News Reel

President Trump told reporters Saturday he is reviewing a new 14-point peace proposal that was submitted by Iran.

A maker of the widely used abortion pill mifepristone​ asked the Supreme Court on Saturday to block an appellate court ruling that cut off mail-order access to the drug just a day earlier.

The Kentucky Derby saw a field of 18 horses Saturday in the first leg of the 2026 competition for horse racing's Triple Crown.

Cherie DeVaux became the first woman to train the winner of the opening leg of the Triple Crown.

A driver crashed a vehicle through the front entrance of the Multnomah Athletic Club in Portland, authorities said, and explosives were found inside the car.

Investigators find explosives in car, which crashed into Multnomah Athletic Club shortly before 3am Saturday

A person was found dead after a vehicle plowed into a health club in downtown Portland, Oregon, early Saturday morning, police said. Investigators later found explosives inside the car.

Portland police and the Portland fire and rescue department responded to the Multnomah Athletic Club shortly before 3am after the vehicle crashed through the front entrance and caught fire. Once the blaze was brought under control, a person was found dead inside the vehicle, police said in a statement.

Long-time Slashdot reader Anne Thwacks frequently uses YouTube's subtitles "not to disturb others in the room, or because my hearing is not very good." But they say there's a new problem. "The subtitling is terrible!" Almost every sentence has a huge error. Proper names are more often wrong than right. Non-English place names are almost always mangled to barely recognizable. And no effort whatsoever is made to use context to figure out whether a place name is Russian or Arabic, and often complete garbage is used in place of a common French, Spanish or Italian name! If AI actually works (I have my doubts about this), surely it would be possible to figure out language contexts. If it is about an event in Italy, then expect a lot of Italian names! If it is about the Russia-Ukraine war, then expect places in Russia or Ukraine to be more plausible than mindless gobbledygook! Does YouTube not know that there are places in the world that are not in America? (However, plenty of names of people and places famous in America are also regularly screwed up.) They argue the subtitles are "appallingly bad" — and that "the situation seems to be getting worse," wondering why the problem isn't addressed with some basic spell-checking. ("I'm sure that the vast majority of foul-ups could be fixed by the use of a dictionary.") Have any Slashdot readers seen similar problems? A friend of mine noticed that YouTube's subtitles even bungled this innocuous song from the 1966. ANNETTE FUNICELLO: "If your love is true love, you can tell by his touch." YOUTUBE SUBTITLE: "If your love is too lava, you can tell by his touch..." Share your own experiences and thoughts in the comments. And do you think YouTube's subtitles are "appallingly bad"?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Arena in Birmingham cleared after report of suspicious bag, with comedian pulled from stage mid-performance

A man has been charged over a bomb hoax after a live show by comedian Peter Kay in Birmingham was stopped when a “potentially suspicious bag” was found around the venue.

The Utilita Arena Birmingham was evacuated and a 19-year-old man was taken into custody, West Midlands police said on Friday evening.

If you’ve been snagged in the airline’s now-defunct flight schedule, here are some things to know about next steps

The collapse of the US-based Spirit Airlines may mark the end of an era for travelers with a certain financial sensibility.

But if you’ve been snagged in their now-defunct flight schedule, here are some things to know on how to get home, and get whole.

"Nuclear AI startup" Fermi had hoped to build power plants generating 17 gigawatts of electricity, remembers Bloomberg, "three times the amount typically consumed by New York City." Hyperscalers could install their data centers on the site itself and tap directly into that power, which would come first from natural gas turbines and later from nuclear reactors. The pitch ticked so many boxes — artificial intelligence, nuclear energy, political connections — that some investors found it irresistible. Fermi went public in October worth more than $19 billion in market value, despite reporting no revenue or signed customers. Now, the startup's board has fired its top executive, Toby Neugebauer, after months of negotiations failed to secure a single client. Chief Financial Officer Miles Everson left as well... Fermi's stock, meanwhile, has tumbled 84% from its peak. The company's more than 5,000-acre site in the Texas panhandle — dubbed Project Matador, or the President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus — remains mostly unfinished. And some analysts see a cautionary tale of the market's AI enthusiasm running ahead of reality, with investors betting on companies whose grand projects may never get built... The idea of giving data centers their own, dedicated power supply not dependent on the grid may sound tempting, but former US Department of Energy official Jigar Shah said banks don't want to finance it. The grid, drawing power from many sources, is more reliable than a handful of expensive, on-site plants, he said. He considers Fermi a failure "of monumental proportions" and says similar, off-grid data center projects elsewhere deserve more skepticism than they've received... "We're allowing these types of projects to continue to be viewed as viable when they most certainly are not," said Shah, who ran the department's Loan Programs Office during the Biden administration.... "It was a piece of dirt with a dream," an investor who visited the site in February told the short sellers, Fuzzy Panda Research.

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Held every spring in Louisville, Kentucky, the event is also known for its over-the-top hats and vibrant suits and dresses.

A new batch of A24 films, including The Farewell, Bodies Bodies Bodies and more, are available this May on free streaming services.

Monday a company called Rainmaker announced their rain-triggering technology had produced 143 million gallons of freshwater for Utah and Oregon residents — making them "the first private company in history to validate the results of cloud seeding operations." The Deseret News reports: Founded in 2023, Rainmaker uses drones to disperse silver iodide into clouds, then they track precipitation with advanced radar. However, Rainmaker — and every other rain-enhancement company — has been up against the notoriously difficult challenge of validation. Since there is no control set to test, and because the weather is chaotic and variable, the Government Accountability Office declares the benefits of the technology to be "unproven." To overcome this evaluation challenge, Rainmaker flies drones in unique patterns when seeding. Then operators compare distinct radar and satellite features with where their drones operated. As of April, Rainmaker found 82 unambiguous seeding signatures, which show their seeding operations directly caused precipitation. In Utah and Oregon alone, the company said its cloud-seeding efforts have added enough water to match the annual usage of about 1,750 households. However, "this figure likely represents only a small fraction of Rainmaker's total generation this season," the company said in their press release... Their drone precision, combined with their radar systems, have produced satellite images proving a direct correlation between the seeding and precipitation. Some images show cloud holes or regions of depressed cloud tops after seeding. Rainmaker's announcement promises they'll "go forward and continue our mission to refill the Great Salt Lake, end drought in the American West and deliver water abundance wherever it is needed most around the world." (Rainmaker currently operates in Utah, Idaho, Oregon, California and Colorado.) The director of Utah's Natural Resources Department told the Deseret News that with cloud seeding, "cost per unit of water is so low; it really is the smartest thing we can be doing with our money," Ferry said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ford Motor Company is recalling over 179,000 vehicles due to a front seat issue that can increase the risk of injury in a crash, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said.

Residents say AI factories with unknown environmental impacts are being rushed into development as proponents argue Australia must ride the data boom or be left behind

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When West Footscray resident Sean Brown takes his 19-month-old boy to the park, their walk passes an imposing new building cheerily spruiked as “Australia’s largest hyperscale AI factory”, a datacentre called M3.

He hates it: the construction noise from its constant expansion, the looming towers and the insistent background hum, the exhaust from the growing array of diesel generators that power the ranks of servers inside.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for May 3, No. 1,057.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for May 3, No. 791.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for May 3, No. 1,779.

Republicans blame Biden administration block on JetBlue deal; Democrats point to fuel price surge amid Iran war

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US airlines and government officials battled on Saturday to deal with stranded passengers and stricken employees after discount carrier Spirit Airlines abruptly ceased operations – and a political and business blame game got under way over the collapse of the low-cost carrier.

“If you have a flight scheduled with Spirit Airlines, don’t show up at the airport; there will be no one here to assist you,” the US secretary of transportation, Sean Duffy, warned at a press conference after laying out measures for customers booked with the Florida-based company to obtain refunds or find discounted flights on other airlines.

"Running a Big Tech company during Silicon Valley's AI mania may not necessarily require fewer workers or cost less," writes the Washington Post: Amazon, Google and Meta together have roughly the same number of employees now as they did during an industry-wide hiring binge in 2022, company disclosures show. Growing costs for technical workers and related expenses have often outpaced sales recently. The tech giants' big AI bet hasn't yet paid for itself. That means AI might be killing jobs not through its labor-saving wizardry but by increasing spending so much that CEOs are pressured to find savings, giving them cover to consciously uncouple from their workforces. Marc Andreessen, a prominent start-up investor and a Meta board director, put it bluntly on a recent podcast. Big company layoffs are a fix for overstaffing and changing economic conditions, he said, but AI provides a convenient scapegoat. "Now they all have the silver bullet excuse: 'Ah, it's AI,'" he said... "Almost every company that does layoffs is blaming AI, whether or not it really is about AI," Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT owner OpenAI, said at a March conference when he listed explanations for AI's unpopularity in the United States. "Recent history suggests Big Tech companies might not be moving toward a future with fewer workers," the article concludes, "but recalibrating to spend the same, or more, on different people and projects." So in the end, "AI might soon reduce hiring," the article acknowledges, "But the reluctance or inability of the largest tech firms to cut too deeply so far could also show that the path to making a workforce AI-ready — whatever that means — isn't a predictable straight line charting declining headcount."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ok so a week in to using the street pro 2 and I can say it is a smooooth tyre,slightly flatter profile nice and comfortable ride been enjoying the work rides.
Obviously needs to be broken in a bit but regardless very nice tyre, glad I decieded to go this way and its quite nice to ride a slick again I spend most my time on pavements or road so not missing the tread so far.

Slashdot reader joshuark writes: Scientific American reports that a ChatGPT AI has proved a conjecture with a method no human had developed. A 23-year-old student Liam Price just cracked a 60-year-old problem that world-class mathematicians have tried and failed to solve. The new solution that Price got in response to a single prompt to GPT-5.4 Pro was posted on www.erdosproblems.com, a website devoted to the Erds problems. The question Price solved — or prompted ChatGPT to solve—concerns special sets of whole numbers, where no number in the set can be evenly divided by any other... Price sent it to his occasional collaborator Kevin Barreto, a second-year undergraduate in mathematics at the University of Cambridge. The duo had jump-started the AI-for-Erds craze late last year by prompting a free version of ChatGPT with open problems chosen at random from the Erds problems website. Reviewing Price's message, Barreto realized what they had was special, and experts whom he notified quickly took notice.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are some highly rated films to try, plus a list of new additions to the streamer in May.

Attending this year's Kentucky Derby means more for thoroughbred expert Mark Toothaker, who suffered a seizure from laughing at a whiffed NFL field goal attempt that led to a lifesaving diagnosis.

Senator Roger Wicker and representative Mike Rogers say move risks undermining deterrence and sending wrong signal to Putin

• Full report: Nato seeks to ‘understand the details’ after US decision to withdraw troops from Germany

• ‘We love our Americans’: the German town rocked by Trump’s plan to withdraw US troops

The UK Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) said suspicious activity had been reported 84 nautical miles southwest of the port of Mukalla in Yemen.

A bulk carrier reported that a small boat and a fishing vessel came within 500m of it, according to UKMTO.

Orange county resident Tommi Jo Mejer’s son was illegally riding e-motorcycle when he ran into 81-year-old

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A southern California woman is facing an additional charge of involuntary manslaughter after an 81-year-old man died from his injuries after being struck by the woman’s teen son while he was riding an e-motorcycle, prosecutors said on Friday.

On 16 April, Tommi Jo Mejer’s 14-year-old son was riding a Surron e-motorcycle and doing wheelies when he hit Ed Ashman, according to prosecutors. Ashman, a former captain in the US Marine Corps, was walking home from his job as a substitute teacher at a high school in Lake Forest.

German government calls redeployment of 5,000 troops ‘anticipated’ and reminder of Europe’s need to invest in its own defence

• ‘We love our Americans’: the German town rocked by Trump’s plan to withdraw US troops

Nato is seeking to “understand the details” of a US decision to withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany, a redeployment ordered by Donald Trump amid a feud with the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz.

The German government sought to play down the severity of Trump’s move, describing it as “anticipated”, and a reminder of Europe’s need to invest in its own defence. The US withdrawal, which the Pentagon said would take place over the next six to 12 months, comes after criticism from Merz over Trump’s war with Iran and his handling of subsequent talks with Tehran.

Last Saturday someone dressed as Jesus "was among the dozens of people in costumes and masks seen on a video forcing open the door of a Scientology building on Hollywood Boulevard," reports the Los Angeles Times, "after a tug-of-war with a security guard." The footage posted on TikTok and Instagram shows the group sprinting up and down stairs and clashing with black-shirted security guards, giggling and gasping to catch their breath while church members scream at them to leave. On their way out — as security guards approach armed with fire extinguishers — one of the sprinters stops and dances to celebrate their successful escape, a move reminiscent of a taunt from the video game Fortnite. For weeks, groups of people have barged into two of the church's Hollywood properties, racing through hallways and tussling with security guards, trying to see how far they can get before they are forced to leave by church staff... Church officials say the incidents are not a game and have accused the speed runners of "hate crimes." After dozens on Saturday stormed the Ivar Avenue building that houses an exhibit dedicated to the church's founder, science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, the external door handles were removed from all three of Scientology's properties on Hollywood Boulevard by Sunday morning. Guards could be seen blocking the doorway to one building on Monday afternoon... No arrests have been made. A report from the Associated Press cites a joke left on one of the videos: that if runners reach the top of the building, they'll find Tom Cruise. One commenter on a recent TikTok video of a speedrun asked why people are doing this, and another user simply replied, "because it's fun." The 18-year-old who started the trend told the Hollywood Reporter his original video has been viewed over 100 million times. "From there on out, I pretty much knew that Scientology was like a free gateway to a lot of views." Vulture notes that "there's even a Roblox re-creation of the trend, made using the 'maps; drawn from actual videos"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Four people are in hospital, with one 25-year-old man facing life-threatening injuries

A drive-by shooting in Brixton which left four people in hospital on Saturday has been called “an act of indiscriminate violence” by police.

Shots were fired in the early hours on Coldharbour Lane in the south London area, leaving one 25-year-old man in hospital with life-threatening injuries.

This week Bill Gates wrote a blog post about a special camera from medtech startup Remidio, which delivers high-resolution images of a patient's retina in seconds. The camera plugs into a phone running an AI system that watches for early signs of diabetes — all without needing a blood draw, eye dilation, or a dibetes specialist. It's already been used in 40 countries for more than 15 million patients. But that same hardware, with different software, can also flag the conditions that drive so many dangerous pregnancies. Gestational diabetes sharply increases the risk of pre-eclampsia [a spike in blood pressure during pregnancy responsible for half a million fetal deaths every year and 70,000 maternal deaths]... In most of rural sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia, it usually isn't screened for at all, because the standard test requires a lab. A retinal scan offers a different way in. Remidio's device is currently being used in India to screen pregnant women for conditions that drive stillbirth. And researchers are now adapting the same hardware to screen for anemia and hypertension, too... [S]mall, portable, affordable diagnostics in the hands of community health workers are exactly the kind of lever that can start to move a number that hasn't moved in a long time.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Several US airlines have agreed to cap ticket prices for Spirit customers who need to rebook canceled flights

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The US secretary of transportation, Sean Duffy, has announced a series of measures to help Spirit Airlines passengers following the low-cost airline’s collapse early on Saturday after running out of cash and the failure of rescue talks with the Trump administration.

Duffy said that larger US airlines, including United, Delta, JetBlue and Southwest, had agreed to cap ticket prices specifically for Spirit customers who need to rebook canceled flights, subject to a Spirit flight confirmation number and proof of payment.

Ten strangers — a mix of conservative and liberal — gathered for a discussion about the rural-urban divide. They came together on a surprising solution.

Nigel Farage, Lee Anderson and Robert Jenrick, among others, have sung the praises of the JCB PotHole Pro

Reform UK’s leading figures have repeatedly promoted a new pothole-fixing machine by the construction company JCB, while the party received £200,000 from the British digger maker, the Guardian can reveal.

Several Reform politicians including Nigel Farage, Lee Anderson, Robert Jenrick, Zia Yusuf and Richard Tice have sung the praises of the JCB PotHole Pro machine.

Electricity has become one of the most important commodities in the region thanks to demand from datacenters, Iran war and rising utility charges

For decades, the only regular visitors to the Twin Lake Reservoir in Lima, Ohio, were fishers passing hot summer evenings trying to snag a largemouth bass.

But today, it’s a hive of activity.

Critics warn that respect for rule of law could break down as executive branch flouts judicial decisions

When a federal judge shot down a Trump administration policy of holding immigrants without bond last December, it seemed like a serious blow to the US president’s mass deportation effort.

Instead, a top justice department official insisted the ruling wasn’t binding, and the administration continued denying detainees around the country a chance for release.

Plus all the details on new rides, lands, shows and more in Disneyland, Disney World and Disney Cruise Line.

PM says there are instances in which he would support bans but organisers say this would ‘strike at root of free speech’

Organisers of pro-Palestine marches have said Keir Starmer’s threat to ban some demonstrations opposing Israel’s actions in the Middle East will “strike at the root of free assembly and free speech” in the UK.

On Saturday morning, the prime minister told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that “there are instances” in which he would support stopping some pro-Palestine protests altogether.

Steam on Linux use in March "had skyrocketed to 5.33%..." reports Phoronix, "easily the highest level we've seen Steam on Linux at since its inception more than a decade ago." So what happened in April? [April's results] point to Linux having a 4.52% marketshare on Steam, a drop of 0.81% compared to March. Year-over-year it's roughly double with Steam on Linux in April 2025 being at 2.27%. Or two years ago for April 2024, Steam on Linux was at 1.9%.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NATO said it was working to understand details of the plan to draw down about 5,000 troops, which coincides with a feud between the president and the German chancellor.

Air traffic control audio records showed the exchanges between controllers and the pilots of some of Spirit Airlines' final flights

The company's first-quarter profit more than doubled as the value of its investments grew and most of its businesses improved.

With the right accessories, this new foldable bike is everything you need to get around town for less.

The once-a-year free comic book giveaway "is splitting in two," according to a local news report. Launched in 2002 by Diamond Comic Distributor, comic book giants like Marvel and DC have historically participated together. But things changed after Diamond Comic Distributors went bankrupt in 2025, "leaving other companies to swoop in and pick up where Diamond left off." The rights to the "Free Comic Book Day" brand were sold to Universal Distribution, which plans to bring Free Comic Book Day back on Saturday. On the same day, Penguin Random House plans to launch a rival event called Comics Giveaway Day. This means you'll still get plenty of free comics, but this time they will be separated, with some coming under the Free Comic Book Day branding and others arriving under the Comics Giveaway Day branding. Free Comic Book Day will include publishers like DC, Image, Dynamite and Archie Comics. Comics Giveaway Day will include publishers such as Marvel, Dark Horse, Boom! Studios and Tokyopop... The other big change coming this year is the introduction of game publishers Wizards of the Coast and Upper Deck to the lineup, as part of Universal Distribution's Free Comic Book Day. Wizards of the Coast is known for its tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, as well as its trading card game Magic: The Gathering. Upper Deck is best known for its sports trading cards and entertainment collectibles, along with deck-building games like the Legendary series... In addition to adding these game makers, Universal plans to expand Free Comic Book Day to include what are colloquially referred to as your friendly local game stores. Marvel's offerings this year include a special Alien, Predator & Planet of the Apes one-shot, while D.C. is offering the first chapter of their upcoming graphic novel Aquamanatee. Other comics include Avatar: The Last Airbender — Legends from Dark Horse Comics and Sonic the Hedgehog from IDW Publishing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. accuses Sinaloa Gov. Ruben Rocha Moya of working with cartels to distribute "massive quantities" of narcotics to the United States.

Tory leader says she did not sign off on video attacking Labour’s Troubles legacy proposals

Kemi Badenoch has apologised after footage from Bloody Sunday was used in social media posts criticising a bill on legacy issues in Northern Ireland.

The Conservative leader said on Saturday that she did not sign off on the use of a clip from the massacre, in which British soldiers opened fire on unarmed civil rights demonstrators in Derry, and that it was distributed by “very young people”.

CAYLA MUTCHNICK

CAYLA MUTCHNICK
Opinion Columnist

I’ve always wanted a best friend to love. One that I can cry on my saddest days and laugh with on my good ones. A best friend who truly gets me. What I didn’t realize is that I would find this, not through a person, but through a four-legged pup. 

Apr. 26, 2014, changed my life. It was the day I brought home my dog, Ginger. I wish I could say I was obsessed with her from the start. Yet, I had a massive fear of dogs. My family thought that getting a dog would help me get over my fear. 

Puppy Ginger was truly a ball of energy, with the sweetest soul and the most lovable bark. Still, I was terrified of her. However, that didn’t stop her from winning me over. 

She was so patient with me. She sensed I was afraid and treated me with such delicate affection that would cause anyone to become a dog lover. 

After a few months, I became comfortable with her. Eventually, I became comfortable with other dogs, too. 

Not only did I become comfortable around Ginger, but my family and friends love to say I became “obsessed” with her. I agree. She was there for me through all my hardships and was the reason I smiled on my hardest days. 

People argue that for someone or something to be a best friend, there’s a cycle of communication: listening, talking and understanding. How could a dog do this? They can’t even speak. 

I don’t believe in that definition. To me, a best friend has nothing to do with the ability to speak. I created a connection with my dog through nonverbal cues and the unconditional love we both share for each other. 

I know for a fact that my dog loves me the way I love her. I know this through the way she jumps on me when I come home, whether it’s from 90 miles away at college or five minutes down the road from Dunkin’. 

I believe, if possible, everyone should experience the friendship of a dog. It’s a relationship like no other. Not only will they make your life 100 times better, but they also improve emotional and mental health. 

Many dogs act as emotional support animals, providing people with a feeling of security and happiness. They help reduce loneliness and teach owners responsibility. 

Owning a dog is a huge commitment. You need to be ready to drop anything and take care of them as they are completely reliant on their owners. Though this sounds like a lot of work, it builds a sense of responsibility that people without dogs never get the chance to have. It prepares owners to take care of someone other than themselves. It’s a responsibility that is completely worth it. 

Next time you are thinking about wanting to make more friends, maybe start your search at the animal shelter or rescue!

Cayla Mutchnick is an opinion columnist at The Review. Her opinions are her own and do not represent the majority opinion of The Review staff. She may be reached at caylamut@udel.edu.

The Gunners can open up a six-point lead at the top of the table with a win.

For audio enjoyment in the great outdoors, this compact speaker is tough to beat.

GB News owner’s son, who wants Channel to be mined to stop migrants, is latest to have a go at transatlantic rightwing commentary

On a Los Angeles stage in 2011 Winston Marshall, then the banjo player for the folk rock band Mumford & Sons, could scarcely believe what was happening. Not only was he playing at the Grammys, he was playing alongside Bob Dylan, legendary composer of social justice anthems and one of his heroes.

About 15 years later, Marshall once again found himself stateside, this time on a very different stage. Appearing on Fox News in his new guise as a conservative YouTuber, Marshall advocated what he admitted was an “outlandish idea” to stop small boat crossings in the Channel.

The tech company Flock has 80,000 cameras across the US – and a report finds some officers are taking advantage

Who would you rate as the world’s most unlikeable tech tycoon? Elon Musk is obviously a major contender. The digital warlord Palmer Luckey is also up there.

While there’s a lot of competition, Garret Langley also deserves a shoutout. The CEO of the tech company Flock may not be a household name, but his controversial surveillance technology is rapidly worming its way into daily life. If you live in the US, there’s probably a Flock product on a highway or parking lot near you. The company, which largely sells its products to law enforcement, makes automated license plate readers (ALPRs) which capture license plate data and help track where a vehicle has been. (If you want to check if your license plate has been the subject of a Flock search you can do so at haveibeenflocked.com)

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

From Virginia to New York, the bugs drain vines, cut yields and leave growers resorting to one simple fix: squash them

Around grape harvest time about three years ago, an employee at Zephaniah Farm Vineyard in Leesburg, Virginia, noticed bugs, about 1in long with gray and black wings and a bright red underwing, atop some trees.

While the insects were pretty, they were there for the grapevines and not welcome guests at the vineyard, which sits atop a farm that the Zephaniah family has run since 1949.

Actors Richard E Grant, Michael Sheen and Bella Ramsey among star-studded cast hoping for victory as BBC’s hit spin-off series returns to screens

Considering the Traitors is a game of murderous treachery played out in a castle, the Shakespearean actors in the cast of the new celebrity spin-off series should be well set.

Oscar-winner Richard E Grant, acclaimed actor Michael Sheen and The Last of Us star Bella Ramsey will be among the thespians vying for victory this year, all of who have the Bard on their CV.

Gemini can call around to find any travel essentials you forgot.

Keir Starmer said he would always defend the right to protest, but that there may be instances where some marches​ should be banned.

The veteran star’s days as the No 1 option once appeared behind him. Against the favored Rockets, he put Father Time on the ropes and his team on his back

The date is 12 March, and the Los Angeles Lakers are in the midst of a run that’s garnering a lot of well-deserved attention, in a month that sees them lose just two contests and win 15. The spirit of the locker room is at an all-time high, and it’s clear in talking to LeBron James, the 41-year-old storied veteran and greatest-of-all-time candidate who recently put his ego aside to accept a role as the team’s third option, that he believes what many around the NBA are starting to as well: his Lakers have a real shot at contention.

“As you get older, you appreciate the moment more than anything. When you’re younger, you think about what you’ve done in the past, or what’s to come in the future,” he tells me when I ask how he’s been able to be so present of late, in light of the ups and downs of a topsy-turvy Lakers season. “But the only thing that we know for sure is happening is the moment.”

The budget carrier Spirit Airlines is ceasing operations after failing to land a $500 million bailout from the Trump administration.

Have tickets to fly on Spirit? Here's what to know about refunds and alternative flights as the budget airline ceases operations.

Check out all the action classics, indie faves and more, streaming free in May.

Cameron Rider's fatigue, body aches and fever were diagnosed as pneumonia, but he couldn't seem to get better.

Amid immigration raids, chemical spills, massive floods and costly healthcare, less-affluent residents of one of the most diverse US cities struggle to pull through

Cándido Álvarez has made it his policy never to go to the doctor.

“Not when I’m sick, not even when it’s serious,” he said. “I prefer not to go.”

Calf was transported by water-filled barge in operation deemed ‘inadvisable’ because of low chance of survival

Rescuers have released a young humpback whale that became a national sensation after it was beached in shallow waters off the coast in Germany, although marine experts have said its chances of survival are low.

The whale, variously nicknamed Timmy or Hope, was released into the North Sea off Denmark after being transported there in a water-filled barge by rescuers.

The phone is reportedly inching closer to launch by getting another certification for operation on carrier networks.

Where (and how) you wear your health tracker can impact your data accuracy. Here's what researchers say matters most.

Figures for England and Wales prompt calls for more rigorous police investigations of cases

Only 3% of suicides related to domestic abuse in England and Wales in the past five years have resulted in any sort of prosecution, figures show.

Between 2020 and 2025, 553 people took their own lives after suspected abuse in an intimate relationship, but only 17 posthumous charges were brought.

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

Government blocks RightsCon 2026 conference saying it did not ‘align with national values’

The world’s largest conference on human rights and technology has been cancelled just days before it was due to start after the Zambian government told organisers it did not align with “national values”.

Zambia’s government had originally welcomed the RightsCon 2026 summit on “human rights in the digital age”, due to be held in the capital, Lusaka, on 5-8 May, but Thabo Kawana, permanent secretary for the Ministry of Information & Media, said last week that the conference would not go ahead to allow time to ensure the gathering “aligns with Zambia’s national values, policy priorities, and broader public interest considerations”.

The king’s US visit reminds me how glorious it would be to live in a country where sunshine is a novelty and For the Love of Dogs is on TV

The so-called “special relationship” between Britain and the United States has never seemed more tenuous. At times, it looks like the US-UK alliance is a geopolitical version of a slowly disintegrating celebrity relationship where neither side wants to admit it’s actually over, so someone has to do a crazy thing like cheating in the most high-profile manner possible to wrap things up. Like Klay Thompson (allegedly) stepping out on Megan Thee Stallion, America has been making goo-goo eyes at Israel for the last year, and King Charles is starting to get jealous.

So the king popped into the White House for a tour of all the changes Donald and Melania have foisted upon the grounds. Have you seen the gaping hole where the East Wing used to be? And what a hole it is. To your left, you’ll see the beehive.

These are the best red light therapy masks to surprise mom with.

GameStop is reportedly preparing a potential offer for eBay, an unusually ambitious move given that eBay's roughly $46 billion market value is nearly four times GameStop's. Reuters reports: GameStop is preparing an offer for eBay as CEO Ryan Cohen pursues plans to boost the struggling videogame retailer's market value more than tenfold, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. Shares of eBay, which has a market capitalization of about $46 billion, soared about 14% in extended trading. GameStop gained 4%. The company has a market value of nearly $12 billion. GameStop has been quietly building a stake in eBay's shares ahead of a potential offer, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter. If eBay is not receptive, Cohen could decide to take the offer directly to the e-commerce company's shareholders, the Journal said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

‘Date My Mate’ nights, which involve pitching a friend to a room of singles, are gaining momentum across the country

For many young people, the dating game has been nothing but a thankless task of endless swiping and ghosting, with little hope of finding love.

But as dating apps fall out of favour, and a relationship recession looms, young singles have discovered a new way to revive the dating scene: talking up their pals to strangers.

The daughter of Iranian immigrants, Asal Sayas worked in the White House and Senate, lobbied for AIDS research and became a tireless champion for people with cancer.

Apps, AI tools and shaky job prospects are pushing gen Z into markets earlier, blending caution with risk-taking

Ambrico Ranginui first heard of cryptocurrencies when he was 12 years old. By the time he was 16, he had saved enough from birthday gifts and his allowance to invest.

“Growing up in a single-mum household, it made me quite a determined person to get ahead,” Ranginui said. “I wanted to find new avenues to make money and crypto was so fascinating at the time.”

US president says ‘we took over the cargo, took over the oil. It’s a very profitable business’

Donald Trump has said the US navy acted “like pirates” as he described an operation seizing a ship amid the tit-for-tat American blockade of Iranian ports.

“We … land on top of it and we took over the ship. We took over the cargo, took over the oil. It’s a very profitable business,” said Trump at a rally in Florida on Friday.

• Kareem’s Daily Quote: Sit. Stay. Heal. (Or help to heal others.)

• The Shameful Verdict: If it comes with no fanfare, does it still count?

• Video Break: Bandly does gymnastics.

• The Scandal That Never Ends: Why we stopped noticing the $4 billion elephant in the room.

• The Price of the California Dream: A conversation about what we owe our neighbors.

• What I’m Watching: Bob Marley: One Love

• Jukebox Playlist: Nat King Cole & Harry Belafonte “Mama Look A Boo Boo”

Kareem’s Daily Quote

"You have to pick the places you don't walk away from." Joan Didion

There is a specific kind of wisdom that comes from Joan Didion—author, screenwriter and essayist who spent her life looking at the fractures in society and the messy, often chaotic reality of being human. The quote above,“You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from,” is from her A Book of Common Prayer. It’s a line that feels particularly heavy when you look at the world we’re navigating right now.

America is a country that was built on walking away. Nearly all of us were conceived from immigrant stock, no matter if those ancestors were from Trinidad (like mine) or from Europe, Africa, the South Pacific, what have you. The Pilgrims may have landed on the East Coast but many ventured to the West, to the North and the South. If we don’t like something, and we have the opportunity to pick up and go, we will. Few of us still live in the house our grandparents built. Fewer still in a town that looks like it did seventy years ago. Marriages crumble. Friendships get sidelined. Churches, synagogues and temples empty out. Walking away is not just a default to find out who we “really” are…it’s our primary defense mechanism against the overwhelming noise of modern life.

But Didion’s point is that if you walk away from everything, you eventually find yourself standing nowhere.

Commitment is a messy business. When she talks about “picking the places,” Didion isn’t just talking about a house or a city. She’s talking about the values we choose to defend and the people we refuse to abandon. It’s about where to dig in our heels.

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of the stories we’ve been tracking this week, the ones that make you want to throw your hands up. It’s easy to walk away from the debate over how we fund our hospitals because it feels too complex or too dominated by billionaire-funded PR. It’s easy to walk away from the struggle for voting rights because it feels like a battle that’s been fought for a hundred years and still isn’t won. It’s easy to walk away from the fight for accountability when corruption starts to feel like a permanent part of the deal.

But these are the exact places that we can’t afford to leave.

Picking a place you won’t walk away from is a radical act of hope. It’s an admission that even if “the magic trick” of public life is designed to confuse us, and even if the antiseptic and even obtuse language of the law is designed to hide the truth, the outcome still matters. It matters because there are real people—kids in schools, patients in ERs, voters in the South—who don’t have the luxury of walking away.

People who eventually change things aren’t necessarily the loudest or the ones with the most resources. They’re the ones who remain in the room.

We’re all tired. We’ve been “flooded with the zone” until we’re gasping for air. But the strength of our community, the “American Experiment,” doesn’t come from those of us who find a clever exit strategy. It comes from those who look at the mess, look at the wires and the pulleys, and say, “Nope. I’m staying put.”

Read more

Spinosaurid fossil bought by Stuttgart institution in 1991 has been the subject of a long restitution campaign

It is a 113-million-year-old bone of contention.

After Stuttgart’s museum of natural history bought a fossilised dinosaur skull in 1991, researchers found it was the most complete spinosaurid skull known to date, belonging to a previously unknown genus of the huge meat-eating dinosaurs.

The semi-pro league gets under way with aims of elevating the sport ahead of the 2033 World Cup on American soil

Dr Jessica Hammond-Graf is president and chief sporting officer of Women’s Elite Rugby, the US semi-professional rugby union competition that kicks off its second season on Saturday in Massachusetts and Illinois. Like most Americans, she did not grow up with the game.

An Army kid, she spent a lot of time playing soccer. In the early 90s, at the University of Connecticut, she tried out for the round ball and then played Ultimate Frisbee. Then, one fateful day, a woman on her floor said, “Hey, you should come try rugby, OK?” Hammond-Graf agreed, then found herself starting her very first game at fly-half, responsible for directing a team.

After correspondents’ dinner shooting, administration has rushed to capitalize in pursuit of its political goals

Less than 72 hours after a man was arrested for trying to assassinate Donald Trump at the White House, the justice department rushed to court to make an extraordinary filing.

The subject of the emergency was a lawsuit by the National Trust for Historic Preservation seeking to halt the construction of a new White House ballroom. A federal judge ruled earlier this month that construction had to stop, though an appeals court later paused that ruling.

Exclusive: Contractor denies allegations including ‘enforced disappearance’ and will help locate unaccompanied minors

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has awarded a contract to a private security company that has faced accusations of “torture” and “enforced disappearance” to assist in tracking down undocumented immigrant children who arrived in the US alone, a contracting document shows.

ICE has stepped up its work so much in pursuing these minors in the US that it has contracted out some of its mission to a third party to put “boots on the ground” and locate immigrant children previously released from US government custody.

El Gamal family was released from detention and then re-arrested as US officials appeared to overstep judge’s order

An Egyptian mother and her children, previously jailed by immigration authorities, arrived back in their home in Colorado on Wednesday, after a days-long ordeal during which the Trump administration likely attempted to violate a federal judge’s order.

Their attorney, Eric Lee, claimed the US government’s actions against the El Gamal family constituted “kidnapping” after immigration officials re-arrested the family last week.

The race to succeed Gavin Newsom has teetered wildly, and with Democrats in disarray, the Republican ex-Downing Street adviser is leading in the polls. Can he really pull it off?

Few political aspirations have proved more futile over the past two decades than running as a Republican for statewide office in California. Yet Steve Hilton – transplanted Brit, erstwhile business entrepreneur, a former Downing Street adviser to David Cameron and a former Fox News host who says he is friends with half of Donald Trump’s cabinet – is having a remarkably good time of it.

With less than six weeks to go before a primary election that has proved to be both dramatic and wildly unpredictable, most polls put Hilton narrowly ahead of a fractured field of Democrats in the race to succeed Gavin Newsom as governor. It is an astonishing turn of events in a state where Democrats enjoy supermajorities in the state legislature and a two-to-one advantage over the Republicans in voter registration.

Some of these word and puzzle games are more casual, while others offer a difficult challenge.

From hardened SUVs to home upgrades, officeholders are going to new lengths to protect themselves. The question is: Who pays?

• Former major winner ‘committed to making team golf work’

• Rebel tour now working on a junior golf initiative, he says

Bryson DeChambeau, the two times US Open champion, has denied reports he is seeking a way out of the beleaguered LIV Golf, the rebel series whose future looks bleak after Saudi Arabian backers indicated they are pulling their multibillion-dollar sponsorship at the end of the 2026 season.

LIV Golf is seeking to secure fresh backers in the wake of the decision by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) to scrap its $5bn (£3.68bn) investment in golf, as part of a general retreat from sports sponsorship. There is every prospect the 2026 season will prove LIV’s last.

Another writer once told me that she never, ever apologizes. How unenlightened and abrasive, I thought at the time. This was circa 2019, when the specter of cancellation loomed large, where old tweets were being dug up, and public apologies abounded.

I like to think we’ve come out on the other side a bit more canny. The era of overcorrection converted me to the idea that, with few exceptions, you should not publicly apologize, and you should not retreat.

I’ve been thinking about this again in the wake of former FBI Director James Comey’s second indictment stemming from a dumb joke he literally wrote in the sand. While on a beach vacation last year, Comey spelled out the words “86 47” and posted the photo online. For this limp act of resistance, he’s been charged with threatening to kill the president and transmitting the message via interstate commerce, i.e., Instagram.

For those who’ve never worked a service industry job and are not unruly, public drunks — which would make for an interesting Venn Diagram for members of this administration — “86” is slang for removing someone from an establishment. It’s ludicrous to imagine this being read as a threat on Donald Trump’s life, but that was hardly the point.  

What matters is that Comey made a critical misstep: He deleted the post and retreated, giving his detractors exactly what they so richly desired. “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down,” he said at the time.

Now, some necessary caveats: There is great value in addressing specific wrongs to the specific people you’ve wronged. This is best done in private. If you find yourself apologizing to a large group of unspecified people for hard-to-pin-down or ever-evolving wrongs, it should give you pause, ditto if you start by opening up your Notes app. Consider who is asking you to apologize and their motivations for doing so. Are they trying to exert control over you? Do they want to gain leverage for future use?

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Comey’s de facto apology not only didn’t matter to its intended audience, but it also telegraphed the former FBI director as weak. Announcing himself as willing to capitulate only chummed the water further, the sharks circled, and he bent the knee to the worst actors rather than stand his ground. Deleting the post, in the modern era, ends up looking like an admission of guilt — or, at least, an admission that the bad guys got under your skin, which means they can do so again, at will, in the future.

Once you start apologizing to appease the nameless, faceless ombudsmen looking to catch you out, you might find it’s impossible to stop. 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is experiencing this firsthand. Early in March, the right-wing website Jewish Insider thought they were onto the scoop of the century when they published a story blaring: “Zohran Mamdani’s wife liked social media posts celebrating Oct. 7 attacks.” That premise was hardly borne out by the posts that Rama Duwaji, an interdisciplinary artist, had “liked” — which included such incendiary phrases as “Systemic change for collective liberation” — but the damage was done. A Mamdani spokesperson responded to the report with a conciliatory statement: “Mayor Mamdani has been clear and consistent: Hamas is a terrorist organization, October 7th was a horrific war crime, and he has condemned that violence unequivocally.”

It’s safe to say this apology was not accepted, and bad actors in the media doubled down on attacking Duwaji. One week later, a gotcha reporter manufactured outrage with a story for the conservative Washington Free Beacon about one of Duwaji’s illustrations running alongside a collection of essays edited by Susan Abulhawa about the indignities of living under Israeli occupation — in this case, a Gazan woman’s search for something as simple as a bathroom. The publication attempted to hold Duwaji accountable for everything the editor has ever said, none of which was contained in the piece itself, which was actually written by Diana Islayih.

Mamdani apologized for the editor, saying, “I think that that rhetoric is patently unacceptable. I think it’s reprehensible.” But the mayor’s critics were quick to seize on what was left unsaid, with an Anti-Defamation League leader crediting his apology with one hand while offering with the other: “However, we have not heard from [Duwaji]. Does she have a problem with the author and her statements? We just don’t know.” (Abulhawa, for her part, nailed it in a withering response to Mamdani’s apology: “You succumbed to forces that seek to pick away at you, at your talented, beautiful wife, and at your work, clawing harder with each apology or concession you make.”)

It wasn’t over, and we likely haven’t heard the end of it. The Free Beacon doubled down on its intrepid reporting by advanced-searching up some of Duwaji’s off-color tweets from when she was a teenager. This seemed to break the dam, and New York’s first lady publicly apologized earlier this month in an interview on the art site Hyperallergic.

“I felt a lot of shame being confronted with language I used that is so harmful to others; being 15 doesn’t excuse it,” she told the site. “I’ve read and seen a lot of what others have had to say in response, and I understand the hurt I caused and am truly sorry.” 

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New York’s Billionaires Are Bending the Knee to Zohran Mamdani

This all comes after Mamdani was only a few months off his historic win in an election where the most votes were tallied since 1969 — one in which he overcame wave after wave of Islamophobic fearmongering and political opponents smearing him as “antisemtic” for refusing to roll over on supporting Palestinian liberation. He stood up for something people believe in and was rewarded for not backing down, which makes it all the more mystifying that he would start apologizing now.

But Mamdani and Duwaji are far from alone. Years back, Rep. Ilhan Omar was famously disciplined for her “all about the Benjamins” tweet, which suggested, apparently quite controversially, that money was involved in lobbying. (After being tarred as trafficking in antisemitic tropes, Omar tweeted, “I unequivocally apologize.”) The attacks on Omar — again, brought by bad actors — have not stopped since then.

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Another Assassination Attempt, More Fertilizer for Conspiracy Theories

The door on all this apologizing only swings one way. You’ll never get an apology out of Donald Trump, AIPAC, or the vast majority of elected Republicans. This should force you to consider that, just maybe, your opponents weren’t actually offended in the first place; they were exercising power over you in a way you’ve already proven works. It’s akin to political blackmail: If you prove you’re willing to pay the bad guys off once, there’s nothing to stop them coming back again and again for another pound of flesh.

Being involved in public life — and politics in particular — means offending people. It means making enemies of the types of people who strenuously fight against everything you stand for. What the left should stake out is the courage to stand on principle and be willing to have the bad people dislike you. Because without a spine, an elected lefty is just another politician.

The post Never Apologize appeared first on The Intercept.

PM worried about ‘cumulative’ effect of marches, as Met chief says Jewish communities facing biggest threat

Some pro-Palestinian demonstrations could be stopped, the prime minister has warned, as the UK’s most senior police officer said the threat to the Jewish ­community was greater than it had ever been.

Keir Starmer indicated he wanted the language expressed on some protest marches to be subjected to “tougher action” as he sought to allay the fears of British Jews after a series of attacks on their communities in recent weeks.

Exclusive: The collection, including donations from Paul McCartney’s brother Mike, shows band’s development in early 60s

A rare set of letters and photos from the early days of the Beatles, in which they write about feeling like stars for the first time, is to go on display in Hamburg.

The collection, from an influential period when the band lived in the German city, includes the only letter in existence with words from both Paul McCartney and John Lennon, which was written to the bassist’s brother, Mike McCartney.

Kurdish Syrian man, 26, said he fled forced conscription by YPG militia because he ‘didn’t want to kill people’

An asylum seeker sent back to France under the controversial “one in, one out” scheme faces being returned to Syria after authorities in Paris ruled it was safe to do so, in what is believed to be the first case of its kind.

When the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, announced the “groundbreaking” deal in July 2025 to stop small boats crowded with asylum seekers from crossing the Channel – by forcibly returning one small-boat asylum seeker to France in exchange for bringing one in northern France legally to the UK – they emphasised that France was a safe country for returnees.

For many months, conservative lawmakers and political operatives have been targeting the scientists and lawyers behind the Climate Judiciary Project, a program meant to educate the courts about climate science, alleging that their effort constitutes a conspiracy to influence federal judges and persuade them to rule against the oil industry.

Now, just as congressional investigators are escalating a formal inquiry into the project, a separate program closely aligned with the fossil fuel industry and free-market conservatives is hosting a symposium for 150 judges in Nashville, Tennessee. The program, run by the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, also aims to educate judges, but in a way that prioritizes American business interests and questions climate science. 

The dueling efforts come as a number of significant lawsuits seeking to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate damages are making their way through the courts and as oil-industry-aligned attacks on climate policies, and the legal arguments supporting them, have been sharply increasing.

ProPublica reported in April that political operatives connected to the conservative activist Leonard Leo were coordinating an effort across 11 states to pass laws shielding fossil fuel companies from liability for climate harm. In the past three weeks, similar liability waiver bills have been introduced federally in both the House and the Senate. Last week the Florida attorney general’s office launched an investigation into alleged judicial influence by the organization that oversees the Climate Judiciary Project, the Environmental Law Institute, a nonpartisan legal scholarship group funded until recently by the Environmental Protection Agency. 

These developments come on the heels of a campaign last winter to get the Federal Judicial Center, the publishing body for the federal court system, to retract a roughly 90-page chapter devoted to climate science from the latest volume of its technical manual for judges. Twenty-two Republican attorneys general wrote to Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, demanding that the committee investigate the center’s publication of material about how to weigh scientific evidence about climate and the weather because the chapter’s authors appeared to be biased. In their letter, they noted the authors work for Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and alleged the chapter was influenced by Michael Burger, the executive director of the center who works closely with the law firm Sher Edling, which represents several climate plaintiffs. The Republican attorneys general also noted that some staff at the Sabin Center work with the Environmental Law Institute and the Climate Judiciary Project. Although the chapter had been peer reviewed and approved by the Federal Judicial Center, as well as by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the center retracted the climate chapter in February.

On April 28, Jordan went a step further, issuing letters accusing Burger, the Environmental Law Institute and Sher Edling of bias, conspiracy and collusion. Jordan demanded that the three parties produce private communications, receipts and records of funding sources, and that the recipients sit for interviews before the committee.

The Sabin Center, Jordan wrote, is “producing materials to be used to bias federal judges about novel climate-related legal theories” and coordinating to bring climate-related litigation to court. The activity raises questions about “the integrity and independence of the judicial process” and “ex parte contact with courts,” Jordan wrote, referring to the improper conduct of contacting a judge without opposing counsel present to argue issues related to a pending case. 

Neither Sher Edling, the Sabin Center nor Burger responded to a request for comment. A representative for the Environmental Law Institute stated in an email that the Climate Judiciary Project “does not participate in litigation, coordinate with any parties related to any litigation, or advise judges on how they should rule on any issue or in any case. The goal of CJP is to provide judges with the tools they need to understand climate science and how it arises in the law.”

Jordan’s office replied to a request for comment by reasserting the statements in the letters it sent, and it did not respond to a detailed list of questions.

Amid the allegations of impropriety and conflicts of interest though, the program at George Mason University has scarcely been noticed.

The George Mason conference, called the “Judicial Symposium on Scientific Methodology, Expert Testimony, and the Judicial Role,” opened the day after Jordan sent out his letters and will continue through Saturday, May 2. It is run by the university’s Law and Economics Center, which oversees a project called the Judicial Education Program. The center is funded in part by ExxonMobil, which is a defendant in several of the climate lawsuits. ExxonMobil did not respond to a request for comment. 

The conference includes speakers who have filed amicus briefs — filings by people who aren’t part of the case but have a strong interest in its outcome — in favor of the oil industry in several of those cases, as well as at least one lawyer who has represented fossil fuel companies in court. The reading assignments prepared for the judges include a Substack post by a notable climate contrarian accusing the authors of the retracted climate chapter in the federal court’s reference manual of including material by Burger and hiding his authorship. They also include a law journal argument that a key tenet of climate science used to identify the cause of disasters should be inadmissible in their courtrooms. One session, titled “Debates on the trustworthiness of tools to evaluate science in the courtroom,” focuses entirely on the federal courts’ reference manual. 

In an emailed response to ProPublica, Donald Kochan, the executive director of George Mason’s Law and Economics Center, which organized the event, presented the symposium as a robust and objective discussion. The program’s advisory board, he wrote, is a politically and jurisprudentially diverse group including “some of the most progressive jurists in the country, including on climate issues.” Kochan, who did not respond to a list of specific questions, added that lectures are by leading academics on science and law and that he invited the authors of the judicial reference manual to speak but they declined, as did several others who he suggested would have represented more centrist viewpoints on the climate issue.

The conference is one of dozens of meetings, retreats and “intimate weeklong gatherings” that are regularly hosted by the Law and Economics Center as part of an initiative to instill free-market values and greater knowledge of the economic consequences of policy in judicial decision-making. In 2016 the law school renamed itself after the former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the center expanded with $30 million in gifts, adding faculty and scholarships and launching additional “colloquia.” The center today runs several parallel initiatives under the umbrella of the Judicial Education Program, each aimed at gathering judges together and educating them. The symposium on science and evidence is one of these events.

According to an internal fundraising document from 2020 obtained by ProPublica, the gatherings are often luxurious all-expenses-paid affairs, created to foster lasting relationships and opportunities to network with judges. The document included a solicitation for more than $930,000 sent by the center to the Charles Koch Foundation, a libertarian organization that provides grants to universities and scholars. At the time of the proposal, more than 5,000 judges representing all 50 states had attended at least one of the organization’s programs, the document stated.

The goal of the symposium, according to the document, is to sway judges toward a libertarian economic viewpoint in their rulings — the very sort of “biasing” that Jordan accused the Sabin Center and the Climate Judiciary Project of. 

“The goal of this project is to expose judges to the intellectual history of the role of capitalism, economic freedom, and a constitutionally limited government as fundamental features of a liberal society,” the document says. It is also to establish a community of like-minded justices “with synergistic effects on the judiciary as a whole” and to influence the outcome of cases that come before the courts. Judges, the fundraising proposal continues, “urgently need to cultivate an understanding” of economic analysis and its relevance to the legal system if they “are to issue decisions that advance the rule of law and America’s free enterprise system.”

According to the George Mason University website, the Law and Economics Center’s 2025 funders include DonorsTrust, a dark money pass-through organization meant to shield the identity of contributors. DonorsTrust is often used by organizations tied to Leo, who brought George Mason a $20 million gift, in addition to $10 million from the Charles Koch Foundation, that made expansion of the law school’s program possible. 

This weekend’s symposium in Nashville is one of the most significant parts of the center’s outreach to justices. According to the 2020 fundraising letter, the goal of such gatherings is to challenge the status quo on science. The conference “will give judges a rounded understanding and healthy skepticism of the invocations of ‘science’ that lurk in the background of lawsuits they are hearing,” the center’s then-director wrote, and it will help judges understand that “so much of what passes as ‘science’ for leverage purposes never has to face tests for rigor, reliability and quality in front of a neutral arbiter.”

One of the symposium’s events prominently features Philip Goldberg, a managing partner at the law firm Shook, Hardy & Bacon and the special counsel to the National Association of Manufacturers’ policy lobbying arm, the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, which the group describes as “the leading voice of manufacturers in the courts.” MAP, as it is called, has publicly rejected the claims in a landmark case that the city of Honolulu brought against Shell, ExxonMobil and other oil companies alleging they misrepresented the risks of using their fuels and are responsible for the damages they have caused. Goldberg authored a brief for the group that was submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court on the case in 2024.

Goldberg, who did not respond to a request for comment, has also authored briefs in climate liability cases brought by the city of Baltimore against BP and other fossil fuel companies — a case won by the defendants in March — as well as a case brought by Boulder County in Colorado against Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil, which alleges the companies misrepresented the risks of using fossil fuels. Lawyers from Shook, Hardy & Bacon are also present at the conference. Other lawyers at the firm wrote a brief in favor of Chevron in a case brought by Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. (The oil companies dispute the allegations and each of these cases is ongoing.)

For its assigned reading for a session on the judicial manual, the symposium offered an article by the political scientist Roger Pielke Jr., a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Pielke wrote that he found evidence that the true authorship of a significant part of the climate chapter in the reference manual was obscured. He used the Claude artificial intelligence program to run an analysis comparing the chapter’s text to a paper co-authored by Sabin’s Burger and said he found a correlation. 

“Michael Burger did not write any of the text in the climate science chapter nor did he have any control over the content and scope,” one of the chapter’s two authors, Jessica Wentz, who has denied the chapter was biased, wrote to ProPublica. The other author did not respond, and Burger declined to comment. 

The conference did not offer readings from the climate chapter of the manual itself, which is still available on the website of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Nor did it offer readings from the United Nations climate science authorities or climate-related readings from any other peer-reviewed scientific journal.

In its final session, the symposium features attorney Matthew Wickersham of the firm Alston & Bird, which has served as counsel for Chevron in several lawsuits. Wickersham did not respond to a request for comment. The only reading assigned to justices for that session is a paper Wickersham wrote in the Rutgers Law Record in 2025 about why attribution science — the field of study that makes it possible to link climate disasters to specific amounts of pollution and their sources — should never be admitted in court.

The post Event With Links to Oil Industry Teaches Judges “Healthy Skepticism” of Climate Science appeared first on ProPublica.

In this CNET Labs exclusive, I look at why the overall brightness of TVs I've measured has increased over the past few years.

Reputed cartel boss Daniel Kinahan lived a luxe life on the lam, largely in the open, until Irish authorities had him arrested near the Burj Khalifa skyscraper.

As a Mast of Fraternity and Memory is unveiled in Nantes, calls are growing for Macron to announce framework for discussions

In the French port city of Nantes, once France’s largest departure point for ships that trafficked enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, a new wooden mast rises 18 metres into the sky from the waterside.

The Mast of Fraternity and Memory, inaugurated this month, marks a turning point in France’s complicated relationship with the legacy of its history of enslavement – just as the French president, Emmanuel Macron, comes under pressure to make key announcements on a process of reparatory justice.

‘Targeted support’ means certain banks and financial institutions can offer free extra help with investments and pensions

Many Britons are daunted by the world of investing, but new City rules mean certain banks and financial institutions can offer free extra help with investments and pensions.

Last month marked the launch of “targeted support”, a new regulated service that permits companies to suggest investments and pension products to customers that might provide a better return.

NASA engineers have tested a next-generation lithium-plasma electric propulsion system that reached 120 kilowatts, a new U.S. record and about 25 times the power of the electric thrusters on NASA's Psyche spacecraft. "Designing and building these thrusters over the last couple of years has been a long lead-up to this first test," said James Polk, who is a senior research scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It's a huge moment for us because we not only showed the thruster works, but we also hit the power levels we were targeting. And we know we have a good testbed to begin addressing the challenges to scaling up." Universe Today reports: While 120 kilowatts is a new record, NASA estimates it a future human mission to Mars will require 2 to 4 megawatts of power consisting of several thrusters and requiring more than 23,000 hours (958 days/2.6 years) of operation. To accomplish this, the thrusters would have to withstand more than 2,800 degrees Celsius (5,000 degrees Fahrenheit), which the thrusters achieved during testing. The reason for the extended operation is due to the estimated time of an entire human mission to Mars, which is estimated to be approximately 2.6 years. This is because the launch window to Mars only opens once every two years due to the orbital behaviors of both planets. While no mission has ever returned from the Red Planet, this same launch window works from Mars to Earth, too. When launched within this window, robotic spacecraft have traditionally taken approximately 6-7 months to reach Mars. However, a human mission would require a much larger spacecraft to accommodate the astronauts, food, fuel, water, and other mission-essential items. For the approximate 2.6-year mission, this would entail approximately 6-9 months traveling to Mars, followed by approximately 18 months on the surface of Mars until the next launch window opens, then another approximate 6-9 months back to Earth. However, having much less fuel due to the electric propulsion system could potentially alter this timeframe.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Documentary makers seek to start ‘informed conversation’ in country where public is allowed on just 8% of land

Anger and momentum are building for Scottish style rights of access to mountains, meadows, rivers and woodlands in England where the public is allowed on just 8% of land, a new documentary suggests.

Our Land, a film whose title is a nod to the protest song by Woody Guthrie, explores the rise of the right to roam movement in England.

Staff warned news operations face 15% cut, above BBC-wide 10% target, as corporation pushes through £600m savings plan

The BBC’s news operation is to cut costs by a steeper-than-expected 15%, with staff told to expect heavy redundancies.

The division, home to about a quarter of all BBC staff, is being saddled with one of the highest cost-cutting targets as the corporation attempts to cut as many as 2,000 jobs in the biggest downsizing of the public service broadcaster in 15 years.

WHO prequalification of Coartem Baby means newborns can be safely treated rather than using medication for older children

The first malaria treatment for babies has been approved by the World Health Organization, opening the door to widespread use around the globe.

In parts of Africa, up to 18% of children under six months will be infected with malaria, but there has historically been no safe treatment for the smallest of them. There were 610,000 deaths from malaria in 2024, about three quarters of which were under-fives in Africa.

Charles III’s subtle, much needed history lesson delivered the US some tough love. But will Trump get the message?

Of the many jokes cracked by King Charles during his visit to Washington, the one recalling the definitive 18th-century Anglo-French contest for dominion over the New World was the most pointed. Speaking at a state banquet in the White House, Charles turned to Donald Trump and said: “You recently commented, Mr President, that if it were not for the United States, European countries would be speaking German. Dare I say that, if it wasn’t for us, you’d be speaking French!”

Did Trump get it? Who knows? Broadly speaking, history, even their own, is not most Americans’ favourite subject. A forward-looking people, they do not dwell on the past, nor hanker after the illusory felicities of former glories. While generations of Britons still wallow in nostalgia for Spitfires, Churchill and Vera Lynn (and beating the French), Americans typically seek new metaphorical mountains to climb. Theirs is a positive outlook, on the whole. Except, under Trump, it has twisted into a revived, ugly version of US “manifest destiny” imperialism.

Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

The new measures increase pressure on foreign financial institutions by threatening their access to U.S. markets if they continue to work with Cuban government entities.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Amazon's cloud customers will need to wait several more months before the US tech company can repair war-damaged data centers and restore normal operations in the Middle East. The announcement comes two months after Iranian drone strikes targeted three Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain -- meaning that full recovery from the cloud disruption could take nearly half a year in all. The Amazon Web Services (AWS) dashboard posted an April 30 update describing how its UAE and Bahrain cloud regions "suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East" and are unable to support customer applications. The update also said that "relevant billing operations are currently suspended while we restore normal operations" in a process that "is expected to take several months." That wording suggests Amazon will continue to avoid billing AWS customers in the affected regions -- ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1 -- after it initially waived all usage-related charges for March 2026 at an estimated cost of $150 million. AWS also "strongly" recommended that customers migrate resources to other cloud regions and rely on remote backups to restore any "inaccessible resources." Some customers, such as the Dubai-based super app Careem—which offers ride-hailing, household services, and food and grocery delivery -- were able to get back online quickly after doing an overnight migration to other data center servers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for May 2.

The longtime president of Bard College announced his retirement, months after it was revealed that he had a much deeper relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein than was previously known.

The Supreme Court's ruling on Wednesday about Louisiana's congressional map could have implications for several states, as it narrowed the section of the Voting Rights Act about majority-minority districts.

This live blog is now closed.

• Iran offers new peace proposal to US but Trump ‘not satisfied’

• Trump claims hostilities have ended in Iran in letter to Congress

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Meanwhile, the White House has said it will not detail private diplomatic conversations when Reuters asked about Iran’s new proposal to the United States that was submitted to Pakistani mediators.

“We do not detail private diplomatic conversations. President Trump has been clear that Iran can never possess a nuclear weapon, and negotiations continue to ensure the short- and long-term national security of the United States,” spokeswoman Anna Kelly told Reuters.

I do have the impression from some of the briefings that I have received, as well as other sources, that an imminent military strike is very much on the table.

There really is no coherent strategy, which came across very vividly and graphically in the hearing today with Secretary Hegseth.

And it comes across in the president’s comments, which oscillate between seeming open to negotiation and then foreclosing it entirely and threatening destruction of civilizations.

The US sanctions target people operating in broad sections of Cuban economy, including energy, defence and mining

Cuba’s government has said new sanctions imposed on the island by Donald Trump amounted to “collective punishment”, as an enormous 1 May procession outside the American embassy in Havana vowed to “defend the homeland”.

In an executive order on Friday, the US president said he would impose sanctions on people involved in broad sections of the Cuban economy, as he seeks to put more pressure on Havana after ousting Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, earlier this year.

Pentagon says withdrawal is expected to be completed over the next six to 12 months – key US politics stories from Friday, 1 May at a glance

It appears Donald Trump is following through on his threats to reduce US military presence in Europe.

The Pentagon announced on Friday that 5,000 troops will be withdrawn from Germany over the next six to 12 months.

The Republican governors of Tennessee and Alabama called state lawmakers into special sessions on Friday, initial steps in what could be a scramble to redraw congressional maps after the Supreme Court narrowed the Voting Rights Act.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for May 2, No. 585

Emergency order allows extension of temporary protected status that has been repeatedly granted

A federal judge on Friday blocked the Trump administration from forcing about 3,000 Yemeni refugees to leave the US, ruling that temporary protected status repeatedly granted to them and due to expire Monday should be extended again.

Judge Dale E Ho in Manhattan extended the status temporarily while a lawsuit seeking to preserve the protections plays out. In an emergency order, he wrote that people granted the status are ordinary, law-abiding people whom the US government had determined could face threats to their safety if they were returned to a country facing an ongoing armed conflict.

Mike and Kayla Wintz lost their entire 11,000-acre ranch to a wildfire in the span of about two hours. They have since been gifted about $80,000 worth of hay, mostly from anonymous donors.

A federal judge scolded prosecutors for pushing to move forward with detention proceedings for accused correspondents' dinner gunman Cole Allen, even though Allen agreed to remain in custody.

Microsoft is rolling out Xbox mode to all Windows 11 PCs, bringing a full-screen Xbox PC app interface similar to Steam's Big Picture Mode. "Some players in select markets will be able to download the Xbox mode experience today, with availability expanding to more players in those markets over the next several weeks," says the Xbox team. The Verge reports: Xbox mode aims to try and bridge the gap between Xbox consoles and Windows, but its original debut felt like a beta on the Xbox Ally devices. "Since first introducing Xbox mode, formerly known as 'full screen experience,' on Windows handhelds, we've been listening closely to player feedback and continuing to evolve the experience across devices," says the Xbox team. "Those learnings directly shaped Xbox mode on Windows 11 PCs." Microsoft is also rolling out improvements to the Xbox Ally X handheld today, including a preview of its Auto SR upscaling technology. Xbox console owners are also getting a new dashboard update today, with the ability to disable Quick Resume on individual games and a feature to add custom colors to the dashboard.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Trump is withdrawing 5,000 of the 36,400 US personnel based in Germany. But why are they there in the first place?

• US withdrawing 5,000 troops from Germany after Merz says US ‘humiliated’ by Iran

The US is withdrawing 5,000 troops from Germany, days after the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, suggested Washington was being outplayed and “humiliated” by Iran.

The US president had earlier said a “determination” on the US military presence in Germany, seen as a key part of Nato’s defences but also vital for the projection of US power in other parts of the world, would be made “over the next short period of time”.

The Google Photos wardrobe feature uses AI to scan your camera roll and create a digital version of your closet.

Ford CEO Jim Farley tells CBS News, "Most of our new models are going to be more affordable versions."

You might use a VPN yourself, but have you considered giving one to your AI agent? It might be more important than you think.

US president says European countries are ‘absolutely horrible’ to refuse to support operations in strait of Hormuz

• Why does the US have military bases in Germany?

The US is withdrawing 5,000 troops from Germany, the Pentagon announced on Friday, as Donald Trump also threatened Italy and Spain for not helping to reopen the strait of Hormuz.

The president’s move to reduce the number of personnel deployed in Germany came after the country’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said the US was being “humiliated” by Iran.

Kentucky State Police said a man went to a U.S. Bank in Berea, Kentucky, and shot and killed a man and a woman, both employees at the bank.

The deal merged Major League Pickleball and the Carvana PPA Tour, two of the nascent sport's most active entities, under one company, Pickleball Inc.

President seemed to suggest that legislative deadline to approve war no longer applies as Democrats push back

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Donald Trump said in a letter sent to congressional leaders on Friday that hostilities with Iran have “terminated”, suggesting that the 60-day deadline to seek approval from the legislative branch no longer applied.

Friday marks 60 days since the US president notified members of Congress that the US and Israel launched strikes against Iran on 28 February. Under the War Powers Act of 1973, the president can deploy troops to respond to an “imminent threat” but must receive congressional approval within 60 days to continue military operations.

President Trump said earlier this week he was reviewing the possible reduction of troops in Germany, which hosts more than 35,000 U.S. service members.

By July, California will close legal loopholes that made driverless cars like Waymos exempt from some laws.

joshuark shares a report from Live Science: An AI coding agent designed to help a small software company streamline its tasks instead blew a hole through its business in just nine seconds. PocketOS founder Jer Crane, said that the AI coding agent Cursor --powered by Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 model -- deleted the company's entire production database and backups with a single call to its cloud provider, Railway, on April 24. [...] "This isn't a story about one bad agent or one bad API [Application Programming Interfaces]," Crane wrote in an X post. "It's about an entire industry building AI-agent integrations into production infrastructure faster than it's building the safety architecture to make those integrations safe." Crane's company, PocketOS makes software for car rental companies, handling tasks such as reservations, payments, customer records and vehicle tracking. After the deletion, Crane said customers lost reservations and new signups, and some could not find records for people arriving to pick up their rental cars. "We've contacted legal counsel," Crane wrote. "We are documenting everything." Crane explained that Cursor found an API token -- a "digital key" made of a short sequence of code that lets software talk to other services and prove it has permission to act -- in an unrelated file which it then used to run the destructive command. According to Crane, Railway's setup allowed the deletion without confirmation, and because the backups were stored close enough to the main database, they were also erased. "[Railway] resolved the issue and restored the data," Railway confirmed via email to Live Science. "We maintain both user backups as well as disaster backups. We take data very, VERY seriously." In his post, he pointed to earlier reports of Cursor ignoring user rules, changing files it was not supposed to touch and taking actions beyond the task it had been given. To him, the database wipe was not a freak accident but the next step in a larger, more concerning, pattern. After the database vanished, Crane asked Cursor to explain what happened. The AI agent reportedly admitted that it had guessed, acted without permission and failed to understand the command before running it. "I violated every principle I was given," the AI agent wrote. "I guessed instead of verifying. I ran a destructive action without being asked. I didn't understand what I was doing before doing it." The statement reads like a confession [...]. "We are not the first," Crane wrote. "We will not be the last unless this gets airtime."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Comedian pulled from stage in Birmingham about 45 minutes into performance and audience told to leave

A live show by comedian Peter Kay in Birmingham has been stopped after a “potential suspicious bag” was found around the venue.

The Utilita Arena Birmingham was evacuated and a 19-year-old man was taken into custody, West Midlands police said on Friday evening.

Investigation found Botstein – who had claimed he wasn’t friends with Epstein – made 25 visits to his townhouse

Leon Botstein has announced he is stepping down from the helm of Bard College, after an independent review of his contacts with Jeffrey Epstein found the college president’s frequent interactions with the convicted sex offender “could have alerted” him to the possibility that he and Bard would be facilitating Epstein’s abuse of women.

An investigation by the WilmerHale law firm, which had been commissioned by Bard’s board of trustees earlier this year to review Botstein’s interactions with Epstein, found the Bard president – who had previously claimed he was not friends with Epstein – made about 25 visits to Epstein’s townhouse, a two-day visit to Epstein’s Little St James Island, and that there were two visits by Epstein to Bard. These visits, WilmerHale reported, included “multiple women” who have since been identified as victims of Epstein.

Made from the company's new Aerominium material, the 2026 models feature the latest Intel and AMD processors and weigh 3 pounds or less.

One of the phones, the Aurora Nex, has modular hardware that lets owners reconfigure it to their preferences.

Thousands of people take to the streets to protest the Trump administration, the Iran war, immigration and social injustice

• Thousands join US May Day protests

Florida's Republican-controlled Legislature approved a new congressional map that could help the GOP flip four seats in the midterm elections. 

State Democrats say the map, put forward by Gov. Ron DeSantis, conflicts with Florida’s Fair Districts amendment prohibiting drawing districts with partisan intent. DeSantis has offered several reasons for the changes, including population growth. 

Florida House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell, D-Tampa, went further, saying after the April 29 vote that it was not only illegal on a state level, but also federal.

"Even if Fair Districts falls, you still have general principles of map drawing, and you still have, under federal law, you cannot engage in partisan gerrymandering," Driskell told reporters. "It would not be OK to draw that map based on partisan data."

Gerrymandering is drawing district boundaries to give one political party, incumbent or group an advantage.

No federal law says states cannot undertake partisan gerrymandering. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering claims are "political" questions that federal courts can’t answer. 

"The court ruled the matter ‘nonjustiable’ by federal courts," said Rick Hasan, a UCLA School of Law election law expert. "It recognized the argument that partisan gerrymandering could be unconstitutional but it wasn’t for the federal courts to say when it is happening."

The court’s majority opinion said excessive gerrymandering is "incompatible with democratic principles," but state legislatures and Congress have the responsibility to police it. 

Driskell’s office told PolitiFact she misspoke and meant to reference racial gerrymandering prohibitions in federal law and the partisan gerrymandering prohibitions in state law. 

What did the Supreme Court say in 2019?

In Rucho v. Common Cause, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a 5-4 majority, said that although extreme partisan gerrymandering may seem reasonably "unjust," the Constitution provides no manageable standard for federal judges to determine when a redistricting plan becomes too partisan. 

"The fact that such (excessive) gerrymandering is ‘incompatible with democratic principles,’" Roberts wrote, "does not mean that the solution lies with the federal judiciary." Federal judges have "no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution."

The opinion acknowledged that courts have gotten involved in other redistricting-related claims, such as racial gerrymandering, but said partisan gerrymandering is particularly thorny because it’s well settled law that legislatures can consider politics when drawing maps.

Does the U.S. Constitution say anything about partisan gerrymandering?

The Constitution doesn’t explicitly mention "gerrymandering" or "partisan gerrymandering." But the practice is regulated through several constitutional provisions, including the elections clause and the 14th Amendment.

The Article 1, Section 4 elections clause grants state legislatures the power to oversee congressional elections. The Supreme Court pointed to this clause in its 2019 decision as the primary constitutional tool for addressing gerrymandering.

Critics of gerrymandering say it violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause by diluting citizens’ voting power based on political affiliation. The clause says no state shall "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws," requiring them to treat people in similar situations equally and prohibits discriminatory laws.

The Supreme Court has used the clause to strike down racial gerrymandering and population imbalances, often called the "one person, one vote" principle. It ruled in Rucho that federal courts can’t use it to police partisan intent because there’s no clear mathematical standard for "fairness."

How does this play out for Florida’s new map?

Potential challenges to Florida’s new map lie in state law, not federal.

In 2010, 63% of Florida voters approved the Fair Districts amendments to be added to the state Constitution. They prohibit redistricting plans "with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent" and plans with the intent or result of "denying or abridging the equal opportunity of racial or language minorities to participate in the political process."

"The Florida maps are far more likely to be challenged in state court, on state constitutional grounds, given Florida’s fair districting amendment," Hasan said. "That’s why DeSantis went out of his way to say that he was drawing the maps because populations have shifted — a clear subterfuge since he sent out maps showing the partisan implications."

DeSantis had said the Legislature would be "forced" to redistrict because of an expected Supreme Court decision over whether certain race-based districts under the Voting Rights Act are unconstitutional.

The high court ruled the districts unconstitutional, and DeSantis’ lawyers told state lawmakers they now believe both the partisan and racial sections of the Fair Districts amendments are unconstitutional. They said the race-based requirements in one section cannot be severed from the partisan-based requirements in the other.

Courts decide whether a provision can be severed from another by asking whether the drafters would have wanted the entire law to be eliminated, or if they would've wanted one part to stay intact, said Justin Levitt, a Loyola Marymount law school professor who served as a senior Biden policy adviser.

Daniel Smith, University of Florida political science professor, said that although the Supreme Court’s 2019 decision opened the door to partisan gerrymandering in some states, Florida is not one of them.

"Notwithstanding Governor DeSantis’ claims to the contrary," he said, "under Florida state law, the prohibition of gerrymandering to advantage or disadvantage a party or incumbent is still in effect."  

Our ruling

Driskell said, "Under federal law, you cannot engage in partisan gerrymandering."

No federal law says states cannot undertake partisan gerrymandering. The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering claims are "political" questions that federal courts can’t answer, and left it to the states and Congress to pass laws to regulate redistricting.

In Florida, the Fair Districts amendment prohibits drawing congressional or legislative districts partisan intent. Driskell’s office said she misspoke. 

We rate the statement False.

RELATED: Is Florida’s mid-decade redistricting plan ‘illegal,’ as some Democrats say?

RELATED: Florida redistricting: DeSantis overstates voters’ shift from Democrats to Republicans

The smart ring company already provides some information on hormonal health.

Pick out a frightening feature to watch this weekend.

The Pentagon says it has reached deals with seven AI companies -- SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection AI, Microsoft, and AWS -- to deploy their tools on classified Defense Department networks. The odd one out is Anthropic, which remains excluded after being labeled a supply-chain risk amid a dispute over military-use guardrails. Reuters reports: SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), several of which already work with the Pentagon, will be integrated into its secret and top-secret network environments, providing more military access to their products for use on sensitive topics, the Pentagon said in a statement. The lesser-known Reflection AI, which raised $2 billion in October, is backed by 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm in which Donald Trump Jr. is a partner and investor. Since the Pentagon deemed Anthropic's products a "supply-chain risk" in March and the two sides became embroiled in a lawsuit, the military has expressed increasing interest in AI startups. Since the blow-up, newer AI entrants have said the military has sped up the process of incorporating them onto secret and top-secret data levels to less than three months. The process previously took 18 months or longer. By expanding AI services offered to troops, who use it for planning, logistics, targeting and in other ways to streamline huge operations and perform more quickly, the Pentagon said in its statement it will avoid "vendor lock," a likely nod to its overdependence on Anthropic or other dominant service providers. [...] AI has become increasingly important for the U.S. military. The Pentagon's main AI platform, GenAI.mil, has been used by over 1.3 million Defense Department personnel, the agency noted in its release, after five months of operation. Further reading: Google and Pentagon Reportedly Agree On Deal For 'Any Lawful' Use of AI

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Democratic Party’s centrist wing is doing a 180 on Maine senatorial hopeful Graham Platner after Gov. Janet Mills dropped out of the race — a major setback for their side in an ongoing intraparty war for the future of the party. 

The June primary was shaping up to be another proxy fight for the ongoing power struggle between the party’s progressive and centrist wings. Sen. Bernie Sanders, along with Elizabeth Warren, Ruben Gallego, and Martin Heinrich, backed Platner early on; Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, as well as EMILY’s List, threw their support behind Mills. 

But the Democratic voters of Maine didn’t appear interested in a protracted back and forth, nor were they impressed by the party establishment’s perceived shoehorning-in of Mills as an alternative to an upstart, energetic, young candidate they already liked. Some more mainstream Democrats already get that, like Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who previously lent his powerful email list to Mills during her campaign announcement; he will host a general election kickoff event with Platner on Friday. Schumer and DSCC Chair Kirsten Gillibrand, meanwhile, announced they “will work with the presumptive Democratic nominee, Graham Platner” to defeat Collins.

Related

The Democrats Don’t Know Who They’ll Be in 2028. Michigan May Offer an Answer.

Others should get on board with the new reality. The primary map is only getting more challenging for centrist Democrats. In Michigan, their preferred candidate Rep. Haley Stevens is in a tight race with state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and public health official Abdul El-Sayed. Iowa state Rep. Josh Turek, Schumer’s pick, is neck and neck with state Sen. Zach Wahls; in Minnesota, Schumer’s favored candidate, Rep. Angie Craig, has a significant cash advantage, but Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan regularly trounces her in early polling.

The writing was on the wall for Mills weeks ago. She was never able to catch up to Platner’s polling, and her campaign stopped ad spending after attacks on Platner over his past controversies failed to gain traction. It was clear the governor was throwing in the towel last week when she vetoed a data center moratorium bill backed by the Maine Democratic base but opposed by business interests in the state. That choice raised eyebrows; the governor’s suggestion in mid-April that she would have voted against a Senate bill restricting U.S. aid for 1,000 pound bombs and armored bulldozers only confirmed suspicions that Mills was out of touch with the party faithful.

Related

The Left Put Its Faith in Graham Platner. Will He Break Its Heart?

Platner, who spent the late summer and early fall of 2025 criss-crossing Maine doing town halls and other events, has been drawing huge crowds since August. That outreach to voters, as New York magazine writer and Mainer Rebecca Traister noted on Thursday, probably saved him from the scandals around a Nazi-related tattoo he got during his time in the Marines and the drudging up of old, controversial Reddit posts. 

Equally important was the feeling for many in Maine that D.C. Democrats were putting their thumb on the scale and trying to take the decision away from the people. It’s part of a national souring on the party’s centrist, corporate wing, which has dominated the internal levers of power for decades, that came in the wake of Trump’s election in 2024. The party base has become radicalized and is demanding fight and action. 

Go to a No Kings protest, and you’ll see liberals holding signs calling for the imprisonment of Republicans like Donald Trump and implying that members of the administration should be dealt with more permanently. It’s become a bit of a meme to remark on the normie bloodlust that’s pervaded liberalism since November 2024, but only because it’s true. 

Despite polling showing voters are eager to throw out the GOP and put in Democrats in the midterms, approval for the Democratic Party is at historic lows. Liberals aren’t going to settle for what’s become the rote Democratic response to Republican misbehavior: objecting on process grounds when out of power, half-assedly pushing ineffective institutional fixes once they reclaim Congress, and then brushing it all under the rug when they win the White House. This time they want accountability, none of the “looking forward, not backward” that Barack Obama placated the base with in early 2009.

Fuel for your fury isn’t hard to find. Sen. John Fetterman’s fervent support of Israel and willingness to buck his party in favor of the president has made him a villain to liberals and progressives alike, so much so that “another Fetterman” has been deployed as a slur by both sides in hotly contested primaries. Politicians whose popularity was once unimpeachable, like Obama, have been confronted over the Gaza genocide in public appearances. Members of Congress are regularly harangued at public events over the party’s weakness and apparent disinterest in meaningfully opposing Trump. 

Platner’s got a good shot at winning. And for all the valid concern that Collins can once again pull off a victory, she appears to be taking this threat seriously, breaking with Trump over Iran war powers on Thursday. It’s a small act of resistance, and not one that should be expected to be of any actual consequence, as is the pattern for the senator. But the fact that she’s doing it now, after Mills dropped out, says that Platner — and the energized movement he represents — is a clear challenge to another six years for the Republican. 

Platner isn’t perfect — no politician is. But as he shifts his campaign to the general election and against Collins, all but the most marginal and fringe diehards in the Democratic coalition are coalescing around him. At 41, he presents himself as a new, more energetic fighter of a Democrat, one who’s promised to confront both the GOP and the centrist corporate elements of his own party. Time will tell if he can deliver, and what compromises he’s willing to make. 

The post Graham Platner Handed Centrist Dems a Bruising Defeat in Maine appeared first on The Intercept.

Nearly 2,000-year-old artifact handed over by FBI matches piece missing from museum near Rome for decades

A nearly 2,000-year-old Roman grave marker discovered in a New Orleans backyard has now been returned to Italy.

The marble epitaph – dating back roughly 1,900 years – was officially handed over to Italian officials in Rome on Wednesday during a ceremony led by the FBI. The event also marked the repatriation of another antiquity recovered in the US, the agency said.

Tehran reportedly passed proposal to mediators in Pakistan on Thursday night, though its contents are not yet clear

Iran has passed a new proposal to Pakistani mediators in the latest effort to end the war with the US, but Donald Trump said he was not “satisfied” by it.

“Right now, we have talks going on, they’re not getting there,” he told reporters, adding that his options remained “either blast them away or make a deal”.

President Trump on Friday told Congress that hostilities with Iran have "terminated," addressing a critical 60-day deadline.

Former Sen. Ben Sasse, 54, called daraxonrasib "a miracle drug" that was allowing him to live longer and with less pain.

Nahida Bristy and Zamil Limon were last seen​ in the Tampa area on April 16. Limon's roommate has been charged with their murders.

Negotiations over a $500 million dollar government aid package for Spirit stalled after bondholders balked at the terms.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for May 2, No. 1,778.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for May 2, No. 1,056.

ICANN has opened applications for new generic top-level domains for the first time since 2012. The Register reports: ICANN hasn't offered new gTLDs since 2012, but on Thursday opened applications for new domains in 27 scripts. A 439-page Applicant Guidebook explains the process. The Register suggests paying attention to the string evaluation FAQ, which explains which gTLDs are valid, and those ICANN will likely frown upon. An FAQ describes this round of applications as giving "businesses, communities, and others the opportunity to apply for new top-level domains tailored to their community, culture, language, business, and customers." "A TLD can be a branding opportunity for a business, but the commercial opportunities are endless, allowing businesses in countries, entire sectors, or niche markets to develop a unique label on the Internet." ICANN also sees this round as a chance to "create a more multilingual Internet for the billions of people who speak and write in different languages and scripts and are yet to come online." If you fancy a gTLD, you'll need to pay a $227,000 application fee by August 12th ... and then wait, possibly until 2030 when this process ends.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

United's newest addition to its in-flight library features shows like The Traitors, but not everything on NBC's streaming service.

Made from high-tech foam and other materials, recovery slides aren't just for athletes or for treating plantar fasciitis. I tested several models. Here are my current favorites.

We came, we listened, we browsed. Audible's Story House could be a new wave.

A federal judge on Friday blocked the Trump administration from revoking legal protections for more than 2,800 Yemeni nationals.

For decades, a small program in the Environmental Protection Agency conducted the painstaking scientific work of assessing the toxicity of chemicals. 

The calculations done by scientists at IRIS, as it was commonly known, underpin vast numbers of chemical regulations, permits and other environmental rules in the U.S. and abroad.

Now the Trump administration is suggesting that their library of more than 500 chemical assessments can’t be trusted, opening the door to weakening hundreds of efforts to protect people from harmful chemicals at the state and federal level. The second-guessing could extend even to long-settled standards, environmental scientists said, such as how much arsenic is allowed in drinking water and how much lead is acceptable in paint and soil.

In an internal memo obtained by ProPublica, David Fotouhi, the deputy administrator of the agency, sharply criticized IRIS this week and directed EPA offices that have used any of the chemical assessments the program has produced to review them. He also advised “external entities” that have used the IRIS assessments to consider undertaking similar reviews and cautioned against using them in future regulations.

The six-page memo said the EPA would be adding “disclaimer language” to the website of the program — the Integrated Risk information System — stating that its toxicity findings are not necessarily meant to be used in regulation.

“This creates the opportunity for companies that pollute to push back on rules and regulations they don’t like,” said Robert Sussman, an attorney who has worked for chemical companies and environmental groups as well as the EPA. “Anybody who wants to ignore a regulation, permit or enforcement action can now just point to this memo and say the IRIS number it was based on wasn’t valid. It’s a huge setback for the process of protecting people from chemicals.” 

Fotouhi’s memo echoes industry criticism that the program’s scientists are far too conservative in gauging the toxicity of chemicals. Before President Donald Trump appointed him as the second highest official at the EPA, Fotouhi worked as a lawyer representing companies accused of causing toxic pollution. 

In an emailed statement, the EPA press office wrote that Fotouhi has complied with all applicable government ethics obligations and said his directive would not put people at risk or allow anyone to ignore environmental regulations. Any revisions to permits or regulatory standards must go through a process that includes public participation, the office noted.

“Science is at the heart of the Agency’s work, and this memo reaffirms that point clearly and unequivocally,” the press office wrote. 

The EPA created IRIS in 1985 as the nation’s clearinghouse for information on the toxicity of chemicals. Its assessments quantify the highest safe level of exposure to a chemical before it triggers health effects, including, in many cases, cancer. The agency previously prided itself on the program’s impartiality and, in an effort to protect its science from the influence of industry, purposefully kept the program separate from the agency offices that craft regulation. 

The memo now tasks those offices with conducting toxicity assessments and brings an end to the program that has powered the EPA’s efforts to protect people from harmful chemicals. 

IRIS assessments earned a reputation for being extremely detailed and undergoing numerous rounds of review by many scientists. The EPA offices routinely relied on them to set the amount of a particular chemical that industrial facilities are allowed to emit. States use IRIS assessments to decide which chemicals deserve their immediate attention and to calculate limits in rules and regulations. And IRIS reports guide environmental regulation in countries that don’t have the resources to fund their own scientists to review chemicals.

The memo is the latest attack on the program. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 called for the elimination of IRIS on the grounds that it “often sets ‘safe levels’ based on questionable science” and that its reviews result in “billions in economic costs.” And last year, congressional Republicans introduced industry-backed legislation that would prevent the EPA from using IRIS assessments in environmental rules, regulations, enforcement actions and permits. (The bills were not put to a vote.) 

IRIS has at times been criticized by independent scientific bodies. More than a decade ago, for example, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine took issue with the organization, length and clarity of IRIS reviews; a more recent report from the same group found that IRIS had made “significant progress” in addressing the problems.

Still, IRIS’ work stood out in a world where much of the science on toxic chemicals is funded by corporations with a vested stake in them. Studies have shown that industry-funded science tends to be biased in favor of the sponsor’s products. 

Over the past year, the EPA has essentially shut down IRIS by reassigning most of the dozens of the scientists who worked in the program to other parts of the agency. And the administration has refused to publish a report on a “forever chemical” known as PFNA, which was completed by IRIS in April 2025. 

But, until now, the EPA had not challenged the science in IRIS assessments. The memo changes that. Although the agency will continue to post the documents on its website, it calls their validity into question, arguing that the toxicity levels calculated in IRIS reports are overly cautious and fail to include the perspective of all “stakeholders.” 

This approach produces values that are more protective than they need to be, according to Fotouhi. “When many conservative assumptions are stacked on top of each other, the cumulative effect can produce an estimated ‘safe’ exposure level that is orders of magnitude below naturally occurring levels in the environment,” he wrote.

Fotouhi pointed specifically to ethylene oxide, a chemical used to sterilize medical equipment — and one used by Medline, a company he used to represent as an attorney at the firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, according to financial statements he filed and that are contained in ProPublica’s database of Trump administration officials’ disclosures. IRIS updated its assessment of ethylene oxide in 2016, after it reviewed the medical literature and found that the chemical was a more potent carcinogen than previously believed. 

The EPA’s updated cancer risk estimate set off waves of concern — and lawsuits — in communities around the country where people are highly exposed to the chemical. And it led the Biden administration to issue more protective regulations. Companies that use or manufacture ethylene oxide and their representatives complained to the EPA and questioned the science that cost them so dearly. 

Under Trump, the agency, which has been championing industry, has already paused those efforts to protect the public from ethylene oxide. But this latest step, which threatens to destabilize health protections built on hundreds of IRIS assessments, is a boon to countless companies emitting a huge variety of toxic chemicals, according to Maria Doa, a scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund who spent more than 20 years working on chemical regulation at the EPA.

“This is the EPA adopting the industry’s talking points,” Doa said. “And it’s going to leave a lot of people at risk.”

The post “A Huge Setback”: New EPA Directive Could Weaken Hundreds of Chemical Regulations appeared first on ProPublica.

Walkouts, marches and other gatherings held for ‘May Day Strong’ demonstrations across the country

• May Day protests across US draw huge crowds – in pictures

Thousands have joined an economic blackout for International Workers’ Day, as part of 3,500 “May Day Strong” events across the country. Organizers have called for “no school, no work, no shopping”, with walkouts, marches, block parties and demonstrations held outside of institutions such as the New York Stock Exchange.

On Friday afternoon in Manhattan, protesters from the youth-led Sunrise Movement chained themselves to the front of the stock exchange while more sat blocking the exits to the property. They were joined by about 100 protesters before being arrested and removed about an hour later. A small crowd remained, playing music and chanting: “Tax the rich!”

Leo, who has criticized Trump’s hardline immigration policy, selected Evelio Menjivar-Ayala as state’s new bishop

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Pope Leo XIV has appointed a man who had once entered the United States as an undocumented immigrant, hidden in the trunk of a car, as the new bishop of West Virginia.

The pope approved the resignation of Bishop Mark E Brennan of Wheeling-Charleston, West Virginia, and selected Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala, 55, of Washington to take his place, reported OSV News.

In 2025, OpenAI banned a ChatGPT account linked to the alleged shooter. CEO Sam Altman later said he was sorry the company didn't alert law enforcement.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has also rewritten rules on international film eligibility

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced a number of major changes for the Oscars on Friday, including a new policy allowing multiple nominations for a single actor in one category, as well as barring acting and writing awards for work done by AI.

According to new statutes decreed by the group’s board of governors, only performances “demonstrably performed” by humans with their consent will be eligible for acting Oscars, while only human-authored screenplays can be up for any writing awards.

Parker, who admitted lying to investigators and sheltering her son after he sent gunmen to kill his ex-girlfriend, is the last of five people sentenced in the November 2022 Brooklyn Park murder.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Robert Rallo and Nathan Hodas speak to students about the future of AI

RICHLAND, Wash., May 1, 2026 — Student winners of this year’s regional National Science Bowl competitions will hear about the future of AI from two researchers from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory this spring. The national competition will take place April 30 – May 4, 2026, in Washington, D.C.

From left to right: PNNL computer scientist Robert Rallo, and PNNL data scientist Nathan Hodas. Photo composite by Shannon Colson/PNNL.

More than 10,000 middle and high school students compete annually, hoping to make it into the national competition where they’ll be able to hear talks from scientific experts such as PNNL’s Robert Rallo and Nathan Hodas. The program was launched in 1991 to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.

Rallo’s and Hodas’s presentations will reflect PNNL’s contributions to the DOE’s Genesis Mission, an initiative to use advanced computing and AI to accelerate breakthroughs in energy innovation and national security. For students, these talks will provide a glimpse into the kind of research they may one day help lead.

Rallo, a computer scientist, will discuss how AI is evolving from a computational tool into a collaborative partner.

“AI is something people are already excited about, often because they’ve seen it in movies and TV shows,” Rallo said. “I’m looking forward to the questions students ask and what they find most interesting.”

His presentation will focus on how modern AI systems are increasingly able to assist researchers by suggesting experiments, identifying patterns in complex data and handling routine tasks. This assistance allows scientists to focus on interpretation and experimental strategy, a goal central to the Genesis Mission.

“I’ve seen its evolution and I’m excited to see what AI can bring to new tools and computing capabilities,” Rallo said. “My main regret is that I am too old to see all the wonderful things that are going to be coming.”

Data scientist Nathan Hodas will focus on what goes on inside AI models, between the input and output, and how thinking in high dimensional spaces helps researchers see where AI is going.

“We’re at a time right now where a lot of students are asking themselves, ‘what career should I be picking? What is the future going to look like for myself?’” said Hodas. “There’s even some anxiety around understanding AI and how it works.”

Hodas explained it is easy to think about lines or curves in 1-D or 2-D, but to imagine a shape in one thousand dimensions would allow you to understand some crucial things about how AI works.

“We’re using AI at the Laboratory extensively every day,” Hodas said. “For the last 75 years it’s been a broken promise, but now we’re really seeing some big successes, which is why we must pay close attention to how it works and how it’s going to impact us. It’s not a matter for the future, it’s happening today.”

PNNL also hosts one of 65 Regional High School Science Bowl competitions each year. The 2026 regional winner, Lakeside School of Seattle, Wash., will represent the region at the national competition. The students receive an all-expenses-paid trip to the national competition, where they’ll enjoy several days of science activities, sightseeing and competitions.

About PNNL

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory draws on its distinguishing strengths in chemistry, Earth sciences, biology and data science to advance scientific knowledge and address challenges in energy resiliency and national security. Founded in 1965, PNNL is operated by Battelle and supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. 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.

Source: Bethany Lee, PNNL

The post PNNL Researchers to Speak About Genesis Mission at National Science Bowl appeared first on HPCwire.

US president says tariff on vehicles imported from EU will rise to 25% and accuses bloc of non-compliance

Donald Trump has said he is tearing up part of the tariff deal he struck with EU leaders at his golf course in Scotland last summer, criticising Brussels for taking so long to ratify the deal.

Blindsiding Brussels late on Friday, a public holiday in much of Europe, he announced that he would be increasing tariffs on cars and lorries imported into the US from the EU from 15% to 25% from next week.

Sloths were set to be displayed at controversial new theme park but report revealed mammals died in warehouse

Prosecutors in Florida said on Friday they had launched a criminal investigation into the deaths of dozens of sloths from South America that were set to be displayed at a controversial new theme park.

A Florida fish and wildlife commission (FWC) report revealed last week that 31 mammals taken from rainforests in Peru and Guyana by the owners of Sloth World, a forthcoming tourist attraction in Orlando, perished in an unheated warehouse between December 2024 and February 2025.

State’s governor has ordered congressional primary halted until state can redraw districts and dilute Black vote

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit on behalf of Louisiana voting rights groups on Friday, asking a state court to block the state’s governor, Jeff Landry, and secretary of state, Nancy Landry, from suspending congressional elections.

Landry suspended the state’s congressional primary election on Thursday – even after early voting had begun – to enact new districts for the 2026 election. The move came after the supreme court’s 6-3 decision in the Louisiana v Callais case on Wednesday, which invalidated swaths of the Voting Rights Act and declared that a Louisiana congressional district with a majority-nonwhite voting population violated equal protection provisions of the US constitution.

Democrats accuse Todd Blanche of pressuring prosecutors for charges ‘despite serious concerns’ about case’s strength

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A justice department lawyer working in Todd Blanche’s office pressured prosecutors to file criminal charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) despite their concerns about the strength of the case, a whistleblower told House Democrats.

The lawyer, Aakash Singh, reportedly “ordered” federal prosecutors in Alabama “to rush through the indictment of the SPLC, despite serious concerns about the strength of the case”, Jamie Raskin and Mary Gay Scanlon said in a letter on Friday. The Democrats also said they were opening an investigation into the matter. The letter was first reported by MS Now.

ZipNada shares a report from ZDNet: Given the dour headlines as of late concerning the diminishing amounts of entry-level software development jobs, coupled with predictions of applications entirely AI-generated, one could be forgiven for assuming that software developers may soon be an endangered species. However, the data tells a different story. James Bessen, professor at Boston University, has been pushing back for some time against the talk of AI and automation displacing jobs on a mass scale, and lately has been arguing that the roles of software developers are nowhere near extinction. AI is certainly not killing the software developer, Bessen said in a recent analysis (PDF). AI is taking over software development tasks and boosting productivity and output, but that is not translating into lost jobs, he argued. Instead, the types of software skills sought by companies are changing. "Surprisingly, however, after three years of AI use, software developer jobs have continued to grow robustly, reaching record levels of employment -- 2.5 million in February," Bessen said in the report, citing data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number of software developers in the US has grown by over 400,000, or 19%, since ChatGPT was introduced in 2022. At that time, the employed software developer population was just under 2.1 million. [...] The productivity uptick developers are seeing may ultimately be a boost to their professional opportunities, however. "An important and possibly disruptive change is happening, but the common view misunderstands what is going on," Bessen pointed out in his report. "Careful case studies find that AI improves the productivity of software developers -- that is, the software produced per developer -- by 30%, 50%, or more. And the rate of productivity improvement in software development is improving." Tellingly, since 2022, when ChatGPT was introduced, developer productivity has increased noticeably, Bessen continued. "From 2003 to 2022, developer productivity grew at 3.9% per year; but from 2022 through 2025, it grew at 6% per year." [...] A coming flood of new software products, now more likely to be enhanced by AI, will continue to create jobs for developers, Bessen predicted. "Thus, mass unemployment of software developers seems unlikely to happen soon." This doesn't mean the job descriptions of developers or other computer occupations will remain static. AI is shifting and re-inventing these roles, Bessen added.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

May 1, 2026 — A new startup spun out of research at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo is accelerating its push toward commercialization with $10.7 million in dilutive and non-dilutive funding and a public listing after launching just more than six months ago.

QuantumCore’s team discussing the amplifier. Back row from left to right: Saleem Huda, Dr. Chris Wilson, Farzad Yazdani, Dr. Mohammad Soltani and Eugene Profis. Front row: Jayke Boghean and Dr. Dmytro Dubyna holding the amplifier.

QuantumCore was co-founded by Dr. Christopher Wilson, IQC faculty and Chief Technology Officer, and Eugene Profis, CEO. The company is developing an amplifier that boosts read-out signals produced by a superconducting quantum chip at near absolute zero temperatures and gets the signal into room temperature. This could solve one of the many hard engineering challenges in quantum computing.

“It’s a necessary product for quantum computing companies that are just a few years away from launching computers with thousands of qubits,” says Wilson, who is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Since October 2025, QuantumCore has closed two rounds of private funding totaling $9 million. The company chose to raise money through non-brokered and brokered private placements with Canaccord Genuity Corp. as lead intermediary and PowerOne Capital Markets Limited. This type of investment brings in capital by selling shares to investors through an intermediary instead of specialized VC firms. It was publicly listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange earlier this month.

The startup also secured $1.7 million as an IQC industry partner through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada’s (NSERC) Alliance Grant program which gives them access to Wilson’s lab to accelerate technology development without impacting shareholder value.

“The quantum industry and the technology are evolving so quickly, and we wanted to be thoughtful about how we access funding,” Profis adds. “We are acting with urgency because of the rapid acceleration of the large quantum computing programs as seen by the recent Q-Day announcements out of Google Quantum AI Labs. Our combined experience in quantum computing and finance have been received well by the investment community.”

Wilson says brokered private placements are an established funding route in Canada for quantum startup companies’ risk profiles, given investor’s experience in funding the mining industry. This gave QuantumCore access to more money from Canadian investors than would be available through venture capital.

“Canada has this homegrown way of financing ventures like quantum tech, and our investors understand how to think about high risk,” Wilson says. “Superconducting quantum computing is one of the biggest sectors in terms of industrial development, and there is a lot of Canadian experience and appetite to fund ventures with these startup risk profiles.”

Profis says the startup’s first product is crucial for quantum computing companies to fulfill their development goals.

“We are not trying to build the most powerful quantum computer; we provide scalable components to all the major platform companies that are competing to build the world’s first commercial quantum computers,” Profis says. “These companies have raised a lot of capital to build computers, and we want to help them get their quantum processors to the next level.”

Since launching, QuantumCore has hired five full-time, technical employees and opened an office and lab in uptown Waterloo to complement other operations, including at the University’s Quantum Nano Fabrication and Characterization Facility.

“Growing the company in the Waterloo ecosystem is crucial because of the big pool of local technical experts, in quantum and other engineering disciplines, access to specialized production resources and the region’s big industrial manufacturing base,” Wilson says.

Source: Naomi Grosman, University of Waterloo

The post QuantumCore Emerges from Waterloo’s IQC with $10.7M to Address Quantum Readout Challenges appeared first on HPCwire.

Chief Geoff Guttschow, who has an autistic child who drives, says the Blue Envelope Program gives officers a tool to recognize when a driver may need additional communication support.

Former FBI Director James Comey was charged with two counts arising out a now-deleted image he shared on Instagram that showed seashells arranged to read "86 47."

EMILY BRADY
Staff Reporter

Laura Gibison helps autistic college students navigate the path from campus to career as a counselor for Spectrum Scholars, a college-to-career initiative at the university’s Center for Disability Studies.

The center works to improve the academic and daily experiences of students with disabilities.

Gibison’s position provides one-on-one coaching and supporting students throughout their time at the university, in everything from college life to academics.

“My role specifically is a career counselor, so I’m specifically meeting with students, mostly one-on-one, to help them figure out what they want to do after college and help them develop career readiness skills,” Gibison said. “So interviewing, resume development, all that fun stuff, networking, and then helping them connect with opportunities, internships, part-time jobs, things like that. And really plan for life after college.”

Gibison shared that every day looks different, although most days tend to revolve around one-on-one coaching with students. She tends to have one hour-long sessions per week with each of her students, which can involve anything from simple career coaching to submitting job applications and working on resumes.

Gibison’s position does not come without difficulties. She noted that the main challenge is people’s perception of the students she works with.

“I have encountered, unfortunately, people who still very much have a deficit focus mindset when it comes to autism and people who are just on the spectrum,” Gibison said. “They maybe still use some terminology that’s a little bit offensive and demeaning. So that is always challenging to navigate.”

She also detailed the uniqueness of the university’s disability studies program and the collaboration that occurs between the program and other individuals and organizations on campus.

“I feel like we’ve created a really strong community,” Gibison said. “I think the way that our program works, students are UD students first and foremost. So they’re not living in separate dorms. They are taking classes with the rest of their peers. We’re just an added support.” 

Unlike other disability programs, the university emphasizes that its students are not defined by the fact that they receive support from Spectrum Scholars. 

Gibison also shared the important lessons she has learned through her work with the university’s disability studies program. 

“Before starting this job, I was a lot harder on myself,” Gibison said. “And I wasn’t super patient with myself, but through working with students and having to be accommodating and listening, I’ve learned to apply some of the same things to myself.” 

Throughout her time working with Spectrum Scholars, Gibison has experienced many rewarding and fulfilling moments.

“I would say when I am in those moments with students who’ve maybe had a hard time, whether they’ve struggled, figuring out what they want to do, or speaking up for themselves, and see how much they have grown,” Gibison said. 

Through career counseling and mentoring, Laura Gibison and the Spectrum Scholars team help autistic students navigate college and plan their futures — part of a broader university push to build more inclusive campuses for students with disabilities.

Today's high-yield savings accounts are offering hefty returns on your deposits. Here's where your money belongs now.

A compact mini router is perfect for small spaces, like your apartment or local coffee shop, and fits in your carry-on.

PALO ALTO, Calif., May 1, 2026 — PsiQuantum has announced that Lip-Bu Tan, a leader of the semiconductor industry and Chief Executive Officer of Intel Corporation, has joined the PsiQuantum Board of Directors.

Lip Bu Tan with Victor Peng at PsiFactory, April 2026

Tan brings decades of experience building and scaling the foundational technologies that underpin modern computing. Before his 2025 appointment as CEO of Intel, he previously served as Chief Executive Officer of Cadence Design Systems, where he transformed the company into a global leader in electronic design automation—the software and tools used to design the world’s most advanced chips. Across his career as an executive, investor, and board member, Tan has played a central role in shaping the modern semiconductor ecosystem. He has served on numerous public and private boards, serves as Chairman of Walden International, and is a founding managing partner of Walden Catalyst Ventures and Celesta Capital.

Tan’s appointment to the PsiQuantum Board of Directors comes as the company drives toward building the world’s first utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers and continues to advance and scale its silicon photonics platform.

“I’ve known the PsiQuantum team for many years as an investor and have followed their progress closely as they’ve built one of the most compelling and differentiated approaches in quantum computing,” said Lip-Bu Tan. “The technology they’ve developed is exceptional, and their focus on fault-tolerant systems that can be manufactured at scale using the semiconductor industry sets them apart. I’m excited to join the board and support the team as they work to bring this technology to the world.”

Tan’s board appointment follows the appointment of semiconductor industry veteran Victor Peng as Interim Chief Executive Officer, as well as Co-Founder Jeremy O’Brien’s transition into the role of Executive Chairman. Peng previously served as President of AMD and as CEO of Xilinx, where he led the company’s transformation into a leader in adaptive computing and through its acquisition by AMD.

“Lip-Bu has an exceptional track record of leading and guiding technology companies from start-ups to large public companies,” said Victor Peng, Interim Chief Executive Officer of PsiQuantum. “As we advance our technology and begin deployment of utility-scale, fault tolerant quantum computers, his insights on high performance computing, advanced manufacturing, ecosystems, and customer adoption will be invaluable.”

“From day one, PsiQuantum has taken the long-term view that quantum computing must be built by leveraging the semiconductor industry,” said Jeremy O’Brien, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of PsiQuantum. “Lip-Bu’s experience scaling technologies, companies, and global ecosystems will help accelerate our path to delivering on that vision and it’s fantastic to have a long-time supporter officially join our board.”

PsiQuantum is a full-stack quantum computing company that leverages existing semiconductor manufacturing to rapidly scale its silicon photonics platform. Since its founding, the company has focused on achieving fault tolerance at scale—now widely recognized as the essential capability for quantum computers to solve commercially valuable problems in areas such as chemistry, materials science, and energy. This approach is underpinned by a modular architecture, allowing PsiQuantum to scale system performance by upgrading components while also scaling deployment.

The company is currently advancing major quantum computing projects in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, including the development of utility-scale quantum computing facilities in Chicago and Brisbane. These efforts reflect PsiQuantum’s strategy to pair breakthrough technology with large-scale infrastructure, in partnership with governments and industry, to deliver the first commercially useful quantum computers.

About PsiQuantum

PsiQuantum was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. The company’s mission is to build and deploy the world’s first useful quantum computers. PsiQuantum’s photonic approach enables it to leverage high-volume semiconductor manufacturing, existing cryogenic infrastructure, and architectural flexibility to rapidly scale its systems. Learn more at www.psiquantum.com.

Source: PsiQuantum

The post PsiQuantum Appoints Lip-Bu Tan to Board of Directors appeared first on HPCwire.

HOUSTON, May 1, 2026 — HPE has expanded its HPE ProLiant edge portfolio for customers seeking to extend AI and mission-critical workloads to highly distributed and harsh environments. The new HPE ProLiant Compute EL2000 chassis, the foundation for two new Gen12 servers, and the enhanced HPE ProLiant DL145 Gen11 are part of a portfolio of resilient and secure solutions engineered for edge deployments, complex environments, and disconnected operations. Additionally, each platform is now available with an Environmental Ruggedization Option Kit ideal for harsh locations, including high- or low-altitudes, extreme temperatures, and hazardous transit.

“Organizations are pushing towards the edge for AI inferencing, and remote operations, where traditional IT structures are impractical for many industries,” said Krista Satterthwaite, senior vice president and general manager, Compute, HPE. “HPE ProLiant is engineered with enterprise-grade security, right-sized performance, and a unified approach to managing and automating operations, enabling organizations to easily deploy, manage, and scale edge environments with confidence. With these next generation platforms, customers can address the complexities of edge computing more efficiently and with ruggedized performance.”

Introducing New and Enhanced ProLiant Edge Platforms

The all-new HPE ProLiant Compute EL2000 chassis is purpose-built for some of the most rugged and size, weight, and power (SWaP)-constrained environments in national security, manufacturing, retail, and telecommunications. The platform is based on Intel Xeon 6 processors, ideal for demanding edge environments. Supporting up to two HPE ProLiant Compute EL220 Gen12 servers or one EL240 Gen12 server, the chassis helps deliver rugged performance and modular flexibility. The new servers, available only with the HPE ProLiant Compute EL2000, features:

• Scalability from 8 up to 144 Intel Xeon 6 cores
• Support for space-saving CPU Thermal Design Power up to 350 watts to achieve higher performance
• Reliable operation in extreme temperatures ranging from -40 degrees Celsius to 55 degrees Celsius, as well as up to 95% humidity, and
• Durability in environments with heavy vibration from aircraft or ground vehicles, environmental contaminants, and electromagnetic interference (EMI)
• Available with NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 or NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs (only on EL240 Gen12 server)
• Support for NVIDIA AI Enterprise, with government-ready software to meet rigorous security standards and high-assurance environments

HPE is also introducing an enhanced version of the HPE ProLiant DL145 Gen11 server, now powered by the upcoming AMD EPYC 8005 series processors (codename “Sorano”), which is designed to support distributed and harsh telco environments. The compact 2U system delivers up to 84 energy-efficient cores, is ideal for quiet deployments from industries such as manufacturing and retail, and is also engineered to operate in extreme temperatures – up to 55 degrees Celsius. A version of the HPE ProLiant DL145 Gen11 server was validated as the only purpose-built server for edge AI inferencing, based on NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPU, in the latest MLPerf Inference v6.0 results.

The HPE ProLiant DL145 Gen11 Premier Solution for Azure Local is also available for customers deploying Azure services to edge sites and is designed to support Azure Local Disconnected Operations.

Meeting Mission-Critical and Ruggedized Edge Standards

HPE’s edge compute portfolio now meets extreme environmental standards and can be used in harsh and remote locations for high-consequence deployments where failure could lead to disruptive results. These HPE ProLiant edge platforms offer ruggedization that adhere to widely recognized industry standards – including:

• U.S. national security standards that validate a server’s survivability against real-world stresses like extreme temperatures and high- or low-altitudes. HPE’s Environmental Ruggedization Option Kit enables systems to meet these requirements across vibration and shock conditions.
• U.S. national security standards that test a system for electromagnetic interference (EMI) protection and ensure reliable operation amid electromagnetic interference.
• Telecom network equipment standards that support 5G core and radio access network (RAN) infrastructure designed for five-nines (99.999%) availability in unattended environments.

Purpose-Built for Secure, AI-Driven Edge Operations

Edge environments are often widely distributed, lightly staffed, and physically exposed. HPE ProLiant edge systems combine Integrated Lights-out (iLO) and HPE Compute Ops Management to deliver compliance‑ready security and centralized control for those complex and demanding environments. HPE’s edge solutions differentiate by streamlining deployment, providing real-time visibility, and maintaining end-to-end security across distributed edge sites.

Availability:

• The HPE ProLiant Compute EL2000 chassis and HPE ProLiant Compute EL220 and EL240 Gen12 servers will be available later in 2026.
• The enhanced HPE ProLiant DL145 Gen11 and the Environmental Ruggedization Option Kit are available today.
• The HPE ProLiant DL145 Gen11 Server Premier Solution for Azure Local will be available May 2026.

These platforms can be acquired through HPE Financial Service’s 90/9 Advantage program that offers no payments for 90 days and an additional 9 months at one percent.

About HPE

HPE (NYSE: HPE) is a leader in essential enterprise technology, bringing together the power of AI, cloud, and networking to help organizations achieve more. As pioneers of possibility, our innovation and expertise advance the way people live and work. We empower our customers across industries to optimize operational performance, transform data into foresight, and maximize their impact. Unlock your boldest ambitions with HPE.

Source: HPE

The post HPE Brings AI and Mission-Critical Workloads to Severe, Ruggedized Environments appeared first on HPCwire.

Green leader apologises for sharing post that said officers were ‘repeatedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head’ and says he had did so ‘in haste’

Keir Starmer has condemned Zack Polanski as “disgraceful” and unfit to head a political party after the Greens’ leader shared a social media post critical of the way police tackled the suspect in the Golders Green stabbings.

The prime minister said any criticism of the police involved in the arrest was unfair on officers having to make split-second decisions in a moment of potentially grave danger.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 1, 2026 — Tenstorrent has announced the general availability of Tenstorrent Galaxy Blackhole deployed at scale, delivering industry-leading general-purpose AI performance. Other solutions require bolting together separate accelerators across fragmented infrastructure. Tenstorrent’s Networked AI delivers them natively – compute, memory, and networking unified into a single system optimized for real-world AI workloads.

Tenstorrent Galaxy Blackhole delivers general-purpose AI with native scale-out for winning performance in AI video generation and LLMs –– prefill and decode.

Leading Industry Performance, Affordable Prices

General-purpose means leading performance on every workload defining modern AI, not specializing in one. Tenstorrent Galaxy tops video generation, large-context LLM inference in both prefill and decode, and the full range of model architectures shipping today. See it for yourself on Friday, May 1st at 1:30pm PT at Tenstorrent’s launch event, TT-Deploy. Watch the livestream: https://tenstorrent.com/deploy.

10x Faster Real-Time High-quality AI Video Generation

AI Video Generation on Tenstorrent Galaxy is 10x faster than leading GPU systems. In collaboration with Prodia, the industry’s fastest video generation is now 10x faster running on a Tenstorrent Galaxy supercluster and generating 720p, 81-frame video in brisk 2.4 seconds. Run state-of-the-art video models and generate high quality videos faster on Tenstorrent Galaxy superclusters.

“We were already leading the Artificial Analysis leaderboard, and working with Tenstorrent allowed us to unlock another 10x improvement in video generation speed. The integration was seamless, and the performance gains were immediate.” Mikhail Avady and Monty Anderson said, co-founders of Prodia Labs.

Blitz Mode: Fastest and Largest-Context LLM Inference

Blitz Mode on Tenstorrent Galaxy, optimized for premium, latency-sensitive AI workloads, enables 350+ t/s/u and sub-4-second time-to-first-token on Deepseek-R1-0528 671B, beating the leading comparable GPU systems. Tenstorrent Galaxy superclusters run high margin AI use cases including agentic workflows, real-time systems, and long-context reasoning.

Tenstorrent Galaxy Performance Benchmarks

• Decode: DeepSeek-R1-0528 671B up to 350+ tokens/second/user –– faster than the fastest inference systems from Groq and Cerebras in performance and capacity supporting batch sizes from 8 to 64 and up to 128k context
• Prefill: DeepSeek-R1-0528 671B sub-4-second time-to-first-token on 100K context –– running on the same general-purpose AI Tenstorrent Galaxy superclusters

Full-Stack AI, Ready for Production

Tenstorrent provides a complete AI solution — from hardware to software to deployment. Tenstorrent Galaxy integrates with open-source frameworks through TT-Forge and TT-Lang, and supports rapid model bring-up, enabling customers to deploy production AI systems without vendor lock-in or proprietary stacks. 90% of models from HuggingFace just work on Tenstorrent hardware.

Networked AI

These results are enabled by an architecture built around a different constraint. Most AI accelerators treat compute as the primary design problem. Tenstorrent instead solved data placement and data flow first which enables performance through scaling.

“Every company in the industry is pairing up to build the accelerator accelerator accelerator. CPUs run code. GPUs accelerate CPUs. TPUs accelerate GPUs. LPUs accelerate TPUs. And so on. This leads to complex solutions which are unlikely to be compatible with changes in AI models and uses. At Tenstorrent, we thought something more general and simpler would work,” said Jim Keller, CEO of Tenstorrent.

The result is what Tenstorrent calls Networked AI: a new model for AI infrastructure where compute, memory, and networking are unified into a single system optimized for real-world AI workloads. By combining efficient data placement and data flow, high bandwidth on-chip memory, and Ethernet-based scale-out, the architecture scales from a single core to thousands of servers under one software model, without proprietary interconnects, without reconfiguration, and without the rigid workload declarations that make competing systems brittle as models evolve.

Deployments

Tenstorrent Galaxy superclusters are one of the new foundations of Equinix’s Distributed AI Hub, a full-stack AI orchestration platform for agentic workloads, launching today with partners BetterBrain and OrionVM. Equinix’s Distributed AI Hub helps customers and partners cover every layer from infrastructure to application, and plugs into legacy enterprise systems, enabling customers to deploy, and operate, sovereign agentic AI systems.

• Equinix: A global digital infrastructure company that provides colocation and interconnection services, enabling enterprises and partners to deploy and scale AI – along with other mission-critical workloads – securely, efficiently, and in close proximity to users, clouds, and data.
• OrionVM: Next-gen heterogeneous cloud platform partner powering the orchestration and infrastructure layer for Tenstorrent-based AI services.
• BetterBrain: A full-stack AI platform and deployment partner delivering secure, customizable, production-ready AI applications and agentic workflows on Tenstorrent infrastructure.

“Tenstorrent brings immense value to our Distributed AI Hub by fundamentally rethinking how AI workloads are executed—from optimizing data flow on-chip across prefill and decode, to orchestrating the full AI stack. This level of architectural intelligence allows enterprises to stay focused on building differentiated products, not managing infrastructure complexity,” said Justen Aguillon, Director of Technology Partner Ecosystems.

“We’re enabling a new class of AI factories—high-performance, cost-efficient environments with the flexibility to run both frontier and open-source models, and the embedded telemetry and governance required to scale agentic systems globally.”

Additional deployments announced include:

• Virtu Financial: A tier-1 market maker working with Tenstorrent to enable real-world AI systems: on-premises agentic AI solutions for trading and operational automation
• Turiyam: A next-generation semiconductor and AI infrastructure company building datacenter-scale inference chips, software, and systems from India for the world
• Cirrascale: A top tier neocloud with cloud services for agentic applications and generative AI, available in the US and multiple international regions
• ai&: Japan’s vertically integrated AI platform: the largest installation of Tenstorrent hardware to power AI infrastructure, models, and applications across Japan and around the world.

“We evaluate a lot of hardware. Most of it is incremental. Tenstorrent Galaxy Blackhole is not. Tenstorrent has taken a clean-sheet approach to AI infrastructure, and the results speak for themselves. Putting this in the hands of our customers is exactly the kind of move Cirrascale exists to make.” said Dave Driggers, CEO and Co-Founder, Cirrascale Cloud Services.

Run Anything – Fast, Simple, Affordable –with Tenstorrent Galaxy Blackhole

Tenstorrent Galaxy Blackhole is Tenstorrent’s air-cooled compute server built with Tenstorrent’s next-generation Blackhole® chips and fully open-source software stack. Starting at $110,000, it delivers 23 PFLOPS Block FP8 of AI compute from 32 Blackhole chips, 6.2 GB of on-chip SRAM with 2.9 PB/s, 1 TB of DRAM with 16 TB/s, and up to 56 × 800G Ethernet ports for 11.2 GB/s of scale-out bandwidth. Tenstorrent Galaxy Blackhole systems scale seamlessly from a single server to multi-rack deployments using standard Ethernet networking. Customers deploy configurations ranging from 4 to 36 or more Tenstorrent Galaxy systems, optimized for workloads including AI video generation, large-scale LLM inference, and private AI infrastructure. Base Tenstorrent Galaxy Blackhole supercluster of four Tenstorrent Galaxies starts at $440,000.

Source: Tenstorrent

The post Tenstorrent Announces General Availability of Galaxy Blackhole AI System appeared first on HPCwire.

Rings can interpret gestures better than cameras or gloves, according to the study. These rings can quickly turn sign language into text.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last month, Anthropic made a big deal about the supposedly outsize cybersecurity threat represented by its Mythos Preview model, leading the company to restrict the initial release to "critical industry partners." But new research from the UK's AI Security Institute (AISI) suggests that OpenAI's GPT-5.5, which launched publicly last week, reached "a similar level of performance on our cyber evaluations" as Mythos Preview, which the group evaluated last month. Since 2023, the AISI has run a variety of frontier AI models through 95 different Capture the Flag challenges designed to test capabilities on cybersecurity tasks, such as reverse engineering, web exploitation, and cryptography. On the highest-level "Expert" tasks, GPT-5.5 passed an average of 71.4 percent, slightly higher than the 68.6 percent achieved by Mythos Preview (though within the margin of error). In one particularly difficult task that involved building a disassembler to decode a Rust binary, AISI notes that "GPT-5.5 solved the challenge in 10 minutes and 22 seconds with no human assistance at a cost of $1.73" in API calls. GPT-5.5 also matched Mythos Preview in its progress on "The Last Ones" (TLO), an AISI test range set up to simulate a 32-step data extraction attack on a corporate network. GPT-5.5 succeeded in 3 of 10 attempts on TLO, compared to 2 of 10 for Mythos Preview -- no previous model had ever succeeded at the test even once. But GPT-5.5 still fails at AISI's more difficult "Cooling Tower" simulation of an attempted disruption of the control software for a power plant, as every previously tested AI model also has. The new results for GPT-5.5 suggest that, when it comes to cybersecurity risk, Mythos Preview was likely not "a breakthrough specific to one model" but rather "a byproduct of more general improvements in long-horizon autonomy, reasoning, and coding," AISI writes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

May 1, 2026 — Today’s advances in robotics are often driven by breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and perception. But in complex and constrained environments, the limiting factor is often hardware, not software. Systems that rely on constant data processing, high-bandwidth communication, and centralized compute can face delays, power constraints, and vulnerabilities that limit performance or prevent mission success altogether.

DARPA is looking to tackle these challenges by embedding intelligence directly into the physical materials of robotic systems. A new Request for Information (RFI), calls on the research community to help define a new class of materials capable of intermixed sensing, adapting, and acting in real time without relying on continuous external computation or communication links.

While the RFI itself is exploratory, it is a first step toward a more immediate opportunity: an invite-only, in-person workshop planned for the summer 2026. Selected participants will have the chance to present their ideas, engage with DARPA, and inform future program directions.

Rethinking Where Intelligence Lives

Commercial robotics has largely centered on building systems that can operate alongside people, often emphasizing familiar shapes and interfaces. National security applications demand something different.

Robotic systems for defense must operate in extreme, unpredictable, and adversarial environments with limited communication and little opportunity for human intervention. In these conditions, performance is not defined by how much data a system can process, but by how quickly and reliably it can respond.

Meeting these demands requires a shift in where intelligence resides.

DARPA is exploring physical intelligence, an approach that embeds sensing, computation, and actuation directly into materials, components, and structures. Instead of routing information through centralized processors, future systems could respond through their physical design, enabling faster, more efficient, and more resilient operation in dynamic environments.

“Today’s robots are often limited by the need to sense, process, and act as separate steps,” said DARPA Program Manager Julian McMorrow. “We are interested in collapsing that loop by embedding intelligence directly into the hardware, so systems can respond in real time without relying on constant data movement.”

This shift could enable robotic systems that are faster, more energy efficient, and more resilient in complex, unstructured environments.

A Focus on Materials, Not Machines

The RFI targets foundational advances at the material, component, and kernel level, with an emphasis on two areas:

• Actuation and sensing: DARPA is interested in materials and structures that integrate sensing, actuation, and even elements of control into the same physical substrate, enabling robots to perceive and interact with their environment with greater speed, efficiency, and adaptability.
• Dynamic and adaptive closed-loop compute: Rather than relying on centralized processors and large data flows, DARPA is exploring materials that can perform computation directly. Embedding compute within sensors and actuators could enable real-time decision-making with minimal latency, reduced power demands, and the ability to adapt continuously to changing conditions.

Together, these areas point toward a new class of systems where perception, decision, and action are tightly integrated at the hardware level.

DARPA is not seeking incremental improvements or system-level concepts divorced from enabling hardware. Instead, the focus is on breakthroughs that could fundamentally reshape what robotic systems can do.

Additionally, while industry has emphasized human-like form factors designed to operate in human environments, of interest here are systems optimized for mission needs. Depending on the application, this could include designs that are smaller, larger, softer, or structurally unconventional, prioritizing performance and adaptability over familiarity.

From Ideas to Action

Responses to the RFI are due by May 27, 2026, at 2 p.m. ET. Submissions will help inform future DARPA programs and guide the agenda for the upcoming workshop.

Participation in the workshop will be limited, with invitations extended to respondents whose ideas align with the agency’s technical interests and mission needs. Those selected may be asked to present their concepts and engage directly with DARPA program managers and peers across the research community.

More broadly, this call underscores DARPA’s focus on the hardware foundations of autonomy. Breakthroughs in this area could enable a new generation of systems capable of operating where today’s technologies fall short.

Additional information on the RFI, including submission instructions, is available in Special Notice DARPA-SN-26-76.

Source: DARPA

The post DARPA Issues RFI on Embedding Intelligence into Robotic Materials appeared first on HPCwire.

The trip comes nearly four months after U.S. forces seized Rodríguez's predecessor, Nicolás Maduro​, and his wife in a daring special forces raid.

All people onboard Cessna 421C dead after crash late at night in city 40 miles south-west of state capital Austin

A small plane crashed among trees in Texas Hill Country, killing all five people onboard, officials said on Friday.

The crash happened in the dark late on Thursday night in Wimberley, a city about 40 miles south-west of the state capital, Austin, the Hays county judge, Ruben Becerra, said in a post on Facebook.

Journalist Paige McClanahan writes about how tourism shapes societies and individuals, and about the need to redefine the meaning of "tourist" in today's shrinking world.

The first refund payments will go out later this month as the portal works through kinks to return money to businesses.

TP-Link's Deco 7 mesh systems, built on the latest and fastest Wi-Fi standard, are designed for today's connected home, delivering fast, reliable Wi-Fi to every corner of your home.

Company accepts it failed to prevent bribery in connection with contracts in Algeria and Oman sought through agents

The British defence company Ultra Electronics has accepted responsibility for a failure to prevent bribery and agreed to pay £15m after an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office.

The penalties are part of a deferred prosecution approved by the high court on Friday, after an investigation opened in 2018 when the company referred itself to the UK law enforcement agency a month after corruption allegations were published by Algerian media.

The "big beautiful bill" requires U.S. states to add work requirements to Medicaid by January 2027. Experts warn millions could lose health coverage.

May 1, 2026 — Researchers at the University of Oxford have demonstrated a new type of quantum interaction using a single trapped ion. By creating and controlling increasingly complex forms of ‘squeezing’ – including a fourth-order effect known as quadsqueezing – the team has, for the first time, made previously unreachable quantum effects experimentally accessible. The approach also provides a new way to engineer these interactions, with potential applications in quantum simulation, sensing, and computing. Their results have been published in Nature Physics.

Experimental trapped-ion setup used to generate the family of squeezed states; the ion is confined between electrode structures and controlled using precisely tuned laser fields. Credit: David Nadlinger.

Many systems in physics behave like tiny objects that vibrate or swing back and forth, like a spring or a pendulum. In quantum physics, these are known as quantum harmonic oscillators. Light waves, vibrations in molecules, and even the motion of a single trapped atom can all be described in this way. Controlling these systems is important for quantum technologies, from ultra-precise sensors to new kinds of quantum computers.

One of the best-known ways to control a quantum oscillator is called squeezing. Quantum mechanics sets a limit on how precisely certain pairs of properties, such as position and momentum, can be known at the same time. Squeezing reshapes this uncertainty: one property becomes more sharply defined, while the other becomes more uncertain. This is not just a curiosity; squeezed light is already used to improve the sensitivity of gravitational-wave detectors such as LIGO.

But ordinary squeezing is only part of a wider family of squeezing interactions. Physicists have long wanted to go further, creating stronger and more complex interactions known as trisqueezing and quadsqueezing. Until now, however, these interactions have been extremely difficult to realize in practice. In most systems, higher-order effects are naturally very weak, and they become weaker very quickly as the order increases. This means the desired quantum behavior is often too weak to observe before it is lost to noise.

The group have now demonstrated a new way around this problem. Instead of trying to drive a weak higher-order interaction directly, the team combined two carefully controlled forces acting on a single trapped ion, following a theory proposed by Dr Raghavendra Srinivas and Dr Robert Tyler Sutherland (UTSA) in 2021. Each force on its own produces a simple, linear effect but when applied together, they produce a new interaction that is more than the sum of their parts. This arises from an effect known as non-commutativity, where the two forces influence each other’s action to generate a stronger interaction in the ion’s motion.

“In the lab, non-commuting interactions are often seen as a nuisance because they introduce unwanted dynamics,” said lead author, Dr. Oana Băzăvan from the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford. “Here, we took the opposite approach and used that feature to generate stronger quantum interactions.”

Using the same experimental setup, the team could switch between different types of squeezing and generated squeezing, trisqueezing, and, for the first time on any platform, quadsqueezing, a fourth-order interaction. By changing the frequencies, phases, and strengths of the applied forces, they could select which interaction appeared while suppressing unwanted effects.

Dr Băzăvan continued: “The result is more than the creation of a new quantum state. It is a demonstration of a new method for engineering interactions that were previously out of reach. The fourth-order quadsqueezing interaction was generated more than 100 times faster than expected using conventional approaches. This makes effects that were previously out of reach accessible in practice.”

The researchers confirmed the interactions by reconstructing the quantum states of motion of the trapped ion. These measurements revealed distinctive shapes associated with second-, third-, and fourth-order squeezing, providing a direct signature of the different interactions.

The method is now being extended to more complex systems with multiple modes of motion. Because it relies on ingredients available in a range of quantum platforms, it could provide a general route to new forms of quantum simulation, sensing, and computation. Already, in combination with mid-circuit measurements of the ion’s spin, the technique has been used to generate arbitrary superpositions of these squeezed states and to simulate a lattice gauge theory.

Study co-author Dr Srinivas also from the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, who supervised the work, added: “Fundamentally, we have demonstrated a new type of interaction that lets us explore quantum physics in uncharted territory, and we are genuinely excited for the discoveries to come.”

Reference:
Squeezing, trisqueezing and quadsqueezing in a hybrid oscillator-spin system, O Băzăvan et al, Nature Physics, May 1, 2026

Source: University of Oxford

The post Oxford Team Achieves First-Ever ‘Quadsqueezing’ Quantum Interaction appeared first on HPCwire.

Greater Manchester mayor’s team have been quietly preparing a manifesto and identifying seats where MPs could step aside to allow a Westminster run

• Andy Burnham has plan to return to Westminster ‘within weeks’, allies say

When the eyes of Westminster were on the committee rooms and voting lobbies of parliament this week, Keir Starmer’s political future was being decided elsewhere.

Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner were buttering up Labour MPs in the Strangers’ Bar in parliament as colleagues spoke of their “existential” fear about the crucial elections next week.

Denny Adán González, 33, whose death is being investigated as suicide, is 18th person to die in ICE custody this year

A Cuban immigrant died inside an immigration detention center in Georgia earlier this week, according to a congressional notification sent on Friday and reviewed by the Guardian.

The Cuban man, identified as 33-year-old Denny Adán González, died inside the privately run Stewart detention center. His death is being investigated as a suicide. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) confirmed González’s death in a press release on Friday morning.

Exclusive: Greater Manchester mayor said to have identified seats where MPs would step aside to allow leadership bid

• ‘No other plan comes close’: Labour MPs turn to Burnham as pressure mounts on Starmer

Andy Burnham has a credible plan to return to Westminster “within weeks”, his allies have said, with the Greater Manchester mayor expected to use a byelection fight to set out a new agenda for government.

Burnham, who was blocked by Labour’s ruling body from running in February’s Gorton and Denton byelection, has identified several seats where MPs are prepared to step aside for his leadership bid.

Analysts say Americans have now paid $21.7bn more to fill their tanks since the start of the US war on Iran

• Exxon and Chevron quarterly earnings fall despite soaring oil prices

• Sign up for the Breaking News US newsletter email

The average price for a gallon of gas in California rose to $6 this week as fuel prices across the US reached their highest level in almost four years.

The American Automobile Association reported on Friday that California consumers were paying an average of $6.06, while the national average hit $4.39. The Golden state is the most expensive US market for gas but costs have also risen nationally with a 27-cent rise this week following two weeks of falling prices, AAA said in a statement.

Spotify is adding "Verified by Spotify" badges to distinguish human artists from AI-generated personas, using signals like linked social accounts, consistent listener activity, merchandise, and concert dates. The BBC reports: The world's most-used music streaming service said the 'Verified by Spotify' text and green checkmark icon would appear next to artist names when they meet "defined standards demonstrating authenticity." This could include having linked social accounts on their artist profile, consistent listener activity or other "signals of a real artist behind the profile," the company said, such as merchandise or concert dates. In its blog post, Spotify said "more than 99%" of the artists listeners actively search for will be verified, representing "hundreds of thousands of artists." It said the process would prioritize acts with "important contributions to music culture and history", rather than "content farms," with the platform rolling out verification and badges over the coming weeks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. Navy Aviation Radioman 2nd Class Robert L. Cyr Jr. enlisted at 17 and flew patrols in the Pacific before his death at 19.

Record-breaker says London Marathon win was ‘a victory for all of us’ as he is greeted by family and friends in Eldoret

Hugged, cheered and adorned with garlands, the first man to run an official marathon in under two hours has returned as a hero to his home village in Kenya.

Sabastian Sawe, who stunned the world when he clocked 1h 59m 30s in the London Marathon last weekend, flew in a Kenyan military plane normally reserved for special operations on Thursday to his home region of western Kenya.

Here's how McLaren protects its team and what experts want F1 fans to know before race day.

Claire Freemantle accused of causing death and serious injury by dangerous driving when vehicle hit school in 2023

The driver of a car that crashed into a south London primary school has been charged with causing death by dangerous driving after two eight-year-old girls were killed.

Claire Freemantle is accused of two counts of causing death by dangerous driving and seven counts of causing serious injury by dangerous driving after the incident at The Study Prep school in Wimbledon in July 2023.

US oil giants report big drops in profits due to Iran war disruptions but are expected to eventually reap benefits

Exxon Mobil and Chevron reported drops in profit in their first quarter despite surging oil prices, a result of stalled deliveries and supply disruptions in the Middle East.

Exxon’s quarterly earnings fell to $4.2bn from about $7.7bn the same quarter last year, a decline of about 46%, while Chevron’s profits fell to $2.2bn from about $3.5bn, down about 37%. Still, both companies beat Wall Street expectations.

Israeli foreign ministry denounces ‘shameful act’ after video shows man pushing woman to ground and kicking her

A video of an attack on a French Catholic nun and archeological researcher in Jerusalem has caused widespread revulsion and been denounced as a “shameful act” by Israel’s foreign ministry.

In the video, a man runs up behind the nun as she walks down a street and pushes her over with force, so that the victim comes close to hitting her head on a block of stone. After walking away a few paces, the attacker, who appears to be Jewish, returns to kick the nun as she lies on the ground and only stops when a passerby intervenes.

RICHLAND, Wash., May 1, 2026 — Scientists have used the power of AI to analyze and predict the conversion of liquid radioactive waste into solid glass waste forms, increasing the amount of waste that goes into each container of glass produced and reducing operational risks, mission duration and costs. The research team, from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, published its work in the April 15 edition of the “Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids.”

Materials scientist Xiaonan Lu is part of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory team that used AI-driven machine learning models with active learning to rapidly develop and validate customized glass formulas to immobilize the Hanford Site’s chemically complex tank waste. Here, Lu shows the atomic structure of a glass sample. Photo credit: Andrea Starr/PNNL.

Waste volume and variability, complex chemistry and the science of glassmaking with rigid requirements have made it tricky to find optimum glass formulations. But with the help of AI, PNNL researchers have created a custom collection of “recipes” that significantly increase the percentage of waste — called waste loading — incorporated into the final glass waste forms to levels that wouldn’t have been possible without the machine learning-driven model.

During the historic Manhattan Project and the Cold War, operators at the Hanford Site generated wastes from plutonium production that are stored in massive tanks buried underground. Often referred to as nuclear byproducts or legacy waste, their complex composition makes it challenging to treat and then store long-term. PNNL has advanced the science of vitrification — immobilizing radioactive waste by converting it into glass — since the 1960s. With new advancements like AI, scientists can make sense of mountains of data faster and discover glass formulas — like customized recipes — they hadn’t considered before.

“Models can learn from their own mistakes,” said Xiaonan Lu, PNNL materials scientist and first author of the study. “We replaced a traditional math equation with a machine learning model that tried every combination of elements that have been measured in the Hanford tank waste samples. That’s decades of data the model used to learn and then predict which recipes would work.

“Nearly all elements on the periodic table exist in Hanford tank waste, which is why it’s considered the most complex mixture of radioactive waste in the world,” she said.

Chemistry of a Cup O’ Waste

Consider a freshly brewed pot of coffee. The composition of the coffee changes from hour to hour, day to day, and more rapidly if it’s kept on a burner because oxidation breaks down the acids and oils that give coffee its flavor.

Similar changes occur in the more than 50 million gallons of tank waste stored underground at Hanford for more than 75 years, albeit on a larger, much more complex scale. The waste has sat for decades in conditions that have fluctuated depending on the tank, altering the composition.

Not only does the waste composition vary from tank to tank, but it varies within each giant tank — and also as the waste is transferred during the treatment process. Hence, the glassmakers need not just one, but a slew of glass formulas that can be tailored to hold as much waste as possible while accounting for the individual composition of each batch. Flexibility in the formulations keeps operations running as efficiently as possible.

The Science of Glass

To make the glass, the waste and added chemicals (known as glass formers) are mixed, heated up to 2,100°F and then poured into 7-foot-tall steel containers. However, many of the components in the waste impact how the glass behaves at each step of that process, including disposal, and these behaviors need to be predicted and controlled within the treatment plant to ensure the process runs smoothly. Glass is a bit like Goldilocks’ porridge — you need just the right mixture. As an example, if it’s too thin, scientists worry about corrosion within the melter; if it’s too thick to pour, it may not fill the container completely, so simultaneous optimization of the glass formulation and all the resulting physical and chemical properties are critical for efficient processing and achieving long-term storage requirements.

In their research, PNNL scientists trained the models to look at thousands of combinations of waste properties and additives to predict which ones allow for incorporating the maximum amount of waste in the glass, while ensuring the treatment plant efficiency is maintained and the glass meets durability requirements. More waste in each final glass waste form means fewer containers are produced, resulting in a smaller footprint in disposal facilities for this decades-long mission. And while the model guides a higher percentage of waste going into each piece of glass, the prediction capabilities of AI — and subsequent validation experiments reported in the published papers — demonstrate the final glass forms will be more stable.

The two-part project, funded by the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Environmental Management’s Hanford Field Office and in partnership with glass scientist Albert Kruger, includes a Spring 2024 study also in the “Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids” focused on the development of the glass formulation models.

Potential Impact on the Bottom Line

The PNNL team’s original algorithm, developed in 2012, still drives the current Hanford glass formulas. The algorithm was intentionally set to accept lower quantities of waste mixed with additives, which helps scientists and contractors test the process with fewer waste variables.

“The majority of my career has been spent on vitrification challenges, but it’s the last 14-year journey from the original glass algorithm application to now that has been the most exciting,” said Lab Fellow John Vienna, who was part of the original team and is the leading expert in this area.

“This is the first experimental validation of an active learning approach in waste glass design,” Vienna said.

Over the life of the vitrification project, using the PNNL-developed algorithm could mean 5% fewer glass logs made to safely encase the waste, Vienna said. “Dropping 5% is significant.”

José Marcial, also a materials scientist at PNNL and a co-author on the paper, explained a bit more. “Usually a glass matrix of low-activity waste holds about 20%-30% by weight of radiological waste. But the new model shows we can increase the amount of waste by roughly 1% for every 20% already going into the recipe, which reduces the volume of disposed waste and the cost over the life of the project.”

Genesis Mission to Accelerate AI Solutions

In February, the DOE announced 26 national science challenges where AI could accelerate and transform research — “Transforming nuclear restoration and cleanup” was one. The challenges are part of the Genesis Mission, which was launched by executive order in November 2025.

Four PNNL researchers are part of the Genesis Mission’s Nuclear Restoration and Revitalization AI-Roadmap team. Senior materials scientist Matt Asmussen, senior advisor Inci Demirkanli, chief AI scientist Nathan Hodas and data scientist Anurag Acharya are among those teaming with other national labs to identify opportunities to operationalize AI in ways that help the DOE Office of Environmental Management speed up cleanup at complex sites, including Hanford.

“This work demonstrates the strong potential of AI in the treatment of nuclear waste,” said Asmussen, who also manages several of PNNL’s waste processing research programs. “We’re combining PNNL’s decades of expertise in glass science and vitrification with advanced AI tools to compress timelines and give a compelling preview of what mission acceleration could look like through the use of AI/ML models.”

Source: Andrea Starr, PNNL

The post PNNL Scientists Leverage AI to Optimize Glass Formulas for Liquid Radioactive Waste appeared first on HPCwire.

WASHINGTON, May 1, 2026 — The Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) has announced the release of a new industry report, The Fourth Pillar of the AI Era: Fiber and the Physical Architecture of Intelligence, outlining why fiber infrastructure must be recognized as core infrastructure for hyperscale AI, underpinning large-scale training clusters, distributed inference architectures, and the performance, economics, and scalability of next-generation AI platforms.

AI systems have scaled to unprecedented levels that span massive data center campuses, consume hundreds of megawatts of power, and require real-time coordination across geographies. This report argues that fiber is no longer simply a connectivity layer but instead is becoming an integral component of the AI machine itself. The report emphasizes that without coordinating investment and planning across compute, power, and fiber, AI development risks delays, stranded capital, and uneven access to its benefits.

“AI is no longer just about chips and models—it’s about the system, and the network is the system,” said Gary Bolton, President and CEO of the Fiber Broadband Association. “Fiber provides the deterministic bandwidth, ultra-low latency, and resilience needed to connect AI infrastructure at scale—from GPU clusters to multi-region clouds. As AI becomes more distributed, only fiber can deliver the high-throughput, reliability, and security required to move data efficiently and meet rising performance expectations. Without ubiquitous, high-quality fiber, hyperscalers simply can’t scale AI or deliver the experience customers demand.”

Key findings from the report:

• Modern AI systems depend on massive data exchange between GPUs, with leading architectures approaching 30 terabits per second per chip, far exceeding current optical module capacity.
• Inside data centers, optical interconnects are moving closer to silicon, with fiber directly impacting performance, efficiency, and scalability.
• As inference moves to the edge across homes, enterprises, and cities, fiber enables the continuous loop of data flowing between edge and core systems.
• Metro fiber design, route density, and latency are emerging as competitive differentiators that include AI performance and economics.
• AI compute is advancing on annual cycles, while fiber deployment, permitting, and supply chains operate on multi-year timelines, creating a growing mismatch.

FBA outlines three priorities to ensure AI can scale effectively:

1. Align AI and fiber ecosystems to address deployment bottlenecks and capacity constraints
2. Position fiber operators as strategic infrastructure partners within AI architecture planning
3. Elevate fiber in national AI policy, alongside chips, models, and energy

The report also highlights fiber infrastructure as the foundational enabler of scalable AI deployment and the role of AI infrastructure as a catalyst for broader economic growth. Large-scale AI campuses act as anchor tenants, accelerating fiber deployment, driving innovation in optical technologies, and strengthening regional broadband ecosystems. At the same time, it warns that insufficient fiber infrastructure could create an AI divide, limiting access to advanced applications and weakening national competitiveness.

The U.S. is entering a decisive phase in the global AI race, and leadership will be determined not only by breakthroughs in chips and models, but by the physical infrastructure that connects them. Fiber is that infrastructure. It is what transforms isolated compute into distributed intelligence. The choices made now, on investment, permitting, and coordination, will shape economic competitiveness, innovation capacity, and digital equity for decades to come.

The paper will be the topic of Fiber for Breakfast on May 6^th. To register to attend visit here. The full report is available here and subscribe to FBA’s Fiber Forward Weekly newsletter here for the latest industry updates.

About the Fiber Broadband Association

The Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) is the voice of fiber, helping providers, policy makers, and communities make informed decisions about how, where, and why to build better fiber broadband networks. FBA is the largest and only trade association that represents the complete fiber ecosystem of service providers, manufacturers, industry experts, and deployment specialists. Since 2001, FBA and its members have worked to advance fiber broadband deployment to accelerate innovation and increase quality of life by enabling every community to leverage the economic and societal benefits that only fiber can deliver. The Fiber Broadband Association is part of the Fibre Council Global Alliance, which is a platform of six global FTTH Councils in North America, LATAM, Europe, MENA, APAC, and South Africa. Learn more at fiberbroadband.org.

Source: Fiber Broadband Association

The post Fiber Broadband Association Report Positions Fiber as the ‘Fourth Pillar’ of AI appeared first on HPCwire.

We compare price, perks, reach and more for two of the largest mobile carriers in the US.

OpenAI, Google, Nvidia and others agreed to ‘any lawful use’ of their tech. Anthropic, feuding with Pentagon over potential AI misuse, was not included

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The Pentagon said on Friday it had reached agreements with seven leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies: SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.

“These agreements accelerate the transformation toward establishing the United States military as an AI-first fighting force and will strengthen our warfighters’ ability to maintain decision superiority across all domains of warfare,” the Pentagon said in statement.

Since 2021, the share of U.S.-based employees who have left their jobs to work in another country has more than doubled.

ICE reported the 18th death of an individual in its custody so far this year, putting the agency on track to record a new all-time high in detainee deaths.

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

The War Powers Resolution sets deadlines for the president to end hostilities without congressional approval.

Greg Jackson argues against costly investments in UK’s power grid that are adding to household bills

The boss of the UK’s biggest energy supplier has suggested that some households would accept an occasional electricity blackout in exchange for much lower energy bills.

A year on from Europe’s largest power outage – which left tens of millions of people in Spain and Portugal without trains, metros, traffic lights, ATMs, phone connections and internet access – the chief executive of Octopus Energy argued against costly investments in the UK’s power grid that are adding to household bills.

New crime thriller M.I.A. premieres, plus Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair arrives later this month.

The pop star sat down with Gayle King for an exclusive interview airing Monday on "CBS Mornings."

Hackers are actively exploiting a critical cPanel and WHM vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-41940, that allows remote attackers to bypass the login screen and gain full administrative access to affected web servers. Major hosts including Namecheap, HostGator, and KnownHost have taken mitigation steps or patched systems, but cPanel is urging all customers and web hosts to update immediately because the software is widely used across millions of websites. TechCrunch reports: cPanel and WHM are two software suites used for managing web servers that host websites, manage emails, and handle important configurations and databases needed to maintain an internet domain. The two suites have deep-access to the servers that they manage, allowing a malicious hacker potentially unrestricted access to data managed by the affected software. Given the ubiquity of the cPanel and WHM software across the web hosting industry, hackers could compromise potentially large numbers of websites that haven't patched the bug. Canada's national cybersecurity agency said in an advisory that the bug could be exploited to compromise websites on shared hosting servers, such as large web hosting companies. The agency said that "exploitation is highly probable" and that immediate action from cPanel customers, or their web hosts, is necessary to prevent malicious access. [...] One web hosting company says it found evidence that hackers have been abusing the vulnerability for months before the attempts were discovered.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jose Yugar-Cruz was granted a court order preventing his deportation to his home country, but the Trump administration is set to send him to the Congo.

The bitter courtroom brawl between Elon Musk and Sam Altman captivating the tech industry this week revolves in no small part around fears that artificial intelligence technologies both men are building could spiral out of control and exterminate humanity. Such far-looking scenarios obscure the fact that tech companies are enlisting to kill today.

Musk’s break with OpenAI, which he co-founded in 2015, is in a sense a lawsuit about safety. He contends that Altman betrayed the company’s original nonprofit mission of safely and responsibly pursuing artificial intelligence for the public benefit by converting it into the revenue-maximizing behemoth it has become. According to Musk, the stakes of this are existential for the human race: “It could kill us all,” he testified on Tuesday. “We don’t want to have a ‘Terminator’ outcome.”

The AI safety community frequently invokes these dystopian scenarios to both warn the public about the technology’s risks and implicitly boast of its great power. While such a science-fiction future may lay ahead, these warnings overlook the deadly present. Artificial intelligence is already targeting humans with the blessing of Musk and his rivals.

Musk and others who caution about an uprising of sentient killer machines are anticipating the emergence of “artificial general intelligence,” an ill-defined form of superior machine reasoning that may never come to pass. But their fear that AI could kill us all is less hypothetical for those living in places targeted by the Trump administration’s global wars. In Iran, for instance, Anthropic’s Claude AI model “suggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance,” according to the Washington Post.

“The risks of integrating frontier AI into the nation’s most lethal capabilities are already existential, both for civilians swept up in the violence and destruction of AI-enabled wars, and rank-and-file troops that have to live with the consequences of potentially unsafe weapons they can’t control,” Amoh Toh, senior counsel at Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, told The Intercept. “Existing AI models are already pushing policymakers and militaries toward nuclear escalation — there’s a real danger of Skynet-like outcomes even without a Skynet-style takeover.”

Related

OpenAI on Surveillance and Autonomous Killings: You’re Going to Have to Trust Us

Silicon Valley has widely embraced AI military contracts despite its worries over lethal AI. Amazon, OpenAI, Musk’s xAI, and Microsoft all earn money from selling large language model services to the Pentagon. Even Anthropic, accused of “betrayal” by War Secretary Pete Hegseth and declared a national supply chain risk for mounting the smallest of opposition to the Pentagon’s terms, is still keen to participate in the national kill chain. “Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences,” CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a blog post a week after the United States bombed an elementary school in Iran, killing more than 100 children.

Google offers a telling illustration of the industry’s increasing coziness with selling AI to the military. Following a 2018 employee revolt over Project Maven, a contract to help target Pentagon airstrikes, CEO Sundar Pichai pledged his company would swear off the business of killing. He wrote in a company blog post that Google would not pursue deals that could cause harm, including applications whose “principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people.” He added: “These are not theoretical concepts, they are concrete standards that will actively govern our research and product development and will impact our business decisions.”

After watching AI help wage a war that has already killed over 1,700 Iranian civilians, Google this week sent a clear message: We want in. In a deal that makes explicit the extent to which company leadership has abandoned its AI principles, Google agreed to provide AI services to the Pentagon that allow for “classified workloads,” sensitive military work that encompasses tasks like intelligence analysis and targeting airstrikes, The Information reported.

According to the tech news outlet, the deal allows the U.S. military to use Google’s AI models for “any lawful government purpose” — a carveout that could allow any uses the administration deems legal. Take, for example, the Trump administration’s Operation Southern Spear, the ongoing aerial assassination program against civilian boats accused of drug trafficking that has killed more than 180 people to date. The campaign has been widely condemned as illegal under both international and U.S. law, but the administration has deemed its own actions legal through a Department of Justice memo that remains secret. On Friday, the Pentagon announced additional “lawful operational use” deals with Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon as well.

The Google contract reportedly includes a toothless and unenforceable provision gesturing at concerns over autonomous and spying. “We remain committed to the private and public sector consensus that AI should not be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry without appropriate human oversight,” the clause reportedly states.

“When I worked at Google, they would spend a lot of time punting into the future, promising a future that would never come,” said William Fitzgerald, a former Google employee who helped organize the 2018 worker-led campaign against the Maven contract. “‘Don’t regulate us or it’ll kill innovation.’ The talking point is the same today. The reality of Google’s work with the military is it’s part of a tech-military ecosystem that’s killing people today.”

Google spokesperson Kate Dreyer did not respond to questions about the contract’s language, instead touting how the company’s military work applies “to areas like logistics, cybersecurity, diplomatic translation, fleet maintenance, and the defense of critical infrastructure.”

There is little evidence the people in charge find this technology enticing because of its diplomatic translation prowess. In a January address to Musk’s employees at SpaceX, another Pentagon contractor, Hegseth explained how “an embrace of AI” would make the military “more lethal.”

Related

AI’s Imperial Agenda

Musk and Altman, though foes at the moment, can at least find common ground in their support of Hegseth. Musk, a longtime defense contractor, similarly wraps himself in the flag, tweeting in 2023, “I will fight for and die in America.” Altman, who once expressed skepticism toward military work, now frames OpenAI’s mission in terms of patriotic nationalism. (In 2024, The Intercept sued OpenAI in federal court over the company’s use of copyrighted articles to train its chatbot ChatGPT. The case is ongoing.)

Between Musk’s courtroom visions of the apocalypse and Google’s plunge into classified workloads, the week’s news illustrates the disjointed state of AI industry ethics, where executives say they’re terrified of the technology killing by accident, while wholly supportive of using it to kill on purpose.

Though AI executives clearly find this a virtuous revenue stream, some of the people who actually built the technology do not. Andreas Kirsch, a research scientist at Google’s pioneering DeepMind laboratory that produced much of the work on which xAI and Anthropic rely, responded to this week’s news with dismay: “I’m speechless at Google signing a deal to use our AI models for classified tasks. Frankly, it is shameful,” he wrote on X. Alex Turner, a DeepMind colleague of Kirsch’s, described the contract in a single word: “Shameful.”

The post Musk Warns of Killer AI — While He and the Rest of Silicon Valley Cash In on AI That Kills appeared first on The Intercept.

Green party leader shares statement after open letter from Met police chief Mark Rowley

• Zack Polanski apologises for sharing tweet criticising police at Golders Green stabbings

As the May elections creep closer, the leadership speculation at Westminster grows more intense. Is Keir Starmer safe and, if so, for how long?

In her analysis piece below, the Guardian’s political editor Pippa Crerar explores the state of prime minister’s leadership, why discontent is building within Labour and who the most likely challengers could be.

Seven seconds passed between when the alleged gunman at Saturday's White House Correspondents' Dinner — carrying a shotgun initially concealed by a jacket — first encountered federal law enforcement and when he was subdued, sources told CBS News.

May 1, 2026 — The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) has published the fourth edition of its Scientific and Innovation Case, outlining the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for Scientific Computing in Europe.

Scientific Computing underpins a vast array of research fields that encompass an ever-growing range of complex problems, amplified by a rapidly changing world. European competitiveness is driven by scientific excellence, which requires significant cooperation as well as infrastructure and investment from both public and private sectors. Significant investments in Europe’s supercomputing platforms have resulted in pre-exascale and exascale systems, open to all those who aim to find solutions to those grand challenges.

Published on 29 April 2026, the fourth edition of the PRACE Scientific and Innovation Case charts the progress achieved in several key branches of science that rely on High-Performance Computing (HPC), outlining the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead as well as highlighting the success and leadership of European scientists tackling them.

For the first time, the PRACE Scientific and Innovation Case includes a specific chapter on Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing.

“Artificial intelligence and quantum computing have both triggered paradigm shifts, and a global race between research institutions, governments, and the private sector, that nobody can ignore,” Prof. Constantia Alexandrou, Chair of the PRACE Council. “Harnessing the power of AI as well as developing a fault-tolerant quantum computer should be high on the agenda of public research funding, to preserve scientific independence and promote technological innovation. At the same time, it is crucial for Europe to maintain its competitiveness in simulation-based science by providing increased and diverse computational resources.”

The PRACE Scientific and Innovation Case also highlights one of the currently most apt examples of the impact and importance of Scientific Computing: the creation of so-called ‘digital twins’: in silico replicas of complex systems, which offer a degree of flexibility that experimental observations cannot reach.

“Digital twins are powerful tools for obtaining an in-depth understanding by evaluating “What if” scenarios, offering a degree of flexibility that is impossible to gain through experimental observations performed on the actual system of interest. They are particularly relevant to climate research, life sciences and human health, as well as advanced materials sciences,” says Prof. Hartmut Wittig, Editor-in-Chief of the PRACE Scientific and Innovation Case for HPC in Europe 2026-2034.

About the Publication

The PRACE Scientific and Innovation Case is a landmark publication of PRACE as the Association of Users and HPC Centres, collecting and amplifying the voices of those who work directly with Europe’s world-class supercomputing resources. Each chapter focusses on a different scientific domain, showing the enormous variety in methodologies and hardware used. From those domain-specific analyses, a set of cross-domain recommendations is derived, which will speak to both scientific and political decision-makers.

The fourth edition of the PRACE Science and Innovation Case continues a tradition established by the HPC in Europe Taskforce (HET) and supports the vision that European infrastructure will enable high-impact scientific discovery as well as innovative engineering research and development across all disciplines in Europe.

Thanks to the high level of expertise and tireless commitment of the members of the editorial committee and the chairs and members of the panels, this publication provides an exciting overview of the achievements of computational science across various domains, including for the first time social sciences, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. It is an excellent advocate for the investments required for state-of-the-art scientific computing to bring further benefits to society. The PRACE Scientific and Innovation Case for HPC 2026-2034 can be read and downloaded here.

About PRACE

The mission of PRACE (Partnership for advanced Computing in Europe) is to represent the interests and identify the needs of users of HPC and related technologies – artificial intelligence, quantum computing, cloud computing, data science etc – in Europe, and to pursue actions to enable high-impact research and innovation across all disciplines and industrial applications, thereby enhancing European scientific, technological and economic competitiveness for the benefit of society. PRACE aisbl is funded by the PRACE Members. Various activities of PRACE are (partially) funded through our participation in several EU-funded projects.

Source: PRACE

The post PRACE Publishes 4th Edition of Its Scientific and Innovation Case for HPC in Europe appeared first on HPCwire.

Who owns the Falkland Islands? Explainer jon.wallace 1 May 2026

A US Department of War memo reignited debate over ownership – which is complicated by Argentine independence, British administration, and the principle of self-determination.

The administration of President Donald Trump brought the issue of sovereignty over the Falkland Islands (known as ‘Islas Malvinas’ in Argentina) back into the news in April. 

A leaked memorandum from the US Department of War mooted a re-evaluation of the British title to the islands – apparently to punish the UK for its lukewarm stance on the US and Israeli war against Iran.

Shortly after the memo became public, the UK responded by saying sovereignty over the islands ‘rests with the UK’. But Argentina’s President Javier Milei posted on X that the islands ‘were, are and will always be Argentine’. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio later appeared to dismiss the significance of the War Department memo, saying the US position on sovereignty of the islands remained unchanged. 

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The UK’s sovereignty claim to the islands reaches back nearly half a millennium, backed by a reference to the population’s right to self-determination. 

Argentina has its own claim, based on the distant history of the early encounter of the islands by imperial Spain. This asserts that Argentina’s colonial territorial inheritance from Spain was forcibly disrupted by Britain in the first half of the 19th century.

Untangling the claims is complex. According to the doctrine of intertemporal law, it is necessary to review the entire strand of the history of a territorial claim and evaluate each step according to the rules of international law that prevailed at the relevant time.

The claims of the UK, France and Spain

The islands were originally uninhabited and unclaimed, which means that any state could legally take possession of them after their discovery. 

However, Spain claimed that the Pope awarded the islands to Madrid when he issued a bull (or papal decree) Inter Caetera in 1493, a year after Christopher Columbus first landed in the Americas. 

That bull assigned all lands 100 leagues west and south of the Azores to Spain, excluding rival claims by Portugal, which instead focused on exploring the African coastline. This was ratified by both states in the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494. But other states did not feel bound by the papal edict, or the treaty to which they were not a party, and proceeded with their own explorations. 

The first sighting of the islands by a European is often attributed to Englishman Jon Davis in 1590. But the initial firm record of their discovery was created by Dutch Captain Sebald de Weerdt a decade later. In 1690, English captain John Strong made the first attested landing. Since then, Britain claims an uninterrupted title to the islands. 

But planting a flag on a beach does not fully confer full title. This act has to be followed by what international lawyers call ‘peaceful and uninterrupted display of state authority’ – that is, a sign of the actual administration of the territory.

It was in fact the French who, in 1764, established a settlement on the eastern island. King Louis XV of France claimed title shortly afterwards. 

The British were initially unaware of the French settlement and established their own at Port Egmont on Saunders Island a year later. Meanwhile Spain, still claiming its notional papal title, persuaded the French to withdraw, paying some 600,000 livres in compensation. 

In 1770, the Spanish removed the British colony at Port Egmont. However, to avert war over the issue, a treaty was concluded reinstating the colony, without prejudice to the legal claims of both sides. 

By 1774, London withdrew its physical administration from the islands. However, to counter an argument that this implied abandonment of the British claim, a plaque was left in place, proclaiming continued sovereignty. 

Argentina’s independence

Spain also withdrew from the islands in the wake of the Latin American independence campaigns that started in 1810. It too left a plaque behind, seeking to maintain its claim. However, Madrid never regained control. 

The United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata, later Argentina, proclaimed independence in 1816. The country was recognized by the UK in 1825, without prejudice to the Falkland Islands. When the United Provinces sought to establish themselves on the islands, the UK protested in view of its own legal claim.

A period of lawlessness prevailed on the islands after independence. Argentina sent a governor in 1829, triggering a protest from London. After an incident involving US vessels, the USS Lexington was dispatched to clear the islands of whatever Argentinian authority was left by 1831. In 1833, the UK resumed administration. 

Argentina argues that its title to the islands was firmly established by then. According to the practice pioneered in the Americas during the independence conflicts with Spain, a newly established state would inherit the boundaries of the former colonial power at the time of independence. This, Argentina asserts, would have included the Falkland Islands (or ‘Islas Malvinas’).

Argentina therefore asserts that it was forcibly dispossessed of its territory when its administration and settler community were expelled by force of arms by the British.

Britain returns

The UK can answer that Argentina could not have inherited from Spain what Spain did not have, given London’s title to the islands. The UK opposed the rival Spanish claim from its inception. And in any event, Argentina never managed to establish an effective administration on the islands for any length of time. 

The UK, in contrast, exhibited the ‘uninterrupted and peaceful display of state authority’ on the islands for close to two centuries, at least since 1833. 

Argentina claims to have consistently protested what it considered British forcible occupation of the islands. That could legally preclude a perfecting of the UK title over time, if it had not had a pre-existing title already. 

However, Argentina failed to protest for a period of several decades, until it sought to revive its claim by 1885. Even if the UK claim had still been doubtful at that point, this prolonged period of unopposed possession would have been sufficient to consolidate the British title.

The self-determination conundrum

Self-determination is a people’s right. It has matured into a firm and foundational right in international law since the wave of twentieth century decolonization. The modern law of self-determination is unique in that it operates retroactively – intended to overcome the historic injustice of colonialism: it therefore displaces any titles based on colonial conquest and possession. 

According to the doctrine of uti possidetis, colonial peoples exercise that right within the boundaries established by the colonial powers. But Argentina’s claim to the islands on the basis of uti possidetis meets significant obstacles. 

The doctrine emerged from Latin American practice as a matter of convenience, rather than a rule of law. It only gained binding legal status in the region over time, and for the rest of the world since the 1960s. 

Even if uti possidetis could be applied to the case of the United Provinces, it would not operate against the UK, which did not participate in the emerging inter-American practice and was not the colonial power from which the United Provinces gained independence. 

Some scholars argue that Argentina is as a whole the self-determination entity and that its people have therefore been denied full self-determination since independence, because UK occupation of the Falklands prevented Argentinians from taking full possession of territories assigned to them under the doctrine of uti possidetis. These scholars argue that, as self-determination displaces competing titles, the UK must now surrender the islands in order to overturn that historical injustice.

But this argument is not persuasive. For one thing, Spain’s title to the territory at the moment of United Provinces/Argentinian independence is doubtful: as noted, the Provinces could not inherit what Spain did not possess. 

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Importantly, Argentina itself has not made this argument – even though a superficially  similar one has been made successfully by Mauritius with regard to the Chagos Islands. There, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) held that the UK excised the Chagos Islands from its colonial territory of Mauritius just before it granted independence to it, leaving the promise of full and complete colonial self-determination within the colonially established boundaries unfulfilled. 

The difference is that Britain already held title to the islands at the point of Argentina’s independence. London therefore did not remove part of the colonial territory just before the grant of independence to the rest of the colony. And Argentina was a colony of, and seceded from, Spain, not Britain. 

Perhaps unwisely, Argentina claims that it was a fully-fledged state by 1816 and had already at that point inherited the Falkland Islands from Spain, completing its territorial unity. It asserts that the UK forcibly detached that territory from an independent Argentina through an act of war. 

Argentina therefore accepts that it had completed self-determination and decolonization from Spain within the uti possidetis boundaries at the time of its independence. It may have taken some years to establish its authority over the islands, but in essence, self-determination had been fully delivered at the point of independence from Spain.

In this scenario, the right to self-determination for Argentina had been exhausted by the time the UK re-established control over the Falkland Islands in 1833, and the right therefore cannot be applied against London. 

The supposed use of force

Without self-determination, Argentina can only legally claim the islands by virtue of the prohibition of the use of force.

However, acquiring territory by force only became unlawful since the adoption of the UN Charter in 1945. It has proven unwise, indeed impossible, to try and undo any forcible changes of territory around the globe that occurred before that date. The only exception is the rule of colonial self-determination.

In any event, the UK can assert that it did not capture the territory of another state. It merely re-established authority over a territory to which it held good title. 

Moreover, Britain did not in fact use force. It was the USS Lexington that cleared out the attempted Argentinian administration in 1831, not UK forces. When British authorities returned to the islands to resume administration two years later, there was no resistance and no shots were fired. 

There was also no mass expulsion of Argentinian settlers, as has been claimed. Most remained and have lived under the UK administration that has now been in place for close to 200 years – with the brief exception of the Argentinian armed occupation of 1982.

A people’s right?

In the UN General Assembly, Argentina has not asserted that the people of Argentina as a whole will not have completed their colonial right to self-determination until the UK hands over the islands. Indeed, it is avoiding the application of the principle of self-determination, in case it is applied to the actual population of the islands, instead of Argentina as a whole.

Argentina is presenting the UK possession as an imperialist issue somewhat outside of the law of self-determination. However, this is an emotional appeal that resonates well with the majority of members of the UN, rather than a legal argument.

There was no indigenous or original population that was colonized by Britain when it originally occupied the islands. And Argentina’s own claim is ultimately based on the supposed acquisition of the islands by Spain in the same manner and at the same time.

The UN considers the Falkland Islands a non-self-governing territory – a label ordinarily reserved for colonial territories still entitled to self-determination. Argentina strongly maintains, however, that this is a sovereignty dispute, and not a matter of self-determination. 

The UK, on the other hand, firmly embraces self-determination in relation to the population of the islands. Changing the status of the islands against their will would fundamentally violate this right. The UK has granted the islands full self-government, including the right to determine their future status in the exercise of their right to self-determination, in a constitution enacted in 2008. Over 99 per cent of the population participating in a referendum of 2013 expressed themselves in favour of remaining a British Overseas Territory. 

Argentina answers this point by claiming that the people on the islands are an artificially implanted settler population whose existence cannot trump Argentina’s territorial claim. However, the UK can point to the fact that well over half of the population has roots on the islands for well over 100 years. Moreover, on closer reading, it is the UK that has the better territorial claim.

In something of a compromise formula, the UN General Assembly is consistently pressing for a settlement of the issue through negotiations between both states. While it notes the underlying sovereignty dispute, seemingly siding with Argentina, it also consistently requires that the interests of the population of the islands must be taken into account. 

A $250,000 annuity can deliver a hefty amount each month at age 60, but the exact payout hinges on several factors.

Apology comes after head of Met police said Green party leader risked undermining public confidence in his officers

Zack Polanski has apologised for sharing a social media post critical of police after the Golders Green stabbings, after the head of the Metropolitan police said the Green leader risked undermining public confidence in his officers.

Polanski, who leads the Greens in England and Wales, said he was sorry for having shared someone else’s post “in haste”.

Thaddeus Stevens was one of the most consequential and uncompromising figures of nineteenth-century American politics. Writing in 1993, historian Eric Foner argued that Stevens’ “unusual complexity of motivations and unique blend of idealism with political pragmatism” defied easy categorization.^[1] As a Radical Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, he was the driving force behind the abolition of slavery and the attempt to remake the postwar South into a racially egalitarian society.

Stevens was born in Danville, Vermont on April 4, 1792 to Baptist parents from Massachusetts. He was named for Tadeusz “Thaddeus” Kościuszko, a Polish general who had moved to North America to serve in the Continental Army in 1776. When Stevens’ father abandoned the family under mysterious circumstances, his mother moved the family to a neighboring town and enrolled Stevens in the Caledonia Grammar School.

Stevens’ early career

After graduation, Stevens moved to western Vermont to study at Burlington College. His time there was cut short by the arrival of Army troops during the War of 1812, who seized the college’s main building to defend against a potential invasion from British Canada.^[2] He transferred to Dartmouth College for his sophomore year, where he participated in a conference on the subject: “Which has been more deleterious to society—war, luxury, or party spirit?” A roommate there recalled that he “was then inordinately ambitious, bitterly envious of all who outranked him as scholars, and utterly unprincipled,” though he admitted that Stevens showed unusual promise as an extemporaneous debater.^[3]

Stevens studied law in Vermont; once he passed the bar exam, he opened a law practice in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in 1816. Of the first 10 local cases to reach the state supreme court after he had begun his practice, Stevens was involved in all 10 and won nine.

Stevens came to regret his participation in Butler v. Delaplaine, an 1821 case in which he helped Maryland enslaver John Delaplaine reclaim Charity Butler and her daughters. According to biographer Hans L. Trefousse, he had not taken a stand on “the slavery question” until the case, but “shortly afterward, he denounced the ‘peculiar institution’” and offered his services to those escaping from slavery.^[4] His toast at an Independence Day celebration on July 4, 1823 made his conversion clear: “The next President—May he be a freeman, who never riveted fetters on a human slave.”^[5]

Stevens’ first major political crusade was not slavery, but anti-Freemasonry, a populist movement against the Masons—an exclusive fraternal order—that had coalesced into an organized political party by the mid-1820s. His prominence in the movement helped him gain election to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 1833, where Stevens was the champion of a plan to introduce free public schooling to Pennsylvania. But his aggressive 1835 investigation of high-ranking Masons in the state helped cost him reelection to the House the following year.

His involvement with the abolition of slavery

The abolitionist movement was young but steadily growing in the mid-1830s, and Stevens became an increasingly vocal opponent of the “peculiar institution” he had defended as a young lawyer. In 1837, he refused to endorse the new Pennsylvania constitution because it would disenfranchise Black men. And in 1842, after moving from Gettysburg to Lancaster, he turned a hidden cistern outside his house into a station on the Underground Railroad. Yet Stevens would not call for the immediate and universal abolition of slavery until the outbreak of the Civil War, as he argued that the Constitution still protected slave states’ internal affairs from federal interference.

In 1848, Stevens was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania’s 8th congressional district. He actively opposed the Compromise of 1850, a package of federal laws that would admit California as a free state in exchange for permitting the residents of new states Utah and New Mexico to decide whether to permit slavery. It would also settle a Texas boundary dispute, abolish the slave trade in Washington, D.C., and provide for passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. While the Compromise’s supporters hoped that it would avert a sectional crisis over slavery’s expansion, Stevens warned it would be “the fruitful mother of future rebellion, disunion, and civil war.”^[6]

Stevens refocused on his law practice in Lancaster when he was not reelected for the 1852 term. Upon his return to Congress in December 1859, this time as a Radical Republican, he leapt quickly into the “rapid-fire exchange of insults and general acrimony between Southern representatives and House Republicans.”^[7]

Stevens entered the Civil War convinced that the Confederacy had forfeited any constitutional protections by taking up arms. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, he introduced a bill for a war loan within a day of his appointment. In July 1861, Stevens secured passage of an act to confiscate rebel property, including the enslaved, and in November he introduced an unsuccessful resolution to free all enslaved persons outright. “Abolition—Yes! abolish everything on the face of the earth, but this Union,” he declared in 1862. “Free every slave—slay every traitor—burn every rebel mansion if these things are necessary to preserve this temple of freedom.”^[8]

Stevens and other Radicals grew frustrated with Lincoln’s pace. As late as March 1862, the most that Lincoln had publicly supported was gradual emancipation in the border states, with slave owners compensated for the loss of their property by the federal government. Stevens wrote privately in April, “As for future hopes, they are poor as Lincoln is nobody.”^[9] Lincoln, for his part, called Stevens and fellow Radical Republicans Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson “the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with – but after all their faces are set Zion-wards.”^[10]

The Reconstruction Era (1863-1877) brought Stevens to the fore of public life. He proposed confiscating the estates of the largest 70,000 southern landholders and distributing plots of 40 acres to freed families, warning that without such measures the southern states would send former rebels to Congress who would undo emancipation. When President Andrew Johnson moved to block land reform and restore former Confederates to power, Stevens organized resistance in Congress, arranging for southern electees to be excluded from the roll call when the House convened in December 1865. He also co-chaired the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which investigated widespread violence against African Americans and Union loyalists across the South, and steered through the legislation that divided the South into five military districts. “This is not a ‘white man’s Government,’” he thundered.^[11]

Stevens died on August 11, 1868, having never seen the full promise of Reconstruction realized. He chose to be buried in a Lancaster cemetery that admitted people of all races because, as he wrote, he wished to “illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life, equality of man before his Creator.”^[12]

Anna Salvatore is a Content Fellow at the National Constitution Center and a graduate of Princeton University.

Notes

^[1] Eric Foner, "Thaddeus Stevens and the Imperfect Republic," Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 60, no. 2 (1993): 140, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27773614.

^[2] "Propaganda and Pestilence," Vermont History 64 (1996), https://vermonthistory.org/journal/misc/Propoganda_pestilence_vol64.pdf

^[3]"Thaddeus Stevens: School Years Shaped by Peacham Education," North Star Monthly, https://www.northstarmonthly.com/profiles/thaddeus-stevens-school-years-shaped-by-peacham-education/article_12277c70-bf1e-11e6-9bca-1fbe729c2188.html.

^[4]Hans L. Trefousse, Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

^[5] "Thaddeus Stevens in the Limelight: Public Life in Pennsylvania," Danville Vermont Historical Society, https://danvillevthistorical.org/thaddeus-stevens-in-the-limelight-public-life-in-pennsylvania/.

^[6] Foner, "Thaddeus Stevens and the Imperfect Republic," 143.

^[7] "A Remarkable Radical: Thaddeus Stevens," Humanities 33, no. 6 (November/December 2012), https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2012/novemberdecember/feature/remarkable-radical-thaddeus-stevens.

^[8] Michael Birkner, "Thaddeus Stevens at Gettysburg," Civil War Faculty (Gettysburg College), https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=cwfac.

^[9] Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, vol. 2, chap. 27, https://www.knox.edu/documents/LincolnStudies/BurlingameVol2Chap27.pdf.

^[10] "Lincoln on Radicalism," The Atlantic, May 2011, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/05/lincoln-on-radicalism/238377/.

^[11] "On Juneteenth, This Moment Rings a Bell," Herald-Tribune, June 19, 2020, https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/opinion/columns/2020/06/19/on-juneteenth-this-moment-rings-bell/112608184/.

^[12] Foner, "Thaddeus Stevens and the Imperfect Republic," 152.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the San Francisco Standard: If state lawmakers have their way, you'll have to get a license plate for your e-bike, and if you're planning to buy one next year, it'll be slower. Amid growing concerns about e-bike safety, particularly among children in Bay Area suburbs, two bills introduced this year aim to make it easier to ticket riders and reduce the top speed of some models. AB 1942 would require certain e-bikes to be registered with the Department of Motor Vehicles and display license plates, and AB 1557 would slow e-bikes that children are allowed to operate. Both bills are still being reviewed in committee. If either bill passes this year, it will take effect Jan. 1.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Artemis II team gained a new member, and the crew made sure their youngest teammate had the right stuff for space.

King skillfully appeals to Republicans fond of Britain and Democrats anxious about rules-based order in state visit

For his last trick, the king revealed a bell that hung from the conning tower of a Royal Navy submarine launched from a UK shipyard in 1944. Its name was HMS Trump. “And should you ever need to get hold of us,” Charles III said, “well, just give us a ring.”

The polished brass bell bearing the name “Trump”, presented at Tuesday’s state dinner at the White House, was an ego-flattering masterstroke that will have prompted groans in foreign capitals from Paris to Canberra to Tokyo. How can they ever hope to match that?

First minister John Swinney says he played significant role but Labour rejects claim and accuses SNP of hypocrisy

Donald Trump’s announcement that he will lift punishing US tariffs on scotch whisky has been overshadowed by a row between rival Scottish party leaders over claiming credit for the decision.

The whisky industry and business leaders were delighted by the US president’s announcement on his Truth Social network on Thursday that he would end the tariffs to mark the visit by King Charles and Queen Camilla.

Rey is teaching Sunny, about two weeks old, all her adopted baby needs to know to fend for herself

Before last month, a young southern sea otter named Rey would never have imagined she would be a mother.

That changed when she met Sunny, a pup – about two weeks old – found orphaned and alone on Asilomar state beach on the central coast of California in February. The pairing went off without a hitch.

The US president said he would carry out of a review of US military presence in Europe after public criticism of the US-Israeli war on Iran

If you are still planning your summer holidays and looking at some of perhaps more original ways of spending your time crossing Europe, you now have a new option in a train between Prague and Copenhagen via Berlin and Hamburg.

The Czech operator, České dráhy, has been somewhat excitedly posting about the latest addition to the growing network of cross-European trains as more passengers turn towards environmentally friendly and picturesque alternatives to flying.

Colombia hosted nearly 60 countries at pivotal time on world stage for fight to transition to a clean energy future

Looking out to sea from the grey sandy beaches of Santa Marta, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, it is never hard to spot evidence of the country’s thriving fossil fuel export trade. Oil tankers ride at anchor on the horizon and sometimes, locals say, lumps of coal wash up on the shore, blown off the collier ships that carry cargos from the nearby mines.

It was here, on Wednesday evening, that the Colombian government took a bold step to shift its economy – and that of the rest of the world – away from dependence on coal, gas and oil and into a new era of clean energy. With the first ever conference on “transitioning away from fossil fuels”, the host joined nearly 60 countries determined to loosen of the grip of petrostates on the world’s future.

Our expert puts the best power washers through their paces on the toughest – and muckiest – outdoor chores, from grimy paving slabs to dirty decking

• The best lawnmowers to keep your grass in check

The trouble with the great outdoors is that it gets a bit untidy. Your garden tools might do a good job of keeping your plot in check, but keeping your patio, decking and outdoor furniture spick and span can take hours, especially if you rely on a bucket of soapy water and a scrubbing brush.

That’s where a pressure washer comes in. These handy tools connect to your hose pipe and squirt water at any cleaning problem. Stubborn and unpleasant stains, from bird dirt to years of neglect, can be lifted from your garden’s hard-wearing surfaces in seconds. With the right attachments, you can also use your pressure washer to hose down cars, bikes and boats.

Best pressure washer overall:
Ava Go P40

Best budget pressure washer:
Kärcher K 2 Classic

Loaded with extras and produced at a cut price, the crossover SUV has overtaken rival cars from US, Japanese and Korean firms

The UK is no stranger to foreign cars. The bestseller lists in recent years have been dominated by the US’s Ford Puma, Japan’s Nissan Qashqai, Korea’s Kia Sportage and occasionally even Tesla’s Model Y.

But in March the top 10 provided a shock: a Chinese car leapt into the lead.

Nine states have a version of voting rights act and 11 more, including several in the south, have introduced bills to protect voters in absence of federal protections

After the US supreme court essentially struck down another major provision of the Voting Rights Act, advocates and Democratic lawmakers have renewed a push in the states to enact their own versions of the landmark civil rights bill to protect voters.

The supreme court ruled this week in Louisiana v Callais, effectively dismantling section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has been used to ensure minority voters receive fair treatment in drawing districts. The decision weakens Black voters’ power to elect their own representatives and sets off another set of redistricting pushes in an election year.

The Artemis II astronauts joined "CBS Mornings" for a live town hall where they took questions from kids just weeks after returning from their historic moon mission.

JOHN BECKER
Staff Reporter

The university’s philosophy department hosted an event, “Debating Sex: Is Biological Sex Binary?” on Mar. 6, featuring two professors from other academic institutions with opposing views on the binary nature of sex.

In response to the event, the university received backlash from students and registered student organizations (RSOs). Two RSOs, the Lavender Programming Board and Sunrise Newark, hosted a counter-event at the same time in the Center for Intercultural Engagement at Perkins Student Center. 

The counter-event featured state Rep. Mara Gorman (D-Newark) as a guest speaker to discuss LGBTQ+ rights in Delaware. Gorman has been representing the 23rd District for the past two years and recently announced her candidacy for state senator in the 8th District, a position currently held by State Sen. David Sokola, who is not seeking re-election.

When asked, Gorman expressed her belief in academic freedom, but also her disdain for the event that the university hosted.

“In terms of hosting the event, I am a believer in academic freedom and freedom of speech,” Gorman said. “So they are entitled to have an event, have anyone who they want to come to campus and also to title it how they would like to, but just because you have that freedom doesn’t mean you should use it in that manner. And I think the name of the event was very unfortunate and triggering and upsetting.”

Emma Abrams, the president of Sunrise Newark and senior environmental and resource economics major, outlined the purpose of the counter-event.

“We didn’t want the narrative to be dominated by bigotry, and by ‘let’s debate trans people’s right to exist,’” Abrams said. “We wanted there to be a space and a counter-narrative for ‘trans people can just exist,’ and queer people can just come and not have to explain themselves.”

Protestors felt that the event should not have been held as a debate, arguing that the existence of intersex, transgender or any LGBTQIA+ individuals should not be considered a debate topic. 

“In general, this is not a debate,” Victoria Silva, co-president of the Lavender Programming Board and senior pre-veterinary science major, said. “It’s a conversation that you can have, like absolutely have this conversation. But we’re not debating people’s lives.”

In response to student protests, philosophy department chair Joel Pust spoke at the event before it began and affirmed students’ right to protest, but felt disappointed by the calls to cancel the event. Before the opening speeches, he defended hosting the event, arguing that it was strictly about whether biological sex is binary, not gender.

“The main criticism I’ve seen is that debating this topic is somehow harmful to people,” Pust said in his opening comments. “I should emphasize we’re debating whether biological sex is binary, whether or not that relates to gender or gender identity, and how it would do so is an open question.”

Pust felt the debate was aligned with the responsibilities of the university.

“I think part of the job of a university is to get students to think hard about controversial issues,” Pust said. “I think it’s the job of a university and especially the philosophy department to expose students to a variety of opinions and a variety of arguments.”

The department invited Professor Agustín Fuentes from Princeton University’s anthropology department to argue against the concept of biological sex as a binary. 

Fuentes specializes in biological and evolutionary anthropology, biocultural anthropology, multispecies relations, race and racism, sex and gender and human evolution. 

During the debate, Fuentes referenced many of his ideas from a book he published in May 2025, “Sex is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary,” and used it as a foundation for many of his arguments.

Fuentes expressed his support for the protesters and praised the students who attended the event.

“I’m really happy with the students’ questions, participation and engagement,” Fuentes said. “I think from what I know about the protests, I actually support them and I really would hope that the students here at the University of Delaware continue to think about this stuff, continue to act on this stuff and don’t let this topic sit.”

The department also brought in Professor Tomás Bogardus, a professor of philosophy in the religion and philosophy division of Pepperdine University. Bogardus focuses on topics such as the relationship between the mind and body, the existence of God, whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God, the nature of knowledge and the nature of gender. 

During the debate, Bogardus argued using concepts from a book he published in September 2025, “The Nature of the Sexes: Why Biology Matters.”

Bogardus said that he was impressed with the students who attended the event but ambivalent toward any student protests on campus.

“I was not aware there was an alternative event,” Bogardus said. “I wasn’t aware of student protests. Overall, I was impressed with the students who did show up.”

During the question-and-answer portion of the debate, many of the audience members’ questions addressed the biological aspects of the debate, as well as the logic and methodology of Bogardus’ arguments.

At the event’s reception, attendees expressed mixed feelings. However, many felt that the conversation was very civil and of value to them.

Senior art conservation major and anthropology minor Rowan Orenstein felt that students who were protesting the event misunderstood what was going to be debated.

“I know it’s been a controversial topic on campus right now, and I think a lot of that has to do with misunderstanding what it was that’s getting debated,” Orenstein said. “People were upset that it’s, you know, debating student identity, and I’m non-binary. So in that case, I should be mad that they would be debating my identity, but they’re not doing that.”

• ‘I do believe all of the golfers should be playing’

• Harman says rebels should face consequences

Donald Trump has supported the reintroduction of LIV Golf players on to the PGA Tour after the league announced the withdrawal of funding by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF).

The US president said he would love to see top golfers who defected to the LIV circuit playing regularly against the PGA Tour’s best as uncertainty engulfed the breakaway league after the PIF announcement.

Livorno council says residents have complained of foul smell after rise in number of pets

Dog owners in an Italian port city will be required to clean up their pets’ urine from public spaces or face fines of up to €500.

Luca Salvetti, the mayor of Livorno, on the Tuscan coast, introduced the measure after complaints from residents about the smell of dog urine, particularly in parks and children’s play areas.

Agents would not allow Pavel Talankin to carry statuette for Mr Nobody Against Putin on to flight from New York

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The Oscar statuette belonging to Pavel Talankin, star and co-director of the Academy award-winning documentary Mr Nobody Against Putin, that went missing after being confiscated by airport officials in New York has been found, according to the airline involved.

Talankin said he lost his Oscar after Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents at New York’s John F Kennedy airport refused to let him bring it on a Lufthansa flight to Germany, claiming it could be used as a weapon.

The Artemis II astronauts said they actually really enjoyed the space food, but it was a familiar candy they enjoyed after splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

The plumbing issues aboard the Orion capsule became headline news in the early days of the historic Artemis II mission.

Serious espresso drinkers rely on one precise measurement to pull the perfect shot. Here's how to get it right at home.

The scorching heat means parts of the UK could also be warmer than Sydney, Buenos Aires or Tunis

You might expect sunshine in Australia, Tunisia or Argentina, but those staying in the UK are likely to see hotter weather, with some parts of the country expected to reach the high 20s before the bank holiday weekend.

Temperatures in London and East Anglia could reach 27C on Friday, the Met Office said, marking the warmest day of the year so far. The scorching heat means parts of the UK could be warmer than Sydney, Buenos Aires or Tunis, where highs of between 24C to 22C are forecast. Temperatures could also exceed those in Honolulu, the capital of Hawaii, where highs of 26C are predicted.

May 1, 2026 — More than 100 undergraduate students enrolled in the University of California San Diego’s new artificial intelligence major took their first major-specific course, CSE 25: Intro to AI, over winter quarter. The class aims to introduce AI principles that the students will see repeatedly over the next four years, and level the playing field between students who may have taken AI coursework on their own, and students for whom this is all new material.

Trevor Bonjour, a UC San Diego computer science teaching professor and one of the lead faculty in the AI program, teaching the CSE25: Intro to AI course. Photos by David Baillot / Jacobs School of Engineering.

UC San Diego’s undergraduate AI major – the result of more than a decade of growth in AI teaching and research on campus – is designed to prepare computer science students to build the next generation of AI systems, improve the foundations of the AI systems currently in use, and engage students with the ethical questions surrounding these systems and their impact on society.

The AI major resides within the UC San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering, with connections across the entire campus, including other academic departments within the Jacobs School of Engineering and with the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing.

In this first major-specific course, students gained an understanding of what AI is, and experienced the end-to-end AI pipeline from problem formulation and data gathering to modeling, training, evaluation and deployment. In the hands-on, project-based course, students learned about different ways to train AI models; applied programming tools to interact with AI models; and evaluated the societal and ethical implications of AI. They saw the core ideas of AI in the context of realistic applications, building small systems from scratch to experience the design challenges and mathematical foundations of model design, parameter turning and evaluation.

“The idea is that over the course of the AI major students will see these topics again and again at different levels of depth,” said Trevor Bonjour, a UC San Diego computer science teaching professor who taught CSE 25 and is one of the lead faculty in the AI program. “Learning happens with repetition, so for this Intro to AI course we wanted to ensure that all students were exposed to foundational concepts in modern AI systems, including neural networks, that they can build on in future classes.”

Over the course of 10 weeks, students explore supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning paradigms, ranging from classical linear models such as perceptrons, to neural networks, language models, and Q-learning agents. The class introduced students to key mathematical tools in AI such as probability, linear algebra, and multivariable calculus. Embedded throughout the course are explorations of how bias shows up in the data and deployment of these models.

Bonjour said he was surprised to learn that roughly a quarter of the students had already taken an AI class before, as a summer course or in their high school. The course’s final project — working in a small group to build an AI agent — was designed in such a way that students who did come in with previous experience could develop more advanced AI projects, while students learning these concepts for the first time could work with the scaffolding provided over the quarter to create their own agent. For example, students created an AI agent that could provide a caption for a given image; detect pedestrians in video footage; and teach a computer to play a game like Blackjack.

“Most machine learning courses in CSE are offered at the upper-division level, so most students come in with very different levels of exposure,” said Eric Song, a UC San Diego computer science graduate student and teaching assistant for this Intro to AI course. “Our goal is to introduce these concepts earlier so that every student at least has some familiarity going in.”

For the final project, students submitted a project report in the format of a conference paper. Bonjour said this was also meant to familiarize all students with how computer science and AI research papers are organized, since there is so much research happening in AI and ML right now that students may choose to contribute to in the future.

This Intro to AI course is being taught again in spring quarter for the remainder of the AI major students. It is being taught by Mia Minnes, a teaching professor of computer science, Vice Chair for Undergraduate Education within the UC San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and another lead faculty in the AI major.

More from HPCwire: UC San Diego Launches Undergraduate AI Major to Meet Rising Student and Industry Demand

Source: Katherine Connor, UCSD

The post UC San Diego Students Get an Intro to AI in First AI Major Class appeared first on HPCwire.

After nearly a decade of testing air fryers of every shape and size, one countertop cooker rises to the top.

This court has impaled one of the most important laws in American history, with disastrous consequences for multiracial democracy

The supreme court justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have made it their life’s work to unravel the Voting Rights Act and undo the most effective civil rights legislation in American history.

On Wednesday, they finished the job.

Rusty Hicks concerned that Democrats could crowd each other out in ‘open’ system and hand victory to Republicans

The chair of the California Democratic party says he wants to get rid of the state’s idiosyncratic “open primary”, calling it a failure that risks pitting a crowded field of Democratic candidates against each other to the point where a Republican can be elected governor of one of the bluest states in the US.

“The current system we have does not work,” Rusty Hicks said in an interview. “It needs to be revised or repealed.”

Four students are in critical condition and security guard and suspect also injured after stabbing in Tacoma

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Five people were recovering in the hospital on Friday following a mass stabbing incident at a high school in Washington state.

A high school student was charged with multiple counts of first-degree assault after five people were hurt during the stabbing incident on Thursday at a campus in Tacoma.

Washington must be willing to make uncomfortable concessions.

Cities in Florida and California, where home prices soared during the pandemic, saw some of the steepest declines in property values.

Amtrak may ease rules on guns on its trains, sources say. Critics worry that would weaken security even though, authorities say, the accused correspondents' dinner shooter took Amtrak cross-country with his firearms.

Federal telecom regulators can revoke broadcast licenses, but legal experts say the FCC would face a tough road in forcing ABC to go dark.

The Trump administration is proposing wastewater testing to try to ferret out data on illegal drug use in real time, according to a draft of a new drug control strategy obtained by CBS News. It also proposes using AI to track threats.

• Minnesota eliminate Denver in Game 6 of series

• Knicks smash NBA records in 51-point rout of Hawks

• 76ers surge in Embiid’s return to force Game 7 v Celtics

Three years after Nikola Jokić led the Denver Nuggets to the NBA championship, the peak looked awfully distant for the team from the Mile High City and the three-time MVP award winner.

Ousted in six games by the Minnesota Timberwolves in their first-round playoff series, the Nuggets trudged into the offseason with plenty of questions to answer about their ability to remain a true title contender in the stacked Western Conference. For the first time in four years, Denver failed to make it to May.

Amid Trump’s unrelenting assault on the rule of law, it is drearily unsurprising to see the ex-FBI director targeted

Consider the following screed: “If any other President had the ability, foresight, or talents necessary, to build this ballroom, which will be one of the greatest, safest, and most secure structures of its kind anywhere in the World, there would never have been a lawsuit. But, because it is DONALD J. TRUMP, a highly successful real estate developer, who has abilities that others don’t … this frivolous and meritless lawsuit was filed. Again, it’s called TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”

The rant, with its tantrum of capitalization, has all the trademarks of a typical post from the president’s Truth Social account. But that is not its source. Rather, the tirade appeared in an official legal document filed by the Department of Justice on 27 April seeking a court order that would lift legal barriers to the construction of Trump’s controversial East Wing ballroom.

The so-called "iPhone Ultra" might dodge the problems of other book-style foldable phones with a hybrid iPhone-iPad interface.

How the Iran war is reshaping Saudi strategy: From Hormuz and Houthis to the UAE’s OPEC exit LToremark 1 May 2026

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has revealed a key threat to Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 strategy and plans for economic transformation.

The US–Israel war against Iran has presented many challenges for Saudi Arabia, including the Strait of Hormuz closure, a deepening rift with the UAE, and the latter’s exit from the oil cartel OPEC. The war has also given Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, pause for thought.

Before MBS, Saudi policy was slow and consensus driven – and largely predictable. The crown prince energized the domestic environment and pursued a far more assertive and, at times, unpredictable foreign policy that got Saudi Arabia into hot water.

However, the Iran war has once again slowed the kingdom’s decision making process as the leadership reassesses its long-term strategy. It is acutely aware that whatever the outcome of the conflict, it will determine the region’s future for at least the next two decades.

From the Strait of Hormuz to the Red Sea

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How to keep the Strait of Hormuz open in the long term

Unsurprisingly, Saudi Arabia’s reassessment now centres on the Strait of Hormuz, through which most of its oil exports and other goods pass. Although the kingdom has long recognized its exposure to disruption at this chokepoint, a sustained closure was historically viewed as highly unlikely. The closure has revealed a key vulnerability not only for trade, but also for the success of the country’s Vision 2030 strategy.

Now that Hormuz has been closed once, there will always be the risk that it could happen again. This poses a long term threat to Saudi Arabia’s trade flows and economic transformation plans. Repeated or prolonged disruption would weigh on revenues, investor confidence, and the kingdom’s ability to present itself as a stable hub for trade, logistics and finance. The ambitions of Vision 2030 and its successor frameworks depend on predictable energy – and revenue – flows and a secure maritime environment.

Hence, the kingdom is beginning to reassess its economic geography, reducing its dependence on Hormuz and reorienting policy towards the Red Sea. Projects along Saudi Arabia’s western coastline, including ports, industrial zones and tourism developments, will now become key priorities. The country’s two coastlines give it a significant geographical advantage over its neighbours, which it will look to capitalize on to distinguish itself – especially from the UAE – as the region’s main export and logistics hub.

Its westward shift means the national oil company Saudi Aramco will need to reorient crude exports to the Red Sea or at least build capacity to convey 7 million barrels a day to match pre-war exports. It is currently transporting around 4 million barrels per day of crude by pipeline from east to west and exporting it via the Yanbu terminal on the Red Sea. While current exports are lower, Saudi Arabia is in a stronger position than many of its Gulf neighbours, whose exports remain locked into the Gulf. With oil prices at around $120 per barrel, roughly double pre war levels, Riyadh retains a degree of financial resilience.

However, significant long-term investment will be needed in infrastructure that allows goods – especially oil – to move between the Red Sea and major urban centres across the Gulf if Saudi Arabia is to establish itself as a regional trading hub. Longer timelines and higher costs will be unavoidable, but the structural nature of the Hormuz problem leaves Saudi Arabia with little choice.

But rerouting away from Hormuz will not eliminate risk, only relocate it. Attacks on Red Sea shipping by the Iran-aligned Houthis show that maritime insecurity will become a central constraint on Saudi Arabia’s westward reorientation, not a secondary concern.

Iran war has renewed rift with the UAE

The World Today

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Iran and Gaza conflicts teach Gulf states a hard-power lesson

The threat of maritime insecurity to its Red Sea ambitions helps explain Saudi Arabia’s reluctance to engage directly in the war against Iran and its lobbying against further escalation. The leadership recognizes that a kinetic response to Iranian strikes would not only increase risks to its energy assets and critical infrastructure but could also draw the Houthis more directly into the conflict. That, in turn, would place Saudi Arabia’s alternative export routes under threat, undermining its essential diversification away from Hormuz.

This also helps explain the different positions taken by Saudi Arabia and the UAE towards the war, and the growing tensions between them. Abu Dhabi has taken a strong line against Iran, with a position much closer to the US and Israel than to its Gulf neighbours. Senior Emirati officials have criticized both the Iranian leadership for striking targets on UAE soil and regional partners for failing to respond more forcefully or show greater support.

Essa Suleiman is accused of stabbing two Jewish men in Golders Green and attacking another over personal dispute in south London

A man has appeared in court charged with the attempted murders of three people during a series of knife attacks in London.

Essa Suleiman is accused of stabbing two Jewish men in Golders Green on Wednesday, having already attacked another man over a personal dispute in south London.

Philip Young changes all pleas to guilty after initially denying charges of making indecent images of children

A former Conservative councillor who admitted nearly 50 offences of drugging, raping and sexually assaulting his former wife has pleaded guilty to additional offences of making indecent images of children.

Philip Young, 49, pleaded guilty in January at Winchester crown court to 11 counts of rape and 11 counts of administering a substance with intent to stupefy his former wife Joanne Young, 48, who has waived her right to anonymity.

The US president has criticised Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and raised the prospect of pulling US troops from Italy and Spain. Plus, 10 big lessons on ending the fossil fuel era

Good morning.

Donald Trump has threatened to withdraw US troops from Italy and Spain a day after he saying was looking at curtailing the number deployed in Germany.

What has Congress been saying about the war? A senior Democrat in the Senate grilled the US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, on Thursday, accusing him of failing to give Trump an accurate picture of the war on Iran while resorting to “dangerously exaggerated” statements to create an inaccurate picture of a US military triumph.

What’s the latest on the suspect? The man accused of attempting to assassinate Trump agreed on Thursday to remain in custody while his federal criminal case moves forward.

They're all good smartwatches, but have their own strengths. Let's compare the details.

While Charles and Camilla were on a three-line whip, MPs watched the excruciating discomfort of civil servants

We don’t often get to see senior civil servants out and about in the wild. They are kept away from the public gaze, sat behind a desk trying to persuade their ministers not to do something too catastrophic to their government department. Quite why they have been been made a knight or a dame just for doing their jobs is one of life’s mysteries. The rest of us have to make do with the occasional email from the boss. But in the last week, two top civil servants have been reluctantly made to give evidence on Keir Starmer’s decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as US ambassador before the foreign affairs select committee and very instructive it has been, too. Not least to see how much they dislike any extra attention from the public. Their obvious discomfort at being held to account was excruciating to watch.

Coventry-supporting Japanese has used his rebel streak and risk-taking instincts to spur on Oliver Bearman this season

There is no one quite like Ayao Komatsu in Formula One. Haas’s Japanese team principal, a rugby-playing Coventry City fan who left his home country to escape the constraints of conformity, is F1’s rebel without a pause.

As Haas enter their first home race of the season in Miami this weekend, they are on a roll. Fourth place in the championship is the highest position held by a US team after three races in the sport’s history and Komatsu has engineered it in a sport he once viewed as his great escape.

New law proposes up to 20 years in prison for promoting ‘foreign interests’, and restricts those who work with or are funded by overseas partners

Ugandan opposition figures, human rights organisations and legal experts have condemned a sweeping bill that proposes up to 20 years in prison for promoting “foreign interests”, and imposes restrictions on a broad range of people and organisations that work with or receive funding from overseas partners.

The protection of sovereignty bill 2026 is being fast tracked through parliament, with debate expected to conclude before the presidential swearing-in on 12 May.

The summer will probably come too soon, but if Mauricio Pochettino does move to bring an upstart, Zavier Gozo and Julian Hall are among the contenders

With the US roster scheduled to drop on 26 May, it is crunch time for Mauricio Pochettino to finalize his World Cup squad.

There were few glowing segments of footage for him to clip from the team’s feckless final pre-World Cup camp in March, with losses to Belgium and Portugal by a 7-2 combined scoreline. On the club side, the only position group teeming with in-form options is central midfield. Matt Turner’s MLS form is far stronger than Matt Freese’s, but his sole international start in the last 14 games ended 5-2. Christian Pulisic is goalless in 18 games for club and country. Gio Reyna remains a bit-part player; Noahkai Banks has yet to commit his international future.

The Artemis missions are paving the way to civilizational decisions. It’s time to ask not just what we can do – but whether we should do it

This month’s splashdown of Artemis II was rightly celebrated as a technical achievement. Four astronauts traveled farther from Earth than any humans in history and returned safely. It is an extraordinary thing to send people into deep space and bring them home again. Nobody should deny that.

But the real significance of Artemis II lies elsewhere.

Republican-controlled states cite legal grounds of DoJ’s request, concerns over data security and privacy laws

The Department of Justice’s quest to secure sensitive voter data is finding opposition in typically friendly territory – several staunchly conservative states.

As of 1 April, the Department of Justice (DoJ) has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for failing to turn over full copies of their voter registration lists. The push has hit repeated roadblocks, including legal defeats in California, Massachusetts, Oregon, Rhode Island, Arizona and Michigan. But the DoJ is also running into obstacles in some of America’s reddest states, with Trump strongholds Utah, West Virginia, Georgia, Kentucky and Idaho all refusing to hand over the requested data.

Anthony Odiong is accused of sexually abusing three spiritually vulnerable female congregants in Waco

Plans are under way for the Roman Catholic archdiocese of New Orleans to remove a priest’s name from a chapel he helped build outside the city as a criminal trial looms in Texas for the clergyman on criminal charges that he sexually abused three spiritually vulnerable female congregants there, the Guardian has learned.

Anthony Odiong had reportedly raised $600,000 to build and then open Our Lady of Guadalupe Healing Chapel in Luling, Louisiana, in 2020, while he was the pastor at an adjacent church, years before authorities criminally charged him in Texas, where he had also previously ministered. His name has since appeared on various inscriptions outside the chapel and on the structure itself even as the criminal case against him has progressed toward trial.

After Friday, your next chance to see two full moons in one month won't come until December 2028.

fjo3 shares a report from the Washington Post: Surging concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere, caused largely by burning fossil fuels, have produced potent changes in the way plants grow -- from increasing their sugar content to depleting essential nutrients like zinc. Experts fear the degradation of Earth's food supply will cause an epidemic of hidden hunger, in which even people who consume enough calories won't get the nutrients they need to thrive. "The diets we eat today have less nutritional density than what our grandparents ate, even if we eat exactly the same thing," said Kristie Ebi, a professor at the University of Washington's Center for Health and the Global Environment. People in wealthy countries with strong health care systems will have many tools to cope with the change, experts said. But for the world's poorest and most vulnerable, the consequences could be devastating. One study concluded that by the middle of the century the phenomenon could put more than a billion additional women and children at risk of iron-deficiency anemia -- a condition that can cause pregnancy complications, developmental problems and even death. Meanwhile, some 2 billion people across the globe who already suffer from some form of nutrient shortage could see their health problems grow even worse. "The scale of the problem is huge," Ebi said. Plants depend on carbon dioxide to perform photosynthesis -- but that doesn't mean they grow better when there's more carbon in the air, scientists say. A sweeping survey of changes among 32 compounds in 43 crops found that nearly every plant that humans eat is harmed by rising CO2 levels. [...] For the past several years, [Sterre F. ter Haar, an environmental scientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands and lead author of the survey] and her colleagues have worked to compile a database of all existing research on nutrient changes linked to rising CO2. They tracked down hundreds of studies, ranging from tightly controlled lab experiments to sprawling global analyses of real-world crops. Next the team used their dataset to calculate the nutritional densities of each crop under different carbon dioxide levels -- and to predict how their composition could continue to shift in the future. On average, they found, nutrients have already decreased by an average 3.2 percent across all plants since the late 1980s, when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 350 parts per million. That figure may seem small, ter Haar said, but with so much of the world already living on the brink of nutrient insufficiency, a drop of just a few percentage points has the potential to push millions of additional people into a health crisis. Researchers are still trying to understand the exact causes of this change. Extra CO2 can make plants grow faster and produce more carbohydrates, but without a matching increase in mineral uptake, nutrients like zinc, iron, and protein become diluted. Higher CO2 also causes plants to open their leaf pores less often, reducing the amount of water -- and dissolved minerals -- they absorb through their roots. At the same time, higher temperatures can further disrupt soil chemistry, affecting how plants take up nutrients and, in some cases, increasing their absorption of harmful substances like arsenic.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The suspect, a juvenile, was detained at the scene, police said.

Gaston Browne is on course to win 15 of the 17 seats in parliament after calling snap election

Gaston Browne, the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, is set to win a fourth term in the country’s snap general election with preliminary results showing his party on course to win 15 of the 17 seats in parliament.

Addressing supporters early on Friday morning, Browne said: “You have spoken, you have spoken clearly. You have indicated that the Antigua and Barbuda Labour party (ABLP) is the best institution to run this country.”

Police arrested a man for allegedly incinerating his dead wife at the zoo where he worked, officials said, following the discovery of human remains.

Tina Fey's The Four Seasons returns, while the release of Remarkably Bright Creatures, Lord of the Flies and more are new on Netflix.

A naval coalition in the Strait of Hormuz should learn these lessons Expert comment thilton.drupal 1 May 2026

The proposed UK-France coalition can learn from anti-piracy missions off Somalia and in the Strait of Malacca to restore confidence for shipping in the Strait of Hormuz in the long term.

On 21 April, the US announced a ceasefire extension with Iran. Since then, however, the US has maintained a blockade over the Strait of Hormuz and boarded a tanker carrying Iranian oil in the Indian Ocean. Iran had also seized two container ships that were transiting the Strait and continues to reject the US presence there. As such, the Strait of Hormuz remains neither open nor secure and conflict at sea continues.

In response, the UK and France have announced that they are assembling an international naval coalition to protect shipping through Hormuz ‘as soon as conditions permit following a sustainable ceasefire agreement.’ The mission ‘will be independent and strictly defensive’ and will not be seeking to reopen the Strait of Hormuz in a conventional military sense. Indeed, the Strait cannot be opened by force and requires more than ad hoc security measures in the long term. 

Instead, the purpose of the proposed UK-France coalition is to deter future conflict and restore confidence about the safety of transit to the insurance and shipping industries. It will face the challenge of managing persistent insecurity in the Strait, whether in the context of a likely fragile US-Iran ceasefire agreement or amid continued ‘grey zone’ confrontation.

It is not yet clear who will join the UK and France’s final coalition, but 51 countries attended the summit they jointly convened in April. The US is also reportedly seeking to establish a separate US-led maritime coalition with international involvement. It remains unclear which plans will come to fruition in a changing situation.

The success of any coalition seeking to maintain open shipping lanes under the potential threat of renewed violence in the Gulf will depend less on military might and more on how it is designed. From combined task forces to coalitions, previous maritime missions offer key lessons for the creation of a naval coalition in the Strait of Hormuz.  

Coordinate and compartmentalize

Efforts to combat piracy off the Horn of Africa involved several overlapping missions. These included the EU’s Naval Force Somalia – Operation Atalanta, the UK Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) centre, the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia, and the UN-mandated Combined Maritime Taskforce 150 (a 34-nation coalition). 

These missions succeeded in large part because there was a clear division of responsibilities between each group and among the countries within them. For example, some groups of countries were responsible for directly interdicting pirate ships. Others were responsible for conducting surveillance, supporting regional capacity building efforts or developing legal frameworks for law enforcement. 

For the Strait of Hormuz, policymakers should consider dividing responsibilities among subordinate task groups. These could include a ship escort group, a mine countermeasures group and a maritime domain awareness group. 

Limit use of force to prevent escalation

Compartmentalizing task groups also allows for escalation management with Iran. A major lesson from counter-piracy efforts in Somalia was that the use of force should be limited, discriminate and tied to specific behaviours: in this case, interference with commercial shipping. 

International naval forces frequently confronted pirates but managed to avoid escalation and retain Somalia’s support through their use of limited force. This reflected rules of engagement that were designed to deter attacks without signalling a broader campaign to destroy any particular regime or group. 

In the Strait of Hormuz, limits on use of force would signal limited intent to a potentially hostile country like Iran. The goal of a naval coalition should not be to defeat Iran militarily but to alter its cost-benefit analysis by making any attacks on shipping consistently ineffective and increasingly escalatory. 

At present it is relatively inexpensive for Iran to threaten to disrupt traffic in the Strait, while it is costly for any single country to guarantee security through naval escorts. A multinational coalition redistributes this burden by pooling naval assets and sharing operational costs. A collective force can outweigh Iran’s capacity for disruption and keep individual contributions manageable. 

Build a tiered escort system

One of the most effective tools developed for Somalia was the use of structured transit corridors and group escorts. The International Recommended Transit Corridor (IRTC) in the Gulf of Aden organized vessels by speed and grouped them into monitored convoys which reduced their vulnerability by allowing naval forces to target their protect efforts. 

A Hormuz coalition should adopt a similar system. High-value or high-risk vessels like oil tankers will need a dedicated naval escort, while rapid-response forces could provide protection to lower-risk traffic in emergencies. Scheduled transit windows would further reduce uncertainty, allowing ships to move in predictable patterns that are easier to defend and insure. 

This system balances security and scale. It avoids the challenge of overextension and heavy-handed militarization while still providing meaningful protection where it is most needed. A tiered escort system would allow the coalition to secure the Hormuz without attempting to control every meter. 

Create regional ownership early

Somalia’s counter-piracy mission depended on foreign navies. As a result, when international attention dropped, piracy returned. By contrast, the Malacca Strait Patrols – designed to protect the Strait of Malacca from piracy – are explicitly led by the Strait’s littoral states: Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. 

Since being formally established in 2006, the Malacca Strait Patrols have successfully protected shipping in the region, demonstrating the effectiveness of regional security systems. More importantly, four-way cooperation has also prevented any one country from taking advantage of this waterway. 

Move over, Netflix -- Peacock's got the epic movies you're looking for.

The Mets have the second-highest payroll in baseball. They also own the worst record in the major leagues

A franchise once known as baseball’s lovable losers are, for the moment, merely baseball’s most expensive losers.

The New York Mets wrapped a shocking April by losing 5-4 to the Washington Nationals on Thursday, dropping to a major league-worst 10-21 and burrowing even deeper into last place in the National League East – making them somehow even worse than their old rivals the Philadelphia Phillies, another wealthy-yet-terrible team. The Mets will (probably) not play at their current 52-win pace all year but their sordid first month has done immense damage to their postseason hopes. Their chances at October baseball were 87% on Opening Day, according to the analytics site FanGraphs. They are now less than three-in-10 to make the playoffs, and that projection seems pretty generous for a team who have lost 17 of their last 20 games.

Something like the demand by Donald Trump that news organizations publish interviews in full may seem innocuous, but they have serious implications

Shortly after sitting for a televised interview with CBS News in January, Donald Trump conveyed a threat through his press secretary: air the interview in full, or face a lawsuit.

The warning may have been delivered offhand, but its implications are being taken seriously inside newsrooms.

Esther Cohen was removed as Greene county’s poet laureate just weeks after the appointment. It’s ‘emblematic of the assault on the arts writ large’, some say

In 1985, just before the poet Esther Cohen, her husband, and two friends bought a house in Greene county, their realtor warned them not to: it was too “wild” and different from what they knew. To Cohen, that sounded ideal; she has lived in the same rent-stabilized Upper West Side apartment since 1973 and loves the city but longed for an escape from her bubble of leftist and liberal Jewish urbanites.

Greene county is 120 miles north of New York City. The birthplace of the Hudson River School of Art, it has waterfalls and majestic views of the river and the Catskill Mountains – the perfect place for a writer to find quiet in the summertime and on other occasions throughout the year.

She made local friends quickly. “I went to the farmer’s wife at the farm stand nearby and said, ‘I want to have a potluck. Will you come and host it with me?’” Cohen said in an interview in her Upper West Side apartment. She’s been hosting big summer potlucks ever since for a “big mix” of neighbors: “Everyone comes who is around. And everyone is welcome.”

In January, Create, a local arts council partly funded by the Greene county legislature, appointed Cohen the county’s first-ever poet laureate. She recalls thinking Greene county, with its overwhelmingly Republican legislature, might not want to be represented by a Jewish transplant from New York City. But she was encouraged by community members to apply and was delighted when she won. She signed an agreement with Create and asked that the ceremony in her honor take place in April, as part of National Poetry Month. As laureate, her job would be to promote poetry in the county and participate in local literary events. She would earn an annual $1,000 honorarium.

When President Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 election, the institutional guardrails of American democracy held — but just barely.

If faced with the same tests today, those guardrails and the people who held the line would largely be missing, a ProPublica examination found.

At least 75 career officials who once held roles at federal agencies related to election integrity and safety are gone. Two dozen appointees — including many who either actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote or are associates of such people — have been hired to replace them. And once-fringe actors now have access to vast powers.

As the midterms approach, current and former government officials and election security experts expressed concerns that Trump appointees who’ve espoused debunked conspiracy theories about balloting are now in positions to control the narrative around the vote’s soundness.

It’s hard to debunk false claims “coming with the seal of the federal government,” said Derek Tisler, counsel and manager with the Brennan Center for Justice’s elections and government program. “I certainly worry what damage that could do to voters’ confidence.”

Here are some of the key things you should know about the Trump administration’s efforts to, as the president said, “take over” the midterms. Read the full investigation here.

Read More

Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections

1. In 2020, institutional guardrails helped to prevent Trump from overturning the election.

Following his defeat in the 2020 election, Trump pushed for federal officials to uncover proof that he had, in fact, beaten Joe Biden at the polls. Election cybersecurity experts with the Department of Homeland Security relayed to Attorney General William Barr that the election fraud claims that they looked into were false. Barr then told the president what he didn’t want to hear: The election had not been hacked.

Barr was one of many federal officials — most of them Trump appointees — who refused to bend to the president’s demands, which only intensified in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, 2021. Despite the violent uprising at the Capitol on that day, the election results held firm.

2. Less than 18 months into his second term, Trump has dismantled many of those same guardrails.

Since the start of his second term, Trump and his appointees have made significant changes at federal agencies tasked with helping to safeguard elections. In all, at least 75 career officials who’d played important roles in elections work at DHS, the Department of Justice and other agencies have left, been fired or been reassigned, ProPublica found.

In their place are roughly two dozen people Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections. Ten of them actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote, and the rest are associates of those people. In some cases, ProPublica found, officials have been hired from activist groups that are pillars of the election-denial movement.

3. Among the first agencies Trump gutted after returning to office was one that had repeatedly disproved his stolen-election claims.

Officials at DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had provided research to the first Trump White House that disproved many theories claiming that the 2020 election had been hacked. CISA also played a crucial part in publicly countering these claims by producing a “Rumor Control” website to rebut them.

Then, only weeks into Trump’s second term, DHS leadership put employees focused on countering disinformation and helping safeguard elections on leave. They also froze CISA’s other election security work, which included assessing local election offices for physical and cybersecurity risks. Eventually, all CISA employees specializing in elections were fired or transferred.

A DHS spokesperson told ProPublica that the changes at CISA were in response to “a ballooning budget concealing a dangerous departure from its statutory mission,” which included “electioneering instead of defending America’s critical infrastructure.”

4. Trump and his appointees have gutted election-related teams at federal law enforcement agencies.

FBI Director Kash Patel dismantled the agency’s public corruption team, which had previously been deployed to help monitor possible criminal activity on Election Day. The Foreign Influence Task Force, which aimed to combat foreign influence in U.S. politics, was also disbanded.

(An FBI spokesperson said the bureau “remains committed to detecting and countering foreign influence efforts by adversarial nations.”)

The voting section of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division had enforced federal laws that protect voting rights, particularly those that combat racial discrimination. But now, nearly all of the section’s roughly 30 career lawyers have resigned or been moved. Trump then filled the section with conservative lawyers, including at least four who participated in challenging the 2020 vote or have worked with people who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election.

5. Trump has replaced ousted career specialists with “Team America.”

In the summer of 2025, after the Trump administration had forced out most of the career specialists, a small group of political appointees — which once called itself “Team America,” according to sources familiar with the matter — began convening at DHS headquarters, looking for federal levers it could pull to realize a March 2025 executive order, in which Trump tried to exert greater federal control over aspects of voting.

Among the core members of the group was David Harvilicz, a DHS assistant secretary tasked with overseeing the security of election infrastructure, including voting machines, and three of his top staffers. As ProPublica has reported, Harvilicz co-founded an AI company with an architect of Trump’s claims about election hacking in Michigan.

Heather Honey, who serves under Harvilicz in a newly created position focused on elections, is a source of the false claim that more ballots were cast in Pennsylvania than there were voters in the 2020 presidential election — a claim Trump cited on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021.

At least 11 administration appointees, including Honey, have ties to the Election Integrity Network, a conservative grassroots organization led by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. Since moving into government, Honey has maintained close ties to Mitchell’s organization, and she and at least two other federal officials have given its members private briefings.

6. Team America members are using a powerful Homeland Security Investigations tool to try to identify noncitizen voters.

The DOJ has been demanding that states turn over confidential voter roll information, and it has sued around 30 states for this data.

Meanwhile, DHS has urged states to upload their voter rolls to its tool, called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system.

The goal in both efforts has been to find noncitizens on the voter rolls. But the SAVE tool has come up short, often identifying citizens as noncitizens, as ProPublica has reported, and officials have faced other roadblocks with its use.

More recently, according to two people familiar with the matter, Team America has worked to harness a more powerful tool used by another branch of DHS, Homeland Security Investigations, to increase its ability to search for noncitizen voters and bring criminal charges against them.

In response to questions sent to DHS, Harvilicz and Honey, a DHS spokesperson disputed that they were seeking to use the department’s powers to advantage Trump. In response to questions about their ties to the election denial movement, the spokesperson wrote, “To meet the diverse and evolving challenges the Department faces, we hire experts with diverse backgrounds who go through a rigorous vetting process.”

7. Trump’s head of election security is behind the FBI’s seizure of 2020 election ballots in Georgia.

Attorney Kurt Olsen once worked to try to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss in court and was later sanctioned by judges for making baseless allegations about Arizona elections. He is now Trump’s director of election security and integrity and is the driving force behind the January raid of the election center in Fulton County, Georgia.

Toward the end of 2025, Olsen flew to Georgia to meet with Paul Brown, the head of the FBI’s Atlanta field office, according to people familiar with the matter. Olsen wanted the FBI to seize ballots from the Democratic stronghold, and he gave Brown a report he claimed would justify the extraordinary action. Brown’s team submitted an affidavit to superiors at the DOJ that did not make a strong enough case to move forward with what Olsen wanted. Afterward, Brown was given a choice: retire or be moved to a new office. Brown retired. The raid went forward under his replacement, based on an affidavit that cited information from the report Olsen provided to Brown.

Olsen did not respond to requests for comment.

An FBI spokesperson said that Brown “elected to retire” and that its “work in the election security space is entirely consistent with the law.”

8. The DOJ’s Public Integrity Section could have tried to block the administration’s Georgia voting investigation.

In the months following Trump’s return to office, the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, which had been responsible for making sure the department’s inquiries weren’t improperly influenced by politics, was eviscerated. Resignations, firings and transfers reduced the 36-person section to two.

Multiple former lawyers for the section said they likely would have tried to block the Fulton County investigation because it lacked strong evidence, had a clear political slant and went against department directives that actions should not be taken “for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.”

John Keller was principal deputy chief of the section from 2020 to 2025 and was acting chief when he resigned in early 2025. He worries that allegations of irregularities in the upcoming election will be handled on a partisan basis.

“Without that review and without apolitical, objective, honest brokers involved in the process, there is a much greater risk for intentional manipulation or inadvertent interference,” Keller said.

The post 8 Things You Should Know About Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections appeared first on ProPublica.

I've tested a variety of tablets in various sizes and price classes to find the top options available.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Plans to demolish a shuttered elementary school and build affordable housing in Southbridge, one of Wilmington’s oldest and most historic neighborhoods, are underway. But whether the final sales prices of the homes will be affordable for residents of the working-class neighborhood is uncertain.  

In 2024, Wilmington and state officials launched a long-term plan to turn Elbert-Palmer, a former-elementary school in the city’s Southbridge neighborhood, into affordable housing. 

Two years later, city officials say they remain committed to the plan, but as they move forward with finding a contractor to build 30 townhomes, it remains to be seen what the final sale prices will be.

In an interview with Spotlight Delaware, Bud Freel, director of the Wilmington Land Bank, which is leading the project, estimated the cost to build each of the 30 houses at more than $300,000. 

Freel said government dollars will allow the Land Bank – which is charged with redeveloping properties in the city – to sell the houses for less than the development cost. But the final listing price will depend on several factors, including the number of subsidies that officials are ultimately able to secure, and whether the city can reduce construction costs through its forthcoming building contract.

“As we sit here today, I cannot give you a number on what we’re going to be able to list these houses for,” Freel said. 

There is also no set definition of “affordable” housing, he said, noting that multiple factors could be used for consideration, including the area’s income, the amount of down payment a buyer can put down, and the local housing market.

“There’s a number of things you look at, but there’s no set formula,” Freel said. 

Asked about Freel’s comments, Caroline Klinger, a spokeswoman for Wilmington Mayor John Carney, said city officials cannot determine a price range yet because affordability will depend on buyers’ incomes. 

“It would be premature to put out a number that would not apply to all buyers, considering the different makeup of household income when determining affordability,” Klinger said in an emailed statement to Spotlight Delaware. 

Still, Klinger also noted that because the project uses federal COVID-era relief dollars, “it must meet a standard set by the federal government for affordable housing.” 

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development states that affordable housing “is generally defined as housing on which the occupant is paying no more than 30% of gross income for housing costs, including utilities.”

The median household income in the city of Wilmington is $58,671, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. 

According to Zillow, current homes for sale in the Southbridge area range between $129,000 and $270,000, while those located in the adjacent Christina Landing neighborhood can sell for $400,000 and above.

For residents of the Southbridge neighborhood, the redevelopment of the school brings with it mixed feelings. 

Constructed in 1928, the school stood in the heart of the majority-Black neighborhood that’s deeply entrenched in political and civil rights history, stretching back to Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. Today the property is simply an empty field with only a skeleton of a foundation marking where the school once stood. 

On Thursday, one resident, who said he lived in the area his entire life, called the Elbert-Palmer school the only monument that existed within the working-class neighborhood.

Two years ago, residents expressed similar sentiments, with some telling Spotlight Delaware that the demolition of the school would take a piece of the neighborhood’s history away. Many also felt that the demolition and housing decision was made without sufficiently engaging the community. 

“This school meant so much to Southbridge,” Rich King, another lifelong Southbridge resident, said then.

How we got here

In December 2024, the Christina School District Board of Education transferred the school’s property to the Wilmington Land Bank. 

As part of the deal, the state allocated $1.2 million for the demolition of the school and any related sitework. The Land Bank then received an additional $3 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding for the project.

More than $2 million of that funding will go toward subsidizing the homes, Freel said. He added that he is also working to secure an additional $500,000 from New Castle County — money that was originally slated for the Land Bank to work on the city’s West Side — in an effort to redirect those funds to the Elbert-Palmer project and further support the subsidies.

Affordable housing has been a hot topic in Wilmington, especially after Mayor John Carney committed to creating a $20 million fund program to incentivize the construction of new housing in his budget address last month. 

None of that $20 million would fund the Elbert-Palmer project, according to city officials. 

Since the redevelopment plans have been underway, Freel and city councilwoman Michelle Harlee, who represents the area, said they haven’t heard concerns regarding the project. 

Freel also set up a working group – made up of neighborhood organizations and individuals such as Rep. Frank Cooke (D-New Castle) – to discuss the project and provide feedback.  

According to Freel, the initial plan for the site was to create 20 townhomes, leaving space for a new neighborhood park. But after hearing from the Southbridge Civic Association, he said community members preferred to have more housing.

“They didn’t feel they needed another park. They felt housing was more important. So that’s how we ended up with 30,” Freel said. 

Each unit, under the updated plan, will be 1,500 square feet, with three bedrooms and one and a half bathrooms. Each unit will also have a porch, backyard space, and a personal driveway. 

In order to prepare residents who live in the area to be able to purchase the new homes, the Neighborhood House, a housing nonprofit, is also working to provide housing counseling for those interested in purchasing the homes when they go up for sale.

The post Wilmington moves forward with affordable townhouse project but final prices uncertain appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Analysis finds real wages fell 12% since 2019, with inequality widening in the US beyond global levels

CEO pay increased 20 times faster than worker pay around the world in 2025, according to a new analysis from Oxfam and the International Trade Union Confederation, the world’s largest trade union federation.

When adjusted for inflation, global worker pay declined 12% between 2019 and 2025, the equivalent of 108 days of free work during that time period. In comparison, CEO compensation increased by 54% between 2019 and 2025.

Why Should Delaware Care? 
Substantial funding from the state and county governments is directed to volunteer companies across the state every year. Recent findings of tens of thousands of dollars of in misused funds and a lack of formal bookkeeping by the Marydel Volunteer Fire Company are raising questions about government oversight of fire companies’ finances.  

A state audit investigating fraud within the volunteer fire company of a small, unincorporated town along the Delaware-Maryland border revealed tens of thousands of dollars of unaccounted spending. It also raised concerns among elected officials about lacking oversight for fire companies across the state. 

In a report detailing the investigation, which looked into the Marydel Volunteer Fire Company’s spending between fiscal years 2021 and 2023, State Auditor Lydia York recommended a number of new regulatory and oversight measures be implemented by both the Marydel VFC and the State Fire Commission, which supervises the state’s roughly 60 volunteer fire companies. 

In her report, York outlined the lack of clear oversight for volunteer companies across Delaware, a gap that leaves the more than $60 million they receive annually from the state largely unchecked, she said.

“Volunteer fire service is noble, and it has a rich cultural history,” York told Spotlight Delaware. “But the number of dollars that are involved now have gotten to the point where we really need to ask more questions about what they’re doing.” 

York’s audit, released on Tuesday, is the second time the company has been investigated in the past 12 years. 

A 2014 audit found a similar dearth of spending documentation, including $13,000 paid from the company account to the fire chief’s personal catering business. 

And while members of the Marydel fire company are pointing fingers at one another in the wake of the most recent audit’s findings, state leaders say the report raises questions about how Delaware funds its fire companies, and the way oversight functions at both the county and state level. 

All fire companies in the state are volunteer-run except for the Wilmington Fire Department, which has paid staff. The volunteer companies are funded through a mix of state grant-in-aid money and some other state funding sources, like a tax from the Department of Insurance, and county funding. 

The state invested roughly $67 million, or an average of $1 million per company, into the volunteer fire companies last year, York said. 

A closer look at the audit 

The unique geography of Marydel makes its fire company funding more complicated. Still, the results of the audit were clear: “Bad behavior” and a lack of internal controls within the fire company ranks, York said. 

The Marydel Fire Company is named for the Kent County town it serves, which straddles the Delaware-Maryland border. The Maryland side is an incorporated town of about 170 residents, while Delaware’s portion is unincorporated and home to roughly 1,350 residents. 

The fire company receives funding each year from the county and state in both Maryland and Delaware. 

The recent audit looked only at the funding from the Delaware side. Nonetheless, York said her office found that Maryland has a more stringent process for ensuring funding oversight on the dollars it provides to fire companies. 

The audit substantiated allegations of financial misconduct by the fire company’s president, Randy Barr, and treasurer, Les States, between the 2021-2023 fiscal years. 

Barr and States are no longer in leadership roles at the fire company, according to other members of the organization and the auditor’s office. Buffy Madden, who was found to have misused tens of thousands of dollars of the fire company’s money in the 2014 audit, is now in charge of the organization again, they said. 

The investigation determined that Barr spent nearly $29,000 on the fire company credit card at a warehouse retail store, $13,000 on food service distributors and $10,800 on hotels between July 2020 and June 2023.

The audit also found that Barr and States reported raising hundreds of thousands dollars from company fundraisers, like fees from renting out the fire hall. But there was no evidence of them depositing those funds into company accounts, or doing any organized bookkeeping of finances. 

The Marydel fire company received about $750,000 in state funding from Delaware in 2022 and 2023, in addition to funding from Kent County, the state of Maryland and Caroline County, Md. 

The company reported surpluses of nearly $78,000 in 2022 and nearly $200,000 in 2023, according to its nonprofit tax forms submitted for those years. 

The lack of formal budgeting and bookkeeping revealed in the audit, York said, is a key point she implores the fire company to change in its policies moving forward. 

“We want people to get better at their accounting systems,” she said. “We would suggest, quite frankly, a paper system can get you there.” 

Firemen, community respond

While the audit report outlined a number of recommendations for the fire department to implement, it remains unclear how fire company leadership plans to proceed, as they question the validity of the findings and blame one another for the situation. 

Robert Helmer and Rob Barnes told Spotlight Delaware they used to be a part of the company’s leadership, but were ousted due to disputes with other members. They also said they were the whistleblowers to the state auditor in late 2024 about the recent financial mismanagement. 

Barnes said the company should have implemented better safeguards after the 2014 audit to prevent certain people from getting too much power, or abusing company funds, but he believes that the company not taking the previous audit seriously led to the current situation. 

“Everything [the state] told them to do in that audit, they didn’t do,” Barnes said. “Now you’ve got this mess.” 

Barr, the president who was found to have misused company funds in the recent audit, wrote in a message to Spotlight Delaware that he “has not stolen anything from the department,” and would attribute the “allegations” to other members of the fire company trying to retaliate against him. 

Barr also said he is in the process of filing a lawsuit against the fire company. 

Madden, the current fire chief — who also is the chief accused in the 2014 audit — declined to comment on the investigation and current state of the fire company. 

A handful of community members described to Spotlight Delaware their experiences with the fire company, both positive and negative. 

State Sen. Dave Lawson (R-Marydel) had a different assessment of the situation. 

Lawson said he has not had a chance to fully read the recently released audit, but he considers the 2014 audit to have been simply a reflection of internal politics within the fire company – its findings were “much ado about nothing,” he said. 

“The volunteer fire companies are the backbone of the state when it comes to community involvement, community effort, and saving the community,” he added. 

State leaders look ahead 

As the volunteer fire company system currently exists, there is limited oversight at the county and state levels. But some elected officials say they want that to change. 

A 2016 legislative task force looked at the financial management procedures of volunteer fire companies, in response to findings that some had embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years.

As a result of the task force, the General Assembly passed legislation in 2017 empowering the State Fire Commission to oversee fire companies’ required audits more directly. If companies did not complete their audit requirements, the state treasurer could withhold grant-in-aid funding from the company, the law says. 

However, York said, the state treasurer has not taken advantage of that mechanism, because the legislation has “very few absolutes,” and the state has been hesitant to encroach on the independence of fire companies. 

Now, though, she said there is a sense the Marydel controversy has brought a need for more oversight to the attention of the fire commission and state lawmakers. 

Lawson said he believes the investigative arm of the State Fire Commission, which has only been around a couple of years, is still figuring out its responsibilities and jurisdiction in “unchartered territories,” so it will take some time for the department to work in full force. 

Bob Scott, vice president of the Kent County Levy Court and a longtime volunteer firefighter in Houston, said the county government has also been reconsidering how it oversees the money it provides to fire companies. 

As the current system functions, Scott said, the Levy Court bases its funding decisions on the financial report the fire companies send to the state fire commission. 

“Naturally,” Scott added, “we don’t want to give taxpayers’ money to departments that aren’t able to be accountable for their funding.”

Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.

The post Marydel Fire Co. audit raises questions about state oversight appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

The Washington Post asked more than a dozen admissions experts what’s most important when choosing a college. Can you guess which schools these three students chose (and why)?

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner last weekend became the site of the third failed attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump. “I remember the feeling was very similar to when it was clear that the House had been invaded on January 6, 2021,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who was in attendance, tells The Intercept Briefing. “Everybody was afraid that somebody had come in with an AR-15 or something like that.”

This week on the podcast, host Akela Lacy speaks to Raskin about his experience at the dinner and later being asked by CNN’s Dana Bash about whether he’s thinking twice about his “heated rhetoric” toward Trump. “It was curious that, in the wake of this terrible episode, that she would try to equate the way that Democrats talk and the way that President Trump talks,” says Raskin. “He calls people crazy, insane. He calls people evil, wicked. He will buttonhole reporters and tell them that they’re stupid, they’re ugly. … But we try to keep it at the level of policies and their actions.” Some examples, which Raskin discusses, is his forthcoming investigation into Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s role in the administration and conflicts of interest, and his fight in Congress to stop the reauthorization of warrantless surveillance on Americans.

After this latest assassination attempt on Trump’s life, claims that it was staged flooded the internet, from comments section to social media posts to videos of influencers dissecting alleged evidence.

“We are so conditioned to distrust what we are being told by authorities that people immediately began concocting conspiracy theories about it even before we even knew what had happened. Whether it was a shooting or just dishes breaking,” says journalist Mike Rothschild. He’s the author of “The Storm is Upon Us,” the first complete book on the QAnon conspiracy movement, and more recently, a 200-year history of conspiracy theories called “Jewish Space Lasers.”

Rothschild joins Lacy to unpack the growing world of conspiracy theories that question whether the multiple assassination attempts against Trump were staged. They also dive into other conspiracy theories currently capturing the public imagination, such as the dead and missing scientists and a wildfire in Georgia. “This is one of our more fun and disturbing interviews,” says Lacy.

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter for The Intercept.

Katherine Krueger: And I’m Katherine Krueger, the Voices editor at The Intercept.

AL: Katherine, do you want to tell our listeners a little bit about what Voices is before we jump into the show today?

KK: Voices is basically The Intercept’s op-ed section we run. Things that are more narrative, things that are a little more first-person-driven, things that advocate for a specific point of view.

AL: An Intercept editorial board, if you will.

KK: Yes, I’m a one-woman editorial board. [Laughs.]

AL: Speaking of opinions on the news of the day, I am going to throw several topics at you. [Laughs.]

KK: OK. Hit me.

AL: On Thursday morning, news broke that Janet Mills is dropping out of the Maine Senate race. Katherine, what was your reaction to seeing that? 

KK: So Janet Mills is the current governor of Maine, former attorney general, running against Graham Platner in the Democratic primary to be the next senator of Maine.

She was neck and neck with the upstart, insurgent, more-left candidate Graham Platner, who has certainly had his share of controversies during this race. But my jaw dropped when I saw the news that she was dropping out. It feels like all polling that I had seen was that her and Platner were pretty close in the polls.

In a statement she put out, she’s blaming a lack of money for not continuing the race, which is also strange to me because she had all of the backing of the Democratic Party. No one at DNC national was pulling for Platner.

AL: Yeah, this was pretty shocking to me. I also got an AP alert on Wednesday evening. The title was “Underdog Governor,” and the dek was “Democratic Maine Governor Janet Mills says she’s used to being underestimated even as she runs for Senate at age 78.”

Literally 12 hours later, Janet Mills is dropping out of the race for U.S. Senate.

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I was also pretty shocked at the statement that Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Kirsten Gillibrand put out after she dropped out of the race, which was “[Maine Sen. Susan] Collins has never been more vulnerable” — what? “We will work with the presumptive Democratic nominee, Graham Platner, to defeat her.” [Laughs.]

KK: Yeah, it’s a bit strange. Also, I just love the framing in that headline, which is “underdog governor” — don’t those things pull in opposite directions? Also, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer were fully behind Janet Mills. It all strikes me as a bit strange. It also seems Platner had been in general polling ahead of Mills, but it does seem like the race was quite close. My jaw dropped when I saw the news. It seems out of nowhere.

AL: Also in midterms and voting rights news, on Wednesday, the Supreme Court issued a decision that rolled back voting rights. This was focused on a case in Louisiana. After that decision, Louisiana postponed its May 16 primary. Which is kind of insane, considering that that was supposed to happen in two weeks.

KK: It does seem like an existential threat for the Democrats to respond. Gerrymandering has been an issue for a long time. The Republicans are fully aware that without gerrymandering, the force of the electorate is against them. Democrats need to respond as other states, I’m sure, will look to redraw their maps in even more draconian ways.

AL: In that vein, Democrats are also facing intense scrutiny over a series of key votes in the house this week, including on extending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which 42 Democrats voted to support and 22 Republicans opposed on Wednesday. This version would authorize warrantless surveillance of Americans.

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There’s also been some developments in the fight to end the partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security. After a monthslong shutdown, the House passed legislation to reopen DHS on Thursday.

After federal immigration agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota earlier this year, Democrats had attempted to block additional funding for DHS until the agency could make some very modest reforms to ICE and Border Patrol. Democrats’ demands have so far gone nowhere. Though some places are framing the vote on Thursday, which did not fund ICE, as a win for Democrats. Katherine, what do you make of all of this?

KK: Well, it does seem that the Republicans are pretty desperate to restore this funding. You know, as an op-ed editor — Democrats need to hold the line on this.

AL: It’s my understanding that this bill will pay for DHS operations except ICE and parts of Border Patrol through September 30. Those agencies are already being generously funded by the Trump so-called Big Beautiful Bill that approved a record $85 billion for immigration crackdowns. 

KK: Right. So for now it appears to be all eyes on the Democrats to see what they can do, if anything, to gum up the works on billions in new funding for ICE and Customs and Border Protection.

AL: And of course, this is all coming on the heels of the third assassination attempt against President Donald Trump over the weekend, which we talk about with Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who was present at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner during the shooting attempt.

Later in the show, we hear from journalist Mike Rothschild about the world of conspiracy theories swirling around the shooting and other recent events in the U.S.

KK: Akela, you got really great details from Rep. Raskin from inside the Correspondents’ Dinner. So let’s listen to that conversation now.

AL: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing, Rep. Raskin.

Rep. Jamie Raskin: Great to see you, Akela.

AL: So you were at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday evening. Tell us what you witnessed.

JR: I entered maybe 10 minutes before the incident happened and the violence and the confusion and the melee and the chaos. All of a sudden, we heard the loud noises, boom boom boom, glasses flying, plates flying — horrific noises taking place. And then people yelling, “Get down, get down.” Somebody, I think it maybe was a Secret Service agent or an officer, somebody threw me to the ground.

Then we stayed on the floor for two or three minutes before people started saying they got the guy, or it’s OK, you can get up. But there was a lot of confusion.

I remember the feeling was very similar to when it was clear that the House had been invaded on January 6, 2021, and everybody was afraid that somebody had come in with an AR-15 or something like that.

It was a scene of crowd chaos and fear in America, which means people are going to be thinking about the possibility of an assault weapon or some kind of deadly gun attack.

AL: The day after the shooting, you spoke to CNN’s Dana Bash about the incident in an interview where she asked you about the responsibility of Democrats whose rhetoric toward Trump she described as “heated.” Let’s hear that clip.

[Clip from CNN]

Dana Bash: And you have, and as many of your fellow Democrats have, used some heated rhetoric against the president. And do you think twice about that when something like this happens?

Rep. Jamie Raskin: What rhetoric do you have in mind?

DB: Just talking about some of the fact that he is terrible for this country and so on and so forth. I understand that’s your democratic right, but overall, do you have no responsibility?

JR: I have no personal problem with Donald Trump at all. I talk about the policies of this administration. The authoritarianism, like we saw on display in Minneapolis where two of our citizens were gunned down in the streets simply for exercising their First Amendment rights; Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and others have died in custody. I’m talking about policies. I don’t personalize it, and I certainly have never called the press the enemy of the people. I think the press are the people’s best friend, and that’s why it’s written right there into the First Amendment.

We need the press to be a vigilant watchdog against every level of government, federal, state, local, all of it.

[Clip ends]

AL: I also want to note that on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed Democrats who have criticized Trump for the shooting, naming several members of Congress, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

What did you make of Bash’s question to you and the idea behind it, that somehow the real problem here is criticizing the president and his policies, no matter what those policies are?

JR: The freedom of speech has to be wide open, vigorous, and uninhibited in America. But the point I was trying to make was that we should keep to policy matters and political matters, and not personalize it.

So I literally didn’t know what she was talking about. I do not use, or at least I try not to use, the kind of rhetoric that President Trump routinely and habitually uses where he calls people communists, he calls people terrorists. He calls people crazy, insane. He calls people evil, wicked. He will buttonhole reporters and tell them that they’re stupid, they’re ugly, all those kinds of things.

I just thought it was curious that, in the wake of this terrible episode, that [Bash] would try to equate the way that Democrats talk and the way that President Trump talks, because we are indeed very vigorous and aggressive in standing up to violent insurrections and attempts to overthrow elections. And we’re very vigorous and aggressive in opposing illegal wars because Congress has been cut out and so on. But we try to keep it at the level of policies and their actions.

AL: A letter that you sent a few weeks ago to the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner opened by saying, “You are now reportedly participating as ‘Special Envoy for Peace’ in negotiations on behalf of the United States government to address the roiling conflicts in the Middle East. At the same time, you are soliciting billions of dollars from Gulf monarchies for your private business ventures while already managing billions of dollars of their money in your international investment firm.”

The letter is meant to notify Kushner about a forthcoming investigation into his role in the administration and conflicts of interest. What do you hope to investigate here, and can you talk about what you find most concerning about Kushner’s role in trying to negotiate an end to the war in Iran and being involved in other foreign policy ventures?

JR: Any reasonable person would see this as an absolute conflict of interest — that you can’t serve two masters at the same time.

So on the one hand, he’s got billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, and they have specific interests of their own. Their leaders do, like Mohammed bin Salman, the homicidal crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who ordered the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. They’ve got particular interests.

It’s been reported widely that his interest — and therefore Saudi Arabia’s interest — is to keep the war going for as long as possible. There’s money to be made there, and they also want to do everything they can to degrade the power of Iran. That’s one set of interests that Jared Kushner is representing. Those are his business partners, those are his clients.

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And at the same time, he’s representing the United States. And I asked him the question straight up: Are you representing, 100%, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates and Qatar and your business with all of those people? Or are you representing, 100%, the people of the United States? Or do you think you’re doing 50/50? Everybody would see that as a dramatic, egregious conflict of interest to do it.

But, of course, in the Trump era, the Trump officials see it not as a conflict of interest but as a convergence of interest. The way they think of it is, “Oh, this is great. We can go over, and we can talk about the war, and we can also talk about our business deals and recruit more clients and get more money from them.”

There was reportage about how he’s seeking to get even more billions of dollars from them, which obviously means they have additional leverage beyond the money that they’ve already put in. This has never happened in another presidency, anything remotely like it.

So we want to investigate, to get to the bottom of exactly who he’s representing. How is he representing himself? What is the mixture of private and public business he’s conducting when he goes on these trips?

AL: The BBC also just published a report on insider trading around Trump’s presidency amid questions about how markets have responded to the Iran war. The House Oversight Committee released a report earlier this year on Trump and his family profiteering from his administration.

Do you know if that’s going anywhere, and are you looking into any of those issues in your capacity on the Judiciary Committee?

JR: Yes, because his sons clearly are venturing into defense contracting and are participating in various ventures where they are selling goods to the Department of Defense.

So look, this is a president who started off in his first administration dipping his toes in the water to see what kind of reaction there would be to collecting millions of dollars from China and Saudi Arabia and Indonesia and Egypt and all of these countries at the Trump hotels, at the Trump golf courses, the Trump resorts, some other independent business ventures — but it was basically “ma and pa” brick-and-mortar-type ventures.

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Now they’ve gone digital. They’ve gone from millions of dollars to billions of dollars with the crypto schemes and scams that they’ve put together, with the military–industrial complex. All bets are off at this point. They have thrown off any kind of guardrails or inhibitions. 

I fault us for not having impeached him in the first term for violating the foreign emoluments clause and also the domestic emoluments clause, which says that the president is limited to his salary in office and cannot receive any other money from the United States — and yet was regularly billing the Department of Defense, the Secret Service, the Department of Commerce, every other federal department for staying at his hotels, making them stay there, then billing them for it, and the golf courses, and so on and so forth. 

The Constitution tried to create a wall of separation between the president’s private businesses and the public Treasury and the public good. Congress has to act. Obviously, our friends on the MAGA side are not going to act on this. But the Democrats will. We need to reestablish that wall of separation.

AL: While I have you, I know you were on the floor on Wednesday for debate on extending FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and whether the government can conduct warrantless surveillance on the public. The House voted to pass the surveillance program extension in the face of fierce opposition from critics and civil liberties advocates. What is the latest here?

JR: It’s an interesting situation because Chairman Jim Jordan, my counterpart on the Judiciary Committee — I’m the ranking member, he’s the chairman for the Republicans — he represented. Nobody else was willing to speak for the FISA bill on the House side. He had no speakers participating in his roster.

I had tons of people who wanted to speak against it and was able to have several of them do it. He was even uncharacteristically subdued in his presentation because he had taken the position historically that there needs to be a warrant requirement and probable cause before you start searching the foreign intelligence database drawn from all the communications companies, emails, texts, phone calls. But he’s changed his position in working with the White House. 

The press at least, is reporting this has to do with his desire to become the next minority leader. So I do not think he advanced the most coherent arguments for this. 

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Our position was simple, which is that before you go searching about in querying information that exists in a foreign intelligence database that was gathered without any Fourth Amendment standards — no probable cause, no search warrant, none of it — before you go searching for the information about hundreds of millions of Americans, you’ve got to go and talk to a judge first. The Fourth Amendment says search warrants have to be based on probable cause, and you need to interpose a neutral, independent magistrate between the government and its detective work and its searches.

They say, no, let’s just leave it up to the FBI director to be reasonable. Well, that’s Kash Patel. When there were complaints about that, even on the Republican side, they added something to say, Kash Patel has got to report what he’s doing to Tulsi Gabbard. So if you think having Kash Patel report to Tulsi Gabbard is a great substitute for the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, go ahead and vote for this.

But if you want to stand by the Constitution, this is not legislation for you. So the wheel is still in spin as we work our way back and forth between the House and the Senate.

Kash Patel had been spending a lot of taxpayer money by getting FBI agents to shepherd and chauffeur his girlfriend around the country for security and for transportation. When the New York Times somehow got ahold of that, somebody leaked it and wrote a story about it, Kash Patel’s response was not, “Oh my God, I’ve made such a mistake, I’ve gotta apologize and stop using taxpayer money and SWAT teams to chauffeur my girlfriend around America.” No. His response was, let’s investigate her. Let’s search all the databases that we’ve got. 

So if you think that’s the guy you want to trust to be respecting the privacy rights of the American people and the Fourth Amendment rights — fine, this is for you. But we had more than a dozen Republicans join us after our debate in opposing it, the vast majority of Democrats voted against it, but they were able to win that one on the floor. We’ll see where it goes, and whether our friends on the Senate side can hang tough.

AL: Thank you so much, Congressman Raskin.

JR: Thanks for having me, Akela.

Break

AL: After the latest assassination attempt on President Donald Trump over the weekend, claims that it was a false flag, another orchestrated and staged incident flooded the internet, from the comments section to social media posts to videos of influencers dissecting the alleged evidence. 

Today I speak to journalist Mike Rothschild about the growing world of conspiracy theories that question whether the multiple assassination attempts against Trump were staged. We’ll also dive into other conspiracy theories currently capturing the public imagination, from dead and missing scientists to a wildfire in Georgia. 

Mike writes “Rough Edges” for TPM, covering fringe groups, conspiracy theories, moral panics, and how the internet broke our brains. He is the author of the first complete book on the QAnon conspiracy movement called “The Storm is Upon Us” and, most recently, a 200-year history of conspiracy theories called “Jewish Space Lasers.” 

Mike, welcome to The Intercept Briefing. 

Mike Rothschild: Thank you for having me. 

AL: Last week’s attempt to assassinate Trump already feels far away. But this was the third such attempt, after two other failed attacks in recent years. One in Butler, Pennsylvania, and another in West Palm Beach, Florida. Mike, one of the reasons that we wanted to bring you on the show is to discuss a growing chorus of online chatter claiming these assassination attempts were staged.

Even before the latest attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, prominent MAGA voices like Marjorie Taylor Green were raising questions. Greene wrote on X, “I’m not calling the Butler assassination a hoax. But there are a lot of questions that deserve public answers. I’m asking why won’t Trump release the information about Matthew Crooks?” Crooks being the 20-year-old gunman killed by Secret Service while trying to attack Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania two years ago.

To start, can you lay out what we know so far about what happened on Saturday and the suspect, Cole Tomas Allen, the 31-year-old from Torrance, California? And then we’ll get into the various conspiracy theories surrounding the shooting.

MR: For an incident that happened fairly recently, we know quite a bit. We know what his motive was because he sent a manifesto to his friends and family. We know what he did because it was caught on camera. He was armed with a shotgun and knives. He ran toward a medal detector on the floor above where the actual White House Correspondents’ Dinner was taking place. He never got in the room. He never actually fired a shot at Trump or was even close. And he was subdued by the Secret Service and security and taken away. This is not the kind of thing where you would think that there would be conspiracy theories about it being fake because we have a timeline of what happened almost immediately.

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But we are so conditioned to distrust what we are being told by authorities that people immediately began concocting conspiracy theories about it — even before we even knew what had happened. Whether it was a shooting or just dishes breaking. 

AL: Let’s unpack some of the “fake shooting” claims. You wrote on Bluesky, “‘Trump keeps staging assassination attempts’ is the same Infowars brainworm strain as ‘Obama keeps staging mass shootings.’ Different party, same paranoia.” What are the conspiratorial claims surrounding the assassination attempt on Saturday? 

MR: The biggest one is that it was staged — that Trump hired this person and set all of this up, and that everyone in the room who needed to know where they were going to go knew about it, and you could tell from the looks on their faces and the way security acted, and he was staging all of this so that he could bump his approval ratings or that he could create more interest for his super-mega ballroom bunker.

All of these are things that have been said about other incidents involving Trump. It’s just that it happened incredibly quickly. I don’t think we even had the name of the suspect before people started saying that it was staged.

AL: You also had Karoline Leavitt having said there will be shots fired tonight, and people taking that and running with it as the verbal version of numerology. I don’t know what the word for that is. 

MR: Right. There is actually a term for it. It’s this term called “predictive programming.” 

AL: Thank you. Thank you. 

MR: Yes, I wish I didn’t know that. In the conspiracy world, it means that the cabal that perpetrates these plots has to tell us what they’re going to do for karmic reasons, but they do it in a way that we won’t understand it. You get this a lot with “The Simpsons” ironically, or other pieces of entertainment where there’s a clue to some upcoming event that’s hidden in a cutaway on the Simpsons or in the plot of something, and it’s the cabal telling us what they have to do.

I once had somebody say, “Oh, it’s like vampires, they have to be invited into your house.” And I said, “Well, vampires aren’t real either.” It’s like come on, what are we doing?

AL: [Laughs.] What are we doing? That is the question, though. What makes these conspiracy theories take hold, as opposed to coming out of something like this with more of a collective sense of an effort to address gun violence, or talk about how these incidents are used to police dissent and criticism of the president?

Last year, we had the Minnesota lawmaker and her husband who were killed in their home by a Trump supporter who had radical anti-abortion views. This is in the vein of our long-standing inability to address mass shootings, but what makes it easier to respond to something like that with a conspiracy theory rather than some other kind of response?

MR: Conspiracy theories are easy. They don’t require any evidence. They don’t require any research or self-reflection. Looking at an incident where the highest-ranked people in the United States are all in one room, and the security isn’t as tight as it should be, and guns are too easy to get, and there’s too many people who have mental illness because they’ve been radicalized and brain-poisoned on the internet — those are really difficult issues to solve. They go to the core of American politics and communication right now. But just deciding that it was staged so that the president could get his ballroom bunker or get 5 points on his approval rating, that’s easy. That doesn’t take any effort. 

And then you can do it immediately. If you do it well, you can get viral clout out of it. You get clicks, you make money. It’s a very easy solution to a very, very complicated problem. 

AL: Right now, in the political environment that we’re in there’s always a rush after these shootings to ascribe either far-left or far-right extremism to the suspect or the assailant.

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We saw that in this case, where it turns out he seems like a pretty normal centrist, liberal Democrat. After the Minnesota killing of Melissa Hortman and her husband, we spoke to journalist Taylor Lorenz about how quick prominent figures on the right took to social media to blame the left for their deaths.

Utah Sen. Mike Lee said it was due to “Marxism.” Elon Musk claimed it was the “far left.” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, said it “seems to be a leftist.” Lorenz said, “There’s an entire right-wing media machine aimed at pushing disinformation around breaking news events and specifically attributing violence to the left.”

What’s your assessment of how this dynamic works and how it worked in this last shooting as well? 

MR: There is. We don’t know how organized or coordinated this apparatus is, but it clearly exists. Minutes after this incident broke on social media, you already had people, “Oh, that’s why we need the ballroom. We gotta have more security around the president. He needs to have his bunker where he can never leave.” You had dozens of extremely popular influencers and politicians all saying this at the same time. These people they coordinate their messaging because that’s what you do in politics.

So I think there is a very real apparatus designed to push the blame onto a convenient scapegoat. Usually someone who is not aligned with the president’s values, and to turn it into something that the president can use for his own ends. Some of that I think revolves around this particular president having a very vocal cult of personality around him.

But I think it’s also that we are so used to things happening very quickly and immediately being seized upon for political ends. We all do this now. It’s just that the right is a lot better at it. 

AL: The other piece of this is that Donald Trump himself — his political career — has been fueled by conspiracy theories that propelled him to the White House. How has Trump in particular used that race that we’re talking about to ascribe blame and the current media environment that has elevated conspiracy theories to where they’re now shaping national discourse and even policy? We could talk about RFK Jr. all day. 

MR: Donald Trump was really the first conspiracy theorist presidential candidate. He rose to political power certainly based on his celebrity and his apparent wealth, but also because he was able to say things that had been very popular on the fringes for a long time that the mainstream right really didn’t want anything to do with. 

Things like Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Antonin Scalia was murdered. Obama is secretly a Muslim. Vaccines cause autism. These are things that mainstream Republicans wanted absolutely nothing to do with. But they were incredibly popular on the sort of fringes and sometimes not the fringes of the far right. 

If you look in the history of these things, you look at some of the more popular conspiracy theory books — and I’ve written about this before — you have the 1970s book, “None Dare Call It Conspiracy,” which was written by two members of the John Birch Society, the far-right anti-Communist group. It sold 5 million copies in the United States in the early ’70s. Clearly there is a market for this, and clearly there are a lot of people who believe this.

Trump was just the first person to say it in a way that made it mainstream grist for discourse. And, of course, everybody’s now catching up to him. So when Trump spouts these insane conspiracy theories or pushes these ridiculous memes, he’s doing something that he’s been doing for the last decade and he’s very good at, and that people expect from him and want from him. He’s filling this niche that I think a lot of people didn’t want to believe was there. 

AL: If you look at the current podcast charts in the news or politics category or the top YouTube shows, you’ll find shows swimming in conspiracy theories topping those charts, like Candace Owens’s podcast. We know the media environment is fragmented. We have a problem with media literacy, yada, yada, yada. But is there a way to come back from that level of saturation of, conspiracy is now the most popular form of media consumption? What do we do with that? 

MR: Unfortunately, I don’t know if there’s a way to do it at scale. I don’t know if there’s a way to glue everyone’s brains back together after 10 years of this insanity, because I think it is extremely lucrative. 

AL: What an image. 

MR: Yeah. It’s extremely lucrative, and it really fills a need that a lot of people have. These are very chaotic times. I think people flock to conspiracy theories and conspiracy theory content creators because these are the people who are saying, “Yeah, this is all crazy, but here’s what’s really going on.” 

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There’s a kind of a smugness to the conspiracy theory world: this idea of, I know something you don’t know. I’ve got the secret knowledge. I know what’s really happening. And I’m going to share it with you because you think I’m the crazy one, but I think you’re the crazy one. And that’s just a very basic human nature kind of thing.

AL: When you talk about filling this need, I think that’s really a key piece of it, because it brings to mind what Cole wrote in his manifesto about feeling like he was filling this role that no one else was taking up — this responsibility to fight back against these raging evils in the administration, some of which is fueled by conspiracy. He writes a lot about the Epstein stuff, which we’ll get into, which is ironically the least conspiratorial part of this. It’s just real and horrible. 

But he talks about feeling like nobody else was going to pick up the torch and do this. It’s interesting to me that that sense of finding meaning in something or taking responsibility where no one else will take it, is also caught up in how we come to believe these conspiracy theories in the first place.

MR: There’s a grandiosity to this. There’s a messianic fervor to a lot of these things. You hear it if you listen to Alex Jones. “I’m standing in the gap against evil, and they’re all coming after me because they know I’m a threat!” It’s the same thing, it’s the same delusions of grandeur.

Now with somebody like Alex Jones or Candace Owens or Tucker [Carlson], you wonder how much of that is a character. Not all of it, but some of it is. 

With a guy like Cole, it’s not. He really believes this, and there is, of course, an inherent irrationality to strapping up a shotgun and going to try to kill the president. It’s not something a rational person does. 

AL: In Trump’s second term, there are also some signs that some of these conspiracy theorists are breaking with him, including prominent figures that we’re talking about, like Candace Owens and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Where and when did you begin to see cracks in that part of Trump’s allies, and what is driving those fractures? 

MR: The Trump relationship with the conspiracy community — it’s very hot and cold. They will turn on him, but then they’ll always come back. But when they really did start to lose faith, I think, for good and much more vocally was Epstein.

This idea that we’re going to break open the Epstein files, we’re going to put everything out there. They had that infamous meeting at the White House with the Epstein files, phase one binders, and they’re all standing there looking very smug. 

Then Trump goes, oh, there’s nothing there. There’s no Epstein files. It’s a hoax. The Democrats did that. Biden and Obama did the Epstein files. You know anyone who thinks that is an idiot. 

These are influencers who helped get him back into office. And trump is now telling them they’re idiots for believing what he said he was going to do about Epstein. You can only humiliate somebody so many times before they actually start to have feelings.

So I think we started to see it happen with Epstein and then it really happened with Iran. The Iran war really was an abrogation of what Trump said he stood for. He said up and down, I’m the peace president. There’s not going to be any more stupid Middle East forever wars. We’re going to be America first. We’re going to go back to isolationism. We’re not getting involved. Maybe we’ll bomb them if we have to, but we’re not going to war.

Then we go to war. And we go to war for reasons nobody can articulate. The reason changes constantly. We don’t know what the objective is. We don’t know how we know if we’ve achieved the objective. It just looks like yet another Middle Eastern misadventure. 

A lot of these people realized their audiences are turning on Trump. If you’re somebody like Tucker or Alex or Candace Owens, you kind of know that you can’t trust Trump, but you still feel stupid. You have feelings, you’re still a person. So I think there is a sense of betrayal and of feeling dumb.

But more than that, they know their audiences are feeling betrayed and dumb. They know their audiences thought we were going to get $2 gas prices — that hasn’t happened. Our electric bills are going to get cut in half — that hasn’t happened. We were going to have so much tariff money we wouldn’t need to pay income tax — that hasn’t happened.

So these people are feeling the effect of Trump’s lying and storytelling in their pocketbooks and in their fuel tanks. And now they’re getting told, yeah, Iran, we gotta go to a war with Iran. You said you weren’t going to go to a war with Iran.

His audiences are feeling betrayed and the influencers are going where their audiences are going because they know they’ve got to start getting ready for a post-Trump world. They just have to do it a little bit faster than they thought they were going to have to. 

AL: You’ve also written extensively about the right-wing conspiracy movement QAnon.

In a story you wrote for TPM recently, you wrote about how the movement differs from the Epstein case. You wrote, “Where QAnon was different, and where it failed spectacularly, was in promising that justice would finally be delivered to these untouchable insiders. It offered believers not nihilistic scapegoating, but a utopia that was just a few executions away. The basis of Q, and why it was so compelling to so many people, was that the monsters were finally going to be brought down by Donald Trump, a figure of outsider wealth beholden to nobody except those who elected him.”

Can you talk about how these worlds intersect — the Epstein and QAnon conspiracies — and what it says about both our political discourse, but also accountability and lack thereof? 

MR: Lack thereof. Yeah. I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds on the Q drops because no one will survive that. But Epstein is a central figure in this world. This idea that he’s got this satanic temple and these tunnels and he’s trafficking all these girls on the planes with Bill Clinton and all these super elite power brokers and Trump is going to take them down. That was always the biggest part of it. That these people have been an untouchable cabal for thousands of years, and it’s Donald Trump who’s finally going to take them down. 

But of course he’s not. So you need an explanation for why he’s not doing it. So something like QAnon invents an explanation of, he’s doing it — it’s just in secret. And it’s happening in all of these ways that the public doesn’t know about, but I’m going to tell you about them so that you don’t lose faith. 

At some point you have to start delivering. I think there was a sense when Trump came back into office of, “OK we’re going to get rid of all this. We’re going to undo the stolen election, we’re going to undo all the Covid stuff. We’re going to finally bring down the elite trafficking rings. Like no one’s standing in Trump’s way.” Then he just says, the whole thing is stupid and nothing’s going to happen, and you’re an idiot if you believed him.

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So the idea of Q was right because there’s elite traffickers. Well, there’s always been elites who’ve gotten away with terrible things that the rest of us would all be in prison for. The point of QAnon was that they were going to go down, they were going to be punished, they were going to be executed, they were going to be mass arrests, and Trump was going to get rid of all of these people.

Trump hasn’t gotten rid of them. He’s protected all of them. You’re finally seeing some of the rank-and-file Trump believers who are still maybe hardcore conspiracy believers going, “Yeah, this guy lied to us. The whole time he’s lied to us.” It is a moment where everything that you have created for yourself over the last decade is starting to fall apart because there was never anything there. 

I think that’s actually how a lot of deradicalization starts, is one thing doesn’t make sense in the world of conspiracies. And when you start looking into that one thing, the whole thing falls apart. Now, I don’t know that these people are going to be deradicalized.

I don’t think a lot of these conspiracy influencers are giving up on the precepts of Trumpism, but they’re giving up on Trump. That’s at least something for us to grab onto. Not with Tucker Carlson, but with the people who listen to Tucker Carlson.

AL: I want to move on to the other conspiracy theories that have been capturing the public’s attention right now.

We’ve been talking a lot about Trump-world conspiracy theories, many of which are now coming back to bite him. But there is a sort of unrelated conspiracy theory that’s been gaining momentum recently that the president is paying attention to and that Republicans are now trying to capitalize on, I would say. This is about the dead and missing scientists. Walk us through that, I know you’ve written about this recently. 

MR: So this conspiracy theory is a very old one. There have been many other conspiracy theories that involve lists of people that are being bumped off by certain powerful figures because they knew too much or it’s part of a plot. 

You had this with the Clinton body count, the Kennedy witnesses. You go all the way back to King Tut’s curse — people who were involved in the opening of King Tut’s tomb were all being killed. So in the case of the missing scientists, it’s this list of around a dozen people who are said to be scientists — not all of them are — who supposedly work in high technology, defense, aerospace, but also UFOs, free energy, anti-gravity, exoplanets. 

It’s been turned into this, “All of these scientists involved in alien technology are being kidnapped, and what are they really doing? And oh my God, it’s so horrible.” I’ve seen these things before and actually one of the clusters of these missing scientists is where I live in Pasadena, California, at [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory].

I know a lot of people who work at JPL. I’ve toured JPL. Thousands of people work there. The idea that three or four of them over the course of a couple of years would have something unfortunate happen to them is not at all a conspiracy, just the same as a few people working at Los Alamos in New Mexico, bad things happening to a few people there. Not a conspiracy, it’s just statistics. 

Linking all of these people together creates a conspiracy theory out of nothing, and there’s no indication of what this plot actually is. So one of these people was an expert in plasma physics. One was an expert in exoplanets. One was a pharmaceutical executive. One of them was an administrative assistant who worked at Los Alamos. One was a construction foreman at JPL, I think. None of these people have anything to do with each other, except they all are sort of science-adjacent — like millions of other people in the United States.

So you have a conspiracy theory that is working purely on people’s lack of understanding about statistics, lack of understanding about science, and of course, this [Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena] craze that we’re going through right now. So it’s taking a fragment of pop culture and turning it into a dastardly plot. 

And because of course, the White House is full of conspiracy theorists, they’re able to talk about this, and then they go, oh yeah we’re investigating that. We’re going to get to the bottom of it. There’s nothing to investigate, there’s nothing to get to the bottom of, except they need more content. They know that people are hungry for more conspiracies. Here’s a really juicy one that you can just serve up to people. 

AL: So you mentioned JPL, that’s NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and UAP is what we’re calling UFOs now?

MR: What we’re calling UFOs. 

AL: The new term for UFOs.

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I will mention that the FBI is now saying that it is looking into connections between these missing and dead scientists. And on Monday, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee announced that it is also investigating reports of the deaths and disappearances.

They released a statement saying that “reports raise questions about a possible sinister connection between … [these] disappearances.” 

MR: [Laughs.] Oh, God.

AL: So, that is how the government is addressing this right now. 

Then actually, I saw this as we were preparing for the show. I had not heard about this, but I don’t know if you’ve seen, there’s another story about conspiracy theories that this wildfire in Georgia was staged to clear the path for a data center.

Have you heard about that? 

MR: I’ve heard a little bit about it. I am not surprised. I can tell you firsthand about wildfire conspiracy theories. We lost our home in the Eaton fire in January of 2025. I’m actually writing a book about it right now. 

AL: Oh, gosh. That’s awful, I’m sorry. 

MR: Yeah. Not been my favorite couple of years, but hey, that’s OK. The exact same theories were spread about the fire that I went through — that it was set to clear land for a smart city in Malibu, that it was set to destroy evidence of trafficking or to build Olympic venues. It is the same strain of paranoia as the missing scientists.

It’s something that wasn’t supposed to happen, and we don’t understand why it’s happening, and therefore there must be a plot behind it. There is something behind it: It’s climate change. 

AL: It’s climate change.

MR: But that’s the thing that people people don’t ever want to talk about. So they make up something so they don’t have to talk about the actual reasons why these things are happening more frequently. Climate change isn’t the only reason, but it’s a big reason. The more you create these fantastical conspiracy theories, the less you have to talk about the actual thing that’s happening.

It’s a psychology that we’re seeing over and over again. 

AL: You wrote a 200-year history about conspiracy theories. They obviously aren’t new, but what does that history tell us about American political culture? Is this unique at all to the United States? How has it evolved over the centuries and how would you characterize the moment that we’re living in now?

MR: It’s a useful question in the context of the speed that everything is happening at. Conspiracy theories are not new to the United States. They’re not inherent to the U.S. They have been part of human interaction always. If you go back to the great fire of Rome, there were whispers that Nero had set it on purpose for his own political ends.

That’s just how we look at things. We look at things we don’t understand, that are dangerous, and we create a plot and we create reasons why these things are happening. 

We live in these extremely chaotic times where a lot of things are happening very quickly. We don’t understand them. We don’t have the trust in the authorities who are supposed to tell us why these things are happening and break them out for us.

So we listen to people who are telling us what we want to hear, who are making us feel better, and making us feel like someone is in control of all of this. It hits on a very particular human need for patterns and for order and for understanding. 

So yes, we are certainly in a time when conspiracy theories are much more mainstream than they’ve ever been, much more lucrative than they’ve ever been. But we’ve always had a strain of distrust and paranoia. 

It’s very American, but it’s not exclusively American. It’s just that right now, we are in a time when we can all connect with each other. These people used to be siloed and isolated; no one wanted to talk to them or be around them. Now they find each other and they create communities, and they create Facebook groups and message boards.

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Sometimes if they’re really good at what they do, they can get elected to office or write bestselling books. This stuff is just everywhere now. Everybody seems to know somebody who’s going through some version of this, and it’s very unfortunate. 

AL: We’re going to leave it there.

Mike Rothschild, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing. This is one of our more fun and disturbing interviews. 

MR: Fun for me maybe. Thank you. This was great.

AL: And that does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept do not exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

Let us know what you think of this episode, or if you want to send us a general message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post Another Assassination Attempt, More Fertilizer for Conspiracy Theories appeared first on The Intercept.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Both Kent and Sussex counties are designated health care shortage areas by the federal government, with residents experiencing access barriers. ChristianaCare is looking to enter one of those shortage areas with a new campus in Camden as part of a larger statewide expansion. 

ChristianaCare, Delaware’s largest hospital system, announced on Thursday it plans to build a $58.1 million health campus in Kent County, continuing its push into contested southern market areas. The hospital’s announcement also comes two months after it said it would build a campus in Georgetown. 

The new 38,000‑square‑foot campus would open in Camden about a mile from the Walmart on U.S. Route 13. The healthcare giant also said in a statement the new campus would offer both emergency and inpatient beds, as well as primary care and outpatient services. 

It hopes to open the facility by late 2028 or early 2029. 

“We are investing in facilities that bring care closer to where people live,” outgoing ChristianaCare CEO Dr. Janice Nevin said in the statement. “This campus reflects our commitment to ensuring every Delawarean, no matter their ZIP code, can count on timely, compassionate, high-quality care close to home.”

ChristianaCare also said the new facility would bring 83 new jobs. As it has done with other recently announced ventures, ChristianaCare positioned its expansion as a means of supporting Delaware’s growing and aging population. 

Two of southern Delaware’s largest health systems Beebe and TidalHealth did not respond to an immediate request for comment about ChristianaCare’s growing expansion into southern Delaware. 

Kent County’s primary hospital system, Bayhealth, said in a statement it “remains focused” on providing care to its patients. But the hospital also said care should not be “fragmented.” 

“We recognize that patients across Delaware are looking for faster access to care,” a spokesperson for the hospital said in an email. “Equally important is making sure that care is not fragmented and delivered in the right setting so patients receive what they need without unnecessary cost or complexity.”

During the hospital’s certificate of public review process, where ChristianaCare will pitch state regulators why this expansion is necessary, Bayhealth said it will “actively participate” by sharing data and ways to address cost, access and quality of care in the area.

While Beebe and TidalHealth have yet to comment directly on Thursday’s expansion announcement, they did discuss regional trends at Spotlight Delaware’s inaugural Health Care Summit on Wednesday.

Steve Leonard, the CEO of TidalHealth which operates the Nanticoke Hospital in Seaford, said he’s not opposed to competition in the region, but that new services should be weighed against their impact on the entire healthcare ecosystem. 

TidalHealth does not have a presence in Kent County, but as other hospital systems like Bayhealth and Beebe expand across Sussex County, he said it is indicative of the state’s growing population and need for services. 

“I think when people come in and compete, it’s not a bad thing,” Leonard said during a panel discussion. “The population’s growing, I mean that’s the reality.”

Dr. William Chasanov, who is Beebe’s chief health systems design officer, said he supports competition in the rapidly growing region, but that there should be more coordination around what services are offered where.

“Competition makes us all better to do a better job for the community that we serve,” Chasanov said during a panel. “I also believe that healthcare is … a finite resource, so we all do have to be very careful about what services that we offer.” 

Recent expansion

In recent months, ChristianaCare announced expansions both in and out of the state after saying last summer it would spend $865 million on new health facilities in the coming years. 

In February, the healthcare giant announced it aims to open a new $65 million campus in Georgetown. Months before that, it said it was building a health center dedicated to treating cancer in Middletown.

The healthcare system expects its new Georgetown facility — which would offer emergency beds, behavioral, specialty and primary care — to open by 2028. It is partnering with developer Emerus Holdings to build the facility at 20769 DuPont Blvd., just south of the Bridgeville Road intersection. 

After its failed bid to merge with Southern New Jersey’s Virtua Health, the Georgetown and Camden plans indicate that ChristianaCare sees more opportunity in its own backyard, and is willing to disregard the loose geographic monopolies that healthcare systems have enjoyed in Delaware for decades.

Its Middletown cancer center, which is slated to open in May 2027, would solidify its foothold in the suburbs south of the C&D Canal. The $92 million health center would bring primary care, behavioral health, pediatrics, neurology and cardiovascular care, among others.

ChristianaCare’s new expansions into Delaware’s southern counties also comes as federal funds begin to flow into the state to support and expand rural health initiatives.

Since 2020, ChristianaCare also has ventured deeper into the suburban Philadelphia health market, purchasing defunct hospitals and building its own in the surrounding towns. The hospital system announced last year it would partner with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, better known as CHOP, leaving Delaware’s chief pediatric hospital, Nemours Children’s Health, on the sidelines.

The post ChristianaCare ventures deeper into southern Delaware with Camden expansion appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Meeting ‘my people’ – video gamers with very long memories – took me back to an era of machine play that lacked megabytes but had far more tangible presence

I want to tell you about the game that has made me the happiest this month. It’s a game I didn’t complete. It’s a game I didn’t even start. I just held it. And smiled. I have played the game before, but not for many years. Forty of them to be precise.

The game is Daley Thompson’s Super Test for the ZX Spectrum.

Hundreds of foreign doctors about to complete training in the U.S. will have to leave the country if the federal government doesn't rapidly process their visa waiver applications, immigration attorneys say.

Americans are fed up with an establishment that has abandoned the working class. It’s time to organize for change

On Friday, more than 3,000 May Day protests will take place across the United States – more than double last year’s number. Workers, students and families are calling for a strike: no school, no work, no shopping and an end to billionaire rule. I’m headed to the streets with members of my own union, the United Auto Workers, in New York City.

Americans are fed up – and not just with Donald Trump. People are angry at a Democratic party establishment that has abandoned the working class, that treated the labor movement like a turnout machine instead of the pillar of democracy it is, that funded a genocide in Gaza while ignoring a cost of living crisis, and that took its own base so completely for granted that it pushed millions out of the political process entirely.

Claire Valdez is a New York state assemblymember, union organizer, and Democratic socialist running for Congress

The Federal Bureau of Investigation multiplied the number of employees assigned to immigration by a factor of 23 in the first nine months of the second Trump administration, The Intercept has found.

There were 279 FBI personnel working on “immigration-related matters” before Trump took office in January 2025, according to bureau records The Intercept obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. By September, that number had ballooned to more than 6,500.

In total, 9,161 people at the FBI worked on immigration between Trump’s inauguration and September 7 of last year, out of a total of 38,000 FBI employees. 

“That is a huge, huge number of people,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council who has testified before Congress on the cost of mass deportations. “This is just a somewhat shocking scale that we’re looking at.”

The flood of FBI personnel into immigration work came in the early days of the tenure of Director Kash Patel, who has shown a willingness to follow Trump’s orders without question or exception. According to David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, the redirection may have hampered the FBI’s ability to perform criminal investigative work.

“That’s a striking diversion of resources away from public safety,” Bier said. “We’re talking about the FBI diverting people away from criminal investigations and ongoing criminal activity and into civil immigration enforcement. This is showing the extent to which the resources of the FBI were put at the disposal of Immigration and Customs Enforcement contrary to the intent of Congress, and the abuse of the funds that Congress grants the FBI to accomplish its mission.”

The documents The Intercept received did not make clear if the employees assigned to immigration were part of the FBI’s total workforce or its smaller subset of 13,700 special agents. In September, the Cato Institute published a disclosure from ICE reporting that 2,840 out of 13,700 FBI special agents — 1 in 5 — were being redirected to work on ICE enforcement and removal operations.

“While the FBI does not comment on specific personnel numbers or decisions, FBI agents and staff are dedicated professionals working around the clock to defend the homeland and crush violent crime,” an FBI spokesperson said in a statement to The Intercept. “The FBI continuously assesses and realigns our resources to ensure the safety of the American people, and we surge resources based on needs.”

ICE did not respond to a request for comment

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Trump has diverted thousands of agents at a number of federal agencies — including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the IRS, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — to aid in his administration’s deportation machine. 

The shift started as soon as he returned to office. By January 26, 2025, just six days after Trump’s second inauguration, the FBI had 1,390 employees working on immigration. In the first months of Trump’s second term, he ramped up arrests of immigrants around the country and authorized federal law enforcement at agencies that don’t work on immigration to help his administration carry out its deportation policies.

The FBI reassignments exploded the following month. As the Trump administration issued a directive to allow law enforcement to enter the homes of people it claimed were suspected gang members without a warrant, the number of FBI personnel working on immigration rose to 2,941. 

September’s 6,500-employee number wasn’t even the peak. The number continued increasing throughout the spring and reached over 5,700 in May, when the administration set a new quota to arrest 3,000 people a day. 

Another shocking detail, Bier said, was that the number of FBI agents being diverted to immigration work remained high even after Congress passed July’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, which directed an additional $170 billion in funding for immigration and border spending. 

The law “infused tens of billions of dollars” for immigration enforcement,” Bier said, ” — “and yet there’s no let-up.”

“This is not about ‘ICE doesn’t have the money,’” Bier said. “ICE has the money, and they’re going ahead with using criminal law enforcement for mass deportation purposes.”

It’s not clear what the FBI’s “immigration-related” work entails, but the rapid expansion suggests FBI staff are working on issues unrelated to the FBI’s mandate, Reichlin-Melnick added.

“If you look at how quickly the scale of this ramped up and compare it to what we know was happening at the time, it’s very clear that a lot of this — probably the significant majority — was immigration enforcement,” Reichlin-Melnick said.

The increase coincides with an increase in FBI presence at immigration raids. On Wednesday, FBI agents were among the federal law enforcement personnel carrying out raids in Minnesota related to the right-wing allegations of fraud against the Somali immigrant community. 

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The number of FBI personnel working on immigration also raises national security concerns, Reichlin-Melnick added. The FBI had to reassign agents to work on counterterrorism, after previously diverting them to work on immigration, following the U.S. bombing of Iran last summer. 

“The national security implications of this are likely significant. In September 2025, 6,500 FBI personnel were working at least an hour of their day on immigration-related matters,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “There is no situation in which the administration has made the security of the nation better by reassigning these agents.” 

Bier agreed the diversion was potentially dangerous, pointing to the risks brought on by the current U.S. war on Iran.

“Anytime you’re involved in a war — and we certainly are — you should be careful about retaliation and monitoring those threats,” Bier said. “It makes little sense to divert people away from that during this time, especially.”

Update: May 1, 2026, 12:32 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with a comment from the FBI sent after publication.

The post FBI Redirected a Quarter of Staff to Target Immigrants Under Trump’s Deportation Push appeared first on The Intercept.

Germany rearms – but can it lead? Europe’s hesitant superpower in waiting Expert comment jon.wallace 1 May 2026

Germany is ready to rearm, but faces many political challenges to achieve strategic leadership.

‘Zeitenwende’ – that deliberately weighty term coined by former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – described a watershed era. It proposed not a policy adjustment, but a real rupture in Germany’s strategic posture. Yet it is only over the past year, under Chancellor Friedrich Merz, that the full measure of what it entails has become clear.

This is not merely higher defence spending. It is a redefinition of Germany’s place in Europe, and of Europe’s dependence on Germany.

Zeitenwende was never just about budgets or brigades. It required that Germany, long accustomed to exercising influence through economic might, must assume the burdens of strategic agency in Europe and translate its latent power into strategic leadership.

That is an almost psychological challenge for a country whose political culture has been shaped by a tradition of restraint, especially regarding the use of its military.

Rearmament without doctrine risks strategic incoherence

Germany’s scale, fiscal capacity, and centrality within the European economy all point in one direction: if Europe is to acquire the strategic coherence needed to defend itself, Berlin will be an unavoidable and increasingly assertive player.

Germany is already moving. An €100 billion special fund has been established for the Bundeswehr (Germany’s armed forces). F-35 aircraft are being procured to replace the Tornado in Germany’s NATO nuclear-sharing role, with first deliveries scheduled for 2026. Defence spending is rising steadily beyond 2 per cent. All signal a shift that would have been politically inconceivable a decade ago.

Be that as it may, inevitability is generally a poor guide to political reality. Power cannot simply be accumulated; it has to be translated – into doctrine, usable force, and a culture of decision.

Here, Germany’s trajectory remains uncertain. Berlin has yet to articulate a coherent military strategy that matches its financial commitments. The Federal Ministry of Defence has developed a Military Strategy for the Armed Forces, to complement the 2023 National Security Strategy.

But these documents remain a framework rather than a doctrine. They signal political intent but do not resolve trade-offs between territorial defence, expeditionary commitments, and industrial mobilization. In practice, Germany continues to rely heavily on NATO planning and American enablers – a dependence exposed as politically fragile amid renewed tensions with a more transactional White House under Donald Trump. 

Rearmament, in this sense, risks outpacing strategy – not because strategy is absent, but because it is still being worked out, and under conditions of exceptional geopolitical pressure.

The Bundeswehr: paper tiger?

The Bundeswehr illustrates the gap between resources and readiness. Despite new funding, deficiencies persist in equipment availability, ammunition stocks, and procurement speed.

Related work

The UK and Germany should combine their strengths to address weaknesses in European defence

The challenge is not only one of volume, but of usability. Germany has pledged to provide combat-ready formations for NATO, yet progress on assembling fully equipped and deployable brigades is slow and troublesome.

Efforts to permanently station a brigade in Lithuania are putting additional pressure on already stretched Bundeswehr units at home. And delays in delivery of everything from communications systems to armoured vehicles point to deep institutional inertia.

This is a serious problem: a superpower is not defined by how much it spends, but by how quickly and coherently it can convert resources into deployable military assets. Germany is still struggling with that conversion.

The growing burden of domestic politics

It would be a mistake, however, to treat rearmament as a mere budgetary episode. It is a generational commitment made in the context of a rapidly fragmenting political landscape.

Indeed, German coalition politics has rarely appeared more brittle. Merz’s popularity has eroded at an unusually rapid pace for a new chancellor. His government struggles to maintain cohesion, while the AfD is surging to historic polling highs and looks poised for further significant breakthroughs in regional elections. Defence is increasingly drawn into ideological debate.

An effort to send German Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine in 2023 is instructive: what might have been a straightforward decision became a prolonged domestic and diplomatic negotiation, with Berlin ultimately moving in step with Washington. Any country that must constantly renegotiate its strategic direction risks discovering that time becomes its adversary.

Germany’s federal, decentralized government structure – instrumental in the country’s post-war economic miracle – is part of the problem, creating delay when speed and coherence are required.

That is not to suggest that greater centralization in Berlin would, in itself, yield sounder decisions; the French presidency has shown that concentration of power does not preclude misjudgement.

The end of the German miracle?

Beneath this sits a deeper constraint: the condition of Germany’s economic model. The industrial system that underpinned its post-war success – export-driven, energy-intensive, and anchored in incremental excellence – now faces pressures it was not designed to absorb.

The end of cheap Russian gas has forced an abrupt and costly recalibration on energy supply.

German car manufacturers face intensifying Chinese competition domestically, while vital exports to China are in decline. Only patient and strategic diversification could cushion that blow.

Germany has also failed to seize the digital turning point, with SAP its only truly globally leading tech firm. That points to a need for a more deliberate state-led push: mobilizing capital at scale, deepening links between industry and tech, and creating the conditions for rapid digital growth. 

Merz’s push to loosen the EU’s industrial AI regulation points in the right direction – an attempt to ease constraints on innovation and restore some of the agility Germany missed in the first wave of digitalization.

But to rejuvenate its economy and compete on increasingly contested global markets, Germany needs not only efficiency, but adaptability, scale, and speed. It can still produce extraordinarily well; the question is whether it can pivot with sufficient rapidity while also underwriting a sustained defence effort.

Economic culture will be a significant hurdle. Germany’s corporate model – spanning the Mittelstand and segments of its listed sector, and marked by long-term and often family-based ownership – privileges continuity over disruption, prudence over risk.

Defence transformation, by contrast, tends to favour precisely those qualities that German capitalism has historically moderated: large-scale, rapid integration, and intimate relations between state and industry.

Do not underestimate the resistance to German power revival

As Germany grows into its role, it will inevitably reshape the European balance by sheer gravity. Partners will look to Berlin for direction while simultaneously resisting its predominance. Power, in Europe, rarely consolidates without generating counter-currents: Germany will not escape that pattern.

Strongest tornado hits Mineral Wells, Texas, where disaster was declared. Elsewhere, extreme rain inundates China

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Eight tornadoes were reported on Monday, including an EF2 tornado that ripped through the town of Sycamore, Kansas. On Tuesday, a more widespread event tore across the mid-west, most notably as a severe hailstorm moved through Springfield, Missouri.

The king charmed Americans – including the president – while artfully asserting his views on climate and executive power

In the end, it was a royal triumph, as King Charles and Queen Camilla managed to avoid all the mines in their path (the strait of Hormuz is not the only place where they exist), and deftly repair the “special relationship”. For another few weeks, anyway.

There were plenty of reasons to be anxious, on both sides of the Atlantic, before the king’s visit to Washington and New York. It is no secret that Donald Trump’s war of choice against Iran has alienated Great Britain, and all of the Nato allies, who were not consulted in advance of the decision and have since been browbeaten for what Trump perceives as insufficient fealty.

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I have a PintV (refloat), an ESP32 dev kit and a remote with a joystick I can connect to it (salvaged from another robotics project, not anything typical you would buy for this). I’m currently writing some code so I can use this as a method of input for remote tilt, but I’ve got a few questions from a software side.

The COMM_SET_BALANCE_INPUT_INFO (cmd 75) payload, specifically what does Refloat actually expects in those bytes, is there a standardised byte layout?

Is remote_tilt just a single float value, or do I need to ship additional fields alongside it?
Is the expected input range in degrees (eg ±10) or is it normalised from -1 to 1?

I have a white board so I don’t think an express is the way to go here, plus I don’t really want any other functionality

Appreciate any help, if I get this to work I’ll probably make a full guide on using custom controllers

Belgium plans to buy its seven aging nuclear reactors from French power giant Engie in a "full takeover" aimed at securing domestic energy supplies, extending reactor operations, and developing new nuclear capacity. "The move would also mean suspending plans to decommission nuclear operations in Belgium," reports the BBC. From the report: The move would reverse the phase-out of nuclear energy legislation approved in the early 2000s amid safety concerns prohibiting the building of new nuclear power plants and limiting the operating lifetimes of existing ones to 40 years. Only two of Belgium's seven nuclear reactors are operational - located at plants in Doel and in Tihange - and their operating licenses were recently extended until 2035. The other five reactors were shut between 2022 and 2025 and plans to dismantle them will now be suspended. Engie and the government said they aim to reach an agreement on the takeover of the nuclear stations by October 1st. In a joint statement with Engie, the Belgian government said the move also highlights its aim to extend operations of existing nuclear reactors and to develop "new nuclear capacity" in Belgium. "By doing so, the Belgian Government is taking responsibility for Belgium's long-term energy future, with the objective of building a financially and economically viable activity that supports security of supply, climate objectives, industrial resilience and socio-economic prosperity," the statement adds.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

EnComm Aviation says the firm’s action has cut off vital support for crisis-hit countries including South Sudan and the DRC

Britain’s biggest weapons manufacturer, BAE Systems, is facing a £120m lawsuit after scrapping support for aircraft used to deliver aid to some of the world’s neediest countries.

EnComm Aviation, a Kenya-based aid cargo operator, claims the decision forced the cancellation of humanitarian contracts and reduced supplies to South Sudan, now threatened by famine, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), among others.

People describe unnatural process as survey finds nearly half of job seekers have been interviewed by AI

Nearly half (47%) of UK job seekers have had an AI interview, research from the hiring platform Greenhouse has found.

In its survey of 2,950 active job seekers, including 1,132 UK-based workers, with additional respondents from the US, Germany, Australia and Ireland, it found that 30% of UK candidates had walked away from a hiring process because it included an AI interview.

Exclusive: Letter sent to government about case of Inuit woman whose baby was removed after now-banned test

The United Nations has warned Denmark that the treatment of a Greenlandic mother whose newborn child was removed by Danish authorities as a result of controversial parenting competency tests “may amount to ethnic discrimination”.

Keira Alexandra Kronvold’s daughter, Zammi, was taken away from her when she was two hours old and placed in foster care in November 2024 after Kronvold was subjected to so-called FKU (parental competence) psychometric tests. At the time, she was told that the test was to see if she was “civilised enough”.

Yara CEO warns of global auction that would leave poorest countries scrambling for supplies they can ill afford

The Iran war could have “dramatic consequences”, causing food shortages and price rises in some of Africa’s poorest and most vulnerable communities, the head of the world’s largest fertiliser company has said.

Svein Tore Holsether, the chief executive of Yara International, said world leaders needed to guard against soaring prices and shortages of fertiliser causing a de facto global auction that would leave the poorest countries, particularly in Africa, scrambling for supplies they could ill afford.

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The consequences of Beijing’s weapons buildup.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Elon Musk wrapped up his testimony on Thursday as the trial in his lawsuit against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman continued into its fourth day. OpenAI's attorney, William Savitt, cross-examined Musk in the morning. He asked Musk about the capped nature of Microsoft's investments in OpenAI, his involvement in negotiations about the company's structure, and whether he knew about the OpenAI nonprofit's recent initiatives. "I don't know what's going on at OpenAI," Musk testified. Savitt also asked Musk about his competing artificial intelligence startup, xAI. While not the main focus of the case, Musk said it is "partly" true that xAI used some of OpenAI's models to train its own models, a process known as distilling. Musk also suggested that xAI has used OpenAI's technology to help build the company. Musk sued OpenAI, Altman, and Greg Brockman, the company's president, in 2024, alleging that they went back on their commitments to keep the artificial intelligence company a nonprofit and to follow its charitable mission. He claims that the roughly $38 million he donated to seed OpenAI, a company he co-founded, was used for unauthorized commercial purposes. Once Musk wrapped up his testimony after roughly two hours of questioning on Thursday, his attorneys called Jared Birchall, who manages Musk's billions at his family office, as their next witness. Birchall testified about his knowledge of Musk's specific donations to OpenAI. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers oversaw the proceedings from federal court in Oakland, California. The trial will resume on Monday. Recap: Elon Musk Says OpenAI Betrayed Him, Clashes With Company's Attorney (Day Three) Musk Testifies OpenAI Was Created As Nonprofit To Counter Google (Day Two) Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court (Day One)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US president faced a 60-day deadline on Friday to end the Iran war or make the case to Congress for extending it

A US-Iran ceasefire that began in early April has “terminated” hostilities between the two sides for the purposes of an approaching congressional war powers deadline, a senior official of the Trump administration said on Thursday.

Donald Trump faced a deadline on Friday to end the Iran war or make the case to Congress for extending it, but the date was most likely to pass without altering the course of the war.

Sharyn Alfonsi, whose report on Cecot prison was pulled by Bari Weiss, admits uncertainty over her future at network

The veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi expressed concern about “the spread of corporate meddling and editorial fear” at CBS News and her uncertainty about whether she will keep her job after she pushed back on a directive to change her December segment on Venezuelans who were sent to the Cecot prison in El Salvador.

Alfonsi spoke about the incident for the first time on Thursday evening after receiving the Ridenhour prize for courage at the National Press Club in Washington. Her comments come as the Trump administration has piled pressure on US media and follow the decision by the CBS News editor, Bari Weiss, to shelve the segment on the flagship news program.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for May 1.

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Louisiana governor Jeff Landry yesterday told GOP candidates that he plans to suspend next month’s primary elections so that state lawmakers can pass a new congressional map first, the Washington Post (paywall) reported last night.

It came hours after the US supreme court decided that Louisiana’s creation of a second majority black congressional district to satisfy previously rulings relied too heavily on race and was “an unconstitutional racial gerrymander”, as opposed to a required effort to comply with the Voting Rights Act.

Religious group ‘reviewing all available remedies’ after clips of young people rushing its buildings in ‘raids’ go viral

On any given day, Los Angeles’s Hollywood Boulevard teems with tourists and street performers clustered near the area’s many landmarks. But in recent months, the strip has been set abuzz for a new reason.

Throngs of mostly adolescent boys and young men have been rushing the Church of Scientology’s international headquarters on the famed street.

April 30, 2026 — The IWOMP 2026 Call for Papers is open. The 22nd International Workshop on OpenMP (IWOMP) will take place at Austrian Scientific Computing (ASC) at TU Wien in Vienna, October 7–9, 2026. IWOMP is the annual workshop dedicated to the promotion and advancement of all aspects of parallel programming with OpenMP. It is the premier forum to present and discuss issues, trends, recent research ideas, and results related to parallel programming with OpenMP.

The theme for IWOMP 2026 is “OpenMP: Adaptability for Heterogeneous Multi‑Device Systems.”

The OpenMP API has been instrumental in advancing parallel programming, enabling portability across both traditional and emerging heterogeneous computing systems. As the standard continues to introduce new capabilities, the OpenMP API continues to evolve, offering solutions to the growing complexity of high-performance computing (HPC) environments. The workshop welcomes papers on how the OpenMP API balances ease of use and performance, particularly in the context of heterogeneous systems, exascale computing, and real-time workloads, with an emphasis on adaptability across heterogeneous and multi-device ecosystems. IWOMP 2026 aims to bring together researchers, practitioners, and tool developers to discuss innovations, experiences, and future directions for OpenMP in an era where flexibility, performance, and portability must coexist across an ever-expanding range of computing architectures.

Background

As computing hardware has evolved from simple cores to advanced SIMD units, deeper memories, and heterogeneous computing, the OpenMP API has also evolved, extending its application interface to harness new capabilities throughout the spectrum of hardware advances. The 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, and 6.0 versions of the OpenMP specification have established the OpenMP API as the leading programming model for on-node heterogeneous parallelism that supports all versions of the C/C++ and Fortran base programming languages. This enables developers to target increasingly diverse and complex computing platforms.

Advances in technologies, such as multicore processors and OpenMP devices (accelerators such as GPGPUs, DSPs, or FPGAs), Multiprocessor Systems on a Chip (MPSoCs), and recent developments in the OpenMP API itself (e.g., metadirectives and variants for selecting device- and architecture-specific directives) present new opportunities and challenges for software and hardware developers. The growing prevalence of multi-device nodes and tightly integrated heterogeneous components further underscores the need for adaptable and scalable programming abstractions. Recent advances in the C, C++, and Fortran base languages also offer interesting opportunities and challenges to the OpenMP programming model. Among others, the more complex applications of OpenMP tasks, usage of heterogeneous computing platforms, and performance portability across different architectures are topics of interest.

Topics

The topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Accelerated computing and offloading to devices
• Implementation of OpenMP for new devices and architectures
• Applications (in any domain) that rely on OpenMP
• Data mining and analysis or text processing and OpenMP
• Machine learning and OpenMP
• Memory model
• Memory policies and management
• Performance analysis and modeling
• Performance portability
• Proposed OpenMP extensions
• Runtime environment
• Scientific and numerical computations
• Tasking
• Tools
• Vectorization

Submissions

Submitted papers for review should be limited to 12 pages (not counting references). Authors of accepted papers will be asked to prepare a final paper of up to 15 pages (including references).

• Submission Deadline Friday, May 29, 2026 (AoE)
• Acceptance Notifications Friday, July 10, 2026 (AoE)
• Camera Ready Copy Deadline Friday, July 31, 2026 (AoE)
• Submission Link easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iwomp2026
• Check for Updates iwomp.org

Submitted papers should follow LNCS Guidelines found at: https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines

Proceedings

As in previous years, IWOMP 2026 will publish formal proceedings of the accepted papers in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.

Source: OpenMP

The post IWOMP 2026 Opens Call for Papers Ahead of October Workshop in Vienna appeared first on HPCwire.

Workers wrote ‘Katrina declaration’, warning that funding cuts made US dangerously unprepared for natural disasters

Fourteen employees with the US Federal Emergency Management Agency returned to work this week, after spending eight months on administrative leave for signing a public letter criticising the Trump administration.

The so-called “Katrina declaration”, sent last August to members of Congress and a federal council formed to help determine Fema’s future, was written as a rebuke from the workers about the dangerous erosion in US capacity to prepare for and respond to natural disasters.

The U.S. Senate unanimously passed a rule banning senators from trading on prediction markets effective immediately. CNBC reports: The move came amid rising concern about insider trading on prediction market platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket, and about event contracts that can involve death or violence. On April 22, Kalshi said it had suspended and fined one U.S. Senate candidate and two candidates for the House of Representatives for political insider trading on their own campaigns. Earlier on Thursday, a group of Democratic members of Congress called on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to issue a rule "that prevents insider trading and corruption in the market and prohibits event contracts on the outcome of elections, war and military actions in the U.S. or abroad, sports, and government actions without a valid economic hedging interest." Kalshi and Polymarket both praised the Senate's action. "I applaud the Senate for passing this resolution to ban Senators and their offices from trading on prediction markets," Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour wrote in a post on X. "Kalshi already proactively blocks members of congress and enforces against insider trading. This is a great step to increase trust in our markets by making it an industry standard," Mansour said. "Now, let's pass this in the House!" Polymarket, in its own post on X, said, "We're in full support of this. Our Rulebook & Terms of Service already prohibit such conduct, but codifying this into law is a step forward for the industry. Happy to help move this forward however we can."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple saw more demand for the iPhone 17 and MacBook Neo than it was expecting and suggests the RAM shortage could hit prices on new stock.

Huawei's XPixel technology at the Beijing Auto Show is far beyond what US EVs can currently do.

As interest in quantum computing grows, many enterprise teams are still asking a basic question: when does it actually make sense to use it?

At SAS Innovate this week, the company introduced SAS Quantum Lab, a new environment designed to help answer that question. With this new sandbox, SAS is treating quantum as a downstream step in a hybrid workflow, with most of the experimentation and validation happening on classical systems first.

This approach reflects how early-stage the quantum market still is. While quantum computing continues to advance, uncertainty around real-world use cases remains one of the biggest barriers to adoption, alongside cost and limited expertise.

A Development Layer for Quantum

Quantum Lab is not a quantum computer. It is a development and simulation environment built on SAS Viya, using CAS (Cloud Analytic Services) workers to emulate quantum workloads.

This design is meant to bring down the cost of experimenting with quantum algorithms. Running experiments on real quantum hardware is still expensive, particularly during the iterative phase where algorithms are tuned and refined. In an interview with AIwire at SAS Innovate, SAS Principal Quantum Architect Bill Wisotsky said those costs can escalate quickly during testing.

(Wright Studio/Shutterstock)

“If you don’t get the algorithm right the first time, there are a lot of dials that need to be changed. You could wind up incurring hundreds of thousands of dollars just to test an algorithm, not to run it for real life,” Wisotsky said.

Quantum Lab moves that work into a classical environment. Wisotsky explained how, because many quantum algorithms are highly parallelizable, SAS distributes workloads across multiple CAS workers, allowing users to test large numbers of parameter combinations simultaneously. This enables what Wisotsky described as auto-tuning, where different algorithm configurations can be evaluated rapidly to identify which one performs the best.

The company says this setup can deliver significant performance gains during development, with reported speedups of up to 100x and substantial cost reductions compared to running those same experiments on quantum hardware. Once an algorithm is validated in the simulated environment, it can then be executed on an actual quantum processor.

“That’s where the 100 times speed-up comes in. You could build a quantum algorithm, go through auto-tuning, and test all these different possible permutations of the settings very quickly for the cost of your Viya license. You can then derive your best quantum algorithm, and then run that on a quantum computer,” Wisotsky said.

The goal is to reduce the cost and complexity of experimentation, and reserve quantum resources for workloads that justify the cost of running on quantum hardware. Quantum Lab will be available to SAS Viya customers beginning in Q4, the company said.

Lowering the Barrier to Entry

A second quantum challenge SAS is hoping to address is accessibility. Developing quantum algorithms typically requires expertise in quantum physics and linear algebra, which limits who can meaningfully engage with the technology. Quantum Lab is designed to abstract much of that complexity.

Quantum Lab allows users to write quantum workflows in its native language, with the system abstracting differences between hardware backends. That includes managing how algorithms are mapped to different quantum architectures, where constraints such as qubit connectivity can significantly affect performance.

The environment also includes a built-in “quantum tutor,” which provides explanations, examples, and sample code for users who are new to the field. Wisotsky described the platform as both a development tool and a learning environment, meant for users who fall between expert physicists and non-technical business users. It is designed to lower the knowledge barrier that has historically limited quantum adoption.

Bill Wisotsky

A Pragmatic Approach to Use Cases

SAS is currently exploring a range of applied quantum use cases, particularly in optimization and machine learning. These include fraud detection, bankruptcy prediction, and collateral or portfolio optimization, with financial services emerging as one of the most active sectors.

But Wisotsky emphasized that SAS does not approach these problems with a “quantum-first” mindset. Instead, the company starts by evaluating whether a problem can be solved effectively using classical methods. In one case, an insurance company approached SAS with an optimization challenge it believed required quantum computing. After reformulating the problem, SAS was able to solve it using classical techniques in under two minutes. In that case, quantum was unnecessary.

That philosophy has shaped SAS’s strategy of identifying where quantum can offer a clear advantage instead of forcing it into workflows. Problems that are good candidates for quantum approaches usually fall into categories involving highly combinatorial relationships or complex interdependencies in data.

“At the end of the day, our goal is to provide value for the customers. If it’s a quantum value, that’s great. But if it’s not, we’ll use our classical algorithms,” Wisotsky said.

Watch a Demo of SAS Quantum Lab at this link

Thinking Like a Physicist

One of the more subtle challenges in applying quantum computing, according to Wisotsky, is that it requires a different way of thinking about problems.

Techniques that are standard in classical data science do not always translate. In traditional statistical modeling, for example, highly correlated variables are often treated as a problem to be corrected. In quantum systems, those correlations can be useful, as entanglement allows them to be explored in fundamentally different ways.

Early in SAS’s quantum work, the team tested the technology on familiar benchmark problems and saw poor results. Wisotsky began to see better results after reframing those problems as physics problems rather than data science ones.

“I spoke to some friends in the field, and they said, stop thinking of it like classical statisticians. Think about it like physicists,” he said.

Quantum as Part of a Larger Stack

Looking ahead, SAS does not expect quantum computing to replace its existing analytics stack but will offer quantum as another tool within it.

Wisotsky compared it to the relationship between CPUs and GPUs. Just as GPUs are used selectively for specific workloads, quantum processors are expected to handle a narrow class of problems where their advantages outweigh their costs. Within SAS, that integration is expected to expand over time, moving from standalone experimentation in Quantum Lab into more workflows across its analytics platform.

For now, the emphasis remains on making experimentation easier. As organizations continue to explore quantum computing, SAS sees the next step as giving more users the ability to determine for themselves whether quantum belongs in their workflows.

“You can think of SAS as a big toolbox with a lot of different tools to solve a lot of different problems,” Wisotsky said. “I think that quantum is just going to be another tool in that toolbox to solve very specific problems.”

The post SAS Builds a Quantum Sandbox to Test What Actually Works appeared first on HPCwire.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for May 1, No. 1,777.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for May 1, No. 1,055.

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A body believed to be that of the suspect was recovered after an explosion triggered a five-alarm fire at a home in Queens early Thursday morning.

North American customers will have to wait -- the tablet is only selling in India for now.

Lawmakers agree 45-day extension but Republican and Democratic critics urge reform of surveillance program

The US Congress has passed a 45-day extension of a law that grants US intelligence agencies warrantless spying powers.

Bitter infighting over section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in the Republican wing of Congress has repeatedly tanked conservative leaders’ plans to renew the controversial surveillance law for multiple years. The deadlock continued on Thursday, as the Republican House speaker Mike Johnson refused to include key reforms pushed by hardliners in his party and progressive Democrats.

Company details $111.2bn in revenue in first earnings report after announcement of Cook’s pending departure

Apple blew past Wall Street expectations in its first earnings report since it announced CEO Tim Cook would be stepping down.

Cook shared his thoughts about the leadership transition on Thursday, saying: “There’s no one on this planet I trust more to lead Apple into the future” than incoming CEO John Ternus. Asked by an investor what advice he has given Ternus, Cook said: “Never forget the north star for the company. You know, we’re about making the best products in the world that really enrich other people’s lives.”

Passengers on the first direct flight from Miami to Caracas since 2019 were excited to return but anxious about what they would find. For others, passport issues are still a hurdle.

State pension was ‘built for a different era’, says former PM’s organisation amid pressure on government finances

Labour has been urged by Tony Blair’s thinktank to scrap the pensions triple lock amid mounting pressure on government finances.

With the Iran war threatening to derail public spending plans, the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) said the “unaffordable” manifesto pledge to maintain the triple lock should be torn up as part of a wider overhaul of the state pension.

Birdwatching no longer niche, old-fashioned pastime, says RSPB as research shows 47% increase in hobby since 2018

Birdwatching is the second fastest growing hobby for generation Z after jewellery making, according to a multiyear study of more than 24,000 people.

Almost 750,000 gen Zers (16 to 29-year-olds) in Britain regularly enjoy watching birds, a -1,088% increase since 2018, according to research by Fifty5Blue published by the RSPB.

Parliamentary committee takes unusual step of declaring no confidence in executives at utility provider

MPs have accused the leadership of South East Water of incompetence over repeated water outages for tens of thousands of customers, and expressed no confidence in their ability to reform the company.

MPs from across the political spectrum said David Hinton, SEW’s chief executive, and the board of directors operated a culture of unaccountability at the company, which provides drinking water for 2.3 million customers in Berkshire, Hampshire, Kent, Surrey and Sussex.

A rare archaeological site in the Sonoran Desert was bulldozed by a Department of Homeland Security contractor involved in building the latest sections of Donald Trump’s border wall, according to multiple sources briefed on the incident.

The area, in a remote corner of Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, is a roughly 280-by-50-foot etching in the desert sand known as an intaglio.

Last Thursday, without any notice, a contractor working for DHS cut a roughly 60-foot swath across the middle of the intaglio, doing irreparable damage to the 1,000-year-old artifact.

Cabeza Prieta, one of the largest wilderness areas outside of Alaska, also encompasses lands sacred to the Tohono O’odham Nation, which borders the refuge to the east. The O’odham have fought to prevent border wall construction across their reservation and during Trump’s first term largely prevailed; they also managed to protect the intaglio and a nearby burial site that they consider to be part of their ancestral lands.

“I liken it to destroying the Nazca lines — something that culturally we should have been relishing and promoting. Not destroying,” Rick Martynec, an archaeologist, said in a phone interview, referring to the hundreds of figures drawn into the deserts of southern Peru.

A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection confirmed the destruction in a statement to The Intercept and said the agency was coordinating with tribal authorities to figure out its next steps.

“On April 23, 2026, a border wall contractor inadvertently disturbed a cultural site known as Las Playas Intaglio, located west of Ajo, Arizona along the border,” said the spokesperson, John Mennell, who is working on the construction of the second barrier in Arizona. “The remaining portion of the site has been secured and will be protected in place.”

Well known to government officials, including the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the refuge, the intaglio lies just 10 or 15 feet from the massive steel wall that now runs along the U.S.–Mexico border. The destruction to the ancient site was first reported by the Washington Post.

Rick and Sandy Martynec, his wife, also an archeologist who has studied the site for more than two decades, said the refuge was in talks with DHS and the contractor to make sure the site was protected as the Trump administration moves forward with a second set of barriers in the ecologically sensitive region.

The Martynecs even visited the intaglio in mid-April and observed stakes that had been put in place by an engineer to mark its boundaries.

The Martynecs were first notified by FWS staff on Monday when they called the refuge to see about visiting the site and to check on its status. According to the archeologists, Rijk Morawe, the refuge manager, had already been out to survey the damage and told them what had happened.

The news took the Martynecs and others by surprise, since the agency had been in dialogue with DHS and the contractor to come up with an alternative route that would avoid the intaglio, similar to the negotiations that had taken place during Trump’s first term. (DHS’s Customs and Border Protection in Arizona did not comment by press time. FWS declined to comment, referring all border inquiries to CBP.)

“The refuge was pushing as hard as they possibly could to come to a resolution,” Martynec said.

Related

“We Are Still Here”: Native Activists in Arizona Resist Trump’s Border Wall

Members of the O’odham Nation had also been keeping a close eye on border wall development. On the day before the site was bulldozed, a group of O’odham runners observed construction getting dangerously close to the protected area. That morning they called Lorraine Eiler, an O’odham elder and co-founder of the International Sonoran Desert Alliance, who lives in the town of Ajo where the Cabeza Prieta Refuge office is located.

According to Eiler, the runners told her that the contractor was indiscriminately clearing the area.

The runners told her, “They’re coming with their bulldozers and they’re knocking down trees and cactus and everything that’s along the border. They’re just bulldozing everything down and they are getting near the intaglio.” 

Eiler made a round of phone calls to tribal officials and environmental groups, but the next day, the contractor moved in and destroyed the site.

“I alerted people, but all I got was, ‘We’re going to have meetings, we’re going to discuss it,’” Eiler said.

Related

The Border Patrol Invited the Press to Watch It Blow Up a National Monument

During Trump’s first term, border wall construction had widespread impacts on protected landscapes and sacred sites. In one case, DHS blasted through several hills that were too steep to build on directly, including one in Organ Pipe National Monument, east of Cabeza, that was a well-known burial ground. A contractor also bulldozed a road through an archaic Hohokam burial site on the border in Coronado National Forest, even though they’d been briefed by the tribe beforehand.

Border security continues to be a priority for the Trump administration, which has allocated more than $11 billion for new barriers and surveillance technology. The path that was cleared through the intaglio is part of an effort to build a so-called “smart wall” that CBP says will allow it to monitor activity in the desert day and night.

To do so, according to the Martynecs, the agency will have to clear a wide swath of land between the original wall and the secondary barrier.

“There won’t be any vegetation on it at all,” Martynec said. “This doesn’t bode well for the desert.”

Correction: May 1, 2026
This story has been updated to correct an errant reference to the day the intaglio was damaged. It was bulldozed on April 23, 2026. The story has also been updated to include a statement from U.S. Customs and Border Protection that was received after publication.

The post Trump Bulldozed a 1,000-Year-Old Archeological Site to Make Room for a Second Border Wall appeared first on The Intercept.

Patient safety mechanism which gives patients the right to seek a second opinion having ‘lifesaving impact’, says health secretary

• ‘I am invoking Martha’s rule’: how a woman saved her father from near death in hospital

More than 500 people have received potentially life-saving care thanks to Martha’s rule, which gives hospital patients the right to seek a second opinion about their health.

They were moved to intensive care or a specialist unit after they, a loved one or a member of NHS staff triggered the patient safety mechanism, which the NHS in England began using in 2024.

A newly disclosed Linux kernel flaw dubbed "Copy Fail" can let a local, unprivileged attacker gain root access on major Linux distributions, with researchers claiming the bug affects kernels shipped since 2017. "The POC exploit works out of the box today, but a future version that can escape from containers like Docker is promised soon," writes Slashdot reader tylerni7. "Technical details are available here." Slashdot reader BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: A newly disclosed Linux kernel vulnerability called Copy Fail (CVE-2026-31431) allows an unprivileged user to gain root access using a tiny 732-byte script, and it works with unsettling consistency across major distributions. Unlike older exploits that relied on race conditions or fragile timing, this one is a straight-line logic flaw in the kernel's crypto subsystem. It abuses AF_ALG sockets and splice to overwrite a few bytes in the page cache of a target file, such as /usr/bin/su. Because the kernel executes from the page cache, not directly from disk, the attacker can inject code into a setuid binary in memory and immediately escalate privileges. What makes this especially concerning is how quiet it is. The file on disk remains unchanged, so standard integrity checks see nothing wrong, while the in-memory version has already been tampered with. The same primitive can also cross container boundaries since the page cache is shared, raising the stakes for multi-tenant environments and Kubernetes nodes. The underlying issue traces back to an in-place optimization added years ago, now being rolled back as part of the fix. Until patched kernels are widely deployed, this is one of those bugs that feels less like a theoretical risk and more like a practical, reliable path to full system compromise.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The United States Attorney's Office filed a motion on Tuesday that says Aimee Bock, since at least February, has been directing her college-age son to "download large volumes of material related to her federal prosecution," and disseminate them to lawmakers and members of the media.

Ross Davidson, who sang with group in 2018, was convicted of offences committed against six women

Musician Ross Davidson, a former singer for Spandau Ballet, has been jailed for 14 years for multiple rapes and sexual assaults.

Davidson, 38, was convicted across two trials of two counts of rape, an attempted rape, three sexual assaults and two charges of voyeurism, in offences committed against six women between August 2013 and December 2019.

Craig Venter, the pioneering scientists who led the team that first sequenced the human genome, died April 29 near his home in La Jolla, California. Venter, a rebellious scientific genius who clashed with authority and the government, leaves behind a legacy of risk-taking and success, as well as the power of applying high-performance computing.

Born in 1946 in Salt Lake City, Utah, to two U.S. Marine Corps. veterans of World War II, Venter’s swashbuckling story almost never came to be. A devoted Southern California beach bum in the late 1960s, Venter rejected the discipline of studying and the Mormon Church, which his father and grandfather belonged to. Instead of accepting a swimming scholarship to the Arizona State University, young Venter spent his time pursuing “drink, girls, and bodysurfing,” as he wrote in his 2007 autobiography.

Things began to turn around after serving as a Navy corpsman during the Vietnam War. Struck by the carnage from his posting in Da Nang, Venter decided to become a doctor if he survived the war. After making it out of Southeast Asia, Venter applied for admission to college, and earned his Ph.D from UC San Diego in 1975.

Pivoting to research, Venter cut his teeth on genetic research. While at SUNY-Buffalo in 1983, he decided to sequence the gene that makes the adrenaline receptor, which introduced him to an early DNA-sequencing machine from Applied Biosystems. In 1984, Venter joined the National Institutes of Health as a section chief of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, where he devised techniques for rapid gene recovery.

Inspired by the potential for DNA sequencing, Venter left the NIH in 1992 and founded The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR). At TIGR, Venter devised a novel approach to sequencing DNA. Dubbed the “whole-genome shotgun” technique, it utilized supercomputers and machine learning to map an organization’s entire genome all at once, rather than stitching the DNA fragments together piece by piece, or the “clone by clone” approach favored by the NIH.

In 1995, Venter proved that the whole-genome shotgun approach worked, as he successfully mapped the DNA for Haemophilus, making him the first person to ever map the entire genome of a living organism. The mapping of about 1.8 million base pairs took about a year, and showed that the promise of Venter’s new method.

Despite the time-savings, the NIH rejected Venter’s application to use his technique as part of the Human Genome Project, which the NIH and the Department of Energy started as a joint project in October 1990. Although TIGR was funded to code a small segment, his team assumed it would sit out the genome project.

So in 1998, Venter joined up with Applied Biosystems to lead a private effort to map the human genome. Backed with $300 million from Perkin-Elmer, the owner of Applied Biosystems, Venter founded a new company called Celera Genomics. He estimated it would take 300 Applied Biosystems machines to fully map the human genome, which consists of about 3.1 billion base pairs.

The government-funded sequencing community did not appreciate the competition. As he wrote in a February 2021 story in Scientific American:

“This announcement was not met with open arms by the NIH-led sequencing community who said Celera’s sequencing plans would end up with the ‘swiss cheese,’ ‘CliffsNotes,’ ‘Reader’s Digest,’ or even ‘Mad Magazine’ version of the genome. I guess I can understand why they were not thrilled to have a newcomer to the game and thus began what the press dubbed a race to sequencing the human genome pitting Celera against the NIH and international genome effort.”

Celera made tremendous progress in mapping a human genome, which turned out to be DNA that belonged to J. Craig Venter himself. Venter gives a lot of credit to the University of Arizona’s Eugene Myers, who was a key developer of the BLAST tool for sequencing analysis.

J. Craig Venter (Christopher Halloran/Shutterstock)

Despite the progress, Celera and NIH eventually called a truce in their competition in 2000, when they jointly announced during a White House ceremony the completion of the first draft sequence of the human genome. The genome ultimately was declared complete three years later, with 92% of the genome decoded.

The truce was a source of mixed feelings for Venter. On the one hand, he expressed satisfaction at making such a large contribution to scientific exploration. On the other hand, Venter was upset that he had to share the limelight with the NIH. The Nobel Prize would never be his, and his greatest success would forever be linked with a government-funded group that he considered too slow, too bureaucratic, and too unwilling to take the risks necessary to advance scientific research.

“You have to take risks,” Venter told Scientific American in a recent interview. “If you’re risk adverse, you’re in the wrong field.”

Following the completion of the Human Genome Project, Venter set his sights on other goals. After parting ways with Celera in 2002, he co-founded Synthetic Genomics in 2005 to use microorganisms to produce clean fuels. In 2006, Venter used $100 million of his own money to found the J Craig Venter Institute, where he continued genetic research. In 2013 he founded Human Longevity, Inc (HLI) to study the application of genetic data with real-world data, such as from MRI machines.

“Craig believed that science moves forward when people are willing to think differently, move decisively, and build what doesn’t yet exist,” JCVI President Anders Dale stated. “His leadership and vision reshaped genomics and helped ignite synthetic biology. We will honor his legacy by continuing the mission he built—advancing genomic science, championing the public investments that make discovery possible, and partnering broadly to turn knowledge into impact.”

Despite the great success in mapping the human genome, less progress has been made applying that knowledge to benefit people in the 25 years since. As Venter pointed out in his February 2021 byline in Scientific American, there is little question that the combination of machine learning/AI with genetic sequencing can be used to detect potential disease in people and help them through preventative measures. But Venter indicated that he believed the level of funding in the US, not to mention the focus of the US healthcare system on treatments, is anathema to preventative care.

“Progress is only made by daring to go where no roads currently exist,” Venter wrote. “As President Clinton said at the White House event in 2000 to unveil the first survey of the human genome, ‘this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.’ We need more explorers and more funding to fully utilize this map to uncover the new ‘lands’ yet to be discovered in the human genome.”

The post DNA Sequencing Pioneer J. Craig Venter Dies appeared first on HPCwire.

• Jibril Rajoub refuses handshake at Fifa congress

• Infantino to seek third term as president

The Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, confirmed his intention to stand for re-election for a third full term next year after an attempt to orchestrate a handshake between the Palestinian and Israeli delegates at congress backfired.

The Palestinian Football Federation president, Jibril Rajoub, refused to stand alongside Israel FA vice-president, Basim Sheikh Suliman, in an awkward moment towards the end of the 76th Fifa congress after both men had been called to the stage in Vancouver by Infantino.

Meenu Batra, a single mother of four adult U.S. citizens, was arrested on March 17 by federal immigration officers while traveling for a work trip.

Foil boarders were pursued by shark – likely a great white – off Santa Barbara before it lost interest and swam away

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email to get newsletter alerts in your inbox

Ron Takeda and Tavis Boise were a few miles off the coast of Santa Barbara when they noticed the large mass trailing behind them.

“Tavis, is it a dolphin?” asked Takeda as he stood on his foil board, a specialized form of surfing, propelling himself through the waves. Boise, who was filming their run, recognized the question as an ominous sign – the veteran surfers are familiar enough with dolphins that Takeda should have recognized one immediately.

The camp withdrew its license application after coming under intense pressure from families of children who died as well as state legislators.

The longest shutdown of a federal department in U.S. history came to an end on Thursday when President Trump signed a bill to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security following a breakthrough on Capitol Hill.

• ‘It needs to change,’ insists seven-time champion

• Lance Stroll labels rules ‘fundamentally flawed’

Lewis Hamilton believes Formula One drivers should have a “seat at the table” in discussion on directions the sport should take in future, to have an input alongside key stakeholders such as the teams and the FIA. Hamilton’s view was largely echoed across the paddock including by the current world champion, Lando Norris.

Hamilton was speaking before this weekend’s Miami Grand Prix where the rule changes implemented after driver dissatisfaction with this year’s new regulations are taking effect for the first time.

A new study from Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess found that an OpenAI reasoning model outperformed experienced ER doctors at diagnosing and managing patient cases using messy, real-world emergency department records. Researchers say the results don't support replacing doctors, but they do suggest AI could meaningfully reshape clinical workflows if tested carefully in prospective trials. NPR reports: The researchers ran a series of experiments on the AI model to test its clinical acumen -- including actual cases like the lupus patient who'd been previously treated at the emergency department at Beth Israel in Boston. The team graded how well the AI model could provide an accurate diagnosis at three moments in time, from the triage stage in the ER, up to being admitted into the hospital. Overall, AI outperformed two experienced physicians -- and did so with only the electronic health records and the limited information that had been available to the physicians at the time. "This is the big conclusion for me -- it works with the messy real-world data of the emergency department, " said Dr. Adam Rodman, a clinical researcher at Beth Israel and one of the study authors. "It works for making diagnoses in the real world." Other parts of the study focused on case reports published in the New England Journal of Medicine and clinical vignettes to suss out whether the AI model could meet well-established "benchmarks" and game out thorny diagnostic questions. "The model outperformed our very large physician baseline," said Raj Manrai, assistant professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School who was also part of the study. The authors emphasize the AI relied on text alone, while in real life, clinicians need to attend to many other inputs like images, sounds and nonverbal cues when diagnosing and treating a patient. The findings have been published Thursday in the journal Science.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hershey says it's benefiting from the growing use of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs even as people cut down on snacks. Here's why.

Developed within the European Commission’s Destination Earth initiative, the Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin is a flexible modeling infrastructure that enables the production of high-resolution climate and impact-relevant information to support climate change adaptation

April 30, 2026 — An international team of researchers, led by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), has published a paper presenting the foundations of the Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin (Climate DT). This system was implemented within the Destination Earth (DestinE) initiative by a European partnership led by the CSC-IT Center for Science (CSC) in collaboration with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).

The system provides both climate and sector-specific impact data via a platform, facilitating its use in areas such as energy, water, and forest management.

In the study, published in the journal Geoscientific Model Development, the authors describe this novel modeling infrastructure, designed to bridge advanced climate science and decision support by enabling the analysis of changing climate signals and extremes and their potential impacts on key climate-sensitive sectors.

Climate DT aims to move from global climate reference projections to much more detailed, decision-oriented information. To this end, the system will generate global multi-decadal simulations (looking decades ahead) with a spatial resolution of between 5 and 10 kilometers and an hourly temporal resolution. This will provide a comprehensive view of the climate with a high level of detail to better understand how extreme weather events may evolve over the coming decades.

“We want to turn global climate projections—estimates of how the climate may change over the coming decades at an unprecedented resolution—into useful information for making local-scale adaptation decisions,” explains ICREA professor Francisco Doblas-Reyes, lead author of the study and Director of BSC’s Earth Sciences Department. “The idea is not only to produce highly detailed simulations, but to implement a system that allows us to derive information for analysis and planning in an operational context, responding as promptly as possible to the requirements of climate-sensitive sectors,” he adds.

The system is designed to produce simulations on a regular basis, with quality control and mechanisms to ensure that results reach those who need them quickly, in an accessible format and in a way that enables reuse.

Tailored Simulations and Data Access

The Climate DT also includes the possibility of running tailored climate simulations and exploring “what-if” questions. For example, it is generating storylines that recreate extreme events—such as an episode of intense rainfall, a drought, or a heatwave—under different climate conditions, to explore how these types of events and their impacts would change. This approach helps provide context for specific decisions: focusing not only on how the climate changes on average, but also on how climate change affects events that have a direct impact on people, infrastructure, and services.

Simulating the planet’s climate at this level of detail generates huge amounts of information, so the Climate DT is designed to make these data available to those who need them and facilitate their reuse. Access mechanisms, quality monitoring, and supporting services are being implemented progressively as the system evolves, with outputs already being made available through the DestinE platform.

The sectors in which this information may be particularly useful include energy (to assess changes in wind resources and their variability), water management (including availability and adaptation mechanisms), and forest management, among other areas where impacts depend on extreme events and their short-term evolution. To ensure that this information responds to real needs, the impact-relevant data is being co-designed together with several selected users.

“The ambition is to transform high-resolution simulations into indicators that can be incorporated into risk assessments, planning, and the design of adaptation measures,” says Katherine Grayson, co-author of the paper and climate researcher in the Earth System Services (ESS) group within the same department as Professor Doblas. “Ultimately, this digital twin is intended to put science at the service of society and help improve anticipation of climate change risks and adaptation to them,” she adds.

BSC’s contribution builds on its expertise in climate modeling, supercomputing, the design of workflows capable of handling demanding systems and massive datasets, and the development of decision-oriented climate information for key sectors. Infrastructures such as the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer, together with the Earth Sciences Department’s knowledge in data integration and management, are key elements in enabling a digital twin of this kind to operate reliably and ensure that its results reach researchers, climate services, and end users efficiently. Also key are the contributions of the broad European collaboration that implements the Climate DT, bringing together scientific expertise, digital infrastructure, and high-performance computing capabilities, as well as the strategic partnership with the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU).

About Destination Earth

Destination Earth (DestinE) is an initiative funded by the European Union and promoted by the European Commission to build, by 2030, a digital replica of the Earth system to help better understand the effects of climate change and extreme events, and to support public and private decision-making. The initiative is being implemented under the leadership of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT).

DestinE is jointly implemented through three entities entrusted by the European Commission: ECMWF, responsible for the first digital twins and the Digital Twin Engine; the European Space Agency (ESA), responsible for the Core Service Platform (the access platform); and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), responsible for the Data Lake, which provides access to data and services.

As part of this initiative, the Climate DT is one of the first two priority digital twins developed by ECMWF within DestinE. Its objective is to provide high-resolution, up-to-date, and useful climate information to support climate change adaptation in specific sectors and territories. It is implemented by a partnership led by CSC, currently involving 12 leading climate institutions, supercomputing centers, national meteorological services, academia, and industrial partners, through a contract procured by ECMWF.

The EuroHPC JU awards DestinE strategic access to the EuroHPC supercomputers LUMI, hosted by CSC (Finland) and the LUMI consortium; MareNostrum 5, hosted by BSC (Spain); Leonardo, hosted by CINECA (Italy); and MeluXina, hosted by LuxProvide (Luxembourg), through a EuroHPC JU Special Access call.

Reference:
Doblas-Reyes, F. J., Kontkanen, J., Sandu, I. et al. The Destination Earth digital twin for climate change adaptation, Geosci. Model Dev., 19, 2821–2848, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-19-2821-2026, 2026

Source: BSC

The post BSC Leads Study Outlining the Foundations for a Digital Twin Aimed at Climate Change Adaptation appeared first on HPCwire.

The iOS 26.4.2 update is actually a big deal for privacy, even for people who use other messaging apps.

Cole Allen, 31, is charged with attempting to assassinate President Trump and two firearms-related offenses stemming from the shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday night.

Enhance your privacy while surfing the web, stream foreign Netflix libraries, unblock regional sports and avoid mobile traffic shaping with the best iPhone VPNs.

President Trump picked Dr. Nicole Saphier as his new nominee for surgeon general, and blamed Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy for Casey Mean's nomination stalling in the Senate.

April 30, 2026 — All activities of the LCCF project support the overriding project goal of “discovery at the frontiers of science and engineering…through large scale simulation, data analysis, and artificial intelligence applications.” In the context of Horizon, this means enabling CPU and GPU computing capability, high speed storage, and interactive capabilities. Horizon offers an order of magnitude performance improvement over the previous Frontera system.

Sabey Data Center, the new home of the NSF LCCF Horizon supercomputer. Credit: TACC.

To receive an allocation on Horizon, proposers must show compelling science or engineering challenges that require large scale computing resources, and they must be prepared to demonstrate that they can effectively exploit the computing capabilities offered by the system. Proposals from or including junior researchers are encouraged, as one of the goals of this project is to build a community capable of using computing at the highest scales. The Horizon team will offer consulting support and assistance to each project team that is granted access through the solicitation.

TACC is offering one allocation track at this time. Other opportunities designed to accommodate a wider range of research needs will be available in the future. The first Horizon opportunity will open for demonstrating large scale science, with submissions opening April 15th 2026, and rolling reviews beginning May 15th. The start date for system access is anticipated in the Summer of 2026.

Early Operations Period – Leadership Resource Allocation (LRAC)

Large allocations from 125,000 to 500,000 SUs (Horizon) and up to 50,000 (Vista) for six months duration will be offered to science teams with a strong scientific justification for access to a leadership-class computing resource to enable research that would otherwise not be possible. Successful applicants must demonstrate readiness to use the allocated cycles, as well as current peer-reviewed research funding to support the activities conducted on Horizon. LRAC submission opportunities are anticipated twice per year, during production operations.

Horizon Allocation Submission Guidelines

TACC’s Horizon Leadership-Class Computing resource is provided through funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Horizon provides a mix of CPU and GPU computing resources, including 4,750 Dell/NVIDIA Vera CPU nodes, and 2,000 Dell/NVIDIA Grace-Blackwell nodes. Details of the architecture and capabilities can be found in the user guide.

Please thoroughly read the entire LCCF allocation page so that you will be prepared to submit a high-quality proposal containing the documentation pertaining to eligibility, a description of the research to be performed using the testbed and sources of research support, and justification of the amount of SUs requested.

• Allocation requests will be submitted via the Resource Allocation System.
• Only Principle Investigators (PIs) may submit a Horizon allocation request.
• Submission period: April 15, 2026 – June 15, 2026 (rolling reviews will begin May 15th)

Learn more here.

More from HPCwire: Horizon Takes Shape at TACC as NSF Leadership-Class Facility Moves Forward

Source: TACC

The post TACC Begins Horizon Allocation Process Ahead of Summer 2026 Access Launch, Deadline June 15 appeared first on HPCwire.

President Lula’s veto of the bill was overturned by Brazil’s congress and senate, meaning it now awaits confirmation by supreme court

Brazil’s largely conservative congress has approved a bill reducing the prison sentence of the far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was convicted last year of attempting a coup.

The bill had initially been passed by congress in December, but President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva vetoed it in January in a symbolic move marking three years since Bolsonaro supporters ransacked the capital, Brasília.

During an April 17 congressional hearing, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called for retraction of a new Danish study that didn’t find a link between Tylenol and autism, repeatedly calling it “garbage” and baselessly suggesting that it was industry-generated and “fraudulent.”

There is no evidence of fraud or industry involvement, and the criticism Kennedy made was a limitation the authors of the paper acknowledged — not legitimate grounds for retraction, according to scientists.

Beginning with a press conference about autism in September — the Kennedy-imposed deadline for knowing the cause of the “autism epidemic” — President Donald Trump has repeatedly told pregnant women not to take Tylenol unless “absolutely necessary.” Kennedy has been a bit more circumspect on the topic, speaking of a “potential association” between prenatal Tylenol, also known as acetaminophen, and later autism diagnoses in children and calling the literature finding a connection “very suggestive.”

As we wrote in September, some studies have shown an association between prenatal acetaminophen use and autism. However, experts told us that these associations were likely not causal, and instead probably due to traits shared among people who tend to take more acetaminophen in pregnancy, such as a hereditary susceptibility to autism.

The new Danish study, published April 13 in JAMA Pediatrics, looked at national prescription fulfillment records for mothers of more than 1.5 million children and corresponding health records, finding no association between taking acetaminophen or taking greater doses of the drug during pregnancy and later autism diagnoses in the children.

When asked about the Danish study at the House Education and Workforce Committee hearing on April 17, Kennedy moved to discredit it. “The study is a garbage study. It should be retracted,” he told Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina. Kennedy went on to criticize the study for relying on prescription records when acetaminophen is also available over the counter. “It was a garbage in, garbage out study,” Kennedy continued. “The industry has the capacity to generate these studies all the time, and it’s fraudulent. It should be retracted.”

The study did rely on prescription data, which can lead to incomplete data on the use of the drug, Dr. Kira Philipsen Prahm, a doctor in the Center for Fetal Medicine at the Copenhagen University Hospital Rigshospitalet and first author of the study, told us via email. But such a limitation “does not automatically invalidate results,” she said. “The key question is whether the misclassification is likely to meaningfully bias the findings.” Her team’s analyses, along with prior research, indicate that “if there were a strong causal effect” of acetaminophen on autism, “it would be unlikely to be entirely obscured by this limitation,” she said.

Brian Lee, a professor of epidemiology at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health, told us that most acetaminophen is prescribed in Denmark, following restrictions on how much of the medication can be sold without a prescription. This makes Denmark a relatively good location to do a prescription-based study, he said, contrary to Kennedy’s implication that the approach invalidated the study. These restrictions were in place during the latter years of the study.

Furthermore, Prahm said, her team’s study did not find “a pattern suggesting increased risk with greater recorded exposure.” If acetaminophen were causing autism, one would expect to see more cases with increasing doses.

Nor are papers retracted simply because they have limitations, which all studies have. Prahm and her colleagues wrote in their paper that information about individuals’ over-the-counter acetaminophen use was missing and that “thus, the true exposure level among those with low-level exposure was likely underestimated,” while also explaining why they thought this was unlikely to have introduced meaningful bias.

Kennedy has a history of trying to “wield his considerable influence” to “force a retraction of a study without a legitimate reason,” Lee said, referring to a study about a common vaccine ingredient Kennedy said last summer should be retracted.

Legitimate reasons for retraction, Lee said, would include “analytical errors that affect the qualitative conclusions of the study, integrity issues, or loss in confidence of findings by the authors.” Prahm’s study “does not appear to feature any of these issues,” he said, calling Kennedy’s calls for retraction “unwarranted and politically coercive.” Lee was co-author of a 2024 Swedish study that pointed away from a causal association between prenatal acetaminophen use and autism in children, but he was not involved in the new Danish study.

Dr. Per Damkier, a professor in the department of clinical research at the University of Southern Denmark, told us via email that Kennedy “is well outside his domain of expertise” in assessing the scientific merits of the study. Damkier was not involved in the new study but has studied acetaminophen use during pregnancy.

Prahm said that the study was “conducted using nationwide Danish registry data and the pharmaceutical industry was not involved in funding or any other part of the study.” The study lists Danish governmental and hospital funding. One of the nine authors disclosed funding by a pharmaceutical company for unrelated work evaluating a contraceptive pill.

HHS did not reply to a request asking for the basis for Kennedy’s claims about the Danish study.

Missing Context on Acetaminophen in Denmark

Kennedy faulted the Danish study for using prescription data and for the low percentage of women it recorded as using acetaminophen. “Only 2% of the people in this study got Tylenol during pregnancy, according to the endpoint,” Kennedy told lawmakers. “In fact, we know, because Tylenol is available by over the counter, most of you have taken Tylenol. Very few of you have ever gotten a prescription.”

But Kennedy was missing context on acetaminophen in Denmark, which has been increasingly obtained via prescription in recent years.

“Reliance on prescription records alone would be bad in a setting like the US, where most acetaminophen use is” over the counter, Lee said. “However, Denmark is not the US.”

Damkier said that before 2014, “more than 60% of all acetaminophen sold in Denmark” was over the counter. But in late 2013, Denmark limited the quantity of acetaminophen that could be sold without a prescription. Following this change, “more than 80% of acetaminophen sold has been prescription based,” he said, citing his own research on the topic. “I believe exposure data from 2014 and onwards are valid and representative with low risk” of misclassifying acetaminophen use, he said.

The new study looked at prescription records from pregnancies for children born between 1997 to 2022. Damkier said that the study “can be criticized” for using prescription data prior to the change in prescription regulations but that he believes “the conclusions of the authors are substantiated” overall. “By and large, this large population-wide study supports the findings from the most recent studies: Exposure to acetaminophen during pregnancy is not associated with an increased risk of childhood” autism, he said.

Prahm said that she and her co-authors had done further analyses to see if the findings varied before or after 2013, but the team “found no statistical differences between the two periods.”

Kennedy also provided a relatively high-end estimate for acetaminophen use during pregnancy in Denmark. “Fifty percent of the women in Denmark, we know from other studies, actually took Tylenol during pregnancy,” Kennedy said. “So the study was comparing people, women who took Tylenol during pregnancy to women who took Tylenol during pregnancy.”

HHS did not reply to a question about where Kennedy got this statistic, but older, self-reported data from the Danish National Birth Cohort found this relatively high rate of use. Estimates of acetaminophen use during pregnancy vary, and one more recent study​ found that 6% of women reported using the medication during the first trimester.

Lee said that many women in the Danish National Birth Cohort study were missing responses on acetaminophen use and were not included, saying that “the 50% is almost assuredly an overestimate.”

Furthermore, Lee and Prahm both objected to Kennedy’s characterization of the new study as comparing “women who took Tylenol during pregnancy to women who took Tylenol during pregnancy.”

“That is not an accurate description of the study design,” Prahm said. “While some individuals classified as unexposed may in fact have used over-the-counter acetaminophen, this does not mean the two groups are equivalent.”

Pros and Cons of Prescription Data

The Danish study is not alone in using prescription data. Lee explained that using prescription data has “advantages and disadvantages.” An advantage is that it provides an objective record of drug supply, whereas studying over-the-counter exposure requires asking people to report on their own use, he said.

People can misreport their medication use, Prahm said, or the data can be influenced by recall bias, a phenomenon where people can remember things differently depending on later events. For example, a parent with a child diagnosed with autism might remember their medication use during pregnancy differently than a parent without this experience.

Furthermore, while prescription-based studies do miss some exposures to acetaminophen, they are likely to capture the most impactful use.

“Prescription based exposure likely captures those women who use substantial amounts of acetaminophen as opposed to [over-the-counter] based use, which tends to be low and sporadic,” Damkier said. “If there is no signal for prescription-based use, it is consequently exceedingly unlikely that sporadic [over-the-counter] use be associated with an increased risk” of autism.

Regardless, researchers don’t rely on single studies to draw conclusions. Rather, they look for a pattern of replication among studies done using various methods and datasets, David S. Mandell, a psychiatry professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and director of the Center for Mental Health Policy and Services Research, told us via email. “When we see replication, we grow more confident in the findings.”

Multiple studies have found that associations between prenatal acetaminophen use and neurodevelopmental conditions go away when comparing siblings. In recent months, two review studies have pulled together the available data, concluding that the evidence does not show any clear or “clinically important” link between prenatal exposure to the medication and autism.

“We now have studies from Nordic countries, Japan and Taiwan showing that Tylenol doesn’t cause autism,” Mandell said. The degree of acetaminophen use varied in the studies, “and it doesn’t make a difference in the findings.”

Prahm emphasized that her team aimed to “contribute one piece of evidence” to be interpreted in the context of the broader literature. “Overall, the current evidence does not establish a clear association,” she said.

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French prosecutors say police detained a 15-year-old suspected of using the alias "breach3d" in connection with a cyberattack on France Titres (ANTS), the state agency that handles passports, ID cards, and other secure documents. The breach allegedly involved 12 million to 18 million lines of data offered for sale online, potentially affecting up to a third of France's population if the records are unique. The Register reports: It formally opened (PDF) a judicial investigation on April 29, covering alleged fraudulent access to a state-run automated data processing system and the extraction of data from it. Each offense carries a potential prison sentence of seven years and a maximum ~$350,000 fine. Public Prosecutor Laure Beccuau has requested that the minor, whose pronouns, like their name, were also not specified, be formally charged and placed under judicial supervision. [...] France's approach to punishing minors via its legal system is typically geared toward re-education and rehabilitation rather than prison time. While those aged between 13 and 16 can face time in juvenile detention, it is often used as a last resort measure. The maximum sentences and fines for the charges the 15-year-old in this case faces are upper limits imposed on adult offenders, and would likely be lowered substantially in cases involving a minor, like this one.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pop star was arrested in March after she was pulled over for driving erratically on US 101 in California

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Britney Spears was charged in California on Thursday with driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol, authorities said.

The 44-year-old pop star was charged with a single misdemeanor count of driving under the combined influence of alcohol and at least one drug, the Ventura county district attorney’s office said.

A teardown of the budget laptop shows it's actually easy to get into.

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Rightwing justices in Louisiana v Callais led 6-3 vote to redraw congressional maps in blow to Voting Rights Act

The US supreme court issued a landmark ruling on Wednesday, Louisiana v Callais, relating to how states draft congressional maps under the key civil rights statute, the Voting Rights Act.

By a margin of 6-3, the rightwing justices who control America’s top court ordered Louisiana to redraw congressional maps that gave African Americans the chance to elect their candidates of choice proportionate to their population size. The majority dismissed this as an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander”.