News Reel

Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes — known as "El Mencho" — was the boss of one of the fastest-growing criminal networks in Mexico.

Some Chicago-area residents currently in Puerto Vallarta recounted hearing explosions and saw thick black smoke billowing from cars and businesses throughout the city.

A massive winter storm​ slamming the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic with blizzard conditions on Monday has prompted travel bans and forced thousands of flights to be canceled.

SOLLEFTEÅ, Sweden, Feb. 23, 2026 — atNorth today confirmed plans to develop a 300MW data center in Sollefteå Municipality, Sweden. Located at Hamre Industrial Park in Långsele, the new site will be developed on a 50-hectare plot (Hamre 1) and is expected to be operational in H1 2028.

The Hamre Industrial Park supports an accelerated construction timeline, as the site is fully zoned and prepared for development. This speed to market is essential, as demand for AI-driven, high-performance computing infrastructure continues to surge, requiring scalable capacity delivered quickly.

“We are very pleased that atNorth has chosen Hamre Industrial Park for this significant investment,” says Emelie Wrede, Mayor and Chair, Sollefteå Municipality. “This establishment confirms that Sollefteå offers the right conditions for large-scale, future-oriented industry. The development will strengthen the local economy, create skilled employment opportunities, and further position our municipality as an attractive destination for sustainable digital infrastructure.”

Hamre Industrial Park was selected for its strategic location, strong grid capacity, and access to renewable energy resources. The campus will be designed in line with atNorth’s modular architecture to cater for data intensive workloads and colocation needs, whether that be for built-to-suit projects or tailor-made data center space at large scale.

As with all new atNorth developments, the company will actively pursue heat reuse partnerships to ensure excess heat generated by the facility can be captured and redirected for local benefit.

“We face a critical point in time right now, where we must balance unprecedented growth in high density workloads with an increasingly urgent need for sustainable, scalable digital infrastructure,” said Eyjólfur Magnús Kristinsson, CEO at atNorth. “Our Sollefteå campus represents a significant milestone for the company and demonstrates our commitment to building data center ecosystems that deliver both technical excellence and long-term value for local communities.”

The news follows atNorth’s recent announcements with the expansion of two new data center sites in Iceland and its plans for an additional data center in Stockholm. atNorth has also recently formed new colocation partnerships with Nokia, Crusoe and 6G AI Sweden AB as well as signed a heat reuse agreement with Vesforbrænding, Denmark’s largest waste-to-energy company, to repurpose excess heat from its DEN01 data center campus.

About atNorth

atNorth is a leading Nordic data center company that offers cost-effective, scalable high-density colocation and built-to-suit services trusted by industry-leading organizations. With sustainability at its core, atNorth’s data centers run on renewable energy resources and support circular economy principles. All atNorth sites leverage innovative design, power efficiency, and intelligent operations to provide long-term infrastructure and flexible colocation deployments. atNorth is headquartered in Reykjavik, Iceland and operates eight data centers in strategic locations across the Nordics, as well as a ninth under construction in Kouvola, Finland, a tenth site in Ølgod, Denmark and an eleventh campus in Stockholm, Sweden. The business has also secured land for a future mega site in the Sollefteå Municipality in Sweden.

Source: atNorth

The post atNorth Plans 300MW High-Density Data Center in Northern Sweden appeared first on HPCwire.

Last Week Tonight host delved into the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in relation to the Epstein files and Musk’s poisonous ownership of X

On his new episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver wasted no time digging into the files related to late pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, which has once again ensnared former prince Andrew.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as he is now known after being stripped of his royal titles for his connection to Epstein, was arrested last week – the first arrest of a senior member of the royal family in modern history – on allegations that that he had shared confidential material with Epstein while serving as a UK trade envoy.

As another major storm brings to the area up to 2ft of snow, people brave the weather to commute and shovel

Bridget Phillipson announces plans to make special educational needs system less reliant on cash-strapped councils

• UK politics live – latest updates

Bridget Phillipson has presented sweeping plans to overhaul special educational needs provision in England, with a package of measures designed to make the system less reliant on cash-strapped councils and give schools greater responsibility.

The education secretary on Monday announced her long-awaited Send proposals, which will result in hundreds of thousands fewer students getting education, health and care plans (EHCPs) than would otherwise have been the case.

The Tories said it was ‘difficult to see’ how Josh Simons could continue in his role

Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, has been speaking about the Send reforms at an event in Peterborough.

This is what she said about the need for inclusion.

Inclusion is a choice. It is an educational choice, and it is also a political choice because we could duck this challenge, ignore the injustice of a postcode lottery in life chances putting off fixing the Send system yet again.

The system works well for some at least.

We welcome the scale of vision contained in the white paper which has the potential to create an education system that fully values children and young people with additional needs and their families.

We also welcome the commitment to retain statutory education, health and care plans (EHCPs) for children and young people whose needs cannot be met through this new model. We know that many parents will welcome the legal requirement for schools to create individual support plans (ISPs) for all children with Send.

An anonymous reader shares a report: PayPal, the digital payments pioneer, is attracting takeover interest from potential buyers after a stock slide wiped out almost half of its value, according to people familiar with the matter. The San Jose, California-based company has fielded meetings with banks amid unsolicited interest from suitors, the people said. At least one large rival is looking at the whole company, while some other suitors are only interested in certain PayPal assets, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. Buyer interest in PayPal is still at a preliminary stage and may not lead to a transaction, the people cautioned. Founded in the late 1990s, PayPal was an early mover in the world of digital payments. But the company now finds itself in a rut with its customers increasingly turning to alternative ways to pay for things. PayPal's shares have fallen around 46% in New York trading over the last 12 months, giving the company a market value of about $38.4 billion.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reform UK has promised to create an ICE-style agency dedicated to mass deportations if the party came to power. Nigel Farage and his party’s home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, have pledged to start a ‘UK Deportation Command’ to remove thousands of people, under plans that Labour has condemned as ‘divisive’. Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian’s deputy political editor Jessica Elgot – watch on YouTube

As multiple investigations unfold back at home footage emerged of Patel whooping it up with team in locker room

The FBI director, Kash Patel, has a lot on his plate just now. There’s the shooting death of the armed man who entered Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home; the weeks-old search for missing Nancy Guthrie, mother of Today co-host Savannah Guthrie; not to mention the ongoing furor around the so-called Jeffrey Epstein files.

So eyebrows were raised on Sunday when phone footage emerged of Patel whooping it up with the men’s USA hockey team in Milan after their gold medal victory against Canada at the Winter Olympics.

Seventeen nonprofit organizations, led by The Intercept’s Press Freedom Defense Fund, filed an amicus brief today urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to prevent the Federal Trade Commission from conducting an retaliatory investigation into Media Matters for America, brought after Media Matters published critical reporting about allies of the Trump administration.

The brief, authored by Albert Sellars LLP, notes that this sort of coercive tactic — where a federal agency will launch a pretextual investigation, keep it open as a way to coerce compliance, and resist any effort to have a court review the lawfulness of the agency’s actions — has become a troublingly common form of government intimidation under the current administration. From the Justice Department to the Federal Communications Commission, court intervention has been one of the few tools that organizations have to prevent federal overreach. The amicus brief asks the appellate court to uphold a preliminary injunction. Without judicial remedy, such investigations are an acute danger to the nonprofit organizations that Americans rely on for information on matters of public concern. The brief argues that courts must intervene to prevent such investigations from chilling coverage of issues that might be adverse to those currently in power. 

“Nonprofit organizations must be aggressively vigilant to protect First Amendment rights in the face of a federal government’s onslaught,” said David Bralow, legal director of the Press Freedom Defense Fund. “The chilling investigation into Media Matters is one of many affronts to free speech. These unabridged regulatory invasions, combined with such other attacks like the arrest of journalists in Minnesota and the invasive seizure of confidential communications in Washington, D.C., demonstrate the perilous state of our democracy.”

The coalition includes a mix of nonprofit research, advocacy, and media organizations, including CalMatters, the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, the Dangerous Speech Project, Defending Rights & Dissent, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the First Amendment Coalition, Free Press, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Lion Publishers, MuckRock Foundation, the National Coalition Against Censorship, Open Vallejo, the Project on Government Oversight, Public Knowledge, and Reporters Without Borders USA. 

“The Press Freedom Defense Fund exists to confront exactly this kind of abuse. When the government uses open-ended investigations to drain resources, intimidate funders, and silence critics, the damage goes far beyond one organization — it sends a warning to every journalist and researcher in the country. We’re standing with Media Matters because the First Amendment is not negotiable,” said Annie Chabel, CEO of The Intercept.

For more information, please contact The Intercept’s Miroslav Macala at miroslav.macala@theintercept.com.

The post Nonprofit Coalition Asks Courts to Prevent Coercive Federal Investigation Tactics appeared first on The Intercept.

The State Department has ordered some staff in the U.S. Embassy in Beirut to begin to leave Lebanon, multiple sources familiar with the matter said.

A travel alert from the US embassy in Mexico notes that no airports are closed, but roadblocks affect airline operations in Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta

• Killing of Mexican drug cartel boss ‘El Mencho’ triggers wave of violence

Major institutions of higher education in the US are reckoning with the latest release of the Epstein files after discovering the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s relationships with board members, professors and administrators on campuses across the country.

In some cases, professors have been placed under review, research centers closed or conferences canceled. Students and staff have responded in different ways, including petitions, open letters and campus forums.

The supreme court (will be using lower case letters for a while based on a complete lack of respect!) of the United States accidentally and unwittingly gave me, as President of the United States, far more powers and strength than I had prior to their ridiculous, dumb, and very internationally divisive ruling.

For one thing, I can use Licenses to do absolutely “terrible” things to foreign countries, especially those countries that have been RIPPING US OFF for many decades, but incomprehensibly, according to the ruling, can’t charge them a License fee - BUT ALL LICENSES CHARGE FEES, why can’t the United States do so? You do a license to get a fee! The opinion doesn’t explain that, but I know the answer! The court has also approved all other Tariffs, of which there are many, and they can all be used in a much more powerful and obnoxious way, with legal certainty, than the Tariffs as initially used.

Ex-president, accused of crimes against humanity, selected targets and promised immunity for death squad members, prosecutor says

Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, was “at the very heart” of brutal anti-drugs campaigns that led to the killing of thousands of people, prosecutors at the International criminal court (ICC) have argued, as they called for charges against him to proceed to trial.

Duterte, 80, who was arrested in Manila last year and flown to The Hague, is facing three counts of crimes against humanity over campaigns against drug users and dealers during his presidency, and his earlier tenure as mayor of the city of Davao.

American skier Lindsey Vonn, who crashed seconds into her downhill race at the 2026 Winter Olympics​, said she is finally out of the hospital as she recovers.

CALGARY, Alberta, Feb. 23, 2026 — SuperQ Quantum Computing Inc. today announced a strategic partnership with the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM (Fraunhofer ITWM), a member of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. The collaboration is governed by a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) focused on joint technical evaluation and research-oriented cooperation in the area of quantum and hybrid optimization.

This partnership marks SuperQ’s official entry into the European quantum ecosystem. By aligning with Fraunhofer, the MoU represents a de-risking of SuperQ’s commercial roadmap and opens new market opportunities with Europe’s industrial “Mittelstand” and Fortune 500 giants. SuperQ transitions from a North American innovator to a global peer.

Under the MoU, the collaboration will focus on technical exchange and exploratory activities, including:

• Independent Technical Assessment: Fraunhofer ITWM will conduct a structured technical evaluation of SuperQ’s platform in selected application scenarios. The assessment is intended to identify capabilities and limitations and may catalyze enterprise adoption and provide a competitive moat.
• Joint Research & Funding Opportunities: The partners plan to explore participation in European and international publicly funded research programs. Such projects, if pursued, would support research and development activities with non-dilutive capital in areas such as energy systems, logistics, and ML.
• The “Hybrid” Advantage: Unlike pure-play hardware firms, this collaboration focuses on SuperQ’s differentiated strategy, which is backed by Fraunhofer ITWM: integrating gate-based quantum, quantum annealing, and classical HPC into a single, seamless workflow.

“This is not just a geographic expansion; it is a validation of our ‘One-Click’ philosophy by the most respected names in industrial mathematics,” said Dr. Muhammad Khan, CEO and Board Chair of SuperQ. “Investors should recognize that we are moving beyond the ‘quantum lab’ phase. Working with Fraunhofer ITWM allows us to engage with one of Europe’s leading applied mathematics institutes in a rigorous and practice-oriented setting turning complex math into executive-ready ROI.”

Within this collaboration, Fraunhofer ITWM will evaluate the Super platform in terms of performance, scalability, and potential integration into its HPC infrastructure for industry-scale simulation and algorithm acceleration. This ensures that as quantum hardware matures, SuperQ’s software remains the indispensable “operating system” for industrial-scale simulation. Together, they aim to develop and evaluate hybrid quantum-classical computing workflows that combine gate-based quantum computing, quantum annealing, and classical high-performance computing to enhance modelling, simulation, and optimization, while jointly identifying application areas – such as logistics, energy, manufacturing, finance, defense-related optimization, or resource exploration.

“Fraunhofer ITWM is dedicated to bringing cutting-edge innovation into industrial practice,” said Dr. Pascal Halffmann, Research Coordinator Quantum Computing at Fraunhofer ITWM. “By coupling our expertise in quantum algorithms and HPC with SuperQ’s orchestration technologies, we aim to advance next-generation computing for industrial use cases.”

More from HPCwire: SuperQ Expands into Quantum Hardware

About the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM

The Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM in Kaiserslautern is one of the largest research institutes for industrial mathematics worldwide. Fraunhofer ITWM sees its task in further developing mathematics as a key technology and providing innovative impetus. Its focus is on the implementation of mathematical methods and technology in application projects and their further development in research projects. Fraunhofer ITWM’s integral components are consulting, implementation and support in the application of high-performance computer technology and the provision of tailor-made software solutions. Its various competencies address a wide range of customers: automotive industry, mechanical engineering, chemical industry, energy and finance. This also benefits from Fraunhofer ITWM’s network such as the Fraunhofer Competence Network Quantum Computing and the “Simulation- and software-based innovation” high-performance center.

About SuperQ Quantum Computing Inc.

SuperQ Quantum Computing Inc. (CSE: QBTQ) (FSE: 25X) (OTCQB: QBTQF) is reducing the technical and financial barriers to quantum and supercomputing commercialization. It is defining the next era of enterprise transformation, emerging as a partner for global organizations seeking direct quantum and supercomputing ROI. SuperQ’s flagship Super platform strives to make the most advanced computational power intuitive and accessible. This will empower executives, leading research institutions, and critical government agencies to unlock immediate business impact across finance, healthcare, logistics, defense, and beyond, leveraging SuperQ’s proprietary AI Autopilots to turn complex challenges into executive-ready results with one-click productization and deployment. SuperQ Quantum is headquartered in Canada with a growing international presence, particularly in the US, Middle East and Asia.

Source: SuperQ

The post SuperQ Enters European Quantum Ecosystem Through Fraunhofer ITWM Collaboration appeared first on HPCwire.

Hungary’s veto prevents EU countries from adopting latest round of sanctions

One other thing we will be keeping an eye on today is the latest on the EU-US trade relationship after last Friday’s US supreme court ruling on Trump’s tariffs.

The European Parliament is expected to discuss what to do with the EU-US trade deal later today.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

The London stock market has dipped slightly in early trading.

The FTSE 100 index is down 19 points, or 0.18%, at 10,668 points.

Exclusive: Figures led by New York Sun owner may seek judicial review after restrictions lifted on DMGT offer

Figures involved in a rival bid for the Telegraph are drawing up legal action against the government, after ministers gave the owner of the Daily Mail permission to take a significant step towards clinching its £500m takeover.

The Telegraph titles, which include the daily and Sunday editions, have been in limbo for three years after previous owners, the Barclay family, lost control of them over huge unpaid debts.

Bankruptcy can offer a fresh financial start, but there are complex rules on how often you can file for relief.

JOHN BECKER
Staff Reporter

For Blue Hen fans, the view of Allegacy Federal Credit Union Stadium from the Blue Ridge Mountains was not pretty on Nov. 21. Delaware fans had to watch as they took the biggest loss of the season against their one and only Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) opponent of the year, the 7-3 Wake Forest University Demon Deacons. 

Delaware began the game struggling on offense as the Blue Hens were unable to score on their first two drives. The offense was so stagnant that they were unable to cross the 50-yard line during the first quarter.

The story of the defense was very similar. Delaware allowed Wake Forest to march 130 yards down the field over two drives, resulting in two rushing touchdowns for the Demon Deacons.

The final minutes of the first quarter contained the beginning of Delaware’s only scoring offensive drive of the first half. Delaware would drive down the field with a healthy mix of passing and running the ball, getting them to the Wake Forest 43-yard line and setting up the biggest play of the game for the Blue Hens. 

Delaware quarterback Nick Minicucci tossed a pass to running back Viron Ellison Jr. at the line of scrimmage, who ran 15 yards before encountering Wake Forest defensive back Nick Andersen. 

In an instant, Ellison Jr. performed an electrifying juke move that evaded the tackler and gave him a wide-open lane to take it to the house for a 43-yard touchdown run, making the score 14-7 in favor of the Demon Deacons.

Unfortunately for the Blue Hens, this era of good feelings was short-lived. Delaware’s offense would not score for the rest of the first half, and only stopped the Wake Forest offense from scoring once in the first half.

The aforementioned defensive stop from Delaware was the beginning of a five-play sequence that both energized and then demoralized the Delaware faithful in a matter of minutes. Delaware defensive back KT Seay intercepted a pass from Wake Forest quarterback Robby Ashford on the first play of the Demon Deacon offensive drive.

The Blue Hens followed up, showing signs of hope after Minicucci completed three straight passes totaling 26 yards. Unfortunately, on the fourth play of the drive, Wake Forest defensive back Karon Prunty forced a fumble on wide receiver Sean Wilson, which was recovered by the Demon Deacons. 

With only 29 seconds left in the first half, the Delaware defense hoped this would be an inconsequential offensive possession. On the first play of the offensive drive, wide receiver Carlos Hernandez was able to create separation deep downfield and Ashford found his man, connecting for a 79-yard touchdown pass and making the score a daunting 35-7 that would only get worse for the Blue Hens as the game went on.

The third and fourth quarter would not get better for Delaware, as the Blue Hens allowed three straight Wake Forest scores totaling 17 points. The Delaware offense scored only one touchdown late in garbage time after backup quarterback Braden Streeter came in and tossed a 25-yard touchdown pass to wide receiver Max Patterson creating the final score of 52-14, outlining a dominant Wake Forest performance.

By the end of the game, the Delaware defense had allowed 314 yards through the air and 263 on the ground. Hernandez had a career-high 197 yards on five receptions and another career-high two touchdowns to go with it. 

However, for Delaware, Minicucci continued to add to his historic season totals as he sat in third place after the game for most passing yards in a single season with 3,380, trailing only Joe Flacco (4,285) and Andy Hall (3,474).

Delaware fell to 5-6 overall on the season after the game, but held their heads up high as they finished their season at home against the 2-9 University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) Miners. With a win against UTEP, Delaware eventually qualified for and won a bowl game despite being ineligible as a first-year member of the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS).

Judgment in city of Boulder’s lawsuit against Suncor Energy USA and ExxonMobil could affect wave of climate litigation

The US supreme court has decided to hear arguments in a climate accountability lawsuit, marking the first time the high court has weighed in on such a case. The decision could potentially hinder the wave of climate litigation the US has seen in recent years.

“It’s not a good sign,” said Pat Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at Vermont Law and Graduate School.

Company admits three pollution events that killed fish and insects in Pools Brook country park near Chesterfield

A water company has been fined more than £700,000 for repeatedly releasing sewage into a stream.

Yorkshire Water was issued with the penalty after pleading guilty to three offences of sewage pollution in Pools Brook country park near Chesterfield.

Climate scientists trying to predict how much hotter the planet will get have long grappled with a surprisingly stubborn problem -- clouds, which both reflect sunlight and trap heat, account for more than half the variation between climate predictions and are the main reason warming projections for the next 50 years range from 2 to 6 degrees Celsius. Two research groups are now racing to close that gap using AI, though they disagree sharply on method. Tapio Schneider at Caltech built CLIMA, a model that uses machine learning to optimize cloud parameters within traditional physics equations; it will be unveiled at a conference in Japan in March. Chris Bretherton at the Allen Institute for AI took a different path -- his ACE2 neural network, released in 2024, learns from 50 years of atmospheric data and largely bypasses physics equations altogether.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Solidarity campaign mobilizes as thousands of children like Liam Ramos taken amid Trump’s immigration crackdown

On 28 January, hundreds of protesters gathered near the Dilley immigration processing center in south Texas, where hundreds of children are being held. Days earlier, immigration lawyer Eric Lee filmed a video of detainees screaming and chanting “libertad,” or “freedom.”

Soon after, solidarity events arose in the state. “Community members saw the children and families crying out [and] having their own protests from within and said to everybody: we need to show up there too,” said Rev Erin Walter, executive director of the Texas Unitarian Universalist Justice Ministry.

Ofgem says about 140 proposed projects, driven by AI use, could require more power than current peak demand

The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in the UK would exceed the country’s current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog.

Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity – 5GW more than the country’s current peak demand.

• 41-year-old developed compartment syndrome

• Skier credits Team USA surgeon with saving leg

Lindsey Vonn says she came close to having her leg amputated in the aftermath of her crash during the Olympic downhill earlier this month.

The 41-year-old suffered a complex tibia fracture to her left leg in the crash and underwent multiple surgeries in Italy before being flown back to the US for further treatment last week. But in an Instagram post on Monday, the American said the crash also led to compartment syndrome in her leg. The condition occurs after traumatic injuries such as falls from heights and car crashes. According to the Cleveland Clinic, “compartment syndrome happens when there’s too much pressure around your muscles. The pressure restricts the flow of blood, fresh oxygen and nutrients to your muscles and nerves. Compartment syndrome is extremely painful.” The lack of blood flow can lead to permanent damage to patients.

Home equity loans this spring may be smart in some scenarios, but ill-advised in others. Here's what to consider.

US president suggests trade war could escalate as administration says it will stop collecting levies ruled illegal by supreme court

• Business live – latest updates

Donald Trump has declared that he can use tariffs in a “much more powerful and obnoxious way”, as the UK and the EU said they were seeking urgent clarity on the US trade deals they struck last summer.

Trump threatened to ramp up his global tariff war on Monday, after a supreme court ruling last week that he had overstepped his legal authority to impose his “liberation day” measures last year.

A study published last week in PNAS found that people who regularly cause problems or make life difficult -- whom the researchers call "hasslers" -- are associated with measurably faster biological aging in those around them, at a rate of roughly 1.5% per additional hassler and about nine months of additional biological age relative to same-age peers. The research drew on DNA methylation-based epigenetic clocks and ego-centric network data from a state-representative probability sample of 2,345 adults in Indiana, aged 18 to 103. Nearly 29% of respondents reported at least one hassler in their close network. The biological toll varied by relationship type: hasslers who were family members showed the strongest and most consistent associations with accelerated aging, while spouse hasslers showed no significant effect on either epigenetic measure. The damage also went beyond aging clocks -- each additional hassler was associated with greater depression and anxiety severity, higher BMI, increased inflammation, and higher multimorbidity. When benchmarked against smoking, a major behavioral risk factor for aging, the hassler effect corresponded to roughly 13 to 17% of smoking's estimated impact on the same aging clocks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A federal judge on Monday permanently blocked the Justice Department from releasing former special counsel Jack Smith's report on the classified documents investigation.

Authorities mounted rescue operation after group of five lost control of ice sheet in Stockholm archipelago

Five people have been rescued from an ice floe carrying a sauna tent, a motorised saw and an onboard motor after they lost control of their DIY vessel in the Stockholm archipelago.

Swedish authorities believe the passengers, who were German tourists, had been attempting to create their own motor-powered floating sauna when the swell from a passing passenger ferry broke the piece of ice and stranded them near Värmdö, an island near Stockholm.

Reiner, 32, charged with two counts of first-degree murder after parents were stabbed to death in December

Nick Reiner was expected to return to court on Monday for arraignment on two counts of first-degree murder in the killing of his parents Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner.

A judge postponed the legal proceedings last month after his attorney withdrew from the case, and was replaced by a public defender. Reiner’s former attorney, Alan Jackson, said at the time that he could not share why he was stepping down, but that his client was not guilty.

Grey’s Anatomy and Euphoria actor died on Thursday less than a year after he publicly revealed ALS diagnosis

A GoFundMe campaign meant to provide financial support for the widow and daughters of Eric Dane after the actor’s recent death had raised nearly $350,000 as of Monday.

The fundraising platform over the weekend had temporarily paused the “In Honor of Eric Dane” campaign while it underwent a standard review. But by Monday, GoFundMe said it had verified the effort and listed the Grey’s Anatomy star’s family as the beneficiary.

SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 23, 2026 — Cadence today announced that it has completed its previously announced acquisition of Hexagon AB’s Design and Engineering (“D&E”) business, significantly expanding its System Design and Analysis (SDA) portfolio and strategically positioning the company to capitalize on the Physical AI opportunity.

The acquisition accelerates Cadence’s Intelligent System Design strategy by combining its compelling multiphysics portfolio with Hexagon D&E’s leadership in structural analysis, acoustics and multibody dynamics. The integration of Hexagon D&E’s flagship MSC Software solutions—including MSC Nastran and Adams—with Cadence’s leading multiphysics portfolio spanning electronics, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and BETA CAE’s structural pre and post processing technologies, will enable Cadence to deliver a comprehensive end-to-end multiphysics simulation platform —elevating the industry standard for integrated design and analysis solutions and enabling more seamless system level innovation.

“This acquisition marks a major milestone in advancing our vision for intelligent system design,” said Anirudh Devgan, president and CEO of Cadence. “By combining our industry-leading computational software and AI-driven design expertise with MSC Software’s world-class structural and physics-based analysis technologies, we’re empowering customers to push the boundaries of what’s possible—from autonomous systems and advanced robotics to the future of transportation.”

The combined portfolio further positions Cadence at the forefront of the emerging Physical AI era by tightly coupling high-fidelity, physics-based simulation with AI-driven design exploration. This will enable customers to create virtual representations of real-world systems that accurately predict system behavior under complex operating conditions. With advanced capabilities spanning motion, vibration, structural response and fluid-structure interactions, engineers can generate richer, physically grounded data to train and validate AI models, improving the performance and reliability of intelligent vehicles and industrial systems.

The purchase price of approximately €2.7 billion, which includes an estimated €150 million of transaction-related taxes owed by the acquired entities, is structured as 70% in cash and 30% in Cadence common stock.

Under its financial model, Cadence expects the incoming business to add an incremental $160 million to its 2026 revenue. On a non-GAAP basis, Cadence expects the transaction to be approximately 28 cents dilutive to its 2026 earnings per share, becoming accretive in 2027.

About Cadence

Cadence is a market leader in AI and digital twins, pioneering the application of computational software to accelerate innovation in the engineering design of silicon to systems. Our design solutions, based on Cadence’s Intelligent System Design strategy, are essential for the world’s leading semiconductor and systems companies to build their next-generation products from chips to full electromechanical systems that serve a wide range of markets, including hyperscale computing, mobile communications, automotive, aerospace, industrial, life sciences and robotics. In 2024, Cadence was recognized by the Wall Street Journal as one of the world’s top 100 best-managed companies. Cadence solutions offer limitless opportunities—learn more at www.cadence.com.

Source: Cadence

The post Cadence Completes Acquisition of Hexagon’s Design and Engineering Business appeared first on HPCwire.

Pay attention to the snow on your roof. If you don't clear it off in a timely manner, you're asking for trouble.

The Supreme Court agreed to take up an effort by energy companies to end a lawsuit filed in state court that seeks billions of dollars in damages.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is pushing back on growing concerns about AI's environmental footprint, dismissing claims about ChatGPT's water consumption as "totally fake" and arguing that the fairer way to measure AI's energy use is to compare it against humans. In an interview with Indian Express, Altman acknowledged that evaporative cooling in data centers once made water usage a real concern but said that is no longer the case, calling internet claims of 17 gallons of water per query "completely untrue, totally insane, no connection to reality." On energy, he conceded it is "fair" to worry about total consumption given how heavily the world now relies on AI, and called for a rapid shift toward nuclear, wind and solar power. He took particular issue with comparisons that pit the cost of training a model against a single human inference, noting it "takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat" before a person gets smart -- and that on a per-query basis, AI has "probably already caught up on an energy efficiency basis."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PRINCETON, N.J. and ESPOO, Finland, Feb. 23, 2026 — IQM Finland Oy, a global leader in full-stack superconducting quantum computers, and Real Asset Acquisition Corp. (RAAQ), a special purpose acquisition company, today announced they have entered into a definitive business combination agreement, which will result in IQM becoming a public company and listing American Depositary Shares on one of the two leading U.S. stock exchanges. The transaction provides funding with the aim to accelerate IQM’s technology and commercial development towards fault-tolerance quantum computing, further advancing its position as a leading provider of quantum computers.

Headquartered in Finland, IQM is also considering a dual listing that would see the trading of IQM’s ordinary shares on the Helsinki stock exchange, which would be expected to take place following the completion of this transaction.

IQM is a quantum computing company that builds full stack, open-architecture systems that can be deployed on-premise or accessed via the cloud. IQM operates a vertically integrated business model, boasting a unique combination of proprietary infrastructure from their own chip design tool and software developer platform, to a quantum chip fab, assembly line and data centre, allowing the company to accelerate its innovation cycles, deliver best-in-class quantum computing to its customers and enabling the quantum ecosystem to grow.

Transaction Highlights

Following completion of the transaction, IQM’s cash on its balance sheet is expected to be in excess of USD 450 million cash at closing4 (including IQM’s existing cash), providing runway for continued broad commercial advantage:

• Approximately USD 175 million of cash held in RAAQ’s trust account (based on the current amount in the trust account and assuming no redemptions).
• Approximately USD 134 million in proceeds from a PIPE financing at USD 10.00 per share from leading new and existing and institutional investors, to close concurrently with the business combination, subject to the satisfaction of certain customary closing conditions
• Expected USD 24 million in proceeds from the cash exercise of outstanding IQM warrants prior to the closing.
• Existing cash on IQM’s balance sheet of USD 172 million (unaudited as of year-end 2025).
• The transaction values IQM at a pre-money equity valuation of approximately USD 1.8 billion.

Jan Goetz, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, IQM, said: “We built IQM from the beginning for one purpose — to put working quantum computers in the hands of the people who will use them to solve real problems. Not someday. Now. Quantum computing is a science project no more. It is an industry where customers own, operate, and build on advanced quantum computers. That’s what IQM makes possible.”

Peter Ort, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman, Real Asset Acquisition Corp, said: “IQM has built and delivered more on-premises quantum systems than any other competitor5 — to some of the most demanding research institutions on earth. This transaction will accelerate the growth of a company that has already earned its position in the field, with real customers, running real quantum systems, today.”

Sierk Poetting, Chairman of IQM’s Board of Directors, said: “Going public is not a change of direction but is rather an acceleration. The board stands fully behind IQM’s mission and goals to make quantum infrastructure as foundational and accessible as classical computing.”

The existing IQM shareholders will not sell any shares or receive any cash consideration as part of the transaction and all material IQM shareholders have committed to a customary lock-up agreement at close of this transaction.

The board of directors of both IQM and RAAQ have each unanimously approved the proposed business combination. The closing of the proposed business combination is subject to, among other things, the approval by shareholders of RAAQ and IQM of the business combination agreement and the satisfaction of other customary closing conditions.

About IQM Quantum Computers

IQM Finland Oy is a global leader in superconducting quantum computers. IQM provides both on-premises full-stack quantum computers and a cloud platform to access its systems. IQM customers include leading high-performance computing centres, research laboratories, universities, and enterprises that require full access to quantum hardware and software. IQM has over 300 employees, with headquarters in Finland and a global presence including France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, UK and the United States.

Source: IQM Quantum Computers

The post IQM Announces Business Combination to Take Quantum Computing Company Public appeared first on HPCwire.

Novo Nordisk’s shares fall sharply after testing of CagriSema falls short of investors’ expectations

• Business live – latest updates

The owner of Wegovy and Ozempic has suffered a significant setback, as its highly anticipated new weight-loss treatment was labelled “obsolete” after disappointing clinical trials.

Novo Nordisk’s shares fell sharply on Monday after the results from testing the Danish company’s CagriSema drug fell short of investors’ expectations.

Austin Tucker Martin, 21, was killed by Secret Service after entering Trump’s Florida resort with a shotgun on Sunday

• US politics live – latest updates

The 21-year-old man who was shot and killed after having entered Donald Trump’s Florida resort on Sunday – while carrying a shotgun – came from a North Carolina family of the president’s supporters and had reportedly become increasingly fixated on the so-called Jeffrey Epstein files.

The focus of the FBI’s investigation into the intrusion attributed to Austin Tucker Martin is tightening on his movements and motives. Martin was confronted by Secret Service agents and a local sheriff’s deputy inside the secure perimeter of Mar-a-Lago and killed after he had raised a shotgun into the shooting position at about 1.30am on Sunday, law enforcement said.

Growing frustrations with AI on social media have us clamoring for better solutions.

The Social Security Administration wouldn't stop issuing benefits once its trust funds are exhausted, but it could be forced to cut benefits.

These frozen fries may be better than most restaurants' offerings.

The narrative that AI spending has been singlehandedly propping up the U.S. economy -- a claim that captivated Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington over the past year -- is facing serious pushback from economists [non-paywalled source] at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, all of whom now calculate that the AI buildup's direct contribution to growth was dramatically overstated and possibly close to zero. The debate hinges on how GDP accounts for imported components: roughly three-quarters of AI data center costs go toward computer chips and gear largely manufactured in Asia, and that spending gets subtracted from domestic output because it boosts foreign economies. Joseph Politano of the Apricitas Economics newsletter pegs AI's actual contribution at about 0.2 percentage points of the 2.2 percent U.S. growth in 2025, and even Hannah Rubinton at the St. Louis Fed -- whose own analysis attributed 39 percent of growth to AI-related business spending through the first nine months of the year -- acknowledges that figure is probably the ceiling. "It's not like AI is propping up the economy," Rubinton said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bellarmine Chatunga Mugabe, known for lavish lifestyle, also accused of theft and being illegal immigrant after man allegedly shot in back

A son of the late Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe has been charged with attempted murder after a 23-year-old man was allegedly shot in the back on 19 February in an upmarket area of Johannesburg.

Bellarmine Chatunga Mugabe, 28, appeared in court on Monday for a brief hearing alongside co-accused Tobias Mugabe Matonhodze. Mugabe’s lawyer Sinenhlanhla Mnguni declined to comment when asked by reporters whether the two men were related. Mnguni said he would request bail for his clients at the next hearing on 3 March.

Feb. 23, 2026 — The performance of rechargeable batteries is governed by processes deep within their components. A fundamental understanding of electrochemistry, structure–property–performance relationships and the effects of processing and operating conditions is essential for accelerating the development of next-generation battery technologies capable of powering electric vehicles, portable electronic devices and grid-scale energy storage.

Overview of the key processes that are fundamental for understanding single-crystal battery materials. Image credit: Yuan et al.

However, laboratory exploration, design and optimization remain extremely time-consuming and expensive. In contrast, advanced modeling and simulation provide powerful tools to elucidate the complex, tightly coupled processes that govern battery performance. These approaches can accelerate rational development of advanced energy storage systems with properties tailored to specific needs.

In a recent paper, published in Chemical Reviews, researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) outlined how state-of-the-art computational modeling can help to unravel the fundamental relationships among battery processing, structure, properties and performance across multiple scales, ultimately paving the way for the implementation of new materials, microstructures and innovative architectural designs in next-generation electrochemical devices.

At the micron scale, battery electrodes are often composed of tiny crystalline particles that can exist in two primary forms: polycrystalline, consisting of multiple grains joined together, and single crystals, which exhibit a continuous and uninterrupted lattice structure. Polycrystalline materials resemble a snowball with many small ice crystals lumped together, while single crystals look more like a uniform ice cube with consistent properties throughout.

The team focused specifically on single-crystal battery materials. Although these materials have not yet been fully commercialized, they offer the potential for improved performance, enhanced tunability and reduced degradation over extended cycles.

“Once a fundamental understanding is obtained, single-crystal materials can be leveraged to inform design strategies for improved battery performance, such as better capacity retention, enhanced safety and longer cycling life,” said author and LLNL scientist Sabrina Wan.

Many open questions remain regarding this essential underlying knowledge, but simulations provide a critical first step toward addressing them. Modeling approaches spanning length scales from the atomistic level to the full battery cell can be used to investigate the key factors governing the electrochemical behavior of single-crystal battery materials.

“It is our intention to provide a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art physics-based modeling approaches for studying properties and phenomena relevant to single-crystal applications in batteries,” said Wan. “We aim to equip the community with the knowledge needed to effectively use these tools.”

Coupled with experiments, computational models enable iterative refinement of material designs, yielding new insights and guiding optimization. By cycling between simulation predictions and laboratory validation, scientists can rapidly optimize battery materials without costly trial-and-error testing.

Looking ahead, the authors emphasized the importance of fully integrated, experimentally validated multiscale modeling frameworks, further enhanced by state-of-the-art machine learning and data science approaches, to enable reliable and predictive design of next-generation battery systems.

Source: LLNL

The post LLNL: Advanced Simulation and Modeling Pave a Path Forward for Single-Crystal Battery Materials appeared first on HPCwire.

The Santa Cruz Fire Department said the surfers helped save the passengers from a “potentially tragic incident.”

Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, also known as "El Mencho," had a $15 million U.S. bounty on his head.

Night owls will be able to check out the lunar eclipse when it appears this March.

Schools close and flights suspended after military raid kills Jalisco New Generation Cartel leader Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes

• Who was El Mencho, the former police officer who co-founded an ultraviolent cartel in Mexico?

Whole areas of western Mexico have been all but shut down after a surge in cartel violence sparked by a military raid that killed one of the world’s most wanted drug traffickers, known as “El Mencho”.

Schools were closed in several Mexican states, and foreign governments warned their citizens to stay inside after the drug lord, whose real name is Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, was declared dead on Sunday.

Dragon-types are extremely powerful in this Pokemon game. Here’s how to catch them early and strengthen your team.

• Trump invites Olympic champions to State of the Union

• FBI director Kash Patel joins locker-room revelry in Milan

Donald Trump made a congratulatory phone call to the United States men’s hockey team after their dramatic win over Canada in the Olympic gold medal game on Sunday afternoon, praising what he called an “unbelievable” performance and inviting the players to Washington DC this week.

The US president addressed the team by speakerphone shortly after their 2-1 overtime victory, telling them they had delivered a moment the country would remember for decades.

The killing of “El Mencho” triggered retaliatory violence across Mexico. In some cities, such as Puerto Vallarta and Cancun, the U.S. is warning its citizens to shelter in place.

Everyone Hates Elon campaigners fix photo of ex-prince slouched in backseat of car after arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office

Activists have hung a photo in the Louvre museum in Paris of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor being driven from a police station after his arrest.

The British political campaign group Everyone Hates Elon fixed the photo, which shows the former prince slouched in the backseat of a Range Rover, on a wall of the Paris gallery on Sunday.

Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, known as "El Mencho," was the leader of the notorious Jalisco New Generation Cartel prior to his death on Sunday.

As details of the death toll for January’s protests continue to emerge, three students explain why they are resisting a return to normality

More than 45 days after a brutal January crackdown that left thousands of Iranian protesters dead, students across several universities are protesting again. As Iran’s new academic term began on Saturday, students in Tehran gathered on campus, chanting anti-government slogans, despite a heavy security presence and plainclothes officers stationed outside university gates.

The Guardian spoke to protesting students about why they were rallying despite the fact that thousands had been killed and tens of thousands arrested in the January demonstrations.

"In August 2025, TypeScript surpassed both Python and JavaScript to become the most-used language on GitHub for the first time ever..." writes GitHub's senior developer advocate. They point to this as proof that "AI isn't just speeding up coding. It's reshaping which languages, frameworks, and tools developers choose in the first place." Eighty percent of new developers on GitHub use Copilot within their first week. Those early exposures reset the baseline for what "easy" means. When AI handles boilerplate and error-prone syntax, the penalty for choosing powerful but complex languages disappears. Developers stop avoiding tools with high overhead and start picking based on utility instead. The language adoption data shows this behavioral shift: — TypeScript grew 66% year-over-year — JavaScript grew 24% — Shell scripting usage in AI-generated projects jumped 206% That last one matters. We didn't suddenly love Bash. AI absorbed the friction that made shell scripting painful. So now we use the right tool for the job without the usual cost. "When a task or process goes smoothly, your brain remembers," they point out. "Convenience captures attention. Reduced friction becomes a preference — and preferences at scale can shift ecosystems." "AI performs better with strongly typed languages. Strongly typed languages give AI much clearer constraints..." "Standardize before you scale. Document patterns. Publish template repositories. Make your architectural decisions explicit. AI tools will mirror whatever structures they see." "Test AI-generated code harder, not less."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Blizzard warnings are in effect for New York City, New Jersey, southern New England and coastal communities along the East Coast.

The Chinese tech company is branching out from phones to robots, via its robot phone -- and it'll show them all off next week at MWC in Barcelona.

Dollar slumps and gold rises as authorities say they will halt levies linked to emergency powers but give no word on refunds. Plus, meet some of the people suing the president over civil liberties

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Good morning.

Donald Trump’s administration has said it will stop collecting tariffs the supreme court ruled were illegal as they were imposed using emergency powers, as investors attempted to digest the US president’s latest volley of replacement levies.

What’s happening with the stock markets after the news? Gold jumped 0.6% to $5,135 an ounce, its highest level since the end of January, as investors flocked to the safe haven asset, while bitcoin dropped as much as 4.8% to $64,300 before recovering some ground, at $65,734. Futures tracking the US S&P 500 stock market slipped 0.5% on Monday morning.

This a developing story. Follow the live blog here.

Who was the intruder? Bradshaw did not immediately identify the intruder. However, the Associated Press reported that the man killed had been identified by investigators as 21-year-old Austin Tucker Martin, citing a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the investigation.

Commentary: Apple's $599 iPhone 16E has good value, but the iPhone 17E is expected to launch soon, possibly at a March 4 Apple media event.

Ties to the disgraced financier run deep through the academic world, documents released by the DoJ show

Major institutions of higher education in the US are reckoning with the latest release of the Epstein files after discovering the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s relationships with board members, professors and administrators on campuses across the country.

In some cases, professors have been placed under review, research centers closed or conferences canceled. Students and staff have responded in different ways, including petitions, open letters and campus forums.

The latest Apple phone brings notable improvements to the camera, display and battery. But is it worth the upgrade?

Report into ‘unprecedented’ violence between members of two communities in 2022 calls for action on communalism

• UK politics live – latest updates

Violence between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester in 2022 was fuelled by online disinformation and met with a failure of leadership from the city’s mayor, council and police, an independent inquiry has said.

Researchers from the School of Oriental and African Studies and the London School of Economics carried out the study after the unrest between predominantly young Hindu and Muslim men in Leicester between May and September 2022.

No single group was solely responsible, with members of Hindu and Muslim communities described as “both victims and perpetrators”.

Online disinformation was a “central accelerant of the crisis”, fuelling distrust.

Community coexistence in Leicester is “increasingly fragmenting” amid new migration patterns, economic decline and the importation of political ideologies such as communalism, Hindutva and political Islamism.

Communalism within south Asian communities in the UK “needs to be urgently recognised and addressed”.

The response from local authorities, including the city council, mayor and police was “lacking or inconsistent” with “major gaps” in intelligence and communication.

Comments by Ted Sarandos follow Donald Trump’s demand for company to remove Democrat from board

• Trump warns Netflix of ‘consequences’ unless it pulls top Democrat from board

• Business live – latest updates

The boss of Netflix has launched a fresh defence of its $82.7bn (£61bn) takeover of Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) assets, as he defended the streaming company’s contribution to the UK film and TV industry.

Ted Sarandos claimed Netflix buying WBD would bring “growth” to the entertainment industry, amid attempts by rival Paramount Skydance to launch a counter offer for the studio business which he said would do the opposite.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told a preposterous story demonizing immigrants in high-profile public remarks alongside President Donald Trump and on Fox News last summer, about a cannibal who ate other people and then, on his Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation flight, began to eat himself. At the time, The Intercept was unable to substantiate any part of the tale.

Now, three officials from federal law enforcement agencies — including Noem’s own Department of Homeland Security — with knowledge of the allegations say the entire story was fabricated.

“It is completely false,” said one senior law enforcement official who is familiar with the allegation but not authorized to speak publicly on the subject.

Two other federal law enforcement officials echoed this, telling The Intercept that the claims were ludicrous and that there was no evidence corroborating the story.

Asked for comment, a DHS spokesperson said Noem was simply relaying the claims of an air marshal. “What ‘fabrication’ of the story of the cannibal?” the spokesperson said. “She was told that story on a deportation flight by one of the air marshals.”

Amid growing calls for Noem to resign — after tarring Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti as guilty of “domestic terrorism” in the immediate aftermath of their killings by federal agents — or face impeachment for obstruction of Congress, self-dealing, and violation of public trust, the false story about a supposed cannibal shows that a willingness to deceive the American public began long before Minneapolis.

While falsehoods by Noem and the department have frequently been exposed during Trump’s second term, they are rarely acknowledged, much less corrected, by the secretary or DHS.

“This administration’s pattern of abusing innocent Americans in the street — from tear-gassing kids to shooting and killing citizens — and then turning around and lying about it to try and cover their asses cannot be allowed to continue,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., told The Intercept.

Sitting alongside Trump during a July press conference, Noem offered a prime example of the “kind of deranged individuals that are on our streets in America, that we’re trying to target and get out of our country.” Noem said that federal agents had “detained a cannibal and put him on a plane to take him home, and while they had him in his seat, he started to eat himself.” 

Noem also told the story to Fox News’ Jesse Watters, claiming a U.S. Marshal said that the cannibal had previously eaten other people before he began to consume himself aboard an ICE deportation flight.

“Was this bad hombre handcuffed to something and he was trying to chew his arm off so he could escape, or was he just hungry?” Watters asked. “You know, what bothered me the most is that this U.S. Marshal just said it like it was normal,” Noem replied, adding, “He said he was literally eating his own arms. That is what he did. He called himself a cannibal and ate other people and ate himself that day.”

The three federal law enforcement officials said the story is fictional. “That is completely made up,” the senior federal law enforcement official told The Intercept. “That never happened.” All three law enforcement sources said attempts to verify Noem’s claims came up empty. “They went to ERO,” one source said, referring to ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, a unit tasked with the standard immigration enforcement process: identifying, arresting, and deporting immigrants. “There was no information about it. It never took place. It’s a lie.”

Asked if the story came from Noem or the U.S. Marshals, one official was unequivocal: “Noem.”

The senior official told The Intercept that Noem had crossed a line: “I cannot condone somebody making up a story that absolutely never happened.”

Related

Why Won’t ICE Comment on Kristi Noem’s Cannibal Stories?

After a July 2025 article by The Intercept on the failure by Noem or DHS to answer questions about the cannibal incident, this reporter regularly asked about it to officials at ICE, DHS, the Marshals Service, and other federal law enforcement agencies.

Noem failed to reply to close to two dozen requests for comment since July.

Months of messages and multiple phone calls finally yielded a non-denial denial. “ICE media folks went to ERO to ask them about it,” Emily Covington, until recently an assistant director in ICE’s Office of Public Affairs, told The Intercept in November. “We do not have information on a flight with a cannibal.” When asked if that was confirmation that the cannibal did not exist, Covington responded: “That is not what I’m saying, whatsoever.”

A Marshals Service spokesperson told The Intercept that information regarding its Justice Prisoner Air Transportation System flights is kept under wraps for the “safety and security of all parties.” 

Members of federal law enforcement — including some speaking off the record — expressed discomfort with having to answer for what they said was a clumsy yarn told by Noem. (All agreed to allow The Intercept to reference these remarks.) “Why would she even say something so insane as this?” asked one of the officials, who said that even a young child would never make up such an outlandish story.

Another was at a loss to explain why Noem would tell a tale that was “obviously utterly false.”

Noem has come under frequent criticism for headline-grabbing stunts, aggressive operations, and hobbyhorse programs of dubious efficacy. The impeachment resolution against Noem for high crimes and misdemeanors, filed in the wake of Pretti’s death last month, now has 187 co-sponsors, a spokesperson for the office of Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Ill., told The Intercept.

“Kristi Noem has blood on her hands,” said Kelly, who introduced the articles of impeachment. “Each time, Secretary Noem lied to our faces and tried to justify the murder of innocent lives. People are disgusted by her.”

Noem’s department has followed her lead when it comes to false statements.

“Border Patrol law enforcement officers were ambushed by domestic terrorists that rammed federal agents with their vehicles. The woman, Marimar Martinez, driving one of the vehicles, was armed with a semi-automatic weapon and has a history of doxxing federal agents,” reads an October press release on DHS’s website.

Related

Chicago Woman Shot by Border Patrol Reacts to Minneapolis ICE Killing: “Of Course This Happened”

Recently, Martinez explained to members of Congress how a car driven by federal officers sideswiped her truck and cut her off. “I could hear my back passenger window shatter, and I felt bullets continue to pierce my body,” she testified. “As I attempted to drive to a safe location, I began to feel lightheaded. I looked down and saw blood gushing out of my arms and legs and realized I had been shot multiple times.”

Martinez pleaded not guilty to a federal charge of assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal officers, and federal prosecutors soon dropped all charges against her. But the October press release, complete with Martinez’s photo, remains on the DHS website.

“I am outraged that Marimar Martinez is still being smeared as a ‘domestic terrorist’ on DHS’s official website, despite DOJ rightfully dropping all its baseless charges against her,” said Duckworth.

DHS did not respond to a request about why Martinez is still cast as a domestic terrorist on their website.

Martinez’s case is typical. A 2025 Associated Press investigation of federal criminal cases against anti-immigration protesters in four Democratic-led cities found that of 100 people initially charged with felony assaults on federal agents, 55 saw their charges reduced to misdemeanors or dismissed outright. At least 23 pleaded guilty, most of them to reduced charges resulting in scant or no jail time.

Related

Trump Calls His Enemies Terrorists. Does That Mean He Can Just Kill Them?

In case after case, however, DHS refuses to acknowledge dropped or reduced charges. The department accused Francisco Longoria of attempting to “run over” Customs and Border Protection officers and injuring them with his pickup truck. Criminal charges against Longoria were ultimately dropped. Still, DHS recently cited Longoria in a press release about “vehicle attacks” on immigration officers.

Noem and DHS routinely paint immigrants rounded up by DHS as the worst of the worst — and even created a website to showcase such persons. But last week, DHS admitted that the site was rife with inaccuracies and that the charges against hundreds of immigrants listed were incorrect.

Noem routinely peddles blatant falsehoods before Congress, during press conferences, and on television and has been excoriated for it by editorial boards from the mainstream New York Times to the right-wing Free Press. Lawmakers have similarly called her out for what Michigan Rep. Haley Stevens termed “nonstop lies to the American people.” 

Noem, for instance, declared “no American citizens have been arrested or detained. We focus on those that are here illegally,” during an October 30 press conference in Gary, Indiana. She added that claims to the contrary are “simply not true and false reporting.” 

But less than a month before, federal agents conducted a pre-dawn military-style raid — personally overseen by Noem — on a home in Illinois, using armored vehicles, a helicopter, and officers in tactical gear with high-powered rifles. That flashy operation resulted in the detention and arrests of two U.S. citizens. Last October, a ProPublica investigation documented 170 cases of U.S. citizens who were arrested by immigration agents during Trump’s second term.

During a December House Homeland Security Committee hearing, Noem falsely claimed that the DHS had “not deported U.S. citizens or military veterans.” Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., then released a letter from Noem, dated September 2, 2025, that reads: “Regarding your question on the number of veterans that have been removed since January 20, 2025, ICE has removed eight veterans.”

The vilification by Noem and DHS of Martinez, Longoria, Good, Pretti, and others is far more dangerous than her cannibal fiction — but the latter is part of a larger effort to demonize immigrants and those that support them. For centuries, claims of cannibalism have been used to justify all manner of racism, violence, and territorial conquest.

For years, Trump has leaned on this racialized rhetoric and also expressed a fascination with the fictional serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter. During his most recent presidential campaign, Trump frequently mentioned Lecter during rants about immigrants. “They’re rough people, in many cases from jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums. You know, insane asylums, that’s ‘Silence of the Lambs’ stuff,” Trump said in 2024. “Hannibal Lecter, anybody know Hannibal Lecter?”

Since taking office a second time, Trump has continued to talk about Lecter. “The late great Hannibal Lecter, right? The fake news would say, ‘Why does he talk about that? He’s a fictional character.’ He’s not. We have many of them that came across the border,” Trump said last year, prior to Noem’s comments. “But when the people went to the voting booth, then we understood why he talked about that because they voted for us. They say, ‘We don’t want Hannibal Lecter in our country.’”

Right-wing influencers on social media and pro-Trump media outlets seized on Noem’s “horrifying” cannibal claims to criticize Democrats, demonize immigrants, and call for “mass roundups” and “mass deportations” of “sub-human pieces of trash.” What followed were increasingly brutal anti-immigrant crackdowns across the country by the Trump administration.

Noem and her agency remain under fire in the wake of the killings of Good and Pretti last month. The Department of Homeland Security shut down earlier this month after Republicans failed to agree to Democrats’ demands for new restrictions on federal immigration agents, including a ban on masked officers, requirements that agents wear visible identification, and a mandate that DHS obtains warrants from judges to make arrests in homes.

“Kristi Noem and other officials in this administration have proven beyond a doubt that they cannot be trusted to credibly investigate their own agents’ abuses, let alone implement the commonsense safeguards that Democrats are pushing for,” Duckworth told The Intercept. “That’s why it’s so important we get these DHS reforms codified into law.”

The post Kristi Noem Repeatedly Claimed ICE Deported a Cannibal. It Was “Completely Made Up.” appeared first on The Intercept.

Apple's streamer is jam-packed with excellent TV shows.

The past year has been turbulent for Tinder and Bumble. Fortunately, it turns out the real world has its charms

Valentine’s Day is mercifully behind us for another year, so we can all go back to not loving each other again. How wonderful it is to be freed of the burden of expressing our emotions in public. I didn’t post a flowery declaration of devotion for my girlfriend on social media, and I kept expecting a flood of messages asking me if we’d broken up already. Such is the peer pressure of a holiday designed purely to justify our own self-worth. Well, someone is willing to put up with me, therefore I have value.

Needing to rub your love into other people’s faces is a natural outgrowth of how absolutely miserable it is out there for finding romance. The world is not exactly filled with optimism these days, as we all hunker down with our cans of tinned fish, waiting for the next disaster to strike. Couple that (pun intended) with the onslaught of digitized dating solutions like the apps Hinge, Raya and Bumble and you have a rancid stew of solitude to look forward to. Why not mark yourself safe from loneliness by posting a picture of you and your partner snogging in the middle of a Walgreens (contraception aisle, of course)?

It's a trap! There are some great deals on used and refurbished desktops and laptops that are still running Windows 10. Don't do it.

Tenants have powerful home security options, too. These kits use peel-and-stick sensors, simple apps and other rent-friendly tricks.

Amid talk of artificial intelligence taking our jobs, the big unasked question is: how will we be fed?

How will we be fed? That’s the biggest question not seriously being addressed amid all this talk about whether or not artificial intelligence will end up taking over all of our jobs.

Formidable though the technology appears, similar fears have popped up repeatedly since the Industrial Revolution, and most working-age adults remain employed. Still, what is sorely missing is a serious debate about what to do if this future in fact materializes.

Three thoughts on the opening weekend of MLS in 2026, including a new Galaxy forward to fear and a pointed celebration in DC

You know a situation is dire when it casts Luis Suárez as its level-headed participant.

Such were the scenes after Inter Miami opened their MLS Cup defense with a pitiful 3-0 defeat at Los Angeles FC. Through 90 minutes, with LAFC coming off a midweek continental match, both team’s stars stuck it out to try starting the 2026 season on the right foot. Son Heung-min made it 89 minutes, subbed out when the result was beyond doubt. Lionel Messi played every minute but was held without a goal contribution, failing to place either of his shot attempts on target and seeing all three created chances go uncashed by his teammates.

In June 2012, an invitation appeared on HPCwire that would quietly ignite a transformation in engineering simulation. This announcement invited engineers worldwide to submit real-world simulation projects to be tested on remote High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems—both on-premises and in the cloud. At the time, cloud-based HPC was still viewed with skepticism. Security concerns, performance doubts, software licensing hurdles, and cultural resistance stood firmly in the way. But rather than debate theory, the Cloud team chose experimentation, and the Cloud Experiments were born.

2012–2014: Learning the Hard Way

The first annual Compendium of case studies appeared in 2013, documenting 25 hands-on engineering experiments. Each project tested whether complex CAE applications could run efficiently in the cloud.

Early results were sobering. Success rates hovered around 40% in 2013 and 60% in 2014. Engineers encountered roadblocks everywhere: slow onboarding, licensing friction, data transfer bottlenecks, configuration complexity, and the ever-present need for scarce HPC expertise.

Yet every case study concluded with two powerful sections: Lessons Learned and Recommendations. These weren’t marketing summaries. They were hard-earned operational insights from real engineers trying to get real work done. Those lessons would later become the seeds of SimOps.

2015: The Container Breakthrough

A major turning point came in 2015. Based on patterns emerging from dozens of experiments, the team introduced novel HPC software containers tailored specifically for engineering workloads. Instead of installing and configuring simulation software on every cluster, applications were packaged into portable, ready-to-run containers.

The impact was dramatic. Onboarding time dropped from an average of three months to just a few days. Engineers no longer needed deep knowledge of system architecture or cloud infrastructure. Through a browser-based interface, they accessed what felt like a familiar remote desktop—backed by powerful bare-metal or virtualized HPC resources.

This abstraction between software and hardware removed one of the biggest operational barriers to cloud HPC adoption. It also quietly shifted the narrative: HPC was no longer just for specialists. It could become part of everyday engineering design.

Case Studies That Proved the Model

As annual Compendiums of case studies continued—eventually totaling 232 cloud-based engineering projects—the evidence accumulated.

At Rimac, engineers designing some of the world’s fastest electric hypercars gained on-demand access to powerful cloud resources. Simulation cycles shortened. Design iterations accelerated. More sophisticated geometries and physics became feasible. And because cloud resources were elastic, they paid only for what they used.

In another study, marine engineers running NUMECA/Cadence FINE/Marine simulations found that bare-metal cloud infrastructure provided performance advantages over local upgrades—without the overhead of maintaining in-house HPC expertise. Containers enabled immediate access to clusters without installation delays.

An implantable planar antenna simulation project demonstrated a fourfold speed increase compared to a local workstation. Preconfigured containerized ANSYS HFSS environments ran instantly, eliminating the traditional setup burden.

Across industries—automotive, marine, aerospace, medical devices—the same themes emerged:

• Access must be simple.
• Software must be ready-to-run.
• Infrastructure complexity must be hidden.
• Performance must be predictable.
• Operational friction must be removed.

The experiments were no longer about “Can HPC run in the cloud?” They were about “How do we make simulation operationally scalable?”

2013–2024: From Case Studies to Best Practices

As the Compendiums expanded—supported by industry leaders such as Ansys, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, and media partners including HPCwire—the UberCloud initiative evolved into Simr, reflecting its broader mission: delivering simulation-ready infrastructure as a service.

By 2024, the experiment success rate had reached 100%. More importantly, the accumulated Lessons Learned across 232 projects were distilled into structured Best Practices. Patterns became frameworks. Recommendations became repeatable methods. Operational insights became a philosophy. That philosophy became SimOps.

2024: The Birth of SimOps

In 2024, the SimOps initiative has been launched. Announced on HPCwire, SimOps (Simulation Operations) positioned itself as “The DevOps of HPC.”

The comparison is deliberate. Just as DevOps transformed how software is built and deployed, SimOps addresses how engineering simulations are run, managed, and scaled. SimOps is not about software development. It is about operational excellence in technical computing.

SimOps provides guidance on:

• Workflow automation
• Hybrid-cloud HPC orchestration
• Containerization of simulation stacks
• Data lifecycle management
• Performance benchmarking
• Cost optimization
• Cross-functional collaboration between R&D and IT

It recognizes that simulation bottlenecks are rarely just about compute power. They are about process, governance, data management, cultural adoption, and operational repeatability.

Inspired by community-driven movements like DevOps and FinOps, SimOps was incorporated as an independent non-profit organization serving the HPC, AI, cloud, and engineering simulation communities. Today, SimOps offers:

• Training courses and certifications
• A SimOps software stack
• A Practitioner community platform
• Webinars and a growing podcast series
• A structured maturity model for simulation-driven organizations

A Cultural Shift in Engineering

What began in 2012 as a practical cloud experiment has evolved into a broader operational philosophy. The early HPC Cloud experiments asked whether and how simulations could move to the cloud. SimOps asks how simulations can become a scalable, automated, and reliable enterprise capability. Over twelve years, the journey revealed a powerful insight: The true challenge was never just compute performance. It was operations.

Simulation projects fail not because solvers are weak—but because workflows are fragile, data is chaotic, onboarding is slow, licensing is complex, and collaboration between engineering and IT is often misaligned. SimOps addresses those systemic gaps.

From Experiment to Ecosystem

The story of SimOps is not one of a single product or breakthrough technology. It is the story of a community learning, documenting, refining, and sharing operational knowledge across more than a decade. From 25 case studies in 2013 to 232 cloud-based engineering projects by 2024, the trajectory reflects a maturation of both technology and mindset. What started as an experiment has become a movement.

And if DevOps reshaped software engineering, SimOps may well define the next chapter in simulation-driven innovation—where HPC, AI, cloud, and engineering converge into operational excellence. The experiment worked. Now the operations scale.

Want to join the movement? Explore the best practices, start your SimOps Fundamentals training, get certified, or join the SimOps Practitioner Club at www.simops.com.

About the SimOps Foundation

The SimOps Foundation is an independent non-profit community organization dedicated to the standardization and automation of simulation operations (SimOps) within the High-Performance Computing (HPC) and engineering sectors. By bridging the gap between engineering simulation and HPC infrastructure, the Foundation provides a vendor-neutral framework for improving the efficiency, scalability, and reproducibility of complex simulations and data flows. Through its tiered certification programs, the “SimOps-compliant” software stack, and a global community of practitioners, the Foundation empowers organizations to accelerate AI-powered innovation and streamline product development. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, the SimOps Foundation is built on a decade of expertise and over 200 real-world engineering use cases. For more information, visit www.simops.com.

The post From HPC Experiments to a Movement: The Rise of SimOps in HPC appeared first on HPCwire.

South-western France could hit 25C, while a powerful Nor’easter is forecast to bring blizzards to Boston

• Europe live – latest updates

An early taste of spring is on the way for millions across northern and western Europe this week. Temperatures could climb close to a near record-breaking 20C (68F) in parts of Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, with south-western France approaching 25C on Wednesday.

The warmth is being driven by a highly amplified synoptic pattern, featuring a region of low pressure over the Atlantic and strong high pressure over central Europe. The setup will allow exceptionally mild air to spread across much of the continent, with temperatures in some places rising to 10-15C above the seasonal average.

At 31% off, this compact blender is hovering just above its all-time low -- but it won't be for long.

Following a ProPublica article revealing that the U.S. Forest Service had for years issued clothing to wildland firefighters that it knew contained potentially dangerous “forever chemicals,” the agency has stopped distributing those garments. It also says that it will instruct its equipment manufacturers to avoid using PFAS in the future.

This month, ProPublica reported that until at least 2023 one of the Forest Service’s suppliers, TenCate, used finishing products made with a PFAS compound on a Kevlar-blend pant fabric. According to emails from the supplier, the finishes were used to repel gasoline and water. Despite knowing about the use of PFAS, officials with the Forest Service had not previously informed wildland firefighters about it.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, have long been used in protective gear to repel substances like fuels. But many municipal fire departments have moved away from the chemicals as researchers revealed more about health risks associated with them. Firefighters in multiple states have filed class-action lawsuits against manufacturers alleging they were harmed by PFAS in the gear they wore. Research specific to wildland firefighters has lagged, and wildland firefighting agencies have been slower to publicly address the issue.

On Feb. 11, one day after ProPublica published its article, a Forest Service cache manager — an official who oversees a gear repository — wrote in an email that he asked colleagues to distribute widely, “I received notice from the Washington Office Cache Management staff late last night that we are to place a hold on issuing” the pants. But the agency didn’t immediately clarify further. A wildland firefighter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their employment said last week that incident management teams had been asking the agency for advice about the pants. “As of right now, our logistics folks haven’t gotten any guidance at all from higher-ups,” the firefighter said.

On Friday, the Forest Service issued a statement to ProPublica: “PFAS in protective gear is a complex, industry-wide issue and any suggestion that the agency has sought to obscure information does not reflect the extensive work to expand testing and improve long-term occupational health protections for firefighters. Firefighter pants manufactured with PFAS water repellent fabric treatments have been removed from available stock in the National Interagency Support Caches.”

TenCate has not responded to repeated inquiries, but in an email reviewed by ProPublica, it told the Forest Service that a PFAS-free finish was available in January 2023. On Friday, the Forest Service sent an email to its staff saying that its supplier had switched to a PFAS-free finish that year. In the same email, the Forest Service wrote that anyone with the older pants “should discontinue use and replace” them. The agency also said that it was updating its requirements “to specify that fabric treatments and fabrics will not contain PFAS.”

Read More

Firefighters Wore Gear Containing “Forever Chemicals.” The Forest Service Knew and Stayed Silent for Years.

Fire departments typically adhere to safety standards set by the National Fire Protection Association, a nonprofit that gathers input from expert committees including firefighters and representatives from companies that supply them with equipment. While the association is not a certifying body, its standards are used by government agencies including the Forest Service. Last year, an NFPA technical committee updated its standards for municipal firefighters to restrict levels of certain PFAS chemicals in protective gear. But the organization has not yet made a parallel update to its standard for wildland firefighters. 

Rick Swan, an NFPA committee member, said the lag reflects a long and deliberative process for developing standards, but he added that a restriction on PFAS chemicals in wildland gear is all but inevitable. “I think it’s a no-brainer,” Swan said. In an email, a spokesperson for the NFPA wrote that the committee overseeing the wildland firefighting standard “will likely consider this issue again.”

Experts can’t say for certain what risks PFAS in gear pose to the health of wildland firefighters and agree more research is needed. Jeff Burgess, a professor and researcher at the University of Arizona who is leading a series of long-term studies of firefighter health, said smoke inhalation and the accumulation of soot on gear are primary ways wildland firefighters encounter carcinogens. Understanding of wildland firefighters’ exposures to PFAS has lagged behind understanding of exposure in municipal fire departments. Historically, researchers have had less access to wildland crews, and in recent years they have focused on studying risks related to smoke.

The post U.S. Forest Service Stops Issuing Firefighter Pants That Contain PFAS, Following ProPublica’s Reporting appeared first on ProPublica.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has criticized the broadening use of anxiety medications, but doctors and researchers say the MAHA movement is misrepresenting drugs that have been proven to help.

Why Should Delaware Care?
In 2020, officials across the United States removed dozens of statues of historical figures from public property following protests over racial injustice. In Wilmington, those included the statues of Caesar Rodney and Christopher Columbus. Recent advocacy from Italian American residents for the famed explorer has since revived the debate, leading the Wilmington City Council to consider its stance on the statue’s potential return.

Four years after Wilmington took down a statue of Christopher Columbus, the sculpture is again exposing tensions in the city over who gets to determine which symbols to publicly embrace.

During a city council meeting last week, members of Wilmington’s large Italian-American community stated that the Columbus statue should return to public display – either at the city’s Father Tucker Park or at its previous location along Pennsylvania Avenue. They argued that Columbus was a historical figure who, while flawed, sparked pride within their community.

But, in response, a mixture of older Black residents, younger white residents and Black city council members stated that Columbus should not be publicly celebrated, citing his role in slavery and in the colonization of the Americas.

During the meeting, Albert Greto – an attorney who is leading a broader Italian-American community coalition – said he wants Wilmington to turn over the statue to his coalition. Then, if the city determines the statue will not be placed at a public site, he said his group will restore it to private property.  

During his public comment, Greto also acknowledged that Columbus had enslaved people.  

“I think there’s no dispute in that,” he said. “Be that as it may, there’s good and bad in everyone.”

After nearly an hour of public comments and council debate, the Wilmington City Council voted down 6-3 a resolution that would have formally opposed the statue being placed on public land, including city parks.

The resolution had been introduced by City Councilwoman Shané Darby.

The council members opposed to the resolution, such as Councilwoman Christian Willauer, said they wanted to allow different communities to be able to celebrate their cultural symbols. 

“I believe our communities are better when we give each other space to express ourselves according to our own traditions, as long as those traditions are not about taking something away from someone else or putting someone else down,” Willauer said.

For months, multiple Italian American community groups have been organizing to push the city to return and re-erect the Columbus statue, which once stood on a strip of land at the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and Franklin and 13th streets.

Many have said that Father Tucker Park, which sits across the street from the St. Anthony’s Lodge No. 3012 in the Little Italy neighborhood, would be an ideal location.   

The recent advocacy comes amid an ongoing national conversation about the kind of monuments that should be displayed in public. On the other side of the ideological spectrum from Darby, the Trump administration last month removed over two dozen panels at the President’s House site in Philadelphia that exhibited stories of people enslaved by President George Washington. 

The city and others sued the Trump administration, and last week a federal judge ordered the exhibits to be temporarily restored until the pending case is resolved.

The removal of the panels were part of broader efforts by the Trump administration to examine monuments and other historical markers to ensure they are not displaying content that “inappropriately disparage[s] Americans past or living.” 

The conversation

The Christopher Columbus statue was originally erected on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1957. 

The Christopher Columbus Monument Committee, a group composed of Italian Americans in the community, had raised $40,000 to commission the statue. Committee members also maintained it over the subsequent decades.  

Then, in 2020, the administration of then-Wilmington Mayor Mike Purzycki contacted Mike Panfile, the head of the Columbus Monument Committee, asking for permission to take down the statue amid protests against racial injustice that occurred following the police murder of George Floyd.

The committee agreed and the city then took down the statue. At the same time, Purzycki also had taken down a statue in the city central square of Delaware Founding Father Caesar Rodney. 

Following the removals, Purzycki said he wanted to hold more discussions with the community about the public display of historical figures and events.  

“We cannot erase history, as painful as it may be, but we can certainly discuss history with each other and determine together what we value and what we feel is appropriate to memorialize,” Purzycki said in a public statement in 2020. 

More than five years later, Darby introduced her resolution, opposing the effort to restore the statue to a public place. She said she supports the statue being returned to private property, but believes that the statue shouldn’t be placed on land that taxpayers are funding. 

“Globally, he just represents something so terrible and bad. In a predominantly Black and brown city, we shouldn’t have to pay to maintain him at a city park,” she told Spotlight Delaware.  

The council heard about 40 minutes of public comments before discussing the measure.   

More than a dozen residents, many of them older, came in opposition to the resolution. Several referenced the discrimination that Italian Americans faced after immigrating to the United States. Some described Columbus as a “sign of hope” for their community. Others characterized him as someone who “connected two great continents and paved the way for others to follow.”

“Ask yourself, how would you feel if a council member presented false toxic narratives designed to malign MLK’s character and campaigned against the legacy,” city resident Rob Savarese said to the 13-member city council, which is made up of nine Black members. 

Like Savarese, most of the city residents who spoke during the public comment period opposed Darby’s resolutions.

Those who supported it emphasized Columbus’ role in colonization and slavery. Some even urged their Italian-American neighbors to choose another historical figure to honor.  

“Every kind of disgusting thing that could happen happened on his watch,” city resident Baba Hamine said. “Christopher Columbus did that to my ancestors.” 

Wilmington’s Columbus statue is currently being stored in a facility that “specializes in high-dollar art and sculptures,” according to Daniel Walker, deputy chief of staff for Mayor John Carney.  

Walker declined to disclose the exact location, but he emphasized that the mayor’s office has made multiple offers for the community to see and pick up the statue.

Carney’s office had not been involved in conversations involving the statue, according to Walker. Asked whether Carney was in support of re-erecting the statue, Walker said the community needs to have that discussion with the City Council.

In a more recent interview after the city council vote, Walker said that Carney’s office will be in discussions with the city council and members of the community to find a path forward.

Walker noted that placing the Columbus statue in a public park would not require City Council approval through an ordinance. Still, he said ordinances have been used in the past to take similar actions.

The resolution voted down by the City Council last week was only a declaration emphasizing the position of the public body. 

Councilmembers Willauer, Chris Johnson, Alex Hackett, James Spadola, Nathan Field, and Zanthia Oliver voted against it. 

Councilmembers Darby, Coby Owens, and Council President Trippi Congo voted for it.

Councilmembers Michelle Harlee and Latisha Bracy voted present. 

Later, Johnson, who represents Little Italy and stood as the main opponent to Darby’s ordinance, told Spotlight Delaware that if an ordinance were required to put the statue back up, he would be willing to propose it. 

He said it could also include a broader monument to highlight the history and achievements of indigenous communities. 

A saint? A sinner?

Amid protests by organizations like Black Lives Matter amid the George Floyd killing in 2020, Wilmington’s Columbus statue was one of at least 33 statues around the nation that were taken down, as well as other confederate monuments, as reported by CBS News. 

Individuals throughout Delaware and other states have spoken out about Columbus’s efforts to colonize land occupied by Indigenous people, which some say led to his role in a “genocide” of the native population.  

The first contact between Europeans and the indigenous civilizations that occupied the Americas occurred after Columbus arrived in 1492 on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, which is currently Haiti and the Dominican Republic. 

A report from the College of Charleston’s Lowcountry Digital History Initiative asserts that Columbus directly captured about 500 Taino slaves to be sold in Spain. About 200 of them did not survive the voyage, according to the report.

By the year 1600, the arrival of Europeans led to the deaths of roughly 55 million indigenous people, according to a 2019 study published by the Quaternary Science Reviews Journal.

During a community meeting at the St. Anthony’s Lodge No. 3012 in Little Italy last week, residents pushed back against criticism of Columbus, with some saying claims of genocide were myths. 

Greto’s coalition gave a presentation discussing the history of Columbus, the oppression faced by Italian Americans, and how the celebration of Columbus Day, which was made a national holiday in 1937, gave his community hope and pride. 

About 70 residents were present, including Johnson, the councilmember who represents the area. Darby did not attend the meeting.  

During the presentation, Peter Frattarelli, cultural director of Societa da Vinci, argued that Columbus’s actions did not fit the definition of genocide.

Frattarelli also argued that most scholars agree the decline of the Taino people was primarily due to European diseases, not systematic extermination. He also framed Columbus’s violence as retaliatory warfare. 

Finally, Frattarelli also strongly pushed back against claims that Columbus was a sex trafficker of young girls. 

“Was he a saint? Was he a sinner? I’m going to tell you he was closer to a saint than a sinner,” he said. 

The post Which monuments should Wilmington celebrate? Columbus statue sparks renewed debate appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

As sordid allegations engulfed Prince Andrew, Queen Elizabeth II showed a mother’s love, King Charles III a brother’s fury, and Prince William, a nephew’s dismay.

Israeli officials say they won’t initiate a strike on Iran but the public is bracing for the possibility of another war.

Why Should Delaware Care?
The Port of Wilmington is one of the last anchors of good-paying, blue-collar jobs in Delaware. It also has suffered a string of financial blows over a dramatic six-year-period. How the state responds to the setbacks may determine the shape of Delaware’s workforce into the future. 

A buildup of sediment around the confluence of the Christina and Delaware rivers is blocking fully loaded fruit ships from docking at the Port of Wilmington – a facility long known as the top banana port in North America.

In conversations with port workers as well as with state and federal officials, Spotlight Delaware has learned that over the previous month cargo ships bound for Delaware and carrying Chiquita Brands fruit have been sailing past the Port of Wilmington because the waterway leading to the Christina River facility has become too shallow. 

The ships have been docking instead at ports in Chester and Philadelphia, where workers at those facilities have unloaded as much as a third of the vessels’ cargo, according to Port of Wilmington workers.

Then, with lighter loads and sitting higher in the water, the ships return to Port of Wilmington where they can navigate through the  shallow Christina River to unload the rest of their cargo.    

While the workaround has kept fruit moving, the situation could amount to a reputational setback for Delaware’s port. It comes at a time when the facility’s operator, Enstructure Inc., has been seeking out new lines of business amid an increasingly intense competition between regional ports.

The situation also means that the hours worked at the publicly owned, privately run Port of Wilmington are lower than what they would have been otherwise. And in some cases, those hours have been filled by non-union labor at upstream ports, sparking outcry from Delaware workers.

“Normally, we’ll work the ship around-the-clock for two days, or at least a day and a half. Now we’re lucky to get one around-the-clock,” Port of Wilmington union leader William Ashe Jr. said, referencing time spent unloading the Chiquita ships recently.

Ashe noted that the only ships impacted so far have been those carrying fruit from Chiquita, and not those bringing in perishables from Dole.  

“They tell me that the draft is deeper on Chiquita than it is on Dole” ships, he said. 

Spokespersons for Enstructure and for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – which is in charge of maintaining the navigable waters in the United States –  each blamed the sediment buildup on delays in dredging that began last fall. 

In an email, Army Corps spokesman Stephen Rochette said a dispute over an awarded dredging contract initially pushed back the start of the project.

“We awarded this contract in the fall and experienced a delay due to a contractual protest from another bidder. Additionally, the selected contractor had other project commitments as well that impacted their start time,” Rochette said. 

The project was then hit by more delays last month when the United States Coast Guard prohibited dredging during a cold snap that caused ice flows to form along the Delaware River, Rochette said. 

He said an expedited dredging operation is scheduled to begin imminently. 

“Our contractor is mobilizing equipment and setting up the pipeline,” Rochette said in the email.

The Army Corps’ website lists the dredging contract for Wilmington Harbor as having been initially scheduled to begin last October. It was supposed to be complete next month.

It is one of 33 “maintenance dredging” projects within the Philadelphia region that are either proposed or ongoing.   

The dredging delays at the Port of Wilmington have occurred just as the Army Corps has been suffering through a period of uncertainty. Similar delays in dredging have also recently been reported for projects in New York and in Michigan. 

Also last fall, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget announced that the Army Corps would pause over $11 billion in low-priority projects within Democratic-leaning states, in response to the government shutdown at the time.

A subsequent Congressional statement indicated that one of those projects is in Delaware.

It is not immediately clear which Delaware project the statement was referencing as the complete list of paused contracts does not appear to be publicly available.

Former-New Castle County Council President Karen Hartly-Nagle was first to report on the Port of Wilmington dredging issues in an article published last week.

‘Raised so much stink’

The head of the Delaware office that oversees operations of the Port of Wilmington said tests of water depths conducted late last fall indicated that the channel leading to the Port of Wilmington “remained operational.” 

In a statement to Spotlight Delaware, Brian Devine, the new interim executive director at the Diamond State Port Corporation, asserted that a rapid accumulation of sediment would have built up around Wilmington’s harbor near the end of last year  

“While sediment accumulates in Wilmington Harbor throughout the year, significant weather events can result in periods of quicker accumulations,” Devine said.

Despite the explanation, Ashe insisted that dredging along the Christina River should have been complete long before the depth became an obstacle for ships — and before the rush of the winter fruit season. And while the Army Corps manages dredging, Ashe directed his criticism at state officials for what he said was their failure to press the issue.

“It should have been done in July,” he said. “Why would you wait until the winter months, knowing that you haven’t done any maintenance dredging in a year.” 

Prior to the Port of Wilmington’s most recent dredging contract award, the Army Corps lists on its website a massive project posted in 2024 to dredge the Delaware River’s main navigation channel from Philadelphia to the sea.

That project’s documents also list dredging along the parallel “Wilmington Harbor, Christina River,” but it appears that the Army Corps separated that portion of the project, and re-awarded it last fall on its own.

Beyond Delaware port officials, Ashe has also criticized Chiquita’s actions in recent weeks.

When Chiquita diverted its first ship away from Delaware a month ago, he said the company violated a union agreement when its ship docked at a non-union Penn Terminals, near Chester.

In response, Ashe said attorneys from the his union, the International Longshoremen’s Association, successfully pushed Chiquita to move their next ship to docks at the Port of Philadelphia, which uses union labor. 

“We raised so much stink, and we got lawyers involved,” he said. 

Nevertheless, subsequent Chiquita ships have returned to Penn Terminals, according to Ashe and three other port workers.

Chiquita did not immediately respond to a request to comment on this story.

The post Dredging delays divert ships past the Port of Wilmington appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

"A surprisingly ravenous black hole from the dawn of the universe is breaking two big rules," reports Live Science. "It's not only exceeding the 'speed limit' of black hole growth but also generating extreme X-ray and radio wave emissions — two features that are not predicted to coexist..." "How is this rule-breaking behavior even possible? In a paper published Jan. 21 in The Astrophysical Journal, an international team of researchers observed ID830 in multiple wavelengths to find an answer...." As they attract gas and dust, this material accumulates in a swirling accretion disk. Gravity pulls the material from the disk into the black hole, but the infalling material generates radiation pressure that pushes outward and prevents more stuff from falling in. As a result, black holes are muzzled by a self-regulating process called the Eddington limit... Its X-ray brightness suggests that ID830 is accreting mass at about 13 times the Eddington limit, due to a sudden burst of inflowing gas that may have occurred as ID830 shredded and engulfed a celestial body that wandered too close. "For a supermassive black hole (SMBH) as massive as ID830, this would require not a normal (main-sequence) star, but a more massive giant star or a huge gas cloud," study co-author Sakiko Obuchi, an observational astronomer at Waseda University in Tokyo, told Live Science via email. Such super-Eddington phases may be incredibly brief, as "this transitional phase is expected to last for roughly 300 years," Obuchi added. ID830 also simultaneously displays radio and X-ray emissions. These two features are not expected to coexist, especially because super-Eddington accretion is thought to suppress such emissions. "This unexpected combination hints at physical mechanisms not yet fully captured by current models of extreme accretion and jet launching," the researchers said in a statement. So while ID830 is launching massive radio jets, its X-ray emissions appear to originate from a structure called a corona, produced as intense magnetic fields from the accretion disk create a thin but turbulent billion-degree cloud of turbocharged particles. These particles orbit the black hole at nearly the speed of light, in what NASA calls "one of the most extreme physical environments in the universe." Altogether, ID830's rule-breaking behaviors suggest that it is in a rare transitional phase of excessive consumption — and excretion. This incredible feeding burst has energized both its jets and its corona, making ID830 shine brightly across multiple wavelengths as it spews out excess radiation. Additionally, based on UV-brightness analysis, quasars like ID830 may be unexpectedly common, the researchers said. Models predict that only around 10% of quasars have spectacular radio jets, but these energetic objects could be significantly more abundant in the early universe than previously suggested. Most importantly, ID830 also shows how SMBHs can regulate galaxy growth in the early universe. As a black hole gobbles matter at the super-Eddington limit, the energy from its resultant emissions can heat and disperse matter throughout the interstellar medium — the gas between stars — to suppress star formation. As a result, ancient SMBHs like ID830 may have grown massive at the expense of their host galaxies.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Motorway stretch plays music as a safety feature but those close to it say ‘intrusive’ noise is constant and distressing

Residents of one of India’s most upmarket neighbourhoods say the country’s first “musical road” has turned their daily lives into a nightmare soundtrack.

A stretch of Mumbai’s recently opened Coastal Road seafront expressway has been engineered to play the pulsating Oscar-winning tune Jai Ho from the movie Slumdog Millionaire when vehicles drive on it at lower speeds.

Premier Chris Minns says state has been working with federal government as group of 11 women and 23 children attempt to leave refugee camp

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New South Wales authorities are preparing for about a third of the group of Australian women and children linked to Islamic State fighters to return to the state, if authorities in Syria allow them to leave the Roj refugee camp.

The premier, Chris Minns, said the state government had been discussing the possible return of some of the 11 women and 23 children with federal government agencies since late 2025, and a strong law enforcement response was expected.

Footage of Punch, a seven-month-old Japanese macaque, has gone viral around the world after he was rejected by his mother and formed a bond with a soft toy

A baby monkey in Japan has captured hearts around the world after videos of him being bullied by other monkeys and rejected by his mother went viral last week.

Punch, a Japanese macaque, was born last July at Ichikawa zoo. He has drawn international attention after zookeepers gave him a stuffed orangutan toy after he was abandoned by his mother.

When one company asked job applicants to submit a video where they answer a question, most of the 300 responses were "eerily similar," reports the Washington Post (with a company executive saying it was "abundantly clear" they'd used AI.) Job seekers are turning to AI to help them land jobs more quickly in a tough labor market.... Employers say that's having an unintended consequence: Many applications are looking and sounding the same... It's easy to spot when candidates over-rely on AI, some employers said. Oftentimes, executive summaries will look eerily similar to each other, odd phrases that people wouldn't normally use in conversation creep into descriptions, fancy vocabulary appears, and someone with entry-level experience uses language that indicates they are much more senior, they added. It's worse when they use auto-apply AI tools, which will find jobs, fill out applications and submit résumés on the candidate's behalf, some employers said. Those tend to misinterpret some of the application questions and fill in the wrong information in inappropriate spots. If these applications were evaluated alone, employers say they'd have a harder time identifying AI usage. But when hundreds of applications all have the same issue, they said, AI's role in it becomes obvious. The article acknowledges that some employers could be using AI tools to screen resumes too. One job-seeker in Texas even says he'll stop submitting an AI-written résumé when the recruiter stops using AI to evaluate them. "You're saying, 'You shouldn't be doing this' when I know a good chunk of them do this!" Obligatory XKCD.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. State Department's Counterterrorism Bureau shared a post on X about Quentin Deranque, a far-right activist, who died of brain injuries after being beaten.

An economic revival can’t happen without political transformation.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Feb. 23, No. 518.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Feb. 23.

Drug lord who was killed by Mexican special forces on Sunday led a cartel known for aggression and military-style arsenal

• Violence erupts after Mexican security forces kill drug cartel boss ‘El Mencho’

The drug lord “El Mencho”, who was killed on Sunday by Mexican special forces, was the co-founder and leader of a gang that in recent years had become the country’s most powerful criminal organisation: the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG).

While less internationally famous than the Sinaloa cartel of the now imprisoned Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the CJNG is a household name in Mexico, where it is known for its displays of ultraviolence and its big, military-style arsenal.

This week Raspberry Pi saw its stock price surge more than 60% above its early-February low (before giving up some gains at the end of the week). Reuters notes the rise started when CEO Eben Upton bought 13,224 pounds worth of shares — but there could be another reason. "The rally in the roughly $800 million company has materialised alongside social-media buzz that demand for its single-board computers could pick up as people buy them to run AI agents such as OpenClaw." The Register explains: The catalyst appears to have been the sudden realization by one X user, "aleabitoreddit," that the agentic AI hand grenade known as OpenClaw could drive demand for Raspberry Pis the way it had for Apple Mac Minis. The viral AI personal assistant, formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, has dominated the feeds of AI boosters over the past few weeks for its ability to perform everyday tasks like sending emails, managing calendars, booking appointments, and complaining about their meatbag masters on the purportedly all-agent forum known as MoltBook... In case it needs to be said, no one should be running this thing on their personal devices lest the agent accidentally leak your most personal and sensitive secrets to the web... In this context, a cheap low-power device like a Raspberry Pi makes a certain kind of sense as a safer, saner way to poke the robo-lobster... The Register argues Raspberry Pis aren't as cheap as they used to be "thanks in part to the global memory crunch. Today, a top-specced Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB of memory will set you back more than $200, up from $120 a year ago." "You know what's cheaper, easier, and more secure than letting OpenClaw loose on your local area network? A virtual private cloud..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

East coast scrambles to prepare for storm forecast to bring major disruption to more than 35 million people

New York mayor Zohran Mamdani has ordered a citywide travel ban for all but emergency travel, as the north-eastern United States was preparing for an intense winter storm that is forecast to reach blizzard strength and bring major disruption.

Residents along the east coast scrambled to prepare for the late-winter storm that spurred weather warnings from Maryland to Massachusetts, affecting more than 35 million people. More than a foot of snow was expected, with wind gusts of up to 70mph and warnings of potential coastal flooding from Cape Cod to Delaware.

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

The Milan Cortina Olympics ended Sunday with a closing ceremony inside the ancient Roman amphitheater, Verona Arena.

Here is a look at the total medal count for Team USA and other nations at the 2026 Winter Olympics.

A defense lawyers group has posted a tracking tool to enable users to check on the status of some of the controversial prosecutions attempted by DOJ in the first year of Trump's second term.

President and first lady were in Washington DC at time of intrusion at their Florida residence – key US politics stories from 22 February 2026 at a glance

US Secret Service agents have killed an armed man who breached the perimeter of Mar-a-Lago. Donald Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, were not at the club and residence at the time.

The authorities said agents confronted a white male in his early 20s carrying shotgun and gasoline can early on Sunday.

Death of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, one of world’s most wanted drug traffickers, sets off wave of disorder across several Mexican states

• Who was El Mencho, the former police officer who co-founded an ultraviolent cartel in Mexico?

One of the world’s most wanted drug traffickers, the Mexican cartel boss known as “El Mencho”, has been killed by security forces, Mexico’s defence ministry has confirmed. The operation set off a wave of violence, with torched cars and gunmen blocking highways in more than half a dozen states.

The drug lord, whose real name is Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, was killed on Sunday in the western state of Jalisco along with at least six alleged accomplices, the ministry said in a statement.

Two Olympic finals between Canada and the US were settled by sudden death. The format made the showpieces feel more like a coin toss than a climax

Two Olympic finals against the US, two strong performances, two sudden-death losses. Canada is so over overtime.

While all good things must come to an end, it’s hard to fathom why hockey’s international rule-makers think that the very best things – huge clashes that were some of the hottest tickets of the entire Olympics – should be ended using three-on-three golden-goal overtime, a concept beloved only by people with a train to catch or firm dinner reservations.

Advertised roles dropped 3% last month to 695,000 – first dip below 700,000 since January 2021, job site Adzuna says

The number of job vacancies in the UK has tumbled to the lowest level in five years, research suggests, falling to levels not seen since the pandemic.

The number of jobs being advertised slid by 3% in January to 695,000, according to the job search site Adzuna, marking the first time advertised vacancies have dropped below 700,000 since January 2021.

Immerse yourself in an installation by Refik Anadol while debating how AI-generated creations stack up in the art world.

60 Minutes travels to South Africa to investigate President Trump's claims that White farmers are victims of a genocide that reporters aren't covering.

Art made with AI is selling for over $1 million and being embraced by some of the world's most prestigious museums, but critics question if it really belongs in those spaces.The art world is divided.

McDowell County, once the nation's largest coal producer, is now one of the poorest places in the United States. Residents have little faith in the government.

McDowell County, West Virginia barely survived coal's collapse and the opioid crisis. Now cuts to food stamps and Medicaid threaten to push its poorest residents to the edge.

A pioneering artist says collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence can bring in a "new age of imagination." Critics question if it's even art.

President Trump claims White farmers in South Africa are victims of a genocide. South Africans dispute his claim.

Russia's domestic intelligence agency claimed Saturday that Ukraine can obtain sensitive information from troops using the Telegram app on the front line, reports Bloomberg. The fact that the claims were made through Russia's state-operated news outlet RIA Novosti signals "tightening scrutiny over a platform used by millions of Russians," Bloomberg notes, as the Kremlin continues efforts to "push people to use a new state-backed alternative." Russia's communications watchdog limited access to Telegram — a popular messaging app owned by Russian-born billionaire Pavel Durov — over a week ago for failing to comply with Russian laws requiring personal data to be stored locally. Voice and video calls were blocked via Telegram in August. The pressure is the latest move in a long-running campaign to promote what the Kremlin calls a sovereign internet that's led to blocks on YouTube, Instagram and WhatsApp... Foreign intelligence services are able to see Russia's military messages in Telegram too, Russia's Minister for digital development, Maksut Shadaev, said on Wednesday, although he added that Russia will not block access to Telegram for troops for now. Telegram responded at the time that no breaches of the app's encryption have ever been found. "The Russian government's allegation that our encryption has been compromised is a deliberate fabrication intended to justify outlawing Telegram and forcing citizens onto a state-controlled messaging platform engineered for mass surveillance and censorship," it said in an emailed response.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Emboldened by recent wins, elected officials gathered in San Francisco to share strategy for a midterm ‘reckoning’

Fury at Donald Trump was the coin of the realm, as thousands of California delegates, activists and elected officials gathered in San Francisco this weekend, emboldened by a string of victories and confident the Golden state would help deliver a power check on the president in the upcoming midterm elections.

On Saturday, Democrats streamed through the Moscone Center convention complex, sporting lanyards emblazoned with Gavin Newsom’s name and tote bags adorned with one of Nancy Pelosi’s favorite aphorisms: “We don’t Agonize, we organize” – symbols of a party in transition as the former speaker approaches retirement and the term-limited governor eyes a presidential campaign.

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

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

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

The Mexican military’s killing of Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, a.k.a. “El Mencho,” set off violence in areas controlled by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

Fossil fuels produce NO2, which is linked to asthma attacks, bronchitis, and higher risks of heart disease and stroke, according the EV news site Electrek. But the nonprofit news site Grist.org notes a new analysis showing that those emissions decreased by 1.1% for every increase of 200 electric vehicles — across nearly 1,700 ZIP codes. "A pretty small addition of cars at the ZIP code level led to a decline in air pollution," said Sandrah Eckel, a public health professor at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine and lead author of the study. "It's remarkable." The study was done at the University of Southern California's medical school, by researchers using high-resolution satellite data, reports Electrek: The study, just published in The Lancet Planetary Health and partly funded by the National Institutes of Health, adds rare real-world evidence to a claim that's often taken for granted — that EVs don't just cut carbon over time, they also improve local air quality right now... The researchers ran multiple checks to make sure the trend wasn't driven by unrelated factors. They accounted for pandemic-era changes by excluding 2020 in some analyses and controlling for gas prices and work-from-home patterns. They also saw the expected counterexample: neighborhoods that added more gas-powered vehicles experienced increases in pollution. The findings were then replicated using updated ground-level air monitoring data dating back to 2012... Next, the researchers plan to compare EV adoption with asthma-related emergency room visits and hospitalizations. If those trends line up, it could provide some of the clearest evidence yet of what we already know: that electrifying transportation doesn't just clean the air on paper; it improves public health in practice. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader jhoegl for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

‘Generational’ reforms are a key moment for Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, and for Keir Starmer

Ministers will unveil a “generational” overhaul of special educational needs and disabilities (Send) support, pledging £4bn to transform provision in schools in England and warning councils they could lose control of Send services if they fail to meet their legal duties.

The reforms are expected to be a key policy moment for Keir Starmer and for the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson – who delayed the changes last autumn after a ferocious backlash from MPs and parents.

Nigel Farage’s party plans to deport up to 288,000 people a year on five flights a day and expand stop and search

Reform UK would create an ICE-style agency dedicated to deporting hundreds of thousands of people, as well as terminating the status of those with indefinite leave to remain (ILR), the party will say.

It would also ban the conversion of churches into mosques and fund a radical expansion of stop and search, the party’s new home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, will also say in a speech on Monday. The deradicalisation programme Prevent would also have its mandate redrawn to focus on Islamist extremism.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Jeopardy time. A. This company spurred CEOs to make huge speculative capital expenditures based on wild unverified claims of future demand, resulting in the layoffs of tens of thousands of workers to reduce the resulting expenses, harming their core businesses. Q. What is OpenAI? Sorry, the correct response is, "What is WorldCom?" In 2002, WorldCom, the second largest long-distance company in the U.S., entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy after disclosing accounting fraud that eventually totaled $11 billion, the biggest ever at the time. CEO Bernard Ebbers was subsequently sentenced to 25 years in prison. CNBC reported that an employee of WorldCom's Internet service provider UUNet set off a frenzy of speculative investment and infrastructure overbuild after he used Excel to create a best-case scenario model for the Internet's growth that suggested in the best of all possible worlds, Internet traffic would double every 100 days, a scenario that would greatly benefit WorldCom, whose lines would carry it. Despite no evidence to support it, WorldCom's lie became an immutable law and businesses around the world made important decisions based on the belief that traffic was doubling every 100 days. "For some period of time I can recall that we were backfilling that expectation with laying cables, something like 2,200 miles of cable an hour," AT&T CEO Michael Armstrong said. "Think of all the companies that went out of business that assumed that that was real." In 2003, NBC News reported: Armstrong and former Sprint CEO Bill Esrey struggled for years to understand how WorldCom could beat them so handily. "We would look at the conduct of WorldCom in terms of their pricing, revenue growth, margins, in terms of their cost structure... and the price leader almost every quarter was WorldCom," Armstrong said. Added Esrey, "We couldn't figure out how they were pricing as aggressively as they were.... How could they be so efficient in their costs and expenses?" AT&T and Sprint began cutting jobs to push down their costs to WorldCom's level. "The market said what a marvelous management job WorldCom was doing and they would look over to AT&T and say, 'these guys aren't keeping up.' So, my shareholders were hurt. We laid off tens of thousands of employees in an accelerated fashion [in a futile effort to match WorldCom's phantom profits] and I think the industry was hurt," Armstrong says. "It just wrecked the whole industry," says Esrey.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Center secures first men’s title for US since 1980

• Americans break Canadian hearts in overtime

It might not have been a shocker on the order of a bunch of scrappy college kids toppling the polished Soviet juggernaut at Lake Placid. But 46 years to the day of the Miracle on Ice, it often felt that way as another underdog United States men’s hockey team ended their Olympic gold drought in a white-knuckle contest dominated by Canada until Jack Hughes’ seismic overtime winner.

Call it the Marvel in Milan.

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

Mexico's Ministry of Defense security forces killed the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, known as "El Mencho," in a military operation.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for Feb. 23, No. 1,710.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Feb. 23 #988.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Feb. 23, No. 722.

Google and Microsoft contributed $5 million to launch Alpha-Omega in 2022 — a Linux Foundation project to help secure the open source supply chain. But its co-founder Michael Winser warns that open source registries are in financial peril, reports The Register, since they're still relying on non-continuous funding from grants and donations. And it's not just because bandwidth is expensive, he said at this year's FOSDEM. "The problem is they don't have enough money to spend on the very security features that we all desperately need..." In a follow-up LinkedIn exchange after this article had posted, Winser estimated it could cost $5 million to $8 million a year to run a major registry the size of Crates.io, which gets about 125 billion downloads a year. And this number wouldn't include any substantial bandwidth and infrastructure donations (Like Fastly's for Crates.io). Adding to that bill is the growing cost of identifying malware, the proliferation of which has been amplified through the use of AI and scripts. These repositories have detected 845,000 malware packages from 2019 to January 2025 (the vast majority of those nasty packages came to npm)... In some cases benevolent parties can cover [bandwidth] bills: Python's PyPI registry bandwidth needs for shipping copies of its 700,000+ packages (amounting to 747PB annually at a sustained rate of 189 Gbps) are underwritten by Fastly, for instance. Otherwise, the project would have to pony up about $1.8 million a month. Yet the costs Winser was most concerned about are not bandwidth or hosting; they are the security features needed to ensure the integrity of containers and packages. Alpha-Omega underwrites a "distressingly" large amount of security work around registries, he said. It's distressing because if Alpha-Omega itself were to miss a funding round, a lot of registries would be screwed. Alpha-Omega's recipients include the Python Software Foundation, Rust Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, OpenJS Foundation for Node.js and jQuery, and Ruby Central. Donations and memberships certainly help defray costs. Volunteers do a lot of what otherwise would be very expensive work. And there are grants about...Winser did not offer a solution, though he suggested the key is to convince the corporate bean counters to consider paid registries as "a normal cost of doing business and have it show up in their opex as opposed to their [open source program office] donation budget." The dilemma was summed up succinctly by the anonymous Slashdot reader who submitted this story. "Free beer is great. Securing the keg costs money!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The space agency said Sunday it's targeting Tuesday for the slow, four-mile trek across Kennedy Space Center​, weather permitting.

Paul Thomas Anderson drama scores six awards, as Jessie Buckley becomes first Irish woman to win leading actress prize

• Full list of winners

• Peter Bradshaw’s verdict

• How the ceremony unfolded – the action as it happened

One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s counterculture comedy about a washed-up revolutionary trying to protect his daughter from a ruthless military officer, has dominated the Baftas, taking home six awards including best film, best director, best cinematography, best editing, best supporting actor and best adapted screenplay.

The film, inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, was nominated for 14 awards going into Sunday’s ceremony, the most of any contender – including nods for stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Chase Infiniti and Teyana Taylor.

• Miami star confronted officials in a doorway after 3-0 loss

• League determined area was not off-limits to players

• MLS has suspended players for entering officials’ room

Major League Soccer has cleared Lionel Messi of wrongdoing after the Argentinian appeared to pursue match officials after Inter Miami’s season-opening loss to LAFC on Saturday evening.

In a video posted to X by Síntesis Deportes reporter Giovanni Guerrero, Messi appears to confront match officials as they entered a doorway within the LA Coliseum after the match, a 3-0 win for LAFC. Miami forward Luis Suárez is seen restraining Messi, who slips out of his teammate’s grip and disappears behind a door. He emerged seconds later and retreated with Suárez to Miami’s locker room.

The American center’s overtime goal will go down in history as the United States ends its 46-year Olympic drought.

The outcry and activism of the 2010s – itself enabled by earlier generations of feminists – brought us to this moment. But if the Trump administration has its way, opposing forces will prevail

This week, for the first time since 1647, a member of the royal family was arrested in the United Kingdom, not over allegations of sexual wrongdoing but for trade-related communications with the supplier of those victims, Jeffrey Epstein, to whom he is supposed to have leaked state secrets. The public outrage in the US about Epstein forced the government to release the files, including emails between Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Epstein now under investigation in the criminal case.

The arrestee formerly known as Prince Andrew was accused by Virginia Giuffre with having had sex with her when she was a minor being trafficked by Epstein. He has always denied wrongdoing. Until his arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office, only his family had held him accountable for his ongoing association with Epstein after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution. “Today our broken hearts have lifted,” Virginia Giuffre’s family stated, “at the news that no one is above the law, not even royalty.”

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and the forthcoming The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot writes: Researchers have developed a robotic hand that can not only skitter about on its fingertips, it can also bend its fingers backward, connect and disconnect from a robotic arm, and pick up and carry one or more objects at a time. This article in Science News includes footage of the robotic arm reattaching itself to the skittering robot hand, which can also hold objects against both sides of its palm simultaneously, and "can even unscrew the cap off a mustard bottle while holding the bottle in place." With its unusual agility, it could navigate and retrieve objects in spaces too confined for human hands. When attached to the mechanical arm, the robotic hand could pick up objects much like a human hand. The bot pinched a ball between two fingers, wrapped four fingers around a metal rod and held a flat disc between fingers and palm. But the bot isn't constrained by human anatomy... When the robot was separated from the arm, it was most stable walking on four or five fingers and using one or two fingers for grabbing and carrying things, the team found. In one set of trials with both bots, the hand detached from the robotic arm and used its fingers as legs to skitter over to a wooden block. Once there, it picked up the block with one finger and carried it back to the arm. The crawling bot could one day aid in industrial inspections of pipes and equipment too small for a human or larger robot to access, says Xiao Gao, a roboticist now at Wuhan University in China. It might retrieve objects in a warehouse or navigate confined spaces in disaster response efforts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fresh Geneva negotiations suggest Trump’s team believes the Iranian government is making serious proposals

Iran and the US are expected to meet for a further round of talks in Geneva this week in a sign that Donald Trump’s team believes Tehran is making serious proposals to dilute its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and show it is not seeking a nuclear weapon.

As fears loomed of renewed conflict after Washington carried out a major redeployment of military assets to the region, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said he thought there was still a good chance of finding a diplomatic solution.

Karoline Vitto, Phoebe English and Sinead Gorey include wide range of body shapes on catwalks

Body diversity has made a comeback at London fashion week despite a wider shift towards ultra-thinness in the fashion industry.

Emerging designers including Karoline Vitto, Phoebe English and Sinead Gorey included a wide range of body shapes on catwalks over the past four days. Sizes have ranged from a UK size 10-16, a category referred to as mid-size in the industry, to plus-size, also known as curve models, which measures from a UK size 18 upwards. Sample size, often referred to as straight models, ranges from a UK 4-8.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Iran has "every right to enjoy a peaceful nuclear energy, including enrichment" as the U.S. pushes for a deal on its nuclear program.

The following is the transcript of the interview with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Feb. 22, 2026.

Reform UK leader flew to the Maldives for a day despite not having permit to visit nearby archipelago

Nigel Farage has been accused of “performing Maga stunts” after claiming the British government stopped him from travelling to the Chagos Islands on a humanitarian mission.

The Reform UK leader said he had flown to the Maldives to join a delegation bringing aid to four Chagossians who are trying to establish a settlement on one of the archipelago’s islands to protest against Britain’s plans to transfer control of the territory to Mauritius.

Investigation under way regarding death of Cpl Lucy Wilde, 25, who prince said ‘served with courage and distinction’

Prince William has paid tribute to a young army medic found dead in her barracks who “served with courage and distinction”.

Cpl Lucy Wilde, 25, who posted videos on TikTok documenting her daily life in the army, was found dead in her barracks in Warminster, Wiltshire, on 5 February. An investigation is under way, the Ministry of Defence said.

Authorities say agents confronted a white male in his early 20s carrying shotgun and gasoline can early Sunday

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

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

Jamieson Greer also said US won’t pull out of deals with UK, EU and others after court declared Trump tariffs illegal

Top US trade negotiator Jamieson Greer insisted on Sunday that the Trump administration was set to persist with its tariffs policy, two days after the supreme court declared many of Donald Trump’s tariffs illegal.

The ruling issued on Friday by the highest US court was a sharp rebuke to the Republican president that toppled a key pillar of his aggressive economic agenda – even as it prompted Trump to announce a new global tariff using different statutes, albeit temporary.

DHS official reportedly says Global Entry program would remain halted amid partial government shutdown

The Department of Homeland Security partially reversed course Sunday morning on an order that had suspended the TSA PreCheck and Global Entry airport security programs as a result of staffing shortages caused by the partial government shutdown.

“TSA PreCheck remains operational with no change for the traveling public,” the Transportation Security Administration said in a social media post. “As staffing constraints arise, TSA will evaluate on a case by case basis and adjust operations accordingly.”

Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report

On this "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" broadcast, Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer join Margaret Brennan.

Imagine a 280-unit apartment complex offering no on-site leasing office with a human agent for questions. "Instead, the entire process has been outsourced to AI..." reports SFGate, "from touring to signing the lease to completing management tasks once you actually move in." Now imagine it's far more than just one apartment complex... At two other Jack London Square apartment buildings, my initial interactions were also with a robot. At the Allegro, my fiance and I entered the leasing office for our tour and asked for "Grace P," the leasing agent who had emailed us. "Oh, that's just our AI assistant," the woman at the front desk told us... At Aqua Via, another towering apartment complex across the street, I emailed back and forth with a very helpful and polite "Sofia M." My pal Sofia seemed so human-like in her responses that I did not realize she was AI until I looked a little closer at a text she'd sent me. "Msgs may be AI or human generated...." [S]he continued to text me for weeks after I'd moved on, trying to win me back. When I looked at the fine print, I realized both of these complexes were using EliseAI, a leading AI housing startup that claims to be involved in managing 1 in 6 apartments in the U.S... [50 corporate landlords have funded a VC named RET Ventures to invest in and deploy rental-automating AI, and SFGate's reporter spoke to partner Christopher Yip.] According to Yip, AI is common in large apartment complexes not just in the tech-centric Bay Area, but across the entire country. It all kicked off at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, he said, when contactless, self-guided apartment tours and completely virtual tours where people rented apartments sight unseen became commonplace. Technology's infiltration into the renting process has only grown deeper in the years since, Yip said, mirroring how pervasive AI has become in many other facets of our lives. "From an industry perspective, it's really about meeting the renter where they are," Yip said. He pointed to how many renters now prefer to interact through text and email, and want to tour apartments at their convenience — say, at 7 p.m. after work, when a typical leasing office might be closed. The latest updates in technology not only allow you to take a self-guided tour with AI unlocking the door for you, but also to ask AI questions by conversing with voice AI as you wander through the kitchen and bedroom at your leisure. And while a human leasing agent might ghost you for days or weeks at a time, AI responds almost instantly — EliseAI typically responds within 30 seconds, [said Fran Loftus, chief experience officer at EliseAI]... [I]n some scenarios, the goal does seem to be to eliminate humans entirely. "We do have long-term plans of building fully autonomous buildings," Loftus said.... "We think there's a time and a place for that, depending on the type of property. But really right now, it's about helping with this crazy turnover in this industry." The reporter says they missed the human touch, since "The second AI was involved, the interaction felt cold. When a human couldn't even be bothered to show up to give me a tour, my trust evaporated." But they conclude that in the years ahead, human landlords offering tours "will probably go the way of landlines and VCRs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest, officials said ‘nobody is above the law’. Sadly that doesn’t seem true

Schadenfreude isn’t a particularly noble sentiment. But who cares, eh? These days bad things never seem to happen to bad people; accountability is fleetingly rare. So I think we should all take a moment to really appreciate how glorious the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on suspicion of misconduct in public office on Thursday was. Not only was the disgraced royal dragged in for questioning like a mere commoner; the arrest happened on his 66th birthday. Instead of birthday cake, he got his just deserts. And, to top things off, the occasion was immortalized with a photo – an instant classic – of Andrew leaving the police station looking shellshocked and decrepit.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

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

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

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

US secret service and local police officers shot and killed an intruder armed with a shotgun early on Sunday after he breached the perimeter at Donald Trump's resort in Palm Beach, Florida, law enforcement officials said. Trump was not at his residence at the time

• Secret Service shot and killed armed man who breached Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence

Your $1,000 laptop deserves a protective home on the road. A tech journalist and frequent traveler recommends his nine favorites

• The four best personal-item backpacks that fit under US airline seats

• Sign up for the Filter US newsletter, your weekly guide to buying fewer, better things

Whether you’re flying across the country on vacation, meeting with an important client downtown or just heading to your local coffee shop for work, there is a good chance you’re bringing a backpack along, with a laptop squirreled away inside.

While you can toss a laptop into just about any bag, the best laptop backpacks are specially tailored to pamper what is probably one of your most expensive (and delicate) possessions. That means a padded pocket lined with soft non-scratch material, easy access to your computer without unpacking everything and lots of extra pockets for portable mice, chargers and other accessories. Add in all of the standard backpack considerations such as capacity, comfort and durability, and you have a lot of factors to consider.

Best overall:
Mission Workshop Meridian backpack

Best for travel:
Peak Design Travel Backpack

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

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said "stand by" the trade deal agreements it has signed with its partners despite the Supreme Court's tariff decision.

Trump says he’s sending a ship to care for Greenland’s sick. But the territory doesn’t want the help and the U.S. appears to have no hospital ships available to send.

Friday Amazon published a blog post "to address the inaccuracies" in a Financial Times report that the company's own AI tool Kiro caused two outages in an AWS service in December. Amazon writes that the "brief" and "extremely limited" service interruption "was the result of user error — specifically misconfigured access controls — not AI as the story claims." And "The Financial Times' claim that a second event impacted AWS is entirely false." The disruption was an extremely limited event last December affecting a single service (AWS Cost Explorer — which helps customers visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time) in one of our 39 Geographic Regions around the world. It did not impact compute, storage, database, AI technologies, or any other of the hundreds of services that we run. The issue stemmed from a misconfigured role — the same issue that could occur with any developer tool (AI powered or not) or manual action. We did not receive any customer inquiries regarding the interruption. We implemented numerous safeguards to prevent this from happening again — not because the event had a big impact (it didn't), but because we insist on learning from our operational experience to improve our security and resilience. Additional safeguards include mandatory peer review for production access. While operational incidents involving misconfigured access controls can occur with any developer tool — AI-powered or not — we think it is important to learn from these experiences.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Promise comes as minister admits to ‘uncertainty’ about new 15% levy on imports from around the world

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

The US will not back out of tariff deals it has already sealed with countries around the world, including the UK, the EU, Japan, Switzerland and others, Donald Trump’s trade representative Jamieson Greer said on Sunday.

The US supreme court ruled on Friday that many of the tariffs imposed by the US president were illegal, leading Trump to announce a new 15% global tariff on all imports the next day.

• American fractured tibia in downhill last week

• Skier is recovering from injuries in US

Lindsey Vonn has hit back at the “haters” who were critical of her decision to take part at this year’s Winter Olympics.

The American crashed out early in her run during the women’s downhill competition during the opening weekend of this month’s Games. She suffered a complex tibia fracture and underwent multiple surgeries in Italy before being flown back to the US for further treatment earlier this week.

U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, made his comments during an interview with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson that aired Friday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

• USA, GB and Australia also set team records

• Norwegians put emphasis on participation

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

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

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

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

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

• Medal table | Full game report | Results | Briefing

Away we go …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The wait for new episodes is almost over.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was a Domino’s delivery driver.

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

• UK politics live – latest updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pennsylvania governor and Democratic star is embroiled in a dispute with his neighbor that has escalated into an unlikely political saga.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moss nodded. “Absolutely.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

• Former coach says player was ‘complete joy’

• Teammates pay tribute after Moore’s death

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A 19-year-old Newark woman was killed in a crash on Interstate 95 north of Wilmington on Friday night.

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

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

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

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

Delaware is under a state of emergency as a blizzard bears down on the state.

• American given rousing reception by crowd in Milan

• Alysa Liu and Mikhail Shaidorov among other performers

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

JENI NANCE
Co-Managing Mosaic Editor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Dutch skater claims his first gold since 2014

• Jordan Stolz misses out on fourth medal of Games

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Tensions are high between two teams

• Status of Canada’s Sidney Crosby still uncertain

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

↫ Alan Coopersmith

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

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

↫ Alan Coopersmith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I am Discussing Today:

• Kareem’s Daily Quote: When power meets principle

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

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

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

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

• Jukebox Playlist: Miles Davis, Milestones

Kareem’s Daily Quote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Government works best when its citizens are knowledgeable and engaged. Delaware’s government has scores of commissions, working groups, agencies and legislative committees. All must hold meetings that are open to the public. Below we highlight a few of those meetings that are happening this week.

Editor’s Note: Monday morning’s State Employee Benefits Committee was canceled due to inclement weather.

Below are some of the most important or interesting public meetings happening around the state this week.

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

State Employee Benefits Committee to change weight loss drug coverage

The State Employee Benefits Committee (SEBC), a board responsible for managing Delaware’s state employee health insurance plans, was scheduled to meet on Monday to finalize coverage changes for employees currently using weight-loss drugs.

That meeting was canceled due to inclement weather, and a reschedule date has not yet been shared.

Those changes could mean employees covered under the state’s health plan could soon pay much more out-of-pocket to get their weight-loss prescriptions or be uncovered altogether.

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

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

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

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

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

📍 The State Employee Benefits Committee meeting was canceled due to inclement weather.

Utility regulator to hear resident input on data center regulations

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lawmakers to review Meyer’s proposed DHSS, DelDOT spending

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Education funding reform discussions continue

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

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

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

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

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

Nick Stonesifer and Olivia Marble contributed to this report.

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

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

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

↫ Patrick Mineault

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two 16-year-olds committed an armed robbery in a Newark apartment, assaulted the victim and stole his car, police said.

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

• US politics live – latest updates

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

• Hughes and Eichel spark US rout of Slovakia

• MacKinnon scores late to send Canada through

• Border rivals to meet for men’s hockey gold

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This year’s keynote speakers include:

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

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

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

Event Links

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

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

Source: SDSU

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• American halfpipe competitor says he has no regrets

• Britain’s Gus Kenworthy just misses out on medal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit: Shutterstock

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

Paving the Way for the Future Quantum Internet

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

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

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

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

The Demonstration

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Deutsche Telekom

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn more about the selected projects here.

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

Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doctors in the Dark 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Political Pressures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• US politics live – latest updates

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

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

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