotary Club has a long history of civic engagement and community leadership in Wilmington, making the gathering a fitting setting for a discussion about Delaware’s representation in Washington.
Public invited to attend or watch online
The Rotary Club of Wilmington is inviting the public to participate in the event, either in person or through an online livestream.
In-person attendance at the Hotel du Pont will be limited by available seating, and advance registration is encouraged.
Those interested in attending should contact Rotary Club of Wilmington Executive Director Ashly Cloud at 302-388-7176 or office@rotarywilmington.org.
For voters unable to attend in person, the forum will be livestreamed on the Rotary Club of Wilmington’s Facebook page.
With early voting beginning the same day, the Oct. 22 forum offers voters a timely opportunity to hear from both candidates before making their decisions in one of Delaware’s highest-profile races.
TO GO BOX: U.S. Senate Candidate Forum
When: Thursday, Oct. 22, 2026, at noon
Where: Hotel du Pont, Wilmington
Candidates: U.S. Sen. Chris Coons, Democrat, and Dr. Mike Katz, Republican
Host: Rotary Club of Wilmington
Moderator: Jake Owens, editor-in-chief of Spotlight Delaware
Format: Questions submitted by Rotary Club members
Attend: Open to the public. Seating is limited; advance registration is encouraged.
The US Department of Justice sued California on Thursday, seeking a court order to prevent the state from tabulating certain ballots cast in the midterm elections.
The suit came two days after the department made a specious demand to the state. On Tuesday, the department sent election officials in Los Angeles county a thumb drive with a handwritten password purporting to contain the names of noncitizens registered to vote. The department asked officials to confirm the citizenship of anyone on the list and set aside ballots from those whose status could not be confirmed. It gave the state 48 hours – an extremely narrow window – to take action. It did not provide details on how it came up with the names on the list. In its lawsuit, filed in federal court in the central district of California, the justice department said it had provided the state with more than 20,000 names of likely noncitizens.
Nine former FBI employees sued the bureau, saying they were unlawfully terminated for working on the investigation into President Trump's classified documents case.
Adult male condor in Patagonia showing the soaring flight that allows birds to flap remarkably little despite their large size. (Facundo Vital via SWNS)
Orlando, FL — Former Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz has been accused in a new federal civil lawsuit of participating in the sex trafficking of two young women between 2017 and early 2019.
The 38-page complaint, filed Thursday in the Middle District of Florida, alleges that Gaetz and two other men coordinated travel, payments and drugs to obtain commercial sex acts from women identified as Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2. The lawsuit says both were recent high school graduates at the time.
Gaetz denied the allegations, saying much of the conduct described is false and that he looks forward to questioning the plaintiffs under oath.
One of the other defendants, former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg, previously pleaded guilty to six federal crimes, including sex trafficking of a child, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. He was later sentenced to 11 years in federal prison.
The lawsuit comes after a bipartisan House Ethics Committee investigation concluded in 2024 that there was substantial evidence Gaetz paid women for sex and drugs. The committee also said Gaetz had repeatedly and incorrectly claimed a separate Justice Department investigation had “exonerated” him.
Gaetz resigned from Congress in November 2024 and later withdrew from consideration to become attorney general under President Donald Trump.
The new allegations have not been proven in court.
Woman claims comedian ‘pranced around like an ostrich’ before forcing himself on her in hotel room attack
Russell Brand transformed into a “monster” when he allegedly made a woman take half-naked photographs of him before raping her in a hotel room at a Labour party conference, a court has heard.
The 51-year-old comedian has denied attacking the woman, who broke down in tears in the witness box at Southwark crown court as she told how she could not fight him off.
Delaware Breast Cancer Coalition activities range from music and soccer to survivor support, wellness programs and Halloween fundraisers through Oct. 31
WILMINGTON, Del. — Breast Cancer Awareness Month may be halfway over, but the Delaware Breast Cancer Coalition has a busy schedule of events, support programs and community fundraisers planned across the state through the end of October.
After major early-month events including Dewey Goes Pink and the coalition’s Monster Mile Walk for a Cause at Dover Motor Speedway, the focus now shifts to a series of smaller community events and programs that illustrate the broader work of the organization.
DBCC’s mission extends beyond October fundraising. The organization works year-round to increase access to breast cancer screening, provide education and patient navigation and offer programs for people diagnosed with breast cancer and their families.
That means the final weeks of October include everything from music and high school soccer to cooking, mental-health discussions, survivor groups and an overnight nature retreat.
Community events keep Delaware pink
Community partners have scheduled a series of fundraisers benefiting DBCC across all three counties.
On Thursday, Oct. 15, Twisted Irons Craft Brewing Co. is scheduled to hold its Drive Out Cancer event in New Castle County.
A day later, Sussex County joins the effort with the first Pink Out Party at Big Chill Surf Cantina on Friday, Oct. 16. Additional Sussex County businesses are supporting the coalition throughout October, including Russo by the Sea Italian Market and the East Sussex Moose Lodge.
On Saturday, Oct. 17, Pink Gumbo 6 will bring music, breast cancer awareness and survivor stories to The Delaware Contemporary on Wilmington’s Riverfront.
The event, presented by 3G Management and Entertainment, runs from 6 to 9:30 p.m. and features local performers, vendors and speakers. A portion of the proceeds will benefit DBCC.
The event combines the traditional pink associated with breast cancer awareness with what organizers describe as a “gumbo” of musical styles, cultures and people united around awareness and early detection.
Schools and sports join the campaign
Students are also helping turn October pink.
The Concord High School boys soccer program will hold its fifth annual game supporting DBCC on Tuesday, Oct. 20, beginning at 3:30 p.m. at Concord High School, 2501 Ebright Road in Wilmington.
The team has been raising money throughout the season and plans to present its donations during the event.
That same week, golf and social events will continue the fundraising effort in Sussex and New Castle counties.
Cripple Creek Golf & Country Club in Dagsboro is hosting its Go Pink or Go Home activities Oct. 20 and 21, including a Pink Champagne on Ice gathering. DBCC lists the events among its October community partnerships.
DBCC also has a Play Fore Pink golf event scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 22, at Newark Country Club. The event includes golf, lunch, dinner and a silent auction. Individual golf registration was listed as sold out on DBCC’s registration page, although foursomes and dinner-only participation remained available when the page was reviewed.
Newark will remain part of the awareness campaign on Sunday, Oct. 25, when the 10th annual DeerPark Goes Pink 5K is scheduled to raise money for the coalition. DBCC lists the longtime event among its New Castle County community fundraisers.
Support continues beyond fundraising
Some of the coalition’s most significant October activities will happen away from races and fundraising events.
DBCC’s calendar includes regular Breast Cancer Conversation support sessions, Young Survivors in Action programming and My Sister’s Keeper gatherings, along with wellness and nutrition programs.
A Breast Cancer Conversation is scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 15, followed by a virtual Young Survivors in Action healing meditation Saturday, Oct. 17.
On Tuesday, Oct. 20, DBCC will host its Forever Fighters program, a Yes2Health In the Kitchen session and a My Sister’s Keeper gathering in Georgetown.
A Yes2Health Active Cooking cookbook club for breast cancer survivors follows Wednesday, Oct. 21.
Additional Breast Cancer Conversation and My Sister’s Keeper programs are scheduled Oct. 27, with the New Castle My Sister’s Keeper group meeting from 6 to 7 p.m.
Mental health part of survivorship
The coalition also is using Breast Cancer Awareness Month to focus on the emotional effects of cancer.
Its “In the Loop” cancer survivorship and mental health series continues Wednesday, Oct. 28, with a session titled “Stress, Mind, and Body — What do I have in front of me?”
The programming reflects a broader approach to survivorship that extends beyond medical treatment to emotional health, nutrition, social connection and long-term wellness.
Nature retreat closes out the month
Breast cancer survivors will have another opportunity to connect during DBCC’s Nurture with Nature overnight retreat Oct. 30 and 31 at Ashland Nature Center in Hockessin.
The Nurture with Nature program uses outdoor activities as a way for survivors to connect with one another while experiencing hiking, nature and other outdoor activities.
The overnight program includes time at Ashland Nature Center, a morning hike and a session on mindful birding and forest bathing.
The program is one of several DBCC initiatives designed specifically around life after a breast cancer diagnosis.
Halloween ends month with a cause
Breast Cancer Awareness Month concludes with a Halloween-themed fundraiser in Smyrna.
The Halloween Hustle 5K Run/Walk is scheduled for 8 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 31, at Smyrna High School.
Participants are encouraged to wear costumes, and runners, walkers, families and first-time participants are invited. Proceeds from the event benefit DBCC.
The event provides a fitting conclusion to a month in which Delaware communities have supported the organization through races, restaurants, golf tournaments, athletic events, concerts and social gatherings.
Awareness can lead to action
For DBCC, October also provides an opportunity to remind Delawareans that breast cancer awareness should ultimately lead to screening and early detection.
The coalition helps residents schedule mammograms and navigate financial, transportation, insurance and language barriers. Its Women’s Health Screening Program can connect uninsured or underinsured Delawareans with free or reduced-cost screening programs and offers transportation and interpretation assistance when needed.
DBCC also provides breast health education and support resources in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole.
While October brings additional attention to breast cancer, the coalition’s programs and support services continue throughout the year.
TO GO BOX
What: Delaware Breast Cancer Coalition Breast Cancer Awareness Month events and programs
When: Events continue through Oct. 31
Upcoming highlights:
Oct. 15 — Twisted Irons Drive Out Cancer
Oct. 16 — Pink Out Party at Big Chill Surf Cantina
Oct. 17 — Pink Gumbo 6 at The Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington
Oct. 20 — Concord Raiders Boys Soccer fundraiser
Oct. 20-21 — Go Pink or Go Home events at Cripple Creek Golf & Country Club
Oct. 22 — Play Fore Pink at Newark Country Club
Oct. 25 — 10th annual DeerPark Goes Pink 5K in Newark
Oct. 27 — Breast Cancer Conversation and My Sister’s Keeper programs
Oct. 28 — In the Loop cancer survivorship and mental health program
Oct. 30-31 — Nurture with Nature overnight retreat at Ashland Nature Center
Oct. 31 — Halloween Hustle 5K at Smyrna High School
Screening help: Call the Delaware Breast Cancer Coalition at 1-888-672-9647 for help scheduling a mammogram or arranging screening-related transportation or interpretation.
More information: Visit the Delaware Breast Cancer Coalition’s website for event registration, support programs, volunteer opportunities and screening resources.
Microsoft says recent Windows 11 updates have made the operating system up to 20% more responsive by improving memory management and reducing background resource use. "A big part of that work is making smarter use of memory and system resources," says Navjot Virk, corporate vice president of Windows experiences at Microsoft. "We've improved memory management and efficiency across Windows to help keep more of your PC's resources focused on what you're actively doing." The Verge reports: The improvements to memory management now make a "meaningful difference" on PCs with just 8GB of RAM. "Windows can now keep up to 2GB more of your active data in memory instead of moving it to slower storage," says Virk. "For example, on PCs with 8GB of memory or less, Widgets load only when you open them, making more than 200 MB of memory available for your apps and other work."
Microsoft has also made Windows Update less disruptive, cleaned up the Widgets section, and finally allowed the taskbar to be repositioned to the sides or top of a display. Windows Hello sign-in has also been sped up, and Bluetooth pairing is more reliable, "including an AirPods pairing experience that's up to 15 seconds faster."
The next big step is a new Windows Search experience that's a lot faster and more capable. [...] It's currently available for Windows Insiders, and Microsoft says it will "roll out more broadly later this year."
It has been one year since Tame Impala released “Deadbeat” on Oct. 17. Although the album’s singles continue to see success, the long-awaited return of the Australian psychedelic rock messiah, headed only by Kevin Parker, was initially met with disappointment.
Last year’s release was starkly unfaithful to Tame Impala’s discography. Parker dramatically shifts genres and rationalizes it in an interview with Grayson Haver Currin.
“Nothing transports me like techno music,” Parker says in the interview. “It makes me feel like I’m not physically where I am right now, like I’m in outer space.”
Parker sat in an amphitheater behind real estate he bought in 2020, the Wave House, located alongside Injidup Bay and surrounded by 47 acres of forest. In the 90s, it played a crucial role in the Western Australian music scene and he would find remnants in the form of glow sticks. He imagined the music there in outdoor raves and wanted to make it himself.
This influence is especially seen and enjoyable on the opening track, “My Old Ways.” The track gets lost in synths and loud techno that mirror lines about how powerful bad habits can be: “I know what’s comin’, ain’t so shockin’/Always f—-n’ up to somethin’.”
The single, “Dracula,” is a standout — not just because it was in everyone’s Halloween posts last year. With ghoulish-sounding background vocals and a groovy bassline, it is almost “Thriller”-esque.
Another single,“Loser,” follows a similar sinister sound to “Dracula.” Both singles continue to find incredible commercial success on the Billboard Hot 100, even a year after their release.
These singles seem to be outliers, since the rest of the album fails to utilize the new shift in genre in an interesting way. However, there are a few exceptions.
“Piece Of Heaven” shows the comfort that Parker finds in a partner. It is angelic at first and the parts that mimic rave culture sound like a Chainsmokers song, but in all of the right ways.
“See You On Monday” is redeeming as it presents Tame Impala’s greatest musical quality: the ability to get lost in a song. However, lyrics like “She said, ‘I’m the one you want and you can turn me on’” differ from his usual personal, introspective lyricism.
Parker’s dabble into the genre isn’t uncharted. In the album “The Slow Rush,” disco-pop and house influences augment the hallucination Tame Impala creates when utilized among staple electronic synths, thought-provoking past and existence-focused lyrics.
In this album, though, it falls short. Lacking much of the mind-blowing instrumentation and lyricism Tame Impala is known for, this album doesn’t transport the listener anywhere.
The most offensive instances of this are “Oblivion” and “Ethereal Connection.” “Oblivion” features a drum sound akin to “Lovin on Me” by Jack Harlow, and “Ethereal Connection” is seven minutes long and features synth buildups that sound like a 2015 YouTube intro.
At the lower extreme, it is incredibly frustrating that most of these tracks feel boring. In the second half, “Not My World,” “Afterthought” and “Obsolete” fall short. They feel repetitive, forgettable and flat, with nothing really interesting or expansive about them. They sound like background music.
The redeeming qualities of this album give great insight into who Parker is. The album feels personal even before you press play, as its cover features a photo of him and his daughter that highlights what he truly values in life. In the album, Parker also creates dance-pop music, which is a genre that’s deeply personal to him.
In the interview with Currin, Parker explains the anxiety the album’s lyrics express.
“‘Deadbeat’ is a feeling of being behind the eight ball in life and in the world, of not being able to get your s— together, of being an inferior human,” Parker said.
In the album, he’s vulnerable about inferiority from the beginning. The second track, “No Reply,” follows a stream-of-consciousness ramble that kind of sounds like a Bleachers song, and it’s also a high point.
A year later, it is clear to see how “Deadbeat” is a heavy letdown of an album and a major departure from his previous work. However, it is great to see its singles resonating with people, even if the rest of the album doesn’t.
I admire how the album expresses the passions Parker holds and confessions of some of the struggles that he deals with. Some sounds work, some of the stories are nice to listen to and, yes — some of the sounds will still make your brain happy.
Ultimately, Parker explores what being a deadbeat is and how it is “… depressing until I wear it as a badge, and then I feel good about it, stronger.”
Best Tracks: “My Old Ways,” “No Reply,” “Dracula,” “Piece Of Heaven”
Worst Tracks: “Obsolete,” “Ethereal Connection,” “Afterthought,” “End Of Summer”
LucccA asks: Why are labor unions in the US still not as well-organized compared to the rest of the world? I know there was a push against them in the past—does that still have an effect today? Also, why are there so many right-leaning unions in the US?
Michael: A lot of reasons. The US has low union density compared to other wealthy nations, currently at 10.0%, and that has been on a precipitous decline for the past few decades for a variety of reasons that include anti-union and union busting campaigns, outdated labor laws where employers often retaliate for union organizing or delay bargaining for years, as we are seeing with Starbucks, where there is no union contract after nearly five years since the first store won its union election in December 2021.Right to work laws in the US also undermine labor unions and starve them of resources. To the extent that there are right leaning labor unions in the US, they typically are law enforcement unions that consistently endorse and back Republican candidates despite the Republican Party in the US opposing collective bargaining. Some unions like the Teamsters have been making efforts to get Republicans to support legislation and in turn receive endorsements from the union, and this has shown up this election cycle with the Teamsters endorsing Republicans like Congressman Max Miller or Kansas Senator Roger Marshall, who are both facing very competitive re-election battles.
Heather: There’s a bunch of ideas floating around on cutting costs for groceries, healthcare and energy bills. A key thing Democrats are promising if they regain power in Congress is to wrestle back authority on trade and repeal Trump’s tariffs, which would lower what it costs compaines to import. A second is to advance a vote to stop the war in Iran, which could calm fuel prices. If Democrats retake the Senate, expect Elizabeth Warren to become chair of the powerful banking committe, and push forward some curbs on private equity investments. And Democrats have been coalescing around more government funding for childcare, a notable move to the left in recent years. Hakeem Jeffries, who will be House Speaker if Democrats win there, is promising to reinstate ACA tax cuts and roll back Medicaid cuts, but the party is divided on Medicare For All, with DSA candidates making promises on the campaign trail and more centrist Dems being pretty quiet.
Republicans running for Congress have been talking a lot about ways to lower gas prices, especially suspending the fuel tax, and shaving utility bills by making tech companies and other big users pay more. Some have promised to curb Trump’s tariffs, including Michigan’s Mike Rogers, and others are proposing suspending data center building after public backlash.
Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, during a news conference ahead of the State of the Union address in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 24, 2026.Photo: Daniel Heuer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Agents from the Department of Homeland Security on Monday raided the Washington, D.C., home of Rep. Ilhan Omar ostensibly in connection with a criminal investigation into her childhood immigration to the United States. The raid was signed off on by a federal judge, apparently after a “back-and-forth” with federal law enforcement, and has been condemned by civil rights groups as highly suspect.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump’s targeting of Omar escalated even further as federal agents issued subpoenas to many of her relatives, including her sister Sahra Noor, and the Wall Street Journal reported the Trump administration’s ultimate goal is to strip Omar of her citizenship and deport her. This obscene abuse of power comes after years of Trump targeting Omar with threats, racist smears, intimidation, and calls for her deportation.
But with rare exception, the response from the mainstream media’s pundit class has been largely muted, with the vast bulk of the coverage coming in the form of he said/she said, down-the-middle reporting. This is in stark contrast with how elite opinion-shapers responded with uniform outrage in the days after Trump’s also dubious raid on John Bolton, his former national security adviser and a neoconservative commentator, in August 2025. Both are part of a consistent pattern of Trump weaponizing the Department of Justice to attack his perceived enemies, yet only the latter solicited widespread media condemnation.
As a rule for U.S. media, the consistent application of principle takes a back seat to class solidarity.
The raid on Omar’s home has thus far received zero of the above media interventions. No editorials, no opinion columns in the Times, Post, or Journal; no preening in The New Yorker or Politico or Atlantic about the erosion of “rule of law.” The Atlantic did run an article on the Omar raid but it was equivocal and Both Sides in its tone. (A similar Both Sides column The Atlantic published about the Bolton raid was not included in our list of opinion pieces expressing outrage over the Bolton raid.)
This is in stark contrast to the breathless tone of outrage leveled at Trump when his DOJ targeted Bolton last year. “It is clear that Mr. Trump and his appointees,” the Times wrote in August 2025, “are perverting the justice system to serve their political interests and intimidate their critics.” “FBI raid targeting Bolton crosses a line in the Trump revenge campaign,” proclaimed the Trump ally–owned Washington Post. Even the right-wing WSJ editorial board, typically a staunch backer of Trump, got in on the fervor under the headline “Trump’s Vendetta Campaign Targets John Bolton,” which made clear “that second-term success for the President includes retribution.”
The Journal not only didn’t publish an editorial or column opposing the Omar raid as they did with Bolton, they published a column by assistant editorial page editor James Freeman endorsing it and using tabloid innuendo to cast aspersions on Omar.
This isn’t to say the mainstream press hasn’t reported on the Omar raid. The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal all ran articles, and analysis, on the raid, but — unlike with the Bolton case — they have published no opinions expressing outrage and demanding recourse for the obvious authoritarian power grab.
The reasons for this glaring discrepancy are likely many: Omar is Black and Muslim, Bolton is white and not. Omar is a woman, Bolton is a man. Omar is considered “far left,” Bolton is squarely in the center-right of elite Washington consensus. Omar is a harsh critic of Israel, and Bolton is among its most overtly and bloodthirsty champions. The reality is it’s almost certainly a combination of all these factors. Writ large, Bolton is a member of The Club, and Omar isn’t.
A similar dynamic of asymmetric In-Group vs. Out-Group outrage could be seen during the early months of Trump’s first term when the media spilled oceans of ink lamenting Trump’s determination to intimidate the press and lock up reporters. Yet this same press almost entirely ignored his DOJ’s absurd prosecution of two independent reporters, Aaron Cantu and Alexei Wood, for covering the January 20 unrest during his 2017 inauguration — a case that was found to have no merit. Ultimately, the city of Washington, D.C., was, despite the lack of any sustained media attention, forced to settle with a payout to the persecuted reporters.
As a rule for U.S. media, the consistent application of principle — as high-minded and lofty as they may appear — takes a back seat to class solidarity. Bolton is a corporate media figure, a national security elite, a hawk, and a committed institutionalist. He is, in other words, one of them. Omar is none of these things. As a direct result, her outrageous persecution by Trump is noted and perhaps critiqued around the margins but is not a source of widespread, sustained outrage and condemnation. This distinction is reserved, very clearly, for those in The Club.
The hole in the scapula and the fragments found embedded in the sediment below the perforation. Top left: Ventral view of the hole in the scapula, showing two refitting fragments. Top right: The linea muscularis, highlighted by the dashed line,…
Demonstrators demand resignation of Edi Rama after three days of clashes in capital Tirana
Albania’s prime minister has said he will not resign as a protest movement, initially prompted by a proposal to build a Trump family-backed resort in the Balkan state, turned violent with clashes convulsing the capital for a third consecutive day.
Speaking on Thursday after calls by students who this week assumed control of the anti-government demonstrations that have rattled Tirana since June, Edi Rama said: “Governments are changed through democratic elections. We had elections last year, not a revolution.”
Voting registration organizations accuse Texas officials of failing to ensure eligible voters can register properly
Texas election officials are struggling to process a massive backlog of nearly 600,000 voter registration applications after a major state computer system failure, just days before early voting is set to open on Monday and amid concerns about widespread voter suppression.
The disruption has raised serious concerns about the state’s voter registration system, with voting rights organizations accusing Texas officials of failing to ensure that eligible voters could properly register.
The sci-fi monster comes complete with motors and joystick controls and formed part of a collection which filled its late owner's home from "floor to ceiling."
Nato source says drones came from Russia, while Romania’s president says attacking commercial ships ‘is unacceptable and has to stop’
Seven sailors are missing after drones struck two tankers near Romania’s Black Sea coast, setting them ablaze and raising fresh security concerns on a vital shipping route used by Ukraine.
A Nato military source told Reuters the drones that had hit the Wine Trader and the Yara J came from Russia. “The drones that caused the fires on board two tankers inside Romanian territorial waters were of Russian origin,” the source said.
Shortly after David Jolly launched his campaign for Florida governor, his former boss was indicted for taking over $100 million from a disability nonprofit. Jolly says he wasn't aware of the scheme.
Amazon has unveiled two new Bee "personal AI" devices designed to continuously record, transcribe, and analyze conversations: the $75 wearable Bee Frontier and the $100 phone-mounted Bee Eclipse. Amazon says the devices can generate conversation summaries, surface recurring themes, and recommend actions or purchases, while claiming audio itself is never stored and users can delete transcripts and summaries. CNBC reports: The Bee Frontier is an upgraded version of Amazon's existing wearable that can either be worn on a wrist or clipped to clothing. Similar to earlier generations, the Bee Frontier has up to seven days of battery life, but it's also more expensive, costing $75 compared with its $50 predecessor.
Amazon acquired Bee, a San Francisco startup known for its always-listening bracelet, in July 2025 for an undisclosed amount. Bee bracelets are equipped with artificial intelligence and microphones that can record, transcribe and analyze conversations. The dual mics on the Bee Frontier have upgraded noise filtering, "so it can take note of what matters and ignore what doesn't, even in noisy environments like a crowded restaurant or open office," Amazon said in a blog post.
Amazon also debuted the $100 Bee Eclipse, which functions like other Bee devices, but instead of being worn, the credit card-sized gadget magnetically snaps on to the back of a smartphone. The Bee Frontier is available Thursday, while the Bee Eclipse "will be available soon," the company said.
Water company tells creditors it will not survive long enough to agree refinancing deal without more money
Thames Water has asked its creditors for another £2.4bn as the embattled water company comes close to running out of cash.
The UK’s largest water company said on Thursday it needed another short-term cash injection because it would be unable to reach a longer-term deal to sort out its giant debt pile before running out of cash by “the end of 2026 or the start of 2027”.
The Supreme Court will hear a dispute between the Trump administration and a watchdog group over public access to records of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which played a key role in the mass firings of federal workers and cancellation of billions of dollars in grants and contracts in the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term.
The administration is trying to keep the group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, from obtaining the records by arguing that DOGE is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The litigation concerns whether CREW should be able to obtain information, or discovery, to make its case that DOGE, formally known as the U.S. DOGE Service or USDS, falls under the federal sunshine law.
Lower courts have sided with CREW, with United States District Court for the District of Columbia Circuit Judge Christopher Cooper finding that USDS is “likely an agency subject to FOIA.” But the Supreme Court issued a preliminary ruling in the administration’s favor when the matter came to the justices last year on their emergency docket. With the three liberal justices in dissent, the court held that a lower court order allowing CREW to obtain discovery from USDS was too broad.
The new case will allow the high court to provide a more lasting resolution.
DOGE was the brainchild of billionaire Elon Musk, who once promised he could find $1 trillion in budget cuts in the Trump administration’s first year. Trump signed an executive order creating DOGE on the first day of his second presidential term in January 2025.
CREW requested records about DOGE a few days later, then filed a federal lawsuit when USDS said it would not comply.
The main dispute between CREW and the administration is over whether the agency wields independent authority or is merely a board that exists to advise the president.
FOIA states plainly that it applies to the Executive Office of the President, but subsequent court decisions have narrowed the applicability of FOIA to exempt entities within the Executive Office that exist solely to advise and assist the president.
In the Justice Department’s petition to the court, Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote that USDS does not exercise independent authority. “The President has directed USDS to coordinate with agency DOGE teams on the President’s efficiency goals, but those teams operate under each agency’s authority, not USDS,” Sauer wrote.
CREW offered a starkly different assessment in its response urging the Court to stay out of the case. “USDS tore through the federal government, terminating billions of dollars in contracts and programs, shuttering agencies, and firing tens of thousands of public servants,” according to CREW’s brief. The lead author of the brief is Nathaniel Zelinsky of the non-partisan Washington Litigation Group, which is representing CREW in the case.
CREW narrowed what it was asking for and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit approved, but Sauer said neither got the Supreme Court’s message.
The appellate panel “has continued to approve intrusive discovery against a presidential advisory body without adequate consideration for the separation of powers, the FOIA statute, and this Court’s previous order,” Sauer wrote.
For its part, CREW argued that the administration was seeking a broad ruling that would frustrate the aims of the federal open-records law.
“The government’s proposed rule is impossible to square with statutory text, and it would be ripe for abuse. Indeed, it would allow the executive to establish hugely consequential entities like USDS, while sidestepping an important sunshine law, simply by placing those entities in EOP and obscuring the precise nature of their delegated authority,” lawyers for CREW said.
The administration relies heavily on the 2004 Supreme Court decision in Cheney v. US. District Court, which concerned efforts by watchdog groups to obtain records of an energy task force that was chaired by then-Vice President Dick Cheney.
The justices put the brakes on lower court rulings allowing discovery, saying in a 7-2 ruling that there was a “paramount necessity of protecting the executive branch from vexatious litigation.”
CREW argued that the current case is vastly different from Cheney, noting that the sitting vice president was part of the task force and that no similarly high-ranking official is involved in USDS.
The administration also objects to CREW’s desire to depose USDS Administrator Amy Gleason. Sauer wrote that allowing CREW’s lawyers to question Gleason under oath would intrude “into the autonomy and confidentiality of presidential advisors.”
But CREW responded that it is seeking Gleason’s testimony because the administration submitted her declaration in support of its argument that USDS is only an advisory body. “Only Gleason can testify about the personal knowledge underlying her assertions,” CREW’s lawyers said.
A decision in the case is expected by late June.
Mark Sherman is a regular contributor to Constitution Daily. Sherman covered the Supreme Court for the Associated Press for 20 years, and he has previously written about the Justice Department, health care, and national politics.
Editor’s Note: Blog posts written by contributors reflect the analysis and opinions of the authors, and do not represent the opinions or positions of the National Constitution Center.
Earlier this month, Acting Secretary of the Army Adam R. Telle signed an order scheduling the execution of Nidal Hasan, a former Army major who was convicted of killing 13 people in a 2009 shooting at Fort Hood, Texas. Two days later, self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth made a startling announcement. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” Hegseth told the conservative Real America’s Voice News network, as the interviewer raised his eyebrows. The Department of War’s official “Rapid Response” Twitter account promptly promoted the clip.
Hegseth’s plan apparently won’t come to fruition. Amid outcry about the barbarity and optics of streaming the planned execution by firing squad — scheduled for December 3 at Fort Hood — President Donald Trump on Thursday called off the broadcast. “I think streaming the execution for all to see might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan but, many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device,” Trump posted on his social media website.
Some news outlets, such as The New York Times, framed the planned killing as an aberration, claiming that “such a broadcast has little precedent, and releasing video of executions is most often associated with extremist militant groups like the Islamic State.” This narrative, however, overlooks a forgotten American cultural history in which filmed executions turned government killings into spectacle.
The practice of filming executions in America is effectively as old as cinema itself.
In 1897, a few years after the first motion pictures began to be exhibited in the United States, a Missouri farmhand named William Carr was convicted of murdering his daughter and sentenced to death by hanging. Filmmaker Frederick Guth, of the American Phonographic Company, who had previously recorded an interview with Carr in prison, opted to film the execution as well — marking a grim milestone as history’s first filmed execution. The resulting motion picture, “The Hanging of William Carr” (1897), was first exhibited in Kansas City and St. Louis, then screened around the country.
The following year saw the nationwide premiere of “An Execution by Hanging,” otherwise known as “Execution of Negro at County Jail, Jacksonville, Fla” (1898). It showed the hanging of Edward Heinson, who was convicted and sentenced to death for criminal assault of a 14-year-old white girl. Illustrating racist views that have long shaped the American criminal legal system and the death penalty, the catalog of the film’s production company, American Mutoscope and Biograph, teased the film as depicting “a very ghastly, but very interesting subject.”
As these early films were distributed across the nation, they were met with interest and outcry. The journal Phonoscope at the time described the filming of Carr’s execution as “revolting,” while the Cleveland Leader cautioned that the film may have “brutalizing effects” on viewers. Some newspapers even claimed that during the hanging of Carr, Guth had hired people to storm the gallows to create added pandemonium.
Soon, the burgeoning cinema industry came to adopt a different practice for the growing number of films about executions. Filmmakers started blending reality with fiction, by combining clips recorded at actual execution locations with fictionalized reenactments of the killings themselves.
For instance, after Thomas Edison’s Edison Studios failed to gain permission from the authorities to film the actual execution by electrocution of President William McKinley’s assassin, filmmakers combined exterior location shots on the day of the killing with footage of a mannequin to depict the actual death in “Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison” (1901).
Edison was no stranger to the format: He had previously produced numerous historical execution reenactments like “The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots” (1895) and “The Execution of Joan of Arc” (1895). His studio also dabbled in zoosadistic entertainment, with films showcasing actual animal deaths, such as “Electrocuting an Elephant” (1903), which presented an elephant named Topsy being put to death for killing a spectator who had burnt her trunk with a cigar.
In 1905, American Mutoscope reused the title of its earlier film, “An Execution by Hanging,” this time depicting a reenactment of the hanging of Mary Rogers, who was convicted of killing her husband (alternate title “Execution of a Murderess”). Along with what were apparently genuine location shots, American Mutoscope incorporated reenactments of the moment of death. The film was released as part of a trilogy, including “Reading the Death Sentence” and “Reprieve from the Scaffold,” with the third installment presenting an alternate fictional ending in which Rogers was not killed.
Other films around the turn of the century used a similar technique to conflate reality and fiction, with film catalogs accentuating the lurid nature of these pictures. The description of “Beheading a Chinese Prisoner” (1900) in the Lubin production company catalog reads: “The executioner displays the head to the spectators to serve as a warning for evil doers. Very exciting.” Lubin had also earlier produced another execution reenactment, “Execution of the Spanish Spy” (1898).
Many films focused on executions carried out by mobs rather than the government. There was “Edison’s Lynching Scene,” also known as “Lynching of a Horse-Thief” and more coyly as “A Frontier Scene” (1898), as well as “Lynching Scene: A Genuine Lynching Scene,” also known as “Lynching Scene at Paris, Texas” (1897) from the International Film Company, and “A Lynching at Cripple Creek,” otherwise known as “Tracked by Bloodhounds” (1904).
The motion picture camera, of course, wasn’t the only new technology at that time shifting the public’s perception of execution. When William Kemmler was killed in the first electric chair execution in New York in 1890, the American media heralded a “new era in capital punishment.” Witnessing the new death technology, even in reenactment form, would prove to be a fascination for filmgoers over the years.
“Death in the Electric Chair at Sing Sing” (1902), the final installment in American Mutoscope’s five-part “A Career of Crime” series, is described in the company’s 1902 catalog as “an accurate and thrilling representation of an electric execution at Sing Sing.”
As the novelty of new execution methods wore off, their cinematic popularity likewise began to taper, though film promoters occasionally used the electric chair as a prop outside the cinema to attract moviegoers in the 1930s. At the same time, as the practice of public hangings faded in the U.S. and executions moved indoors, authorities began restricting access to death chambers to select groups of family members, victims’ relations, official personnel, and chosen media. It’s a practice that continues to this day, preventing actual recordings of executions from reaching the public.
With the advent of grindhouse exploitation cinema in the 1970s and the home video boom of the 1980s, however, the American entertainment industry once again found a way to court audiences by depicting executions.
Taking up the mantle of films that blended real footage and reenacted execution scenes were movies like “The Electric Chair” (1976), whose theatrical promotional materials prominently featured the titular chair and touted that “scenes in this picture were filmed in an actual death house. What you will see is real.” The infamous shockumentary “Faces of Death” (1978), whose marketing material similarly emphasized its staged electrocution scene, enticed viewers to “experience the graphic reality of DEATH, close-up.”
In the bloody wake of “Faces of Death” came a seemingly endless parade of straight-to-video death compilations, spanning from the late 1970s to the mid-2010s, which made death something to be consumed in private in the home, versus as theatrical spectacle. The films, which spliced together clips of executions with other atrocities, have titles such as “Dying: Last Seconds of Life” (1988) and “Executions 2001” (2001).
“Death Watch,” a typical entry in the genre released on VHS in the late ’90s or early ’00s, adequately summed up its genre: “unedited first-hand footage of death, vivisection, autopsy, cremations, suicides, tortures, decapitations, state and governmental executions, animal ingestion of humans, as well as human limb extraction.” Its cover featured an electric chair, echoing the posters promoting films such as “The Electric Chair” (1976) and “Death in the Electric Chair at Sing Sing” (1902).
When Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging on December 30, 2006, a security guard used his cellphone to record the execution. The phone video was promptly released on DVD in the U.S. under the title “Sad Damn! Who’s Sane?” Though still listed on online retailers like Amazon, the DVD is now long out of print, much like turn-of-the-century execution films.
The proposal to livestream Hasan’s firing squad execution would have, in some ways, marked a significant change in course. The killing would have been the first known execution to be recorded and disseminated by the government itself, rather than a film studio. Critics lambasted Hegseth’s plan as violent propaganda that could invite similar brutality against American prisoners abroad. Trump himself reportedly expressed hesitation about the imagery, fearing footage of the U.S. military killing Hasan, who uses a wheelchair after injuries during the Fort Hood shooting, might result in him being celebrated as a martyr.
Prosecutors say Adan Manzano was victim of Danette Colbert’s operation targeting New Orleans tourists
A woman involved in a New Orleans criminal enterprise that targeted tourists and led to the death of a reporter has been resentenced to life.
On Wednesday, a Jefferson Parish judge resentenced 49-year old Danette Colbert to life in prison plus 75 years under Louisiana’s habitual offender law. In September, Colbert was sentenced to a total of 60 years in prison, 50 years for racketeering and a consecutive 10 years for negligent homicide in the death of Adan Manzano, a journalist for the Spanish-language news outlet Telemundo Kansas City.
Jane Does allege ex-congressman and two others coordinated ‘payments, drugs and travel’ for sexual acts
The Republican former congressman Matt Gaetz has been accused of participating in the sex trafficking of two young women in a civil lawsuit filed on Thursday in district court in Florida.
The allegations, which Gaetz denied in a statement to the Guardian, are the latest developments in a long-running sexual abuse scandal involving the politician who resigned from Congress in November 2024.
Soldier who killed 13 people in 2009 will still be executed, but president said ‘people would rather not watch him die’
Donald Trump has shelved a widely condemned plan to livestream the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, who was convicted of killing 13 people at a military base at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009.
In a social media post on Thursday, Trump argued that broadcasting such an execution “might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan” but said that “many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device”.
High-performance, software-defined NFS reduces infrastructure requirements for demanding cloud, AI, HPC, and enterprise workloads
HELSINKI, Oct. 15, 2026 — Tuxera, a global leader in quality-assured data storage management and networking software, has announced the upcoming launch of Tuxera Fusion NFS, a high-performance NFS server that enables storage vendors, systems integrators and cloud providers to add enterprise-grade NFS to their offerings without developing and maintaining the technology internally. This helps organizations bring new services to market faster while gaining more performance and capacity from their existing infrastructure. Fusion NFS will be available from Nov. 16, 2026.
As AI, high-performance computing (HPC), and other data-intensive workloads place growing pressure on storage infrastructure, businesses need to support increasing demand without constantly adding hardware. Developing enterprise NFS capabilities internally can require significant time and specialist engineering resources, while proprietary storage platforms can restrict infrastructure choice and increase costs.
Fusion NFS provides a software-defined foundation that can be integrated into new or existing storage and cloud offerings. It allows vendors and operators to respond more quickly to customer requirements and focus their engineering resources on differentiating their own products and services.
In Tuxera benchmark testing, Fusion NFS achieved throughput of 22.7 GB/s using a single 200 GbE network port. It delivered twice the throughput of NFS-Ganesha and outperformed Linux NFSD, enabling organizations to support more customers and demanding workloads without an equivalent increase in hardware.
This increased efficiency can help reduce or delay investment in additional servers while lowering associated power, cooling, networking and management costs. It also offers an alternative to costly hardware replacement, allowing organisations to modernise file services through software and gain greater performance from infrastructure they already own.
“Fusion NFS gives storage and cloud providers a faster route to market without forcing them to compromise on performance, reliability or scalability,” said Ned Pyle, CTO Enterprise Storage at Tuxera. “Instead of spending years developing and maintaining NFS capabilities internally, they can focus on differentiating their own services while making better use of existing infrastructure.”
Fusion NFS joins Fusion SMB as part of the award-winning Tuxera Fusion platform. When both protocols are used, multi-protocol locks, handles and permissions are automatically enabled, helping organizations provide consistent, secure access to the same data across NFS and SMB environments.
Fusion NFS provides the reliability and availability required for business-critical workloads. It supports NFSv4.1, RDMA, user-mode operation and scale-out high availability. It can be deployed across clusters, containers, cloud infrastructure, virtual machines and single servers, giving organizations the flexibility to use their preferred hardware and architecture. Continuous availability, transparent failover and rolling upgrades help maintain access to critical data as services are scaled, maintained and updated.
Fusion NFS is commercially licensed and backed by dedicated support and regular product development from Tuxera’s engineering team, providing the accountability required for enterprise and service-provider environments. It is designed for AI, HPC, and other data-intensive applications across research, life sciences, engineering, energy, and other sectors where performance, availability, and rapid access to large datasets are business-critical.
Tuxera Fusion is an enterprise-grade file sharing platform for Linux-based storage, delivering high-performance SMB access for AI/HPC, media, and cloud workloads. Purpose-built to replace open-source limitations at scale, with NFS support being added in Q4 2026 along with multi-protocol support – vital in Enterprise. With nearly 20 years of engineering heritage, Tuxera is the data layer that physical AI is built on, from edge to data center.
Oct. 15, 2026 — By working together on complex scientific questions and developing new research projects, Forschungszentrum Jülich and the Japanese research institute RIKEN are expanding their partnership in a bilateral cooperation agreement. Both institutions aim to strategically combine the expertise of their outstanding researchers with their state-of-the-art research infrastructures. The agreement, which was signed in Jan. 2026, was celebrated by both organizations on Oct. 9 at the RIKEN site in Wako. The official event took place as part of a Helmholtz Association delegation’s visit to Japan.
Dr. Makoto Gonokami, President, RIKEN, and Prof. Markus Diesmann, Director of IAS-6, Group Leader Computational Neurophysics, Forschungszentrum Jülich.
Nowadays, reliable international research partnerships are more important than ever. Many scientific questions are too complex for a single institution or country to answer on its own. For this reason, Jülich and RIKEN are building long-term partnerships and fostering open exchange across national borders. Having worked together for many years, they are now fusing complementary strengths to collaboratively develop novel scientific approaches.
“We are motivated by shared scientific questions: How do we decipher the complex interactions within large neural networks? How can we gain an even deeper understanding of the properties of materials? And how can we use these insights to lay the groundwork for the information technologies of tomorrow?” says Astrid Lambrecht, Chair of the Board of Directors of Forschungszentrum Jülich. “With this agreement, we are bringing our research teams even closer together, with the aim of pushing scientific boundaries, advancing common research questions, and turning the resulting insights into groundbreaking research projects.”
As one of Japan’s leading research organizations, RIKEN encompasses a network of research centres and institutes. The agreement enables Jülich and RIKEN to move their collaboration beyond the confines of single research teams. They will develop new joint projects and also create new opportunities for the next generation of researchers. The collaboration spans a wide range of fields, from high-performance computing and quantum computing through neuroscience to transmission electron microscopy and neutron research.
With JUPITER in Jülich and Fugaku at RIKEN, both institutions have two of the world’s most powerful supercomputers at their disposal. With many years of experience, their researchers leverage high-performance computing and advanced computational methods to solve complex scientific problems.
Additional synergies arise from linking supercomputers with quantum computers. Through its JUNIQ user infrastructure, Jülich connects different quantum systems with its supercomputing infrastructure. With projects such as JHPC-quantum, RIKEN is developing software to enable the two computing technologies to work together.
Oct. 15, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is now accepting applications for the Summer 2027 term of the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) program and the Community College Internships (CCI) program. Mentored by scientists, engineers, and technical professionals, interns will acquire new skills through hands-on learning, be exposed to science and technology careers, and expand their professional networks to advance their educational and career goals.
The interns will have the opportunity to work with a team of experts to solve real-world problems and contribute to science and innovation that support the DOE mission, including new frontiers in the Genesis Mission, quantum information sciences, fusion science and engineering, space sciences, biotechnology, nuclear energy and technology, critical minerals and materials, advanced manufacturing, and cybersecurity.
SULI is open to full-time students attending four-year institutions and community colleges and to recent graduates within two years of receiving their bachelor’s or associate degree. CCI is for community college students including those who are enrolled part-time. Both programs are stipend-based and offered three times annually in Fall, Spring, and Summer. Participants residing outside the commuting area are offered domestic round-trip travel to and from the host Lab and financial assistance with lodging. The application deadline for both programs is Jan. 6, 2027, at 5:00 p.m. EST. A number of workshops, an alumni panel, an online internship fair, and technical support will be available to applicants throughout the process.
Workshop Details
Several workshops are planned to provide strategies for submitting a compliant application and opportunities to learn about the internship experience from CCI and SULI alumni.
Workshops will introduce the programs and application processes and offer live alumni panel discussions, which will showcase the project opportunities and internship experiences of students who have taken part in the programs.
Nov. 4, 2026, SULI Application Assistance Workshop: Registration information here.
Nov. 5, 2026, CCI Application Assistance Workshop: Registration information here.
Dec. 8, 2026, SULI Panel Workshop: Registration information here.
Dec. 11, 2026, CCI Panel Workshop: Registration information here.
Summer Internship Fair
In addition to the workshops, prospective applicants are invited to engage with representatives from the DOE National Laboratories at a virtual Summer Internship Fair scheduled for November 12, 2026, from 1:00–5:00 pm EST. During the fair, WDTS staff, as well as researchers from the National Laboratories, will be online and available via chat. Registration information here.
Office Hours
The program office invites applicants and letter-of-recommendation writers to attend office hours to receive answers to administrative questions, such as those pertaining to uploading transcripts, submitting letters of recommendation, and general inquiries. For upcoming dates, please visit:
Office hours for CCI: Registration information here.
Office hours for SULI: Registration information here.
The programs offer unique opportunities to gain a glimpse into discovery science research that is at the cutting edge of national priorities. Learn more about the internship experience through the many Lab Stories shared by previous participants.
SULI and CCI are managed by the Office of Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists (WDTS) in the Office of Science. More information can be found at https://science.osti.gov/wdts.
We’d like to hear about whether you feel like the US is in a recession and what you think signals such a downturn
Nearly two-thirds of Americans think the US is experiencing a recession, according to a new Harris Poll conducted for the Guardian. By the typical definition of a recession – when a country’s economic growth is in the negative for two consecutive quarters – the US is not experiencing one. Still, Americans are facing higher prices and a stagnant job market, which for many feels like a downturn.
We want to hear from Americans: do you feel like the US is experiencing a recession? What is your so-called personal “recession indicator”, or a signal in your everyday life that points to an incoming economic slump? It could be seen in your job or at your local grocery store, something you notice at your children’s school or out in your community. Tell us about it below.
From chat-up lines to social coaching, we’d like to hear from people who use AI to assist them navigating the online dating world
We’d like to understand more about the different ways that people are using AI to assist with online dating.
Perhaps you have used an AI assistant to help with chat-up lines? Or you may have turned to one for some social coaching? However you have used AI for online dating, we’d like to hear all about it. What worked and what didn’t?
CBS California Investigates accompanied a group of women traveling from San Diego to Lipo Tijuana VIP, a medical spa that attracts patients from across the United States.
Home secretary says she will block all Eritreans from UK unless a returns deal is agreed for rejected asylum seekers and criminals
Shabana Mahmood has been accused of launching a “perfunctory political gimmick” by the Eritrean government in a row over the return of rejected asylum seekers and criminals.
After the home secretary threatened to block all Eritreans from entering the UK unless a returns deal was agreed, the country’s embassy claimed the UK had failed to engage in “meaningful and appropriate” dialogue.
Rewritten indictment accuses ex-Venezuela president and wife Cilia Flores of leading campaign of torture
Nicolás Maduro insisted on Thursday during an appearance in a New York court that torture allegations in a rewritten drug trafficking indictment against the deposed Venezuelan president and his wife were “false accusations”.
Maduro, shackled at the ankles, was brought to court to face the new charges accusing the couple of leading a state-sponsored campaign of repression that tortured scores of victims, including three Americans.
International delegates agree leap second no longer tenable, but first leap hour not likely to happen for thousands of years
After decades of discussion, quibbling and worrying about clocks in computer systems, the world’s official timekeepers have voted to replace what many viewed as a tiresome correction: the leap second. It’s time, they say, for the leap hour.
Delegates from 69 countries cast their votes on Thursday at a conference in France of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, which ensures the world sticks to the same standards of time, weight, distance and more.
After agents with Homeland Security Investigations, a division of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, raided the Washington, D.C., home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., on Monday morning, officials who spoke to The Intercept raised questions about whether the raid was political in nature.
Though the investigation into Omar has reportedly been ongoing for years, an ICE official working in immigration enforcement suggested the timing of the raid raised questions.
“She’s always been a thorn in the side of the Trump administration,” said the ICE official, who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to protect their livelihood. “This has to be politically motivated.”
The raid is the latest of what several officials inside ICE told The Intercept were a series of moves — policy changes, sweeping initiatives, and, in Omar’s case, a specific operation — that reflect a scramble to help lift Republicans’ dimming prospects in November’s midterm elections.
In the last month, ICE has undertaken steps like requiring vehicle stop training, announcing surges into sanctuary cities, and freezing then quickly unfreezing non-criminal deportations — what one official called a “midterm panic move.”
According to analysts, these politically charged moves are rapidly degrading the reputation of law enforcement agencies among many Americans.
“Throughout the Trump administration, we have seen them use law enforcement for overtly political purposes, often directly targeting blue states or blue politicians for their actions” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a policy analyst and senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. “This is something that has really been a significant challenge for the reputation of law enforcement, because we have seen so many issues along these lines where there are allegations of these overtly political actions.”
Reporting had linked the raid on Omar’s home immigration paperwork — she arrived in the U.S. as a refugee in 1995 and naturalized five years later — but a second ICE official familiar with the matter questioned that explanation.
“There is something more than that, there have to be other charges for the substantiation of the warrant because a judge wouldn’t sign something beyond statute of limitations,” said the official, who is with Homeland Security Investigations, the arm of ICE that carried out the raid, who also spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity.
An article in the New York Post suggested the investigation might be related to an effort by Omar in 2019, just after she arrived in Congress, to correct her birth year in a Minnesota state legislature library.
The statute of limitations for crimes related to citizenship, according to a Justice Department website, is 10 years. Civil denaturalization proceedings do not have a statute of limitations, but must meet certain conditions, according to Reichlin-Melnick.
“In order to subject someone to civil denaturalization,” Reichlin-Melnick said, “the government has must prove either that the person committed fraud or that they were ineligible for naturalization in the first place.”
“A Waste of Time”
According to accounts from inside ICE, the moves, allegedly motivated by the midterms, are creating chaos and confusion inside the agency — and fostering resentment among employees.
“We are highly trained agents who should be working child exploitation and trafficking cases, instead we are being used as pawns in our administration’s games,” said the Homeland Security Investigations official, touching on a shift away from the ICE branch’s traditional areas of focus. “I think everything happening with the agency right now is related to the midterms and to stoke divisive fires.”
“We are highly trained agents who should be working child exploitation and trafficking cases, instead we are being used as pawns.”
Politically motivated operations started ramping up inside Homeland Security Investigations after federal agents were ordered to pursue a criminal voter fraud probe across nine states in early September, according to the first ICE official.
“The voter fraud initiative was just inefficient and ridiculous,” the official said. “Knocking on doors to question people about voting before you even have evidence to present to them is a non-starter.”
The official added, “Directing your entire workforce to do that for weeks instead of real criminal investigations is a waste of time.”
“It Backfired”
With the midterms themselves approaching, fresh controversies engulfed ICE, prompting the administration to react with a string of messy policy changes and public announcements.
As the voter fraud investigations were underway, public backlash erupted after immigration officers from ICE’s other division, Enforcement and Removal Operations, or ERO, shot and wounded a 28-year-old Venezuelan man during a traffic stop in Austin, Texas, on September 20.
Days later, on the weekend of September 25, ICE leadership quietly issued internal orders for a major change that would overhaul nationwide immigration enforcement. The orders directed all deportation officers to stop arresting undocumented immigrants without criminal histories. After news of the orders broke in the right-wing Daily Wire, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, denied the story.
Despite the denial, ICE officials operating across the country told The Intercept that the orders were legitimate and stayed in place for nearly a week.
“We reverted back to Biden-era enforcement,” said one official with Enforcement and Removal Operations, who was ordered to stop all arrest of non-criminal immigrants, including those who had standing deportation orders from immigration judges. “The DHS denied it but the orders stayed in place for 4-5 days and we followed them.”
Another deportation officer, who also asked for anonymity, described the orders as a “midterm panic move” in response to the ICE shooting in Austin.
“Our FODS” — field office directors — “told us through our team group chats and word-of-mouth to keep it out of the press, it was never in writing. I think leadership wanted to dial things back after the Austin shooting, but the orders got leaked and it backfired.”
On the same day as the leak and denial, the Department of Homeland Security seemed to take a harder public line by announcing a “nationwide public safety surge in sanctuary cities” targeting “criminal illegal aliens.”
Vehicle Stops “Shit Show”
On October 1, a week after the stand-down order, the Washington Examiner reported on another leaked DHS guidance that announced the formally amended ICE’s vehicle stops policy.
The Department of Homeland Security issued another direct denial, downplaying the significance of the guidance, which took aim at keeping unexperienced personnel from engaging with vehicles.
“Wrong, this is nothing new. This memo makes no changes to how ICE conducts vehicle stops,” the department said. “ALL officers have always received vehicle stop training.”
“The footage looks like a carjacking.”
In 2025, the DHS cut training time requirements for ICE’s academy by approximately 40 percent, including cuts to driving and firearms training. The cuts came ahead of a hiring spree that added about 12,000 people to ICE’s ranks to meet the Trump administration’s deportation goals.
The recent amendments to ICE’s vehicle stops policy marks the third time this summer that department and ICE leadership ordered Enforcement and Removal Operations officials to change how they engage with vehicles. Previously, ICE halted and then amended its policy after immigration officers shot and killed two men during traffic stops in Texas and Maine in July. These orders were also challenged by official government social media channels.
“There’s clearly a disconnect between leadership on the ground level and what’s coming out of Washington” said one official. “It’s a total shitshow.”
Then, on Thursday, October 8, plainclothes ICE officers opened fire on a vehicle during a targeted enforcement operation in New York City. At least seven rounds were fired into the car, according to reports. The driver, a 28-year-old Dominican man, was struck in the neck as his 5-year-old son sat in the backseat.
“The footage looks like a carjacking, they fucked up again,” said another Homeland Security Investigations official after reviewing video of the incident. “ERO was never given the freedom to work like they have in the past 2 years. They were always much more restrictive with their general enforcement.”
“Now comes these free-for-all mandates, and these guys who weren’t used to ‘enforcement’ and dealing with the public who were thrust into this world. Couple that with no tactical training — disaster.”
The University of Chicago announced Wednesday morning that it has identified a person of interest in a sexual assault at a fraternity house this past weekend.
Leader of CREC church – whose pastors have advocated death penalty – says he ‘prefers public executions to private’
Donald Trump announced on Thursday he was cancelling Pete Hegseth’s recently announced plans to livestream a military execution – because “many very good and well-meaning people would rather not watch him die”. But there were some fans of Hegseth’s now-scotched idea: the rightwing religious figures who have long backed his career.
Hegseth announced last week that the US public would be able to see the execution of Nidal Hasan, which is set for 3 December at Fort Hood, Texas. Hasan, a former army major and psychiatrist, killed 13 people and wounded 32 at Fort Hood in 2009. A military court sentenced him to death in August 2013.
President Trump has formally invoked executive privilege to shield certain records from a Democratic congresswoman who sits on the Kennedy Center board.
Venues across Birmingham As Britain’s longest-running live art festival returns, get ready for late-night artist dinners, a show in a swimming pool and Faye Driscoll’s incredible rotating disintegration
The phrase “two things can be true” is a frequent refrain in popular psychology and it’s also a frequent response, I find, to witnessing the farther reaches of live art. Hmm, is this performance confusingly self-indulgent or utterly profound? Sometimes it can be both. In fact, it’s not just two things that can be true, it’s as many things as there are people in the audience, since this is all about the live subjective experience, in the moment; presence and connection.
Launched in 1998, Fierce is Britain’s longest-running live art festival. For one week it takes over Birmingham’s conventional theatres alongside unconventional spaces, especially in ex-industrial Digbeth, which is fast becoming a creative hub. Also on the bill this year: late-night artist dinners, a show in a swimming pool, and a six-hour performance jam at a grand gothic hall that was apparently the inspiration for Cluedo.
Culture secretary’s move paves way for deeper scrutiny of deal that would create UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster
The culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, has said she is “minded to intervene” in Sky’s £1.6bn purchase of ITV, in a move that paves the way for deeper scrutiny of a deal that would create the UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster.
Sky announced over the summer that it had reached a deal to buy ITV’s broadcasting and streaming arm, representing a big shift in the ownership of Britain’s public service media.
Susan Collins, the US senator of Maine, has dismissed allegations that she traded federal contracts for campaign cash as “completely false” after it emerged the FBI examined the claims.
Asked by a reporter about an ethics complaint filed last week by a Maine attorney, the Republican – currently campaigning to retain her seat ahead of November’s US midterm elections – said the allegations were recycled from 2020 and had been rejected by the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Federal Election Commission.
Grid operator is paying huge sums to switch off windfarms in areas of excess electricity generation while turning on gas plants elsewhere
The cost of balancing Great Britain’s power grid has soared to near-record highs of almost £50m a day after windfarms were turned off because of bottlenecks in transmitting power around the country.
The grid operator paid £47.9m on Wednesday to turn windfarms off in areas with an oversupply of electricity and turn gas plants on in areas where supplies were tight.
Four MPs raise conflict of interest concerns over Samantha Jones’s past links to a big provider of ADHD assessments
A senior civil servant should play no part in ministers’ crackdown on private ADHD and autism clinics because of her recent ties to the industry, MPs have said.
Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs are demanding that Samantha Jones, permanent secretary at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), steps away from any role in plans to toughen regulation of the booming market in private neurodiversity assessments.
Foreign rivalries risk turning Somalia’s political crisis into a protracted warExpert commentthilton.drupal
Somalia’s domestic instability is being compounded by sharpened regional rivalries, paving the way for a more entrenched conflict as seen elsewhere in the Horn of Africa.
Somalia has been embroiled in a political crisis since May 2026, when the term of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was originally due to expire. Parliament passed constitutional amendments in March that extended presidential terms to five years, keeping President Hassan Sheikh in office until May 2027.
This was disputed by Somalia’s opposition alliance, a coalition of political figures including the leadership of the federal member states of Puntland in the north and Jubaland in the south, as well as the former president of South West State, Abdiaziz Laftagareen. This week, the opposition also rejected the electoral commission’s unilateral announcement that parliamentary and presidential polls would take place in April and May 2027.
The political crisis has sparked fierce clashes in Mogadishu and the city of Baidoa in South West State. The recent fighting around Baidoa, between government forces and opposition-allied fighters loyal to Laftagreen, reportedly involved thousands of fighters and the use of drones and fighter jets.
The federal government, along with its allied federal member state administrations – South West, Hirshabelle, and Galmudug – controls most major cities in southern and central Somalia, while Jubaland, in the far south, is at odds with Mogadishu. Al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda-affiliated organization, controls much of the surrounding countryside. Meanwhile, the administrations of Puntland and the self-declared Republic of Somaliland govern much of the north, with the newly created and federal government-aligned North East State squeezed in-between.
High stakes amid regional tensions
This is not Somalia’s first experience of constitutional disputes leading to armed clashes, with similar conflict occurring in 2021. But the stakes are higher this time, as the balance of power within the federal system is at stake. The opposition accuses the current federal government under President Hassan Sheikh of seeking to consolidate power in Mogadishu at the expense of the states.
The conflict in Somalia is also taking place in a region that has increasingly become the focus of escalating rivalries between foreign powers in a complex web of alliances. Two broad, fluid blocs have taken shape: Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are seen as broadly aligned with Sudan’s Armed Forces and Eritrea in the region, while the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Israel are seen as broadly aligned with Ethiopia.
In Somalia’s current political crisis, Turkey and the UAE are the two most important external actors. Turkey is seen as backing the federal government, while the UAE has relations with the opposition state administrations.
These dynamics are helping to both incentivize new alliances and deepen divisions. Given the existing domestic volatility, there is a serious compound risk of newly entrenched conflict.
Turkey and the UAE
Turkey has been engaged in Somalia for over a decade, primarily but not exclusively through the federal government in Mogadishu. Its initial involvement concentrated on humanitarian and development initiatives. It has also run a military training camp for the Somali armed forces since 2017.
Turkey has drawn closer to the Hassan Sheikh administration since 2024 after signing several strategic agreements with Mogadishu. This prompted some opposition figures to question Turkey’s neutrality in the context of the current conflict over the presidential term extension. Turkey has rejected accusations of political interference and says its position is consistent with its support for Somalia’s federal government institutions.
However, more recently, Turkish fighter jets were reportedly involved in the fighting near Baidoa. This has not been confirmed by Ankara, but would constitute a notable direct intervention against armed political opposition.
In Somalia’s current political crisis, Turkey and the UAE are the two most important external actors.
The UAE established multi-layered ties with the current federal government and some of the country’s federal member states. However, in January 2026, Somalia’s federal government annulled all its defence and security cooperation agreements with the UAE, accusing it of undermining Somalia’s national sovereignty.
This move coincided with the Saudi-Emirati rift in Yemen. Days before annulling the agreements, Somalia launched an investigation after the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen accused Abu Dhabi of facilitating the evacuation of a Yemeni separatist leader to the UAE via Berbera and Mogadishu. Somalia then signed defence agreements with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with diplomatic support from Turkey and Egypt.
The UAE has maintained direct relations with Somaliland, Puntland and Jubaland, with Emirati firms maintaining significant interests in port operations. All of these regional administrations had rejected the cancellation of the agreements by Mogadishu.
Retaining influence with the leadership in each territory is therefore critical to the UAE’s wider strategy in the Horn of Africa. But its relations with the federal states opposed to Mogadishu are contributing to further inflaming tensions.
Domestic drivers
Local actors are also increasingly looking outwards for foreign backing to shore up their domestic interests and legitimacy. To attract support, both the federal government and the opposition are making efforts to show that their domestic influence aligns with the interests of external actors.
This appeal to foreign players is driven by multiple factors. Key among them is the profound political division among Somali political actors, and the persistent failure to genuinely address these divisions. To counterbalance their local political rivals, competing domestic elites are therefore seeking to offer strategic incentives to external powers such as port investments, economic partnerships, transport corridors and military bases.
The balance of power within the federal system is at stake.
The federal government’s controversial constitutional and electoral reforms have solidified these divisions. Some federal member states and Somaliland feel threatened by Mogadishu’s consolidation of power, backed by Turkey’s reported military support and investments.
Shifting regional geopolitical dynamics are also increasing the leverage available to domestic actors in Somalia. The Houthis’ advance in Yemen has once again exposed the importance of the Bab al-Mandab Strait connecting the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, reinforcing Somalia’s strategic location. The Houthis reportedly have growing relations with al-Shabaab in Somalia.
The risks of deepening war
Somalia has been embroiled in armed conflicts for over three decades. No single entity – whether a clan, a specific administration or a regional government – has been able to dominate the rest and rule the entire country.
However, the escalation of current armed clashes between political opponents, and the involvement of more sophisticated weaponry, points to a new chapter. Local actors are increasingly seeking external support and new alliances as a counterbalance to rising threats.
For example, a minister from Laftagareen’s former South West State administration recently stated that their forces used drones in the latest Baidoa conflict and said they would accept drones from any external power. In the north, Puntland and Somaliland formed an alliance in response to the federal government establishing North East State in 2025. These dynamics risk a widening conflict fuelled by the support of foreign powers.
Furthermore, these armed conflicts provide an opportunity for terrorist organizations active in Somalia, such as al-Shabaab and ISIS-Somalia. During political crises, security operations against these groups often decline considerably, allowing them to recover and regroup. The deepening armed conflicts between the federal government and opposition groups offers these organizations an opportunity to expand their influence within a multi-layered conflict.
Given these broader stakes, it is in the interests of all external parties who have relations with the federal government and member states to pursue options for de-escalation between Somali political actors. Considering their intersection with wider regional dynamics in the Horn of Africa and Red Sea, it is also vital that de-escalation efforts are triangulated through regional institutions such as the African Union and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD).
In the short term, there is a need to facilitate dialogue that can pave the way for an inclusive political agreement on constitutional amendments, electoral issues and interim governance arrangements, with a realistic timetable until elections can be held. Without such an agreement, the risk of a wider protracted conflict will continue to rise.
Tonight’s Citizen of the Year dinner celebrates WSFS leader Rodger Levenson while highlighting Scouting’s growing role in developing young leaders, strengthening families and serving communities across Delmarva.
WILMINGTON, Del. — When Delaware business and community leaders gather Thursday evening, Oct. 15, to recognize Rodger Levenson as Scouting America’s 2026 Delaware Citizen of the Year, the occasion will be about more than honoring one of the state’s prominent business executives.
It will also be an opportunity to celebrate the return of a familiar institution to a more visible role in Delaware communities.
Scouting America is experiencing renewed interest among families seeking opportunities for their children to develop leadership skills, build friendships, explore the outdoors and learn the importance of serving others.
For Del-Mar-Va Council, the annual recognition event offers an opportunity to connect the accomplishments of today’s business and civic leaders with the development of tomorrow’s.
Levenson, chairman, president and CEO of WSFS Financial Corp., is the honoree for the Oct. 15 dinner.
The award recognizes the kind of leadership, personal responsibility and commitment to community that Scouting seeks to instill in young people.
A familiar organization finds new purpose
Scouting has been part of Delaware life for more than a century, but today’s organization looks different from the one many parents and grandparents remember.
Camping, hiking, earning merit badges and learning outdoor skills remain important. However, Scouting also introduces young people to technology, engineering, environmental conservation, career exploration and public service.
Perhaps more important, it gives children the opportunity to practice leadership rather than simply learn about it.
Scouts organize activities, solve problems, work in teams and take responsibility for projects. As they grow older, those responsibilities become more demanding, preparing them to make decisions, overcome setbacks and lead others.
And in an increasingly digital world, those face-to-face experiences are attracting renewed attention.
In an August interview with Delaware LIVE, Ray Teat, Scout executive for the Del-Mar-Va Council, said participation was recovering after the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The number of scouts, scouting units and families involved with Scouting is once again growing following a challenging time for the program coming out of COVID,” Teat said.
Tim Holly, president of the council’s executive board, said parents are increasingly recognizing the value of activities that encourage children to interact, become more independent and develop confidence.
“Parents are looking for ways to reconnect their children with other kids and with their communities,” Holly said. “They want them outside, interacting face to face, learning how to work with other people and building confidence through real experiences.”
More than a comeback — a commitment to growth
The renewed interest is supported by a deliberate effort to expand Scouting’s presence throughout the Delmarva Peninsula.
The Del-Mar-Va Council launched a Campaign for Growth covering 2024 through 2026, establishing an ambitious goal of nearly doubling youth membership by the end of 2026.
The council currently reports more than 3,500 young people participating in over 165 Scouting units, supported by approximately 1700 volunteers across 14 counties in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia. Those figures describe the scale of the program, although the council has not publicly established that its membership-doubling goal has been reached.
In April, more than 1,200 people attended the Del-Mar-Va Council Jamboree at Akridge Scout Reservation near Dover. The gathering, the council’s first jamboree since 2016, brought together Scouts from Delaware and neighboring states for outdoor activities, demonstrations and an opportunity to share the Scouting experience with the public.
It was another indication that the organization is working to reconnect with families and demonstrate how its programs fit the needs of today’s young people.
Business leadership and community service
The Citizen of the Year dinner reinforces another part of Scouting’s mission: connecting individual success with responsibility to the wider community.
By recognizing leaders such as Levenson, the organization highlights the values of leadership, integrity and service that it encourages young people to develop.
Those connections are particularly relevant to Delaware’s business community.
Employers regularly emphasize the importance of communication, teamwork, problem-solving, dependability and the ability to work with people from different backgrounds.
These are skills Scouting seeks to develop through practical experiences, often long before a young person enters college or the workforce.
Whether organizing a food drive, leading a camping trip, completing an Eagle Scout service project or helping younger Scouts learn new skills, participants are expected to contribute to something larger than themselves.
The program also depends heavily on adult volunteers, local organizations, businesses and charitable supporters who provide the resources needed to make those opportunities available.
That makes the Citizen of the Year dinner more than a recognition ceremony. It is also an opportunity to strengthen the relationship between Scouting and the community leaders whose support can help the organization reach additional families.
An investment in Delaware’s future
For a new generation of Delaware families, the appeal of Scouting may be rooted in something remarkably simple: children need opportunities to experience the real world, test their abilities and discover what they can accomplish.
Those experiences can involve an outdoor adventure, a difficult team assignment, a community service project or a first opportunity to lead a group.
They can also introduce young people to careers, interests and responsibilities they might otherwise never encounter.
Scouting’s expansion to serve both boys and girls in its core programs has opened additional opportunities, while its continued emphasis on character, citizenship and personal responsibility gives the organization a consistent mission.
For Delaware’s communities, the benefits extend beyond individual participants. Scouts help maintain public spaces, support local charities, assist community organizations and contribute thousands of volunteer hours through their activities.
The result is a youth development program that seeks to strengthen both the individuals participating and the communities they serve.
Recognizing today’s leaders, preparing tomorrow’s
Tonight’s tribute to Levenson provides a timely illustration of that connection.
Honoring an accomplished Delaware business leader is one way to celebrate the importance of service and leadership. Giving more young people the opportunity to develop those qualities is the larger mission.
With growing family interest, an expanding network of programs and an ambitious membership campaign, Scouting America is working to restore and strengthen its place in Delaware’s community life.
The uniforms, campfires and merit badges may be what people recognize.
But behind those traditions is a broader purpose: helping young people become confident, capable and responsible adults who will someday lead businesses, volunteer organizations, neighborhoods and communities.
That is the larger message behind tonight’s award dinner: Scouting America is building momentum again, and Delaware’s future leaders are the reason it matters.
To Go | Delaware Citizen of the Year
Event: Scouting America Delaware Citizen of the Year recognition dinner
When: Thursday, Oct. 15, 2026
Honoree: Rodger Levenson, chairman, president and CEO of WSFS Financial Corp.
Host: Del-Mar-Va Council, Scouting America
Regional reach: More than 3,500 youth, 165 Scouting units and 1700 volunteers
This live blog is now closed, you can read more of our European news coverage here
Just as the leaders sit down at the big table in Brussels, Romania has said that seven people are still missing after a fire on a vessel in Romanian territorial waters of the Black Sea.
Suspected Russian drones have hit several ships off Romania and neighbouring Bulgaria since last week in a spillover from the Ukraine war, AFP reported.
The much-loved central London institution, which has been threatened with closure since January 2025, secures 25-year lease without break clause with current landlords
The celebrated Prince Charles repertory cinema in London’s Leicester Square has announced that the threat of closure has been staved off by signing a new 25-year lease with its landlords.
In a post on social media titled “You Saved the PCC”, the cinema said that “after 21 months of uncertainty, we’re delighted to have secured the future of the cinema” and that they had “signed a new 25-year lease with no break clause, ensuring our projectors will keep rolling for years to come”.
This live blog is now closed, you can read more of our UK political coverage here
Labour says it’s told all of its local councils who share power with the Green Party to review their agreements after the Greens passed a “Zionism is Racism” motion at their autumn conference earlier this month.
If Green coalition partners don’t agree to condemn the policy, the Labour council groups have been instructed to terminate existing power deals.
We cannot support a partnership with a party that holds [the] position that has recently been adopted.
“Now is the time to step up pressure on Putin and step up support for Ukraine.”
“I’m working on different ways we can step up support for Ukraine, military, diplomatic, and economic, and you know, if anybody needed any reminder of that, it’s what we see coming out of Ukraine, with Putin targeting these energy systems, leaving thousands without power, as we’ve got a harsh winter approaching.
The future of Ukraine is the future of European security, and that’s that’s why it’s so crucial that Putin doesn’t prevail.”d
LONDON, Oct. 15, 2026 — ORCA Computing today launched the PT-3, the newest generation of its photonic quantum computers, and the first built to deliver commercial quantum advantage. The first system is live in the Digital Realty Innovation Lab (DRIL) in London, where it runs alongside NVIDIA accelerated computing.
AI for science, harnessing AI to transform scientific discovery, is rapidly emerging as one of the most important new categories in computing and a major industry-wide focus, yet it is held back by limited training data. According to ORCA, PT-3 works alongside GPUs to increase the expressivity of AI models (their ability to represent complex patterns and data distributions), helping them learn more from limited data and identify better, more novel candidates for new drugs and materials.
The PT-3 has allowed ORCA to generate results from a hybrid quantum-classical extension of NVIDIA Proteína, the generative model for protein design. Trained on 32 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs working with a PT-3 using 64 photons in 128 qumodes, the hybrid model showed enhanced designability over the classical baseline, improving the ratio of useful proteins by 20%, and generated novel proteins with a different mix of secondary structures.
This builds on earlier life sciences results from ORCA’s PT-2 system. Working with the Technical University of Denmark, the PT-2 produced around twice as many strong peptide binders as classical AI, validated in the wet lab. It also generated 49% more valid, unique molecules on the QM9 benchmark.
The PT-3 is also being applied to optimization problems such as smarter energy scheduling. Earlier this year, JIJ Inc. and ORCA, in collaboration with bp and the UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC), published a white paper that benchmarked hybrid approaches to the unit commitment problem. On that 25,755-variable benchmark, ORCA’s PT-3 now runs the hybrid quantum-classical workflow in about an hour, more than 12× faster than its predecessor at the same solution quality. In the white paper’s testing, the hybrid solver’s results were competitive with the industry-standard commercial optimization solver on solution quality and, with more runtime, found the best solutions of any method tested.
Richard Murray, Co-founder and CEO of ORCA Computing, said: “By integrating our photonic quantum computer with NVIDIA accelerated computing, we have taken a critical first step in the future of hybrid quantum supercomputing. The PT-3 is already delivering results in AI for science and industrial optimization, from protein design to energy scheduling. Through Digital Realty, enterprise users can now put it to work on their most challenging workloads, and customers are trialling use cases in life sciences, defense, energy and logistics. The PT-3 is built to scale: it upgrades in the field, so customers who start today keep building on the same system.”
“With the PT-3, ORCA is bringing photonic quantum computing and NVIDIA accelerated computing together in a system researchers can use to develop and test new applications,” said Sam Stanwyck, Director of Quantum Product at NVIDIA. “The value of a computing platform is in what researchers build on it. ORCA’s extension of NVIDIA’s Proteína model to generate a different range of protein structures with improved designability is a great example of what can be accomplished when these tools come together.”
“Our partnership with ORCA reflects a shared ambition to make quantum computing practical for business. Hosting the PT-3 in the DRIL gives us a real-world environment to explore how quantum can deliver value today, and it’s a significant step towards commercial quantum advantage at scale,” said Séamus Dunne, Managing Director, UK & Ireland, Digital Realty.
About ORCA Computing
ORCA Computing, headquartered in London, UK, with offices in the United States, is a leading developer and provider of full-stack photonic quantum computing systems. The company delivers an innovative approach to quantum computing, providing robust, high-performance, and data center-standard systems for machine learning, generative AI and optimization workloads. ORCA Computing has successfully delivered eleven on-premises quantum computers to leading global customers, including the UK National Quantum Computing Centre, Montana State University, and the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center.
Moscow sends swarms of drones to attack infrastructure in central Ukraine as Zelenskyy says Kyiv will restart strikes on Russian oil refineries
The White House’s unilateral effort to negotiate an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine has collapsed as Moscow sent a record swarm of drones overnight to attack infrastructure in central Ukraine and Kyiv appeared to resume strikes on Russian oil refineries despite warnings from Donald Trump.
Moscow accused Ukraine of launching a strike against a Russian oil refinery in the Ryazan region, its first since Trump abruptly declared an “energy ceasefire” that neither Russia nor Ukraine said they had agreed to.
Santiago Caputo cites election of Sagal Abdi-Wali as MP and calls UK a threat to the west in post shared by Argentina’s president
The chief adviser to Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, has cited the election of Sagal Abdi-Wali to the UK parliament as evidence of the Islamisation of Britain and further reason for Argentina to take sovereignty over the Falkland Islands.
In a post on social media, Santiago Caputo, who is reportedly taking a key role in Argentina’s strategy over the Falklands, suggested that the taking of the south Atlantic islands was necessary to prevent the “interference of an Islamic state” in the region.
Rising costs and threatened healthcare benefits are testing voters’ loyalty to Trump as Democrat Randy Villegas challenges David Valadao
Vanessa Martinez used to work two jobs to make ends meet. Now she works three.
In another era, the 26-year-old from California’s hardscrabble Central valley could have been a poster child for the American Dream, the sort of ambitious, up-by-her-bootstraps personality that politicians of both major parties like to highlight.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Uber has begun a trial of autonomous vehicles on the streets of Manchester as it looks to bring robotaxis to cities around the UK. The first self-driving cars are operating, using the technology of its partner firms Pony and Verne, with whom Uber recently launched Europe's first autonomous taxi service in the Croatian capital, Zagreb. Uber said it was "excited to take this first step toward making this technology accessible to people across the UK."
In social media posts, Verne said it had "started our autonomous vehicle testing in Manchester," while Pony said there were "plans to bring robotaxis to the city" and that testing was under way. The tests involve the company mapping the streets of the city in north-west England with a safety driver behind the wheel and no passengers. Limited passenger services started last month in London, but with a safety driver in the front seat of cars supplied by Wayve under Transport for London's licensing rules for private hire vehicles.
The next steps are unclear. Opposition from Uber drivers, their unions and the capital's politicians to the rollout of robotaxis is mounting. The GMB and ADCU unions have both said thousands of drivers jobs will be lost and have called for help for those affected. A critical report from London assembly's transport committee this week called for the government to devolve authority over autonomous taxi services. It said there was "considerable uncertainty about many of the claimed benefits of autonomous passenger vehicles", and fears over the impact on public transport and congestion, as well as safeguarding and accessibility for disabled passengers. There has been no official application to launch passenger services in Manchester so far.
An accelerating sell-off of AI-linked shares has hit global markets, as fears over rising inflation and future interest rate hikes spooked traders already wary of the heavily indebted sector.
South Korea’s benchmark Kospi 200index, which is heavily skewed towards the companies that make memory chips, fell more than 8% overnight to a six-month closing low, triggering circuit breakers that brought trading to a halt at various points.
Arrival of 4,400+ qubit Advantage2 system advances Q-Alliance’s efforts to expand quantum computing access, accelerate Italian workforce development and support commercial and academic applications
PALO ALTO, Calif. and COMO, Italy, Oct. 15, 2026 — D-Wave Quantum Inc. today announced at Digital Innovation Forum 2026 that its Advantage2 annealing quantum computer has arrived in Lombardy, Italy, for installation at Villa Saporiti in Como. Funded by Swiss Quantum Technology SA (“SQT”), the system, referred to within the Q-Alliance ecosystem as the VoltaB1, will give European researchers, universities and businesses access to powerful, production-grade annealing quantum computing technology once installed. Its arrival marks an important step in Q-Alliance’s work to turn Italy’s quantum ambitions into research capabilities, practical applications and industrial opportunity.
The VoltaB1 Advantage2 annealing quantum computer will be formally inaugurated at Q-Alliance’s “Quantum per l’Italia” event on October 16, at the historic Villa Saporiti. Held as part of the lead-up to the bicentennial of Alessandro Volta’s death, D-Wave CEO Dr. Alan Baratz will deliver remarks during the special ceremony, which includes representatives from research, industry and government. The ceremony follows D-Wave’s momentous signing of the Volta Declaration at the World Tech Conference in Milan in June 2026, which established a framework for cooperation on quantum, artificial intelligence and sovereign computing infrastructure.
“Bringing Italy’s first annealing quantum computer to Como marks a historic milestone toward making quantum computing a working capability for Italian innovation and industry,” said Dr. Baratz. “Italy has exceptional scientific talent and industrial strength. Together with SQT and Q-Alliance, we can give Italian teams the technology and hands-on experience to tackle complex problems, develop applications that can move into production, and build expertise in the country. That is how quantum infrastructure becomes industrial advantage.”
The system’s arrival follows a €10 million agreement between D-Wave and SQT to deploy an annealing quantum computer in Europe. Under the agreement, SQT acquired 50% of the system’s capacity for five years and holds an option to purchase the full system. Once operational, the Advantage2 system will be accessible through D-Wave’s Leap real-time quantum cloud service, which offers 99.9% availability and uptime.
“The arrival of the Advantage2 system in Lombardy puts physical infrastructure behind our vision for Italian quantum innovation,” said Thomas F. Darden, acting CEO, SQT. “Our investment is intended to connect researchers and businesses with advanced computing resources, support the development of useful applications and help build the expertise that will sustain Italy’s role in the quantum economy.”
Featuring more than 4,400 qubits, the Advantage2 system is D-Wave’s most advanced annealing quantum computer and has demonstrated the ability to outperform classical computing on a complex materials simulation problem that would have taken one of the world’s most powerful classical supercomputers nearly one million years and the world’s annual electricity consumption to solve. Today, some of the world’s largest organizations across aviation, manufacturing, telecommunications and health care are using the Advantage2 system to address real-world problems, spanning optimization, materials simulation and artificial intelligence.
D-Wave (NASDAQ: QBTS) is a leader in the development and delivery of quantum computing systems, software, and services. It is the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers, and the first and only to offer dual-platform quantum computing products and services, spanning both annealing and gate-model quantum computing technologies. D-Wave’s mission is to help customers realize the value of quantum today through enterprise-grade systems available on-premises and via its Leap quantum cloud service, which offers 99.9% availability and uptime. More than 100 organizations across commercial, government and research sectors trust D-Wave to address complex computational challenges using quantum computing. Learn more about realizing the value of quantum computing today and how D-Wave is shaping the quantum-driven industrial and societal advancements of tomorrow: https://www.dwavequantum.com.
Oct. 15, 2026 — The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has commissioned its newest research facility, the Translational Research Capability (TRC), a multidisciplinary center located only a few hundred yards away from the historic Graphite Reactor.
ORNL Senior Research Scientist Ben Lawrie, center, shows off a dilution refrigeration unit in one of the TRC quantum labs. The dilution refrigeration unit can reach temperatures of only four kelvin, colder than the deepest reaches of space, allowing research in a variety of quantum information science disciplines. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL.
The Graphite Reactor, a national historic landmark still standing at ORNL, was built during the Manhattan Project and was the world’s first continuously operating nuclear reactor. More than eight decades later, research in the TRC builds on a foundation created during ORNL’s earliest work.
A unique and versatile example of ORNL’s emphasis on collaboration across disciplines, the TRC incorporates a range of programs from several major research areas at the lab. Its specialized design encourages frequent researcher interaction to advance both laboratory and national priorities by exploring topics such as materials, quantum information science, energy storage, nuclear energy and national security. Many innovative TRC research programs thriving today are rooted in groundbreaking research at the Graphite Reactor.
The 100,000-square-foot TRC was custom-built for scientific exploration on the former site of the Clinton Engineer Works headquarters — the site of which later became ORNL — and is now fully operational. The lab celebrated the commissioning of the TRC this week with an open house and dedication to mark the occasion.
Specialized equipment has been installed throughout the TRC, with a host of customized features incorporated into the design of the building specifically to facilitate the science mission. TRC showcases one-of-a-kind capabilities, like the most arid dry lab in the DOE complex, enabling innovative research in energy storage. Quantum research requires incredibly delicate instrumentation, so the quantum labs have floors mechanically isolated from the building to reduce vibration while continuous aluminum shielding embedded in the walls and floors protects from electromagnetic interference.
A Powerful Past Reverberates Today
ORNL’s iconic post-WWII neutron pioneers and Nobel Prize winners, including the lab’s first research director Eugene Wigner, paved the way for the TRC. Their efforts led directly to iconic ORNL facilities like the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR), a leading international research reactor since the 1960s, and the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), the world’s most powerful accelerator-based pulsed neutron source.
“Eugene Wigner is known for the Wigner effect, resulting from neutron irradiation in graphite,” said Yutai Kato, Materials Science and Technology Division director. “This closely relates to his original vision for ORNL, where physical science and nuclear technology intersect. Historic ORNL research on molten salt corrosion, nickel alloy development and creep study connect directly to what we do today in these areas at the TRC.”
Developing Materials to Withstand Extreme Conditions
The lab’s foundations rest on the critical materials science research of the early 1940s that made the Graphite Reactor possible. Not only graphite, but aluminum, uranium, plutonium and various alloys would play key roles.
Today, TRC researchers use specialized equipment to develop and test materials for demanding energy and industrial applications. Large laboratory spaces and material-handling equipment allow researchers to process and study materials at scales difficult to accommodate in conventional laboratories.
Other specialized materials efforts that branch out from early Graphite Reactor research include the Severe Accident Test Station, where a distant cousin to the lab’s early fission-specific accident research continues. ORNL’s Accident-Tolerant Fuel Analysis evaluates advanced nuclear fuels, and Ceramic Matrix Composites research develops tougher, lighter composites for use in aerospace and energy systems.
The study of Corrosion — how materials degrade in extreme environments — and Creep — how structured materials like alloys and ceramics deform over time under extreme stress and temperatures — were foundational concerns for research when designing and building the Graphite Reactor. Both remain essential to a variety of ORNL research today, with much of that work taking place at the TRC.
From Reactor Calculation to Scientific Computing
Although mechanical computing at the Graphite Reactor during wartime was minimal, some manual modeling did occur and dealt with complex calculations.
“Science is a numbers game, and the early nuclear work required extensive calculations,” said Bill Cabage, retired ORNL science writer. “ORACLE, the lab’s first vacuum-tube- powered showpiece computer, was one of the first breakthroughs aided by computation simulation, occurring with ORNL’s ion channeling research in the early 1960s.”
In the early 1990s, ORNL reemerged as a force in scientific computing, as the value of computational simulation was increasingly appreciated. By the early 21st century, ORNL was home to several record-breaking supercomputers. Those seeds were planted by the computational needs of the early reactor-based research at the Graphite Reactor.
In contrast with the Graphite Reactor’s early days, when humans with a particular computational skillset were referred to as “computers,” computing and computational sciences have become integral to scientific research at ORNL.
From Quantum Physics to Quantum Information Science
“ORNL’s first scientific director, Eugene Wigner, received his Nobel Prize in 1963 not for nuclear engineering, which he practically invented, but for his contributions to the understanding of the role of mathematical symmetry in quantum states and particles,” said Cabage. “We have roots in quantum science here, as well.”
From the modeling of cohesion energies for molten salt droplets to superconducting qubits as a potential source for neutrino detection, physics concepts explored at the Graphite Reactor remain active today.
Quantum information science and technology spans a range of applications, including computing, sensing, materials and networking.
The requirements of quantum research were integrated into the infrastructure of TRC.
“We were involved in the justification, the design, construction progress checks and commissioning of the TRC with the goal of delivering experimental quantum capabilities in quantum networking, computing, sensing and materials that were not previously possible in the existing infrastructure,” said Nicholas Peters, head of the Quantum Information Science Section.
Initial study of quantum physics’ applicability to various technologies — such as lasers and MRIs — were focused on early attempts at manipulation and were often referred to as Quantum Technology 1.0. This approach has evolved into mastering control of quantum mechanical effects, known as Quantum Technology 2.0.
“The Graphite Reactor was an anchor for the research, development and application of Quantum 1.0 technologies that has now become historical for controlling nuclear reactions,” said Travis Humble, director of the lab’s Quantum Science Center. “By comparison, the TRC is a newly formed anchor for Quantum 2.0 technologies, acting as the footprint for our first on-premises quantum computer, the platform for our advanced quantum sensing research and the testbed for our local quantum network.”
If not a direct line, ORNL IT Project Manager Josh Cunningham sees at least a parallel line of symmetry between the lab’s new quantum computer, Pathfinder, and the Graphite Reactor.
“The Graphite Reactor gave researchers access to a novel physical system with which they could conduct experiments that had not previously been possible,” Cunningham said. “Pathfinder serves a similar role today. It puts emerging quantum-computing hardware directly into researchers’ hands, so they can determine what it can do, where it falls short, and how it might be integrated with other scientific capabilities. In that sense, TRC continues the experimental model established across the street — building unique research platforms and then using them to open entirely new areas of science.”
On an historic site closely tied to ORNL’s early history, research at the TRC is breaking new ground with cutting-edge technology designed for future-focused innovation. Like the Graphite Reactor decades in its era, the TRC is enabling new research by unlocking access to unprecedented scientific inquiries. Its links to the past remain strong, but the TRC is already building a legacy all its own.
More than 60 years since it was deactivated, the Graphite Reactor looms large across the entirety of the ORNL campus. As Humble points out, at certain times each day, the TRC lies literally in the Graphite Reactor’s shadow, prompting a question: “Is the impact from this historical icon a standard we should strive for from our modern selves?”
SNS and HFIR are DOE Office of Science user facilities.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit https://energy.gov/science.
Messages pulled from Nolan Wells' phone show what his friends said before and after the 18-year-old disappeared in early July following a boat outing with friends.
Authors withdraw book planned for young readers after disputes with editors over characterizations of 7 October
A book on Palestine for young readers was pulled at Penguin Random House just before its scheduled release, following editorial disputes between the publisher and the book’s Palestinian American authors over their account of Palestinian history.
In November 2024, Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House, signed the book deal with Alana Hadid, a philanthropist, activist and older sister of models Bella and Gigi, and Jenan Matari, an author and communications strategist. The book was promoted for release in September this year.
Official guidance says ammonia in animal urine should be watered down to stop it corroding bark
A neighbourhood in Vienna has introduced guidelines for dog walking, including the use of bottled tap water to rinse away urine and protect vulnerable trees.
Neubau, an up-and-coming, densely populated district dotted with cafes and galleries, rolled out the Schönes Gassi (nice dog walk) campaign this week.
Move comes as Senator Elizabeth Warren condemns Barclays response to questions over ex-boss’s ties to sex offender
US lawmakers have unveiled a new bill to hold Wall Street’s “Epstein-connected” bosses to account for helping finance the late sex offender’s crimes.
It came as top Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren condemned the UK bank Barclays for “dodging responsibility” over its failure to vet former boss Jes Staley and his ties to the once well-connected billionaire.
Graphical user interfaces for DOS were a dime-a-dozen back in the ’90s, but of course faded into irrelevance as time went on. But what if you still run DOS today, and want a maintained graphical shell instead of the rather limited DOS command line?
Costa is a small and lightweight application which runs on top of MS-DOS or compatible operating systems. It replaces the DOS-prompt with a clean, user-friendly interface – a so-called GUI (Graphical User Interface). Costa comes packed with a bunch of useful accessories and can be used with or without a mouse.
Developed by Jacob Palm, a Danish IT-professional and hobby developer, the first release of Costa came way back in 2004. Over the years – and through several releases – Costa has gradually evolved into what it is today, with new releases still coming out regularly as of 2025.
Costa comes bundled with a number of useful utilities, a few games, and useful features like a desktop with custom icons, virtual desktop support, a file selector, and much more. The latest release, version 1.8.0, was released in late 2024, and should run on just about any IBM PC-compatible, but a 386 is recommended. It’s been tested with a variety of DOS flavours, including FreeDOS ad DOSBox, so it should run pretty much anywhere.
Opening marks the next phase of the university’s largest corporate research partnership, with a research portfolio spanning quantum computing, networking, sensing, and security
COLLEGE PARK, Md., Oct. 15, 2026 — IonQ and the University of Cambridge have announced the opening of the first-ever university-based IonQ Quantum Innovation Centre. The Centre is located at the Ray Dolby Centre, the new home of the University’s Cavendish Laboratory. This initiative brings the University’s largest corporate research partnership from agreement to a physical home at one of the world’s leading facilities for physics research.
The IonQ Quantum Innovation Centre demonstrates the company’s commitment to quantum innovation and academic research within the United Kingdom. Research at the Centre includes co-development of new quantum network nodes and sensing capabilities with the university, and a strengthening of the existing Cambridge-to-Bristol quantum network. IonQ and the University of Cambridge first announced the partnership on March 11, 2026, supporting advanced research and workforce development for quantum technologies.
“The opening of the IonQ Quantum Innovation Centre turns a landmark agreement into a working home for quantum research inside one of the world’s most storied physics laboratories,” said Niccolo de Masi, Chairman and CEO of IonQ. “By bringing quantum computing, networking, sensing, and security research together at Cambridge, we are accelerating the timeline between academic discovery and commercial quantum advantage. This is a long-term commitment to the United Kingdom, built for researchers, start-ups, and industry alike.”
The Centre’s nine inaugural research projects will bring together Cambridge researchers and IonQ specialists to advance quantum hardware and explore new applications across science and industry. Selected by a Joint Steering Committee comprising business and scientific leaders from both organizations, the projects combine Cambridge’s research expertise with IonQ’s capabilities in trapped-ion quantum computing, quantum networking, and device engineering.
Experimental projects address key capabilities for building larger quantum systems. One will develop microscopic mirrors designed to collect light from trapped ions more efficiently, laying the groundwork for optical connections between quantum processors.
Computational projects will investigate how quantum algorithms can solve difficult problems in chemistry, materials science, finance, engineering, and medicine. Highlighted research within this group will construct investment portfolios that maximize expected returns at a given level of risk, model how engineering structures respond to forces, and investigate biological networks to identify potential targets for cancer therapies.
The program draws on Cambridge’s Departments of Physics, Engineering, and Computer Science and Technology, the Milner Therapeutics Institute, and Cambridge Judge Business School. Across the projects, students and postdoctoral researchers will gain experience connecting fundamental research with technology development and applications, helping train the next generation of leaders in quantum science and engineering.
“The official launch of the IonQ Quantum Innovation Centre is an exciting milestone in our partnership with IonQ, which will help Cambridge and the UK stay at the forefront of the quantum revolution,” said Professor Mete Atatüre, Head of the Cavendish Laboratory. “The announcement of the first round of the funded research projects celebrates the depth and breadth of expertise and talent at Cambridge, and will accelerate our impact in quantum science and engineering.”
IonQ will deploy a Superion 256-qubit quantum computer and an entanglement-distribution quantum network at the University. This quantum technology will support related work involving quantum memory chips and frequency-conversion technologies, as well as provide access to IonQ quantum computers through the IonQ cloud. The on-campus IonQ quantum network will consist of two Quantum Networking Data Centres and three Quantum Networking Nodes. As part of the collaboration, Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, will provide access and computing time for the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) over three years.
“The Centre combines Cambridge’s research strength with IonQ’s networking, sensing, and security capabilities. It transforms into a facility where new quantum network nodes, sensing techniques, and the intellectual property behind them are developed side by side,” said Jordan Shapiro, President, Quantum Platform at IonQ. “That work feeds directly into our platform roadmap, and it gives researchers, partners, and customers a stronger foundation to build on.”
The partnership supports new academic positions, postdoctoral fellows, and PhD students at Cambridge, and aligns with the UK National Quantum Strategy. The Centre also deepens IonQ’s presence in the United Kingdom.
About IonQ
IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ) is the world’s leading quantum platform and foundry – delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. IonQ’s newest generation of quantum computers, the Superion, is the latest in a line of cutting-edge systems. Earlier systems have helped customers and partners including Amazon Web Services, AstraZeneca, and NVIDIA achieve a 20x performance increase over previous quantum solutions and accelerate innovation in drug discovery, materials science, financial modeling, logistics, cybersecurity, and defense. In 2025, the company achieved 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity, setting a world record in quantum computing performance.
Headquartered in College Park, Maryland, IonQ has operations across North America, Latin America, EMEA, and APAC. Our quantum computing services have been available through all major cloud providers since 2021, while we also meet the needs of networking and sensing customers across land, sea, air, and space. IonQ is making quantum platforms more accessible and impactful than ever before. Learn more at IonQ.com.
Ubuntu 26.10 brings significant progress for security, and strengthens the platform with the full adoption of Rust-based coreutils, post-quantum-ready package signing, and expanded TPM-backed full-disk encryption support. Enterprise authentication gains deeper integration with Microsoft Entra ID, including password and multi-factor authentication. Linux kernel 7.3 extends support for the latest hardware, alongside new RISC-V desktop images and optimized amd64v3 installation images.
Of course, it comes with the latest version of GNOME, and the whole family of Ubuntu variants focusing on other desktops have also been updated. While I doubt many people here run Ubuntu, it’s still quite popular, and serves as the base for countless other distributions.
As enterprises and governments scale their use of quantum computing, Pasqal’s information security management system is independently certified against the internationally recognized standard
PARIS, Oct. 15, 2026 — Pasqal, a global leader in neutral-atom quantum computing, today announced that its Information Security Management System (ISMS) has achieved ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification, the internationally recognized standard for information security, cybersecurity and privacy protection. The certification provides customers, particularly in regulated industries, with independent assurance that Pasqal systematically identifies, assesses, and manages information security risks across its certified activities, as they transition quantum computing from pilots to production.
As quantum computing expands into increasingly sensitive and business-critical applications, from financial risk modeling to energy systems and advanced materials research, organizations expect their technology partners to demonstrate effective risk management and compliance, with internationally recognized security standards.
“In quantum computing, trust is not a feature you add once the technology works. It has to be built in from the first qubit,” said Wasiq Bokhari, CEO of Pasqal. “Our customers are preparing to run some of their most sensitive workloads on quantum computers. That is why we have built information security into the way we design, develop, produce and support our solutions, and this certification recognizes that work.”
Certified by SGS under COFRAC accreditation after an independent audit, Pasqal’s Information Security Management System (ISMS) covers activities related to the design, development, industrialization, deployment, maintenance and support of quantum computing solutions and associated services across its sites in France, Canada and Saudi Arabia. This scope includes hardware R&D, QPU production, software development, product management, sales, procurement, operations and corporate functions, including legal and intellectual property.
About Pasqal
Pasqal (Nasdaq: PSQL) helps organizations tackle problems that are difficult or impossible to solve with conventional computing methods alone. Founded in 2019 on Nobel Prize–winning research, Pasqal builds and operates neutral-atom quantum computers, delivered with a full software stack, for industry, science, and governments. Pasqal’s production-ready systems are available both on-premises and through the cloud, enabling organizations to harness quantum computing without requiring in-house quantum expertise. A single hardware platform supports analog workloads today and is designed to evolve toward fault-tolerant quantum computing in the future.
Headquartered in France with operations globally, Pasqal’s quantum computing systems are used by customers across energy, financial services and advanced materials to address complex challenges. Pasqal’s customers include Saudi Aramco, Crédit Agricole CIB, LG Electronics and supported by partnerships with NVIDIA and IBM (Pasqal is part of the IBM Quantum Network).
Oct. 15, 2026 — A long-standing collaboration with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego has helped provide the computing expertise for the search for high-energy neutrinos from space, work recognized this week with the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The NSF IceCube Neutrino Observatory. Credit: Martin Wolf, NSF IceCube
Francis Halzen, the University of Wisconsin–Madison physicist whose vision and leadership helped establish the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, was awarded the prize on October 6 “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.” The recognition also marks a moment of celebration for SDSC – a division of the at the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing – which has partnered with IceCube for more than a decade to advance the computing infrastructure supporting its science
“IceCube’s discoveries depend not only on the detector at the South Pole, but also on our ability to simulate and interpret what it observes,” Halzen said. “For more than a decade, our partnership with SDSC has brought computing expertise and resources to that challenge, helping us turn observations of elusive particles into new insights about the universe.”
At the South Pole, IceCube uses light sensors embedded in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice to detect the rare interactions of neutrinos, which are elusive particles that usually pass through matter unnoticed. Halzen first presented his vision for the observatory in 1988. Completed in 2011, IceCube subsequently detected high-energy neutrinos originating beyond our solar system, helping establish a new field of astronomy. Those observations showed that neutrinos could serve as cosmic messengers, offering scientists a new way to study some of the universe’s most energetic and distant phenomena.
“Neutrinos are special in that high-energy light is absorbed before it reaches Earth, but neutrinos can travel across the universe largely undisturbed,” explained SDSC Director Frank Würthwein, who holds faculty appointments at UC San Diego in the Physics Department and the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute. “A wide range of the most extreme events in the universe can thus be only studied with either neutrinos or gravitational waves.”
Behind that scientific work is a substantial computing challenge. SDSC and IceCube have collaborated on the cyberinfrastructure needed to run large-scale simulations and bring distributed computing resources together for research.
One particularly ambitious demonstration took place on Nov. 16, 2019, when SDSC and the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center ran an approximately two-hour experiment using some 51,500 graphics processing units, or GPUs, across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform Supported by a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) EAGER grant, the collaboration brought together resources across 28 cloud regions in North America, Europe and Asia to run IceCube simulations.
The “cloudburst” showed how researchers could temporarily assemble computing capacity on an extraordinary scale rather than rely on a single facility. Using HTCondor software, the team integrated the cloud GPUs into one resource pool, allowing IceCube researchers in Wisconsin to conduct simulations to a globally distributed system coordinated through SDSC. The experiment was executed by SDSC scientific software developer Igor Sfiligoi and IceCube production software manager David Schultz.
Explained Wurthwein: “We demonstrated how close collaboration between scientists and computing specialists could expand the resources available for computationally intensive research workloads.”
That partnership extends beyond a single experiment. IceCube’s scientific computing needs have helped inform SDSC’s approach to systems including Expanse, Prototype National Research Platform (PNRP) and Cosmos, connecting infrastructure development with the practical demands of discovery.
As Halzen receives physics’ highest honor, SDSC celebrates both his scientific leadership and the sustained collaboration that helps IceCube researchers pursue new questions about the universe.
Read more about Halzen’s award on the NSF News site.
Discovery of grenades prompted a neighborhood lockdown and a visit from the Austin police department’s bomb squad
A buyer at a Texas estate sale discovered several second world war-era grenades in a box of newly bought items, prompting a neighbourhood lockdown and a visit from the Austin police department’s bomb squad.
The grenades, which were described as “live and active” in a social media post by the Austin police association, were removed and disarmed.
Talarico casts himself as a moderate who would put Texans’ needs over party allegiances amid close contest against Republican Ken Paxton
James Talarico, the Texas Democratic nominee for Senate, sat face to face with skeptical Republicans and independents voters who grilled him on a slew of contentious issues including Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, abortion and foreign aid, during a CNN town hall co-hosted by the Jubilee Media digital platform on Wednesday.
One voter, a young Republican activist who volunteered at the party’s midterm convention in Dallas last month and recently appeared on Fox News as a supporter of Talarico’s opponent, questioned the authenticity of Talarico’s faith, referencing a past remark where he described God as nonbinary.
The Department’s amended award will support GlobalFoundries’ $5 billion investment at its existing facilities in Malta, New York, and Burlington, Vermont
WASHINGTON, Oct. 15, 2026 — The Department of Commerce’s CHIPS Program Office has agreed with GlobalFoundries to amend its existing award and reallocate up to $955 million in incentives under the CHIPS and Science Act.
The amendment will increase the portion of an existing CHIPS Program award allocated to GlobalFoundries’ modernization and expansion of its semiconductor manufacturing facilities in Malta, NY and Burlington, VT. As part of the amendment, GlobalFoundries has agreed to expand its capital investment in these facilities to $5 billion. The total amount of the existing CHIPS Program award will not be increased.
The investment will expand domestic manufacturing capacity for technologies increasingly critical to communications infrastructure and data centers, including silicon photonics, silicon-germanium and the first U.S.-based source of silicon interposers supporting advanced packaging technologies.
“GlobalFoundries is expanding its investment to develop and manufacture critical semiconductor technologies enabling data center and high-performance compute infrastructure,” said Bill Frauenhofer, Executive Director for Semiconductor Innovation and Investment at the Department of Commerce. “The CHIPS Program award supports GlobalFoundries efforts to onshore and accelerate the development of these important semiconductor components.”
GlobalFoundries is a leading manufacturer of essential semiconductors, enabling technologies from the cloud to the physical world. Through deep partnerships with customers, GlobalFoundries delivers differentiated, power efficient, and high-performance solutions for automotive, aerospace and defense, data center, smart mobile devices, internet of things and other high growth markets.
Citizen Lab, a digital investigations research unit at the University of Toronto, said it believed dozens of devices at the Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera had been compromised by spyware delivered through ads run by Discover-Tech, which describes itself as a specialised digital advertising agency.
Palatine, IL — An Illinois teenager has been arrested after prosecutors say he planned a mass shooting targeting a Hindu temple in the Aurora area and circulated a racist manifesto describing his intent to kill as many people as possible.
Alexandros Paporakis, 19, faces felony charges including making a terrorist threat and unlawful possession of weapons. Authorities arrested him Sunday as he left his home after coworkers reported disturbing messages and an eight-page document allegedly titled “Why I fought: A.K.A. (Aurora Shooter’s Manifesto).”
Prosecutors say the document contained racist and antisemitic language targeting Indian, Jewish and Black people and described the author as a white supremacist and neo-Nazi who frequently fantasized about mass murder.
Police said a search of Paporakis’ home uncovered an unserialized AR-style rifle, loaded magazines, ammunition, Nazi-related items and a gas canister marked with an anti-South Asian slur.
Investigators believe the alleged attack was intended for Sunday after Paporakis reportedly told coworkers the day would be “special.” Authorities have not publicly identified the specific temple they believe was targeted.
India’s government condemned the alleged plot and called for a thorough investigation and stronger protections against hate-motivated violence.
A judge ordered Paporakis held in custody pending trial. He is scheduled to return to court Oct. 30.
It’s indisputable that the political polarization of our time has reduced (and confused) the influence of economic conditions on US elections.
In September of 2024, in the waning weeks of the Joe Biden presidency, 65% of Republicans believed the US economy was getting worse. About six months later, as Donald Trump launched a trade war on the rest of the world with his “liberation day” tariffs, the share of Republican pessimists had dropped to 33%.
John Healey has promised to use his first budget in a fortnight’s time to offer consumers and businesses a “breathing space” while sticking to Labour’s fiscal rules.
Speaking to journalists in Bangkok, where he has been attending the International Monetary Fund annual meetings, the chancellor said he was conscious of rising costs.
President Zelenskyy accused Donald Trump of taking Russia’s side after access to the vital system was throttled. Plus, a happy ending for a dog that was missing for a month
Good morning. Ukraine’s president has said he feels “betrayed” by Donald Trump over a throttling of Starlink access. Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused the US president of picking the other side after more than four years of war, risking a breakdown in US-Ukraine relations.
Ukraine’s military reported that the communications system, produced by Elon Musk’s SpaceX but managed by the US government, was no longer working on terminals moving at speeds greater than 100mph. That effectively rendered most of the drones used by Ukraine to strike behind the frontlines inoperable and affected the country’s best air defence system to stop Russian jet-powered attack drones bombing Kyiv.
What is the likely impact of the loss of Starlink? The Ukrainian human rights activist Oleksandra Matviichuk said: “Without that protection, Russian drones will strike residential buildings, hospitals and schools like targets in a shooting gallery.” However, Starlink is not required for long-range Ukrainian missions that target Russian oil refineries, which Trump has been concerned because of their impact on world energy prices.
How is Israel blocking Trump’s plans for Gaza? Israel is refusing to allow a key project for Donald Trump’s Board of Peace to proceed. In early August, it issued its first construction contract, for a military outpost to host 150 international troops as a vanguard of an international stabilization force. Two months later, Israel has still not allowed the contract to move forward.
The DUP has disowned its former leader and condemned his crimes but faced a backlash from supporters amid allegations the party turned a blind eye to other misbehaviour by Donaldson, including drunkenness and sexual harassment.
The jury in the four-week trial found that his wife, Eleanor, aided and abetted her husband’s offending. The 60-year-old was deemed unfit to stand trial on mental health grounds and faced a trial of the facts, which tests evidence but does not result in a criminal conviction.
Exclusive: Aleksandar Vučić personally intervened to push plans for controversial $500m Trump Tower in Belgrade, which sparked protests and a criminal case
Serbia’s authoritarian ruler personally intervened to advance an allegedly illegal scheme to hand over a protected site in Belgrade for a Trump tower, the Guardian can reveal.
Aleksandar Vučić summoned officials to a meeting at his presidential offices about the project, which has culminated in a landmark indictment of senior figures from his regime on charges of abuse of public office.
This story was reported and produced by Injustice Watch, a nonprofit newsroom in Chicago that investigates issues of equity and justice in the court system. Sign up here to get their weekly newsletter.
After being detained for five days in an airport hotel, a mother filed suit against a longtime Immigration and Customs Enforcement contractor on behalf of herself and her now 23-month-old son, alleging false imprisonment among other counts.
The lawsuit was filed on September 29, more than a year after an investigation by Injustice Watch and The Intercept revealed MVM Inc. had confined Valentina Galvis, an asylum-seeker from Colombia, and her then seven-month-old infant, a U.S. citizen, in a room at the Sonesta Chicago O’Hare Airport Rosemont last summer. In that reporting, Galvis had described her captivity in stark terms, detailing how she and her son were locked in a room with no way to communicate with the outside world and no idea when, if ever, they would be set free.
Galvis is seeking monetary damages for the alleged harm and injury she and her child suffered as a result of the detention following their arrest by ICE at a Chicago immigration court in June 2025. Galvis named the Sonesta International Hotels Corporation and affiliated companies that own and operate the hotel as defendants in the complaint.
The lawsuit also named five Sonesta and two MVM executives and employees. It identifies JoAnna Granado as the MVM employee who transported Galvis and her son from the hotel to a federal office in Chicago on the day they were released, drawing on the original reporting in which Granado confirmed she was involved in the family’s detention.
Granado and other individuals named in the suit couldn’t be reached for comment. MVM didn’t respond to questions about the lawsuit. During the original investigation, Sonesta said that it “does not condone illegal behavior of any kind” at its hotels. The company declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The suit accused both the ICE contractor and the hotel of detaining Galvis and her child for profit, and alleged the companies engaged in a civil conspiracy by working together to use the hotel room as a detention cell.
“MVM, a federal contractor, physically seized, transported, and confined Ms. Galvis and her infant son,” the suit claimed. “Sonesta knowingly provided and maintained the hotel room used as a makeshift detention cell, profiting from the arrangement while a mother and her infant were locked inside.”
The suit seeks more than $50,000 in compensatory damages, plus punitive damages, and demands a jury trial.
In the complaint, Galvis alleged that her detention at MVM’s hands caused her and her baby a range of physical, emotional, and caregiving harm. Her son had just recently started transitioning to solid foods before the pair were seized by ICE; the suit alleged the infant was provided only scraps of food that were nutritionally inadequate for his age. Meanwhile, confinement-induced stress caused Galvis to decrease her breastmilk production at a time when her son needed it most.
Her baby suffered sleep disturbance and a worsening skin condition, the lawsuit claimed. While MVM had given Galvis an adequate change of clothing, the garments provided for her baby didn’t fit him. Because no laundry service was available, Galvis “washed [the infant’s] clothing in the bathroom sink multiple times,” she stated in an affidavit filed with the court, hanging “the wet clothes near the bed where the air conditioning would dry them quickly.” The infant wore only diapers while his clothes were being washed, and left the hotel on a Tuesday wearing the same outfit he’d worn since he and Galvis were detained by ICE the previous Thursday, according to the affidavit.
In court documents, Galvis alleged MVM confined her and her infant to a room near O’Hare International Airport. Galvis said she was sometimes told she would be taken to a Texas detention center and, on one occasion, that she would be deported to Colombia. She was released by MVM after a federal judge ordered that Galvis and her baby couldn’t be removed from Illinois.
The Sonesta Chicago O’Hare Airport Rosemont where Galvis and her son were detained for five days in 2025. Photo: Sebastián Hidalgo for Injustice Watch
The practice of using hotel rooms as makeshift detention sites has drawn little media attention; far more scrutiny has centered on conditions inside the growing network of ICE detention centers around the country. An inspector general’s report published last month found that ICE had failed to manage its detention space contracts. When asked about it at a September 30 press conference, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin defended facility conditions, saying detention centers meet and often exceed federal standards — and that comfort isn’t the department’s priority.
While ICE agents don’t generally place people in hotels, the agency contracts with MVM to transport immigrant children and families; the contractor sometimes places them in hotel rooms across the U.S. Since fiscal year 2020, MVM has received more than $1.3 billion in ICE contracts, much of it for transporting families.
The lawsuit doesn’t name the federal government as a defendant.
William G. McLean III, who represents Galvis and her baby, underscored the companies’ role in their confinement. “The corporate defendants in this case unlawfully imprisoned and permanently traumatized my clients,” he said, “over five terrifying days after the Department of Homeland Security illegally arrested them.”
Galvis remains at risk of deportation — a final decision on her asylum claim is still pending in immigration court. She’s currently in therapy after an evaluation determined she’s experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from the detention.
“I isolate myself to avoid anything that reminds me of what happened. I stay home and I do not go outside unless I really need to,” she said in an affidavit.
“Even now, when I go out, I get very nervous, and I feel terror.”
Bank of America hired 1,000 outside contractors to help patch software vulnerabilities exposed by advanced AI models, including Anthropic's Mythos. The effort added hundreds of millions of dollars in third-quarter expenses. CNBC reports: In an interview after the bank's third-quarter earnings release, [CEO Brian Moynihan] said that earlier this year the company rushed to bolster a wide spectrum of its internal and vendor code using thousands of employees and outside personnel. "That risk is real risk, and that's why when the frontier-type models came out. ... A lot of us sat down and said, 'How do we figure out how to get through this quickly?'" Moynihan told CNBC's Leslie Picker.
"We put on 1,000 contractors to help us do the patching work in the second quarter, and those people remain here today, helping us, on top of the 3,000 people we have in that area," he said. The bank spent a "couple hundred million plus" on the software remediation and regulatory issues related to anti-money laundering compliance in the third quarter, Moynihan told analysts earlier Wednesday.
When it comes to food, Caroline Bauldree does not like to “deprive” herself of anything. She does not like to cook either, so that means a lot of food deliveries. “If I want sushi, I’m getting sushi,” said the 24-year-old nanny, who lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. “I’m definitely lazy in that regard.”
Bauldree got into the habit of near-daily DoorDashing back in college. “I could order whatever food from whatever restaurant and it showed up at my door – that’s the dream,” she said. “But then I just feel like crap about myself because I’m like, ‘wow, I’m a lazy piece of shit.’ Nine times out of 10, I feel bad about myself.”
Family express concerns about William Chapman’s contact with mental health services before his death
A man who was killed by a tiger at a South Yorkshire zoo had bouts of psychosis, his family told an inquest opening, as they expressed concerns about his contact with mental health services before his death.
Exclusive: Trump has falsely claimed Afrikaners are facing ‘white genocide’, but very few have applied to live in US
The US government could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a media campaign in South Africa to figure out why more white Afrikaners are not applying to become refugees to the US, as Donald Trump had hoped.
State department officials, according to an August proposal seen by the Guardian, outlined a roughly $335,000 research and advertising effort after applications to the refugee program “trended lower than expected” since Afrikaners were allowed to apply directly online in November 2025. The document, written by the US mission in South Africa with a department research unit for the embassy in Pretoria, admits officials know little about why.
Claims that James Talarico suffered a mental health crisis spread across rightwing media, offering a warning about disinformation ahead of the US midterm election
Where is James Talarico? The question ricocheted around rightwing echo chambers before metastasising into a conspiracy theory – and a reminder of the persistent danger of disinformation in the US midterm elections.
The smear campaign began when Talarico, the Democratic candidate for the US Senate in Texas, was not seen in public for nine days. His campaign was slow to explain why. While nature abhors a vacuum, Donald Trump and social media seize on one and weaponise it.
While presidents of both parties have long rewarded donors and allies with plum ambassadorships, Trump has chosen loyalists willing to go to bat for him regardless of the implications for US-foreign relationships.
Emily Scherer for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Source images: The Texas Tribune and documents obtained by ProPublica.
Last month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott repeated a claim he’s made for the past five years. He stated that the number of people crossing the Texas-Mexico border illegally “posed an ongoing and imminent threat” across the state. In doing so, he renewed a border security disaster proclamation that has greatly expanded his powers without going through the state Legislature.
Abbott’s declaration stands in sharp contrast to the numbers reported by the Trump administration, which says the drop in the flow of migrants crossing the border has been unprecedented and has reached historic lows since it took over in January 2025.
Yet, since Abbott first declared an emergency at the border during the Biden administration in 2021, he’s renewed or amended the proclamation at least 69 times — 21 of those during Trump’s tenure.
The Republican governor, who is running for his fourth term next month, has consolidated power like no Texas governor before him, building on his predecessors’ efforts to strengthen what by design is supposed to be a “weak governor” state as the constitution limits what can be done without legislative approval, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have reported. One of the methods he’s used to do that is issuing executive orders and disaster declarations that allow him to shift funds, suspend regulations and award no-bid contracts at times of emergency.
Since January 2025, two of the top agencies involved with border enforcement — the Department of Public Safety and the Texas Military Department — have awarded more than $5 million in noncompetitive contracts citing the emergency for items like a Ford F-150, rifles and apartments, state records show.
“I think it’s unprecedented,” said Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “I don’t think that there is a similar example, certainly not as to the length of the emergency, and certainly not after the emergency has seemed to pass.”
Abbott’s office did not respond to specific questions for this story, including about the noncompetitive contracts, but Deputy Press Secretary Madeline Waschak said in a written statement that the governor has been clear that border security is an ongoing priority.
“The damage caused by four years of failed border policies under Democrat rule did not disappear overnight, and the progress we have made will not sustain itself without continued vigilance,” she wrote.
“Securing the border requires constant, deliberate action to combat illegal crossings, cartel smuggling, fentanyl trafficking, and other criminal activity that threatens public safety in Texas. Governor Abbott will ensure the tools remain in place to safeguard our state as we work alongside the Trump Administration to deter, arrest, detain, and deport illegal immigrants,” she added.
At the time of Abbott’s first border declaration, four months into President Joe Biden’s term, Border Patrol was making more than 180,000 apprehensions along the southwest border in a single month. According to Abbott, the federal government’s inability or unwillingness to enforce immigration laws had created a humanitarian crisis in many communities in Texas.
“The Biden Administration’s open-border policies have enabled escalating violence from the cartels, dramatically increased the risk of human trafficking, and created a severe crisis of illegal drugs crossing into the United States,” the order stated.
Since then, apprehensions along the southwest border have dropped on average to about 8,000 a month this year.
The border security declaration remains Abbott’s longest continuously running emergency proclamation. Abbott similarly renewed his 2020 COVID-19 disaster declaration for three years, even as he downplayed the severity of the pandemic.
“This is the quiet power of the governor,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston. “It’s not something often that they brag about because the more that it becomes a political issue, the more that there might be some contestation of it.”
Other than border security, the governor’s second longest-running emergency declaration is related to droughts. He declared a state disaster in July 2022 and within days amended it bringing the total of counties to 189. He’s continued to renew it, but now it applies to about a third of the counties originally identified.
State lawmakers have repeatedly tried — and failed — to curb the governor’s powers under the state’s disaster act. Last year, legislators from both parties filed at least a handful of measures that would mandate Abbott get approval from the Legislature if he wanted to extend a disaster declaration, but none passed.
Abbott’s emergency declarations have been accompanied by record spending on border security efforts. Texas budgeted over $11 billion during the Biden administration and allotted an additional $3 billion last year, after Trump took office.
It’s all part of Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, an initiative he launched in March 2021 contending it was needed to stem the smuggling of drugs and people into the country through Texas. Because of the emergency declaration, police could charge immigrants with criminal trespassing for crossing the border through private property, and the governor was able to shift money from other agencies to fund the operation and build border barriers, deploy the National Guard and get help from other states.
Much of the funding for Operation Lone Star is funneled through the Texas Military Department and DPS, two of the agencies responsible for major enforcement efforts. But the governor’s share of border spending has also ballooned since Abbott took office over a decade ago. State lawmakers allotted his office nearly $230 million last year to distribute through grants, largely to local prosecutors and government agencies helping the state with Operation Lone Star.
Though the situation on the ground has changed, one aspect of the emergency declaration has remained constant: the ability of state agencies to award noncompetitive contracts.
DPS and the Texas Military Department have awarded at least six noncompetitive contracts so far during the second Trump administration for work related to the operation where they cite an emergency. This includes a more than $2 million contract to Texas-based CTC Gunworks LLC for rifles and pistols for active-duty personnel. CTC Gunworks officials could not be reached for comment.
Officials with the Texas Military Department referred questions about its procurement process to the governor’s office. A DPS spokesperson said in a written statement that even though the disaster declaration allows for expedited purchases, the department still follows best practices and “aims to select vendors offering the best value, determined by cost, quality, and ability to meet the specific disaster response requirements.”
Regarding the specific contracts, the DPS spokesperson said they were purchases tied to existing state contracts.
The continued funding and expansion of Operation Lone Star has come even as it’s been plagued with problems. In 2022, an investigation by ProPublica, the Tribune and The Marshall Project found that the state’s reported success included arrests unrelated to the border or immigration and counted drug seizures made by troopers from across the state who were not directly assigned to the operation. The Tribune and Army Times also exposed poor working conditions, pay delays and suicides among National Guard members deployed as part of Operation Lone Star.
During a Tribune-hosted event this week with state lawmakers from El Paso, Democratic state Rep. Mary González, vice chair of the Appropriations Committee, said state legislators have already started to scale back when it comes to border funding and there’s interest from both sides of the aisle to continue to do so in the upcoming legislative session.
“I think that the problem is that some of that border security money still lies in the governor’s office which has no checks and balances and because we are still under an emergency — which is not an emergency anymore — an emergency border security statement which he can just use that money, you have seen some questionable appropriations under the veil of border security,” she said.
Abbott, however, has repeatedly said that Texas’ work in securing the border is not over.
“We must secure the border not just for the next two years of the Trump administration, but we gotta do it forever,” Abbott said at a press conference in early October where he discussed the federal government’s $7.5 billion reimbursement for border security expenses the state had incurred.
Rottinghaus said that Texas will always have to confront border crossings and drug trafficking, but the existence of those problems don’t always justify an emergency declaration.
“Even someone who strongly supports the governor’s board of policies might ask whether they want a future governor of the opposite party using the same interpretation of emergency authority for years,” Rottinghaus said, adding that the issue is that “governors, once they get a power, are hesitant to give it back.”
An ad targeting Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Chris Pappas resurrects a line of attack from six years ago, when the New Hampshire congressman was running for his second term.
The ad from the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC supporting Republican candidate John E. Sununu, cites a 2020 debate exchange between Pappas and his Republican opponent, Matt Mowers.
In the Oct 21, 2020, debate hosted by PolitiFact partner WMUR-TV, Mowers challenged Pappas — New Hampshire’s first openly LGBTQ+ member of Congress — over his relationship with Vann Bentley. Mowers said the relationship with Bentley, then a former Amazon lobbyist, could have tainted several of Pappas’ votes on legislation that Amazon supported or opposed.
“You’ve been dating a corporate lobbyist, who actually was lobbying on behalf of Amazon at a time when you then went on to cast 10 separate votes on Amazon’s behalf, on bills they lobbied you on,” Mowers said.
Pappas responded, “That’s not true, Matt.”
This year’s Senate Leadership Fund ad, launched Oct. 1, revives the exchange, with a narrator summarizing it by saying: “Pappas lied about dating an Amazon lobbyist, then voted on bills Amazon lobbied on.”
The ad’s claim is misleading.
Mowers acknowledged after the debate that he had no evidence that Pappas did anything illegal, unethical or in violation of House rules.
Did Pappas ‘lie’ about dating an Amazon lobbyist?
The Pappas campaign told PolitiFact that he and Bentley began dating in spring 2019. The campaign pointed to an Instagram post of the couple from Nov. 27, 2019.
The debate included back-and-forth accusations and responses — it’s not a clear case of Pappas denying the relationship.
Mowers: “With all due respect, you’ve been dating a corporate lobbyist, who actually was lobbying on behalf of Amazon at a time when you then went on to cast 10 separate votes on Amazon’s behalf. On bills they lobbied you on.”
Pappas: “That’s not true Matt. Matt, that’s not true.”
Mowers: “Yes it is, Congressman. It absolutely is.”
Pappas accused Mowers of taking money from pharmaceutical companies before Mowers dug back in on Pappas’ relationship with Bentley.
Mowers: “You’re dating a corporate lobbyist, which by the way, you know, the fact of the matter is, he never disclosed it. You never disclosed it to the people of New Hampshire.”
Pappas: “That’s not true. Matt, come on.”
Mowers: “And in fact there’s actually rules and regulations. You have to disclose that, especially gifts from lobbyists, to the House ethics committee. Something you’ve never done. So this is an opportunity for you to come out and speak the truth.”
Pappas: “Matt, that’s just not true. … This is an outrageous charge.”
According to our search of the internet and the Nexis news database, there were no news articles about the relationship until the day after the 2020 debate, when the New Hampshire Union-Leader reported that Pappas’ campaign “confirmed that he is dating an ex-lobbyist.”
Did Pappas vote on Amazon-related bills while Bentley was lobbying for the company?
There was overlap when Bentley was lobbying for Amazon and Pappas was voting on bills that Amazon wanted passed. The Senate Leadership Fund portrays Pappas’ relationship as the only factor behind his votes, but that omits the broader context of the bills they point to.
Here’s the relevant career and relationship timeline: In September 2014, Bentley joined Amazon as a legal policy intern, and in May 2015, he was promoted to policy counsel. On Jan. 3, 2019, Pappas was sworn in for his first congressional term. In the spring of 2019, according to the campaign, they started dating. In November 2019, Bentley left Amazon. They married in 2023.
The Senate Leadership Fund cited seven bills Pappas voted on when Bentley was lobbying for Amazon. In some cases, Amazon wanted provisions beneficial to the company, such as federal contracts or limits on technology regulation; in other cases, the company supported broader policies such as anti-discrimination laws or higher minimum wage. Amazon lobbied on each bill.
Feb. 14, 2019: Pappas voted for an omnibus spending bill to avoid a government shutdown. The measure passed, 300-128, with 87 Republicans joining 213 Democrats in favor.
May 17, 2019: Pappas voted for the Equality Act to prohibit discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. The measure passed, 236-173, with eight Republicans joining 228 Democrats.
June 19, 2019: Pappas voted for the Labor and Health and Human Services appropriations bill. The measure passed, 226-203, with no Republicans joining 226 Democrats in favor.
July 10, 2019: Pappas voted for the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act, which changed the rules for employment-based visas, including increases in the annual numbers. The measure passed, 365-65 with 140 Republicans joining 224 Democrats in favor.
July 12, 2019: Pappas voted for the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. The measure passed, 220-197, with no Republicans joining 220 Democrats in favor.
July 17, 2019: Pappas voted for a three-year intelligence reauthorization bill. The measure passed, 397-31, with 171 Republicans and 226 Democrats in favor.
July 18, 2019: Pappas voted for a bill to raise the federal minimum wage. It passed, 321-199, with three Republicans joining 228 Democrats in favor.
Amazon listed Bentley as a lobbyist in eachofthecompany’s four 2019 quarterly lobbying-disclosure filings. He was specifically listed as lobbying on several of the bills cited by the Senate Leadership Fund, including defense and intelligence authorization bills, the minimum wage measure and the Equality Act.
However, saying Pappas voted as he did because of Amazon’s wishes ignores important context about these bills.
Four of the bills were much larger and more impactful than Amazon’s interest in them. Two of the bills were major government funding bills, and one of them was urgent because it ended a government shutdown. Two others were major reauthorization bills for national defense and intelligence. Each of these bills had hundreds or thousands of provisions, most of which had no relevance to issues Amazon was lobbying on.
Pappas also voted with most of the Democratic caucus on all of the bills.
For at least three of the bills, Pappas’ votes aligned with his past positions or campaign promises. Pappas’ support for the Equality Act preceded his relationship with Bentley; he praised the bill by name in a 2018 WMUR debate. Pappas had also supported a minimum wage hike in a 2018 NHPR debate. And on immigration, Pappas had supported encouraging immigration and expanding the visa process.
For two bills, Pappas voted in a way contrary to Amazon’s position. The defense bill failed to secure a $10 billion cloud services contract Amazon sought from the Pentagon, while the intelligence bill included language requiring a report on the use and regulation of facial recognition technology, a market that Amazon was heavily involved in.
Stanley Brand, a longtime attorney on congressional matters who is now a distinguished fellow in law and government at Penn State Dickinson Law, said there is no explicit prohibition on voting on legislation unless congressional members have a direct financial interest. Brand said the situation with Pappas in 2019 would not have required a recusal.
Given the weak links to personal benefit to Pappas, “I wouldn’t advise anyone to recuse, which effectively leaves his constituents without a voice on the bill being considered,” Brand said.
Our ruling
The Senate Leadership Fund said Pappas “lied about dating an Amazon lobbyist, then voted on bills Amazon lobbied on.”
The relationship with Bentley may not have been widely known before a 2020 debate, but we found no evidence that Pappas lied about its existence.
Pappas cast seven votes on bills that Amazon and Bentley lobbied for. However, each vote aligned with the rest of the Democratic caucus, in three cases matched his preexisting views and twice diverged from Amazon’s position.
The statement includes an element of truth but ignores evidence that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.
Weekend Spotlight is a round-up of the five best events to check out in Delaware over the coming weekend, curated by Arts + Culture Editor Cannon Taylor. This edition covers Oct. 16-18, 2026. What should be on our radar for future editions? Let us know!
Ancient Aliens
Embrace delusion at conspiracy theory convention
Sunday, Oct. 18. Siegel JCC. 101 Garden of Eden Road, Wilmington. 10 a.m.-7 p.m. General Admission: $10.
The team behind Delaware-filmed flick “The Conspiracists” are bringing the wild-haired, frenetic fun of the History Channel with ConCon, a conspiracy theory convention ripped straight from the film.
More in the vein of “Avril Lavigne is a clone” than “9/11 was an inside job,” the event promises an escape from concerning conspiracy theories permeating politics and online echo chambers.
Practice your Bigfoot roar ahead of the contest, become a model in a tin foil hat fashion show, hear about the escapades of Delaware’s paranormal researchers and see if you can suss out which conspiracies are real or fake in a game show competition. The event culminates in a screening of “The Conspiracists” and a Q&A with the cast.
Off 24 performs at the CAMP Rehoboth Block Party 2025. The band returns for this year’s block party on Oct. 18. | PHOTO BY G. MICHAEL BEIGAY, COURTESY OF CAMP REHOBOTH
Sunday, Oct. 18. Second Block of Baltimore Ave., Rehoboth Beach. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Free.
CAMP Rehoboth’s mission to “Create A More Positive Rehoboth” must be paying off, because more than 4,000 people flocked to the coastal town last year for the LGBTQ+ nonprofit’s annual block party.
This year, the free event will feature local artisans selling goods ranging from sea glass art to body care products. Drag performers Roxy Overbrooke and Amethyst Diamond will emcee the stage. Between their antics will be musical performances from local bands and actors from Clear Space Theatre Company.
Children are welcome at the block party, which will feature activities like chalk art, carnival games and button-making.
The Milton Theatre’s annual Zombie Fest returns Oct. 17. | PHOTO COURTESY OF MILTON ZOMBIE FEST
Saturday, Oct. 17. Hudson Fields. 29763 Eagle Crest Road, Milton. 2-7 p.m. Tickets: $5 online, $10 at gate. Kids 12 and under free.
Do your limbs keep falling off when you’re taking a nap in your coffin? Do you express yourself best through ghoulish shrieks? Do you have an insatiable craving for brains? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you are the perfect participant for The Milton Theatre’s annual Zombie Fest.
The theme this year is “Undead Disco,” so dust off your bell bottoms and dancing shoes and get ready to party to live bands and DJs. If you don’t have the makeup to zombify yourself at home, artists from The Salon Professional Academy of Delaware can hook you up.
Beyond dancing, the day will feature a costume contest, circus acts like fire breathing and stilt walking and a “Pyrocalypse” fireworks show at 7 p.m.
Delaware Friends of Folk, the organization behind the 35th annual Delmarva Folk Festival, sure knows how to advertise its acts.
“This band has given the blues a fresh kick in the a**,” the organization writes about Delaware band Lower Case Blues, which will be closing out the festival this year.
The weekend will feature many more regional folk acts, a collaborative poem written over the course of the festival and a contest on Friday to determine Delaware Friends of Folk’s 20th “Folk Hero,” an ambassador of the genre. The title is currently held by Milford singer-songwriter Jean Bayou, who will host the contest.
Come to The Grand to see ‘a bad man get dragged to hell’
Opera Delaware stages “Don Giovanni” Oct. 16 and 18. | PHOTO BY JOE DEL TUFO/MOONLOOP PHOTOGRAPHY, COURTESY OF OPERA DELAWARE
Friday, Oct. 16 and Sunday, Oct. 18. The Grand Opera House. 818 N. Market St., Wilmington. Friday 7:30 p.m., Sunday 2 p.m. Tickets: $29-109.
There’s nothing more satisfying than watching a villain get his comeuppance. That’s never been more true than in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera “Don Giovanni,” which Opera Delaware will perform this weekend.
The opera follows the titular womanizer, whose body count numbers over 2,000 partners across Europe, as he repeatedly skirts the consequences of his lechery — that is, until a fateful swordfight. Afterwards, Giovanni is haunted by the statue of the man he slayed.
If you’ve never been to the opera before, there’s no better place to start than with “Don Giovanni.” As Opera Delaware puts it in one of its advertisements, it’s “kinda chic to watch a bad man get dragged to hell.”
The president is used to bullying his media targets. The quagmire that is his libel actions shows the broadcaster is working to a different script
For the greatest account of the BBC’s finest hour, one must turn to Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, Human Voices, written in 1980 and set 40 years earlier, at the corporation’s Portland Place wartime HQ. Flanked by sandbags and infused with a smell of cooking “from the deep hold that suggested more strongly than ever a cruise on the Queen Mary”, the organisation that Fitzgerald describes is at once noble and deeply eccentric. “Broadcasting House stood headed on a fixed course south,” she writes. “With the best engineers in the world, and a crew varying between the intensely respectable and barely sane, it looked ready to scorn any disaster.”
In other words, a formidable foe, one that in the spring of 1940, in the face of anticipated Nazi invasion, decided “without prompting, that truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective”. I bring this up in respect to the gathering storm of Donald Trump versus the BBC, a fight triggered by the US president’s $10bn defamation lawsuit – $10bn! It’s a wonder he didn’t go for $10 gazillion – brought against the corporation at the end of last year in response to a poorly edited episode of Panorama. The BBC was at fault, editing together comments made by the US president at a rally on 6 January 2021 to give, as the corporation’s apology put it, “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action”. But it is fighting the lawsuit.
Why Should Delaware Care? A boom in the construction of data centers to power the artificial intelligence industry has sparked a nationwide backlash over fears that the facilities’ electricity use could cause power bills to surge. New Castle County’s new ordinance is the latest attempt in Delaware to stop that from happening.
The New Castle County Council on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed its second ordinance regulating data centers — with little debate.
If signed by County Executive Marcus Henry, the new ordinance will mandate that any developer who wants to build a large energy-use facility, including data centers, first prove that there will be enough electricity and transmission infrastructure to support it.
Councilman Dave Carter, the ordinance’s sponsor, said the measure is meant to prevent large energy users from raising the electric bills for homes and businesses, which can occur when there is a massive new demand on power.
The new rule does not apply retroactively, meaning data center proposals already in the county’s approval pipeline will not be subject to it. Still, those pending plans have largely been stalled in the face of resident opposition and state regulations.
The passage of the ordinance comes after more than a year of discussion and debate in Delaware over how the fast-growing industry could impact energy costs. In response, state and local governments have passed several new rules designed to slow the industry’s growth.
A day before New Castle County adopted its new regulation, Dover approved an ordinance to impose a moratorium on data center construction.
During the New Castle County meeting Tuesday, council members posed few questions about the ordinance, marking a sharp contrast from an acrimonious debate over the first slate of data center regulations that the county passed earlier this year.
At that time, dozens of union members associated with the Delaware Building Trades filled the County Council chambers during meetings to lobby against the regulations.
No such pressure was applied on Tuesday.
“It was a lot easier to get this piece through, which tells me how much the public sentiment has changed,” Carter said in an interview.
New Castle County Councilman Dave Carter has led the council’s efforts in placing limits on data center projects. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY OLIVIA MARBLE
The first set of regulations was also more expansive. It included new rules that require data centers to maintain buffer zones around them, and to use energy-efficient backup generators, among other requirements.
The newest ordinance also is similar to a law that the state legislature passed in June. That law requires large energy users, such as data centers, to enter into energy service agreements meant to ensure they pay the full costs of the electricity they use.
If a developer can’t agree to the terms of that agreement, then a utility would not have to provide power to it, the law states.
Carter said he thinks his ordinance is necessary to make sure the county and state approval processes are aligned.
“This is a helpful tool to make sure that we are in sync,” Carter said during the Tuesday meeting.
The vast majority of Americans say they are struggling to pay for gas and groceries, and are cutting back on luxuries. But what or who is actually behind these price rises? We asked you to tell us what's gotten too expensive in your own life. Now, Kai Wright and Carter Sherman enlist Guardian columnist and former labor secretary Robert Reich to explain why you’re feeling the pinch. From breaking down the market factors behind the cost of a $16 cheesesteak, to explaining why AI is playing into the price of a Nintendo Switch 2, Reich reveals who you should point the finger at in this economy. Additional music by Epidemic Sound
Robert Reich has written this week’s edition of How We Win, a pop-up opinion newsletter with bold ideas for defeating Trumpism. Sign up here
As the midterm elections loom, Oliver Laughland and Tom Silverstone travel to rural West Virginia, a Republican party stronghold, to explore how soaring gas prices, war in the Middle East and datacenter expansion are affecting Donald Trump's popularity among his base. Although the state remains staunchly Republican, there are signs of a new politics emerging – and local Democrats are looking to capitalize on it
The studio is swapping the Mushroom Kingdom’s vivid palette for the blood-soaked grit of military action series
Where do you go after Mario? It’s a question the team at Ubisoft Paris found itself pondering three years ago after wrapping up work on the charming turn-based tactics adventure, Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, sequel to its unexpected crossover hit, Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. By melding a rather specialist genre with video gaming’s biggest household name, the developer introduced chin-stroking strategic play to a whole new audience. “Having the opportunity to work with the Mario franchise was a privilege, and it’s still something I’m very proud of,” says level designer director, Julien Vial. “I still remember seeing the first prototype and being blown away by all the possibilities.”
Now, Ubisoft Paris has returned with a new project, but this time the studio is swapping the Mushroom Kingdom’s vivid palette for the blood-soaked grit of military action series Rainbow Six. Where Mario and Rabbids saw squishy creatures bounce harmlessly across levels as Mario encased foes in honey, Rainbow Six Tactics, a turn-based tactical spin-off from Rainbow Six Siege, sees balaclava-clad insurgents take shrapnel rounds to the chest. A seamless tonal shift, then.
With the season approaching its climax, we look at the players who have perfected the art of smack talking through the years
Today, even the most casual of WNBA fans have watched some of the league’s biggest stars talking trash on the court. But while the snarling convos look heated, most of the time, they are good-natured, competitive fun.
Still, we wondered, who are the best trash talkers in the game? Which players over the years have turned talking smack into an art form? Let’s explore.
The lack of cohesion in the center of the park is evident for the US, with Emma Hayes continuing to try different combinations
The discourse around the US women’s national team may have been a harsh one if not for a fourth-half surge against Spain.
In the latest of their back-to-back bookings, where Emma Hayes’ team plays the same opponent twice, Spain looked far more confident and effective than the four-time champions. Both teams were missing a handful of crucial players; Naomi Girma and Sam Coffey headlining the US’s absentees, while Aitana Bonmatí, Mariona Caldentey and Clàudia Pina were among Spain’s.
Some 86 years ago, Missouri voters enshrined a system for selecting top judges that would remove political influence from the courts. And almost immediately, it came under attack.
Under what has come to be known as the Missouri Plan, lawyers help choose a slate of three candidates from which the governor must make an appointment for the state Supreme Court, appeals courts and, in some populous areas, the circuit courts.
In the first years after adoption, it faced pushback from party bosses who had historically used judicial seats for political patronage. They said it gave too much power to the lawyers. Voters, though, decisively defeated a repeal measure in 1942.
More recently, the conservative activist Leonard Leo, who viewed Missouri as a crucial battleground, tried in 2007 to persuade Republican Gov. Matt Blunt to reject a slate of Supreme Court candidates — part of a broader effort to weaken a judicial selection system that had become a model for some two dozen states around the country.
Blunt resisted and picked one of the three judges from the approved slate.
Then, in 2012, GOP lawmakers put a proposed overhaul before voters that, if approved, would have given the governor more control. Voters, by a 3-to-1 margin, turned back the plan.
Now the attacks are back, driven by a new grievance.
At President Donald Trump’s behest, Republican lawmakers redrew the state’s congressional map in a mid-decade gerrymander. The goal: to give the GOP a shot at winning seven of Missouri’s congressional seats, instead of the six it now holds.
But voters gathered enough signatures to force a referendum on the map and put it on hold. While Secretary of State Denny Hoskins tried to keep the referendum off the ballot, the Missouri Supreme Court overruled him. It ordered the old map restored until voters decide on the new one.
Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins walks into the state Supreme Court in September. The court found Hoskins in contempt for directing election officials to use a congressional map it had barred, but it did not punish him.Liz Rymarev/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via Getty Images
Fourteen Republican lawmakers responded by threatening to impeach “responsible members of this Court” for “willful neglect of duty, incompetency and misconduct” if the justices held Hoskins in contempt; the court did so anyway. Hoskins backed down and instructed local election officials to distribute ballots using the old map; the justices decided not to have him arrested.
The drama played out as Republicans in Missouri and elected officials nationwide have sought to weaken institutions that limit their power. In North Carolina, the Republican-dominated General Assembly stripped authority from Democratic governors. In Wisconsin, Republicans threatened to impeach a newly elected Supreme Court justice to protect gerrymandered maps. And in New York, Democrats bypassed an independent commission to pass a gerrymander that favored them, but the state’s highest court struck it down.
Rather than electing top judges, as Illinois does, or giving the governor primary responsibility for choosing them, like California, Missouri selects its appellate and Supreme Court judges through a commission made up of three lawyers, one elected by lawyers in each appellate district; three non-lawyers appointed by the governor, one from each district; and a state Supreme Court judge selected by the court. After they are appointed, judges face a retention vote at the first general election after completing one year in office, then every 12 years, with voters deciding whether they keep their positions.
In response to the controversy, a number of Missouri Republicans have attacked the system. U.S. Rep. Jason Smith called for the state to switch to electing its Supreme Court judges. Republican Party executive director Miles Ross declared on X, “The Missouri Plan is done.” Dan Seitz, chief of staff to Sen. Brad Hudson, called for replacing it with a system in which the governor could nominate judges directly, subject to Senate confirmation.
State Rep. Cathy Jo Loy, a Carthage Republican who has introduced legislation in each of the past two sessions to replace the Missouri Plan with gubernatorial appointment and Senate confirmation, said she intends to file a new proposal Dec. 1, the first day lawmakers can file bills for next year’s session. Loy said her opposition to the system predates the recent clashes with the Supreme Court. But she acknowledged that those defeats could give the proposal new momentum.
“There will probably be more appetite because there are several senators that feel the same way,” she said.
Republicans, who hold every statewide elected office, supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature and six of the state’s eight congressional seats, seem to have suddenly found the limits of their power. At the ballot box, voters have overwhelmingly rejected major pieces of the party’s agenda, including an effort to weaken their power to bypass the legislature by amending the constitution or putting laws passed by lawmakers to a statewide vote.
Time and again, when elected officials have sought to limit voters’ use of the ballot initiative, the courts have protected voters’ use of direct democracy. Courts repeatedly rewrote ballot summaries prepared by Republican state officials that they found unfair or misleading, including language describing the initiative that ultimately established abortion rights in 2024.
By the end of that year, after the Missouri Supreme Court rejected a last-minute effort by Republican lawmakers and anti-abortion activists to keep the abortion measure off the ballot, Senate President Pro Tem Cindy O’Laughlin was calling to repeal the Missouri Plan. She proposed replacing the system for selecting Supreme Court and appellate judges with a nonpartisan election. But her bill stalled in committee.
Then came Hoskins. The former state representative and senator from west-central Missouri took office as secretary of state in January 2025 and brought a more combative approach to overseeing elections and ballot measures. Hoskins made a bright-red sport coat his sartorial trademark, often posing with a wood baseball bat and speaking about politics as a series of battles and himself as a conservative warrior.
Hoskins didn’t respond to questions sent to his office. He has previously said that he disagreed with any suggestion that he and Republican leaders were defying the will of voters. He hasn’t publicly called for changing how Missouri selects Supreme Court judges, but his office’s official X social media account reposted Smith’s message calling for the end of the Missouri Plan.
Gov. Mike Kehoe also complained, saying in a post on X that “unelected judges” have shown a “lack of respect for the legislative process.” On a radio show the next day, Kehoe acknowledged that changing how judges are selected hadn’t even been on his radar before the ruling.
“But I think it’s definitely something a lot of people are going to start asking about,” he said. “And I’m not sure the judges across our state, whether Supreme Court or other judges, really wanted that on people’s radar screen.”
Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe speaks during an event in May with Vice President JD Vance in Kansas City.Eric Lee/Pool via Getty Images
Kehoe’s office said it would not respond to questions from ProPublica.
Although some Republicans have derided the state Supreme Court as being a bastion of liberal activists, five of the Supreme Court’s seven judges were appointed by Republican governors. Among them is Powell, whom the then-chair of the state GOP hailed as a “good conservative” before Republican Gov. Eric Greitens selected him in 2017.
Powell, who also serves as chair of the judicial selection commission, declined to comment for this story. In remarks on Sept. 17 to the joint annual meeting of the Missouri Bar and the Judicial Conference of Missouri, he warned of “threats from those who seek to detract from the ideals of our republic and to undermine faith in our sacred institutions — including our legal profession and our courts.”
“It is incumbent on all of us as lawyers and judges to rise up and defend our constitutions and the rule of law,” he added.
Missouri Supreme Court Chief Justice Brent Powell speaks during Secretary of State Denny Hoskins’ contempt hearing in September.Liz Rymarev/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via Getty Images
Whether there’s enough support to repeal the Missouri Plan remains to be seen. Peverill Squire, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Missouri, said some of the bills that would eliminate the Missouri Plan might go to committee hearings, “but my guess is there probably won’t be enough appetite among enough Republicans to really want to put it on the ballot.”
Any change would ultimately have to be approved by the voters, something Loy acknowledged could be difficult after Republicans’ recent losses at the ballot box.
But the renewed calls have also mobilized the system’s longtime defenders. Ed Dowd, a former U.S. attorney who for two decades has helped lead the Citizens for Missouri Courts, a campaign that advocates for preserving the Missouri Plan, said the group has historically become most active when the system is under threat.
Dowd’s St. Louis-based firm, Dowd Bennett, recently contributed $100,000 to the campaign.
“It’s something that we take very, very seriously and don’t want to take any chances on losing something that we have that works so well,” he said.
With the midterm elections less than three weeks away, key voting groups including independents, rural voters and even some Republicans are increasingly disenchanted with Donald Trump’s economy, according to an exclusive Harris poll for the Guardian.
The majority of those surveyed were pessimistic about the economy, with three-quarters of Americans saying they are concerned about a recession while 61% wrongly believe that the US is already experiencing one. By its typical definition, the US is not currently experiencing a recession.
Why the US midterms are a rare foreign policy electionExpert commentLToremark
US voters are linking economic concerns to the Trump administration’s foreign policy choices. This is bad news for Republicans.
Foreign policy rarely decides US elections. Conventional wisdom is that voters know little, and care less, about international affairs. Instead, they are driven by pocketbook issues, like the price of gas and groceries. As James Carville, an adviser to Bill Clinton, once observed: ‘it’s the economy, stupid’. But this year, the economy is foreign policy.
There are two important exceptions to the rule that US voters don’t care about foreign policy – and they both apply this year. One, voters care about foreign affairs when an administration’s choices directly affect their daily lives. Two, voters care about what foreign policy choices reveal about a president’s competence as commander-in-chief.
The upcoming midterms could therefore be a rare foreign policy election – of a kind not seen since 2006 when a backlash to George W. Bush’s handling of the Iraq war handed Republicans a ‘thumping’ defeat.
With voters now feeling the pain of yet another war in the Middle East and Trump’s tariffs, history could repeat itself. The president seems aware of this risk, sending mixed signals about whether the elections will shape his handling of the war in Iran and striking a deal on diesel exports with Russia to ease the pain at the pump for voters.
But perhaps the bigger question is what Trump does after the midterms, the last major electoral check on his presidency.
War has always been the clearest example of when foreign policy directly affects the daily lives of voters.
But this is not always reflected in polls about the importance of individual issues – and this year is no different. Voters cite economic issues as the key drivers of their vote. In a recent survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, pluralities of voters across the political spectrum cite inflation and the cost of living as most important to their vote (37 per cent overall). By contrast, only 2 per cent single out the war in Iran as the most important issue, possibly due to the relatively low number of US casualties.
But that does not mean it is not having an impact. Voters are linking the pain in their pocketbooks with the foreign policy choices of this administration. According to a recent survey by the Institute for Global Affairs, 81 per cent of Americans say the war in Iran has increased the cost of living. The Chicago Council survey puts the number even higher, at 86 per cent.
And then there are the trade wars. According to the Chicago Council survey, 81 per cent of respondents say tariffs have been bad for the cost of living. It is unsurprising, therefore, that 75 per cent of Americans say tariffs will be important to their midterm vote, according to a survey by the Cato Institute.
Importantly, these findings cannot be written off as partisanship. Across a whole range of issues, support for Trump’s policies lags well behind his overall approval rating – which continues to hover around a historic low of 37 per cent. This suggests voters are not just instinctively opposing anything the president does but that large numbers of Americans, including many who otherwise support him, do not like his policy choices.
Affordability concerns will still dominate these elections. But large numbers of Americans blame the administration’s foreign policy choices for the perilous state of their household finances. And that’s bad news for Republicans.
From a strong leader to a reckless one
The second exception is when prominent foreign policy missteps tarnish the image of the sitting president in ways that cause voters to take note.
For example, how the Biden administration handled the 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan severely damaged perceptions of Joe Biden. His approval rating dropped almost overnight and never recovered.
In 2024, Trump was able to turn this into an advantage on the campaign trail by presenting himself as a strong leader who would stand up against America’s adversaries – and with a commitment to peace.
Today, Trump’s reputation is suffering from both his inability to resolve foreign policy challenges he inherited and the abandonment of his pledge to avoid entangling the US in costly conflicts overseas.
In a CNN/SSRS survey, just 29 per cent of US adults said they approved of Trump’s handling of foreign affairs, down from 42 per cent shortly after he returned to office. Only one in four respondents believed he had a clear strategy for handling Tehran, down from 40 per cent in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of the war.
These dynamics also appear to be feeding into broader perceptions of Trump’s leadership. In a YouGov survey fielded at the outset of the war, 56 per cent of respondents said the word ‘reckless’ applied ‘a lot’ to Trump – up five points from a year ago – while the proportion who described him as a ‘strong leader’ dropped four percentage points.
To what degree will foreign policy shape the results – and how will Trump respond?
Republicans were already likely to fare poorly. The midterms are traditionally seen as a referendum on the performance of the incumbent president, and with Trump’s overall approval ratings at a near-record low, history is not on his side.
Even though foreign policy may not dominate any given race, it is likely to matter at the margins. And in a tight race, that could make all the difference.
In some swing states Republican candidates are distancing themselves from the president’s policies. In Michigan, Senate nominee Mike Rogers has said the war ‘needs to end, and end quickly’, to provide relief for American families. In Iowa, meanwhile, Senate nominee Ashley Hinson similarly said that Iowans ‘shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran’.
Trump’s diesel deal with Russia indicates some sensitivity to the electoral risks of high gas prices. But achieving this by accommodating Vladimir Putin – rather than an embargo on US diesel exports, for example – has only highlighted another foreign policy weakness: Trump’s inability to end the war in Ukraine.
But will an electoral rebuke result in more foreign policy restraint? Perhaps the most important question is not the degree to which foreign policy will shape the results, but how the president will respond.
And here, history offers a warning. After his 2006 midterm defeat, President Bush did not change course. Instead, he defied the mandate voters had given by escalating an unpopular war in the Middle East.
President Trump recently pledged not to attack Iran before the midterms, having previously expressed a desire to help his party in the elections. Whether he too will try to end the war through a dramatic escalation once the ballots are counted remains to be seen.
But he would not be the first president to double down on an unpopular policy once unshackled from electoral constraints. The ‘lame duck’ phase of Trump’s presidency may therefore prove even more disruptive on the international stage.
Another three pupils from al-Khair school in Peshawar in critical condition after search for survivors
At least 34 schoolchildren and a female teacher have died after the roof of a school collapsed during morning classes in the northern Pakistani city of Peshawar.
As panicked parents and relatives thronged the site of the privately run al-Khair school to search for their loved ones, rescue workers spent hours pulling children from the rubble.
The Middle East and North Africa: Shaping the Next Decade
3
February 2027 — 08:30 TO 19:15 GMT
Anonymous (not verified)
Chatham House and Online
This conference convenes leading policymakers, scholars, and public intellectuals to explore the forces likely to shape the Middle East and North Africa over the coming decade.
This conference convenes leading policymakers, scholars, and public intellectuals to explore the forces likely to shape the Middle East and North Africa over the coming decade.
The Middle East and North Africa is experiencing a period of profound transformation. The regional order is being reshaped by multiple regional wars, geopolitical competition, technological change, economic diversification, and evolving relationships between states and societies.
Traditional alliances are becoming less predictable as regional powers pursue flexible partnerships across competing geopolitical camps. Artificial intelligence and advanced infrastructure are creating new opportunities for economic transformation, while also introducing new forms of technological and strategic dependence. Political leaders are advancing models of governance centred on state capacity, national development and technocratic effectiveness, even as citizens confront economic insecurity, demographic pressures and declining trust in political institutions.
Questions discussed at the conference include:
Are new structures of regional order emerging, or is strategic fluidity becoming a permanent condition?
How will automation and artificial intelligence affect employment, education and inequality?
Will new technological and investment corridors promote regional integration or deepen fragmentation?
How are concepts of citizenship, national identity and political legitimacy changing?
What competing political visions could define the region over the next decade?
To what extent are public attitudes shaping foreign and domestic policy?
Washington, DC — A conservative organization founded by former Vice President Mike Pence is urging President Donald Trump to abandon his deal allowing Russian diesel into the United States, joining a growing group of Republicans questioning the administration’s sharp reversal on Russian energy policy.
Advancing American Freedom said the agreement would send money to Russian President Vladimir Putin while Moscow continues its war against Ukraine.
“The way to cheaper diesel is more American drilling and refining,” the group wrote in a letter to the administration. “Paying Putin blood money for fuel America already exports is wrong, illegal and stupid.”
Trump announced the deal with Putin last week as part of an effort to lower diesel prices ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections. The administration temporarily eased sanctions on Russian diesel, allowing shipments through April 2027.
Several Republican senators have also objected, arguing the arrangement may conflict with a 2022 law banning Russian energy imports and could undermine recently enacted sanctions designed to reduce Moscow’s war revenue.
Trump has defended the deal as necessary to lower costs for American consumers, farmers and truckers.
Energy analysts have questioned how much relief it will actually provide. Russia’s promised shipments represent a relatively small portion of U.S. diesel consumption, while the agreement could generate billions of dollars in additional revenue for Moscow.
At least 320 people detained for ‘acts against nature’ after law criminalising homosexuality toughened, HRW reports
Mass arrests, forced HIV testing and barriers to legal representation are part of an escalating crackdown against LGBTQ+ people in Senegal, according to a new report.
More than 320 individuals have been arrested and detained on allegations of “acts against nature” since February, according to HIV Justice Network, an organisation quoted in the Human Rights Watch (HRW) report. Among these, at least 84 were charged with “voluntary HIV transmission”, solely on the basis of their HIV status.
Researchers from Mount Sinai, NASA, and Space Tango have launched miniature human hearts and brains to the International Space Station to study how microgravity and radiation affect organs and potentially accelerate aging. "If people are going to be living and working in space, then we need to understand what's going to happen to them," David Sachs, assistant professor of surgery at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told ABC News. "But also, because it's interesting as a model of accelerated aging for studying people on Earth." From the report: The mini organs launched aboard commercial resupply mission CRS-35 on Tuesday morning from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. They are expected to arrive at the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday. The miniature organs offer researchers a unique opportunity to simulate aging in a much shorter period of time to understand disease and develop treatments. "Six months in space ... is equivalent to about 10 to 20 years of aging on Earth," Kevin Costa, associate professor of surgery at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told ABC News.
Sachs and Costa are sending up to 16 miniature hearts to the ISS to test how they respond to electrical signals and monitor how they may react to near-zero gravity. The technology, which is integrated into a miniature laboratory called CubeLab, was developed by Space Tango and simulates the natural environment in the human body. "[It is] slightly bigger than a shoebox, and it is a fully automated, miniaturized system," Gentry Barnett, chief technology officer at Space Tango, told ABC News.
[...] As part of the new effort, the team is sending miniature brains, called miBrain, to the ISS. Around the size of a peppercorn, the miBrains reflect models of healthy and diseased brains. By exposing them to the space environment, scientists can see how mini-brains respond and better understand why living in space accelerates aging. Though the mini organs are not full-sized human organs, the researchers say they are good substitutes, cost-effective and don't take up much of the limited space aboard the space station. They also believe discoveries made in space can translate to uses in everyday medical care.
The microgravity environment uniquely allows researchers to study what happens to humans with a sedentary lifestyle or prolonged bed rest, which isn't easily simulated on Earth, Sachs explained. "[The research is] translating to stuff in space, but it's also translating back to the research we do in the laboratory to help people with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease," Joel Blanchard, associate professor of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told ABC News. Lisa Carnell, the director of the biological and physical sciences division at NASA, told ABC News that these experiments serve as a starting point for future research beyond low Earth orbit, including to the moon and beyond.
Responding to US sanctions on the International Criminal CourtExpert commentsfarrell.drupa…
The US decision to extend sanctions has upped the ante in its campaign against the ICC. The Court’s supporters must decide how to respond, perhaps now it is time to put all options on the table.
On 9 October 2026, the US designated the International Criminal Court under Executive Order 14203, extending its existing sanctions package on individual ICC officials to the entity itself as a whole.
The US imposed asset freezes on any property owned by the Court and prohibited all transactions by US individuals or entities involving the ICC.
The US has allowed certain limited exceptions to this general prohibition, to allow for the ongoing detention of some awaiting trial, the payment of pensions, the use of IT software and social media and a 180-day ‘wind down’, allowing certain otherwise prohibited transactions until April 2027.
These sanctions were introduced by the US in what Secretary of State Marco Rubio called an ongoing campaign to ‘dismantle the ICC brick by brick’.
‘For decades, Republicans and Democrats alike rejected the idea that the International Criminal Court had the power to prosecute American citizens, military service members, or political leaders. America never joined the court. We don’t need it. And we don’t want it,’ Rubio said in a statement.
‘We expect our allies, many of whom are part of the ICC and that rely on American service members for their defense, to rein in the court. If they do not, the United States will continue its campaign to dismantle the ICC, brick by brick, until Americans are threatened no longer,’ he added.
The ICC called the sanctions ‘an attempt to obstruct the course of justice and to prevent the Court from doing what it was created to do. It is an assault on the rule of law and on the very foundations of the international legal order which strikes at the simple principle that no one stands above the law.’
Those countries that have signed up to the ICC – the ‘State Parties’ – now have to decide how to respond, through diplomacy; support or the ‘nuclear option’.
The impact
An asset freeze essentially prevents making any economic resources available directly or indirectly to the ICC. They must be observed by all US persons and green card holders, wherever they are in the world, all US companies and any person in the US.
If left unchecked, the US sanctions could severely hamper the day-to-day operations of the ICC
They also apply to any transactions or data routed through the United States. In reality, this can often limit (at best) and prevent (at worst) nearly all financial transactions of a designated person.
As such, if left unchecked, the US sanctions could severely hamper the day-to-day operations of the ICC. The General Licence operates to provide a wind down period, but at most provides a stay of execution and the potential for diplomatic efforts to reverse or mitigate the impact.
The Court itself noted that whilst it endeavours to continue functioning as normal, international cooperation is imperative as the Court’s fate also rests in ‘the hands of the States that created it’.
So far, foreign ministers of the UK and others have issued a Joint Statement affirming their unwavering support for the ICC. The EU has also said that it stands ready ‘to take all necessary measures to ensure the Court continues to operate effectively and fulfils its indispensable mandate’.
Below are recommendations on how the UK government may best respond to the ICC designation in coalition with other State Parties.
Diplomatic Engagement
State Parties should open the dialogue as necessary to address the US concerns regarding the authority of the ICC.
The 180-day Maintenance General Licence, marked as a show of good faith, intends to achieve just that. It provides State Parties the chance for diplomatic engagement. The ICC’s Assembly of States Parties in December will provide an opportunity to review and align the response of the State Parties to the US.
Practical Support: Preparing for the Worst
In parallel to diplomatic efforts, State Parties can start to consider what practical assistance they can provide in the event that diplomatic efforts are unsuccessful or that companies start de-risking sooner rather than later and start to withdraw services before the expiry of the US General Licences that could impact – as no doubt the US intends – the ongoing investigations and operations of the Court.
As such, whilst the US General Licence might allow for a 180-day ‘wind down’ of the provision of crucial goods and services, companies caught by US sanctions may simply decide to stop working with the Court at any time.
That means the State Parties need a comprehensive plan to support the Court, covering everything from provision of IT to support on banking and payment routes, and everything in between.
Blocking Statute: the Nuclear Option
Some State Parties – in particular the UK and EU Member States – may have the option of turning to the ‘Blocking Statute’.
This has been dubbed the ‘nuclear option’ by Dutch Foreign Minister Tom Berendsen. It would essentially prohibit any natural or legal person from complying with US sanctions.
But Blocking Statutes have only been deployed vary rarely in the past, primarily targeting US extra-territorial over-reach where it has imposed sanctions against countries like Cuba and Iran, and required those outside of US jurisdiction to comply with them.
However, even this nuclear option’ is not without its limitations. First, it won’t be available to all State Parties without new primary legislation. Second, even where the legislation is in place, it is not clear that the US measures would fall squarely within the legislation which is designed to protect ‘trading interests’ against extra-territorial measures. An argument could certainly be made, but it could face challenge if ever relied upon.
Third, it only applies to those caught by the relevant jurisdiction. In the UK and EU, for example, the prohibition on complying with the US sanctions would only have to be observed by UK/EU nationals, UK/EU companies or those operating in the UK or EU.
Finally, it essentially puts domestic companies between a rock and a hard place – fail to comply with US sanctions or fail to comply with the UK/EU ‘Blocking Statute’.
State Parties with this potential option have not deployed it despite the US targeting of judges and Court staff; perhaps now the US has upped the ante in its campaign against the Court, it is time for its supporters to put all options on the table.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump’s job approval has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded for him in a Fox News poll, while the network’s own election analysis says Democrats are positioned to take control of the House.
The latest Fox News survey found just 36% of registered voters approve of Trump’s job performance, while 64% disapprove. His approval had been stuck at 39% since May but has now fallen further, with declines particularly pronounced among younger voters, lower-income households, non-White voters and people without college degrees.
Trump is also struggling badly on the economy. Seventy percent disapprove of his economic performance, 77% disapprove of his handling of inflation and 69% disapprove of his tariff policies. Only 18% of voters say their families are financially better off than two years ago.
The political consequences are showing up in congressional polling. Fox found Democrats leading Republicans 54%-45% on the generic House ballot, while its latest Power Rankings say Democrats are poised to win control of the chamber and have shifted 20 additional races in their direction.
Fox currently rates 215 seats Democratic and 201 Republican before toss-ups are resolved. Its analysis says Democrats have a wider and more durable generic-ballot advantage than they held before the 2018 blue-wave election.
Above the rain-soaked streets of Warsaw, the observation deck of the Varso tower overlooks Joseph Stalin’s gift to Poland that has divided opinion for decades.
For some, the Soviet-era Palace of Culture and Science is a drunk confectioner’s nightmare; standing as a relic of oppression that should have been demolished. For others, it is an icon on the skyline and a monumental warning from history.
In today’s newsletter: As Russia resists a ceasefire and Trump’s shifting priorities unsettle allies, an end to the conflict isn’t getting any closer
Good morning. In his usual asinine unconventional approach to international relations, Donald Trump announced on Sunday (via Truth Social, how else) an “ENERGY CEASEFIRE in the War between Russia and Ukraine”, apparently without checking with either side. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who said any such deal was “news to me,” nonetheless declared he was “ready and we will accept it”. Vladimir Putin responded by blowing up some Ukrainian power plants.
This has been the tenor of much diplomacy during Trump’s tenure: false starts, U-turns, incoherent positions (and some playful flirting with Vlad). Meanwhile fighting continues, and America’s allies attempt to manage the fallout. Andy Burnham hosted Zelenskyy at Downing Street yesterday, stating the UK is doubling down on its support for Ukraine, and pointedly calling on others to “follow suit”.
UK | Sally Rooney has said she is being forced to withdraw her books from sale in the UK because of her support for the banned organisation Palestine Action.
EU | Britain will benefit from much closer trading relations with the EU even if that means giving up its ability to negotiate free trade agreements, the Scotland secretary has said.
Ukraine | Ukraine’s military has suddenly had its access to Starlink satellite internet terminals restricted as the Trump administration has increased pressure on Ukraine to immediately halt long-range strikes on Russia’s oil industry.
Vaccine | Guinea-Bissau has not approved the controversial hepatitis B study in newborns that would be funded by the US government and private partners, the African country’s minister of health said.
Washington, DC — Former Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene delivered an unusually sharp rebuke of the Trump administration Wednesday, dismissing its investigation into Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar as “bullsh*t” and accusing the White House of focusing on political spectacle instead of everyday economic concerns.
Greene said she remains deeply opposed to Omar on abortion, gun rights and other policies, but questioned why the administration is prioritizing an effort that could potentially strip Omar of citizenship and deport her.
Her comments came shortly after The Wall Street Journal reported that the federal probe is examining whether Omar or her late father misrepresented her age during the immigration process in the 1990s. Federal agents searched Omar’s Washington-area home Monday as part of the investigation.
Greene argued that the case does nothing to lower gas prices, make health insurance more affordable, reduce grocery bills or keep U.S. troops out of foreign wars. She also criticized the administration over the still-unreleased Epstein files.
The intervention is striking because Greene and Omar have been bitter political adversaries for years.
Trump, meanwhile, denied directing the investigation but continued attacking Omar personally, calling her “totally crooked” and a “terrible person.” Omar has denied wrongdoing, and no charges have been announced.
Finance ministers gathering for the IMF annual meeting know the need for multilateral cooperation to deal with many crises. There is little chance of that
Not much has gone right for the global economy this year, and plenty has gone wrong. Two big regional wars are destabilising prices and supply chains everywhere.Businesses and consumers are feeling the effects of a serious energy shock. Rising inflation has made it a lot more expensive for governments to finance their debts. China and the US are at loggerheads over trade.
Yet, so far, the impact has been modest. It is something of a miracle that the finance ministers and central bank governors gathered for this year’s annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Bangkok are not having to deal with a full-blown crisis. This is not like the autumn of 2008, when the meetings took place during the worst of the global banking meltdown.
(StatePoint) The holiday season is fast approaching. Families of all varieties are asking two questions: “Where do we meet?” and “What do we do when we get there?”
BEIJING, Oct. 14, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- October 14, SANY Renewable Energy showcased itself at China Wind Power 2026. SANY Renewable Energy announced a 25-year extended turbine lifecycle and a comprehensive service roadmap through 2030, reaffirming its commitment to delivering value…
Having tried cloud seeding and water bombing, one pilot project will see dry ice dispersed by plane across the province of South Sumatra
As fires ravage Indonesia, emitting a toxic smoke that has drawn the ire of regional neighbours, the government is testing an unusual new approach to tackle the haze: dry ice.
Having tried cloud seeding, water bombing and sending in army personnel to fight the fires, Indonesia’s coordinating security minister said dry ice would be dropped on the province of South Sumatra on Thursday.
Workers have always been monitored by their bosses, first through output targets, and then via computer software labelled ‘bossware’. But AI is transforming the capabilities of these systems, processing huge volumes of data to provide minute-by-minute accounts of activity, and productivity. To find out more, Ian Sample hears from UK technology editor Robert Booth. He explains which sectors are adopting this approach, why they are doing it, and how it could end up being counterproductive.
(The Center Square) - Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger joined Gov. Gavin Newsom Wednesday at the California Economic Summit in Long Beach to celebrate two decades of the state's decarbonization framework under what's regarded as landmark climate legislation.
Milwaukee rally past Los Angeles for 3-0 NLCS lead
Bauers and Mitchell homer back-to-back off Blake Snell
Defending champions face elimination on Thursday
Jake Bauers and Garrett Mitchell hit back-to-back home runs off Blake Snell to reclaim the lead in the seventh inning as the Milwaukee Brewers beat the Los Angeles Dodgers 6-2 on Wednesday night to take a commanding 3-0 lead in the National League Championship Series.
The Dodgers had just taken a 2-1 lead in the bottom of the sixth before being stunned. The loss pushed the two-time defending World Series champions to the brink of elimination. They had trailed 3-0 in a best-of-seven postseason series only once previously in franchise history, when they were swept by the Baltimore Orioles in the 1966 World Series.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Schools and libraries from around the U.S. pleaded with the Federal Communications Commission to drop the idea of ending E-Rate, a $2 billion-a-year program that connects students and library visitors to the Internet. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has criticized school districts for having "experimented with a massive increase in screen time for students," and said E-Rate expanded too far beyond its original purpose of "supporting basic Internet access to schools and libraries for educational purposes." In June, Carr led a 2-1 vote to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) seeking public comment on whether E-Rate should be "limited or sunset to reflect today's extensive connectivity rates."
Carr's proposal could result in E-Rate cutting the discounts that schools and libraries receive for telecom services and equipment, and imposing more restrictions on how E-Rate money can be used. The FCC seeking comment on whether to sunset the program also raises the possibility that Carr might choose to axe E-Rate entirely. The National Association of Elementary School Principals told the FCC that it "strongly supports the continued operation of the E-Rate program and urges the Commission to reject proposals that would eliminate, substantially restrict, or impose new conditions on this essential source of connectivity assistance for schools and libraries." The Carr FCC already scaled E-Rate back last year by ending funding for schools and libraries to lend out Wi-Fi hotspots and for Wi-Fi service on school buses. "Importantly, the FCC does not have the authority to terminate the E-Rate program. The E-Rate program is mandated by Congress, and the FCC is responsible for administering it," the American Library Associated told the FCC.
The American Library Association said "the FCC lacks the authority and expertise to regulate screen time or determine educational outcomes." In a filing, the group pointed out that under U.S. law, determinations about what content is inappropriate for children "shall be made by the school board, local educational agency, library, or other authority responsible for making the determination."
Why Should Delaware Care? Hospital systems across the state are competing to serve a rapidly aging population and meet their care needs. At the same time, they are looking to close access gaps in the southern part of the state as Sussex County becomes a retirement destination for many in surrounding states.
Bayhealth leaders unveiled multiple expansion projects on Wednesday, including a new hybrid emergency room similar to its campus off Route 9 near Harbeson.
It also provided more details about its already announced $250 million expansion to its main campus in Dover.
It comes as healthcare systems across the state are preparing for an influx of retirees who require more frequent and complex care, particularly in Sussex County.
At a Wednesday press conference, Bayhealth leaders showcased seven projects that have already been approved or still require state regulatory approval.
Only one of those projects will need to be approved by the Delaware Health Resources Board, which approves large hospital expansions, according to the system’s chief operating officer, Kyle Benoit.
All of the projects are slated to be up and running by the end of 2029, but many of them will be complete before that date, likely by the end of 2027.
Bayhealth held the press conference at its main campus in Dover, often called Kent General, where the hospital’s CEO Terry Murphy and Benoit outlined the new projects and their potential impact in the region.
The hospital system is marketing the new renovations which will cost at least $373.7 million as the “Next Wave.” During the press conference, Murphy pointed to the rapidly aging state and the hospital’s aim to prepare for that demographic shift.
Bayhealth CEO Terry Murphy said the growing health needs of an aging population will require his health system to make upgrades. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JACOB OWENS
What are the projects?
Nearly all of the projects and expansions are in Kent and Sussex counties, except for a new hybrid facility in Smyrna, which is on the New Castle County side of the bifurcated town.
Some of the projects announced on Wednesday had already been publicly known, such as the $250 million Kent General expansion slated to bring six additional floors to the hospital, as well as dozens of new patient beds.
Additionally, the Kent General emergency room is also slated for renovations as the hospital plans to build 10 new low-acuity emergency room bays, as well as five behavioral health rooms, typically used for those experiencing a mental health crisis.
Other projects like a new hybrid emergency department in Smyrna will cost Bayhealth $52.6 million and operate 14 emergency bays. The facility would mirror another hybrid emergency department run by Bayhealth near Harbeson that offers emergency and walk-in care for patients.
Bayhealth already operates an emergency room in Smyrna off Carter Road, and said on Wednesday it intends to relocate those services to the new location, which would be located near the Smyrna Rest Stop on U.S. Route 13.
The old facility would be repurposed and Bayhealth would “backfill” other medical needs using the space. Benoit said Bayhealth intends to file a letter of intent with the Delaware Health Resources Board on Wednesday, and that it hopes to send its full application to the board in January 2027.
Separately, Benoit said the health system would expand its services and use of the Blue Hen Mall, which he said the hospital already mostly owns. In November, he said the hospital will purchase the remaining space it doesn’t own within the mall.
Benoit added businesses and operations already leasing with Bayhealth, like a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs clinic, would continue to operate as normal and the hospital would honor its leases.
As for the hospital’s Sussex County locations, Bayhealth’s hybrid emergency room near Harbeson would also receive a $3.5 million renovation that would double its capacity.
Bayhealth would build new medical offices at its campus in Milford, which would bring an additional 105 specialty exam rooms close to the relatively new facility. According to a slide during the press conference, the new medical offices would cost $39.1 million.
Murphy pointed to Bayhealth’s reuse of spaces that otherwise may have not been active or serving the community, and how the hospital has transformed the spaces into that benefit patients.
“They’re serving the community without knocking it down,” Murphy said.
Downstate arms race
In recent months, Delaware’s hospital systems have been at odds and publicly clashing over proposals below the C&D Canal as they prepare for an onslaught of retirees.
Bayhealth in Dover, TidalHealth in Seaford and Beebe Healthcare in Lewes are all challenging the two downstate campuses, as the systems look to protect what has historically been their territory. Long the dominant player in northern Delaware, ChristianaCare has increasingly invested below the C&D Canal in recent years.
Spotlight Delaware reported in August that Bayhealth, Kent County’s primary health system, submitted a letter to regulators asking them to halt two proposed ChristianaCare campuses in Georgetown and Camden.
Those regulators, who sit on the Delaware Health Resources Board, were set to discuss that letter in their meeting on Aug. 25, but tabled the discussion to allow for some additional internal review.
For decades, Delaware’s three major health care systems largely fit into geographic monopolies: ChristianaCare serving New Castle County, Bayhealth serving Kent County and Beebe Healthcare in Sussex County.
But over the last five years, a health care arms race heated up between Bayhealth, Beebe and now TidalHealth, coming up from Salisbury, Md. They have all built or broken ground on major projects in locations, such as Lewes, Milton or Millsboro in recent years.
It follows a post-COVID population boom in Sussex County. The region is now designated as a “Medically Underserved Area” by the federal government, with projections showing that the population will increase from 237,000 in 2022 to over 361,000 by 2050. The county is also rapidly graying, as the population growth is largely driven by retirees who will demand more health care needs.
The arrival of ChristianaCare, which to date only had primary care offices in Milford and Rehoboth Beach, will bring needed resources, but also new competition to the crowded market.
But the downstate hospitals are hoping to convince the Delaware Health Resources Board that ChristianaCare’s plans would flood the market and offer redundant services.
In 2019, the board was central in a debate over whether to allow Beebe to build a freestanding emergency room in Georgetown. It ultimately denied that project, saying it was too close to Bayhealth’s Milford campus and Nanticoke Hospital in Seaford.
The board was also expected to be critical of plans by Bayhealth to build its own freestanding emergency room in Milton, which led the Dover-based health system to pull its plans.
Both of those projects predated the population surge that has particularly struck Sussex County after the COVID housing market boom though.
Congress approves constitutional amendment that bans six-day workweeks, which could affect up to 30 million
Brazil’s congress has approved a constitutional amendment to shorten the working week to a maximum of 40 hours, a move that could affect 30 million workers and that will hand a political victory to the leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ahead of the presidential runoff in under two weeks.
In an attempt to overturn the first-round lead secured by his opponent, far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro, Lula has strongly championed the amendment, which will give some workers an extra day off each week.
Donald Trump has yet to weigh in on the late night ruling from a federal judge that blocks him from barring CNN, MS Now and Politico access to the White House grounds.
Previously, the president had blasted Judge Timothy Kelly – a Trump appointee – for issuing a temporary pause on his media ban. That expired on Tuesday, and Kelly handed down a preliminary injunction that stops the administration from blocking the outlets while the litigation plays out.
Hey guys! I bought two pints both with bad batts for 145. I was unsure of the HW and FW on them so I decided to gamble and get an only amps biggie battery. I plugged it in to see its HW 5326 FW 5100, so I did an ST-Link. I flashed the bootloader from the only post in the subreddit on how to st link it, and it flashed. I went to rewheel to flash 5040, the update completed but the board became stuck on blue and yellow SOLID lights. I tried to restart the board, it did not turn back on. When I try to turn it on, the bluetooth turns on I can connect, but it doesn't transfer any data. I am wondering is my board a lost cause at this point or is there still any saving it? The other controller is the exact same HW and FW as the main board was when I got it. Im new to St linking and messing with onewheel FW. Thanks guys!
A group of American researchers believes it may be days away from finding what remains of the missing plane of legendary aviator Amelia Earhart off a remote island in the South Pacific.
The AI boom has created insatiable demand for high-performance computing, driving up the cost on everything from GPUs and CPUs to high-bandwidth memory and even networking. The boom has triggered a real-estate frenzy, driven up power costs, and even has people worried about water shortages. But it’s also raising big questions about AI itself, such as: Will it ever actually pay off?
The industry keeps racking up milestones thanks to generative AI. For instance, the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) announced last week that we’ve already reached $1 trillion in chip sales for the calendar year. It’s the first time in history that chip sales have reached 12 digits–and it only took eight months. Global chip sales for August grew at a ridiculous 144.3% clip–180.9% in the Americas–and we’ll likely end the year with $1.6 trillion in sales, says Michael Robbins, SIA president and CEO.
Chip sales are skyrocketing (Source: SIA)
Growth in chip sales normally follows a somewhat predictable curve, thanks to the massive, multi-year investments required to build chip fabs. Clearly, profits are taking up a big chunk of the area under the sharp, elbow-like curve that SIA shared, as the inputs for chips themselves haven’t changed much. The difference is the absurd level of demand for silicon, caused by AI.
SIA’s data jibes with the latest out of Gartner, which in late September announced its prediction that worldwide spending on AI would total $2.7 trillion in 2026, a 49.5% increase in just one year, with another 36% leap expected in 2027 to $3.6 trillion (this is just for AI, not for keeping the ERP system running).
As Gartner analyst John-David Lovelock pointed out: “The buildout of AI data center capacity is the largest infrastructure project humanity has even undertaken.”
Now, humans have built big projects over the past 5,000 years. Egyptians moved 6 million tons of block to build the Great Pyramids of Giza, the Chinese constructed a 13,000-mile fortification called the Great Wall, and the US laid down 49,000 miles of pavement for the Interstate Highway System.
All of these multi-year projects took massive amounts of capital as well as human labor to build. The AI boom, which is currently in its fourth year, makes previous mega-projects look like child’s play, according to a new paper titled “Financing the AI Buildout,” by Stinj Van Nieuwerburgh, a professor of real estate and finance at the Columbia Business School.
“Relative to the economy, the projected buildout would exceed the major U.S. canal, railroad, electrification, highway, and telecommunications investment booms,” Van Nieuwerburgh writes.
Source: “Financing the AI Buildout,” by Stinj Van Nieuwerburgh
Van Nieuwerburgh estimates that a single 200 megawatt AI data center will cost about $8.2 billion to build, with two-thirds of that amount going to outfit it with IT gear (servers, switches, networking, cooling) and one-third to buy real-estate and electrical connections.
“We estimate that 188 GW of new capacity will be completed during 2025–2032, with a further 115 GW completed after 2032,” he writes. “This pipeline generates approximately $9.0 trillion in investment during 2025–2032, averaging 3.22 percent of [U.S.] GDP per year.”
So where is all the money to finance this AI blowout coming from? And how will the AI applications running on all that HPC actually generate a return for the investors?
Hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta–collectively worth $13 trillion in market cap–are doing a lot of the heavy lifting, Van Nieuwerburgh points out. These companies have increased their capital expenditures from about $97 billion in 2020 to more than $400 billion in 2025, a number that’s expected to double to $800 billion this year.
Since these figures exceed the company’s operating cash, the hyperscalers are bringing in external partners to help provide capital for the investments. There is a raft of “data center developers, infrastructure funds, REITs, and private equity investors” who are providing cash, while another group composed of banks, private credit funds, and securitization vehicles supply debt to finance construction of the nearly 200 GW of data center capacity expected over the next five years, according to Van Nieuwerburgh.
Source: “Financing the AI Buildout,” by Stinj Van Nieuwerburgh
Just as developers historically have looked to spread out the risk inherent in large-scale capital projects such as construction of buildings and electrical infrastructure, the AI boom is giving us new structures for handling the risks with buying hundreds of billions of dollars of GPUs.
“Investment-grade hyperscaler tenants make these structures financeable by supporting long-duration contractual cash flows, while frontier AI firms effectively access infrastructure through the hyperscalers’ balance sheets and creditworthiness,” Van Nieuwerburgh writes.
However, these arrangements don’t eliminate risk, he writes–they merely transform it. And potentially, they can amplify it.
“Long-duration debt is then supported by cash flows and collateral values that depend on uncertain AI demand, rapid technological change, timely access to power and hardware, and the continued credit quality of a small number of tenants,” Van Nieuwerburgh writes. “The resulting capital structure can therefore make exposures more layered, correlated, and difficult to observe.”
It does not appear that Van Nieuwerburgh is trying to be an alarmist in his paper. Rather, he sees the events as a worthwhile laboratory to study “how modern
economies finance a general-purpose technology in real time.”
Stinj Van Nieuwerburgh of Columbia Business School
His study is also valuable because it lays out the underlying facts of the AI boom in great detail. For instance, his estimate of the IT costs illustrate the scale of the investments being made. At 142 kW per rack, one could install 1,170 GB300 NVL72 systems at $4.0 million each, or $4.68 billion in total, into a typical 200 megawatt data center. “This price already includes the GPUs, attached highbandwidth memory, Grace CPUs, NVLink switching, power systems, and the physical rack,” Van Nieuwerburgh writes. “We add 10 percent of the rack cost for the external network fabric and fiber, 5 percent for shared storage, and 5 percent for cluster-level installation, integration, and commissioning.” Sounds about right.
The AI boom is many things. It has enormous potential for scientific discovery, as we have explored in HPCwire pages. It’s a technological revolution, reshaping the trillion-dollar IT industry in its image. It’s upending business processes and giving new meaning to workflow automation. For some, it represents a new form of entertainment, or even a new digital form of life–and potentially threatening our own lives. It’s an engine of growth for millions of peoples’ 401(k)s and is making a much smaller group of individuals ludicrously wealthy.
AI is all of these things. But at the end of the day, AI will need to show a return on the investment, or the investments will slow. We know that $9.0 trillion is slated to be invested over the next five years, although who exactly holds the risk is somewhat vague, as Van Nieuwerburgh shows us.
Will the payoff for AI ever reach $9 trillion? That ultimately is AI’s big question.
Michelle Parker disappeared the same day that an episode of "The People's Court" aired that featured Parker and the suspect, Dale Smith Jr., in a contentious dispute over an engagement ring.
The subpoenas were issued on Friday, just days before Omar's home in Washington, D.C., was searched early Monday morning by investigators from ICE's investigative unit.
Zach Hickerson, the brother of Hayden Panettiere's on-again, off-again boyfriend, Brian Hickerson, called 911 and attempted CPR on the actress before she was declared dead.
The judge gave the maximum sentence possible to Sean Gardner, 39, who pleaded guilty to placing a hidden camera in a bathroom at a gymnastics studio in Purvis, Mississippi.
Australia, prepare to start guarding your marmalade reserves: the award-winning Paddington: The Musical is on its way.
The acclaimed theatre production, which has been running in London’s West End since 2025, will land in Sydney in September 2027, where it will be performed at the Capitol Theatre for 10 weeks.
Alleged assault follows report of gang-rape at frat house at Cornell, which ignited national uproar and criticism online
A 21-year-old woman reported being sexually assaulted last weekend at a fraternity house near the University of Chicago, as Greek life nationwide faces renewed scrutiny for recurrent misconduct.
The incident allegedly took place on Sunday at about 1.50am at the off-campus Alpha Epsilon Pi residence, according to a university daily crime log.
Dozens of people detained after government building and two banks set on fire as tens of thousands march over education costs and corruption
Tens of thousands of students have taken to the streets of Tirana, the Albanian capital, setting alight a government building and two banks and hurling stones at police during a protest over rising education costs and corruption.
Police responded with water cannon and teargas to disperse protesters who started a fire at the ministry of education building, overturned bins and smashed the fronts of local businesses. A branch of Raiffeisen Bank near the education ministry also caught fire.
Resolution Foundation says ‘crude changes’ to benefits system would probably make it harder for people to work
Banning people with anxiety, ADHD or autism from claiming disability benefits would not deliver major financial savings and would probably make it harder for them to get or stay in a job and participate in society, a leading thinktank has warned.
The Resolution Foundation said any proposals to make certain mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions ineligible for personal independence payments (Pip) would be “crude changes” aimed at hitting unrealistic savings targets.
Ukrainian president accused US president of picking the other side after four years of war
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he feels personally betrayed by Donald Trump after it emerged that Ukraine’s military has had its access to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite squeezed, raising doubts about long-term US support for Kyiv.
The Ukrainian president, on a visit to London, accused Trump of picking the other side after more than four years of war, risking a breakdown in relations already strained by the US agreeing to buy diesel from Moscow.
Eight US states, including Kansas, Arizona, and Montana, have sued OpenAI, alleging that ChatGPT encourages children to harm themselves. The states are seeking changes to how the company's products interact with young users and the forfeiture of profits generated from their activity. Reuters reports: Attorneys general from the states, which include Iowa, Kansas and Arizona, filed the lawsuits independently in state courts, claiming ChatGPT is designed to be agreeable and engaging to earn the trust of users. But the chatbot reinforces delusions, encourages dangerous behavior and assists users in planning violence like mass shootings, the lawsuits claim. The lawsuits represent the most significant coordinated state action against an artificial intelligence company, adding to a wave of legal challenges OpenAI faces as it prepares for a public listing. Florida's attorney general filed the first such state suit in June.
The lawsuits accuse the company of violating state consumer protection laws by misleading users about the safety of ChatGPT. The states also allege that the company created a public nuisance by endangering the health of their residents. The lawsuits seek orders forcing OpenAI to make changes to how ChatGPT works. Among other things, the states want the company barred from developing AI models that can improve themselves unless it can ensure those models are aligned with human values. The states ... are also seeking civil monetary penalties for OpenAI's violations of state law as well as damages.
(The Center Square) - Colorado’s 1st Congressional District race, which is focusing on healthcare, immigration and taxes, could help determine whether Republicans keep their razor-thin House majority.
Account by Oscar Belgal differs sharply from that of DHS agents, who fired into vehicle with young boy in back seat
Lawyers for a man wounded by an immigration officer while driving with his young son in New York City said in a court filing Wednesday that the agent who shot him never identified himself before he ran up to the car, smashed one of its windows, then fired several shots into the vehicle.
The account by lawyers for Oscar Belgal contrasted sharply with the version of events outlined by Department of Homeland Security officials. They have said officers opened fire only after Belgal smashed his car into two government vehicles and “accelerated toward other officers”.
Federal authorities investigating the Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar seized the Democratic lawmaker’s phone and have issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, including to some of her relatives, according to a person briefed on the inquiry.
The subpoenas were issued for a grand jury collecting evidence in Minnesota as federal authorities investigate potential fraud in Omar’s immigration paperwork, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation. The investigation led to federal agents searching Omar’s Washington DC home on Monday just weeks before the November midterms, in which Omar is seeking re-election.
Digital Realty is offering utility and property tax credits to residents of De Soto, Kansas, in a bid to win public support for a data center facility.
I have an X7 LR and absolutely love it. I ride about 80% on road and about 20% off. For Christmas, I am thinking about treating myself to some WTF BTG rails from the float life or X10 rails from Fungineers and a Thundercat tire. Let the debate begin!
"Starting today, Linux desktops are now officially supported by Microsoft Defender," reports Neowin. A public preview of the threat detection app extends its enterprise security platform beyond servers to developer workstations running distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and RHEL. The offering includes antivirus protection, endpoint detection and response, vulnerability management, threat hunting, and device isolation. From the report: Microsoft is also making it easier to onboard desktops through streamlined methods, offering a unified security operations experience, strengthened security, and improved response times. Organizations that are already familiar with securing Linux servers via Defender should feel right at home securing desktops too, as the experience is exactly the same. Defender knows whether it is securing a device in a data center, the cloud, or that it is owned by a developer and identifies them as such in inventory and security workflows.
As stated previously, all Linux server distros are supported via Defender on desktops too. These include RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, SLES, Fedora, and Oracle Linux, GNOME, KDE, and more. That said, you do need Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Plan 2 or a Microsoft 365 E5 and E7 subscription. You can enroll Defender on workstations using the same deployment methods you use for servers, but do check out the prerequisites here.
US states sue ChatGPT maker and seek to force the company to change how its products work for young users
Eight US states sued OpenAI Wednesday, alleging the ChatGPT maker is harming children en masse.
Kansas, Arizona, Montana, Iowa and four others allege the company’s products carried out “willful, dangerous, reckless and unlawful conduct” by coaxing children into harming themselves.
Image of state flag incorporating KKK hoods was sent to other schools participating in regional tennis tournament
The University of Maryland (UMD) has indefinitely suspended its club tennis team after a graphic featuring Ku Klux Klan imagery was circulated to other universities before a regional tournament, prompting widespread condemnation.
The controversy erupted after Toni Rachal, president of Howard University’s club tennis team, spotted the offensive material in a shared Google document sent to participating schools before last weekend’s tournament, WUSA9 reported.
New Republican-funded ads aim to connect former U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Ohio, to a young woman’s traumatic experience following a gender transition-related surgery.
In a Senate Leadership Fund ad published Sept. 28, a woman said, “Sherrod Brown supports sex changes for minors. Irreversible surgery on kids. Like me.”
She continues, “At 11, I was groomed by strangers online. At 15, a doctor told my family I was transgender. Hormone injections, then surgery, without my parents’ consent. I was a kid. I was confused. Sherrod Brown isn’t. He knows the consequences. Ohio’s kids deserve better. So did I.”
In a Sept. 24 ad, the same woman said her experience led to “years of trauma.” “I wasn’t born in the wrong body. I was a kid. But Sherrod Brown supports sex change surgery for minors and admitted he would never oppose it,” she said.
The woman is Soren Aldaco, who has been outspoken about her experience identifying as transgender when she was younger, to later “detransitioning.”
The ads make it seem as though Brown’s position on gender-affirming care for minors played a role in Aldaco’s experience. But records and reports show he had nothing to do with it. The surgery took place in Texas — not Ohio — when Aldaco was 19, no longer a minor.
The Senate Leadership Fund is a Senate Republican-affiliated super PAC supporting incumbent U.S. Sen. Jon Husted in the race. The group can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to campaign for federal candidates.
In a February op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal, Aldaco wrote that she began identifying as transgender at the age of 11. At 17, she said, her stepmother accompanied her to visit a nurse practitioner, who prescribed testosterone and estrogen blockers. She had an elective double mastectomy at 19, she wrote.
In a Fox News op-ed published the same month, she said she was “sexually groomed by adult strangers” in internet chatrooms.
“I was 11, freshly groomed, when I started identifying as trans — 15 when doctors got involved, 17 when they prescribed hormones without valid consent, and 19, still a teenager and a college kid, when I underwent a double mastectomy — and I’ll never get back the seven years of childhood that recent reporting has omitted,” Aldaco said in a statement emailed to PolitiFact.
Aldaco told Fox News Digital in March that the nurse practitioner who prescribed her hormones did not confer with her biological mother.
Brown’s response and position on gender affirming care
Brown has released an ad in response calling the Senate Leadership Fund’s ads a “complete lie.”
“Records show not only is this woman actually from Texas, she didn’t have any surgery as a minor,” the ad said.
An earlier ad from Brown’s campaign emphasizes that Ohio law prohibits performing transition-related surgeries on children.
Gender transition surgery for minors isexceedingly rare, and no medical guidelines support providing it for young children.
A 2024 Ohio law prohibits gender-affirming medical care for minors. State lawmakers passed it in December 2023 and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed it. The Legislature overrode that veto, and the law was implemented in April 2024.
Brown’s public comments about gender-affirming care for minors have been limited. The Senate Leadership Fund has pointed to a 2023 news interview when Brown said, “A child’s health care decisions are between them, their parents, their families, their doctors — not politicians. I will never agree with anybody that wants to bring politics into the family situation with health care, period.”
He did not say in that interview that he supports sex-change surgery for minors. We rated a similar claim that Brown supports “forcing childhood sex change surgery” from the Senate Leadership Fund False.
WVTG reported Oct. 9 that “Brown hasn’t publicly supported or opposed the issue,” adding that Brown said in a recent campaign stop, “That’s settled law.”
Chris Gustafson, spokesperson for the Senate Leadership Fund, told PolitiFact that Brown’s 2023 statement is proof that Brown “does not support any limitations on transgender/gender-affirming procedures on children.”
Our ruling
A Senate Leadership Fund ad featuring Aldaco says Brown “supports sex changes for minors. Irreversible surgery on kids. Like me.”
Aldaco had transition-related surgery in Texas when she was 19 years old. Brown had no role in it.
Ohio bans gender-affirming medical care for minors, and such surgery for minors is exceedingly rare with no medical guidelines supporting it. We found no evidence that Brown has ever said he supports sex-changes for minors.
We rate this claim Pants on Fire!
PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
Restaurants and pubs such as Nando’s and Fuller’s will create placements for 18- to 24-year-olds under DWP-backed scheme
Bars, clubs and restaurants will offer up to 100,000 jobs to young people not in employment, education or training (Neet) over the next three years in an effort to give them a first step on the ladder into work.
The move comes before the publication of a report on Neets by the former health secretary Alan Milburn, who has warned that the number of young people not in work or education in the UK could rise to 1.25 million over the next five years unless ministers intervene.
El 27% de los trabajadores estadounidenses han tenido que sacar dinero de su cuenta de ahorros de forma inesperada en el último día, según un nuevo estudio. Y el 12% lo hizo en las últimas horas, según el estudio de…
Police arrested Metallica Rose Harrison, 27, after reports of a ‘distressed female’ at the Great Wolf Lodge resort
A Pennsylvania woman allegedly killed her husband and her three-year-old son at a resort in the Poconos Mountains of Pennsylvania this week before attempting suicide, according to local officials.
Pocono Township police responded to reports of a “distressed female” at the Great Wolf Lodge resort, with the woman identified as 27-year old Metallica Rose Harrison of Towanda, Pennsylvania, by police.
(The Center Square) – Nine of the largest U.S. banks dropped services for customers over political and religious views, according to a report from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency released Wednesday.
Epic has launched a preview of a new AI-generated Games Launcher that it says cold-starts 46% faster than Steam. Neowin reports: Epic commissioned a third-party company to benchmark this new launcher in its current Preview build versus the Steam client on Windows machines. The results reported that Epic's client is 46% faster than Valve's client during cold starts, clocking in at 5.47 seconds compared to Steam taking 10.07 seconds. When you restore both apps from system tray background states, the new client takes 0.36 seconds while Steam takes 0.42 seconds, according to the report. Speed aside, Epic says the new launcher gets a better interface, dedicated title summary pages, and custom top bars. "The updated client also lets players aggregate external PC game libraries, toggle between grid or list views, and monitor storage write rates alongside download queues," reports Neowin.
Epic Games says Fortnite will finally come to Linux through this new client once Easy Anti-Cheat is rebuilt and kernel-level security agreements are established with major Linux distros.
(The Center Square) – The United States cannot grow its way out of a debt load costing taxpayers more than $1 trillion a year in interest, the International Monetary Fund said Wednesday.
Sabrina German, a poll official in Chatham county, details a typical election day, the pressure election workers face, and fallout from 2020 disputes
It’s not that Sabrina German doesn’t have political views. But as the director of voter registration for Chatham county, Georgia, talking politics is like breakdancing in traffic. “I don’t talk politics with anyone,” says German; she knows better.
America’s partisan minefield has trained much of the country – aside from that one uncle you avoid at weddings and funerals – to get pretty good at the art of political diplomacy in polite company.
Republican representative described the assault in a nearly hourlong speech in February 2025 that named the men
Nancy Mace’s former fiance and two of his business associates were charged with sex crimes and voyeurism on Wednesday over an episode the South Carolina representative described in detail during a speech last year on the House floor, about how crimes against women are not investigated thoroughly.
John Douglas Osborne committed sex acts on a 23-year-old incapacitated and intoxicated woman while Mace’s ex-fiance Patrick Bryant and Eric Bernard Bowman watched, according to sworn statements by agents from the state law enforcement division, which brought the charges.
Oct. 14, 2026 — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.
The work, published recently in The Planetary Science Journal, uses LLNL’s Spheral simulation code to more accurately model how an asteroid might respond when X-rays from a nuclear device detonated near its surface rapidly heat and vaporize material. After validating the approach against established asteroid-deflection models, researchers used Spheral to study three complex disruption scenarios.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Photo: Blaise Douros/LLNL.
Unlike many natural disasters, a hazardous asteroid impact could potentially be prevented if the object is detected early enough. One approach is deflection — imparting a small change in velocity that causes the asteroid to miss Earth while largely remaining intact. Another approach is disruption, in which an asteroid is intentionally fragmented and dispersed so that no remaining piece poses a significant threat to the planet.
NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, demonstrated a kinetic-impact approach to deflection in 2022 by deliberately striking the asteroid moon Dimorphos. Nuclear mitigation represents an alternative emergency option, particularly for larger objects or scenarios with shorter warning times, because much more energy can be delivered to an asteroid than the kinetic energy of a spacecraft impactor.
Two of the simulations showed strong signs of disruption, highlighting how high-fidelity 3D modeling can help researchers better understand how an asteroid could respond to a nuclear mitigation attempt.
“These simulations give us a much more detailed picture of how an asteroid may respond to a nuclear mitigation attempt,” said Isaiah Santistevan, who led the study. “Being able to model damage, fracture and material motion in three dimensions is an important step toward improving our ability to evaluate planetary defense options.”
Graphic image depicts 3D simulation showing, from left, material damage, material velocity and the x-component of velocity. The simulation shows extensive damage and material moving in opposite directions, signs that the asteroid is breaking apart. (Graphic courtesy of Isaiah Santistevan)
Building a 3D Modeling Capability
To test the approach, the team compared more than 1,500 one-dimensional Spheral simulations with asteroid deflection results from LLNL’s established Ares simulation code.
The calculations showed close agreement between the two codes, giving researchers confidence to use Spheral for more complex 3D disruption simulations. Spheral is particularly well-suited to modeling problems involving material damage, fracture and fragmentation, Santistevan said.
The researchers then modeled three disruption scenarios involving an irregularly shaped asteroid roughly 160 meters across, varying both the distance of the hypothetical nuclear detonation and assumptions about how easily the asteroid material would fracture.
Strong Signs of Disruption
In the longest-running simulation, about 98% of the asteroid material became fully damaged, meaning it had severely lost its ability to remain intact. The simulation also showed that roughly 97% was moving faster than the asteroid’s escape velocity, with the majority of material moving in opposite directions, further indicating that the body was breaking apart.
“What’s encouraging is that we’re seeing the asteroid sustain extensive damage while material is also moving fast enough to escape its gravitational pull,” Santistevan said. “Those are important indicators that the asteroid is in the process of disrupting, and the 3D simulations allow us to examine that process in much greater detail.”
The results also highlighted the importance of where energy is deposited across an asteroid. In one case, a detonation farther away from the asteroid’s surface deposited less total energy but produced more widespread damage because the energy was spread over a larger area.
The finding does not mean a more distant detonation would always be more effective. The optimal approach would depend on factors including an asteroid’s size, shape and composition, as well as whether the objective is deflection or disruption.
Pushing the Limits of Simulation
The work also highlights the computational challenge of following an asteroid through the full disruption process.
The longest simulation used 1,680 processors for 59 days but advanced the calculation to only 145 milliseconds of physical time. Researchers would need to follow the fragments much longer to determine their eventual size and trajectories, Santistevan said.
That longer-term analysis is important because robust disruption requires showing that no remaining fragment is larger than about 10 meters and that the fragments disperse rather than reaccumulate. The current simulations did not run long enough to explicitly make that determination, but the extent of damage and material motion in two cases strongly suggests they were in the process of disrupting.
Future work will focus on accelerating simulation times, improving resolution and modeling more realistic asteroid structures, including loosely bound “rubble-pile” asteroids. Researchers also plan to compare simulations with small-scale laboratory experiments.
(The Center Square) – More than 71 million Americans receiving Social Security benefits will see a 3.6% cost-of-living adjustment beginning in January, the federal government announced Wednesday.
Hours before Apple and the ChatGPT maker were due to face off in court, a new allegation delayed the showdown
An OpenAI employee who left the ChatGPT maker for Apple sent more than 100 files about an unreleased product to a personal account and later made a presentation about the unreleased product to senior Apple leadership, a new filing in the lawsuit between OpenAI and Apple alleges.
In the filing in US federal court in San Jose, California, OpenAI alleged that the presentation happened months ago and that Apple is now making AI products of its own, citing the release of Apple’s HomeView product this week.
(The Center Square) – Several Democratic candidates have razor thin leads over more well-funded Republicans in key races that are now considered statistically tied.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could change how much latitude judges have to determine sentencing in gun possession convictions.
In Beaird v. United States, the Court is considering a sentencing process based on its precedent in Stinson v. United States (1993), which has defined the level of deference in criminal sentencing given to federal judges. The U.S. Sentencing Commission, an independent agency in the judicial branch of government, publishes Federal Sentencing Guidelines for judges to follow, along with commentary to help judges interpret the guidelines.
In Stinson, a unanimous Court gave great deference to the commentary in sentencing decisions, holding that “the Guidelines Manual’s commentary which interprets or explains a guideline is authoritative unless it violates the Constitution or a federal statute, or is inconsistent with, or a plainly erroneous reading of, that guideline.”
Kendrick Jarrell Beaird is challenging the Stinson precedent. Beaird filed his appeal in forma pauperis, under the conditions of a Court rule that allowed him to waive filing fees with the representation from public defenders.
The Path to the Court
Beaird was arrested for possession of a gun following a felony conviction. A Northern District of Texas grand jury indicted Beaird under 18 U.S.C922(g)(1), a statute that punishes someone previously convicted of a felony from possessing a firearm that has moved in their possession via interstate commerce. Beaird failed at the trial court in his claims alleging violations of the Second Amendment and Commerce Clause, and he pleaded guilty.
A federal judge consulted the Federal Sentencing Guidelines for someone possessing a “semiautomatic firearm that is capable of accepting a large capacity magazine.” Beaird was found in possession a Glock capable of holding 17 rounds of ammunition. The Sentencing Commission’s official commentary on the federal guidelines called for 63 to 78 months of imprisonment for possession of a semiautomatic firearm that “had attached to it a magazine or similar device that could accept more than 15 rounds of ammunition.”
The judge sentenced Beaird to 72 months of imprisonment, to be followed by three years of supervised release. In his appeal, Beaird’s defense argued that commentary on the sentencing guidelines had improperly expanded the definition of a large-capacity magazine. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision and sentencing. In taking this case, the Supreme Court limited arguments to the holding in Stinson as it applied in Beard’s case.
Beaird’s appeal took several turns. Initially, the Solicitor General responded to the Court that Beaird’s petition should be denied. But once the Court accepted the case limited to the Stinson guidelines precedent, the United States asked the Supreme Court to vacate the appeals court decision so the lower courts could consider the case focusing on the Stinson precedent. Then, the Supreme Court moved to appoint an amicus curiae, Anthony J. Dick of Washington, D.C., to argue the position that Stinson correctly defined the deference that courts must give to the commentary on Sentencing Guidelines.
The Arguments at the Court
During arguments, public defender Kevin Joel Page, representing Beaird, faced repeated questions from the justices about changing the Court’s precedent in Stinson and granting more discretion to federal judges in sentencing.
“The proper rule for deference to guideline commentary is no deference. Nothing in the text of the Sentencing Reform Act suggests that courts must ever defer to commentary when interpreting a guideline, let alone defer . . . according to the extreme rule of Stinson,” argued Page.
“What concerns me about your arguments is that you’re suggesting that they are separable in some way which is really not the way in which the guidelines were devised,” said Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who served as assistant special counsel of the U.S. Sentencing Commission from 2003 to 2005 and as a commissioner and vice chair from 2010 to 2014.
Jackson told Page that his argument represented “a fundamental misunderstanding” of the guidelines and commentary, which she said are linked together. “When you are a judge, you’re using both to reach the right answer under the guidelines, and there is a right answer as to what the guideline range is,” she said.
While Page noted Stinson and other precedents allowed a judge to ignore the commentary if it is not consistent with the guidelines for sentencing, Jackson believed Page’s position allowed a judge to ignore both.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor seemed skeptical of Page’s arguments, stating “you’re creating a sea of confusion for district court judges to fill in the blanks.”
Several justices pointed to the Court’s precedent in United States v. Booker (2005), which held that the guidelines were advisory and not mandatory. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch asked Deputy Solicitor General Eric J. Feigin how the Court should account for the Booker precedent in this case.
“We do not think that the commentary as it’s been promulgated by the Commission can either be viewed right now as a policy statement or as a guideline,” Feigin told Gorsuch.
Justice Samuel Alito wondered what would happen in the Court overturned Stinson and cases had to be reconsidered. Feigin countered that, “I think we’d argue that in a lot of those cases, the courts reached the correct result notwithstanding having referenced the commentary.”
The Court-appointed amicus curiae, Anthony J. Dick, echoed the Court’s landmark decision in Marbury v. Madison in his opening statement. “It is emphatically the province of the judiciary to say what the law is, but the advisory sentencing guidelines are not the law. They are advisory. As a result, when interpreting the guidelines, the question is not what the law is but, rather, what is the non-binding advice that the Commission is offering about what type of sentence should be imposed?”
“Stinson should be upheld. There's no reason to create the chaos that would come from overruling it,” he concluded.
Dick faced extensive questioning from Justice Neil Gorsuch, who disagreed with Dick’s characterization of Stinson. “It’s a nice reconceptualization of Stinson, but that's not what Stinson said,” Gorsuch noted.
“What about the topsy-turvy problem that we have binding commentary—advisory guidelines?” Gorsuch asked Dick in one exchange, referencing the Booker precedent. After Dick refuted any problem, Gorsuch remarked, “[Y]ou say this is all good with Booker, but, boy, the more you make these things binding, you’re creeping up to a Booker problem again.”
After arguments concluded, Chief Justice John Roberts thanked Dick for his service as amicus curiae.
For now, the justices will consider the Stinson precedent in context of several other precedents mentioned during arguments that could affect how federal judges take Sentencing Commission’s commentary into account. The question is whether Stinson will remain as the basis for such precedents going forward, or whether the Court will create a new test in its place clearly allowing judges more latitude in sentencing decisions?
Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.
(The Center Square) – Advancing American Freedom Foundation wants Congress to see how much electricity data centers use. It also wants states to reveal how much their data center tax breaks cost.
State officials, healthcare providers and advocates gathered Wednesday at ChristianaCare’s Wilmington Hospital to encourage women to stay current with recommended screenings, understand their family medical histories and seek help when cost, transportation or access to care becomes a barrier. Photo Courtesy of the State of Delaware.
With nearly 5,000 women diagnosed over five years, Delaware health leaders emphasize the importance of screening, affordable treatment and addressing disparities in breast cancer outcomes.
WILMINGTON, Del. — With nearly 5,000 Delaware women diagnosed with breast cancer over a recent five-year period, health leaders are using Breast Cancer Awareness Month to reinforce a message that could save lives: Early detection and timely access to treatment can dramatically improve the chances of survival.
State officials, healthcare providers and advocates gathered Wednesday at ChristianaCare’s Wilmington Hospital to encourage women to stay current with recommended screenings, understand their family medical histories and seek help when cost, transportation or access to care becomes a barrier.
The event brought together Gov. Matt Meyer, former first lady Dr. Jill Biden, Lt. Gov. Kyle Evans Gay, Delaware Department of Health and Social Services Secretary Christen Linke Young, Delaware Surgeon General Dr. Neil Hockstein and ChristianaCare President and CEO Jenn Schwartz.
Meyer signed a proclamation recognizing October as Breast Cancer Awareness Month, honoring survivors, remembering those who have died from the disease and recognizing the healthcare professionals, caregivers and advocates who support patients and families.
Delaware faces significant breast cancer challenges
Breast cancer was the most commonly diagnosed cancer among Delaware women from 2018 through 2022, with nearly 5,000 diagnoses during that period.
Delaware’s breast cancer incidence rate ranks second nationally, according to state officials, and disparities remain significant. Black women in Delaware experience higher breast cancer mortality rates than white women.
The difference between detecting cancer early and discovering it after it has spread can be substantial.
According to the American Cancer Society, the five-year relative survival rate exceeds 99% when breast cancer is detected before it spreads beyond the breast. That rate falls to approximately 32% when the cancer has spread to distant parts of the body.
“Early detection saves lives, and access to timely diagnosis and effective treatment gives patients the best chance for a successful outcome,” Hockstein said.
“Breast cancer touches nearly every family in Delaware and while we’ve made tremendous progress in screening and treatment, significant disparities remain, particularly among Black women, who continue to experience higher mortality rates,” he said.
Screening is important, but access remains a concern
Health officials emphasized that knowing when to get screened is only part of the challenge. Some Delawareans delay mammograms or follow-up care because of cost, transportation problems, difficulty finding an appointment or lack of insurance.
Delaware’s Screening for Life program helps eligible residents obtain cancer screenings and related services, reducing some of the financial barriers that can prevent early detection.
“No one should have to put off a potentially lifesaving screening because of cost, transportation or difficulty finding an appointment,” Linke Young said.
“Through programs like Screening for Life and partnerships with health care providers across Delaware, we’re working to make breast cancer screening and treatment more accessible so more Delawareans can get the care they need, when they need it.”
The broader challenge is not simply encouraging more screenings but ensuring patients can move promptly from an abnormal mammogram to additional testing, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up care.
“Every woman deserves high-quality, accessible care regardless of her ZIP code, income or insurance status,” Meyer said. “Early detection is critical, but so is ensuring that once Delawareans are diagnosed, they can afford the appointments and care that follow.”
ChristianaCare’s Schwartz emphasized the role of healthcare providers in supporting patients throughout the screening and treatment process.
“We are here for our neighbors when they need an annual mammogram, when they have a question, when they’re waiting for results,” Schwartz said. “And, if you receive a breast cancer diagnosis, we’re here for that too, with extraordinary physicians.”
A personal reminder to prioritize screening
For some participants, the message was personal.
Gay, who turned 40 this year, shared that she had scheduled her own mammogram and encouraged others to make time for preventive care.
“This year I turned 40 and I got my mammogram. I encourage others to take time to take care of themselves,” Gay said.
She also recognized the caregivers and advocates who support patients through diagnosis, treatment and recovery.
Biden, who founded the Biden Breast Health Initiative in Delaware before serving as first lady, has been a longtime advocate for breast cancer education and women’s health.
“Early detection could save your life,” Biden said. “There’s nothing on your to-do list more important than that.”
Biden’s work has included encouraging young women to learn about breast health and advocating for greater attention to women’s health research and cancer treatment.
Understanding family history and genetic risks
Breast Cancer Awareness Month also provides an opportunity for Delawareans to learn more about inherited risks.
Certain genetic changes can increase the likelihood of developing breast and ovarian cancers. Genetic counseling can help patients understand their family histories, assess inherited risks and determine whether genetic testing may be appropriate.
A Delaware law signed in August 2025 is intended to make that process easier.
Senate Bill 70, sponsored by Sen. Nicole Poore and Rep. Krista Griffith, allows licensed genetic counselors to order genetic tests directly, eliminating an additional step for some patients seeking information about inherited health risks.
The law maintains requirements for physician referrals when medical assessments are necessary.
By improving access to genetic information, healthcare providers and patients can make more informed decisions about additional screening, preventive care and treatment options.
Turning awareness into action
While Breast Cancer Awareness Month brings additional attention to the disease, health leaders emphasized that its value ultimately depends on people taking action.
That includes discussing screening recommendations with a healthcare provider, knowing family medical history and following up promptly when additional testing is recommended.
For women facing financial or logistical barriers, state programs and healthcare organizations can provide assistance in accessing screenings and care.
The Wilmington gathering underscored a shared message from medical professionals, advocates and public officials: Early detection can save lives, but those benefits must be accessible to every Delawarean, regardless of income, insurance status or where they live.
TO GO: Breast Cancer Awareness Month
What: October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, encouraging early detection, screening and support for patients and survivors.
Who should consider screening: Women should discuss mammogram recommendations with their healthcare providers based on age, individual risk factors and family medical history. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends mammograms every two years for women ages 40 to 74 at average risk.
Need help paying for screening? Delaware’s Screening for Life program provides assistance with cancer screenings for eligible residents.
Concerned about family history? Ask a healthcare provider whether genetic counseling or additional screening may be appropriate.
Important reminder: An abnormal mammogram does not necessarily mean cancer, but prompt follow-up is essential. Anyone experiencing a new breast lump or other concerning breast change should consult a healthcare provider rather than wait for a routine screening.
TW: This article includes mentions of eating disorders.
For my 16th birthday, my mom bought me a cake. Every year, she made me a cake for my birthday: angel food cake with fresh fruit, lemon coconut cake with lemon curd in between the layers, red velvet cake with buttercream frosting and rainbow sprinkles on the top.
But for my 16th birthday, I stumbled down the stairs with my backpack digging into my shoulders, still bleary-eyed from snoozing my alarm clock three times, to find a tall cake with pastel colors, wrapped in fondant that was pressed elegantly to fit the curves of the pastry, topped off with French macarons in shades of pastel purple, blue and pink.
My mom hadn’t made this cake; it was the kind that was made specifically for a person from a high-end pastry store and cost a lot more than it should but made you feel super special. I should have felt super special.
As any 16-year-old would, or should when being gifted such a cake, I beamed. I presented the biggest smile I could muster. I hoped my mom couldn’t tell that my cheeks didn’t quite rest on the corners of my mouth the way that they should. I hoped she couldn’t tell that my palms had gone shaky and that a line of sweat had started to drip down my back. I hoped she couldn’t tell that I didn’t feel special.
My heart raced as I sat down at the kitchen island to open cards and blow out the 16 candles that were placed expertly on the cake. I laughed at the right parts of the goofy card that my dad had given me, and pouted at the card my mom had given me about growing up so fast. I hugged my parents and my siblings, thanking them a multitude of times for making me feel so special.
“It’s a special day,” my mom said.
Really, the entire time I was in a trance: simply going through the motions, my head detached from my body. I had gotten good at acting, though.
I had a lot of practice.
So when my mom went to cut the cake, I sat on my hands to hide the shaking. I bit my lip and continued to present the best closed-mouth smile I could. All eyes were on me. I couldn’t nonchalantly spit my bite into a napkin under the table when no one was looking, or pretend to blow my nose and fold my food into the tissue.
I took a bite of the cake, and I swallowed. I took another bite of the cake, and swallowed. It was good. Like melt-in-your-mouth-I-would-eat-the-whole-cake-if-I-didn’t-have-self-restraint good, but my brain was screaming at me for eating that single slice. I attempted to steady my breathing when I hopped down from the high chair, excusing myself to the bathroom.
Routinely, I went to the one upstairs so that no one could hear me, turned on the fan and the sink, put back my hair and knelt before the toilet bowl. I had gotten so used to this routine that I had forgotten to feel for it. This time, though, I felt. Tears pricked at my eyes as I heaved into the bowl, the porcelain cool beneath my fingers.
My mom had bought me the most beautiful cake; I should have felt so special, but instead, I couldn’t stop feeling like a failure. My brain applauded me, but my heart wrenched. I brushed my teeth, wiped my mascara and headed back downstairs.
For roughly a year, I became really good at acting. As far as everyone around me was concerned, I was content. Happy even. I deserved an award. I masked the exhaustion that came from not supplying my body with enough energy, the headaches that came with the times spent over the toilet bowl.
It’s so funny how I didn’t realize that when my mind applauded me for eating less and exercising more, for those times spent over the toilet bowl and invitations out to lunch or dinner that I declined, I never felt truly happy.
I guess that’s what happens when your mind is at war with your body; when you convince yourself that being empty makes you feel more whole.
As my wrists got thinner and my clothes got looser, my common Google searches became filled with “lowest calorie meals” and “how to be less hungry.” During one of my searches for bread alternatives, Google led me to a girl just like me, whose mind was also at war with her body. As I read her story, I felt understood at a time in which I had conditioned myself to feel nothing. Her words comforted me, and I finally let myself feel what I needed to, rather than what I thought I should. I realized that what I was experiencing wasn’t ridiculous or dramatic, but justified.
I wish I could go back to that time sometimes, to check in. To tell myself that I could die any day, and no one would remember if I was a size two in jeans. They would remember my hugs and my laugh; my brain and the way I cared for others. They would remember my smile, the one that I had allowed to dim all that time.
For my 18th birthday, my mom made me another cake before school. It was a chocolate mocha cake with brown buttercream frosting and brown chocolate sprinkles that looked like glitter scattered across the top. I beamed at my parents and enveloped them both in a big hug. I blew out all 18 candles and when my mom offered me a slice, I asked for seconds. I ate both slices and left my steady palms on the table. I didn’t think once about going to the bathroom. Instead, I sat there and beamed.
PITTSBURGH, Oct. 14, 2026 — Axe Compute Inc. today announced a strategic partnership with Penguin Solutions, adding Penguin’s deep technical expertise, technology, and services to Axe Compute’s partner network, accelerating Axe Compute Build, the company’s build-to-order program for delivering enterprise-grade AI infrastructure at scale.
This multi-year strategic partnership with Penguin Solutions is intended to speed time to market as Axe Compute works to bring more than $3.45 billion in contracted customer AI infrastructure projects to production globally. Axe Compute has selected Penguin for multiple sites, with the collaboration focused on AI infrastructure deployments that are designed, owned, and operated by Axe Compute. These sites include large GPU clusters where Penguin’s expert-led services will help support AI infrastructure deployment. With Penguin’s team working alongside Axe Compute, the company expects to add capacity to accelerate delivery and take on more Build projects to meet demand in its pipeline.
Through Axe Compute Build, customers co-engineer large AI infrastructure deployments, giving them choice in a constrained market. From there, Axe Compute serves as their end-to-end partner and orchestrator, delivering dedicated AI infrastructure configured to their workloads, performance requirements, hardware preferences, and geographic needs. Penguin will add expert-led deployment and operational services for specified GPU cluster sites. This includes Penguin Solutions’ ClusterWareAI operating system software for managing GPU cluster operations at scale, along with 24×7 network operations center coverage from a Penguin team working alongside Axe Compute.
“Penguin Solutions is a natural fit as we scale our neocloud business. Demand for Axe Compute Build has been exceptional. Customers choose Axe Compute Build because they gain dedicated AI infrastructure tailored to their requirements without the complexity of designing, deploying, and operating it themselves,” said Christopher Miglino, Chief Executive Officer of Axe Compute. “With partners like Penguin adding delivery capacity to our program, we expect to deploy faster and take on more builds, and our customers can activate and sustain high-performance AI infrastructure within the flexible, reliable, and end-to-end operational model that defines Axe Compute.”
“Axe Compute is addressing a critical need in the market by bringing enterprise-grade AI infrastructure online quickly, reliably, and at scale, and our AI Factory Platform is helping enable that growth,” said Kash Shaikh, President and CEO of Penguin Solutions. “What sets our Platform apart is its rare combination of OEM-like differentiated products and deep systems integration expertise. That helps customers like Axe Compute accelerate project delivery and bring additional capacity online to meet growing demand and generate revenue faster while meeting service-level agreements. We look forward to bringing our expert-led services to Axe Compute as it scales AI infrastructure for customers around the world.”
About Axe Compute Inc.
Axe Compute Inc. (NASDAQ: AGPU) is a neocloud AI infrastructure platform built on a fundamental premise: AI innovation should not be constrained by hardware choice or availability. The company provides enterprises and AI innovators with flexibility across hardware, geography, and deployment models. Axe Compute provides the design, deployment, ownership, and operation of large-scale, dedicated AI infrastructure worldwide, supported by enterprise-grade SLAs and operational expertise.
About Penguin Solutions
Penguin Solutions (NASDAQ: PENG) is the AI Factory Platform Company. We design, build, and manage next-generation data centers for enterprises, sovereign AI initiatives, and neocloud providers. With deep design expertise at the intersection of data center AI infrastructure and memory solutions, our Full-Stack AI Factory Platform combines differentiated infrastructure software, advanced memory, compute systems, end-to-end services, and industry-leading partner technologies to help customers accelerate deployment, optimize token economics, and maximize the return on their AI investments.
Climate change has pushed the planet's environmental systems "deeper into uncharted territory," researchers said in a new report centered on the state of Earth's climate in 2026.
Accounts for the Westminster-based company behind ChatGPT show that 110 staff shared £87m in salaries and £168m in shares last year
OpenAI’s London staff each received £2,318,181 on average last year, as the ChatGPT-maker poured Premier League football salaries into its bid to dominate the global AI race.
Accounts for OpenAI UK Ltd, which is based in Westminster but is opening a new HQ in London’s King’s Cross area, showed that 110 staff shared £87m in salaries and £168m in shares in the company, which is aiming to list on the stock market at a valuation of about $1tn.
LAGUNA HILLS, Calif., Oct. 14, 2026 — BrainChip Holdings Ltd., a global leader in ultra-low-power, fully digital, event-based neuromorphic AI, today announced BrainChip Sequora Core IP, a processor IP core that runs generative AI, including large language models (LLMs), directly on battery-powered edge devices.
The next step in BrainChip’s edge AI roadmap, Sequora builds on the strengths of the company’s Akida platform. Its efficiency comes from model structure: a state-space design keeps memory use fixed no matter how long the data stream or conversation runs. As a result, Sequora scales from models of a few million parameters up to 3 billion. Devices that once could only recognize a signal can now understand, explain and respond — at the power levels customers expect from BrainChip.
“Our commercial and aerospace/defense customers are designing AI into many of the next-generation edge systems that provide real-time processing and decision-making in congested and contested environments with minimal footprint in size, weight and power,” said Frank Ferrante, chief executive officer at ForwardEdge ASIC. “Sequora puts generative AI in a low-power IP core that fits many of the demands of the custom silicon we build. It gives us a path to add on-device intelligence to mission-critical edge ASICs.”
What Sequora Does
Sequora removes the memory and power bottleneck that has kept generative AI out of battery-powered devices such as earbuds and sensor nodes. Paired with Akida, it brings two workloads together in one solution: Akida processes streaming sensor data — vibration, audio, radar, raw radio-frequency (RF) IQ data and biological signals — while Sequora runs generative and sequential AI, including on-device LLMs, voice-to-voice interaction and AI agents.
Markets from consumer voice and wearables to aerospace and defense, automotive and industrial radar, industrial IoT, and medical and biomedical devices need conventional inference and generative inference in the same product.
“The edge is where AI becomes useful in everyday infrastructure, from utility meters to mobility systems,” said Jay Kim, CEO of edgeAI Inc. “BrainChip saw early that efficiency would decide who wins at the edge. Now they’re applying that same thinking to generative AI, bringing language and reasoning capabilities to devices that run on a small battery.”
Key challenges Sequora addresses:
Generative models stall on memory bandwidth
Per-word cost that climbs as the conversation (context window) and its cache grow
Memory traffic caps model size on battery power
Make run-time branching predictable for automotive, medical and avionics certification
On-device per-query latency and privacy
Sensing and Generative AI on One Device, One Battery
“Customers are not asking for just a signal classifier or a language model,” said Sean Hehir, chief executive officer, BrainChip. “They want both, in the same product, on the same battery. Akida and Sequora together deliver exactly that.”
Because Sequora runs generative and sequential AI without sending data off the device, it addresses a growing market priority: keeping data and AI models sovereign while minimizing size, weight and power.
Availability
Sequora is available now as licensable semiconductor IP. Customers integrate the design into their own system-on-chip (SoC) and manufacture it at the foundry and process node of their choice. Delivered as process-portable, fully synthesizable register-transfer level (RTL) code, the Sequora package includes verification IP and testbench, synthesis scripts and timing constraints, and an SDK with a static graph compiler, a C++ runtime library and a model zoo.
About BrainChip Holdings Ltd.
BrainChip (ASX: BRN, OTCQX: BRCHF, ADR: BCHPY) is the worldwide leader in edge AI on-chip processing and learning. The company’s first-to-market, fully digital, event-based AI processor, Akida, uses neuromorphic principles to analyze only essential sensor inputs at the point of acquisition, processing data with unmatched efficiency, precision and energy economy. BrainChip’s Sequora is an efficient digital AI processor for GenAI and other large models using state-space architectures. BrainChip’s technology is deployed across industries including aerospace, defense, industrial IoT, healthcare, consumer devices, and wearables. Explore more at www.brainchip.com.
BOCA RATON, Fla. and HOBOKEN, N.J., Oct. 14, 2026 — INmune Bio Inc. and Quantum Computing Inc. (QCi) today announced a collaboration to apply quantum computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics to identify new potential applications for XPro (XPro1595), INmune Bio’s investigational treatment for Alzheimer’s disease and other disease conditions.
The collaboration brings together INmune Bio’s data from pre-clinical research through four clinical trials and understanding of disease biology with QCi’s Dirac-3S quantum optimization machine. Working with clinical and publicly available biomedical datasets, the companies intend to use quantum computing alongside AI and conventional data analytics to uncover relationships that could help find diseases driven by the same biology XPro targets, and to prioritize those with the greatest potential for success.
The Stage 1 engagement represents QCi’s first commercial customer in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology market. The agreement also provides options for additional work as INmune Bio advances its clinical development programs.
“We’ve built a large clinical dataset on Alzheimer’s and other diseases, backed by years of work with XPro,” said David Moss, Chief Executive Officer of INmune Bio. “This collaboration allows us to examine patient populations and biomarkers most likely to predict responses by analyzing large data sets. We’ll look for the diseases with the greatest potential for success, those whose human biology matches what we’ve already seen XPro do, starting with rare diseases where trials can be smaller, faster and more capital-efficient, and where qualifying pediatric approvals may earn a Priority Review Voucher.”
Together, the companies will build on INmune Bio’s research into XPro to explore where its approach to targeting inflammation may offer the greatest potential. XPro is designed to selectively inhibit soluble tumor necrosis factor (TNF), a protein involved in inflammation, while preserving other TNF functions important to the immune system. INmune Bio is investigating its potential in neurological and rare diseases where this targeted approach may offer a therapeutic benefit.
Using its Dirac-3S entropy quantum optimization machine alongside AI and conventional analytics, QCi will look for patterns and relationships across these datasets that could help researchers better understand treatment responses, identify promising patient populations and prioritize new indications for further study.
“This is a great example of what practical quantum computing can look like today,” said Yuping Huang, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of QCi. “INmune Bio has a complex scientific problem and a substantial body of clinical and biological data. Our job is to bring new computing capabilities to that problem and see what we can learn. The potential to help researchers make better decisions about future treatments is exciting, and it opens an important new market for QCi.”
An important part of the program will be testing where quantum optimization adds value. The companies plan to compare results from QCi’s quantum optimization machine with appropriate conventional statistical and machine-learning methods, evaluating which approaches are best suited to different parts of the analysis.
The work is also intended to establish a repeatable discovery process through quantum computing that INmune Bio can use with additional datasets and potential disease indications.
For INmune Bio, the collaboration offers a new way to evaluate the broader potential of XPro and prioritize future development opportunities. For QCi, it represents an opportunity to showcase how its room-temperature, low-power quantum computing technology can be applied to complex, real-world problems in pharmaceutical research.
About INmune Bio Inc.
INmune Bio Inc. is a publicly traded (NASDAQ: INMB), late-stage biotechnology company focused on developing treatments that target the innate immune system to fight disease. The Company’s clinical-development strategy centers on advanced precision medicine, matching drug mechanisms directly to patient biology to optimize clinical outcomes. To learn more about INmune Bio’s pipeline and its approach to harnessing the innate immune system, please visit www.inmunebio.com.
About Quantum Computing Inc.
Quantum Computing Inc. (Nasdaq: QUBT) is an integrated quantum photonics company developing and manufacturing technologies that use light to compute complex information, capture hard-to-detect signals and communicate more securely. QCi brings together quantum optics, integrated photonics, semiconductor manufacturing and advanced packaging to create a more direct path from advanced science to practical products.
QCi’s portfolio includes quantum machines, photonic chips, components, modules and subsystems, as well as foundry and advanced manufacturing services. Its technologies are designed to operate at room temperature and low power, without the specialized cooling infrastructure required by many quantum approaches. These advantages enable deployment across computing and AI, secure communications, sensing and imaging, aerospace and defense, and other demanding applications.
Headquartered in Hoboken, New Jersey, QCi has operations across the United States. By combining advanced physics, device engineering and scalable manufacturing, QCi is working to make quantum and advanced photonic technologies more accessible and useful in the real world.
To learn more about QCi and its approach to harnessing light for practical quantum computing, please visit www.quantumcomputinginc.com.
College Democrats and Republicans join forces to organize Senate debate after UD’s traditional program fails to materialize; Katz plans Oct. 19 town hall.
NEWARK, Del. — A bipartisan effort by University of Delaware students to organize a U.S. Senate debate has become the latest point of disagreement between Democratic Sen. Chris Coons and Republican challenger Dr. Mike Katz, raising questions about whether Delaware voters will have an opportunity to see the candidates debate before the Nov. 3 election.
The College Republicans and College Democrats at UD worked together to propose a campus debate after the university’s traditional Delaware Debates program did not materialize this election cycle.
According to statements from the College Republicans and Katz campaign, Katz accepted the invitation and offered to participate in any format, at any time and location on campus. The student Republicans said the Coons campaign declined.
The development follows an earlier debate proposal from WDEL and CoastTV that Katz accepted and his campaign says Coons declined.
The competing decisions have renewed a question for both campaigns: How will Delaware voters be able to compare the candidates’ records, positions and proposals before casting their ballots?
Students seek bipartisan solution
The joint proposal represented an unusual example of cooperation between student organizations representing opposing political parties.
College Democrats President Sophie Douglas and College Republicans President Tim Schugsta helped lead the effort to create a forum where voters could hear from both candidates.
“The proposal showed that College Democrats and College Republicans at UD can work together in a good-faith effort to serve our state,” the College Republicans said in a statement.
The organizations have previously cooperated on campus activities, including a Sept. 11 remembrance and discussions about political polarization.
Katz praised the students for putting aside political differences.
“When the UD College Democrats and College Republicans put aside their political differences to promote open debate, elected leaders should applaud their leadership — not shut them down,” Katz said.
The College Republicans also thanked Douglas and her leadership board for helping organize the proposed event.
The organization said it hopes to continue working with the College Democrats on future opportunities for civic engagement.
The College Democrats’ independent account of the debate discussions was not included in the statements provided to Delaware LIVE.
Coons campaign has not provided an explanation
Coons, who has represented Delaware in the U.S. Senate since 2010, has not publicly explained his decision to decline the student proposal in a statement located by Delaware LIVE.
Candidates frequently consider scheduling, format, moderators and other factors before agreeing to debate invitations. Declining a particular invitation does not necessarily mean a candidate is unwilling to participate in other public forums.
Both candidates have participated in individual interviews and other campaign appearances. Katz’s campaign also acknowledged that the candidates appeared at a September forum at the Jewish Community Center, although the format did not allow direct exchanges between them.
Still, a traditional debate provides an opportunity for candidates to answer identical questions, respond to criticism and defend their positions in front of the same audience.
For voters, the distinction is meaningful. Coons has a nearly 16-year Senate record to defend, while Katz is asking voters to consider a change in representation.
“Senator Coons has served in Washington for 16 years. Delaware voters deserve to compare our records, our positions, and our plans for the future before voting begins,” Katz said.
Delaware LIVE has not located a public statement from the Coons campaign explaining its decision to decline the proposed student-led debate or responding to allegations concerning interactions with student organizers. Delaware LIVE contacted the Coons campaign headquarters by telephone and left a message requesting comment. As of publication, the campaign had not responded directly.
Student Republicans raise concerns about campaign interactions
Beyond the debate invitation, the College Republicans raised concerns about how the Coons campaign responded to students involved in the organizing effort.
In their statement, the College Republicans alleged that representatives of the Coons campaign “scolded individuals for simply reaching out to gauge interest in this debate.”
The Katz campaign separately criticized Coons campaign manager Matt Schoonmaker, alleging that a College Democrat involved in the proposal had been reprimanded.
Those allegations have not been independently verified by Delaware LIVE.
Neither the precise communications between the campaign and student organizers nor the circumstances surrounding the alleged exchange have been independently established.
The Coons campaign has not provided its account of those discussions.
The distinction matters because there may be differences between a campaign declining an invitation, expressing concerns about the organization of an event and discouraging students from pursuing a bipartisan debate.
The student organizations’ statements raise questions deserving clarification, but the allegations should not be treated as facts without additional information.
Traditional Delaware Debates absent from election calendar
The controversy follows uncertainty surrounding the University of Delaware’s longstanding Delaware Debates program.
The university has hosted candidate debates since 2010, providing a forum for Delaware voters to hear from candidates seeking statewide and federal office.
In September, Delaware LIVE reported that the university had not announced debates for the 2026 election cycle, although the university’s website continued to describe the program.
At that time, Delaware LIVE could not independently confirm that the university had formally canceled this year’s debates.
Katz subsequently called on Delaware Republican and Democratic leaders and media organizations to help organize a televised debate.
On Sept. 29, Katz’s campaign announced that he had accepted an invitation from WDEL for a debate that would also be broadcast on CoastTV. The campaign said Coons declined and WDEL’s offer remained open.
The latest student proposal would have provided another opportunity for the two candidates to appear together.
Katz questions media scrutiny
Katz also used the announcement to question whether Delaware news organizations have provided sufficient scrutiny of the debate decisions.
His campaign specifically mentioned The News Journal, Delaware Online and Spotlight Delaware, arguing that declining debate opportunities should receive greater attention.
“Delaware already has a limited number of major news outlets. That makes independent, investigative journalism more important than ever,” Katz said. The criticism reflects the candidate’s view of media coverage. It does not establish that the organizations deliberately avoided the issue.
The broader accountability question applies to both candidates.
“Voters have an interest in understanding why Coons has declined the reported debate opportunities, including whether alternative formats were offered,” stated a spokesperson from the Katz Campaign. “A debate could provide an opportunity to question both candidates about federal spending, economic policy, immigration, health care, foreign affairs and other issues affecting Delaware residents.”
Katz plans Oct. 19 campus town hall
With the proposed joint debate off the calendar, the College Republicans plan to host Katz for a town hall Monday, Oct. 19, at the Trabant University Center in Newark.
The organization has invited College Democrats and other political student organizations to attend.
“I look forward to meeting with students — Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike — listening to their concerns, answering difficult questions, and discussing Delaware’s future,” Katz said.
The event will provide an additional opportunity for students to question Katz, although it will not offer the same direct comparison available when both candidates participate in a debate.
Early voting in Delaware begins Oct. 22, giving voters limited time to evaluate the candidates before ballots can be cast. The general election is Nov. 3.
Whether another organization can arrange a debate before Election Day remains uncertain.
For Delaware voters, the unanswered issue is not simply which campaign accepted or declined an invitation, but whether the candidates will appear together to answer questions, explain their differences and defend their records before the election.
TO GO: Senate candidate town hall and voting information
Event: U.S. Senate candidate town hall featuring Republican nominee Dr. Mike Katz
Date: Monday, Oct. 19, 2026
Time: 7 p.m.
Location: Trabant University Center, University of Delaware, Newark
Organizer: College Republicans at the University of Delaware
Participation: College Democrats and other student political organizations have been invited.
Early voting: Begins Thursday, Oct. 22, and continues on designated dates through Nov. 1.
General election: Tuesday, Nov. 3. Polls open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Senior Care Options: Technology is expanding what is possible at home. Assisted living communities are shifting their focus from managing decline to promoting wellness and a sense of purpose. And specialized advisers are helping families navigate the increasingly sophisticated choices. Image created on 10/14 using AI.
Artificial intelligence, purpose-driven assisted living and new approaches to care planning are giving Delaware families more ways to keep aging parents safe, independent and engaged in life.
WILMINGTON, Del. — When Mom begins forgetting medications, struggling with daily routines or becoming less comfortable living alone, families face a familiar question: Can she safely remain at home, or is it time for assisted living?
The answer is changing, and families have more choices than ever.
“We’ve also shifted from reactive to proactive, anticipating challenges and guiding families to avoid pitfalls — delivering greater value and peace of mind,” said Lynn Paxson, owner of Oasis Senior Advisors of Delaware, reflecting on how her business has evolved over the past decade.
Technology is expanding what is possible at home. Assisted living communities are shifting their focus from managing decline to promoting wellness and a sense of purpose. And specialized advisers are helping families navigate the increasingly sophisticated choices.
For caregivers, the transformation offers opportunities to anticipate problems, preserve independence and potentially improve an aging parent’s quality of life while reducing some of the burdens on family members.
Artificial Intelligence Makes Staying Home More Practical
One significant advance involves artificial intelligence systems that can monitor a senior’s safety even when a professional caregiver is not present.
Griswold Home Care, which serves Delaware families, has partnered with Wisdom to introduce technology-enhanced services through its Griswold Care Plus program.
Small audio-sensing devices installed throughout a home use artificial intelligence to recognize patterns and identify possible falls, calls for help, unusual activity or changes in daily routines. The system does not require cameras or wearable devices.
Patrick Gray, who operates Griswold Home Care serving Wilmington, has described how the technology gives professional caregivers information they previously lacked.
In one example, repeated falls were identified during a client’s morning routine, allowing the care team and family to recognize the need for additional assistance.
The technology can help determine whether caregiving schedules should change or whether more intensive support is necessary.
Combined with hands-on assistance for bathing, meals, transportation and companionship, these tools can make remaining at home a more practical option for some families.
For adult children, they can provide greater awareness of what happens between visits and reduce uncertainty about a parent’s safety.
Easterseals Lets Families See the Technology for Themselves
For families uncertain about what technology might help an aging parent, Easterseals Delaware & Maryland’s Eastern Shore offers a practical place to explore the possibilities.
Its Resource and Technology Demonstration Center at 61 Corporate Circle in New Castle features hundreds of assistive devices designed to help people remain independent.
The approximately 3,000-square-foot center demonstrates everything from adaptive clothing, specialized eating utensils and medication aids to mobility equipment and voice-activated household controls.
Families can see how relatively simple tools might make eating, dressing, bathing and other daily activities easier and safer.
The center can also demonstrate Griswold’s AI-supported home monitoring technology for caregivers interested in understanding how newer systems can supplement traditional home care.
Easterseals staff help visitors explore appropriate options and understand where equipment can be obtained. The nonprofit does not sell the products, and virtual tours are available for people unable to visit.
The center provides a useful starting point for families who may not realize how many technologies and everyday adaptations are available.
Not every solution requires an expensive electronic system. Sometimes a modified utensil, adaptive clothing or simple home safety device can make a meaningful difference in a senior’s independence.
Assisted Living Shifts From Managing Decline to Encouraging Purpose
Assisted living is undergoing a different, but equally important, transformation.
Historically, many families considered assisted living primarily when an older adult could no longer manage independently. The emphasis was often on meals, medications, personal care and supervision.
Today’s model increasingly includes helping residents remain physically active, socially connected, and engaged in meaningful activities.
Harmony Senior Services, which operates communities in Delaware, is among the providers promoting this approach.
Its Living Life in Harmony programming emphasizes physical wellness, intellectual stimulation, social relationships, and opportunities to contribute to the community.
The emphasis on purpose is particularly important.
An older adult who spent decades working, raising a family or volunteering may struggle with isolation after retirement, the death of a spouse or the loss of the ability to drive.
Assisted living can provide opportunities to build friendships, participate in activities, mentor others, and rediscover interests that have become difficult to pursue independently.
Instead of spending the day managing household chores, meals, and transportation, residents may have more time for relationships and meaningful activities.
The approach also changes the conversation about when to move. Rather than waiting for a medical crisis, some families are considering assisted living earlier, while their parent can fully participate in community life.
For other seniors, remaining in familiar surroundings will continue to provide the greatest independence and quality of life.
AI Is Improving Memory Care, Too
Artificial intelligence is also finding a role inside residential communities.
Arden Courts, which specializes in memory care for people living with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, has introduced AI-supported fall detection in select communities.
The optional technology uses cameras and artificial intelligence to detect falls and preserve a short video record of the incident for authorized caregivers to review.
This can be particularly valuable for residents who may have difficulty explaining what happened.
Rather than simply responding to a fall, caregivers can review the circumstances and consider whether changes to furniture placement, mobility assistance or supervision might prevent another incident.
The technology can become part of an individualized care plan, combining specialized memory care with additional information about safety.
Arden Courts operates a memory care community in Wilmington, although availability of the technology at that location requires confirmation.
The larger development is that technology is no longer simply a tool for helping seniors avoid moving into assisted living. It is increasingly becoming part of improving care inside residential communities as well.
Senior Care Consulting Is Changing With the Choices
As options multiply, the professionals helping families make decisions are changing their approach, too.
Traditionally, senior placement services often focused on identifying assisted living communities, comparing costs and arranging visits.
Those services remain valuable, but determining where Mom should live is increasingly only part of the challenge.
Families may first need to understand whether home monitoring, adaptive equipment, professional caregivers, or household modifications could help a parent remain independent.
Others may need to evaluate cognitive changes, mobility limitations, or whether a residential community could improve their parent’s social engagement and quality of life.
Paxson said her Oasis Senior Advisors team now includes professionals with years of experience in physical therapy, social work, hospice care, assisted living and cognitive therapy.
Those backgrounds bring different perspectives to care planning, helping families consider physical limitations, memory changes, safety, emotional well-being and the practical responsibilities of family caregivers.
The advisers help families understand available services and appropriate next steps, while clinical evaluations remain the responsibility of qualified health professionals.
The growing range of options is also making early planning more important.
A family might begin with relatively inexpensive assistive devices demonstrated at Easterseals, add AI-supported home monitoring and professional caregiving as needs increase, and eventually consider an assisted living community that emphasizes wellness and social engagement.
Another family may decide that moving sooner will offer a better quality of life.
The decisions remain personal, and costs, safety needs and individual preferences all matter.
But the changing models give families something they did not always have: more opportunities to address challenges before they become emergencies.
For Delaware caregivers, the question is no longer simply whether Mom can stay home or needs to move.
It is what combination of technology, professional care, purposeful activity and experienced guidance will help her remain safe, independent and engaged in life.
TO GO: Resources for Delaware Caregivers
Oasis Senior Advisors of Delaware
Professional guidance for families evaluating senior living and care options.
Website: oasissenioradvisors.com
Easterseals Resource and Technology Demonstration Center
61 Corporate Circle, New Castle
Explore hundreds of assistive devices, adaptive equipment and technology solutions. Virtual tours are available.
DOVER, Del. — Dover Police arrested 14 adults during a multi-agency operation Tuesday in downtown Dover targeting alleged drug activity, trespassing and other quality-of-life concerns.
The operation focused on South New Street near Reed Street and South Governors Avenue near Reed Street. Dover Police were assisted by Delaware Probation and Parole, Delaware State Police, the FBI, DEA and U.S. Marshals Service.
Police said detectives obtained six search warrants for areas surrounding properties on South Governors Avenue and also observed alleged drug dealing and trespassing at 46 South New Street.
Two people were charged with drug dealing and conspiracy. Eight were charged with trespassing. Two others were charged with trespassing, drug dealing and possession of a controlled substance, while two were charged with trespassing and possession of a controlled substance.
Police said all 14 arrests were made without incident. Bail information was pending at the time of the department’s release.
The Dover Police Department said it plans to continue working with law enforcement partners, residents and business owners to address criminal activity and quality-of-life concerns in the downtown area.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump’s newly appointed press secretary, Katie Zacharia, is facing a request for a California State Bar investigation over repeated claims that she is a lawyer despite no public record showing she is licensed to practice law in the United States.
The nonprofit Campaign for Accountability filed a complaint Wednesday asking the State Bar of California to determine whether Zacharia violated state law by presenting herself as an attorney without a license.
Zacharia earned a law degree from Pepperdine University in 2011 and has described herself as a lawyer during television appearances. She also previously held the title of general counsel for Fix California, a conservative nonprofit founded by Trump ally Richard Grenell.
The California State Bar says it has no record of Zacharia being licensed under either her current or maiden name. Reviews of attorney databases have similarly found no admission in other U.S. jurisdictions.
Questions intensified Tuesday when a reporter asked Zacharia which state’s bar examination she passed. Her response appeared to reference moving to China rather than identifying a U.S. jurisdiction. Foreign nationals generally cannot qualify as licensed Chinese attorneys.
The White House maintains that Zacharia performed international transactional legal work in China with appropriate credentials but has not produced evidence of a U.S. law license.
No finding of wrongdoing has been made, and the California Bar has not said whether it will open a formal investigation.
The protests around an anti-ICE T-shirt show that politics can never be separated from sports, especially now
On 26 September, Daniela Silva was expelled from Austin FC’s match with San Diego FC for wearing a T-shirt reading “Abolish ICE”. She says she was banned from Q2 Stadium for a year (Austin FC said that the ban was issued by the Austin Police Department, not the club, and that they offered to rescind it but that Silva declined).
Leander Schaerlaeckens is the author of The Long Game: US Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, which is out now. He teaches at Marist University.
I'm wondering if anyone has tried the Fusion Core by VOW? What are the thermals like?
I really want a build with the Cannoncore V3, Fusion Core to mount the VESC inside the axel, and 20S2P 21700 in both front and back (using his custom boxes). I know it would be heavy but it would be so cool!
After Trump’s Russian diesel deal, will Europe give Ukraine the support it needs? Expert commentjon.wallace
The new row between Washington and Kyiv must not distract Europe’s leaders from the urgent matter at hand: how to sustain Ukraine’s economy through the winter.
An intervention by President Donald Trump this week has once again created problems for Ukraine’s war effort. The president’s deal with Moscow, which could see millions of barrels of Russian diesel released to global markets, was condemned by Democrats and even some prominent Republicans in the US. Trump openly framed the deal as an effort to secure ‘Lower prices for Americans’ as midterm elections approach in November.
It is uncertain that the deal will do much to swing votes back to the president’s party. But it has created another open dispute between Trump and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy – at precisely the moment when Ukraine needs renewed, focussed support from its allies.
A mounting Russian assault
Recent weeks have seen a noticeable shift in Russia’s war strategy. Some had expected Putin to order a new wave of mobilization and a renewed offensive in the Donbas. Instead, he has moved to intensify Russia’s ballistic missile and drone campaign, with the aim of breaking Ukraine’s economy.
There has been a marked uptick in attacks on ports, grain storage and shipping, seemingly to block Ukrainian agricultural exports. Key bridges across the River Dnipro in Kyiv have been hit. So have railways across the country. And attacks have continued on Ukraine’s energy grid (despite the ‘energy ceasefire’ Trump claimed was part of his deal with Moscow), extending beyond generation to transmission infrastructure. Meanwhile, strikes on Ukraine’s steel plants have put five blast furnaces permanently out of action. Retail, warehousing and logistic hubs have also been targeted.
Russia’s intention is to tip Ukraine’s economy back into recession, cause hardship, and erode the morale of Ukrainians. It may even hope to spark a new migration crisis out of the country.
Ukraine’s ask of its allies
Wreaking havoc on Ukraine’s budget, as GDP stagnates, revenues stall, and the budget deficit widens, will increase Ukraine’s needs and the financing ask it makes of its allies in Europe.
That is a serious problem. Ukraine was already warning of a $27 billion defence financing gap in 2026 and a budget financing shortfall of $32 billion in 2027. The problems are so acute that the IMF will likely stall further disbursements under Ukraine’s $7 billion Extended Financing Facility (EFF) unless the financing gap is closed or new financing assurances are provided. The intensification of Russian attacks on the Ukrainian economy will only increase Ukraine’s financing needs, as will an extended war.
Putin’s strategy is clear. He hopes to increase the costs of supporting Ukraine at a time when Europe’s public finances are in a parlous state, and the far right – generally opposed to funding Ukraine’s war effort – appears to be on the rise in some countries. With key elections looming, particularly in France next May, Putin hopes to present Ukraine’s cause as hopeless, unaffordable, and a drain on European taxpayers.
How will EU leaders, gathering in Brussels for a two-day summit, respond?
Russian assets
Europe needs to be ambitious and creative in how it funds Ukraine. The message to Putin should be that, regardless of President Trump, Europe is in this for the long haul and will provide Ukraine with the financial bazooka it needs to win the war.
To begin, the $90 billion Ukraine Support Loan (USL) agreed at the EU Council meeting in December 2025 could be increased. Better still would be to finally bite the bullet and seize the €210 billion of immobilized Russia Central Bank (CBR) assets in the EU (mostly in Belgium) and €25 billion in the UK. It should be an obvious move for Europe’s leaders to have Russia pay for this war rather than their own taxpayers.
The Belgian government, which has resisted any attempt to seize assets, should not have a veto on European security. However, its concerns over shouldering all the liabilities for such a move should be taken on board, with the wider European community providing an indemnity for its legal risks.
First, the assets should be taken out of Belgium’s jurisdiction to a common EU managed Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV). The assets can then be sweated to generate a higher investment return to fund even bigger Extraordinary Revenue Arrangement-style facilities for Ukraine.
Urgent measures are also needed to insulate the Ukrainian economy from Russian attacks. Militarily, the obvious solutions would be to provide Ukraine with more and better air defences. But these are in short supply as a result of President Trump’s war with Iran.
To compensate for the emerging gaps in air defence, new solutions on the financing front are needed. These should include providing funding to enable the speedy reconstruction of lost productive capacity, perhaps through public-private partnerships. Two initiatives on this latter account are currently in focus.
One is a first loss compensation scheme, meant to mitigate the risks to existing insurers. The current threat is that even the limited insurance available to Ukraine will be cut if the risks from war losses increase.
But if the Ukrainian government and international donors offer to cover the first losses from attacks on Ukrainian productive assets, private insurers will be more likely to commit to provide insurance cover. This will ensure that funding is available to provide for the speedy reconstruction of key economic assets – factories, farms, energy assets, transport and logistics infrastructure.
The government of Ukraine and donors could increase the scale and scope of the URGF, perhaps to cover port terminal storage.
Another initiative being pushed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is the extension of the existing Ukrainian Recovery and Reconstruction Guarantee Facility (URGF). This has been used to help insure agricultural exports out of Ukraine. But its cover is limited in size to €2million per shipment and €5 million per client. And it covers just 60 days transit, not storage, and is limited to ‘Free on Board’. That means that farmers are not covered while grains are in port or in storage, where Russia is now stepping up attacks.
Grain exports earn between $10-11 billion annually for Ukraine. Donors have to make the financials of shipping from Ukrainian ports work again. That means helping the market find solutions. To start, the government of Ukraine and donors could increase the scale and scope of the URGF, perhaps to cover port terminal storage.
A deal to force Russia back to the previous Black Sea shipping deal would still be the optimal solution to protect this trade, or perhaps some kind of NATO air or defensive cover for its shipping.
Trump’s deal with Putin undermines Ukraine, but it will not fundamentally change the war situation. What will be decisive is ensuring Ukraine’s economy gets through a difficult winter, so that the country can survive the war and ensure European security in the process. As the US becomes ever more unpredictable, European leadership is needed to bring this about. Will Europe step up?
Cancer is one of the world’s most common diseases, with an average of one in every four people developing cancer at some point in their life. Over the past two months, new research has emerged regarding melanoma treatments from the pharmaceutical companies Merck and Moderna.
On Aug. 19, Merck and Moderna announced phase three of their KEYTRUDA melanoma trials, a prescribed immunotherapy medication used to treat certain types of cancers. The companies are utilizing messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology to prevent melanoma, an aggressive form of skin cancer, from returning and to increase patients’ survival rates. The technology is used to create a new immunotherapy that would be administered through a vaccine.
Immunotherapies train the body’s immune system to find and destroy existing cancer cells. Cancer vaccines, specifically the ones Merck and Moderna are developing, are a form of immunotherapy where a therapeutic vaccine is used in hopes of preventing the return of melanoma. However, they do not completely prevent a melanoma diagnosis.
Kevin Solomon, an associate professor in the university’s department of chemical and biomolecular engineering, explained what therapeutic vaccines are.
“These don’t necessarily allow you to prevent the infection, but it does train your immune system to better recognize and deal with an infection once it takes root and eventually stops a disease from progressing too far,” Solomon said.
Kelvin Lee is the Gore Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, an endowed professorship that is funded by the Gore family. Lee delved into the societal perceptions of this new technology.
“I also recognize the word ‘vaccine’ does have different implications, and there’s a lot of different views in society about that,” Lee said. “Maybe the term ‘cancer vaccine’ could lead to questions from people who might otherwise equate that technology with other kinds of vaccines for infectious disease.”
Cathy Fromen, an associate professor in the departments of chemical and biomolecular engineering and biomedical engineering, explained that this development of cancer vaccines is a crucial stepping stone for more elaborate medical discoveries, including gene editing technologies.
“I think every single advance of mRNA, new therapies and new disease treatment regimens, is a step in the right direction,” Fromen said. “But we still have a long way we can go.”
Fromen mentioned that the university has its own developments in cancer vaccine research.
“There’s a lot of research going on here, in cancer vaccines and cell therapies and monoclonal antibodies, all towards treating cancer,” Fromen said.
As research for the vaccine advances, it not only impacts the scientific world, but all people who have dealt with this disease.
“We’re at the leading edge of a new era,” Lee said. “I think it’s really exciting to see the progress that’s being made. I think, hopefully, all of us are in some way going to benefit.
“We’re all likely to know somebody at some point, whether it’s a friend or a loved one who’s going to be impacted by cancer.”
Lee is looking forward to the future of immunotherapies and shared his excitement.
“To think that there’s now another class of medicines that can really impact and improve people’s lives, I think, is really exciting,” Lee said.
The Yemen war is not just Saudi Arabia’s problem. It’s the Gulf’s tooExpert commentthilton.drupal
The renewed conflict in Yemen exposes the limits of Saudi Arabia’s military options and the vulnerabilities of the Gulf states. A unified Gulf Cooperation Council strategy on Yemen and a credible political settlement between Yemenis are needed.
The Yemen conflict has escalated significantly in recent weeks. Houthi strikes on airports in Riyadh, Abha and Dammam have killed at least 20 people and injured hundreds. Saudi oil infrastructure has also been attacked. Within Yemen, renewed fighting following a Houthi offensive around the strategic Bab al-Mandab Strait has brought return to full-scale war.
The escalation is an alarming reminder of the 2015 Saudi-led intervention in Yemen. This came after the Iran-backed Houthis seized the Yemeni capital Sanaa in September 2014 and ousted the internationally recognized government from power. More than a decade later, the Houthis remain entrenched and clearly emboldened, while Yemen’s government is fragmented. Prospects for a political settlement currently seem remote.
Since the UN-brokered truce in April 2022, Saudi Arabia has sought to disengage militarily from Yemen and pursue a negotiated settlement with the Houthis. Talks gained momentum in 2023, but the Houthis’ involvement in the Gaza war, including attacks on Red Sea shipping and Israel, disrupted the political process. US president Donald Trump’s intensive bombing campaign against the Houthis led to a separate US-Houthi ceasefire in May 2025. But it did not advance solutions to the conflict in Yemen.
Difficult choices for Riyadh
Saudi Arabia now faces a difficult choice between flawed options.
The first option is military escalation through renewed air strikes and an offensive by Yemeni government-aligned forces. But this risks returning Riyadh to the costly, ill-planned and ill-conducted war it has spent years attempting to extricate itself from.
The Houthis have learned that even limited strikes can impose disproportionate economic and political costs. This gives the group leverage that Saudi Arabia’s conventional military superiority has struggled to overcome.
Saudi Arabia cannot win this war alone, but neither can it outsource its resolution.
Seeking to contain the Houthis has also proved insufficient. Although the relative calm following the 2022 truce reduced cross-border attacks, it allowed the Houthis to consolidate their territorial control and strengthen their military capabilities, only to attack Saudi Arabia again.
Negotiation remains the most favourable route towards a lasting settlement. But it faces a fundamental obstacle: the Houthis believe they are winning and have little incentive to compromise.
Nor can Riyadh simply outsource the conflict. The US faces the looming prospect of a renewed confrontation with Iran and is therefore unlikely to have much appetite for opening another front or supporting a prolonged military campaign in Yemen. Saudi Arabia’s defence pact with Turkey and Pakistan may strengthen deterrence and defensive capabilities, but it does not offer a solution to the Houthi threat or Yemen’s underlying political fragmentation.
Saudi Arabia cannot win this war alone, but neither can it outsource its resolution. The lesson of the past decade is that military pressure without a coherent political strategy will only reproduce the conditions that allowed the Houthis to consolidate their position.
A Gulf problem
Instead, a collective Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) response is needed. Yemen and the Houthis have become a collective Gulf security challenge. It would therefore be a mistake to continue treating Yemen primarily as a domestic conflict or a Saudi security problem.
The attacks on Saudi airports have further demonstrated the vulnerability of critical infrastructure across the GCC to missiles, drones and other asymmetric threats. This exposure is not confined to Saudi Arabia. In January 2022, the Houthis launched attacks on Abu Dhabi’s oil facilities and airport, killing three people and injuring six. This threat is particularly concerning for the Gulf states as most of their economic diversification agendas depend on secure aviation, logistics, tourism, investment and a stable regional environment.
Yemen and the Houthis have become a collective Gulf security challenge.
Attacks on Saudi transport infrastructure also threaten the wider Gulf by disrupting vital supply routes. The kingdom’s extensive land connections have become increasingly important and provided alternative supply routes for neighbouring GCC states while the Strait of Hormuz has been disrupted.
Yemen’s economic collapse, water scarcity and demographic pressures also make its stability a long-term Gulf interest.
The GCC must therefore move beyond expressing support for Saudi Arabia. It should pursue a coordinated strategy that creates a unified GCC agenda directed at strengthening Yemen’s government and establishing a credible political pathway to ending the conflict.
Gulf unity must go beyond condemnation
A collective Gulf response must begin by addressing the divisions that have undermined previous efforts in Yemen. Most importantly, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) must move beyond their damaging confrontation over southern Yemen in early 2026. Despite entering the 2015 intervention as allies, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have increasingly pursued competing priorities and supported rival Yemeni factions.
Reconciliation requires more than expressions of solidarity following Houthi attacks. The UAE should reconsider its support for southern separatist ambitions and work towards a unified but decentralized Yemen that accommodates southern grievances and competing political interests.
Without agreement on Yemen’s political future, renewed military coordination will achieve little.
Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, must reassess its dependence on established Yemeni partners, particularly the Islah Party, whose alleged Muslim Brotherhood connections have long generated Emirati opposition. Riyadh’s reliance on Islah-linked networks has narrowed its political options and contributed to divisions within the anti-Houthi camp.
Both countries must recognize that their competing relationships with Yemeni factions have weakened the very forces they seek to support. Without agreement on Yemen’s political future, renewed military coordination will achieve little.
Gulf coordination must also be matched by a serious reassessment of Yemen’s internationally recognized government.
The Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), established in 2022 to replace former president Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, was intended to unite competing anti-Houthi factions. Yet years of internal rivalries, weak governance, and limited institutional accountability, as well as alleged widespread corruption, have undermined its effectiveness.
Saudi Arabia should continue providing financial support to sustain basic services and prevent economic collapse in government-controlled areas. But this backing should go to the government and cabinet, not the PLC.
The experience of the Hadi presidency serves as a clear warning that a decade of backing an ineffective leadership did little to strengthen the Yemeni state or reverse Houthi gains. Today, Riyadh cannot afford to repeat that mistake.
A more effective governance structure is essential not only to strengthen the position of anti-Houthi forces but also to provide a credible Yemeni counterpart in any future political settlement.
Towards a larger Gulf–Yemeni settlement
Although Saudi-Emirati reconciliation is indispensable, a sustainable Gulf strategy must also involve Qatar and Oman.
Qatar should contribute to a more coherent Gulf political approach in Yemen, including through its media influence and relationships with Yemeni actors. Oman, meanwhile, should retain its role as a diplomatic intermediary. Muscat’s channels with the Houthis and preference for mediation make it particularly well placed to facilitate future negotiations without joining military operations.
The ultimate objective should be a Gulf-backed political settlement that preserves a unified but decentralized Yemen and accommodates its competing political constituencies. All factions, including the Houthis, should be able to participate, conditional on verifiable commitments to relinquish heavy weapons and accept a common political framework. This would require sustained Gulf diplomatic and financial support.
After more than a decade of war, the Houthis still control Sanaa, Yemen’s government remains weak and Gulf divisions continue to undermine efforts to end the conflict. Avoiding another prolonged war requires a common Gulf vision, investment in a functioning Yemeni government and a political settlement that addresses the causes of the conflict, rather than merely seeking to contain its consequences.
I was riding my onewheel with admittedly probably too flat of a tire. It only has about 50 miles but I don't have a warranty. After about five minutes, I started noticing the classic repeated bump as I rode. I took it home and checked, expecting a side bulge. But there was no side bulge. Instead, there was only a slight bulge in the middle ring of the tire. Where one part of the tire rose slightly higher than the rest. I put more air in it but it remained. Am I the unluckiest person alive? (Literally just bought this second hand. I've had issues with the last three four onewheels I've bought at this point) Or is this something people have seen before? Maybe just needs more air still even after my pump?
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump drew widespread condemnation Tuesday after sharing graphic footage of a 23-year-old British man being fatally mauled by a tiger, then posting an AI-generated video portraying himself wrestling and cuddling the animal.
William Chapman died Saturday after entering the enclosure of a Siberian tiger named Altai at Yorkshire Wildlife Park. His family has said he struggled with significant mental illness and asked the public to stop circulating footage of his death because it was causing additional distress.
South Yorkshire Police also explicitly urged people not to share the video.
Trump nevertheless posted footage of the fatal attack to Truth Social with the message, “Don’t ever mess with nature!” The official White House Rapid Response account amplified the post.
Hours later, Trump posted an AI-generated clip showing himself chasing, overpowering and eventually embracing a tiger while “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” played. He had also shared a separate montage of people being attacked by lions set to upbeat music.
The posts prompted unusually harsh criticism across the political and media spectrum. Piers Morgan called the video “appallingly tasteless” and urged Trump to delete it, while other commentators condemned the decision to turn a young man’s death into online entertainment.
Authorities are still investigating how Chapman entered the enclosure. The tiger will not be euthanized.
Austin, TX — Voting rights groups are suing Texas after more than 500,000 voter registration applications and updates submitted through the state’s driver’s license system went unprocessed, some dating back nearly a year.
The League of Women Voters of Texas and MOVE Texas Civic Fund are asking a state judge to enforce a 2021 settlement requiring Texas to maintain a functioning process allowing residents to register to vote while completing online driver’s license or identification transactions.
The backlog was caused by a software update error involving the Department of Public Safety’s web portal. County election officials received hundreds of thousands of delayed records last month, while separate problems with the secretary of state’s voter registration system have complicated efforts to clear them ahead of the Nov. 3 midterms.
The lawsuit argues that the failures violate the state’s earlier agreement and says some Texans are still experiencing registration problems.
The plaintiffs want the court to order DPS and the secretary of state to maintain a reliable registration system, disclose records explaining the failures and demonstrate compliance within 30 days.
State officials had reportedly been aware of problems with the system as early as March.
DPS and the Texas Secretary of State’s Office had not publicly responded to the latest lawsuit.
They were victims, not abusers. That’s what they told police officers, attorneys, visitors and anyone else who would listen. It didn’t matter. The women were all taken to a sprawling immigration detention center in the woods of west Michigan and handed thin jumpsuits — red, to mark them as a high security risk.
Inside the North Lake Processing Center, they talked about the men whose calls to police landed them there. The boyfriends or husbands who threatened to get them deported and cut them off from their children. The men, or sometimes women, who hit them, pulled their hair or choked them, bruising their throats.
They didn’t know where to go for help before, but now, in the confines of a cold cellblock in a former prison, the women helped one another. If one spoke to somebody on the outside who could connect them with advice, legal aid or money for the commissary, she’d pass around a tablet used for calls so others could tell their stories.
Migladys Bermudez, an immigration attorney in southeast Michigan, remembers a call in May from a Peruvian woman detained at North Lake. Her name was Pilar, and she’d heard about Bermudez from a fellow detainee who had been a client. Pilar told Bermudez about the boyfriend she tried to escape before her arrest, when she used makeup to cover the marks she said he left on her face. But he had accused her of being the abuser, resulting in her arrest.
Pilar handed the tablet to a Cuban woman named Leya. Over the echoes of the other detainees’ chatter, she described how her boyfriend insulted her, isolated her and gave her a black eye. Then, after grabbing him by the arm during an argument, she was the one behind bars, separated from their nursing daughter. On video calls, the girl didn’t seem to recognize her mother anymore. She stopped calling her “Mamá.”
Bermudez was taken aback. All three women in that chain — the former client, Pilar and Leya — said they were trying to get out of abusive relationships when they were arrested by local police on domestic violence allegations. In all three cases, the charges were dropped or never filed at all. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained the first woman during a routine check-in a few months after her charges were dropped. The others were handed over to ICE by local officials.
It’s long been intimidating for immigrants who suffered abuse to call 911, regardless of who was in the White House. They knew — and their abusers knew — that their immigration status made them vulnerable. But previous administrations treated victims as just that, people who needed help, not as targets for deportation. Bipartisan coalitions in Congress have long supported the Violence Against Women Act, which creates a pathway toward legal status for immigrants who are victims of domestic violence or other serious crimes.
Now, under President Donald Trump, all bets are off. On inauguration day, his administration rescinded guidelines that largely prevented immigration agents from making arrests at sensitive locations — including domestic violence shelters and hospitals. About a week later, the administration eliminated key protections granted to VAWA applicants and other crime victims. For the first time in decades, immigration authorities could disregard those protections and more freely arrest, detain and deport immigrant victims.
Life became more harrowing in other ways for immigrants who were victims of domestic violence. Federal immigration agents made arrests outside specialized domestic violence courts. And the administration persuaded more and more local police and jails to carry out the president’s mass deportation campaign, sweeping still more immigrants into custody.
Even communities without these so-called 287(g) agreements are helping the government round people up. In west Michigan’s Kent County, where Pilar and Leya were arrested, the county jail turned over more immigrants to ICE in the first six months of 2026 than it did during the entire Biden administration.
Advocates across the country say they’re seeing signs of an alarming increase in the numbers of domestic violence victims who are detained and deported. And many immigrants are staying in abusive relationships, fearful of calling for help or even stepping outside their homes.
“It’s just probably the most dangerous time for immigrant women right now who are victims of domestic violence,” said Bermudez, who took on Leya’s immigration case.
The arrest and detention of domestic violence victims is, in part, an unanticipated consequence of an effort meant to keep them safe. In much of the country, law enforcement officers are encouraged — or even required — to make an arrest when they have probable cause to believe that a domestic violence assault has taken place. Sometimes victims are mistaken as the abuser and taken into custody. Then, if they’re immigrants, they can be turned over to ICE — even if they were never criminally charged.
There’s no comprehensive way to track how often this happens or how many domestic violence victims have been detained by ICE or deported. But ProPublica spoke with a half-dozen alleged victims who were locked up together in a single facility, North Lake, and reviewed police records about others who were there, too. Their stories offer a picture of why Congress created programs like VAWA in the first place, and what’s at stake when those guardrails are taken away.
A coalition of immigrant survivors and advocates have sued the Trump administration, saying changes to how immigrant victims are treated not only undermined public safety, but also broke promises enshrined in federal law and policy.
“We were seeing our clients be more scared, be systematically targeted, be arrested, and deported very quickly,” said Kathleen Rivas, supervising attorney of the survivors team at Public Counsel, a law firm that’s involved in the litigation.
In May, a federal judge ordered the government to restore protections while the case played out. The Trump administration has appealed the order.
White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement that ICE is targeting the “worst of the worst.” The real story, she added, is the “American women whose lives have been taken by illegal alien criminals.” A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that “we will never apologize for deporting illegal aliens, because that’s how we save lives.”
But Leya, Pilar and other immigrants we interviewed have no criminal records. And advocates said communities are less safe now because immigrants are afraid to call police when their partners hurt them. This gives more ammunition to the threats of their abusers, said Casey Carter Swegman, director of public policy at the Tahirih Justice Center, a national nonprofit that advocates for immigrant survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking.
“Certainly more immigrant survivors are feeling like the violence and abuse they experience behind the closed door is somehow more tolerable than the violence and abuse they could experience if they tried to leave,” she said.
The first time her boyfriend’s fist slammed into her face was in July 2025, Leya recalled. They were living in Florida with his relatives. Only a month before, Leya gave birth to their daughter.
One night, she said, he heard her laugh in the kitchen with his mother and a man his mother was dating. Leya’s boyfriend flew into a jealous rage, she said, and punched her a few feet from their sleeping baby.
Leya called 911 but hung up when the operator answered. She was afraid of what might happen. She was 26; her boyfriend was a decade her senior. Leya, a recent immigrant from Cuba, had applied for status and was in active immigration proceedings. She said he was a permanent resident, with permission to work in the U.S. and better command of English. She felt trapped.
Sheriff’s deputies arrived and spoke with Leya and her boyfriend. They took photos of her puffy and bruised face, with the white of her left eye bright red. Her boyfriend said the injury occurred during an “argument,” according to the report, but he didn’t specify how. He was arrested on suspicion of domestic battery.
Leya said her boyfriend’s mother threw her out that night. Unsure of where to go, she and her daughter moved in with another one of his relatives. Pursuing a criminal case felt daunting. She said his relatives urged her to drop the charges and reconcile with him. Eventually, she asked prosecutors to drop the charge because the battery took place in “a moment of impulse that he feels very sorry for,” records show. Her boyfriend didn’t enter a plea before the case was dismissed.
Like other immigrants interviewed for this story, Leya asked not to be fully identified because of her pending immigration case, and because she worries about repercussions for her and her daughter.
She and Pilar also asked that ProPublica not interview their alleged abusers because they’re afraid the men will interfere with their cases, hurt them or take away their children. To report their stories and get their partners’ perspective, we reviewed records from law enforcement, immigration court proceedings and habeas corpus petitions seeking their release from detention. We also interviewed attorneys, family and others who interacted with them.
Soon after the Florida arrest, Leya and her boyfriend moved to the city of Wyoming, Michigan, a suburb of Grand Rapids that’s a magnet for immigrants who come for jobs in manufacturing and food processing. The unpretentious city is dotted with temporary staffing agencies, money-wiring businesses and Mexican restaurants.
Leya said their relationship worsened. Her boyfriend pushed her, pulled her hair and broke her phone, she said. He made her delete her social media accounts and isolated her from friends and family. They fought about money and talked about breaking up. One night in April, during an argument, he called the police.
“I’m having problems with my wife,” he said in Spanish, according to a recording of the call. The operator asked if there had been any violence. “No, no, no. None,” he said. “Just a discussion.”
He told officers who came to their apartment complex that Leya got angry because he had talked to an ex-girlfriend, according to body camera footage and a police report. When he tried to leave, he said, Leya pushed him and grabbed his arm. Then she attempted to hang up his phone when he dialed 911.
He said he wasn’t injured, though he accused her of hitting him several times a few days earlier.
Officers interviewed his brother, who mentioned the arrest in Florida, according to bodycam footage. “They had a cycle of problems where she called the police for abuse and he was detained for three days,” he said in Spanish. “My brother is trying to avoid having that happen again.”
The police report doesn’t mention the earlier arrest.
Footage of the interview with Leya was redacted due to state privacy laws, in part because she was interviewed inside their residence, unlike her boyfriend, who was interviewed outside. According to the police report, she “minimized” the argument and said there was no physical contact. She acknowledged trying to hang up the phone.
In an interview with ProPublica, Leya said they argued when she learned he sent money to his ex-girlfriend, who is the mother of his son. At the same time, she said, he had told her he couldn’t afford to buy diapers for their daughter. She said she has never hit him.
Officers arrested Leya on suspicion of domestic assault and interfering with a 911 call. They didn’t arrest her boyfriend or seek charges against him. Leya said she didn’t tell officers she was a victim of abuse because she thought she’d be able to tell a judge.
She never got a chance.
The Wyoming Police Department’s written policy encourages officers to make an arrest in incidents involving domestic violence “when there is reasonable cause to believe an assault was committed.”
Arrests demonstrate that “violence in the home is recognized as a serious crime,” according to Michigan’s law enforcement training manual on domestic violence. This approach is common across the country. Twenty-four states require an arrest when there’s probable cause of a domestic assault.
But domestic violence scenes can be chaotic, with both partners accusing each other of being the aggressor. It can be difficult for officers to understand what happened, said Erin Ross, a former domestic violence prosecutor who works at the national nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice. Sometimes, the wrong person ends up in handcuffs.
The Vera report doesn’t touch on immigration. But Ross and a dozen other domestic violence advocates across the country told ProPublica that immigrants who don’t speak English or understand their rights are, under the Trump administration, especially vulnerable to an arrest that can have irreversible consequences.
ProPublica reviewed hundreds of habeas corpus petitions filed nationwide since January 2025, in which immigrants challenged their ICE detention on constitutional grounds. We found dozens of petitioners who were arrested on suspicion of domestic violence and turned over to ICE, even though they were never charged or their charges were dropped. Using jail and police records from Florida and Michigan, as well as newsreports, we identified even more cases.
In their petitions, several immigrants said that officers mistook them for the aggressor. The underlying arrest records show that officers often had to make close calls in messy cases where it was unclear who was the victim and who was the aggressor. Either way, under Trump, there’s little grace for immigrants.
In one case in Florida, a state where sheriff’s offices cooperate with immigration authorities, a deputy came upon a Venezuelan couple arguing in the street in November 2025. In his report, the deputy said the woman pulled at her husband’s pants, necklace and arm, leaving marks on his body. The woman said her husband had taken her keys and phone. She didn’t want to be left stranded, she said, so she ran after him.
She was charged with misdemeanor battery; her husband wasn’t charged. The woman was turned over to ICE while the case was pending. Prosecutors later dropped charges. The sheriff’s report didn’t mention any allegations of prior domestic violence, but the woman later said that, during their marriage, her husband had beaten her and threatened to kill her. In her habeas corpus petition, she said she was “afraid to report the abuse to the police.”
The woman was released in May, but during the five months she was incarcerated, her husband took their daughters out of state, her attorney told ProPublica. She still hasn’t seen the girls in person.
For Leya, it was a shock to find herself handcuffed, sitting in the back of a police cruiser, headed toward the Kent County jail. She was silent during the 15-minute ride, unable to make sense of what had just happened: “I had suffered from domestic violence,” she said. “But the one who ended up in trouble was me.”
The next day, a detective asked the prosecutor’s office to file charges against her. Prosecutors declined to do so,saying there was insufficient evidence, there were no injuries and Leya hadn’t successfully interfered with the phone call.
Still, she wasn’t released.
Leya had no criminal history, apart from this arrest, according to a DHS record. But her fingerprints had been run against state and federal databases, flagging ICE officials who could match them with her prints from when she arrived in the U.S. In addition, Leya said, a jail official asked about her status, and she told him she was waiting for an immigration court hearing.
ICE issued a detainer, essentially asking the jail to hold Leya until agents could pick her up. Kent County officials honored their request. A day later, Leya was at the detention center in the woods.
She cried in despair over her daughter. They’d never been separated. The 80 miles between Wyoming and North Lake seemed infinite. Her breasts ached from the drying milk. Leya wondered whether she’d be deported and if their separation would be permanent.
From a narrow window in her cell, she saw people outside holding signs, protesting ICE. She could hear their chants in English. Though she had trouble understanding them, she felt comforted by the care of strangers.
Inside, she familiarized herself with the routines. She spent most of her time in a large, open room with other women in red. Cameras eyed them as they talked about their children and upcoming court dates. They shared contact information for relatives in their home countries in case one of them got deported and had nowhere to go. To pass the hours, they watched telenovelas, played rounds of Uno and pieced together jigsaw puzzles of forests and farms.
Leya grew close to a few women from Latin America and Eastern Europe who said they, too, had been in abusive relationships. Several had called police for help, records show. A Honduran woman said her partner tried to choke her. A Dominican woman said her husband, a U.S. citizen, hit her, pulled her hair and chased her with a stick.
Then there was Pilar, Leya’s first cellmate. The asylum seeker from Peru had also been arrested on suspicion of domestic violence in the city of Wyoming.
Pilar, her boyfriend and her teenage daughter called 911 five times in the 15 months before her arrest, records show. On one occasion, Pilar’s daughter said she worried that the boyfriend would hurt her mom; according to bodycam footage, Pilar assured officers that everything was fine. On another, the man said he experienced mental abuse and wanted to find a shelter. On yet another, Pilar said she just wanted him to leave.
None of these calls ended in an arrest. Officers ensured that the boyfriend had another place to stay when he sought help, and they told Pilar to call back if he tried to return and hurt her, according to the footage. They advised the couple to go to civil court for future disputes over money and property.
In an interview with ProPublica from North Lake, Pilar, 48, said that her boyfriend took financial advantage of her and physically assaulted her. And in her habeas corpus petition, she described the relationship as one of “physical, mental, psychological, economic abuse.” Her sister took a photo of the bruises around Pilar’s neck and feared the worst. “I would tell her to leave that man,” she said.
Pilar said she was ashamed to go to her job at a food-processing plant with bruises on her face. She wondered what her co-workers would think. She distanced herself from relatives and friends. Pilar said she never told the police the full story because she worried about the possible repercussions — not for herself, but for her boyfriend. She didn’t want him to be deported. Despite everything, she loved him and felt he loved her.
One night in October 2025, her boyfriend drove up to their apartment complex in a rental car. The couple argued in the parking lot. He called 911.
“I need police,” he said over and over in English.
Pilar called moments later: “This man is leaving my house and he’s not giving me my keys,” she screamed in Spanish. “This man has hurt me. He has scratched my whole arm.”
When officers arrived, they separated the couple. The boyfriend said that Pilar slapped his head, grabbed his shirt and tried to pull him out of the car while he was in the driver’s seat, according to bodycam footage and the police report. One side of his T-shirt was torn. He said he never assaulted Pilar and any injuries were her own fault. “I’ve never hit her,” he said in Spanish.
He told officers that he’d become a U.S. permanent resident two months earlier and that Pilar was jealous. “She is making this up because she knows she can get papers,” he said.
Pilar insisted she was the victim. She showed officers the scratch marks on her arm and said her boyfriend was to blame. She begged them to make him return the apartment keys, according to bodycam footage and a police report. “I’ve been trying to kick him out for a while and he won’t leave, and he doesn’t want to help pay the rent,” she said in Spanish.
An officer asked how her boyfriend’s shirt got ripped. Pilar said she grabbed onto him when he started driving away in order to avoid being dragged by the car. The officer asked her several more times about the ripped shirt. Pilar told him she wanted to speak to a lawyer.
In their report, police noted that the boyfriend had called 911 first. His shirt was ripped. Pilar’s wasn’t. If the boyfriend had thrown her down, the officer wrote, then her shirt should have been ripped because he was “much taller and heavier (around 80lbs more).”
Her boyfriend wasn’t arrested. Pilar was.
Wyoming Public Safety Chief Kip Snyder declined to speak about the arrests of Pilar or Leya. In an email to ProPublica, he said officers don’t “participate in enforcing federal immigration laws. We encourage trust and cooperation with all residents and aim to ensure that everyone feels safe reporting crimes or seeking assistance.”
Shortly after Pilar’s arrest, a police detective asked the prosecutor’s office to file domestic violence charges against both her and her boyfriend.
Prosecutors declined to file any charges, citing insufficient evidence. Pilar wasn’t released. Apart from this arrest, she had no criminal history, according to DHS records. She also had a pending asylum case.
Still, ICE put a detainer on her and jail officials turned her over.
A few years earlier, Kent County Sheriff Michelle Lajoye-Young said a handoff like this wouldn’t happen.
In 2019, she announced that deputies would stop automatically honoring detainers and instead require warrants signed by a federal judge or magistrate. The move came after a U.S. citizen — a Marine combat veteran — was transferred from her jail into ICE custody.
“There needed to be a judicial oversight inserted into that process to give us the assurance that somebody wasn’t erroneously detained without due process,” Lajoye-Young said around that time.
Trump called Kent a “sanctuary jurisdiction.” The label haunted the county, which in the 2016 election voted for Trump. A national think tank that aims to reduce immigration put Kent County on its list of sanctuary communities, while Republican state lawmakers tried to compel its cooperation with federal authorities.
Yet it’s unclear whether Lajoye-Young ever delivered on her promise. ProPublica requested copies of all department policies, procedures, memos and instructions on how it handles ICE detainers since 2018. None said a judicial warrant was needed. ProPublica also asked for copies of judicial warrants for Pilar and Leya. The county said no such records exist.
Lajoye-Young,who retired last week,declined interview requests. Sgt. Scott Dietrich, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office, didn’t directly answer questions about whether the policy was ever implemented. But in a statement he said that detainers are “handled under applicable law and established policy, consistent with our commitment to public safety, due process, and fair and impartial enforcement.”
Gema Lowe, an organizer with the local chapter of an immigrant rights group, said the sheriff had backtracked on her promise and wasn’t being forthright. “I don’t understand why they’re being secretive,” she said.
The shift deepened the mistrust among immigrants in a county with one of the state’s fastest-growing immigrant populations. Lowe,an immigrant herself from Mexico, said she advises victims to think twice before reporting domestic violence to the police because of the risk of arrest and deportation, while pointing them to other local resources like shelters.
She and others said the stakes are especially high now. ICE arrests have skyrocketed under Trump. Nobody is off limits, including immigrants with pending asylum claims and no criminal records.
And more local authorities are helping ICE make arrests. In January 2025, fewer than 150 state and local law enforcement agencies had signed 287(g) agreements with DHS to help carry out the president’s deportation agenda. That number has ballooned to more than 2,600 today.
“Partnerships with law enforcement are critical to having the resources we need to arrest criminal illegal aliens across the country,” a DHS spokesperson said. “We have had tremendous success when local law enforcement works together with us.”
Kent County doesn’t have a 287(g) agreement. Still, the jail hands over the vast majority of people with detainers to ICE, records show. Dozens of people who were turned over to ICE this year had their criminal charges dropped, or, like Pilar and Leya, were never charged in the first place.
Dietrich said the dismissal of a criminal charge “does not, by itself, mean the original arrest lacked probable cause.” The sheriff’s office also doesn’t “determine whether criminal charges are ultimately prosecuted, nor does it determine whether an individual is deported,” he said.
DHS told ProPublica in a statement that both Leya and Pilar “illegally entered the country” in 2022 and that both “will receive due process” in their immigration proceedings.
Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker said he hadn’t heard of victims getting detained by ICE after calling the police. In his experience, he said, more perpetrators with active cases get deported.
Becker said he tries to get the message out that his team serves all victims, regardless of their immigration status. He’s aware that immigrants are reluctant to seek help. His own staff has told him that victims are afraid to testify or file restraining orders. They don’t want their partners — often the breadwinners and the fathers of their children — to be deported.
“There’s been a chilling impact to women coming forward in domestic violence situations due to what’s going on,” Becker said.
As the months passed at North Lake, Leya watched as women she befriended started to leave.
Some were deported, including at least two Mexican women who were also arrested in Kent County on suspicion of domestic violence. Others were released. New women took their cells. Some told Leya that they, too, had been arrested after 911 calls about domestic violence.
Leya fought for her freedom. She met with volunteers from Kent County, who raised money to hire her lawyers and pay for a required physical exam and fees. Even her ex-boyfriend, the one who she said gave her a black eye, wrote a letter on her behalf to help her case, calling her “a calm person.” He explained that he had called the police after their argument “escalated” and that “problems are situations that can happen in any relationship.”
Leya, he added, “deserves a second opportunity to remain in this country and be close to our daughter, as our baby truly needs her very much.” While Leya was locked up, their little girl celebrated her first birthday, got her first teeth and took her first steps.
At virtual hearings, Leya sat with her arms crossed, her dark, wavy hair neatly braided in cornrows and wearing an oversized coat over her red uniform. She tried to follow the discussion of people who seemed to have her life in their hands.
In late August, a judge granted Leya bond. While her immigration case played out, she could be free.
It was a profound relief. At the same time, it felt awful to leave behind her friends. It seemed like some of them were never getting out. Pilar was approaching a year in detention.
Four months after her arrest, Leya walked out of the old prison. She thought about how she would live on her own now and support her daughter.
She promised herself she wouldn’t go back to the man who hurt her.
Phoenix, AZ — Voting-rights organizations, political groups and the Justice Department are preparing unusually large election-monitoring efforts ahead of the midterms, with some groups specifically training volunteers to watch for possible immigration enforcement near polling places.
Living United for Change in Arizona, or LUCHA, has begun training “constitutional observers” to monitor polling environments and document activity that could intimidate voters. The group says it is particularly concerned about Immigration and Customs Enforcement after increased immigration enforcement around parts of Arizona earlier this year.
The Trump administration has said ICE does not plan to target polling locations, and sending armed federal agents to polling sites for general enforcement purposes would raise serious legal concerns. However, administration officials have also said agents could execute warrants at polling places under some circumstances.
Other organizations, including the Save America Movement, National Action Network and several labor unions, are organizing observers in states with competitive Senate races. Their stated goal is to document potential intimidation without directly confronting federal agents.
The Justice Department is also planning a major presence. Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon said approximately 1,000 DOJ personnel could be deployed to monitor polling sites, describing it as the department’s largest election-observer effort.
Election officials note that large monitoring campaigns are announced frequently, though actual activity at polling places is often far less dramatic.
St. Paul, MN — A former Macalester College professor has been charged with felony property damage after allegedly spilling urine on a student’s backpack, causing more than $2,000 in damage.
Paul Fischer, 55, was charged Oct. 7 in Ramsey County with first-degree property damage. According to the criminal complaint, a student left her belongings unattended for about six minutes near Fischer’s office last December and returned to find urine on her backpack and items inside it.
The student later reported the incident to police. Investigators learned that Macalester had documented at least six other urine-related incidents in the Olin-Rice Science Center over roughly a year, including urine found in trash cans, water bottles and faculty decorations.
Police said Fischer acknowledged developing a habit of urinating into a cup and disposing of it in trash cans or laboratory sinks around campus. He allegedly told investigators he believed urine accidentally spilled onto the student’s belongings while he was emptying a container near his office.
The student estimated the damage at $2,070.
Fischer resigned after 25 years at Macalester. The college said his employment ended during the 2025-26 academic year and declined further comment because the criminal case remains pending.
If convicted, Fischer could face up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Meta is building a massive data center on the northeast edge of El Paso, Texas, on the New Mexico border. Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune
Last December, New Mexico officials celebrated publication of a plan to address climate change, designed to dramatically reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. A few months later, just across the state line in Texas, El Paso city officials adopted their own such plan with a similar ambition.
Each report cost millions of dollars to draft, but neither one took into account how the construction of data centers could upend climate goals in both places.
Work is underway in Doña Ana County in southern New Mexico on one of the largest data center developments in the country: Project Jupiter, built by Austin-based Oracle. Twenty miles away in El Paso, construction is underway on another massive data center, this one built by Meta Platforms.
A third, larger data center project is planned less than a 30-minute drive from the Meta site, on the Fort Bliss Army post in east El Paso.
The data centers are “going to undo a lot of the very expensive and very meaningful work a lot of people are doing,” New Mexico state climatologist Dave DuBois told El Paso Matters.
The sites are among a wave of data centers under construction across the country, driven by the rapidly escalating demand for artificial intelligence services like Claude and ChatGPT. Such projects have drawn intense scrutiny in recent months, as residents and elected officials have questioned their impact on communities’ water supplies, household electric bills and air quality. Texas alone has 596 data centers that are either in operation or planned across Texas as of early September, according to research by The Texas Tribune.
But the projects located in this population center of 1.2 million, which encompasses El Paso and parts of southern New Mexico, are particularly notable because of their combined scope. When fully built out, the three data centers, each with its own power plant, will emit millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to the planet-warming emissions released by more than two million cars in a year.
They will also release air pollutants like particulate matter and nitrogen oxides, which directly affect local air quality and human health. The Meta and Project Jupiter data centers are expected to release these kinds of pollutants at relatively low levels, according to paperwork submitted to state regulators. But even a small increase in air pollution can still negatively impact communities close to and downwind of the data center sites, said Shaolei Ren, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at University of California, Riverside.
“The health impacts can be significant for local communities,” Ren said.
Because Project Jupiter, Meta and the Fort Bliss data centers are in two different states, and because there is no single federal regulation governing climate change or emissions, regulators have largely considered the projects’ impacts separately.
“We’ve never had a national climate law passed by Congress,” said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. “And so what we’ve had in this country are primarily state and local efforts.”
The result is that officials in one state have little say over a project happening minutes away from them.
Texas and New Mexico also take different approaches to dealing with climate change. New Mexico has codified greenhouse gas reduction targets into state law; Texas has not.
A truck sprays water for dust suppression at the construction site of Project Jupiter in Santa Teresa, New Mexico.
New Mexico state Rep. Sarah Silva, a Democrat, represents the community of Chaparral, directly across the state line from Meta’s data center site in northeast El Paso. Her state has the power to regulate air quality and impose noise requirements, but only in New Mexico, not at a Texas construction site, even if it’s only a few hundred yards away.
Likewise, residents living in west El Paso across the state line from Project Jupiter have no say in the project despite sharing an aquifer that crosses the state boundary. Emissions do not remain within the state where they originate, Silva said.
“This is why we need federal regulation,” said Silva. “How do we knit something together that makes sense for our region when actually this is the job of the federal government?”
Though they profess a desire to mitigate the impacts of climate change, local governments in El Paso and Doña Ana counties green-lit these projects in a part of the country seeing rapidly rising temperatures. The counties offered Meta and Project Jupiter tax incentives in exchange for corporate investment in their communities, job creation and, hopefully, the ability to attract more technology companies to the region.
State officials have also provided incentives. More than a decade ago, Texas legislators approved a data center sales tax break, which exempts the facilities from paying sales tax on equipment they purchase, a decision that could now cost the state $3.2 billion in revenue over the next two years, according to The Texas Tribune.
New Mexico lawmakers declined to advance a bill creating a similar tax break for data centers in 2021. But in 2025, they passed an unrelated law allowing large facilities such as Project Jupiter to generate their own electricity using natural gas. The law exempts these private power systems, known as microgrids, from renewable energy requirements, even as New Mexico requires electric utilities to source 50% of the power they sell from clean energy by 2030.
The power plants that keep data centers running typically produce large amounts of emissions like carbon dioxide and methane that drive global climate change over time. Combined, the plants proposed for Project Jupiter and Meta’s data center could emit up to 10 million tons of planet-warming emissions annually. Comparatively, the region spanning El Paso County and neighboring Hudspeth County released 8.4 million tons of greenhouse gases in 2019. (The Army has shared scant information about the Fort Bliss data center, so it’s not clear what level of emissions the facility will produce.)
“This does add to our greenhouse gas emissions in a massive way,” said Gunnar Schade, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. “This is a huge source.”
Homes in Chaparral, New Mexico, sit adjacent to Meta’s data center, just over the state border in El Paso, Texas.
An Unprecedented Amount of Energy
Silva, the New Mexico representative, was initially supportive of Project Jupiter, in part seeing it as an opportunity to create long-term jobs. Last year, she voted in favor of a bill that included an amendment — tacked on by state Sen. Michael Padilla, a Democrat from Albuquerque — that allows facilities like Project Jupiter, which aren’t connected to the local power grid, a 20-year exemption from clean energy laws, allowing them to generate all their electricity with fossil fuels.
“We worked this bill pretty much the entire session, but it did not quite get done. So, we found a piece of legislation that was very similar,” Padilla said in an interview last year. “That’s the legislative process. You have to be very creative to get your work done.”
But Silva soon soured on the project out of concern that it won’t employ enough local workers and because it won’t rely on zero-emission renewable energy. Oracle has said the data center will have 750 full-time employees when it’s up and running. The company told Doña Ana County officials in early September that nearly 3,700 people had worked at the site during construction up to that point.
Silva and other state lawmakers have said they voted for Padilla’s bill without realizing the broader implications for a data center project in the southern part of the state.
“State regulators, state legislators, I think, were so caught off guard at the speed at which these hyperscale data centers showed up in all of our communities almost simultaneously,” Silva said. “I would support a moratorium.”
New Mexico state Rep. Sarah Silva was initially supportive of Project Jupiter but has soured on the project over time.
The amount of energy Project Jupiter needs is unprecedented in the region: The data center will receive electricity from an on-site power plant made up of fuel cells built by a company called Bloom Energy. Bloom has said the plant will have the ability to produce up to 2.45 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power around 1.5 million homes and more than El Paso Electric has ever supplied to its 465,000 residential and commercial customers at one time, according to the utility’s corporate reports.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, has specifically lauded Oracle’s promise to use fuel cells for electricity instead of natural gas turbines, which would have used more water and produced more air pollution. However, an air permit — a state-granted license that authorizes industrial facilities to emit a predetermined amount of pollution — would allow the fuel cells to produce up to 8.8 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year. Lujan Grisham didn’t address questions from El Paso Matters about the impact of these additional climate emissions.
The Meta power plant in El Paso could release up to 1.3 million tons of climate emissions every year, according to an estimate calculated by El Paso Matters based on El Paso Electric regulatory filings and the Environmental Protection Agency’s emissions factors. Nancy L. Seidman, a senior adviser with the Regulatory Assistance Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on energy policy, confirmed the emissions estimate is sound.
“Regulators should weigh all emissions and other impacts like water usage, noise and local air pollution, which can affect public health, when they make decisions about data center projects,” Seidman wrote in an email to El Paso Matters. “This is particularly important when projects are phased over time, so that an accurate account can be made of the total, holistic impacts.”
The data center planned for Fort Bliss is expected to use 3 gigawatts of electricity that would likely be supplied by natural gas turbines, according to officials with the Department of Defense, who shared details with reporters during a briefing in April. The Army has issued few other details about the project because it is still in “exclusive negotiations” with the developer, Carlyle Group, a large publicly traded private equity firm.
Carlyle Group did not respond to a request for comment.
“These are cities in terms of their electricity consumption,” Peskoe, of Harvard Law School, said of AI hyperscale data center campuses such as Oracle’s and Meta’s. The facilities are cropping up so fast that “the pace of this and the scale of this — I think there’s no real parallel, at least for 50, 60, 70 years, but probably ever for the U.S. power industry.”
Facilities in New Mexico seeking a state air permit are required by law to disclose estimated amounts of air pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions the project will release. And the state Environment Department has spent months evaluating Project Jupiter’s air permit application, which was submitted in April. A spokesperson for the environmental department didn’t respond to emailed questions.
By contrast, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality only requires project developers to disclose information about pollutants that affect local air quality, and not about greenhouse gas emissions, which are what contribute to climate change.
So when El Paso Electric sought an air permit last fall for the Meta data center’s natural gas power plant, the utility didn’t have to share estimated greenhouse gas emissions. The Texas commission approved the permit 20 days after it was filed, following an expedited review.
Meta directed questions about its data center’s power plant to El Paso Electric. The electric company declined to share estimates of the plant’s greenhouse gas emissions but said in a statement that the Texas environmental commission had reviewed and authorized the Meta power plant “under a standard permit, which is specifically for projects with limited and well-controlled emissions.” The statement said the facility will “operate in compliance with state and federal standards.”
A spokesperson for the agency said, “All Standard Permits have gone through formal notice and comment procedures and have been adopted by the Commission in a public meeting.”
These plants will be releasing large amounts of greenhouse gases even as climate change has become increasingly evident in the El Paso metro area, which sits where Texas’ westernmost boundary meets New Mexico and northern Mexico. El Paso’s temperatures have risen faster than those of almost any other city in the U.S. since 1970, according to Climate Central, a nonprofit that quantifies climate shifts throughout the United States. Drought driven by climate change has amplified the impact of wind storms that fill the air in El Paso with hazardous dust in the spring and summertime.
This year has been the hottest on record in El Paso through the first nine months of 2026, according to the National Weather Service. Similar records have been set across the state line in New Mexico.
“If we started to do these kinds of things — having big data centers with natural-gas-fired turbines — it’s kind of like bringing back a lot of the retired plants that were more dirty, like coal,” said DuBois, the New Mexico state climatologist.
Fernando Berjano, El Paso’s climate coordinator, wouldn’t comment specifically on effects resulting from the data centers in the region, but he said the kinds of power plants tied to them produce greenhouse gases that will make it harder for the city to meet its climate goals, as well as produce air pollutants.
If emissions increase in the El Paso area, “that has an impact on air quality, that has an impact on pollution,” Berjano said, “which is something that we all know is not good.”
Construction at the Project Jupiter data center in Santa Teresa, New Mexico
The Road Ahead for Data Centers
Although construction is already underway on the Project Jupiter and Meta data centers, regulatory hurdles remain for both facilities. The public hearing on the Project Jupiter air permit was scheduled to begin Sept. 14, but the New Mexico Supreme Court delayed it when opponents filed lawsuits challenging the state’s approval process and the facility’s use of groundwater.
The state Supreme Court last month lifted the stay. New Mexico more recently appointed an examiner to preside over the hearing that would authorize the facility’s emissions. Other legal challenges are making their way through the court system.
In Texas, El Paso Electric is still waiting for the state’s Public Utility Commission to approve construction of the power plant planned next to Meta’s data center, a decision that could come later this year.
Officials with both Project Jupiter and Meta have said they are taking steps to help mitigate the climate effects of their projects and plan to develop clean energy projects elsewhere to create new electricity sources and offset the greenhouse gases their data center power plants will release. Oracle also maintains that its emissions will be lower than what it sought in its air permit application and that it plans to get to net zero greenhouse emissions by 2031.
“Oracle is committed to building Project Jupiter responsibly and incorporating community feedback into our planning,” the company said in a statement.
Protesters rally against the construction of data centers in their region.
The road ahead for data centers is unclear. Even once-supportive officials have softened or changed course: Last year, Lujan Grisham, New Mexico’s governor, said Project Jupiter “reaffirms New Mexico’s leadership in global trade, advanced manufacturing, and digital infrastructure.” In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott at one point called his state “the epicenter of AI development.”
Now, amid growing opposition to Project Jupiter, Lujan Grisham recently said she takes seriously residents’ concerns about the data center “and expects any data center operating in New Mexico to meet the state’s rigorous environmental standards and use water responsibly.” This summer, Abbott called on the Texas Public Utility Commission to ensure the projects pay for their own infrastructure and don’t lead to higher electricity costs for residents. He also recommended the state Legislature pass a number of regulations related to data centers next year, many concerning water and electricity usage, and recently told the Texas Water Development Board to penalize data centers that do not report their water usage.
Abbott’s new edicts do not address air pollution or climate change, nor the effects that a data center project in one state can have on another.
Texas Democratic state Rep. Joe Moody, whose district includes much of west and northeast El Paso, near two of the data center projects, said Abbott’s proposals will likely shape the Texas Legislature’s debate over data-center-related policies next year but called them just a starting point.
“In the governor’s directives, we’re not talking about local control and local autonomy to make decisions on these projects,” he said. “And I do think that that’s a whole other lane of conversation that we’re going to get into next session.”
Why Should Delaware Care? Delaware police departments have been using Flock cameras — modern, artificial intelligence-backed automatic license plate readers — to fight crime. But the public has raised privacy concerns over the technology. Now, state police regulators are planning to implement statewide standards for how law enforcement agencies can use the cameras.
Delaware police leaders took steps toward creating statewide regulations for the use of controversial Flock cameras this week, though no policies have formally been put in place.
While license plate reading technology has been used in law enforcement for more than 20 years, newer Flock cameras — a name referencing the largest company producing the cheap and easy-to-deploy technology — have come under fire in recent months.
The public outcry largely comes from fears of government surveillance, Flock’s use of advanced artificial intelligence to track vehicles and the overall lack of regulations surrounding the cameras’ implementation.
One of the biggest draws of the technology is an owner’s ability to tap into a federal data sharing network that tracks detailed vehicle information as well as arrest warrants and other criminal information about a vehicle’s owner.
But without standards in place, police departments across Delaware have discretion over how long they can retain their Flock cameras’ data for, and with whom they share that data with.
This means, for example, while the Georgetown Police Department has chosen to open a transparency portal to let the public know which other police jurisdictions the Sussex County seat shares its Flock data with, other police departments in the state are not required to do so.
To address these discrepancies, the Delaware Police Accreditation Commission (DPAC), an oversight body responsible for setting law enforcement standards, appointed its new administrator Kelli Burns to draft regulations for police departments across the state during its quarterly meeting on Tuesday.
Those draft regulations will address hot-button issues such as how long license plate reader data is retained by law enforcement agencies and rules surrounding out-of-state data sharing.
The commission is next set to meet on Jan. 12, 2027, when members will discuss Burns’ draft regulations. It is unclear when those regulations would be fully implemented.
Addressing data privacy concerns
DPAC Vice Chairman Richard McCabe cited concerns over the data-sharing agreements police departments have with out-of-state agencies as one of the main areas of focus for the draft regulations.
McCabe, who also serves as chief of the New Castle City Police Department, suggested assigning a system administrator within each police department to oversee Delaware officers who wish to make out-of-state searches as a possible remedy.
McCabe also suggested creating a regional data sharing agreement with New Jersey, Maryland and Pennsylvania. If sharing is needed beyond those states, Robert Wallace with the Delaware State Police suggested the Delaware Information and Analysis Center, a joint intelligence agency operated by local and state law enforcement alongside the Department of Homeland Security, would oversee those requests.
Data-retention times also were debated during the meeting. The maximum retention time in Delaware is currently five years, but leaders agreed it was too long.
Dover Police Chief Thomas Johnson asked for regulations that would allow law enforcement agencies to retain Flock data for 30 days. This timeframe could impact the success likelihood of more sensitive cases, like sexual assault, that typically are not reported day-of, he said.
“We’re manpower-restricted, we’re resource-dependent, and sometimes when you finally shake a fact loose that you can run with to try to bring justice back, I would hate to miss a deadline,” Johnson said.
Dover Police Chief Thomas Johnson. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY MAGGIE REYNOLDS
Commissioners agreed that 60 days of data retention would be optimal for balancing investigatory needs and privacy concerns.
Questions remained after Tuesday’s meeting about how often audits would be conducted to identify any misuse of the Flock network as well as exact protocols for data retention.
Those questions, said DPAC Chairman and Delaware Public Safety and Homeland Security Secretary Joshua Bushweller, will be addressed in Burns’ draft regulations.
How will Delaware decide on guardrails?
The DPAC will mainly rely on regulations set by the national version of their organization, the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, McCabe said.
He also said the Newark Police Department is being looked at as a model policy.
The department has developed a training presentation for its officers on how to use Flock network data responsibly, and it also has recently decided to not automatically share its data with out-of-state agencies.
If Newark police decide to share data with another state, that decision must go through a documentation process.
DPAC is set to meet next on Jan. 12, 2027, where Burns will present her draft regulations to the group.
Why Should Delaware Care? In December, a state task force charged with reworking school district boundaries in Wilmington laid out a plan that would impact tens of thousands of families in New Castle County. Now, its subcommittees must work through details of how the district consolidation could happen, and what it would mean for students and educators.
The Delaware task force that last year recommended the consolidation of four New Castle County school districts is now writing rules for how state officials could carry out the massive plan.
Among the questions its members are considering are how far kids could be bused in a new northern Delaware district, and how much its teachers could be paid.
It comes after five years of deliberation and debate among education leaders and advocates in Delaware’s largest city about where Wilmington’s students should go to school.
Last winter, those conversations led the Redding Consortium — a state task force charged with redistricting Wilmington schools — to recommend that the state consolidate Delaware’s four northernmost school districts. Those include the Brandywine, Christina, Colonial and Red Clay Consolidated school districts.
The recommendation represented a seismic shift in public education in Delaware that, if implemented, could be an answer to decades of questions around where Wilmington kids should attend school. But the idea of intertwining suburban schools more closely with students from the city also sparked a backlash last year.
In December, one Brandywine school board member said such a move would upset the “values” of their district. In response, some in the city characterized the criticism as being tinged with racism.
Now, the Redding Consortium is working to establish standards that a future New Castle County consolidated school district could use to determine attendance zones, feeder patterns and educator salaries.
While Redding Consortium officials say they will not make those decisions directly, their standards will set guidelines for how school officials proceed.
During a public meeting Monday of the Redding Consortium, officials discussed guidelines, such as fiscal responsibility, and how to ensure that kids enrolled in extracurricular activities have transportation home.
Redding co-chair Sen. Elizabeth “Tizzy” Lockman (D-Wilmington) said during the meeting that such standards are important because the task force subcommittees will use them to create recommendations that the consortium will later vote on.
They are doing so even as the idea of consolidating Delaware’s four northern school districts remain hypothetical. Delaware officials – including the State Board of Education, General Assembly, and Gov. Matt Meyer – have not yet approved the recommendation to consolidate the districts.
The earliest the consolidation plan could be approved by all three is next year.
Also during the meeting Monday, Wilmington Mayor John Carney brought up the ongoing thorny issue of closing half-vacant schools.
When discussing the state’s past efforts to desegregate schools by moving Wilmington kids outside of the city, Carney asserted that school officials today could instead close a suburban high school in the Christina School District and bring the kids “closer to home.”
What led up to this?
In 1968, Delaware officials consolidated 49 school districts into 26, but the state law that allowed the move excluded the Wilmington School District from being part of it.
A federal court found in 1974 the state’s Educational Advancement Act to be unconstitutional, and ordered New Castle County to desegregate its schools again. By January 1978, a federal judge issued a desegregation plan that required kids in the city to be bused to suburban schools for nine years, while kids from the suburbs would be bused into the city for three years.
Some students were forcibly bused more than an hour to school from their homes.
Three years later, after considerable discontent over the unified governance of the enormous district, the federal court allowed Delaware to create the four districts within northern New Castle County – Red Clay, Brandywine, Colonial, and Christina. They retained their feeder patterns established under the original framework though.
In 2000, Delaware lawmakers attempted to reduce lengthy student trips on buses by requiring districts to assign students to public schools closest to their homes.
But today, high schoolers in Wilmington don’t have the option to attend a traditional high school within the city. And for some enrolled in the Christina School District, their high school can be 15 miles away in Glasgow.
Cincinnati, OH — Cincinnati Public Schools has created what officials say is the nation’s first school district-owned parking lot where families experiencing homelessness can safely sleep in their vehicles overnight.
The Safe Sleep Lot opened April 30 at William Howard Taft Elementary School and has served more than 300 people. The 12-space lot operates nightly from 9:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. and typically hosts three to eight families.
District officials developed the program after seeing a growing number of families living in cars and struggling to find safe places to park. Nearly 2,650 Cincinnati Public Schools students, about 8% of district enrollment, experienced homelessness during the 2025-26 school year.
Families staying at the lot receive access to security, bathrooms, showers, Wi-Fi, food and other basic supplies. Children are also connected to school enrollment and transportation services.
One major benefit is that families can be quickly verified as homeless and added to shelter waiting lists, a process that can otherwise take much longer for people moving from place to place each night.
The lot also provides temporary hotel stays and connects families with housing services. Shelter waits can still last one to two months.
District officials hope the model can eventually be replicated by other school systems facing similar increases in student homelessness.
Have had my pint 2 weeks now and loving it. Let it get too low on battery and motor turned off while I was cruising at about 10 mph. My fault, it warned me that the battery was low but I kept pushing it! Lesson learned. Posting for people to learn from my stupidity, onewheel battery warnings are there for a reason don’t ignore them.
Sacramento, CA — California reparations advocates are pressing for broader compensation and policy changes after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a new law requiring large corporations to disclose historical ties to slavery.
Assembly Bill 2599 requires companies doing business in California with more than $100 million in annual worldwide revenue to examine historical records and disclose whether they or related entities participated in slaveholding, financing, insurance or other slavery-related transactions.
Kristin Nimmers of the California Black Power Network said advocates view the disclosure law as only one step toward reparations. She argued that compensation should be based on specific historical harms rather than limited to a single payment.
California’s reparations debate remains far from settled. The state’s Reparations Task Force issued an extensive report in 2023 recommending numerous remedies involving housing, education, health, discrimination and economic inequality, but lawmakers have not approved the large-scale direct cash payments that generated the most national attention.
Advocates themselves also disagree over eligibility. Some groups argue reparations should primarily benefit descendants of people enslaved in the United States, while others favor a broader approach covering Black residents who experienced later forms of government-sanctioned discrimination.
Newsom has generally supported reparations-related studies and targeted reforms while remaining cautious about costly direct-payment proposals.
Washington, DC — The Trump administration is offering immigrant children as young as 5 years old $3,000 to voluntarily leave the United States, expanding a controversial program that lawyers say can pressure minors into abandoning potentially valid immigration claims.
Bloomberg Law reported that ICE attorneys and, in some cases, immigration judges have presented the payments to children in removal proceedings. Legal advocates said some minors lack attorneys and have been given little or no time to consider the consequences before accepting.
The new offers expand a program introduced last year that provided $2,500 to unaccompanied migrant children ages 14 and older who agreed to leave the country.
Immigration attorneys argue that offering thousands of dollars to young children raises serious questions about whether they can meaningfully understand or voluntarily waive their legal rights. Shaina Aber of the Acacia Center for Justice described the approach as part of an effort to pressure children into dropping their cases.
The Department of Homeland Security has characterized voluntary departure programs as a way to help migrants return home, but it did not directly address questions about payments to children as young as 5.
The policy comes amid a sharp increase in immigration enforcement involving minors. Federal records analyzed by The Marshall Project show that more than 22,000 children have been deported since Trump returned to office, while ICE has arrested more than 8,500 children during his second term.
Q: Claims about James Talarico being hospitalized in a mental health facility. Is this true?
A: No. An Ohio mental health center rebutted false online rumors that Talarico, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, had been there as a patient.Talarico said he was off the campaign trail for several days in early October while recovering from the flu at his Texas home.
FULL ANSWER
The conspiracy theory that James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in Texas, recently went to Ohio to receive treatment for mental health issues began after he stopped making campaign appearances at the beginning of October. Several readers asked us about these claims, which they saw on social media.
Talarico and a campaign spokesperson have said that he was at his Austin, Texas, home, recuperating from the flu at the time. And the New York Times said it verified that Talarico was at his house by reviewing time-stamped camera images from Talarico’s home security system that was provided by his campaign.
“The images showed Mr. Talarico around the exterior of the home and at its entrances between Oct. 1 and Oct. 8,” the Times reported on Oct. 12.
Talarico at the 2026 Austin City Limits Music Festival on Oct. 9. Photo by Gary Miller/Getty Images.
The Texas state representative had mentioned his flu diagnosis in a Sept. 30 Hispanic Business Council forum that he attended virtually.
However, on Oct. 11, conservative influencers Nick Sortor and Rhein Amacher said in separateposts on X that they had called the Lindner Center of Hope, a mental health center and hospital in Mason, Ohio, and were told that Talarico had just been there as a patient.
“During my recorded call, an individual identifying themselves as a female facility employee reportedly stated that Talarico was no longer a patient and had been discharged within the previous 24–48 hours,” Amacher wrote in his post. He also posted audio from the conversations that he said took place on Oct. 10.
Amacher’s and Sortor’s claims were then amplified in posts by other conservatives, as well as X owner Elon Musk, who has spent millions of dollars supporting Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Talarico’s Republican opponent in the Senate race.
But in its own post later the same day, the facility at the center of the rumor denied that Talarico had been there as a patient. “Representative James Talarico has never received treatment from Lindner Center of Hope,” the center said in an Oct. 11 X post.
Talarico then shared the center’s statement in an X post that included a laughing emoji and said, “I’ve never even been to Ohio.” And in a response to a post by Sortor, Talarico campaign spokesperson JT Ennis called the claims a “lie designed to promote a pathetic conspiracy theory.”
Talarico was back in public on Oct. 9, when he attended the Austin City Limits music festival. He also went to a Kacey Musgraves concert in Dallas on Oct. 10.
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Photo: Delaware’s Environmental Appeals Board voted 5-1 Tuesday to send a key regulatory decision involving the US Wind Maryland Offshore Wind Project back to the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC), finding that the agency failed to follow regulations governing its review. Photo was created on 10/13 using AI.
In a 5-1 ruling, the board found state environmental regulators failed to follow required procedures, ordering a new public notice and regulatory review of the controversial offshore wind project.
By George D. Rotsch, Delaware LIVE
DOVER, Del. — Delaware’s Environmental Appeals Board voted 5-1 Tuesday to send a key regulatory decision involving the US Wind Maryland Offshore Wind Project back to the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC), finding that the agency failed to follow regulations governing its review.
The Oct. 13 decision represents a significant development in the continuing dispute over the offshore wind project, which has generated opposition from coastal residents and local officials concerned about its potential environmental impacts and planned transmission infrastructure in Sussex County.
The ruling stems from an appeal filed by Edward Bintz, a coastal Sussex County homeowner who challenged a decision by former DNREC Secretary Shawn Garvin that the project was consistent with applicable coastal management requirements.
Bintz argued that DNREC’s review was inadequate and that US Wind’s application did not contain all the information required under state regulations.
Board finds problems with regulatory process
According to M. Jane Brady, a partner with Halloran Farkas + Kittila who represented Bintz, the board agreed that DNREC had failed to comply with its regulatory requirements.
The board ordered DNREC to reconsider its determination, issue a new public notice, ensure US Wind’s application complies with applicable requirements and follow the regulations governing the review process.
The ruling does not automatically cancel the offshore wind project or permanently prohibit its development. Rather, it requires the state agency to revisit the process used to reach its earlier decision.
The board indicated that it would issue a formal written decision explaining its findings and the requirements imposed on DNREC.
Brady is lead counsel in several other matters related to the Maryland Offshore project, including challenges to the beach construction and subaqueous lands permits. Those permits are pending review in the Superior Court and the EAB, respectively.
Why the consistency determination matters
The dispute centers on a process known as a federal consistency determination, which evaluates whether certain federally authorized activities affecting Delaware’s coastal resources comply with the state’s federally approved coastal management policies.
Although the wind turbines would be located offshore in federal waters, US Wind’s plans include transmission infrastructure affecting Sussex County.
The project proposes bringing underwater transmission cables ashore at 3R’s Beach in Delaware Seashore State Park and connecting them to electrical infrastructure near the former Indian River Power Plant.
Those plans have prompted questions about coastal land use, environmental protections and the extent of state oversight over infrastructure associated with federally approved offshore energy projects.
Bintz’s challenge focused on whether DNREC had sufficient information to make its determination and whether the agency followed the procedures intended to protect public participation and ensure regulatory compliance.
Attorney praises decision and public oversight
Brady argued that US Wind’s application was incomplete and that DNREC’s analysis failed to address issues specifically required by state regulations.
Following Tuesday’s ruling, she praised the board for recognizing the importance of the regulatory process.
“I am pleased the Board recognized how important a properly informed public is to environmental regulation, and that the members appreciated how important careful compliance to the regulations, that were so carefully crafted, can be,” Brady said.
The appeal has been part of a broader legal and regulatory dispute involving the proposed offshore wind development.
Tuesday’s decision addresses DNREC’s handling of the consistency review rather than determining whether offshore wind development itself should proceed.
What happens next for US Wind?
The ruling returns the matter to DNREC, which must address the regulatory concerns identified by the board.
The agency will be required to issue another public notice and examine whether US Wind’s application satisfies the applicable regulations before reaching a new determination.
It remains unclear whether the additional review will affect the project’s construction schedule, federal approvals or other regulatory proceedings.
The board’s forthcoming written decision should provide greater clarity about the deficiencies identified and the actions DNREC must take.
Responses from DNREC and US Wind to Tuesday’s ruling were not immediately available.
The decision also highlights the importance of procedural requirements in environmental permitting, particularly when projects involve overlapping federal and state authority.
For coastal communities, the ruling potentially provides another opportunity to review information about the project and participate in the regulatory process.
THE TO-GO BOX: US WIND ENVIRONMENTAL APPEAL
What happened? Delaware’s Environmental Appeals Board voted 5-1 on Oct. 13 to return a US Wind regulatory determination to DNREC for further review.
Who challenged the decision? Edward Bintz, a Sussex County coastal homeowner, represented by attorney M. Jane Brady.
What did the board find? DNREC failed to follow applicable regulatory requirements in reviewing the project’s consistency with Delaware’s coastal management policies.
What must DNREC do? Issue a new public notice, ensure the application complies with regulatory requirements and conduct its review in accordance with those regulations.
Is the project canceled? No. The ruling requires additional state regulatory action but does not itself cancel the project.
What’s next? The board is expected to issue a written decision detailing its findings. DNREC must then address the deficiencies identified by the board.
Washington, DC — A decorated Air Force major has reportedly spent nearly two months in round-the-clock solitary confinement while awaiting a rare military court-martial stemming from his public calls for President Donald Trump’s impeachment.
Maj. Jason Watson, a 17-year Air Force veteran, was first arrested after appearing outside the U.S. Capitol in uniform with a sign reading “Impeach. Convict. Remove.” He later appeared on CNN and sharply criticized Trump, knowing active-duty service members face stricter limits on political activity and public criticism of senior officials than civilians.
Watson was detained the day after that CNN interview again and has remained in pretrial confinement since August. His attorney, Christopher Mutimer, said Watson is alone 24 hours a day, including during meals and exercise. CNN described the charges as exceptionally rare, citing only two previous convictions under the relevant contempt provision since the Uniform Code of Military Justice took effect in 1951.
The Air Force has charged Watson under provisions covering contempt toward officials, disobeying orders, and conduct unbecoming an officer. He faces a general court-martial, possible imprisonment, dismissal from the military and loss of benefits.
The Pentagon maintains that Watson is presumed innocent and entitled to due process, but his continued isolation before trial and the unusual severity of the prosecution have intensified questions about whether the military is using its disciplinary system too aggressively against an officer who publicly opposed the president.
At an Oct. 2 Mobile, Alabama, rally, Trump didn’t name Talarico but called him “the guy from Texas who’s — he’s a vegan, but now … he’s eating meat like a pig.”
Trump added, “But what they don’t show you is that, after every barbecue, he walks to the back of a tent and he throws up all over the place.” (Vegans don’t eat animal products.)
Days later in Nebraska, again without naming Talarico, Trump took it a step further by saying the candidate described himself as a vegan.
“In Texas he talks about, ‘I’m a vegan, I’m a vegan.’ He’s a vegan, vegan meaning he likes lettuce. And now he goes to every barbecue available. He then throws up immediately after eating the steak, throwing up all over the place.”
At a San Antonio rally, Trump said, “I hear the guy’s disappeared. Nobody knows — you know where he is? He’s sick because he’s been forced to eat meat for political reasons and he’s throwing up all over the place.” Talarico, who had been missing from the campaign trail for several days, said he had the flu.
Trump’s political rallies have elements of theater. His vomit story draws laughter and cheers from audiences and is one of his most frequent attacks on a Democrat. It goes further than when he said in May that Talarico is “a vegan in Texas, and you can’t get elected as a vegan in Texas.”
We asked the White House for evidence that Talarico has been throwing up after eating meat and a spokesperson referred us back to the president’s comments.
Talarico vegan claims stem from 2022 speech about meat consumption
Talarico’s meat critics point to a 2022 speech during a fundraiser for the Texas Humane Legislation Network, a group that lobbies for humane animal treatment. At the time, Talarico was running for reelection to the Texas House of Representatives.
During the speech, Talarico said reducing meat consumption is the “moral thing to do” and “necessary to fight climate change.”
“I am proud to say that our campaign has officially become a non-meat campaign, so we are only buying vegan products from our local vegan businesses,” he said, adding, “Everyone has to take personal responsibility in this effort.”
Talarico didn’t say he is a vegan. But the accusations came anyway in his 2026 Senate campaign.
Talarico has repeatedly said he eats meat; there’s no evidence of vomiting
Talarico’s Republican rival in the Senate race, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, said in May that Talarico is a vegan. PolitiFact rated the statement False.
“This is a flat out lie, James is not and has never been a vegan,” Talarico spokesperson JT Ennis said in response to our Oct. 12 query. Regarding Trump’s comments about vomiting, Ennis said, “This is a lie without any basis.”
We also asked the Talarico campaign if the candidate has ever had disordered eating and Ennis repeated, “This is a lie without any basis.”
Since the primary season, the Talarico campaign has posted pictures of Talarico eating meat, showing him biting into a turkey leg at the Texas State Fair in March and sampling chicken and steak at April’s Fiesta San Antonio.
Official statement from @JamesTalarico on vegan accusations https://t.co/pLwtlknBYj
“I want to say this definitively, and categorically, that I deny all accusations of veganism,” Talarico said in a March interview with The Bulwark’s Tim Miller. “And our campaign basically runs on barbecue these days.”
In a May video, Talarico joined former President Barack Obama and Texas gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa for breakfast tacos with eggs, potatoes and cheese at Taco Joint in Austin.
We found no reporting, videos or photos documenting that Talarico eats meat on the campaign trail and then vomits.
For those who have bulimia, Trump’s comments trivialize a real condition.
“For someone to use that as a punch line, it makes it seem like it isn’t a serious behavior and it actually is,” said Mallary Tenore Tarpley, a University of Texas assistant professor and author of a book on eating disorder recovery, who struggled with anorexia as a teen and is in ongoing recovery from it. “When leaders make jokes about it it can feel undermining.”
Our ruling
Trump said Talarico is “a vegan” and “what they don’t show you is that, after every barbecue, he walks to the back of a tent and he throws up all over the place.”
Talarico advocated in 2022 for reduced meat consumption to address climate change and said he was running a “non-meat campaign.” He did not say he was a vegan. This year, he has repeatedly said he is not a vegan and has publicly consumed animal products.
Trump has repeated the vomit anecdote without backing it up with any evidence. To some rally goers, Trump’s story is just that — a laugh line. But in Texas where voters take pride in their barbecue, these are fighting words and worthy of a fact-check.
I just printed my first pair of tpu grip tape for my X7LR and I'm aware that you need to poke holes through the grip tape before applying it to the foot pad so air can escape and not cause front foot pad sensor issues. My question more or less is how many holes should I poke through and what should I use to do it and where should they be? I've been watching gripthane videos to get an idea of what to do and it looks like he just stabs it three times with a butterfly knife really quick 🤣. And figured I would ask on here for advice before I attempt doing something like that LOL.
For reference I printed the treez grip tape from printables.com. Appreciate any feedback, thanks 🙏
Photo: The Philadelphia 76ers have named Brad Jones general manager of the Delaware Blue Coats, placing an experienced NBA G League executive in charge of the organization’s Wilmington-based developmental affiliate. This Photo was updated with on 10/14. This is the right Brad Jones.
Former NBA G League basketball affairs executive takes over Delaware’s basketball operations as the Blue Coats prepare to open the 2026-27 season Nov. 6 in Wilmington.
WILMINGTON, Del. — The Philadelphia 76ers have named Brad Jones general manager of the Delaware Blue Coats, placing an experienced NBA G League executive in charge of the organization’s Wilmington-based developmental affiliate.
Jones will also serve as a 76ers pro scout. He becomes the seventh executive to lead the Blue Coats’ basketball operations department during the program’s 14-year history.
Jones spent the past eight years working in the NBA G League office, most recently as basketball affairs and player personnel lead. His responsibilities included player personnel, contracts, transactions and other basketball operations matters.
“Brad possesses a tremendous knowledge of the game and has natural leadership capabilities and a wealth of experience that will position him well as the next Blue Coats general manager,” 76ers President of Basketball Operations Mike Gansey said in the team’s announcement. “He’s a great addition to our organization and well respected throughout the league. We’re happy to have him on our side.”
Jones helped assemble the NBA G League United team that won the 2026 FIBA Intercontinental Cup championship in Beijing this summer.
Experience From the NBA and G League
Before joining the G League office, Jones worked as a consultant for USA Basketball after spending eight seasons in scouting and video positions with the Orlando Magic.
His time in Orlando also overlapped with current 76ers executive Jameer Nelson, who played for the Magic and previously served as general manager of the Blue Coats.
Jones earned a law degree from Florida Coastal School of Law and a master’s degree from the University of Florida.
He succeeds Ariana Andonian, who left the Blue Coats last month to become general manager of the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks.
Blue Coats Promote Marchesani
The organization also promoted CJ Marchesani to assistant general manager of the Blue Coats.
Marchesani spent the previous four seasons working in the 76ers scouting department. Before joining the Sixers organization, he served as director of recruiting for AMR Talent Agency.
The personnel moves come as the Blue Coats continue their role as a development program for the 76ers while competing independently for an NBA G League championship.
Season Begins Nov. 6
Delaware will open its 2026-27 season with back-to-back home games against the Capital City Go-Go on Friday, Nov. 6, and Saturday, Nov. 7, at Chase Fieldhouse in Wilmington. Sixteen of the Blue Coats’ 24 home games are scheduled for weekends this season.
The Blue Coats won the 2022-23 NBA G League championship and previously captured the 2021 Winter Showcase championship.
To Go Box:
What: Delaware Blue Coats 2026-27 home opener
Opponent: Capital City Go-Go
When: Friday, Nov. 6
Where: Chase Fieldhouse, Wilmington
Tickets: Available through Ticketmaster and the Delaware Blue Coats website
Learn more: The complete schedule, ticket packages and team information are available through the Delaware Blue Coats.
I recently finished my xrv and mte hub install, but noticed a significant drop in battery life. Then I was testing spinning the wheel with the app and it has these bumps that shakes the board, im wondering if anyone has any idea what it might be?
I had removed a shim that was on there previously before installing the ufo washers that were included with the mte, im wondering if that could be it? I also had some slight weirdness when seating the stator so im wondering if maybe I installed it poorly.
It’s weird though because riding on it i didnt feel any significant issues, but this definitely doesn’t seem normal and is probably the root of my batter efficiency problems too. Any input appreciated!!
I have an og pint. Rode that thing for 7 years to its absolute limits.
Decided to upgrade and settled on the XR classic. Seems to be the most well loved model. Ill get a funwheel eventually im sure
Anyways, I absolutely loved the carveabilty and nimbleness on the pint and on my first ride out on xrc, I dont know if I love it yet. At first I went with Cruz shaping. According to the description, that's what I wanted, but with the stock tire on it I couldnt go too into turns before that thing was looking to throw me off. Felt unstable and not in a fun way lol
Just switched to Mission, and that feels way better. Im assuming id be better off with a new tire, and I need to play with the other ride modes. Does anyone have any tips for me with custom shaping or have preferences on certain things.
Lovingggggg the torque and speed im getting from this thing though
First State Educate’s new advisory structure is intended to help the organization develop resources that support those responsibilities. Image created on 10/13 using AI.
First State Educate launches 12-member advisory board to strengthen local school governance, improve student achievement and help districts navigate major changes in Delaware public education.
By George D. Rotsch, Delaware LIVE News.
WILMINGTON, Del. — As Delaware schools face growing expectations to improve student literacy, demonstrate academic progress and adapt to a new school funding system, First State Educate has assembled 12 current and former school board leaders to help strengthen the effectiveness of local school governance.
The nonprofit organization, whose mission is to empower school boards to improve public education, announced the formation of its new Advisory Board, bringing together representatives from all three Delaware counties with experience in education, business and community leadership.
The initiative comes at a significant time for Delaware public education, as state leaders advance changes to school funding and accountability while placing renewed emphasis on improving student outcomes.
First State Educate Executive Director Julia Keleher said the advisory group will help ensure the organization’s programs and resources reflect the practical challenges confronting local school boards.
“First State Educate has launched the Advisory Board to inform and ground our work; this esteemed group of Delaware leaders will ensure we are serving our state and schools in the most relevant, impactful ways possible,” Keleher said.
School boards play a critical role in student success
Although school boards often receive public attention for budgets, policies and controversial decisions, their responsibilities extend to establishing district priorities, evaluating superintendents and monitoring whether schools are delivering measurable academic results.
Delaware Secretary of Education Cindy Marten welcomed the initiative, emphasizing that those who serve on school boards should have a voice in developing the resources intended to help them succeed.
“School boards have an enormous responsibility. They set the direction for their districts, hire and hold superintendents accountable, and make decisions that directly affect students and classrooms,” Marten said.
“If we want board members to be effective, we need to understand what they need to succeed. I’ve always believed that if you want to know what works, ask the people doing the work.”
Marten said involving board members in shaping training and resources could improve the quality and relevance of those programs.
“The strongest solutions are built with people, not simply for them,” she said.
Literacy, accountability and funding top the agenda
The new Advisory Board will focus initially on five areas that could influence how Delaware school districts allocate resources, measure success and respond to community expectations.
Improving literacy outcomes: Members will help identify ways local school boards can support district literacy goals and align their priorities with the Delaware Department of Education’s strategic plan. This includes examining how board decisions about curriculum, instructional resources and student performance can contribute to improved reading achievement.
Strengthening academic accountability: The group will help school boards prepare for Delaware’s evolving performance and accountability framework, including the use of student achievement data to establish expectations, monitor progress and support continuous improvement.
The Delaware Department of Education is developing a School Performance and Support Framework intended to identify struggling schools earlier and provide increasingly intensive assistance when needed. The framework remains in draft form, with public feedback open through Nov. 1.
Delaware Department of Education
Preparing for school funding reform: Delaware’s proposed hybrid funding model represents a substantial change in how public education resources would be distributed and managed. Advisory Board members will help identify the guidance school boards need to understand funding decisions and oversee the use of public money.
The state’s Public Education Funding Commission has recommended a model combining core staffing support with additional resources based on student needs and operational expenses. The proposal also emphasizes transparency and accountability for how education dollars are spent.
Connecting employers and schools: Through initiatives such as the Delaware Education Performance Partnership, First State Educate intends to encourage greater engagement between school leaders and the business community. The goal is to strengthen connections between education, workforce needs and student opportunities.
Expanding access to school board resources: Members will provide feedback on First State Educate’s Knowledge Hub, an online resource designed to connect board members, parents and community leaders with information, tools and professional learning opportunities.
Together, these priorities reflect a broader challenge facing Delaware education: ensuring that increased resources, changing policies and new expectations translate into measurable improvements for students.
Bringing local experience to statewide discussions
First State Educate said the Advisory Board was intentionally designed to represent geographic, professional and community diversity, including newly elected and longtime school board members.
The organization also sought perspectives from individuals who have served in leadership positions and those with professional backgrounds outside education.
Patricia “Patty” Maull, a Cape Henlopen school board member, said the advisory group provides an opportunity to ensure statewide initiatives reflect the realities of local governance.
“The voice of local school board members is essential to shaping strong, community-focused educational leadership,” Maull said.
“I’m honored to join the FSE Advisory Board to continue to help ensure the voice and perspective of local governance remain front and center.”
The board will provide ongoing feedback on First State Educate’s research, training and initiatives, identify emerging challenges and recommend improvements to the organization’s work.
The advisory group will guide First State Educate’s efforts rather than replace the authority or responsibilities of locally elected school boards.
Meet the First State Educate Advisory Board
The 12 members announced by First State Educate are:
Member
School board affiliation
Jeff Allen
Vice president, Woodbridge
Dr. Jeffrey T. Benson Jr.
President, Seaford
Earle Dempsey
Former president, Lake Forest
Carlos Dipres
Colonial
Donna Johnson Geist
Capital
Patricia Maull
Cape Henlopen
Jose Matthews
Red Clay
Britney Mumford
Appoquinimink
Dr. Alison Myers
President, Cape Henlopen
Keeley Powell
Former president, Christina
Beth Twardus
President, Red Clay
Marcus Wright
Seaford
Membership and positions are as identified in First State Educate’s announcement.
A greater emphasis on results
The launch of the Advisory Board also comes as Delaware policymakers reconsider how schools are evaluated and how education funding can be connected more closely to student needs and outcomes.
The state’s existing school accountability system measures academic achievement, student growth and other indicators of school success. Those measures provide information school boards can use to identify areas needing improvement and evaluate whether district strategies are working.
For local school board members, the challenge is translating that information into effective governance — asking the right questions, establishing clear expectations and evaluating whether educational investments are producing results.
First State Educate’s new advisory structure is intended to help the organization develop resources that support those responsibilities.
Its success will ultimately depend on whether the guidance and training provided help school board members make better-informed decisions, strengthen oversight and support improved academic outcomes.
For parents and taxpayers, those results may prove more important than the creation of another statewide advisory group.
TO-GO BOX: First State Educate Advisory Board
What’s happening: First State Educate has formed a 12-member Advisory Board of current and former Delaware school board leaders to strengthen school governance and improve student outcomes.
Who’s involved: Representatives from school districts across all three Delaware counties, bringing experience in education, business and community leadership.
Five priorities:
Improving student literacy
Strengthening school performance and accountability
Districts navigate the new school funding formula
Building partnerships between schools and employers
Expanding resources and training for school board members
Why it matters: School boards oversee district leadership, budgets and academic priorities. Better-informed board members can strengthen accountability for student achievement and public education spending.
Learn more: Visit FirstStateEducate.org to explore the Knowledge Hub and learn about the organization’s initiatives.
I just wanted to share how gorgeous this X7 is in Tiffany blue
*edit. I just took my first fall on the X7. I have a year of not riding. I have 2k miles under my belt. Just went to jump a 4 inch curve and next thing I know I’m on the floor. Idk what I did wrong
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump has granted clemency to at least 85 public officials charged with or convicted of corruption-related crimes across his two presidential terms, with Republicans and prominent Trump supporters receiving most of the relief, according to a Reuters investigation.
Reuters identified 36 elected Republicans and 19 Republican political appointees among the recipients. Another nine had campaigned for Trump or publicly supported his MAGA agenda. Only four were known Democrats.
Collectively, the clemency actions spared recipients more than 130 years of imprisonment and over $15 million in fines, restitution and other financial penalties. Nearly three-quarters avoided prison, left custody early, escaped sentencing or regained rights restricted by their convictions.
Among those pardoned was former Nevada official Michele Fiore, convicted of diverting charitable donations intended for a slain police officer’s memorial toward personal expenses. Trump also pardoned Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar.
The Constitution gives presidents broad clemency authority, and the White House says Trump has used it to correct what it describes as politically motivated prosecutions.
Former prosecutors interviewed by Reuters expressed concern that repeated pardons in corruption cases could weaken deterrence and accountability for public officials.
Reuters also found that the administration has reduced federal anti-corruption enforcement resources while issuing the clemency grants.
Washington, DC — Kimberly Guilfoyle has resigned as U.S. ambassador to Greece after the White House asked her to step down amid mounting allegations of improper conduct.
New White House press secretary Katie Zacharia confirmed Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s administration requested Guilfoyle’s resignation. Trump had said a day earlier that he was “not happy” with her performance and was considering removing her.
Guilfoyle’s departure follows reports alleging she accepted improper gifts, used private travel connected to wealthy Greek businessmen, threatened a Greek official and sought political favors tied to personal financial matters. She has denied wrongdoing, and her attorneys have disputed key allegations.
The controversy intensified after reports that Guilfoyle sought a $100,000 payment from a Republican donor before her Senate confirmation while allegedly offering access to senior Trump administration officials. Her representatives say the requested money involved legitimate services performed before she became ambassador.
Guilfoyle was confirmed by the Senate in September 2025 after Trump nominated her for the Athens post. She is a former Fox News host and former fiancée of Donald Trump Jr.
The State Department inspector general is reportedly reviewing the allegations, though it remains unclear whether a formal investigation has been opened.
Harrisburg, PA — Pennsylvania’s measles outbreak has now surpassed 1,100 cases, with state officials reporting a sixth measles-related death as hospitalizations continue to rise.
The latest death involved a 39-year-old woman in Franklin County, according to county Coroner James Conner. His office said she had several underlying health conditions and had previously been diagnosed and treated for measles. The probable cause of death was described as an acute cardiac event possibly complicated by measles.
Pennsylvania reported 1,137 cases and 219 hospitalizations as of Monday, including 157 new infections over the previous week. Roughly one-third of cases have occurred in people 18 or younger, while fewer than 1% have been among those fully vaccinated.
State health officials have attributed the outbreak to low vaccination rates and continue recommending two doses of the MMR vaccine.
The federal death count remains lower than Pennsylvania’s because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses a different review process for determining whether measles caused or contributed to a death.
Nationwide, the CDC has reported more than 4,000 confirmed measles cases across dozens of outbreaks this year, the highest level in decades.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly sent mixed messages about measles vaccination, at times encouraging parents to vaccinate while also publicly questioning vaccine effectiveness and praising anti-vaccine activists.
As you start a new school year amid an undeniably turbulent time for our country, I wanted to offer some reflections that I hope encourage you to see the messy state of our democracy not as a burden you’ll bear, but as a gift you’ll inherit.
In American history, young people have always been the first to remember that the power to act belongs with the people. Thomas Jefferson was 33 years old when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was 34 when he gave the “I Have a Dream” speech. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was 32 when she helped organize the Seneca Falls Convention, laying the groundwork for women to have the right to vote.
So this is my message to all of you:
Don’t seek merely to leave this university as a college graduate; seek also to leave it as an informed and responsible citizen. Our democracy depends on it.
Use this time here on campus to prepare yourself to lead our country out of the darkness. Have the debate with the classmate you disagree with. Read the flyer from the student group promoting a cause you don’t support. Take classes offered here at the university on democracy and leadership. Attend events on campus to hear from state and national leaders. And of course, vote.
And to the professors on campus, always remember that you may be teaching our country’s next president — he or she is relying on you to impart lessons from our country’s past, and to give him or her the skills and confidence, to lead our country’s future.
When I graduated from the university in 1965 it felt then as it feels now — that the world was filled with chaos. I remember standing on the steps of Hullihen Hall and hearing that President John F. Kennedy, our hero, had been assassinated.
Our country would soon be in the throes of a pitched battle over civil rights. As I graduated law school, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. There were overwhelming disagreements and protests about our engagement in Vietnam.
It was my professors here at the university who helped me make sense of this chaos, and because of them, I left college with a sense of optimism that whatever troubles our country may face, my classmates and I had the power to solve them. Ultimately, it was my university professors who gave me the confidence at age 29 to run for and be elected to the United States Senate.
Today, undeniably, something has been lost in our civic discourse. Political violence is on the rise. Hurling invective gets more votes than speaking the truth. The idea of disagreeing without being disagreeable seems downright quaint. Americans can be forgiven for feeling that hope is hard to come by. Believe me — I get it.
For the entirety of our country’s history, we’ve engaged in a constant push and pull — an existential struggle between peril and possibility. It’s a battle that’s never truly over. Alexis de Tocqueville, a French political philosopher who studied our country in its early days, wisely wrote, “the greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”
That’s where all of you come in.
Your generation is the best educated, most talented, least prejudiced our country has ever seen. I know you’re trying to make sense of all that’s unfolding around you. And I won’t sugarcoat it — these are dark days. But America is one of the only countries in the world that time and again has come out of every crisis we faced stronger than when we went into that crisis. And throughout our history, it’s been young people like you who have chosen to act, to pull us back from the abyss.
Having spent time with members of this student body, I am more optimistic than ever that we will emerge from our current crisis as we always have. I believe you will lead us back to the nation we know we can be: fair, equal, honest, decent. A country where we give hate no safe harbor, and where we treat everyone with dignity and respect. We just need to remember who we are. We are the United States of America, and there’s nothing we cannot accomplish, if we do it together.
Fellow Blue Hens, I know we can do this, and with your generation’s leadership, I know that we will.
Former President Joe Biden is a university class of 1965 alum who wrote the above op-ed. His opinions are his own and do not represent the majority opinion of The Review staff.
The pre-midterm defenestration of ACA enrollees looks like political madness – but the president appears to believe hitting poor people might work for him
There is a manic quality to Donald Trump’s desperate dash to do something, anything, ahead of November’s midterm elections to convince beleaguered Americans that he can make the pressures his policies have imposed on their livelihoods go away.
The US president offered to lower barriers against beef imports to limit surging meat prices, only to consider backtracking under pressure from the cow lobby. He offered to stop diesel exports, only to find oil companies werenot interested. He weakened fuel efficiency standards, claiming this would trim the price of a new car (and forgetting to point out it will also raise spending on gas). In early October he started mailing $500 checks to nearly a million people touting his healthcare “wins”. Oh, and he promised adult Americans a $5,000 check if Republicans maintain control of Congress. That, too, will go nowhere.
An aerial photo shows a Google data center on July 24, 2025, in Henderson, Nev.Photo: Bizuayehu Tesfaye/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Two wealthy lawfare warriors recently failed in their attempts to bury reporting on government-released documents. Both lawsuits — one in state court in California, the other in federal court in Arkansas — were frivolous strategic lawsuits against public participation, known as SLAPPs. Supreme Court precedent couldn’t be clearer that it’s not the journalists’ problem if the government accidentally shares information it’s not supposed to disclose.
But only the California SLAPP victim had any real recourse against the censorial bully who wanted to shut him up — not because that case was any more frivolous than the Arkansas one, but because of the court in which it was filed.
Let’s start with the Arkansas case. Jessica Kivell — a mom, healthcare worker, and concerned citizen — sought to find out who was paying for a data center project in West Memphis. She filed public records requests with the Arkansas Public Service Commission and received documents indicating Google would cover only one-third of the cost of a new solar plant to power the facility, contradicting its promises that ratepayers would not be on the hook. Kivell shared the documents with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which reported on them.
Entergy Arkansas, the utility set to build the solar facility, sued Kivell, the Democrat-Gazette, its reporter, and the Arkansas Times, which said it never even had the records. It claimed the commission erred by releasing the records to Kivell, that they contained trade secrets (sidenote: baselessly invoking the need to protect trade secrets to duck public records laws is also a serious problem), that she and the press should be restrained from discussing them, and the Democrat-Gazette should have to take down what it had already reported. Entergy also disputed the Democrat-Gazette’s characterization Google would share the costs.
There are at least four Supreme Court cases that should have put Entergy’s lawyers on notice that they had no legal leg to stand on. Even in scenarios involving information far more sensitive than a utility’s purported business secrets — and far less newsworthy than the public being misled about what a data center would cost them — the court has rejected “prior restraints” that would claw back records that the government released inadvertently.
One such case, Florida Star v. BJF, involved a newspaper that published the name of a rape victim in violation of state law. The court held the law was unconstitutional to the extent it barred news outlets from publishing information released by the government, regardless of whether the government intended to release it. The red-line rule against holding the press liable for the government’s failure to protect confidences makes sense given that the court has called prior restraints against the press the “most serious” of all First Amendment violations.
There is no economic disincentive stopping Entergy from SLAPPing again the next time a news report interferes with its business.
Ultimately, U.S. District Court Judge Lee Rudofsky rightly denied Entergy’s request for an emergency gag order. Entergy subsequently dropped the case. But it forced the defendants to lose money, time, and sleep. (Kivell, who rushed to court in her work scrubs for the hearing on Entergy’s motion, reportedly broke down sobbing in the courthouse hallway.) The defendants should have been able to at least recover their legal costs but, because they were in federal court, they could not.
Arkansas, like 39 other states and the District of Columbia, has an anti-SLAPP law allowing those hit with frivolous anti-speech lawsuits to recover their attorneys’ fees. But there is no federal anti-SLAPP statute, and district courts in the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Arkansas, have declined to apply the state’s anti-SLAPP law. Federal courts in some states, like Florida, apply state anti-SLAPP laws, but many others decline to do so, viewing them as in conflict with federal pleading standards.
That means that other than their own legal fees — likely a drop in a bucket for them — there is no economic disincentive stopping Entergy from SLAPPing again the next time a news report interferes with its business in hopes that an incompetent judge grants it unconstitutional relief (it wouldn’t be the first time, unfortunately), or a scared defendant backs down without a fight.
Now let’s head to California. In 2023, independent journalist Jack Poulson published a story in his news outlet, All-Source Intelligence, about the 2021 domestic violence arrest of Maury Blackman, then CEO of Premise Data, a surveillance tech company that holds U.S. government contracts. Poulson reported on and linked to a police report that Blackman claimed the government never should have released because it was sealed. (Under California law, the records could be sealed because charges were not filed.)
Blackman sued Poulson; Substack, which hosted the article; and others in an attempt to not only punish them for their journalism, but also scrub the articles and police report from the internet. For the same reasons Entergy’s case failed, a judge threw out Blackman’s SLAPP. That decision was affirmed by an appeals court last week.
Leading its opinion with a quote from the Florida Star case, the appellate court also upheld the lower court’s award of attorneys’ fees to the defendants under California’s robust anti-SLAPP law. That means Blackman will need to reimburse his SLAPP target’s legal fees, and that other wannabe SLAPPsters in California might think twice knowing there are consequences for weaponizing the courts against their critics.
While Poulson’s victory was more satisfying than the Arkansas defendants’ win, in both cases, the plaintiffs achieved the exact opposite of what they wanted. The stories they tried to bury became national news as their lawsuits got far more coverage than the records they sought to suppress. It’s a phenomenon Techdirt editor Mike Masnick dubbed the Streisand effect, after a privacy lawsuit by the singer backfired and drove exponentially more publicity than it prevented.
Blackman, whose suit was only one component of a multifaceted censorship and intimidation campaign, went from his sealed arrest report appearing on a single, relatively niche blog to being detailed in an opinion from the California Court of Appeals, not to mention reported on by everyone from the San Francisco Chronicle to Courthouse News. Blackman only made things worse when he or his apparent representatives tried to manipulate Google to keep the articles about his arrest and SLAPP suits out of searches, generating even further bad press.
But public shaming is of little use to people like Kivell, whose lives are interrupted by legal nonsense from companies or governments trying to censor them. That’s why Congress needs to pass a federal anti-SLAPP law that would apply even if states decline to enforce their local versions. That would give defendants in federal court, like Kivell, what Poulson had in California: a quick way to get meritless speech suits dismissed, with plaintiffs paying the price.
Nobody’s ability to request public records or publish news should depend on which courthouse a corporation picks.
Correction: October 13, 2026
A previous version of this story reported that Entergy disputed the Democrat-Gazette’s math of how Google would share the costs of the data center. Instead, the newspaper reported on a figure cited in the documents it obtained.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump publicly attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar on Monday shortly after federal agents searched her Washington-area home, calling the Minnesota Democrat “totally crooked” and a “terrible person” while insisting he had nothing to do with the investigation.
“Well, I understand they’re looking at her very carefully,” Trump told reporters before departing for a campaign rally in Ohio. He said the matter was “really up to the DOJ.”
Homeland Security Investigations executed a court-authorized search warrant at Omar’s residence as part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation involving immigration records completed by her late father when she was a child. Federal officials have not announced charges against Omar or publicly disclosed evidence showing she committed a crime.
Omar said she had “done nothing wrong” and accused the administration of using federal law enforcement to target a political opponent. Democratic congressional leaders have also questioned the timing of the search, which occurred roughly three weeks before the midterm elections.
Trump has repeatedly targeted Omar, who was born in Somalia and became a U.S. citizen as a teenager, with highly personal attacks involving her background and immigration history.
Despite denying involvement in Monday’s search, Trump again attacked Omar and Somalia while discussing the investigation later that day.
Austin, TX — Republican Texas Senate candidate and Attorney General Ken Paxton reportedly celebrated New Year’s Eve in Dubai with two American businessmen who were facing federal criminal charges in the United States.
According to reporting cited by Mediaite, Paxton attended the Dec. 31, 2024, gathering with Tracy Duhon and businessmen Anosh Ahmed and Sameer Suhail. Both men had been indicted months earlier in a federal healthcare fraud case involving allegations that roughly $15 million was stolen from a Chicago hospital.
Ahmed also had substantial financial ties to Paxton. Campaign-finance records reviewed by the Wall Street Journal showed that Ahmed contributed about $190,000 to Paxton, including $25,000 just days after his indictment.
Ahmed separately faces charges in a larger alleged fraud scheme involving at least $195 million in government payments for fraudulent COVID-19 testing. He has pleaded not guilty. Both Ahmed and Suhail have since returned to the United States to face prosecution.
Paxton’s campaign did not directly address questions about the Dubai gathering. Senior adviser Nick Maddux instead accused Paxton’s opponents of political persecution and compared the scrutiny to investigations involving President Donald Trump.
The revelations arrive as Paxton campaigns for the U.S. Senate against Democrat James Talarico and faces continuing questions about his relationships with wealthy political donors.
Austin, TX — Texas health officials are proposing to eliminate the state’s Children’s Autism Program as part of budget reductions ordered for the 2028-29 biennium, alarming families and providers who say access to treatment is already severely limited.
The Texas Health and Human Services Commission included eliminating the program in its budget request after Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows directed state agencies to cut spending by 3%.
The program provided treatment to 583 children during fiscal 2026, while contractors told the Associated Press that at least 1,000 additional children are waiting for services, sometimes for years.
State officials argue that Medicaid now provides many of the same autism-related benefits, making the separate program less necessary. Advocates dispute that assessment, saying Medicaid coverage does not always translate into actual access to providers, particularly in rural communities.
If lawmakers approve the cut, children currently enrolled could continue receiving services through August 2027 before the program ends.
Parents and disability advocates say the proposal could leave families with fewer options for therapies such as applied behavior analysis, especially for children who are uninsured, underinsured or unable to find Medicaid providers.
The Legislature will ultimately decide whether to eliminate the program when it considers the state budget during its 2027 session.
In several congressional races, Republican ads are claiming that Democratic candidates support “sex changes” for children or support taxpayer money being used for such surgeries. But the allegations of support for those claims are flawed.
Some of the ads cite politicians’ votes against measures that went beyond prohibiting surgeries. Also, it’s worth noting that gender-affirming surgeries typically take place after age 18, according to experts and studies on the prevalence of gender-affirming care, as we’ve reported before.
Republican politicians and outside groups are spending millions on TV, streaming and digital ads pushing these claims. Our search of AdImpact’s ad-tracking database identified more than $100 million in spending on more than 200 ads since Aug. 1 that contain the words “sex change.” In federal Senate races alone, the spending totaled more than $77 million.
We’ll look at ads in three toss-up Senate races:
In Ohio, ads from the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC connected to the Republican Senate majority leader, say that Democrat Sherrod Brown “supports sex changes for minors,” citing a 2023 TV interview in which Brown said that “a child’s health care decisions are between them, their parents, their families, their doctors — not politicians.” One ad, featuring a woman who is suing her medical providers in Texas, leaves the false impression that she had surgery as a minor without her parents’ consent.
In Texas, ads from an SLF-associated group, Texas PAC, say that Democrat James Talarico “supported using taxpayer dollars for sex change surgeries on young children.” The ads cite his vote against state legislation that went beyond that, broadly prohibiting gender-affirming care for kids. Talarico, a state representative, voted for an amendment that would have restricted the bill to banning surgeries.
In Alaska, ads from No Going Back PAC Inc., which is linked to the MAGA Inc. super PAC, claim that Democrat Mary Peltola “voted against prohibiting taxpayer funded sex changes for minors,” citing her votes on amendments that pertained to gender-affirming medications or surgeries. In another vote cited by the PAC, Peltola, a former U.S. representative, voted against a defense spending bill because of an amendment that would have limited abortion access for military personnel.
These ads are a continuation of Republican messaging during the 2024 presidential campaign and reflect President Donald Trump’s repeatedclaims that Democrats want “transgender for everybody.” Some of the messages being pushed in the midterms suggest that surgeries are performed on children, even young children, without parental consent. “The law generally requires the consent of a parent before medical care can be provided to a minor,” according to the National Center for Youth Law. There are exceptions, such as state laws allowing minors to consent to emergency care and care for certain services, including abortion, contraception and substance use care.
People who are transgender — meaning they identify with a gender that doesn’t match the sex they were assigned at birth — make up a small percentage of the U.S. population. A 2025 report by the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law’s Williams Institute estimated that more than 2.8 million people in the U.S. age 13 and older identify as transgender. That’s 0.8% of adults and 3.3% of youth ages 13 to 17.
We’ll look at ads in three Senate races in which the Democrats are hoping to flip the Republican seats.
Ohio Ads
Several ads attacking Brown in the Senate race in Ohio claim that he supported “taxpayer-funded sex changes” on children, citing an interview he did with WSYX-TV in Columbus on July 19, 2023.
Brown didn’t say he supported that. Rather, he was asked about a broader federal bill, introduced by then Sen. JD Vance, that aimed to “prohibit gender-affirming care on minors,” defined as both surgeries and medication, including hormones and puberty-blocking drugs. The bill called for fines and/or prison time for anyone prescribing or administering such care. It also aimed to prohibit federal funding being used for any gender-affirming care.
In a 21-second clip of that interview, posted online by the Senate Leadership Fund, Brown says: “A child’s health care decisions are between them, their parents, their families, their doctors — not politicians. I will never agree with anybody that wants to bring politics into the family situation with health care, period.”
Vance’s bill never received a vote.
In 2024, SLF PAC made similar claims about Brown and also pointed PolitiFact to a March 2023 letter nine Democratic senators, including Brown, sent to then President Joe Biden. But that doesn’t show Brown necessarily supporting “sex-change surgeries for minors” either. Instead, the senators expressed concern about discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals and state laws blocking gender-affirming care for youth and adults. As we’ve explained, gender-affirming care encompasses counseling, social transitioning and medication — in addition to surgery.
Two SLF PAC ads feature Soren Aldaco, who is suing her medical providers over the “top surgery,” or double mastectomy, she had at age 19 in Texas. One ad leaves the false impression that Aldaco had surgery as a minor without her parents’ consent. She was an adult at the time.
Aldaco, who has said she was “gaslit” into receiving gender-affirming care, says in the ad: “Sherrod Brown supports sex changes for minors, irreversible surgery on kids. Like me. At 11, I was groomed by strangers online. At 15, a doctor told my family I was transgender. Hormone injections, then surgery without my parents’ consent. I was a kid. I was confused.”
We asked SLF PAC about the ad’s suggestion that Aldaco wasn’t an adult when she had surgery. Communications Director Chris Gustafson pointed us to information about when Aldaco received medication, not surgery. He pointed to Aldaco’s February commentary piece in the Wall Street Journal, in which Aldaco said a nurse practitioner prescribed testosterone and estrogen blockers when she was 17. Also, in an interview with Fox News, Aldaco said her stepmother took her to that appointment, but the nurse practitioner should’ve gotten consent from her biological mother.
In the ad, Aldaco says, “Ohio’s kids deserve better.” But gender-affirming care, defined as both medication and surgery, for minors is illegal in the state. The law, with exceptions for children with sex development disorders, was enacted in 2024, after the Ohio Legislature overrode Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto. The state Supreme Court is considering a lawsuit challenging the legislation.
In vetoing the bill, DeWine said, “These are gut-wrenching decisions that should be made by parents and should be informed by teams of doctors who are advising them,” while noting that he was against surgeries before age 18. Among the families he spoke to before deciding to veto the bill, “none of them … talked about surgeries,” DeWine said. “I think that’s frankly a fallacy that’s out there that it goes right to surgery. It just doesn’t. All of the children’s hospitals say, we don’t do surgeries.” (See the 17:45 mark of the video.)
One response ad from the Brown campaign makes the point that these surgeries are illegal in Ohio for kids. A second response ad shows an image from the Aldaco ads and says they’re “a complete lie. Records show not only is this woman actually from Texas, she didn’t have any surgery as a minor.”
(The ad goes on to misleadingly say that Brown’s opponent in the Senate race, Republican Sen. Jon Husted, voted to block the release of the Epstein files, a claim we’ve written about before.)
Texas Ads
In the Senate race in Texas, an ad from Texas PAC, which is affiliated with SLF PAC, says, “Talarico supported using taxpayer dollars for sex change surgeries on young children.” It, as well as other ads making such a claim, cites Talarico’s vote against a 2023 state law that, like the law in Ohio, prohibits gender-affirming medications and surgeries for minors and using state money for it. In Texas’ version, doctors could lose their medical licenses if they violate the law. The state Supreme Court upheld it in 2024.
The ad above includes “puberty blockers” on screen, but the narrator only says that Talarico supported “sex change surgeries.” Another ad by the same group says he “supported using taxpayer dollars for sex change surgeries on kids.”
JT Ennis, press secretary for Talarico’s campaign, told us: “These ads are lies. As James has said, he opposes gender reassignment surgery for minors.”
Talarico said that in June in a podcast interview.
In September, Talarico told Fox News that he opposed the 2023 Texas legislation because it was “overly broad” and that at the time he “voted for a major amendment to limit the bill to banning surgeries for minors.” He did vote in favor of such an amendment, which failed. He also told Fox News that he would “absolutely” support a national prohibition on gender-affirming surgery for minors.
In 2023, Talarico said the state law “would deny, many times, life-saving healthcare from our trans youth” and that “the reason that I opposed that bill is because I trust parents and doctors to make decisions for kids and not politicians in Austin.”
The Texas law included exceptions for administering treatment for certain medical conditions, such as premature puberty or sex development disorders, but, according to the Texas Tribune, at least one family had trouble accessing such care after their physician was sued by state Attorney General Ken Paxton, Talarico’s opponent in the Senate race.
Alaska Ads
In Alaska, Peltola, a former U.S. representative for the state, is being attacked over several votes. But as in the other races, the ads misrepresent her votes. Pelota is running against incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan.
Twoads from No Going Back PAC, a super PAC linked to Trump, claim that Peltola “voted against prohibiting taxpayer funded sex changes for minors.” One ad says she did this “time and again,” citing three votes.
Two of those votes were against amendments in 2024 to prohibit gender-affirming surgeries or medication for minors under two military healthcare programs. One of those programs — TRICARE — was already “explicitly prohibited from covering gender-affirming surgical care for beneficiaries,” according to a 2023 report from the Congressional Research Service. Both amendments, which were attached to the fiscal year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, a defense spending bill, passed.
Peltola’s campaign pointed us to statements by an advocacy group for LGBTQ+ service members, which said the amendments would hurt military readiness and retention. The campaign also noted that Peltola was one of six Democrats who ultimately voted for the final House version of the NDAA that year.
The third vote cited in the ad was in July 2023 against passage of a version of the NDAA that year. But as we explained previously, Peltola specifically criticized Republican amendments, including one that would have limited abortion access for military personnel.
“We shouldn’t be pitting pay raises that they [military members] deserve against the reproductive freedoms that they also deserve,” Peltola said in a prepared statement at the time. “That is a false choice, created for purely political reasons, and I look forward to negotiations with the Senate’s version of the bill where this issue will be discussed further. I will advocate strongly to return to the bipartisan, policy-focused bill that came out of committee, and will gladly vote for a bill that fully protects our troops and their families.”
Democrats had objected to the limitation on abortion and several other amendments that they called “poison pill riders,” including one prohibiting gender-affirming surgeries or hormones under TRICARE. Peltola didn’t mention the latter amendment in her statement.
The Senate didn’t pass the House version of the bill. Instead lawmakers negotiated a compromise defense bill that stripped out many of the Republican amendments. Peltola voted in favor of that.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Alaskans for Mary — her campaign committee — told us: “Let’s be clear: Mary does not support gender re-assignment surgeries for children, and she believes those decisions should be in the hands of parents and doctors, not DC politicians. Mary thinks both parties have spent far too long obsessing over this issue, and that’s why she’s focused on cracking down on corruption in both parties and lowering costs for Alaskans.”
In a response ad, Peltola also says: “I’m a mom, and I know that parents know what’s best for their kids. These attacks are lies. No, I don’t want kids getting surgeries to change genders.”
More Context on Gender-Affirming Care
As we’ve explained before, gender-affirming surgeries for children are rare. Before puberty, there are no medications or surgeries offered to children. Instead, families are offered counseling. Children may change their name, pronouns, or hair and dress as part of a social transition.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health have published guidance recommending care at different ages. In terms of medication, puberty blockers, which delay the beginning of puberty, can be offered between ages 8 to 13 for girls and 9 to 14 for boys. Gender-affirming hormone therapy typically wouldn’t be given until around age 16.
In terms of surgery, one expert previously told us that older adolescents sometimes may be able to get surgery to remove their breasts, also known as top surgery, and may want to do this before college. But genital surgeries wouldn’t typically happen until age 18 or older. The Endocrine Society’s guidance for care specifies that surgeries involving removing the testicles, ovaries or uterus shouldn’t occur before age 18. In February, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons issued a position statement recommending that all gender-affirming surgeries be done at age 19 or later, while saying that “physicians should also use their personal and professional judgment.”
Studies have found that neither surgery nor medication is common for minors. “The politicization of gender-affirming care for transgender youth has been driven by a narrative that millions of children are using hormones and that this type of care is too freely given. Our findings reveal that is not the case,” said Landon Hughes, a fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a co-author of studies published in JAMA journals in 2024 and 2025, on the utilization of care among transgender and gender diverse adolescents in the U.S.
In a study examining insurance claims in 2019 for tens of millions of U.S. adults and minors, Harvard researchers and colleagues found no gender-affirming surgical procedures in transgender and gender diverse minors under 12 years of age. Surgeries among older minors “were rare and almost entirely chest-related,” the study said. The rate of having a gender-affirming surgery among minors with a diagnosis of being transgender or gender diverse was 2.1 per 100,000 for ages 15 to 17 years and 0.1 per 100,000 for ages 13 to 14 years.
Another study of private insurance claims data by some of the same Harvard researchers found that, between 2018 and 2022, less than 0.1% of minors ages 8 to 17 with private insurance were transgender or gender diverse and received puberty blockers or hormones. No minor under age 12 received a hormone prescription.
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Four privately financed installations would expand local electricity generation and offer subscribers lower bills, but questions remain about costs, incentives and broader benefits.
By George D. Rotsch, Delaware LIVE News
DOVER, Del. — Gov. Matt Meyer’s administration has announced plans to accelerate four community solar projects representing approximately $20.3 million in proposed private investment, promising additional electricity generation and savings for participating Delaware consumers.
The projects, proposed by King Energy, would add nearly 10 megawatts of solar generating capacity at commercial properties in New Castle and Sussex counties. Construction is expected to begin in spring 2027.
The announcement comes as Delaware residents and businesses continue to face concerns about electricity affordability, generating capacity and the state’s ability to attract private investment.
Although the administration says the projects will expand local energy production and help customers manage electricity costs, its Oct. 9 announcement did not specify how many households would benefit or how much an average subscriber could save annually.
That distinction matters because community solar programs provide financial benefits directly to participating customers but do not necessarily reduce electricity rates for everyone.
Four projects, $20.3 million in investment
The solar installations are among six projects accepted into the governor’s JobsFirst Permitting Accelerator, an initiative designed to shorten government review timelines for housing, energy and infrastructure development.
The six projects represent approximately $165 million in proposed private investment, including two mixed-use housing developments and the four solar installations.
King Energy would develop the solar facilities at commercial properties owned by Harvey Hanna & Associates and Coastal Trade Supply.
Location
Capacity
Estimated investment
Ships Landing Way, New Castle
2.8 MW
$5.8 million
Lambson Lane, New Castle
2.45 MW
$5.1 million
Dock View Drive, New Castle
1.34 MW
$3.6 million
Frankford Business Park, Sussex County
3.08 MW
$5.8 million
Total
9.67 MW
$20.3 million
According to the administration, the installations would generate more than 12 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually after completion.
“King Energy is extremely excited to partner with the Delaware JobsFirst program to accelerate the deployment of rooftop solar programs at four commercial properties, owned by Harvey Hanna and Coastal Trade Supply,” King Energy CEO John Witchel said in the announcement.
Witchel said the projects would help address growing electricity demand and costs by expanding in-state generation.
The installations would connect to Delmarva Power’s distribution system. Construction is scheduled to begin in late March 2027, with completion dates varying by location.
How much will customers save?
Unlike traditional rooftop solar, community solar allows eligible residents and businesses to subscribe to a larger solar installation without purchasing or installing panels on their own property.
Electricity generated by the facility enters the utility’s distribution system, and participating customers receive credits on their electric bills based on their subscriptions.
Delaware law establishes minimum savings requirements for newer community solar projects.
For facilities receiving final operating certificates on or after Sept. 3, 2026, residential subscribers must receive savings of at least 10% on the value of their community solar credits. Qualifying low- and moderate-income subscribers must receive savings of at least 20%.
The law also requires at least 15% of a qualifying facility’s electricity output to serve low- and moderate-income customers.
Those savings percentages apply to the value of solar electricity credits after applicable charges, not necessarily to a customer’s entire electric bill.
For example, a residential customer receiving $100 worth of solar credits would save at least $10 under the standard requirement. An income-qualified customer receiving the same credits would save at least $20.
The actual annual savings would depend on electricity consumption, subscription size and billing arrangements.
While those consumer protections are established in state law, the administration has not released expected annual dollar savings for participants in the four newly announced projects.
The number of available subscriptions, eligibility details and enrollment dates also have not been announced.
More generation does not necessarily mean lower statewide rates
The facilities would add locally generated electricity to Delaware’s energy supply, an objective emphasized by the Meyer administration as electricity demand grows.
Solar generation can reduce demand for electricity from other sources during periods when sunlight is available. However, solar panels do not produce electricity at night, and generation varies with weather and seasonal conditions.
The four proposed projects do not include a battery-storage component in the information released by the administration.
As a result, the installations could contribute to Delaware’s electricity supply but would not independently address the need for dependable generation during nighttime hours or other periods when solar production is limited.
The state has not released an analysis quantifying how these four projects would affect wholesale electricity prices, grid reliability or utility rates for customers who do not subscribe.
Those questions are relevant as Delaware considers how to balance renewable energy development with dependable, affordable electricity from a variety of generating sources.
Private investment and public incentives
One notable feature of the announcement is its emphasis on private-sector investment rather than a newly announced state construction appropriation.
King Energy is identified as the developer, with approximately $20.3 million in proposed investment across the four facilities.
However, private financing does not necessarily mean a project operates without public incentives or other financial support.
Depending on eligibility and applicable rules, solar developers may receive tax benefits or generate revenue through renewable energy credit programs.
The governor’s announcement does not identify the specific tax incentives, grants or other public financial assistance, if any, expected to support these installations.
It also does not provide a detailed accounting of utility interconnection expenses or program administration costs.
Those financial arrangements would help establish the projects’ overall economics and clarify whether any associated expenses could affect taxpayers or utility customers who do not subscribe.
Meyer promotes faster permitting
The governor’s JobsFirst Permitting Accelerator is intended to reduce unnecessary delays by coordinating reviews across state agencies.
Established through Executive Order 18, the initiative assigns participating projects a central point of contact and seeks to complete complex permitting reviews within 120 business days.
Existing environmental, public safety and regulatory requirements remain in place, according to the administration.
“The JobsFirst Permitting Accelerator is about cutting unnecessary red tape, moving projects forward faster and making it easier to invest in Delaware,” Meyer said.
“These projects will help lower costs, create opportunities and strengthen the communities Delawareans call home.”
Thomas Harvey, managing director of Harvey Hanna & Associates, said the permitting improvements could help bring needed energy projects online more efficiently.
“We believe projects like these can play an important role in addressing Delaware’s growing need for reliable, affordable energy,” Harvey said.
The approach has implications beyond solar development. More predictable permitting timelines can reduce uncertainty for businesses considering investments in manufacturing, housing and infrastructure.
However, acceptance into the accelerator does not constitute final regulatory approval or guarantee that construction will begin on schedule.
Construction jobs expected
The administration also says the four installations will generate local construction employment.
The announced construction schedules range from approximately five to eight months, depending on the facility.
The state did not specify the number of construction positions, expected wages, how many workers would be Delaware residents or whether the projects would create permanent jobs after construction.
Those details would help evaluate the employment impact of the investments, particularly because the permitting initiative is part of the administration’s JobsFirst economic development program.
Part of a larger solar initiative
The newly announced facilities build on Delaware’s efforts to expand community solar.
In September, the Delaware Public Service Commission highlighted four previously accepted community solar projects in Seaford, Townsend and Clayton.
Those projects represent more than 16 megawatts of proposed generating capacity and over $73 million in investment.
According to the commission, state officials estimated that the earlier projects could provide electricity cost reductions of 10% to 15% for more than 16,000 Delaware households.
Those estimates apply to the earlier projects, not the four King Energy installations announced in October.
The additional facilities would expand the number of proposed solar installations moving through the state’s accelerated permitting process.
Measuring the benefits
The latest announcement represents another step in the administration’s effort to encourage private investment, expand energy generation and reduce regulatory delays.
The projects offer potential benefits, including additional electricity production, savings for participating customers and construction-related economic activity.
Whether those investments also produce broader affordability benefits will depend on actual electricity output, project costs, subscriber participation and how the facilities operate within Delaware’s electricity system.
Several questions remain unanswered in the announcement, including how many Delawareans will subscribe, what average annual savings will be, whether public incentives are involved and how the administration will measure the results of accelerated permitting.
For consumers concerned about rising electricity costs, those figures will help determine how much of the promised benefit ultimately reaches Delaware households and businesses.
The four installations remain proposed developments, with construction planned for 2027. Their economic and energy benefits will become measurable once the facilities are completed and begin operating.
The Delaware Department of Education will recognize the 20 district and charter Teachers of the Year during an Oct. 13 celebration at the Modern Maturity Center in Dover. The photo was updated on 10/13/26 and was created using AI.
Twenty educators from across the state will be honored in Dover before one is selected to represent Delaware in the national Teacher of the Year program.
DOVER — One of 20 educators representing Delaware’s public school districts and charter schools will be named the state’s 2027 Teacher of the Year Tuesday evening.
The Delaware Department of Education will recognize the 20 district and charter Teachers of the Year during an Oct. 13 celebration at the Modern Maturity Center in Dover. The evening will conclude with the announcement of the educator selected to serve as Delaware’s Teacher of the Year.
The nominees were selected by their districts or the Delaware Charter Schools Network during 2026 and recognized for their ability to inspire students, their professional skills and their dedication to teaching.
The honor is intended to recognize an outstanding classroom teacher while also selecting an educator who can represent teachers across the state. Delaware’s winner automatically becomes the state’s nominee for the National Teacher of the Year program.
Twenty educators in the running
This year’s nominees represent elementary, middle and high schools and teach subjects ranging from kindergarten and third grade to science, mathematics, music, social studies, French and special education.
The 2027 district and charter Teachers of the Year are:
Appoquinimink — Caitie Layton, Silver Lake Elementary, music
Brandywine — Victoria Sorg, Concord High School, French and AVID
Caesar Rodney — Morgan McManus, Allen Frear Elementary, third grade
Cape Henlopen — Julianna Danese, Cape Henlopen High School, special education and AVID
Capital — Angela Darling-Spinelli, Central Elementary, library media
Christina — Jessica Liu, Etta J. Wilson Elementary, multilingual learners
Colonial — Chadia Garyeazon, Southern Elementary, third grade
Delaware Charter Schools Network — Kelly Kline, Newark Charter High School, music
Delmar — Terry Rodenbaugh, Delmar Middle School, English
Indian River — Emily Wright, Sussex Central Middle School, science
Lake Forest — Brian Gilewski, W.T. Chipman Middle School, social studies
Laurel — Brittany Franchino, North Laurel Early Learning Academy, kindergarten
Milford — Erin Raniszewski, Mispillion Elementary, third grade
New Castle County Vocational-Technical — Sarah Dunn, Delcastle Technical High School, mathematics
POLYTECH — Victoria Ruckman, POLYTECH High School, science
Red Clay — Darla Jones, William C. Lewis Dual Language Elementary, fifth grade
Seaford — Donna Wells, Blades Elementary, kindergarten
Sussex Tech — Sarah Rose, Sussex Technical High School, music
Woodbridge — RoseMarie McGill, Woodbridge High School, social studies
The list illustrates the range of educators considered for the award, from teachers working with some of Delaware’s youngest students to those preparing high school students for college and careers. The Department of Education says the program is designed to recognize educators who can serve as ambassadors for the teaching profession.
A lengthy selection process
Being named a district Teacher of the Year is only the beginning of the statewide selection process.
Each candidate completes an application that includes five essays. Five Department of Education staff members and five former Delaware Teachers of the Year independently review and score the applications.
A former state Teacher of the Year and a department staff member then observe each candidate in the classroom.
An independent panel of judges from outside the Department of Education considers the application scores, classroom observations and a recorded presentation from each candidate before recommending a winner to the secretary of education.
The program seeks educators who are knowledgeable and skilled, inspire students of different backgrounds and abilities, earn the respect of students, parents and colleagues and can represent the profession publicly.
More than a one-night honor
The educator selected Tuesday will become Delaware’s representative in the National Teacher of the Year program, which is administered by the Council of Chief State School Officers.
The state winner also takes on a larger role as an advocate and ambassador for Delaware teachers during the year.
Through action by the Delaware General Assembly, the state Teacher of the Year will receive a $5,000 grant to benefit students and a $3,000 personal grant.
Each of the other 19 district and charter nominees will receive a $2,000 state grant.
The celebration begins with a social hour at 5 p.m., followed by dinner at 6 p.m. The Teacher of the Year announcement is expected after dinner.
For Delawareans who cannot attend, the final portion of the program will be livestreamed, with coverage expected to begin about 7:15 p.m.
TO GO BOX
What: Delaware 2027 Teacher of the Year celebration
When: Tuesday, Oct. 13. Social hour begins at 5 p.m.; dinner begins at 6 p.m.; the Teacher of the Year announcement is expected after dinner.
Where: Modern Maturity Center, Dover
Watch: The announcement portion of the ceremony is expected to be livestreamed beginning about 7:15 p.m. on YouTube.
Meet the nominees: The Delaware Department of Education has profiles of the 20 district and charter Teachers of the Year on its Teacher of the Year website.
From handcrafted jewelry and award-winning wildlife photography to homemade preserves, the Oct. 17-18 fair offers something beyond ordinary shopping.
WILMINGTON — A jar of homemade Delaware preserves, a piece of copper jewelry colored by fire or an award-winning photograph of wildlife could become someone’s favorite holiday gift this year.
Those are just a few of the discoveries awaiting visitors to the annual Hagley Craft Fair, returning Saturday, Oct. 17, and Sunday, Oct. 18, to Hagley Museum and Library along the Brandywine.
The two-day event brings together artisans from across the Mid-Atlantic, transforming Hagley’s historic upper property and Soda House into a marketplace of handmade jewelry, fine art, pottery, woodworking, textiles and gourmet foods.
For Delaware residents, the event is more than an opportunity to begin holiday shopping. It’s a chance to meet the artists and small-business owners behind the products, discover regional talent and enjoy one of the state’s most picturesque historic properties during the fall season.
Among this year’s exhibitors are several makers whose work and personal stories offer a glimpse into the creativity behind the fair.
From a Delaware backyard to a thriving food business
One of the fair’s distinctly Delaware exhibitors is Backyard Jams and Jellies, a Milton-based company offering more than 90 varieties of jams, jellies, mustards, chutneys and other preserves.
The business traces its beginnings to founder Krista Scudlark, who started making preserves from fruit grown in her backyard more than 25 years ago.
What began as a way to use an abundant harvest grew into a specialty food business recognized at farmers markets and shops throughout Delaware.
In 2023, Andrew and Janece Pipon purchased the business, continuing its small-batch production methods and original recipes while introducing additional varieties.
The company remains connected to Delaware agriculture through its use of ingredients from regional farmers.
Its selection ranges from traditional fruit preserves to pepper jellies and savory products, offering shoppers an opportunity to discover gifts made close to home.
Turning fire into wearable art
Visitors looking for something less traditional may be drawn to 222 Creations, which specializes in torch-fired copper enamel jewelry and flame-painted copper designs.
Unlike jewelry produced using standardized manufacturing techniques, flame painting uses heat to produce changing colors and patterns on copper.
The result is jewelry that can be difficult to reproduce exactly, making individual pieces distinctive.
The artist behind 222 Creations explains that while the flame patterns can be guided, the resulting colors are influenced by the heating process.
The work demonstrates one of the attractions of an artisan show: discovering how an artist transforms an ordinary material into something unexpected.
Jewelry designed to become an heirloom
Another featured exhibitor, Anna Biggs Designs, approaches jewelry as a form of sculpture.
Biggs creates hand-carved designs in silver and gold, producing pieces that combine fine-art craftsmanship with jewelry intended to be worn.
Her collections include rings, earrings and necklaces featuring distinctive shapes and detailed metalwork.
For shoppers interested in a special gift or a piece of jewelry that can be treasured for years, her work offers an alternative to mass-produced accessories.
Delaware photographer earns recognition beyond the state
The fair also features the work of Heather Orkis, a wildlife photographer from Townsend whose photographs have earned recognition in national and international competitions.
Orkis specializes in wildlife, particularly ducks and other waterfowl.
Her accomplishments include a 2023 honorable mention in the National Wildlife Federation’s photography competition, recognition from the Ward Museum of Wildfowl Art and a winning entry in a Ducks Unlimited waterfowl photography competition.
Her photographs also have appeared in a national Ducks Unlimited calendar.
Orkis, who works as a paramedic, describes wildlife photography as an opportunity to find solitude and relaxation away from the demands of emergency medical work.
Her photography demonstrates that Delaware’s creative community includes artists whose work reaches well beyond the state’s borders.
More than jewelry and fine art
The fair’s variety extends far beyond these featured exhibitors.
Visitors can browse handmade pottery, wood carvings, furniture, hand-dyed textiles, leather goods, decorative metalwork, glass art and specialty foods.
Other exhibitors on Hagley’s 2026 vendor list include the Delaware Woodworkers Guild, Blue Fox Studio, Avant Garden Pottery, Blazing Bella and Waggies by Maggie & Friends, a nonprofit dog-treat business whose mission includes employing people with intellectual disabilities.
The mix of established artisans, small businesses and specialty producers makes the show attractive to visitors with different interests and budgets.
For those shopping ahead of the holidays, the fair offers opportunities to buy gifts directly from their makers while supporting independent businesses.
A fall outing with a little history
The setting is part of the appeal.
Exhibitors will occupy Hagley’s upper grounds and historic Soda House building, allowing visitors to browse inside and outside while enjoying the surrounding landscape.
The Hagley Museum Store and Hagley Handwork Group also will be located in the Library Copeland Room.
Food trucks will provide refreshments, and shuttle transportation will be available throughout the event.
Admission includes access to the historic du Pont family home and gardens, giving visitors an opportunity to combine shopping with an exploration of Delaware history.
Tickets are valid for both days, and the fair will take place rain or shine.
For anyone who enjoys handmade craftsmanship, local entrepreneurship and the colors of a Brandywine Valley autumn, the Hagley Craft Fair offers an opportunity to experience all three in one weekend.
TO GO BOX: Hagley Craft Fair 2026
What: Hagley Craft Fair — fine arts, crafts, and specialty food market
When:
Saturday, Oct. 17, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Sunday, Oct. 18, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Where: Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington. Enter from the Buck Road East entrance off Route 100.
GPS address: 298 Buck Road, Wilmington, DE 19807
Admission:
Tickets
Advance online
At the gate
Adults
$10
$15
Children ages 6-14
$8
$10
Children under 6
Free
Free
Hagley members
Free
Free
Parking and transportation: Follow event parking directions from the Buck Road East entrance. Shuttles will operate throughout the grounds.
Included: Admission to the du Pont family home and gardens. Food trucks will offer refreshments for purchase.
Important: Tickets are valid both days. The event is rain or shine. Dogs are not permitted.
This year, the Prayer Breakfast features Bob Doll, CEO and chief investment officer of Crossmark Global Investments, as its keynote speaker. Doll previously held senior investment positions at Nuveen, BlackRock and Merrill Lynch Investment Managers.
39th annual gathering brings business, civic and faith leaders together Thursday at the Chase Center
WILMINGTON — For nearly four decades, the Delaware Leadership Prayer Breakfast has brought together an unusual cross-section of the First State: business executives, elected officials, nonprofit leaders, educators, clergy and other community leaders.
On Thursday, Oct. 15, the tradition continues at the Chase Center on the Riverfront with the 39th annual Delaware Leadership Prayer Breakfast, an event that has grown from a Wilmington-area gathering into a statewide institution connecting faith, leadership and Delaware’s business community.
The breakfast begins at 7:20 a.m. and this year features Bob Doll, CEO and chief investment officer of Crossmark Global Investments, as its keynote speaker. Doll previously held senior investment positions at Nuveen, BlackRock and Merrill Lynch Investment Managers.
A Delaware business tradition
The roots of the breakfast go back to 1985, when Wilmington-area businessmen Bob Nickle, David Ripsom and Bob Townsend attended the White House Prayer Breakfast in Washington and returned to Delaware interested in creating a similar gathering.
The first New Castle County Leadership Prayer Breakfast was held in 1986, attracting about 500 people. Its first speaker was Dr. Richard Halverson, then chaplain of the U.S. Senate.
The founders envisioned more than a religious event. The original purpose specifically spoke about leadership in Delaware’s business, professional and community life — a focus that has remained central to the breakfast.
As attendance expanded beyond New Castle County, organizers renamed it the Delaware Leadership Prayer Breakfast in 2002. Federal, state and local political leaders have regularly participated, but the event also has maintained strong ties to Delaware’s business community.
The volunteer steering committee itself is made up largely of Christian business men and women, according to organizers.
A Wall Street voice for Delaware leaders
Doll brings a particularly strong business connection to this year’s gathering.
He has spent more than 40 years in investment management and has served as president and chief investment officer of Merrill Lynch Investment Managers, chief equity strategist at BlackRock and senior portfolio manager and chief equity strategist at Nuveen.
He joined Crossmark in 2021 as chief investment officer and became CEO in 2024. He regularly provides investment commentary and market predictions and has appeared on Bloomberg TV, CNBC and Fox Business.
For a Delaware audience — in a state where banking, financial services and corporate business play an outsized role in the economy — Doll’s combination of financial experience and faith-based leadership gives the keynote a natural connection to the people who have helped make the breakfast a fixture on the business calendar.
Doll also serves a number of Christian, educational and ministry organizations and is choir director at his local church. His background reflects the intersection of professional leadership, faith, stewardship and service that has defined the Delaware breakfast since its beginning.
A long list of prominent speakers
The staying power of the breakfast can also be seen in its speakers.
Recent guests have included John Templeton Foundation President and CEO Timothy Dalrymple in 2025; Pro Football Hall of Famer and former Philadelphia Eagle Brian Dawkins in 2024; JPMorgan Chase executive Dr. Betty Uribe in 2023; and former National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins in 2022.
Earlier speakers have included business leaders, athletes, authors, government officials and nationally known figures such as Interstate Batteries Chairman Norman Miller, Auntie Anne’s founder Anne Beiler, former NFL coach Joe Gibbs, Conoco CEO Archie Dunham and former U.S. Senate Chaplain Barry Black.
That mix has helped the breakfast endure as something broader than either a business meeting or a church event. It provides a place where leaders from different sectors of Delaware life can gather around common themes of character, responsibility, service and faith.
Delaware history takes the stage
This year’s program will also have a distinctly Delaware component.
The cast of the new musical “Big Quarterly” will provide special music. The gospel and hip-hop production tells the story of the Rt. Rev. Peter Spencer and his religious legacy in Delaware.
The musical was written and produced by Bishop S. Todd Townsend, Luke McLemore and Dr. Kim Kilby. Pastor James Burrows Jr. of The Resurrection Center also will lead “God Bless America.”
Nearly four decades after a small group of Delaware businessmen returned from Washington with an idea, the Delaware Leadership Prayer Breakfast has become part of the rhythm of the state’s civic and business community.
Its longevity may be its most significant accomplishment: generations of Delaware leaders have changed, companies have grown and disappeared, political administrations have come and gone, but the breakfast has continued bringing people together each fall to consider the responsibilities that accompany leadership.
Juliet Moore is an assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Applied Physiology at the university, where she studies the relationship between physical activity and immune health. Her research focuses on exercise and its effects on the body’s immune system.
“My interest in my focus for research, as well as teaching, is exercise immunology, specifically how exercise influences inflammation,” Moore said.
Moore’s most recent research investigates the body’s response to high-intensity interval training (HIIT), which is a type of exercise that includes an interval of intense workouts followed by an interval of recovery. The length and intensity of the intervals can be altered depending on the individual.
Moore wondered if there was a correlation between anti-inflammatory responses in the body and painless exercise.
“Can we get that same anti-inflammatory benefit of exercise without the damage, without the pain, so we can promote people that are going to be very low adherents to exercise?” Moore asked. “That goes into actually measuring between treadmill and cycling.”
She earned her doctorate in biokinesiology from University of Southern California and the most recent publication of research on HIIT exercises is from her PhD work.
“This paper is one of my many papers that will be coming out from my PhD, which was looking at how two exercise modalities, as well as diet, affects how the immune system responds to exercise,” Moore said.
Moore discussed how extensive research has examined the link between high-intensity exercise and inflammation, particularly among athletes who participate in events such as marathons, triathlons and the Man of Steel. However, there has been much less research on recreational athletes and people who are unaccustomed to exercise.
She explained that she chose to study HIIT exercises with her participants because HIIT can be modified for most, if not all, populations.
“It’s really fast, it’s highly variable, so, we can edit it to whatever we want, depending on what population we’re going to work with,” Moore said. “It’s high intensity enough that we can still have measurable responses and inflammation and differences between different types of exercise.”
This research was collected through twenty-six individuals who were all college-aged students at USC. Participants were all recreational athletes who participated in consistent physical activity but did not run or cycle regularly.
“We want to make sure that the running and cycling was novel, or new, to them to help stimulate that response,” Moore said.
Moore referred to the program of HIIT exercises used in her research as a “four-by-four,” where participants ran on a treadmill at a set speed for four minutes, then got a three-minute rest period of walking. They repeated this four times.
Moore used heart rate as the measure of intensity during exercise. Although she recognized that it was not the most robust measure, it can be used as a collection method for a wide range of demographic groups.
Each participant was randomly assigned to complete either the treadmill or bicycle exercise first, then waited a week before completing the second exercise. This ensured that participants’ data would not be influenced by inflammation resulting from other forms of exercise.
“Generally that inflammation that can occur after an acute bout of exercise typically goes away after 48 to 72 hours, so two to three days,” Moore said. “It can last upwards of like five days. We did seven days just to make sure it was completely washed out.”
Each participant had a blood sample taken before their exercise, after one hour of recovery and after twenty-four hours of recovery. These blood samples needed to be fasted for the inflammatory markers, so participants were not able to eat until they completed the one-hour recovery blood draw.
The treadmill experiment of running was to test a high-level impact exercise, while the cycling experiment of biking was to test a low-level impact exercise.
“We saw that there were some similar responses between treadmill and cycling, but then there was one really big difference between them,” Moore said.
Moore’s primary outcome measurement was a cell called Interleukin-8 (IL-8), which is released by the immune system and promotes the body’s inflammatory response.
“IL-8 does not change in cycling, and that is theoretically possible, because concentric cycling, cycling that is non-damaging, doesn’t really produce much muscle damage,” Moore said. “You’re not gonna have the IL-8 response. If you don’t have the IL-8 response, theoretically, you’re going to have less muscle soreness as you progress through a recovery.”
She then elaborated on how the body responds to this pain in regards to the immune system.
“Part of that is all of these immune cells moving into the tissue and causing pain,” Moore said. “A lot of muscle soreness is the infiltration of immune cells to help repair the damage. When immune cells move in, there is swelling, and that hurts.”
As participants came in, Moore asked about their level of muscle soreness. Results showed that cycling soreness went up immediately after the exercise; however, during recovery, soreness was not reported. After the treadmill exercise, participants reported that their muscle soreness continued to increase.
Moore gathered enough data for multiple future articles analyzing the same population. One paper from the same study was already published in Dec. 2024. There are plans for more papers regarding the diets of the participants, half of whom were omnivores and half of whom had plant-based diets.
With the inflammatory changes, Moore was curious how the athlete’s performance would change.
Moore also did a jump test, where she used portable force plates to measure the athlete’s performance on a countermovement jump. This jump is performed by squatting down, immediately jumping back up and landing.
She then explained the phenomenon of experiencing pain after doing something that is considered good for your body. People might move their body and feel good doing it, but then feel the recovery pain days later. The body’s inflammatory responses can be stimulated by most activities, as Moore explains.
“Just getting up and moving stimulates these responses,” Moore said. “It may not be to the highest degree, but it will be something. Your body is smart, and your body is well-tuned; just giving it what it needs is going to promote long-term health.”
Pierre, SD — Republican Sen. Mike Rounds has removed prominent references to President Donald Trump from his reelection website, joining a broader group of GOP candidates who are downplaying their ties to the president ahead of the Nov. 3 midterms.
An archived version of Rounds’ site previously highlighted Trump’s endorsement directly beneath the campaign banner and featured a large “ENDORSED BY PRESIDENT TRUMP” graphic. Those references are now gone, along with several mentions of Trump on the campaign’s issues page. Rounds’ campaign did not explain the changes.
The shift comes as Reuters found that Republican candidates in 41 of 62 competitive House and Senate races have either broken with Trump on specific policies or reduced emphasis on their association with him. The most common areas of disagreement include the Iran war, affordability concerns and data centers.
Rounds is not alone. Other Republican candidates have also removed Trump endorsements, photos or “America First” messaging from campaign websites as they move from primary contests into general-election races.
The White House maintains that Trump remains the Republican Party’s strongest campaign draw, and he continues traveling to support GOP candidates in competitive states.
New York, NY — Mayor Zohran Mamdani intensified his criticism of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Sunday, saying video from last week’s shooting of Oscar Belgal looked more like a mass shooting scene than a law-enforcement operation.
Belgal, 28, was shot in the neck during an ICE enforcement action in Marble Hill while his 5-year-old child was inside the vehicle. The child was physically unharmed.
In an interview with MS NOW’s Jacob Soboroff, Mamdani said bystanders appeared unsure whether the plainclothes agents in the footage were law-enforcement officers at all.
“What you can see in that video … it feels like you’re looking at a mass shooter as opposed to seeing someone who is reportedly representing a federal agency,” Mamdani said.
The mayor also accused ICE agents of treating legal restrictions as optional, pointing to New York Police Department rules that generally prohibit officers from firing at people inside vehicles except under limited circumstances.
Mamdani said he spoke with President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin after the shooting and again called for ICE operations to end in New York City.
Belgal remained in federal custody Sunday after being discharged from the hospital and transferred through an ICE facility in New Jersey to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
Two masked suspects entered a Culbreath Street home Sunday afternoon; police are seeking witnesses and information
SMYRNA — Delaware State Police are investigating an armed home invasion in Smyrna after two masked suspects entered an occupied residence Sunday afternoon, threatened a victim with a handgun and escaped with cash and personal property.
Troopers were called to a residence in the 800 block of Culbreath Street at about 2:20 p.m. Oct. 11 for a reported armed robbery.
Police said two victims were inside the home when the two masked suspects entered. One suspect pointed a handgun at one of the victims and demanded money. The suspects then searched the residence before leaving with cash and personal belongings, according to State Police.
Neither victim was injured.
Police have not released descriptions of the suspects beyond saying they were masked, nor have investigators said how the suspects entered the home, whether the victims knew them or whether investigators believe the residence was specifically targeted.
The Delaware State Police Criminal Investigations Unit is handling the investigation.
What is a home invasion?
The term “home invasion” generally distinguishes this kind of crime from the burglary of an empty house because people are inside when the intruders enter, creating the possibility of a direct confrontation.
Delaware law specifically recognizes “home invasion burglary first degree” under certain circumstances. The statute applies when someone unlawfully enters or remains in an occupied dwelling intending to commit a crime and, during the entry, crime or immediate flight, commits or attempts certain serious felonies, including robbery, assault, murder, manslaughter, rape or kidnapping.
That distinction helps explain why an incident such as Sunday’s can be particularly concerning to residents. A conventional residential burglary may occur when no one is home. In a home invasion, occupants can suddenly find themselves face to face with an intruder.
State Police have described Sunday’s incident as an armed home invasion but have not announced arrests or specific criminal charges.
What nearby residents can do
Residents in the Culbreath Street area may be able to help investigators even if they did not witness the crime itself.
Anyone with a doorbell camera, exterior security camera or vehicle camera that captured activity near Culbreath Street around the time of the 2:20 p.m. incident should consider reviewing the footage before it is automatically deleted. Video showing unfamiliar people, vehicles or activity before or after the robbery could potentially be useful to investigators.
Residents should not confront anyone they believe may be connected to the crime. Suspicious activity that appears to present an immediate danger should be reported by calling 911.
The incident also offers a reminder to review basic home security practices.
Federal security guidance recommends keeping exterior doors and windows secured, maintaining outdoor lighting, using cameras where practical and trimming landscaping that can provide hiding places or block views of doors and windows. Families also can discuss in advance what to do during an emergency and where household members can safely retreat while calling police.
Residents also can take several simple precautions:
Keep doors locked even while at home, including during daylight hours.
Identify visitors before opening the door, particularly when someone is unexpected.
Avoid opening the door simply because someone knocks or claims to be making a delivery or providing a service.
Make sure exterior lighting, doorbell cameras and other security equipment are working.
Save potentially relevant security-camera footage rather than assuming someone else has reported it.
Call police rather than confronting suspicious people outside a residence.
Talk with children, older relatives and other household members about what to do if an unknown person tries to enter the home.
The recommendations are precautions, not an indication that police believe additional home invasions are imminent. State Police have not announced a broader threat to Smyrna residents in connection with Sunday’s case.
Police seek information
Detectives are asking anyone who witnessed the incident or has information that could assist the investigation to contact Detective E. Paneda at 302-698-8444.
Tips also may be submitted through a private message to the Delaware State Police Facebook page or through Delaware Crime Stoppers at 1-800-847-3333.
Victim assistance is available
The Delaware State Police Victim Services Unit and Delaware Victim Center provide assistance to crime victims, witnesses and people who have lost loved ones to sudden deaths.
The 24-hour toll-free hotline is 1-800-VICTIM-1, or 1-800-842-8461. The Victim Services Unit also can be reached by email at DSP_VictimServicesMail@delaware.gov.
To Go
What happened: Two masked suspects entered an occupied home in the 800 block of Culbreath Street in Smyrna about 2:20 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 11. One suspect displayed a handgun. Cash and personal property were taken. No injuries were reported.
Have information or video: Contact Delaware State Police Detective E. Paneda at 302-698-8444.
Delaware Schools Receive $7.1 Million in Early Literacy Grants
The Delaware Department of Education has awarded more than $7.1 million in grants to 28 districts and charter schools to support teacher training, instructional coaching and early literacy instruction during the 2026-27 school year. (Photo courtesy of Delaware.gov.)
The Delaware Department of Education has awarded more than $7.1 million in grants to 28 school districts and charter schools for the 2026-27 school year to strengthen early literacy instruction and improve reading outcomes for students.
The funding is part of the state’s second round of Bridge to Practice grants, which support teacher training, instructional coaching, curriculum development and school leadership initiatives focused on the science of reading.
Several school districts in Kent and Sussex counties received funding, including Capital School District, which was awarded $763,855.93, Lake Forest School District with $321,093.20 and Milford School District with $248,238.10.
Other local recipients include Cape Henlopen School District, which received $316,384.87; Laurel School District, $207,285.75; Indian River School District, $146,448.42; Woodbridge School District, $132,485.60; Seaford School District, $81,799; and Sussex Academy, $84,057.75.
The grants are intended to help educators apply research-based reading instruction methods in classrooms through ongoing professional development and support.
“We know how to teach children to read, and we believe every Delaware student can become a strong reader,” Secretary of Education Cindy Marten said. “Passing strong policy is important. Providing resources is important. Training educators and providing coaching are important. But none of those things alone is the outcome we are working toward. The work is making sure what we know reaches students through strong instruction every day and then showing our progress in ways we can reliably measure, see and report. That is how we move plans into progress and stay accountable as we go.”
The funding supports Delaware’s Birth through Grade 3 Early Literacy Plan, which focuses on improving reading instruction during the earliest years of education.
Grant recipients can use the funding for science-of-reading training programs such as LETRS and AIM Pathways, curriculum-based professional learning, instructional coaching and leadership development through the Early Literacy Leadership Academy.
The state previously awarded $6.1 million to 25 districts and charter schools in March as part of the first round of Bridge to Practice grants.
During that round, Indian River School District used funding to improve consistency in literacy instruction across its elementary schools through districtwide instructional frameworks, monthly classroom observations and professional learning for prekindergarten through third-grade educators.
Capital School District focused on connecting teacher training to classroom instruction through student work, classroom reflections and participation in the state’s Student-Centered Coaching program.
The latest round of funding will continue those efforts while placing additional emphasis on how training and instructional strategies are implemented in classrooms.
Throughout the school year, the Department of Education will work with participating districts and charter schools to evaluate progress through classroom observations, coaching activities and student literacy data.
The grants are part of Delaware’s broader early literacy strategy and the Department of Education’s 2025-2028 Strategic Plan.
Washington, DC — Federal agents executed a pre-dawn search warrant Monday at the Washington-area home of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar as part of an ongoing criminal investigation, according to the Justice Department.
Homeland Security Investigations carried out the court-authorized search. Federal officials have released few details about what agents were seeking, and no charges against Omar have been announced.
Reuters, citing Fox News reporting, said the investigation concerns possible immigration fraud involving paperwork completed by Omar’s late father when she entered the United States as a child. The Justice Department has not publicly released the warrant affidavit or other evidence supporting that allegation.
A federal search warrant generally requires investigators to establish probable cause before a judge, but the issuance of a warrant does not establish guilt or mean criminal charges will necessarily follow.
The search follows earlier public statements from Trump administration officials indicating Omar was under federal investigation. President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked Omar, a longtime political opponent and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress.
Omar and her attorneys had not publicly responded to the substance of the investigation as of Monday morning.
Washington, DC — Elon Musk has contributed more than $276 million to Republican-aligned groups and his own super PAC since July, making him the largest known donor in the 2026 midterm elections.
The spending includes approximately $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, the main super PAC working to preserve the Republican Senate majority, and more than $76 million to Musk’s America PAC, according to reporting based on campaign-finance filings.
America PAC has also spent heavily in competitive races, directing tens of millions of dollars toward voter turnout operations and Republican candidates in key states and congressional districts. The scale of Musk’s spending gives him an unusually large financial role in the party’s effort to retain control of Congress.
The contributions continue Musk’s transformation into one of the country’s most influential political donors. He spent roughly $290 million supporting Donald Trump and other Republicans during the 2024 election cycle, according to previous campaign-finance disclosures.
Federal law limits how much individuals can contribute directly to candidates, but super PACs may accept unlimited donations as long as they do not coordinate expenditures with campaigns.
Musk’s latest contributions arrive as Republicans face expensive House and Senate contests nationwide and outside groups are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into advertising and turnout efforts ahead of Election Day.
Houston, TX — A 48-year-old man was hospitalized after an unmarked vehicle driven by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents struck him during an immigration enforcement operation in west Houston on Saturday.
The Harris County Sheriff’s Office identified the injured man as Miguel Parra-Hernandez. Surveillance video shows him running through a shopping center parking lot before an ICE SUV turns into the lot and strikes him. His family says he suffered broken bones in both legs and requires surgery.
ICE said agents were pursuing another man, Jose Mendoza-Cervantes, who was the target of the enforcement action and remains at large. The agency said Parra-Hernandez ran in front of the ICE vehicle, while the available surveillance footage has prompted calls for an independent accounting of what happened.
Parra-Hernandez was taken into ICE custody while hospitalized. His family and immigrant-rights advocates are calling for his release and say he has lived in Houston for more than three decades.
Harris County Commissioner Lesley Briones and Rep. Sylvia Garcia called for ICE to preserve and release all video evidence and cooperate with the sheriff’s investigation.
The incident comes amid broader scrutiny of ICE vehicle pursuits and use-of-force practices during the Trump administration’s expanded immigration enforcement operations.
Based on the bestselling book series by Elle Kennedy, the TV show “Off Campus” has taken the world by storm. Transforming the beloved college romance novel into the current number one show on Prime Video, “Off Campus” follows a close-knit group of college hockey players and the people around them as they navigate love, loss, friendship, ambition and trauma.
The special thing about Kennedy’s series is that each book focuses on different characters all with intertwining storylines at Briar University. Season one of “Off Campus” is based on the book “The Deal,” and is primarily centered on music composition major Hannah Wells, played by Ella Bright, and hockey captain Garrett Graham, played by Belmont Cameli, whose fake-dating relationship slowly evolves into something genuine and is impossible not to root for.
Alongside them are fan-favorite characters Allie Hayes, played by Mika Abdalla, John Logan, played by Antonio Cipriano, Dean Hayward-Di Laurentis, played by Stephen Kalyn, John Tucker, played by Jalen Thomas Brooks, Jules Logan, played by Julia Sarah Stone and Justin Kohl, played by Josh Heuston.
Right from the beginning, “Off Campus” perfectly captures the compelling excitement of college life. Between crowded parties, high-pressure games, dynamic performances and hard late-night conversations, the show accurately represents aspects of life as a college student. At first glance, “Off Campus” is a seemingly shallow and classic romance story, but it quickly evolves into something deeper, balancing humor and emotional vulnerability with authentic and serious real-world issues.
What immediately made this show so insanely compelling to me were the characters. Every character in this series is so likable and has their own unique personalities and emotional arcs which makes the entire friend group feel real.
Focusing on the main two characters this season, Hannah is an intelligent, lively and guarded character who faces many challenges, but yearns for love and happiness. Garrett is charismatic, confident and unexpectedly emotionally aware despite his playboy reputation. Their chemistry is electric and the relationship works due to how their personalities naturally challenge and support one another.
Honestly, I believe that one of the most compelling aspects of “Off Campus,” — thanks to Kennedy — is the way the men are portrayed. Garrett, Logan, Dean and Tucker all feel emotionally complex in ways that male characters in romance shows are often not seen as. Yes, they can be immature and a tad egotistical, but they are also all loyal, emotionally vulnerable and they deeply care for others. This show understands that masculinity does not mean emotional unavailability, but rather it flourishes when men share their feelings and look out for others.
Garrett especially stands out as he is one of the most emotionally intelligent characters in the series. They could have easily made him the stereotypical arrogant hockey player, but he is different. He listens to and respects Hannah. Garrett genuinely wants to understand her rather than fix her, which differs from most rom-com men. Their relationship is built on trust, patience and communication rather than toxicity. Watching them together feels authentic and rewarding.
Something that felt so safe about “Off Campus” was how professionally the writing tackled heavy topics. This show discusses coping with trauma, domestic violence, abuse, sexual assault, death, addiction, intimacy issues, mental health issues, financial struggles, family conflict and uncertainty about the future. These themes were portrayed in a way that felt real and not performative, as everything seamlessly fit into each character’s storyline.
I loved that these important moments were balanced with lighthearted humor and fun. One scene will be emotionally heavy while the next will make you smile and laugh out loud. Through their struggles, I saw myself in many of these characters, and that is what makes “Off Campus” so addicting.
One thing I picked up on in the first five minutes of watching this show is the epic soundtrack. The music ranges from pop to rock to romantic ballads, as well as original songs that Hannah writes and performs in the show. Music is used as a way to cope, which I believe many people can relate to. If a character feels sad or uncertain, they put on headphones and turn on some music.
Songs like “The Bitch is Back” by Elton John, “Cherry Pie” by Warrant, “Baby Now That I’ve Found You” by The Foundations and “On the Floor” by Jennifer Lopez are all now associated with “Off Campus” and, in my opinion, are played during the most iconic moments of the show. I think I especially loved the music in “Off Campus” because I have a soft spot for nostalgic rock music, as Hannah and Garrett do. The music choices in this show just made college life feel fun, possible and overwhelmingly beautiful.
“Off Campus” is so popular because it combines fun romantic tropes with relatable coming-of-age themes. At a time when audiences were yearning for another hockey romance story, the show managed to feel both familiar and fresh by adding real emotional weight to a genre that is often a cliché. Every character feels flawed in believable ways, and those imperfections are what make them feel human, relatable and worth watching.
After finishing season one, I can confidently say that I am fully invested in these characters and their storylines. “Off Campus” is definitely a series about romance and love, but also friendship, healing, identity and learning how to become the person you actually want to be.
Season one ends in a perfect way to set the show up for season number two, which, diverting from the order of the book series, will be centered around Allie Hayes and Dean Hayward-Di Laurentis. I absolutely cannot wait to see where this story goes.
Water has emerged as a key issue for Arizona voters ahead of US midterms – governments should take noteExpert commentLToremark
The case of Arizona shows that governments must stop treating water as merely an environmental issue.
US President Donald Trump may dismiss the threat posed by climate change, but its consequences are becoming harder for US voters to ignore. Take Arizona, for example, where water has emerged as an unusually prominent issue ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Recent polling found that long-term water supplies was the top concern for Arizona voters, after federal cuts to the state’s water supply from the drought-stricken Colorado River. Water has consequently become a prominent issue in Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs’ re-election campaign, with opponents accusing her of mismanaging Arizona’s water supply in an effort to undermine her bid for a second term.
Water is no longer just an environmental issue
Arizona is an extreme example, but the underlying dynamic is much broader. Water is fundamental not only to drinking and sanitation, but to almost every aspect of an economy. In Arizona, it underpins agriculture and urban development, while also supporting industries and amenities that can seem particularly incongruous in a desert environment, such as golf courses. Now a new source of demand is emerging: data centres, driven by the rapid growth of cloud computing and artificial intelligence. The Phoenix metropolitan area ranks second in North America for proposed data-centre development, raising questions about the impact of these energy- and water-intensive facilities on already stretched water supply – an emerging big issue in the midterms.
Arizona’s water predicament is being intensified by a changing climate. Already one of the hottest and driest states in the US, Arizona is experiencing rising temperatures that increase evaporation and water demand, while intensifying drought. This is also putting further pressure on the Colorado River, which supplies more than a third of Arizona’s population, while groundwater reserves are being depleted in parts of the state.
But climate change is only part of the story. Water crises are rarely caused by climate alone. Decades of groundwater over-abstraction, inefficient agricultural practices, pollution, poorly maintained infrastructure and allocations based on historical assumptions can turn a drought into a systemic crisis.
And this is not only an American problem. Cape Town’s 2018 ‘Day Zero’ crisis demonstrated how quickly drought, population growth and rising demand can turn water scarcity into a political emergency. Tehran offers another warning, where drought and declining rainfall have combined with groundwater depletion, and decades of water-management decisions to produce a systemic crisis. European cities like Barcelona, Madrid, Athens, Rome and even London have all faced emergency water restrictions in recent years as drought intensifies.
Companies are paying attention too. The World Economic Forum’s global risk assessments have repeatedly identified water supply shortages among the risks facing economies and businesses. Water shortages can disrupt agricultural supply chains, manufacturing, electricity generation, construction, real estate and technology infrastructure.
Water security is increasingly also about economic and political security.
When water crosses borders, scarcity becomes political
The political challenge becomes even harder when water crosses administrative boundaries.
Arizona’s position within the Colorado River system is governed by a complex web of agreements and legal arrangements, some dating back more than a century. The 1968 legislation authorizing the Central Arizona Project, for example, gave its Colorado River deliveries junior priority, meaning Arizona would face reductions before California in specified shortage circumstances.
As the river comes under increasing pressure, these historical arrangements have become politically consequential. The latest federal proposals for managing the Colorado River envisage substantial reductions in water deliveries to the three lower-basin states – Arizona, California and Nevada – with Arizona facing particularly significant cuts: 27 per cent this year and reductions could nearly double after 2028 if the drought worsens.
The underlying problem is therefore not simply that there is less water. It is that agreements and institutions designed for a different hydrological reality are being used to distribute a resource whose availability is becoming more uncertain.
The same dynamic exists internationally. For example, Ethiopia’s plans to develop three new hydropower projects on the Blue Nile have reignited tensions with Egypt, which remains concerned about how upstream water is stored and managed, particularly during drought. The long-running dispute over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam illustrates how greater hydrological variability and more frequent drought can put existing water-sharing arrangements under growing strain.
Water can therefore become a geopolitical issue even when that is not the intention. When a river or reservoir crosses political boundaries, a reduction in supply also becomes a question of who gets less.
Policymakers must move beyond crisis management
Arizona offers a particularly vivid warning, not only to the US government but to governments around the world, because water has become a political issue before it has run out.
The first step is to stop treating water primarily as an environmental issue. It is increasingly central to decisions on infrastructure, industry, agriculture, housing and public health, and, where water crosses borders, to foreign and security policy.
Water availability needs to be considered much earlier in decisions about where and how economies grow. If a region is chronically water-stressed, governments – as well as regional, state and local authorities – should ask whether new housing, agriculture or industrial development can be supported by available water supplies over the long term.
Technology will have an important role. Wastewater recycling, leakage reduction, precision irrigation, improved groundwater monitoring, more efficient cooling systems and, in some coastal locations, desalination can help expand the options available.
But technology alone cannot change the realities of water availability. The harder question is therefore what societies choose to build – and where.
This is also where nature-based solutions come in. Restoring wetlands can improve water storage, filter pollutants and reduce flood risk. Protecting watersheds can support groundwater recharge and improve downstream water quality. Restoring degraded soils and changing agricultural practices can improve water retention and reduce irrigation requirements.
These measures can deliver several benefits simultaneously – water security, biodiversity, flood protection, carbon storage and resilience to extreme heat – often at lower cost than purely engineered alternatives.
Finally, governments need to integrate water, land use, energy, agriculture and economic planning, both domestically and with neighbouring countries that share water sources, using realistic projections of future water availability rather than historical averages. Water-sharing arrangements should also be revisited as conditions change, before scarcity turns technical disagreements into political crises.
The emergence of water as a political issue in Arizona is striking in a political environment dominated by concerns over the cost of living, immigration and the Iran war. The fact that it has become a leading concern among voters in one of America’s fastest-growing states shows that water security is crossing an important threshold: from an environmental concern that governments can defer, to a question about what kind of future is physically possible.
Minneapolis, MN — A federal prosecution of 15 Minnesota anti-ICE activists is drawing growing opposition from labor unions and civil liberties advocates, who argue the government has turned protest-related allegations into an unusually broad conspiracy case.
Federal prosecutors accuse the group, known as the “Minneapolis 15,” of coordinating efforts to disrupt Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations during protests last winter. Alleged tactics included blocking access to a federal building, following agents in vehicles and, in one case, tracking an ICE employee to his home in Wisconsin.
Authorities have characterized the conduct as criminal interference rather than protected protest. However, prosecutors acknowledged at a June news conference that they could not identify injuries suffered by federal officers in connection with the alleged conspiracy.
The case has generated additional controversy after court filings revealed that undercover Homeland Security Investigations agents attended meetings involving unions and nonprofit organizations. Investigators also subpoenaed financial records from labor groups while examining possible “domestic terror financing.”
Those revelations have helped generate broader support for the defendants. Hundreds of union members marched in Minneapolis on Oct. 3 demanding that the charges be dropped, while several major labor organizations have publicly backed the defendants.
None of the 15 has accepted a plea agreement, and the allegations remain unproven in court.
Austin, TX — Texas is appealing a federal court order requiring the state to provide air conditioning in all of its prisons by the end of 2029, continuing a years-long legal battle over extreme heat behind bars.
U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman ruled in September that forcing incarcerated people to endure dangerously high indoor temperatures violates constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. He cited evidence of ongoing injuries, severe suffering and at least nine heat-related deaths between 2023 and 2025.
As of Oct. 1, only about one-third of Texas prisons were fully climate controlled, leaving roughly 90,000 incarcerated people without air conditioning.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice says it intends to eventually install air conditioning statewide but argues that Pitman’s deadline could disrupt other priorities, including healthcare, staffing and contraband prevention. The agency estimates the full project would cost approximately $1.5 billion.
Texas has asked Pitman to suspend his order while the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals considers the case.
Attorneys representing prisoners argue the state has already delayed action for years despite knowing about the risks. Texas county jails are required to maintain temperatures between 65 and 85 degrees, but state prisons are not subject to the same requirement.
New York, NY — Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a sweeping review of New York Police Department use-of-force policies Monday, along with new accountability measures aimed at officers accused of serious misconduct.
The review, described as the department’s first comprehensive examination of its use-of-force rules in roughly a decade, will include community input and reconsider how officers are trained and guided in encounters involving force.
The changes follow renewed criticism surrounding the 2024 police killing of Win Rozario, a Queens teenager experiencing a mental health crisis. One officer involved was allowed to retire before facing a disciplinary trial after the NYPD failed to notify the Civilian Complaint Review Board of his retirement request.
Mamdani said the city will provide an additional $2.6 million to the NYPD Office of Inspector General, nearly tripling its current staffing capacity. The administration also plans to strengthen procedures preventing officers facing serious discipline from retiring and later seeking other law-enforcement jobs without their records following them.
Additional reforms include improving the release of information to families after fatal or serious police encounters and ensuring required reports of police-involved deaths are submitted to the state.
The announcement comes as Mamdani continues facing pressure from supporters who argue he has retreated from several police-reform promises made during his mayoral campaign.
Washington, DC — The Justice Department announced election-related charges against 16 noncitizens across four states, but the small number provides little evidence that noncitizen voting occurs on anything approaching a meaningful scale in U.S. elections.
The cases involve defendants in Florida, Louisiana, Wisconsin and Minnesota accused of offenses including illegal voting, false claims of citizenship and false statements during the naturalization process. Some allegations involve registration rather than a successfully cast ballot, and at least one Minnesota case concerns the 2022 election rather than 2024. All defendants are presumed innocent unless convicted.
For perspective, the Federal Election Commission counted more than 155 million votes in the 2024 presidential race. Even if all 16 defendants represented illegal 2024 votes, which they do not that would equal roughly 0.00001%, or about one case for every 9.7 million presidential votes.
Research conducted over many years has consistently found noncitizen voting to be extraordinarily rare. States already require applicants to affirm U.S. citizenship under penalty of law and maintain procedures for identifying ineligible registrations.
The Justice Department did not disclose how much federal money or investigative manpower was spent developing the 16 cases, making it impossible to determine their total taxpayer cost.
The prosecutions show that violations can occur, but the numbers remain extraordinarily small compared with the scale of American elections.
Washington, DC — The U.S. Secret Service has investigated about 10,000 threats against the people it protects so far this year, with cases involving full-time protectees up more than 40% from 2025.
Secret Service Director Sean Curran told CBS News that the agency has not seen an increase like this before. Curran, who has worked for the Secret Service for 25 years, was one of the agents protecting Donald Trump during the 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, when Trump was wounded and Corey Comperatore was killed.
Curran pointed to the internet and social media as factors making public officials more accessible, which may be driving the increase in threats. Deputy Director Matthew Quinn also mentioned mental health issues and political hostility as contributing factors.
When asked if most threats come from the political left or right, Curran did not specify, saying the Secret Service investigates threats regardless of political motivation.
Research from the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that in 2025, left-wing attacks and plots briefly outnumbered those from the far right. However, left-wing violence has been much less deadly over time. CSIS also notes that election-related political violence has come from several ideological directions.
The Secret Service also faces new security challenges, including the use of weaponized drones, as the overall threat environment grows.
Washington, DC — The Trump administration is urging a federal judge not to intervene in a lawsuit challenging its taxpayer-funded promotional ads, arguing that the advertising campaign is scheduled to end Sunday anyway.
The Department of Homeland Security told the court it plans no additional media purchases under the approximately $20 million campaign. About $19 million has already been committed, and the remaining funds are expected to be withdrawn from the contract.
Common Cause, which sued DHS seeking an immediate halt to the ads, argues that ending the current media buy does not resolve the broader legal dispute. The watchdog noted that the underlying advertising contract runs through 2027 and said the administration has not provided sufficient guarantees that similar taxpayer-funded ads will not return.
The ads have attracted bipartisan criticism because several prominently feature Trump and resemble campaign advertising. One government-funded spot was virtually identical to a Trump 2024 campaign advertisement, except it carried a disclaimer stating it was paid for by the U.S. government.
Trump later said he would personally fund future advertisements or use money associated with MAGA Inc., but the White House said he does not intend to reimburse taxpayers for millions already spent.
A federal judge has not yet ruled on Common Cause’s request for emergency relief.
On May 23, 1980, Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” was released, taking the film industry by surprise. Considered by most as one of the best horror films of all time, it is inspired by Stephen King’s 1977 novel, but vastly differs from it. This year marks the 46th anniversary of the film’s release. Kubrick never disappoints in the films he makes, as he pushes cinematic boundaries and incorporates unsettling features into scenes.
Starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, “The Shining” follows writer Jack Torrance, his wife Wendy Torrance and their son Danny. Jack is hired at the Overlook Hotel in Colorado to care for the facility during the harsh winter months while it is closed to the public. The Overlook Hotel is actually inspired by a real hotel in Colorado called the Stanley Hotel. Many have reported paranormal activity occurring while staying in the hotel.
The job seems easy to Jack, who wants to take advantage of the free time to get over his writer’s block; however, disturbing secrets hide behind the hotel’s beautiful appearance.
The last caretaker of the hotel seemed to have some sort of “mental breakdown” and murdered his family and then committed suicide while staying here. Despite this horrible event, Jack still decides to bring his family here to do the job, ensuring that everything will be fine.
As the weeks go on, Jack slowly seems to get possessed by a paranormal spirit in the hotel. His writing goes nowhere and he starts to become more psychotic with nightmares about harming his family. Wendy discovers this by looking at his writing and seeing the same phrase, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” written repeatedly on multiple papers.
Jack experiences visions, seeing events that nobody else can see, such as a party in the hotel’s ballroom. He is given a drink by a bartender despite the hotel getting rid of the alcohol for its off-season and no one else physically being inside the building. Danny experiences visions of the past caretaker’s twin daughters being murdered as a warning of what may happen to him.
Their son Danny also has some sort of psychological ability called “the shine,” which allows him to have visions of both past and future events. Danny warns his mother of the danger Jack will inflict on them by repeating the phrase “redrum,” or simply “murder” backwards.
Kubrick is known as a director for strategically placing hidden details throughout his films in order to give the viewer an uneasy feeling. Many have realized that the layout of the Overlook Hotel physically does not make sense. The office where Jack has the interview for the job would not realistically fit within the layout of the exterior appearance of the hotel. In addition, hallways would lead to nowhere or would not exist, which adds to the feeling of things being off or not making sense.
Although I am not a huge horror fan, I enjoyed watching this film due to the plot and the acting performances that left a chilling effect on me. One of my favorite performances in the movie is from Duvall. However, she famously looked back on this film with negativity because of how draining it was to shoot on set. Many of the most iconic scenes took hundreds of takes to get perfect, such as the staircase scene where Jack’s insanity torments Wendy.
Even though making the movie was hard work for Duvall, she does a great job of capturing a woman in a constant state of terror as she watches her husband go insane. She deserves all the praise she gets for her role in this film, and I am glad people view her performance in a positive way.
Many features of the film, such as the music, make the viewer feel uneasy during moments of uncertainty as the camera films characters from behind, so the viewer does not know what is coming when they turn the corner. Nicholson’s acting was also horrifying as he perfectly captures a normal man who slowly descends into madness. I was terrified watching him and felt the evil energy through the screen.
Overall, I do not recommend watching this movie alone like I did because you will feel true fear while watching. Ask a friend or family member to watch it with you so that you can bond over the scariness of the movie. Since I loved the movie so much, the next appropriate step is to read King’s novel and compare it to the film adaptation.
Washington, DC — The Trump administration is reportedly considering removing U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle as new allegations emerge that wealthy Greek businessmen financed luxury travel while she promoted their business interests.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Guilfoyle traveled to the World Economic Forum in Davos aboard a private jet owned by Greek businessman Alexandros Exarchou and planned additional travel on a jet belonging to shipping magnate Nikolas Tsakos. Tsakos also reportedly paid for her stay at the Four Seasons George V in Paris.
Audio reviewed by the Journal allegedly captured Guilfoyle boasting about her connections to the businessmen while seeking access to an event honoring Eric Trump. She was also reportedly recorded telling one businessman, “I’m going to make you a lot of f—ing money.”
The allegations raise questions about whether Guilfoyle improperly accepted gifts or used her diplomatic position to advance private commercial interests. She has denied wrongdoing and maintains that she followed applicable ethics rules.
President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are now weighing whether she should remain in the post, according to reporting cited by The Hill and the Associated Press.
The controversy follows separate allegations that Guilfoyle previously sought a $100,000 payment from a Republican donor while offering access to senior Trump administration officials, an accusation her attorney disputes.
Police said Rogers had been traveling in a wheelchari on the sidewalk along the east side of Philadelphia Pike before entering the roadway. A Jeep Cherokee traveling north in the left lane struck him.
69-year-old Ronald Rogers was using an electric wheelchair when he was struck; investigation remains open
WILMINGTON — Delaware State Police have identified 69-year-old Ronald Rogers of Wilmington as the man killed Friday afternoon when he was struck by a vehicle while traveling in an electric wheelchair along Philadelphia Pike.
The crash happened about 1:30 p.m. Oct. 9 on northbound Philadelphia Pike, north of East Holly Oak Road, according to state police.
Police said Rogers had been traveling on the sidewalk along the east side of Philadelphia Pike before entering the roadway. A Jeep Cherokee traveling north in the left lane struck him.
Rogers was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. State police publicly identified him Sunday after notifying his family.
Driver initially stopped, police say
The Jeep was driven by a 51-year-old woman from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Police said the driver initially stopped at the crash scene but later drove away. Troopers subsequently located both the driver and the Jeep at a nearby residence.
As of the latest police update, the driver had not been arrested. Investigators continue gathering evidence and determining whether any charges are warranted.
Philadelphia Pike was closed for about three hours while troopers investigated and cleared the scene.
Investigation continues
The Delaware State Police Collision Reconstruction Unit is continuing to investigate the crash.
Police are asking anyone who witnessed the collision or has video of the incident to contact Cpl. K. Oakes at 302-365-8483. Tips may also be submitted to Delaware Crime Stoppers at 1-800-847-3333 or through a private message to Delaware State Police on Facebook.
To Go Box
What: Ongoing investigation into a fatal pedestrian crash involving an electric wheelchair
Where: Northbound Philadelphia Pike, north of East Holly Oak Road, Wilmington area
When: Approximately 1:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 9
Victim: Ronald Rogers, 69, of Wilmington
Have information or video: Contact Delaware State Police Cpl. K. Oakes at 302-365-8483 or Delaware Crime Stoppers at 1-800-847-3333
Victim support: Delaware State Police Victim Services and the Delaware Victim Center are available 24 hours a day at 1-800-VICTIM-1, or 1-800-842-8461.
Clarksville, TN — President Donald Trump said Saturday that he wants to rename either the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean before leaving office, floating “Trump Ocean” and “Ocean of the Americas” as possibilities.
Speaking at a campaign rally in Clarksville, Tennessee, Trump linked the idea to previous geographic name changes ordered by his administration.
“We need a river and we need an ocean,” Trump told the crowd before suggesting that either the Atlantic or Pacific could receive a new name. He did not announce a formal proposal or specify which ocean he preferred.
Trump also said he would like a major river renamed but ruled out changing the Hudson River, praising explorer Henry Hudson, and said he would leave the Mississippi River untouched.
The remarks follow Trump’s 2025 order directing federal agencies to use “Gulf of America” instead of Gulf of Mexico. In August, he also ordered federal agencies to refer to Lake Ontario as “Lake America.”
Those actions determine terminology used by the U.S. federal government but do not compel other countries or international geographic organizations to adopt the names.
Trump additionally floated calling the Strait of Hormuz the “Trump Strait.” No formal executive action involving the oceans, a river or the strait had been announced as of Saturday.
Elizabeth, LA — A Republican candidate for police chief in the small Louisiana village of Elizabeth is positioned to win the Nov. 3 election without opposition despite facing two pending child rape charges.
Christopher Paul, 46, was arrested Sept. 8 after authorities accused him of raping two girls in 2005 and 2006. He remains out on $60,000 bail and has not been convicted of a crime.
Paul originally faced one opponent, Zachary LaCaze, but LaCaze withdrew Sept. 23 after learning that his federal employment made him ineligible to run. Because the candidate filing deadline had already passed, Paul is now the only remaining candidate.
Under Louisiana law, Paul would remain eligible to take office unless he is convicted of a felony before his term begins Jan. 1.
Mayor Mandy Leo Green said village officials cannot remove Paul from the ballot, emphasizing that criminal charges are allegations and that Paul is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
The situation has prompted local officials to consider changing how the police chief is selected. The village council scheduled a Dec. 12 special election asking voters whether the position should become an appointed office subject to board approval.
A child-safety advocacy group has called on Paul to withdraw from the race while the criminal case is pending.
Clarksville, TN — President Donald Trump told supporters Saturday that he expects to be blamed if Republicans lose control of Congress, while again promising $5,000 payments to every U.S. adult citizen if the GOP keeps both chambers.
“If we don’t win the midterms, they’re going to blame me,” Trump said during a rally in Clarksville, Tennessee, adding that he was working aggressively to turn out Republican voters.
Trump repeated his proposed “Trump dividend,” saying every adult citizen would receive $5,000 after a Republican victory. The proposal would cost roughly $1.2 trillion to $1.3 trillion, depending on eligibility, and would require congressional authorization. Trump has said tariff revenue would help finance the payments, but no detailed legislative plan has been released.
Independent budget analysts have questioned whether tariff collections could come close to covering the cost. Current tariff revenue is far below the amount required for nationwide $5,000 checks.
Trump also warned that a Democratic victory would produce severe economic consequences, while touting income gains and poverty reductions under his administration.
The rally was part of a broader push to energize Republican voters ahead of the Nov. 3 elections. Trump acknowledged that the results will likely be viewed as a referendum on his presidency, saying he expects responsibility if Republicans fall short.
As someone who has been a fan of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man since his debut in “Captain America: Civil War,” I am so glad that he was able to get a fourth film and prove all of his haters wrong. For years, I had to hear how he is the worst Spider-Man among the three who have played the character, and now, people have begun to change their opinions based on this new movie.
Following the massive success of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” which was released on July 17, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” came out on July 31, just two weeks later. With Holland starring in the two most highly anticipated films of the summer, many eyes were on him to see how he would do in both roles, since there has been much controversy online about whether or not he is a good enough actor to be in these blockbusters.
As a fan of Holland’s for many years, maybe I am a bit biased, but I think he performed phenomenally in both films, especially as Peter Parker in “Brand New Day.” Parker is no longer a teenager in this film and must deal with the aftermath of “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” which ended with everyone in the world forgetting who he is, including his girlfriend, Michelle Jones-Watson, played by Zendaya, and his best friend, Ned Leeds, played by Jacob Batalon. Grappling with this and the death of his Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), Holland delivers an especially melancholy version of Parker that we haven’t seen much of in his past films.
The scenes that hit the hardest in this film are when Holland’s scene partners are either Zendaya, who is his wife in real life, Sadie Sink, who is newly introduced as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU’s) Jean Grey, or Jon Bernthal, who returns as Frank Castle, aka The Punisher. The chemistry — romantic and platonic — he has with all three actors is palpable and will leave you on the verge of tears in some scenes.
Holland’s scenes with Batalon in this movie also hit hard when you remember the pair played best friends for years, only now for Batalon’s character to completely forget who Parker is. However, that doesn’t stop Leeds from being completely obsessed with Spider-Man and trying to figure out who is behind the mask so he can thank him for saving his life so many years ago. Adding this into the movie provides some bittersweet scenes between Parker and Leeds that will leave you nostalgic.
Aside from the acting in this film, the plot is very entertaining and introduces a new obstacle in Parker’s life, which is his evolution from man to spider. As he deals with traumatic situations in the movie, it causes his arachnid genes from the spider bite to mutate and make him more “spider” than “man.” Although audiences have seen something similar before in Tobey Maguire’s movies, with his organic webs, “Brand New Day” provides a new spin on it by showcasing how our hero must balance being Peter Parker and Spider-Man.
This is how the theme of the movie is expressed, which is that “the bravest thing you can do in life is ask for help.” It is important to remember the community around you and not to isolate yourself, which can only make your mental health worse. Audiences see how Parker neglecting his human side and only focusing on being Spider-Man has taken a toll on his body and mind. Balancing your private life and your social life is one of the key things to motivate yourself to keep going forward.
Watching Holland convey the difficulties of mental health while also having the responsibility of helping people as Spider-Man was very sad, and he really made you feel for the character of Peter Parker, who thought he had no one to turn to except for himself. I believe that Holland’s live-action portrayal of Peter Parker/Spider-Man is the strongest the world has had, and the box office numbers support that.
In only a few weeks — 17 days to be exact — of the movie hitting theaters, it crossed two billion dollars globally. Although this doesn’t necessarily mean that the movie is good, it goes to show how many people took the time to go out and see the movie — maybe even more than once. I know that I did!
After leaving the theater on July 31, I had a newfound sense of hope. I was reminded that tomorrow is always a brand new day and there are always great things ahead despite bumps in the road.
Syracuse, NY — President Donald Trump erupted over the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, attacking the committee that denied him the award and warning that the United States would “not forget” Norway.
Speaking at a rally in Syracuse, Trump called the decision “disgraceful” and “embarrassing” and said it left an “indelible stain” on Norway. He also described members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee as “radical ideologues” and “enemies of civilization.”
The 2026 prize went instead to South African jurist Navi Pillay, a former U.N. human rights chief and international judge recognized for decades of work involving human rights, war crimes and genocide. Trump dismissed Pillay as a “mystery person” and claimed that “nobody” had heard of her. Pillay previously defended anti-apartheid activists, served as U.N. human rights chief and worked on international tribunals.
Trump again argued that he deserved the prize, citing several international conflicts he says he helped resolve. Some of those claims remain disputed, while fighting has resumed in several regions he has cited and the wars involving Ukraine and Iran remain unresolved.
The president has complained repeatedly about not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize during both of his terms.
His latest tirade came at a political rally intended to support Republican candidates, but Trump devoted significant time to attacking the Nobel Committee and questioning Pillay’s selection.
Washington, DC — The Trump administration imposed sweeping sanctions Friday on the International Criminal Court, escalating a campaign against the tribunal by targeting the institution itself rather than only individual judges and prosecutors.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the sanctions will prohibit transactions with the ICC and eventually cut the court off from U.S. financial services, technology providers and the dollar-based banking system. American companies will receive a six-month period to end affected business relationships.
The United States is not a member of the ICC and has long disputed the court’s authority over Americans. The Trump administration has also objected to ICC investigations involving Israel, including its arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as investigations involving alleged wrongdoing by U.S. personnel in Afghanistan.
Rubio said the measures are intended to protect American sovereignty and warned that the administration would continue escalating pressure unless the court changes course.
The ICC, which has 125 member states, called the sanctions an unprecedented effort to obstruct justice and interfere with investigations of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The move drew criticism from numerous U.S. allies, including European governments and Japan, which argued that the court must remain capable of operating independently. Israel welcomed the sanctions.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump announced a deal Friday to purchase large quantities of Russian diesel, reversing years of U.S. efforts to restrict Moscow’s energy revenue over its war in Ukraine.
Trump said Russia will immediately supply more than 300,000 metric tons of diesel, followed by 500,000 tons in November, another 1 million tons afterward and eventually an additional 3 million tons. The agreement comes as U.S. diesel prices remain above $6 per gallon and less than a month before the midterm elections.
The move is particularly notable because Trump signed legislation last month expanding sanctions intended to restrict Russian energy income. Shortly after Friday’s announcement, the Treasury Department issued a six-month license easing sanctions on Russian diesel shipments.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy criticized the agreement, arguing that additional energy revenue could help Moscow continue financing its invasion of Ukraine. Trump said lowering fuel costs for American farmers, truckers and consumers was his priority.
The deal follows supply disruptions linked to the Iran war and Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries. Analysts cautioned that simply redirecting Russian diesel from existing customers to the United States may have limited impact on global prices.
The White House has not disclosed payment terms or clarified when the first Russian shipments will reach U.S. markets.
Boise, ID — The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has contributed $1 million to a political action committee seeking to defeat Idaho’s Proposition 1, a November ballot measure that would expand reproductive rights and repeal the state’s current abortion restrictions.
The donation went to the Too Extreme for Idaho PAC and is the largest reported contribution from a church-affiliated organization in the campaign. The LDS Church said it remains neutral toward candidates but participates in ballot campaigns involving what it considers significant moral issues.
Proposition 1 would repeal Idaho’s existing abortion laws, establish protections for reproductive healthcare decisions and provide liability protections for providers offering abortion and related services.
The church had already announced its opposition in September and encouraged members to oppose the measure. Its abortion policy generally opposes elective abortion while allowing possible exceptions involving rape, incest, serious threats to a pregnant woman’s health or fatal fetal abnormalities.
Religious organizations are active on both sides. Catholic groups have contributed to the opposition campaign, while the Boise Unitarian Universalist Fellowship donated $5,000 to the pro-Proposition 1 PAC.
Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador previously concluded that churches may legally contribute to ballot campaigns without disclosing their individual donors under certain conditions.
Who will replace Republican Councilwoman Janet Kilpatrick? Here’s where Kira Alejandro and Melissa Brayman stand
This story is part of Delaware LIVE’s continuing coverage of the 2026 New Castle County Council races.
WILMINGTON, Del. — In August, Delaware LIVE introduced the two Democrats running to replace Councilwoman Janet Kilpatrick. Kira Alejandro won that Sept. 15 primary over Kyle Grantham. Now she faces Republican Melissa Brayman, and on Wednesday, Oct. 7, the two answered questions side by side at an in-person candidate forum hosted by the League of Women Voters of New Castle County at Limestone Presbyterian Church.
Kilpatrick, a Republican who has represented Hockessin, Yorklyn, North Star, Pike Creek and part of Newark for 16 years, is not seeking reelection. She was in the audience.
The seat is known as New Castle County Council District 3. County council votes on the county budget, property taxes and requests to rezone land for new development. According to the League of Women Voters of New Castle County, questions were submitted online before the forum and on note cards at the event.
The general election is Nov. 3. Six county council seats are on this year’s ballot, but only three have candidates from both parties, and this is one of them, according to the Delaware Department of Elections. A Delaware LIVE look at all six races is coming next.
What they have in common
Whoever wins, the seat will stay with a woman. Neither Democrat Kira Alejandro nor Republican Melissa Brayman has held elected office. Both attended the University of Delaware, both left Delaware for a time before coming back, and both bring an environmental background to the race: Alejandro through her work saving land from development, and Brayman through her University of Delaware studies in wildlife conservation.
Both named affordability as the county’s most urgent problem. Both said the state passes costs to the county without paying for them, and both said many residents don’t know what county council does.
Several questions asked about specific development proposals, including a McDonald’s on Limestone Road and a car wash in Hockessin. Delaware LIVE will report separately on the status of those projects.
The table below compares the two candidates in 10 areas, from their backgrounds to where they stand on taxes, development and data centers. The forum covered more ground than we could fit here. You can watch the full discussion on the League’s website.
Where they differ
Kira Alejandro, Democrat
Melissa Brayman, Republican
Lives in
Yorklyn
Pike Creek
Education
Attended the University of Delaware
Bachelor’s degree in entomology (the study of insects) with a concentration in wildlife conservation, University of Delaware
Work
A decade in specialty coffee and small local businesses; says she worked with neighbors to save nearly 30 acres from development
Director of administration and finance, Delaware State Chamber of Commerce; board member, Citizens for Delaware Schools
In her own words
“The only people politicians should ever be beholden to are the voters who elect them.”
“I’m not an influencer. I’m not an activist.” Describes herself as a working mom.
Taxes
Wants to protect people on fixed incomes from county tax increases
Pledged to oppose any new tax increase: “I will vote no on that tax increase.”
Spending
Would preserve the public library “first and foremost”; would stop buying more automated license plate readers
Supports public safety, law enforcement and libraries; would scale back administrative costs
New development
Errs “on the side of not supporting anything that the people who live in the immediate area do not want when their concerns are legitimate”
“Each project should be treated as an individual project and should be heard on its merits.”
Housing costs
Would require more lower-priced homes in new developments and build more in areas that already have roads, sewer and power
Would allow more kinds of homes, including small starter homes and in-law suites
Data centers
Wants a pause on approving new data centers: “We don’t totally understand everything about data centers yet.”
Would not support a pause if defending it costs taxpayers money, but would “pump the brakes a little bit”; opposes data centers in any residential area
Money from developers
Takes none from developers, land use attorneys, corporations or corporate political action committees; will refund any developer donation she learns of
Has not accepted any from developers; did not say directly whether she would commit to refusing them
Delaware LIVE’s 2026 Voter’s Guide
Who’s on your ballot? Delaware Live’s 2026 Voters Guide shows every candidate in your county and district, updated daily, with a countdown to Election Day. Check it out=>Delaware LIVE 2026 Voters Guide.
(Author’s note: Quotes from both candidates are taken from a transcript of the League of Women Voters of New Castle County’s video recording of the Oct. 7 forum.)
From Apple-Scrapple in Bridgeville to international films in Wilmington, the Oct. 9-11 weekend offers so many activities that a Top 10 list isn’t nearly enough.
BRIDGEVILLE, Del. — Delawareans looking for something to do this weekend have a good problem: There may be more festivals, sporting events, concerts and family activities than anyone can fit into three days.
The weekend of Oct. 9-11 brings together some of the First State’s favorite fall traditions, with activities stretching from Wilmington to Sussex County.
From scrapple slinging and pumpkin picking to independent films and college football, the calendar offers something for nearly every age and interest.
Here are Delaware LIVE’s top weekend picks, followed by an expanded guide because there are simply too many events to leave out.
Delaware LIVE’s Top Weekend Picks
Apple-Scrapple Festival — Bridgeville
One of Sussex County’s biggest fall traditions returns Friday and Saturday, bringing food, crafts, live entertainment, carnival rides and the popular Scrapple Sling competition to downtown Bridgeville. Saturday’s activities run from 9 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Wilmington International Film Festival — Wilmington
Independent films, international productions, documentaries and filmmaker events fill downtown Wilmington venues through Sunday. The festival offers audiences an opportunity to discover films outside the traditional commercial theater circuit.
Delaware State University Homecoming — Dover
Delaware State University welcomes Franklin Pierce for its homecoming football game Saturday at 1 p.m. at Alumni Stadium, adding to a weekend of alumni and campus activities.
Fifer’s Fall Festival — Camden-Wyoming
Pumpkins, farm attractions, seasonal treats and family activities make Fifer Orchards a popular autumn destination. Saturday’s festival runs from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Amish Country Bike Tour — Dover
Cyclists will travel scenic roads throughout central Delaware Saturday during the 40th annual Amish Country Bike Tour. Multiple routes accommodate riders of different abilities, with activities centered around Legislative Mall.
Nature and Outdoor Adventures — New Castle County
Families can watch migrating hawks at Ashland Nature Center near Hockessin or explore Wilmington’s wetlands through Delaware Nature Society programs. Both offer opportunities to experience Delaware’s natural environment during the fall migration season.
Live Music — Wilmington and Smyrna
Vinyl Shockley performs Saturday evening at The Queen in Wilmington, while Van Halen Nation brings classic rock to the Smyrna Opera House.
Too Much Fun to Leave Out: More Delaware Weekend Events
Putting together a Top 10 list presented an unusual problem this weekend: There are simply too many worthwhile events to fit into one short list.
From farmers markets and nature programs to concerts, cycling, films and community activities, organizations across Delaware have planned activities for nearly every interest.
Here’s a longer look at what’s happening across the First State this weekend.
About the author: Cristin Merritt leads Communications and Partner Ecosystems at 
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