An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Anthropic announced new workplace features on Tuesday, including Claude Meetings, which brings Claude into video calls to begin working on tasks while participants are still talking. The company also unveiled Claude Whiteboards and Claude Sheets. The launch of Anthropic's new productivity-focused features comes just a few weeks after OpenAI unveiled a series of workplace tools that allow users to collaborate with ChatGPT to do things like visualize company information and create presentations, as both companies compete to turn their products into office suites of sorts to take on Microsoft and Google. Meta is also joining the competition with its Muse AI agent, which can build mini-apps on the fly to help users complete specific tasks. Here's a summary of each of the offerings Anthropic announced today:
Claude Meetings: Allows Claude to join video calls as a visible participant, take notes, answer questions, retrieve information from connected apps, and create plans, timelines, and action items in real time. Available in beta for Team and Enterprise plans, initially supporting Google Meet.
Claude Whiteboards: A collaborative visual workspace where teams can brainstorm with Claude, organize ideas into timelines and plans, and turn their work into documents or slide decks. It also integrates with Claude Meetings to build whiteboards during conversations.
Claude Sheets: Lets teams create and collaboratively edit spreadsheets with Claude, including budgets and trackers with multiple tabs, formulas, formatting, and dropdown menus. Claude can make changes directly in cells while explaining its edits.
Anthropic also announced the general availability of Claude Data (formerly Claude Dashboards) that connects Claude to business systems like CRMs and data warehouses. "Users can ask questions, and Claude responds with dashboards, written data stories, or narrated videos," reports TechCrunch. Additionally, the company announced new interactive connectors that let users open Claude and work within third-party apps like Adobe, Atlassian, and HubSpot.
Republicans have elected veteran congressman Jim Jordan as their new leader in the House of Representatives, putting a strident defender of Donald Trump at the helm of their conference as they navigate the fallout from sweeping losses in last week’s midterm elections.
Jordan will serve as minority leader under a new Congress that begins next year, where Democrats will have their largest margins in both the House and Senate in years. He will be responsible for shaping the party’s strategy against the waves of investigations Democrats have promised to open into Trump’s second term, as well as their vows of an ambitious legislative agenda, regardless of whether it has the president’s support.
Niners add WR Keenan Allen; Bills land S Amani Hooker
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In NFL-adjacent news:
Jordon Hudson is suing two Airbnb hosts over a Ring doorbell camera video of a shirtless Bill Belichick. Hudson says that the 2023 clip invaded her privacy by prompting public disclosure of her relationship with the former Patriots coach.
During his press conference, Hegseth was resolute that the articles of impeachment are baseless, and that all attacks were carried out legally.
“As for the articles themselves, Iran, the cartels, Maduro, Yemen, everyone was a lawful operation ordered by the commander-in-chief, then ordered by myself, notified to Congress and executed by American warriors who did their jobs,” he said. “We destroyed terror regimes’ capabilities. We sank the boats carrying poison into our communities. We put a narco dictator in handcuffs. These are not high crimes. This is the job, and it’s the job well done.”
Senate Republicans reelected Sen. John Thune as their leader, staying the course as they prepare to enter the minority after their brutal midterm losses.
Sen. Bernie Sanders said Tuesday he won't support Sen. Chuck Schumer as Democratic leader in the new Congress, becoming the most prominent progressive to oppose his candidacy to date.
Nov. 10, 2026 — Through a new Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA), scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are partnering with San Francisco Bay Area startup Diamond Quanta to advance semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S.
The partnership, facilitated by the Laboratory’s Innovation and Partnerships Office (IPO), will explore how laser pulses can be used to engineer and remove defects in diamond, a material that is a leading candidate for next-generation semiconductors.
A partnership between LLNL and Diamond Quanta will explore how pulsed laser annealing can remove defects in diamonds. Graphic credit: Dan Herchek/LLNL.
“Developing these materials could be revolutionary for high-power electronics, which are critical to the national security infrastructure,” said LLNL scientist Ted Laurence. “We also want the U.S. to be at the forefront of the development of new semiconductor options, with U.S.-centric manufacturing and a secure supply chain.”
Diamond Quanta will provide the engineered diamond materials and set the requirements for the materials after laser processing. The company’s larger goal is to make diamond a practical option for mainstream chip manufacturing.
“We are trying to make diamond as accessible as silicon. That’s our mission,” said Michael Pierantozzi, Diamond Quanta co-founder and chief operating officer. “But in doing so, we are breaking a barrier in manufacturability with this pulsed laser annealing technique and CRADA.”
That barrier stems from defects in diamond materials. These atomic-scale irregularities in crystal structure can impede the flow of electrons and have so far limited device performance, reliability and commercial adoption.
At LLNL, researchers are engineering out defects with pulsed laser annealing, which uses nanosecond bursts of high-energy laser light to heat, melt and recrystallize materials. In a recent publication, LLNL and Diamond Quanta scientists proved that the laser technique can effectively modify the structure of diamond, making it denser and less stressed while preserving the diamond phase. Now, the team will work to optimize the method.
“Pulsed laser annealing provides a very straightforward, relatively easy way to improve the properties of diamond and make sure that it can meet the necessary specifications,” said Laurence. “This CRADA allows our team at LLNL to finish developing the method for Diamond Quanta’s application. We want to improve its manufacturability, repeatability and scalability, and then help them transfer it into a real product.”
The CRADA project will examine how changes in laser wavelength, pulse width and energy impact the diamond materials. After determining these processing conditions, Diamond Quanta aims to create an integrated pilot manufacturing platform — named Diamond Forge 1 — at its operations and process development center in Petaluma, California.
“Diamond has exceptional material properties, but commercial adoption depends on our ability to manufacture and integrate it consistently,” said Adam Khan, co-founder and chief executive officer of Diamond Quanta. “Our earlier work with LLNL established an important scientific foundation. This CRADA is the next step toward developing repeatable laser-processing methods that can be incorporated into our manufacturing platform.”
Collaborations such as this are enabled by IPO, LLNL’s focal point for industry engagement. IPO facilitates partnerships to deliver mission-driven solutions that support national security and grow the U.S. economy. Through IPO’s technology transfer, LLNL provides access to cutting-edge research, advanced technologies and world-class expertise to help validate early-stage ideas, scale mature systems or create new inventions.
“This collaboration exemplifies how technologies and subject matter expertise in laser materials processing and materials science developed for LLNL’s mission can be leveraged to strengthen U.S. industry while addressing emerging national security needs,” said Ibo Matthews, materials science division leader in the Laboratory’s Physical & Life Sciences directorate.
Legal battle escalates as far-right US podcaster continues to spread false claims that France’s first lady was born a man
Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron have brought a fresh defamation lawsuit against Candace Owens in her home state of Tennessee, in an escalation of a transatlantic legal battle as the far-right US podcaster continues to spread false claims that France’s first lady was born a man.
The Macrons first sued Owens and her media companies in July 2025 in Delaware in response to what the French first couple called “verifiably false and devastating lies” being repeated by Owens on her podcast and on X. According to that lawsuit, those lies included that Brigitte Macron, 73, was born a man named Jean-Michel Trogneux – who is actually her older brother – and committed identity theft to hide a gender transition; that Emmanuel Macron was elected as French president as part of a CIA mind-control program; and that the couple are blood-related relatives committing incest.
The federal agency is requiring all GLP-1s to include information about the potential risk on warning labels
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a new warning on GLP-1 medications – which can facilitate weight loss – over a rare eye condition that could lead to sudden and permanent blindness.
On Monday, the FDA announced that it is requiring all GLP-1 medications – including Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Wegovy, Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro and Zepbound, as well as Sanofi’s Soliqua – to include information about the potential risk of nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, also known as NAION, on warning labels.
Man, 41, arrested near Gloucester by police working with US authorities in investigation involving ‘allegations of espionage’, according to FBI director
A US soldier with alleged links to Russia has been arrested by British counter-terrorism police.
The man, 41, was arrested as part of an investigation by counter terrorism policing, working closely with US authorities, the US military and the FBI, counter terrorism policing London said.
SpaceX has unveiled the Starlink Mini 2, equipping the company's smallest satellite internet terminal with a removable 71Wh battery and Wi-Fi 6. Preorders are opening to select U.S. customers for $999, which also includes a year of Roam Unlimited service. Shipments are expected to begin in mid-December. InterestingEngineering reports: The removable battery represents the biggest functional upgrade over the original Starlink Mini. Previously, users needed an external power source to operate the satellite terminal. That meant carrying additional equipment for camping trips, remote work, or extended journeys. Mini 2 addresses that limitation with a detachable 71 Wh battery pack. It weighs approximately 1.08 pounds (490 grams) and delivers up to 4.5 hours of connectivity. Owners can replace it with another charged battery when necessary.
The battery also features LED indicators and its own USB-C charging port. SpaceX supports 60-watt USB-C Power Delivery charging for the pack. The retail kit includes a compatible 60-watt wall adapter and a three-meter USB-C cable. Users can also power the terminal through USB-C without relying on its battery. A physical power button replaces the original model's simpler plug-and-play arrangement.
[...] SpaceX has also upgraded the wireless hardware from Wi-Fi 5 to Wi-Fi 6. The integrated router supports coverage across approximately 1,800 square feet (167 square meters). An IP67 rating provides additional protection against dust and water. Other hardware details include a foldable kickstand and a standard 1/4-inch-20 tripod mounting thread. The terminal also offers a 55-degree field of view for satellite acquisition.
Estranged father of Duchess of Sussex was arrested for keeping child sexual abuse material, authorities say
The 82-year-old estranged father of Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, cut an electronic monitoring device off his ankle, just days after his arrest for keeping child sexual abuse material in storage units in California, authorities said onTuesday.
Thomas Markle was in custody awaiting a hearing in federal court in Tampa, Florida, first assistant US attorney Bill Essayli said.
Delaware sees the most flight passenger growth over the Thanksgiving and winter holidays, while traffic declines in Maine and WyomingSource: Luxury Link analysis of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) dataHoliday air traffic patterns vary significantly across different states, with some regions…
Photo Credit: AnnaStills / ShutterstockThe data in this analysis come from the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) FOIA Electronic Reading Room. Researchers ranked airports and states by the percentage change in the daily passenger traffic during the 2025 holiday season compared…
Although traffic rises across the board, the smallest local airports see the biggest surges over Thanksgiving and the winter holidaysSource: Luxury Link analysis of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) dataDuring the Thanksgiving and winter holiday seasons of 2025, the smallest airports…
Average daily flight passenger traffic has surpassed COVID lows but is showing signs of slowing downSource: Luxury Link analysis of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) dataAir travel has rebounded significantly since the sharp declines of 2020, with average daily passenger traffic…
Photo Credit: AnnaStills / ShutterstockAs the holiday season approaches, millions of travelers are preparing to pack their bags and head to the skies, making this one of the busiest times of the year for air travel. Airports across the United…
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Immigration-related habeas corpus filings have surged to unprecedented levels under President Donald Trump, with more than 93,000 cases filed in federal court since January 2025 as detainees challenge the legality of their detention.
According to a ProPublica tracker, 93,245 immigration-related habeas cases were filed through Nov. 3, including nearly 8,000 in October alone. That compares with only hundreds of such cases in a typical year before the current enforcement surge.
A habeas petition allows a detainee to ask a federal judge to review whether the government has legal authority to continue holding them. The petitions do not decide whether someone may ultimately be deported; they challenge the detention itself or seek a bond hearing.
The increase follows the Trump administration’s decision to broaden mandatory detention for noncitizens arrested inside the United States, including people without criminal records. That interpretation has produced conflicting appellate rulings, with nine courts ruling against the administration and two siding with it.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case involving a Brazilian national detained by ICE despite having no criminal record, potentially giving the justices an opportunity to clarify the government’s detention powers.
The surge is also creating additional pressure on federal courts already dealing with record immigration caseloads.
Supporters of the administration argue broad detention authority is necessary to ensure people appear for removal proceedings. Immigration attorneys counter that detention without individualized review can violate constitutional protections.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — House Republicans elected Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio as their next minority leader Tuesday, choosing one of the party’s most combative conservatives to lead a sharply reduced conference after Democrats’ sweeping midterm victories.
Jordan defeated current Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana 106-73 in a closed-door secret ballot. The result marked a significant setback for Scalise, who had argued that his years in leadership made him the natural choice to guide Republicans after losing the House.
Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, campaigned on a more confrontational strategy. He told colleagues Republicans needed to present clear alternatives to Democratic policies and emphasized his experience battling Democrats in oversight hearings.
Republicans also elected current Majority Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota as minority whip, defeating Texas Rep. August Pfluger 103-36.
The leadership overhaul follows a disastrous election for House Republicans. Democrats gained more than 40 seats and will take control of the chamber in January. Speaker Mike Johnson declined to seek any leadership role in the next Congress after the defeat.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is expected to become speaker when the 120th Congress convenes Jan. 3. Democrats will hold their own leadership elections separately.
Jordan’s victory suggests House Republicans are responding to their losses not by moderating their leadership, but by elevating a longtime Trump ally known for aggressive investigations and partisan confrontation.
Arrests made after three properties were searched in relation to inquiry into late businessman
French police have made arrests after raiding three properties, including the Ritz hotel in Paris, in relation to an investigation into sexual abuse and trafficking by Mohamed Al Fayed.
Several individuals were taken into custody for questioning last month and later released, according to the Paris public prosecutor’s office. Another property in Paris and one in Saint-Tropez, both with links to Fayed, were also searched in mid-October.
Minnesota acquire veteran quarterback for 2027 pick
Cousins returns to Vikings after six seasons with team
No 1 pick Mendoza set to make first NFL start
Kirk Cousins is heading back to Minnesota.
The Vikings have acquired the veteran quarterback from the Las Vegas Raiders in exchange for a third-round pick in the 2027 draft, according to multiple reports, including from ESPN’s Adam Schefter and NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport.
House Republicans voted to elevate Rep. Jim Jordan as their leader, and the chamber will vote on whether to move forward with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's impeachment.
Voters adopted extreme policy requiring medical sex verification for all girls who want to play team sports
Parents of student athletes in Washington state have sued to block a ballot initiative banning transgender girls from women’s sports teams, calling the measure discriminatory and warning it would lead to “invasive” genital examinations for female athletes.
The Senate race in deep-red Mississippi remains unresolved, as Democrat Scott Colom has mounted a surprisingly competitive challenge to incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.
The Justice Department unsuccessfully attempted to force California election workers to set aside mail ballots returned from up to 20,000 alleged noncitizens.
A new study found that lower-income, rural households bore a disproportionate share of the financial burdens associated with AI data centers and the energy they use.
Defense secretary calls impeachment effort a ‘farce’ and praises president in press conference for audience of one
There was no talk of “weirdos or beardos” – two among several categories whom Pete Hegseth has made it known are unwelcome in the US armed forces under his watch.
But a man with a beard had to be uppermost in his mind for him to meet journalists in the Pentagon at the ungodly hour of 8am on Tuesday.
Observers say Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward has carved out an unusual role, with a pattern of intervening in pending criminal cases involving corporations.
Senators pressured Danielle Thumann, senior counsel to FCC chair Brendan Carr, to speak about agency’s actions toward ABC and Jimmy Kimmel
During a contentious Tuesday hearing on her nomination by Donald Trump to serve as a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner, Senate Democrats hammered Danielle Thumann about recent actions taken by the Brendan Carr-led regulator that have been criticized as hostile to press freedom.
Thumann, who serves as senior counsel to Carr, is expected to be approved as commissioner, with Republicans in charge of the US Senate and House. But Ben Ray Luján, a senator of New Mexico, assured her that the commission’s actions will be under close scrutiny when Democrats take charge of the chamber in January.
The AI infrastructure conversation usually starts with GPUs. It’s understandable because GPUs are emphasized by sellers, they’re expensive, capacity is constrained, and performance is easy to compare. However, a training cluster is only productive when those processors have a steady supply of data.
That makes AI training fundamentally a storage performance problem. The training data is often decades of files scattered throughout an organization. A training run requires centralization, reading large datasets through hours – or weeks, or even months – of analysis, then writes constant checkpoints so it can recover without starting over.
If the storage stack cannot sustain either side of this cycle, GPUs wait. The file system containing this data is often remote from the GPU compute machines or was filled remotely from many other file storage devices. The checkpoints must be remote, or they are not real checkpoints.
The Bottleneck Changes as AI Scales
File infrastructure that performs well during a proof of concept may not in production. Small tests rarely reproduce the metadata requests, client concurrency, sustained reads, and checkpoint writes generated by a full training environment’s GPU array. A real dataset can be millions of files. A peak throughput figure alone does not show whether performance will remain consistent as concurrency increases or training jobs continue for days or weeks.
(Shutterstock/Chaosamran_Studio)
Furthermore, storage sets are limited in capacity. When one is consumed by files and being used by the GPUs, you must wait for the training to complete to empty it and add new training materials. A remote file system allows disaggregated storage, where one set of data is trained on and another is filled in parallel to be next in line for training. Both require highly performant remote file systems – how long does it take to fill an array with 40PB of data where the GPUs are doing nothing? What if you could train on one remote file system while preparing the other?
NFS Is Not One Architecture
NFS remains central to HPC and AI environments because it provides a familiar way for large numbers of Linux systems to access shared data. The protocol itself is not the problem. The more important question is how the remote file service has been implemented and whether that architecture matches the workload.
Many storage solutions begin with the NFS service included in Linux. Kernel-based services such as NFSD are mature and widely understood, but running file services inside the operating-system kernel creates operational trade-offs. Failures or vulnerabilities have a significant reliability or security impact, and the architecture is not suited to safe container deployment.
User-space implementations such as NFS-Ganesha move the service outside the kernel. That separation improves isolation and makes modern deployment models possible but can compromise throughput and scalability. Additional components may also be required to deliver the high availability expected from infrastructure supporting long-running training jobs.
Proprietary storage appliances provide another option and can deliver mature management, support, and strong performance. The trade-off is often cost and dependence on a particular hardware platform. In the past two years those hardware costs have skyrocketed, with storage companies announcing 40% price increases. Adding another premium appliance whenever demand grows may solve the immediate bottleneck, but it can make scaling prohibitively expensive.
The Case for a Software-Defined Approach
A software-defined approach separates the file-service layer from a specific appliance. It allows storage integrators to deploy the software on hardware suited to the workload and expand performance or capacity as demand changes, without replacing the entire storage platform.
(dizain/Shutterstock)
For AI and HPC environments, the priorities are maintaining throughput as more GPUs and clients connect, using compute and memory efficiently, and preserving access to data during maintenance or failure. Scale-out high availability, transparent failover, and rolling upgrades become especially important when interrupting training has a measurable financial cost.
This approach changes economics. If more work can be handled by existing infrastructure, organizations can delay additional server purchases and reduce the associated networking, power, cooling, and management requirements. This is a TCO equation.
One Dataset, More Than One Protocol
Although AI training is commonly associated with Linux and NFS, enterprise data does not originate in one environment. Engineering and research teams may use Linux, while other parts of the organization create and manage information through Windows or macOS using SMB. Preparing data for training often means bringing selected information from those environments together on a high-performance platform.
Supporting NFS and SMB access to the same underlying data can reduce unnecessary copies and avoid separate silos for different teams. But multi-protocol access must be coordinated rather than simply switched on. Locks, file handles, permissions, identity mapping, and security controls must remain consistent so that an application using NFS and a user connecting through SMB do not corrupt data or receive conflicting views of it. Multi-protocol access needs to be designed into the file service from the outset, rather than treated as an integration task later.
Measure the Whole Training Path
The most useful AI infrastructure test is not about individual elements reaching an impressive number in isolation, but whether the complete stack can keep processors supplied with data under realistic load.
That means testing with representative datasets, client counts, and checkpoint patterns. It also means observing what happens during an upgrade, a node failure, or a period of heavy concurrency. A system that reaches high throughput in a short benchmark but stalls during checkpointing or maintenance will not deliver the utilization assumed in the business case.
GPU performance will continue to improve and newer models will make more impressive results. But the generative AI world is not naturally efficient and a return on investment depends on the infrastructure. When the remote file system scales with compute, GPUs spend more time doing useful work. When it does not, adding processors can simply create a more expensive queue for data.
About the author: Ned Pyle is CTO Enterprise Storage at Tuxera, where he leads technical strategy for Fusion SMB and future enterprise storage products. He brings three decades of experience in storage, security, and identity, including 20 years at Microsoft leading development of the SMB protocol and Windows file server capabilities. His work includes SMB compression, SMB over QUIC, Storage Replica, Storage Migration Service, and distributed file replication, alongside numerous security and management improvements.
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Nov. 10, 2026 — AMD today announced the general availability of the 6th Gen AMD EPYC server SP7 processors, based on the new “Zen 6” architecture, extending its historical server CPU performance leadership as AI creates new demands across the data center. Systems powered by the new CPUs are shipping from all leading server vendors, and cloud instances from Microsoft Azure and OCI are coming soon.
AMD announced the general availability of 6th Gen EPYC server SP7 processors in Nov. 2026. 6th Gen EPYC data center CPUs provide a foundation for growing agentic AI deployments and demanding enterprise applications. Credit: AMD.
Across five generations, AMD EPYC processors have repeatedly raised the standard for server CPU performance, energy efficiency and platform choice, culminating in 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors becoming the fastest-ramping and highest-volume EPYC generation in AMD history. Now, 6th Gen AMD EPYC server CPUs extend AMD CPU leadership, running AI agents, accelerated infrastructure and critical enterprise applications, helping customers expand computing capacity that runs their businesses.
“AI is significantly expanding the role of the CPU across every layer of the data center,” said Dan McNamara, senior vice president and general manager, Compute and Enterprise AI, AMD. “With 6th Gen AMD EPYC, customers can standardize on the proven x86 foundation while choosing a workload-optimized solution to run more agents, keep accelerated infrastructure fed and power the business-critical applications they depend on.”
World’s Best Server CPU Portfolio for the Modern Data Center
6th Gen AMD EPYC provides a workload-optimized stack that delivers leadership performance across a diversity of applications while improving infrastructure economics and preserving the flexibility of the broad x86 ecosystem.
Agentic AI adds even more diversity to a data center as a single workflow can run agents, call models, retrieve data, execute code and interact with the databases and applications enterprises already depend on. The 6th Gen AMD EPYC portfolio is designed for that reality, matching CPU density, frequency, bandwidth and efficiency to each job while preserving one common software, security and operational foundation. That workload-optimized approach delivers advantages across critical areas including agentic AI, enterprise services and rack-scale solutions.
Power More Enterprise and Cloud Services: The 6th Gen AMD EPYC 9996 CPU is the world’s best general-purpose processor, delivering leadership performance, performance per CPU watt, performance per CPU dollar and performance per socket. An AMD EPYC 9996 CPU-based system delivers up to 3.7x more performance compared with an Nvidia Vera CPU-based system and up to 2.2x the performance and 2.0x the performance per dollar of an Intel Xeon 6980P system. For customers, that can translate into more applications, transactions and users supported by each server, helping create capacity for new workloads within existing data center power and footprint limitations.
Lead Across Every Tier of Agentic AI: Agentic AI infrastructure spans three distinct CPU roles – general-purpose services, GPU host nodes, and agent sandboxes – and 6th Gen AMD EPYC provides a workload-optimized processor for each. High-frequency host-node processors, with up to 5.3 GHz, can deliver up to 1.8x the LLM output throughput of previous generation EPYC processors and high-density AMD EPYC processors can provide up to ~3.3x agents-per-CPU-watt advantage over Nvidia Vera and ~2.5x over Intel Xeon 6980P for hosting agent sandboxes. Additionally, for agent sandboxes, AMD EPYC 9996 CPU-based servers can support an estimated ~1.18x as many agents per rack within the same 35 kilowatt power envelope as systems using default power-management settings.
The competitive choice is increasingly straightforward. With 6th Gen AMD EPYC, customers do not have to settle for a one-size-fits-all CPU in a data center that is anything but uniform. AMD EPYC delivers the performance, choice and ecosystem support needed to move AI from answers to action and prepare for what comes next.
From the Server to Rack-Scale AI
6th Gen AMD EPYC extends its leadership from individual servers to AMD Helion agentic AI racks, giving customers three deployment options matched to how and where they operate: AMD Helion Liquid, designed to sit side-by-side with AMD Helios rackscale solution in large-scale agentic AI deployments, for maximum agent density; AMD Helion Air for expanding agent capacity within existing air-cooled data centers; and AMD Helion Air Inference for combining CPU execution and local GPU inference in one rack. AMD has worked across the server ecosystem to help develop the high-density AMD Helion rack with some configurations reaching up to 73,728 threads in one rack, delivering the most agents available in a rack. Customers can choose the balance of CPU and GPU capacity, cooling and connectivity that fits their infrastructure as agent demand grows.
Broad Ecosystem Support and Availability
Systems powered by 6th Gen AMD EPYC server processors are shipping from leading server vendors:
Meta is working with AMD as a lead customer and has been validating 6th Gen AMD EPYC CPU-based platforms as the companies prepare for deployment at scale.
Microsoft Azure is bringing 6th Gen AMD EPYC to customers across the AI infrastructure stack, with Azure HDv2 now in preview for AI data processing, agentic AI and HPC; Azure HXv2 for EDA and technical computing; and Azure ND MI455X v7, based on AMD Helios, for production-scale AI inference.
AMD recently shared updates to its multigeneration collaboration with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). OCI Compute E7 cloud compute instances will be powered by 6th Gen AMD EPYC server processors, supporting enterprise applications and the CPU services surrounding AI models.
With 6th Gen AMD EPYC, AMD is extending five generations of server CPU leadership into the agentic AI era; delivering more compute, better economics and more choice from the server to the rack. Across enterprise, cloud, HPC and AI infrastructure, EPYC provides a broad portfolio built for the workloads customers run today and what comes next.
About AMD
AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) drives innovation in high-performance and AI computing to solve the world’s most important challenges. Today, AMD technology powers billions of experiences across cloud and AI infrastructure, embedded systems, AI PCs and gaming. With a broad portfolio of AI-optimized CPUs, GPUs, networking and software, AMD delivers full-stack AI solutions that provide the performance and scalability needed for a new era of intelligent computing. Learn more at www.amd.com.
In an era of advanced analytics, deciding when to move on from a manager still seems to come down to vibes rather than logic
He just had to go.
His position had become untenable.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is the author of The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, which is out now. He teaches at Marist University.
Countries clash over Sea Lion project as Hamburg tribunal risks deepening sovereignty dispute
The people of the Falkland Islands face “devastating consequences” if Argentina is successful in blocking development of its offshore oilfield, the attorney general for England and Wales has told an international tribunal.
Ellie Reeves, representing the British government at a hearing of the international tribunal for the law of the sea (Itlos), said billions of pounds vital to the future of the British overseas territory would be lost.
A collage showing a diagram of the key parameters of the proposed terminal, a photo of a U.S. Navy exercise in the Beaufort Sea in 2022, and two vantage points on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker/ProPublica. Photos by Lance King/Getty Images, Justin Yarborough/U.S. Navy.
To an outsider, the research boats bobbing in the frigid and stormy Beaufort Sea off Alaska would seem little cause for alarm. Oil and gas companies have regularly explored the area for decades.
For this project, businessmen from the United Arab Emirates were touting a plan to tap the vast natural gas reserves that lay beneath the tundra of Alaska’s North Slope. They promised the operation would eventually be American-owned. No one could dispute Alaska’s dire energy needs — not to mention the potential for lucrative exports.
The surveyors last year used specialized equipment to map the depth and shape of the seabed, collect samples of shallow marine sediments and conduct sonar scans to check for obstructions such as shipwrecks. Documents show that their work was not far, as the crow flies, from the start of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System — a cornerstone of U.S. energy production. An Air Force long-range radar station sat just to the west. More than 100 miles off the coast, the Navy’s fast-attack nuclear submarines sometimes practiced surfacing through the thick Arctic ice.
But this project was far from routine. While the contractors performing the work were American, the UAE company paying for the surveys was actually being steered by Russia’s liquefied natural gas giant, Novatek — a company under partial U.S. sanctions, documents and interviews show.
The proposal to create an LNG processing plant on Alaska’s coast has already put reams of scientific data about the strategically critical region within reach of Novatek’s leader, an oligarch who is close to President Vladimir Putin, a ProPublica investigation found.
The Financial Times and The New York Times reported on the Russian ties to the venture last month. But the extent to which the company gathered detailed information about sensitive areas of Alaska has not been previously disclosed.
Such information is highly valuable in the ever-changing and unpredictable Arctic, with its potential routes for both naval ships and missiles. Norwegian security services and U.S. lawmakers have expressed concerns this year about the danger of increased spy and sabotage operations by Russia in the Arctic.
Russia-backed information gathering so close to the U.S. shoreline can be seen as “a direct challenge to sovereignty and security,” said Heather Conley, a former State Department official who is now a senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute.
“It’s super, super sensitive,” she said, adding, “Any scientific data, it immediately is dual use,” meaning it can serve both military and civilian ends.
Information on changing sea ice and other conditions off the North Slope could help Russia plan activities that undermine U.S. security, said Troy Bouffard, director of the Center for Arctic Security and Resilience at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. The fact that the surveys were given permits and done without interference could be seen as an intelligence failure, he said.
Bouffard added that it’s “highly unlikely” that intelligence personnel didn’t learn of the effort because any work in the austere, remote and militarily sensitive North Slope area stands out.
“All this is really surprising,” Bouffard said. “Should not have happened.”
The surveys were conducted in the second half of 2025, paused during harsh weather, then restarted in mid-2026, documents and sources say. By late August 2026, dozens of contractors were stationed on three large vessels — the Annika Marie, the Ukpik and the Uŋalaq — loaded with equipment for tasks such as monitoring waves, testing currents, and tides, and drilling core samples in the mud, according to a person familiar with the situation.
Then, in September, the CEO of the project’s U.S. arm, Polar Train LNG, resigned, questioned the operation’s legality and asserted it was a Russian ploy to gain control of a strategic U.S. asset, Alaska’s natural gas reserves.
In 2025, the survey work was focused on an area just west of Prudhoe Bay, which is near where the pipeline originates, documents and sources say. The next year, as the area thawed, Polar Train’s CEO, Joel Riddle, and his team told his financiers that location was not ideal for an LNG operation because of the high cost of dredging that would be needed and the potential to interfere with whaling by local residents. They urged the company’s UAE parent to focus on a site more than 250 miles to the west.
A page from a Tech Wave presentation on plans to locate a liquified natural gas operation in Alaska. Polar Train LNG is a subsidiary of UAE-based Tech Wave.Reviewed by ProPublica
But the UAE company asserted its control over the purportedly American outfit Riddle led in late August and ordered the contractors offshore to head back to a site closer to Prudhoe Bay. Riddle resigned the next month, on Sept. 19, warning that Polar Train’s “investments” were “very likely sooner or later to trigger” a federal inquiry.
Polar Train had applied to the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control the month before, seeking a waiver of U.S. sanctions to allow it to purchase a partially built LNG plant sitting in a Murmansk, Russia, shipyard and transport it to Alaska.
“Deploying this technology in Alaska serves not only to unlock U.S. LNG resources in the Pacific basin closer to key export markets in Asia,” said the application, which ProPublica obtained, “but also to ensure this cutting-edge equipment is deployed primarily to the benefit of the United States rather than Russia.”
The six-page application did not make clear who was behind the effort, steering the financing and decision-making needed to get the venture off the ground. The document’s digital properties held a clue: Many computer applications include what is known as metadata in a document that can reveal who has previously worked on it. In this instance, the OFAC application was signed by a lawyer in Washington, D.C., but the author’s name was listed in the metadata in Cyrillic: Evgeniya Kononova, a lawyer whose LinkedIn profile says she is deputy head of legal for Novatek in Moscow.
Novatek said in a statement to ProPublica that it “provided technical and other information” about its equipment for the waiver request, providing “comments to the draft application.” The company did not answer a list of specific questions, including inquiries about Kononova’s role.
It’s not clear whether the Russian natural gas executives backing the project hope to operate an LNG plant in Alaska or have a more immediate goal in mind — like finishing the incomplete plant that sanctions had stranded in Russia or gathering intelligence for the Kremlin in a strategically important region.
In a statement to ProPublica, Novatek denied it is gathering intelligence through the project, saying: “We state clearly and categorically: any such claims or implications are false.”
Novatek said it is “focused on utilizing its technology in Alaska and views this opportunity as a standalone and self-sufficient project.” The company said decisions about the project’s surveys “and other operational matters” were made by Polar Train and its UAE parent, Tech Wave Industrial Project Management.
Reduced staffing makes counterintelligence more difficult, said Emily Harding, a former CIA analyst and former deputy director of the Senate intelligence committee under Republicans.
“It’s not just that you need people knowledgeable about the counterintelligence mission, but you need people knowledgeable about highly technical topical areas,” she said. “That’s a big problem in normal times, but especially hard when staffing is down.”
The FBI did not respond to a request for comment last week.
ProPublica’s account of the Polar Train LNG project is drawn from interviews with a dozen people and documents that include corporate records, correspondence, and memos, as well as presentations detailing the survey work, budgets, a wire transfer receipt, and loan agreements.
On Saturday, Polar Train LNG said its research in Alaska “involved a standard set of surveys routinely conducted by companies worldwide.” The data collected is not classified, it said, and “all activities complied with applicable laws.” The purpose of the work was to find an appropriate site for the LNG project, the company said.
The White House has sought to leverage energy deals involving Russia as an incentive to negotiate an end to the war with Ukraine. Putin has spoken publicly about his desire to cooperate with the U.S. in the Arctic, potentially through Novatek.
“We are discussing with our American partners the possibility of working together in this field, not only in our Arctic zone but also in Alaska,” he said in August 2025, days after meeting with Trump at a summit in Anchorage.
In September, Putin talked about Polar Train LNG’s project with President Donald Trump’s peace envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, The New York Times reported last month. Polar Train’s U.S. parent has also filed an application with the Treasury Department in hopes of importing LNG to Alaska directly from Russia, according to a person familiar with the request.
When he resigned as CEO, Riddle accused Novatek of “financing and ultimately controlling the strategic direction” of the supposedly American-led Polar Train.
All three companies said Novatek had agreed to buy a minority stake in the Alaska operation and had paid Tech Wave an undisclosed amount of money. The deal, they said, is contingent on Tech Wave attracting American investment totaling more than 50%. Novatek simultaneously said it “did not provide any funding to the Project.”
”We would like to note, however, that provision of debt financing, including to U.S. persons, is not prohibited.” Novatek did not answer questions from ProPublica about whether it has provided debt financing to the Alaska project.
In its website statement, Polar Train called Riddle “a disgruntled employee” and said he was “recently terminated from the company for cause.”
“You can’t legally terminate someone who’s already resigned,” Riddle said. Tech Wave’s termination notice, which accused Riddle of announcing plans to launch a competing LNG project, was dated six days after his resignation, copies of both documents show. The notice was signed by a new acting CEO, Tim Talkington.
In a statement to ProPublica on Saturday, Talkington said that the U.S. has “a generational opportunity to advance U.S. energy dominance, unlock profound benefits for the state of Alaska, and strengthen American Arctic navigation.”
An Audacious Plan
A schematic drawing of the liquified natural gas processing facility Polar Train LNG is asking to bring to AlaskaPolar Train OFAC waiver application
The audacious LNG project was launched in 2025, when a half dozen executives with ExxonMobil sat down with representatives of Abu Dhabi-based Tech Wave Industrial Project Management, which was eyeing Alaska for an LNG facility, according to a person familiar with the project.
Tech Wave was 95% owned by Norwegian Bjorn Gundersen. He’d served as a deputy director for Novatek and played a key role in developing one of the most technologically ambitious LNG projects ever, known as Arctic LNG 2, on the Gydan Peninsula in Russia’s Far North. Gundersen and Tech Wave’s CEO, Rajeev Lehar, assured Exxon and others that no Russian money was involved in their project, the person said.
Tech Wave said in a statement Saturday that “Novatek offers the only proven technology suited to Arctic conditions” that also meets the project’s timeline. The company’s expertise is “informed in part” by Gundersen’s experience working on Arctic LNG 2, the company said.
Reached in Abu Dhabi on Saturday, Gundersen declined to comment. Exxonmobil did not respond to a request for comment.
Tech Wave’s plan was to seek permission to buy state-of-the-art natural gas equipment from Novatek that was meant for Arctic LNG 2 before U.S. economic sanctions prevented the company from finishing the work. The incomplete apparatus, built atop a concrete platform that is the size of nearly 10 football fields, was sitting in a Russian shipyard. Tech Wave wanted to bring the equipment by sea to Alaska’s North Slope, where it could begin processing and selling millions of metric tons of liquified natural gas that had been trapped in the ground for decades. The project would need to reach an agreement with the oil and gas companies already working in the area, since the natural gas it wanted was a byproduct of their extraction work.
Tech Wave had been exploring possible sites for the plant in the summer of 2025, before its leaders met with the Exxon executives, according to documents obtained by ProPublica and interviews.
It also dispatched the first group of surveyors who worked off the coast near Prudhoe Bay, collecting detailed information about the seabed.
Riddle was hired in March 2026 as Polar Train LNG’s CEO. Documents show his employment agreement was signed by Gentry Beach, a Texas investor who was a college friend of Donald Trump Jr. and helped raise money for President Trump’s campaign in 2016. Beach, who took part in meetings about the Alaska project, later told The Financial Times that he had an “incredible relationship” with oligarch Leonid Mikhelson, the Novatek founder and CEO.
Beach did not respond to requests for comment. Novatek said “Gentry Beach has no connection” with the company.
Riddle previously led the Australian fracking operation Tamboran Resources, where he developed a business relationship with Chris Wright, who was confirmed as Trump’s energy secretary in February 2025. Wright had been CEO of the fracking giant Liberty Energy, which partnered with Tamboran in 2023.
Leonid Mikhelson, the founder and chief of Russia’s largest private gas group, Novatek, on July 20, 2023Alexander Kazakov/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images
It wasn’t long before the actions of the UAE leaders made Riddle suspicious about who was behind the company and what their motives were.
Early on, Riddle said he and his team sought information on how Tech Wave spent tens of millions of dollars before he came on the project, including doing the surveys. “They were very hesitant to provide details around the cost or origin of the money that supported the company before I was hired,” Riddle said.
Riddle said Gundersen wanted to locate the LNG plant just off the coast near Prudhoe Bay, an area that includes the largest oil field in North America, the start of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and operations by companies that include Exxon, ConocoPhillips and Hilcorp. The site is near, too, to the Oliktok Long Range Radar Site. Such installations watch for inbound missiles and aircraft and play a critical role in national defense because satellites don’t have good visibility over the poles. Prudhoe Bay is a key location, as well, for communications infrastructure supporting the military and residents in northern Alaska, through a subsea fiber optic cable that originates there and stretches to Nome.
Riddle advised Tech Wave to consider a different site, near Wainwright, saying it would require less dredging and would not interfere with whaling by Alaska residents. He hired another team of surveyors for about $10 million to scope out that area, records and interviews show.
At the time, Riddle was becoming concerned that the operation was not truly the work of Abu Dhabi-based investors, but instead was controlled by Novatek, and its CEO, Mikhelson, who has close ties to Putin.
In meetings throughout the summer, Riddle and other Polar Train executives met with Novatek executives including Mikhelson, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with Riddle. Tech Wave also employed several others who had worked for Novatek besides Gundersen, according to social media profiles and documents.
On Aug. 14, Polar Train formally requested permission from the Treasury to import parts into Russia to complete construction of the LNG processor, and then to allow Polar Train to buy the plant and bring it to Alaska.
Riddle said his efforts to secure U.S. backing for the project met resistance from his funders. “For months now, there has been no engagement on productively achieving substantial US shareholding,” he told Gundersen in a September letter.
Riddle and his team consulted lawyers on how to handle sanctions issues related to the project — including concerns from Treasury personnel that Gundersen “may be acting on behalf” of Novatek. In an Aug. 3 letter, the firm Baker Botts told Riddle those concerns “could result in heightened regulatory scrutiny of the Project even absent a direct sanctions prohibition.”
Records show Polar Train’s funding, on paper, came in the form of loans from Tech Wave and Gundersen.
In late August, however, Riddle asked Gundersen and Lehar for more funding for Polar Train. In response to his request, he said, an employee connected him via WhatsApp to Denis Solovyov — a deputy of Mikhelson’s at Novatek. Solovyov — who has been lobbying in Brussels and Washington against tougher sanctions on Russian energy — promised Riddle he would send money. Solovyov did not respond to a request for comment.
Joel Riddle
Denis – in our meeting on Tuesday, you committed to facilitating the new funding by the end of this week. Can you please let me know the status? Thanks.
9:03am
Denis Solovyov
The initial funds are already on their way; for stable financing, I need an approved budget and a weekly payment schedule.
10:40 am
August 21, 2026
Messages show Solovyov and Riddle discussed unpaid bills, payroll, budgets and loan proceeds sent to Polar Train, which were routed through as many as three other companies, records show.
Joel Riddle
Denis – I have now received confirmation that all information requested by Rashid and Catherine has been provided. It is critical that the new funding agreed is wired on the morning of Aug 27th. If funding is not received, Polar will not be able to make payroll for its employees and pay critical bills, which will negatively impact the reputation of the company.
1:07am
Denis Solovyov
Joel, Katerina confirmed to me that the funds should be in your account on the morning of August 27. We are doing everything we can.
1:46am
Joel Riddle
Thanks Denis
1:47am
Denis Solovyov
How did your meeting in Alaska go?
1:52am
Joel Riddle
Dinner just finished, Secretary Wright is very supportive. I also have a 1:1 planned with him tomorrow
1:54am
August 27, 2026
In the meantime, Riddle had dispatched boats to survey his preferred project site near Wainwright. But Tech Wave pushed to move the operation back to Prudhoe Bay, which it said would be quicker and cheaper. Lehar, Tech Wave’s CEO, sent Polar Train orders Aug. 20 to tell contractors to “cease and suspend works and services related to the Wainwright site.”
That day, Tech Wave also asserted its control over Polar Train’s spending, directing Riddle to follow a budget it provided. The plan allocated $13 million for summer field surveys near Prudhoe Bay that included studies of the seabed, weather and oceanographic conditions, records show. The UAE company also barred Riddle from obtaining any financing for Polar Train without Tech Wave’s approval.
Tensions between the American executives and their backers in UAE and Russia culminated in a meeting in a lavish private suite at the Four Seasons Hotel in Abu Dhabi between Riddle and Mikhelson on Aug. 31. Riddle said he tried again to convince Mikhelson and Tech Wave that Wainwright was the only location that made sense for the project. Mikhelson told Riddle that a Prudhoe Bay area site was non-negotiable. Riddle told him he’d consider their position and do what was in the best interest of the company.
In the days that followed, Riddle again became concerned about making payroll.
“Denis please confirm the new funding that was agreed last Monday will be transferred no later than Monday 7th,” Riddle wrote on Sept. 6 to Mikhelson’s deputy. In Solovyov’s next message to Riddle in the chat the following day, he wrote that “the first 5 million were supposed to arrive by today.”
Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank on Sept. 7 wired $5 million from Tech Wave to a holding company called Polar Eagle, the U.S. parent company of Polar Train, records show. A Tech Wave employee messaged Riddle the next day saying that “PE is making a wire transfer to PT.”
Tech Wave’s funding came via a loan from a UAE financial services company, records say.
In statements, Tech Wave and Polar Train LNG said the company has been “funded exclusively by Tech Wave, through both personal investments by Mr. Gundersen and borrowed funds.”
Joel Riddle
Denis – I just had calls with both EDF and State – this was to introduce the potential Murmansk trip in late Sept. I noticed from both of these calls there was a material uptick in anti-Russia sentiment. I’ll continue to push on the trip but wanted to just share this feedback – how should I respond?
9:59am
Denis Solovyov
Joel, thanks for the information. How is this anti-Russian sentiment manifesting itself? Positive news should be coming our soon. Besides, the Graham Act is currently on hold.
12:39pm
September 3, 2026
The Graham Act, which was named for the late South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham and expanded the sanctions on Russia, was signed into law Sept. 18. Riddle resigned the next day, and several others followed.
“They wanted to have Russian technology controlling the resource and the North Slope,” Riddle said. “I just felt like that was not in the U.S. interest.”
In meetings with energy and state officials, Riddle said he told them what he’d learned about Novatek’s backing for the project. Energy officials said they would alert the FBI, Riddle said.
With Riddle gone, Polar Train tapped Talkington, who was formerly CEO of Goldman Sachs Bank Russia in Moscow and sits on the board of Rusal, one of the world’s largest aluminum producers. The Russian company was founded by oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who is under U.S. sanctions.
Lehar said in a statement that the company is “ready to work with the Trump administration” and the state of Alaska. He said the LNG project will, among other things, “deliver jobs, tax revenue, and more affordable, reliable energy for Alaskans.”
The status of Polar Train’s application to the Treasury Department is unclear. On its website, the company says, “LNG deliveries to the market are expected in 2030.” A Treasury spokesperson declined to comment on the status of the sanctions waiver, saying the department does not comment on “specific licenses or applications, including on the existence or lack of any application.”
The Trump administration’s stance on Russia is in flux. The president and his representatives have signaled that they hope to use business deals as a carrot to bring Putin to the negotiating table and end the war in Ukraine. In October, Trump signed a waiver exempting Russia from the new sanctions laid out in the Graham Act.
But other U.S. policymakers have been less sanguine. In June, U.S. Sens. Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, and Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire, introduced a bipartisan bill aimed at stopping spy ships from countries like China and Russia from conducting research and espionage operations in U.S. waters.
“This legislation shuts the door to foreign adversaries attempting to commit espionage and exercise influence at our doorstep in the Arctic,” Lee said then, “affirming the sole right of the American people to determine who may approach their shores, from the Aleutians to the Beaufort Sea.”
Cutting-edge research, expert talks and demonstrations at the international supercomputing conference
Nov. 10, 2026 — Researchers will share advances in high performance computing, including in fusion energy simulations, cancer research, agentic systems and next-generation scientific workflows.
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory will showcase their work in high performance computing (HPC) at SC26, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, in Chicago on Nov. 15-20. This year’s theme is “HPC Unites,” bringing together experts to share advances in software, artificial intelligence (AI), computer architectures and more.
Argonne researchers will present new research, lead technical discussions and hands-on tutorials, and share their work through the DOE booth and the conference’s Art of HPC exhibition. Featured below are a few highlights. Visit the Argonne at SC website for a full list of participation.
Meet Argonne Researchers at the DOE Booth
Argonne researchers will join colleagues from across the DOE national laboratory system to present their work at the DOE booth. Talks and demonstrations will highlight record-setting exascale simulations, quantum networking and community-driven scientific software. A featured talk by Venkat Vishwanath will spotlight how the ALCF Inference Service makes advanced models broadly accessible across HPC.
Gordon Bell Prize Finalists: Advancing Fusion Energy and Galaxy Simulations
Argonne scientists and the laboratory’s Aurora supercomputer contributed to two projects named as finalists for the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize.
A team, led by Elia Merzazi of Penn State University with a joint appointment at Argonne, has carried out the world’s largest multiphysics simulations of a liquid-metal fusion breeding blanket. Using the Argonne-developed NekRS software and the exascale supercomputers Aurora at Argonne and Frontier at the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the team achieved the first full fusion blanket simulation at engineering scale. The work represents an important step in the development of future fusion reactors. Aurora and Frontier are DOE Office of Science user facilities.
In another finalist project, a research team led by Japan’s RIKEN research institute used supercomputers, including Aurora and Frontier, to perform star-by-star simulations of the Milky Way at unprecedented scale. Using the PHEASANT simulation code, the team modeled our galaxy with up to 5.4 trillion particles, roughly 10,000 times more than previous state-of-the-art simulations. The work aims to provide new insights into how the Milky Way formed and evolved over time.
As scientific workflows become more autonomous, researchers are examining how people and computing systems can work together effectively. Lois Curfman McInnes has co-organized a session to help define the next generation of scientific computing ecosystems. Discussions will include human-AI collaboration with the aim of identifying actionable directions for the community. Another session led by Stephen Hudson brings together users, developers, theorists and industry collaborators to explore next-generation workflows for HPC and the changing role of humans.
Shaping the future of scientific computing
Argonne researchers are helping shape the scientific computing community by organizing and co-chairing workshops that bring together researchers from national laboratories, universities and industry. At XLOOP 2026: The Workshop on Extreme-Scale Experiment-in-the-Loop Computing, researchers will explore how computing can work alongside live experiments, helping scientists analyze data as it is collected. The Trillion Parameter Consortium Workshop will explore the computing infrastructure, models and agentic systems needed for scientific discovery. And the new AgenticAI4HPC’26 workshop is focused on using agentic systems to improve HPC software development and performance.
The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility provides supercomputing and AI capabilities to the scientific and engineering community to advance fundamental discovery and understanding in a broad range of disciplines. Supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program, the ALCF is one of two DOE Leadership Computing Facilities in the nation dedicated to open science.
Nintendo is hiring a digital archivist to help ensure the company's historical records are "preserved for future generations." The 12-month position is tasked with designing and implementing a "structured framework for organizing technical records, engineering documentation, source materials, and institutional knowledge related to legacy systems and platforms." Polygon reports: In the past, Nintendo has drawn criticism from the preservation community. In 2022, the Video Game History Foundation publicly criticized the company for announcing it would be closing the Wii U and 3DS eShops. The foundation released a statement saying that Nintendo's decision was "actively destructive to video game history." The statement also pointed out that Nintendo is part of the Entertainment Software Association, which funds lobbying that prevents a number of preservation efforts.
Testbed will model and validate integrated fuel cell, battery, and power electronics configurations against real-world AI data center load demand
DANBURY, Conn., Nov. 10, 2026 — FuelCell Energy, Inc. today announced its participation in StabilityMax, a three-year collaborative project led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR), formerly known as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL),
StabilityMax will develop and validate integrated power system architectures designed to support the rapidly evolving energy requirements of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers. The project also includes participation from Argonne National Laboratory (ANL).
As AI adoption accelerates, data centers are driving unprecedented demand for electricity and creating rapid fluctuations in power consumption. StabilityMax will develop and validate a testing and modeling framework to evaluate how fuel cells, energy storage, advanced controls, and power electronics can work together to deliver reliable, responsive power for AI data centers.
Under the project, FuelCell Energy will develop a fuel cell test facility in Connecticut, creating a national laboratory-supported testbed for evaluating integrated power solutions for AI data centers.
Combining FuelCell Energy’s fuel cell technology and operating experience with NLR’s expertise in AI infrastructure modeling and power systems engineering, the initiative will create the tools and insights needed to optimize system designs, validate performance, and support future deployment of integrated power solutions for digital infrastructure.
NLR will develop data center load profiles and simulation models that capture the dynamic power demands of modern computing infrastructure, providing a foundation for evaluating FuelCell Energy’s fuel cell technology under realistic operating conditions. Argonne National Laboratory will complement this work with techno-economic and lifecycle analyses to help identify commercially appealing, cost effective deployment strategies.
StabilityMax is part of a broader initiative by NLR to support the growing energy needs of AI-enabled digital infrastructure. Through new modeling tools, planning platforms, and test environments, NLR is helping accelerate the development and deployment of the power systems needed to enable efficient fuel cell-powered data centers.
“AI infrastructure is creating unprecedented demand for reliable, flexible, and resilient power,” said Shankar Achanta, Chief Product and Technology Officer of FuelCell Energy. “StabilityMax brings together FuelCell Energy’s operating experience and fuel cell technology with the expertise of leading national laboratories to better understand how integrated power systems can support the evolving needs of AI data centers. The insights gained through this work will help optimize system designs, validate performance under real-world conditions, and support future deployment of fuel cell-based solutions for digital infrastructure.”
“Fuel cells collocated with data centers provide unique solutions to meet the power demands of AI infrastructure,” said Zhiwen Ma, Principal Investigator at NLR. “Through this project, NLR will help demonstrate how integrated fuel cell systems can rapidly respond to data center power needs while limiting impacts to the utility grid and ratepayers.”
The project builds on FuelCell Energy’s ongoing development of integrated power solutions for digital infrastructure. Earlier this year, the company announced a collaboration with Siemens to advance a layered architecture approach that combines multiple technologies operating across different timescales to support the evolving power requirements of AI data centers. Insights generated through StabilityMax are expected to further inform system design and deployment strategies for future digital infrastructure applications.
Eric Strayer, FuelCell Energy’s Head of Global Sales, commented, “FuelCell Energy is actively working with customers and partners deploying power solutions for digital infrastructure, and this project will provide valuable data and operating experience that can inform future deployments. As demand for AI infrastructure continues to accelerate and load profiles evolve with each new generation of chips, the insights gained through this work will help refine system designs and deployment strategies for integrating fuel cells, energy storage, and power electronics in data center environments.”
About FuelCell Energy
FuelCell Energy, Inc. (Nasdaq: FCEL) is a U.S. clean energy technology company that delivers continuous, scalable baseload power for mission-critical applications worldwide. Its fuel cell systems generate electricity on-site at the point of use, providing reliable power for data centers, industrial facilities, utilities, and distributed-generation customers. Compact and modular by design, the systems deliver quiet, low-emission power while minimizing impacts on surrounding communities. FuelCell Energy provides proven utility-scale solutions for cleaner, more resilient local energy and has global deployments approaching one gigawatt. Learn more at FuelCellEnergy.com.
Inflation rose at a monthly pace of 0.4%, hotter than economists had forecast and raising expectations that the Federal Reserve will increase interest rates in December.
On the eve of a House impeachment vote, self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth made a rare appearance before the Pentagon press corps. Over half an hour, he declared every military operation he has overseen “lawful” and claims of civilian harm “slander.” He said the Iran war was a great victory and only 18 Americans have died in the conflict. He also claimed that the effort to impeach him was a stunt by just “one disgruntled congressman.”
None of it is true.
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., introduced articles of impeachment on the House floor Monday afternoon, charging Hegseth with “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Democrats are overwhelmingly expected to join Massie’s effort following their midterm election landslide. “I am a hard yes on the Hegseth resolution,” said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the presumed next House speaker.
Massie wrote on X that if his impeachment resolution advances Tuesday evening, he will request a separate vote on each of the eight articles. “I’ve heard from several members they agree with some of the Articles of Impeachment but not all of them,” Massie wrote. “If the motion to kill my resolution by referring it to committee fails, and we proceed to the Articles themselves, I’ll request a vote on each of the Articles separately.”
As Hegseth steels himself for a vote that could see him put on trial in the Senate and sink his chances of serving for the rest of Trump’s term, The Intercept is dissecting his self-defense and examining Hegseth’s false claims about his disastrous war-making.
Everything Was “Lawful” and “Notified to Congress”
“Iran, the cartels, Maduro, Yemen — every one was a lawful operation ordered by the commander-in-chief, then ordered by myself, notified to Congress, and executed by American warriors who did their jobs.”
Experts in the laws of war, a Pentagon official, and members of Congress from both parties say Hegseth’s boat strikes against “cartels,” which have now killed upward of 240 people, are illegal extrajudicial killings. The military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.
Sarah Harrison, who previously advised Pentagon policymakers on issues related to human rights and the law of war, said that the attack on Venezuela was also a clear violation of international law and that the administration’s justifications for the raid were baseless.
Of the Iran war, Air Force Lt. Col. Rachel VanLandingham, a former chief of international law at U.S. Central Command, said the opening strike “clearly violates the U.S. Constitution and the War Powers Resolution,” which requires the president to seek congressional approval to start a war in most cases. Harrison Mann, a former U.S. Army officer and intelligence official and now the associate director for campaigns and policy at Win Without War, drew specific attention to the attacks on the bridges and water reservoirs in Iran. It is “quite dangerous to be conditioning the U.S. military to carry out orders that are clearly war crimes,” he warned.
Hegseth’s claims about notifications are also spurious. Congress never authorized the Iran war, and a call to the congressional “Gang of Eight” the night before is not the formal report experts say the law requires. Following the January attack on Venezuela, Republicans privately complained they were not told in advance.
“The Terrorists That We Hunt”
“As to the claim that the American military targets civilians, well, that is a lie and that is a slander against every professional who flew, sailed, and fought on these missions. The only people who target civilians are the terrorists that we hunt.”
The U.S. boat strike campaign has only targeted civilians. The summary executions of more than 240 people are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies detained suspected drug smugglers and brought them to trial on criminal charges.
A U.S. military investigation also found U.S. forces attacked an elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing more than 150 people, most of them children. One official called it “colossal negligence.”
For months, Central Command has failed to answer questions about additional civilian casualties, including eight members of a family — the youngest, a 20-day-old infant — killed in an attack documented in an Intercept investigation.
These attacks came after Hegseth conducted a comprehensive campaign to undermine efforts to prevent and mitigate civilian harm. The Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, for example, slashed its staff from 40 personnel in January 2025 to just nine by the end of the year, according to the report.
“Dead Where They Should Be”
“More than 70 narco vessels sunk. 218 narco-terrorists dead where they should be. Maritime smuggling down at least 65 percent and dropping even further.”
Hegseth misstates the toll of his own boat strike campaign. The Intercept’s tracker counts 72 strikes and at least 243 dead. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., after reviewing classified material, wrote that the evidence suggests the military killed people not involved in drug trafficking. A top Pentagon Joint Staff official told lawmakers in a classified briefing that victims of human trafficking could be among the dead of the first strike.
The drug claims fare no better. Deputy Assistant Secretary of War for Americas Security Affairs Joseph Humire, for example, offered completely different numbers to Congress, telling the House Armed Services Committee in March that there “has been a 20 percent reduction of movements of drug vessels in the Caribbean and an additional 25 percent reduction in the Eastern Pacific.”
The Pentagon’s latest civilian casualty report, meanwhile, claims no civilians were killed in the boat strikes. One U.S. official said it had “absolutely no credibility.”
Iran Was a “Historic Military Victory”
“By every measure, we achieved a historic military victory. Under 40 days of sustained combat…”
The Iran war, by all objective measures, is an abject failure. The conflict undermined the decades-old U.S. security framework, as well as America’s archipelago of bases, in the Middle East. Iran determined how to overwhelm U.S. air defenses, offering up a playbook for U.S. adversaries around the world. This, in turn, damaged U.S. military security across the globe. From Jordan to Kuwait to the United Kingdom, U.S. outposts are now increasingly vulnerable to attack. As a result, the Iran war has left the military on the brink of a “breakdown.”
The Trump administration’s attempt to rebrand its faltering forever war hasn’t slowed the mounting toll of U.S. casualties, either. While Hegseth focused on the conflict’s first 40 days, the U.S. has suffered more casualties as a result of the conflict since the war formally ended and, in July, underwent a name change to “Overseas Operations.”
Voters did not see a victory either: About 6 in 10 told The Associated Press the war was the wrong decision, and Vice President JD Vance agreed, writing of the GOP’s crushing defeat in last week’s midterms: “The reason we lost is the war.”
18 Americans
“Eighteen Americans have given their lives in Operation Epic Fury.”
Hegseth spent his rare press conference using the troops under his leadership as a shield, claiming that indictments of him were actually indictments of them. When not using them for cover, Hegseth praised them. “They are the best of our nation. Like the president, I will defend them with every fiber of my being every single day,” he crowed.
What he didn’t care enough to do was offer an accurate count of the war’s toll. The official Pentagon count of deaths during Epic Fury is 15, not 18 — but that’s misdirection at best and a lie at worst. At least 23 military personnel have died in Operation Epic Fury and “Overseas Operations,” the new moniker for the war introduced in July, according to the Pentagon’s official count. (This includes 11 killed by hostile fire.) The actual number of troop deaths in the region since the war began is higher.
“One Disgruntled Congressman”
“This is one disgruntled guy who drew up some really flimsy articles.”
In Hegseth’s telling, Massie is pursuing his impeachment out of resentment over the loss of his Kentucky congressional seat to Trump-backed far-right candidate Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL. But Massie’s impeachment effort has strong bipartisan support. The entire House Democratic caucus is widely expected to vote in favor of the impeachment effort. While no House Republicans aside from Massie have openly committed to voting yes, the outgoing congressman said Monday that he believes “several” Republicans will vote for the measure.
Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz agreed. So did Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., one of the leading voices for Hegseth’s impeachment. “I think there’s a high chance that it will be successful,” she told The Intercept of Massie’s effort. In April, Ansari filed six articles of impeachment against Hegseth, including violations of the law of armed conflict and targeting of civilians, abuse of power, and obstructing congressional oversight.
Discontent with Hegseth is widespread within the military establishment as well. The Intercept recently spoke with six current and former defense officials who said Hegseth had undermined the rule of law; irreparably harmed the U.S. military through purges of top commanders; spurred religious extremism; and diminished the department he leads due to an almost endless raft of scandals and culture-war clownishness. In fact, 64 percent of active-duty service members, veterans, and military families disapprove of Hegseth, according to a recent poll conducted by Common Defense, a grassroots veterans organization.
The American people, writ large, appear to agree with Ansari, Massie, the U.S. officials, and those in the military’s orbit. Just 32 percent of voters approve of the way Hegseth is handling his job, while 57 percent disapprove, according to a Quinnipiac University poll in September.
Republicans on House panel criticize US government’s investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell
Republicans on the House oversight committee released a report on Tuesday criticizing the federal government’s handling of the investigations into Jeffrey Epstein and his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, and called on the Department of Justice to interview “key witnesses, investigate Epstein associates accused of criminal activity, and ensure survivors have access to their records”.
“The federal government has failed the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s horrific crimes for decades,” James Comer, the Republican congressman who chairs the committee, said in a statement.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 10, 2026 — The Commission on U.S. Quantum Primacy (CUSP), convened by the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), released today its preliminary report, Defining the American Quantum Era, a strategy argument for why the United States must move beyond scientific leadership in quantum and build the capacity to deploy and manufacture quantum technologies at scale. The Commission is co-chaired by U.S. Sen. Todd Young (R-IN), U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), and Ylli Bajraktari, president of SCSP.
The report warns that America’s strengths in research, software and private investment will not automatically become leadership in deployment or industrial scale. The U.S. currently holds an edge in quantum research and in deployed quantum computing systems, but that position varies across the quantum technologies. China has made quantum a strategic priority, backing it with significant public investment, and is moving from demonstration to infrastructure in areas like quantum networking. Supply chain and manufacturing advantages, paired with a well-funded R&D base, could allow China to scale quantum innovation faster than the United States.
“Leadership in quantum will not be decided by who publishes the most papers or reaches a single milestone first,” said Bajraktari. “It will be decided by who turns quantum discoveries into deployed, manufactured, trusted capabilities. This preliminary report lays out what the United States must get right across discovery, development, deployment, and scale, and the window to act is limited.”
The Commission defines quantum primacy as the enduring ability to discover, develop, deploy and scale strategically consequential quantum capabilities and use them to strengthen national security, technological innovation and economic competitiveness. It does not require self-reliance or being first at every milestone, but it does depend on trusted allies and partners.
“America’s quantum science is the envy of the world, but discoveries in the lab only matter if they reach the field, the factory, and the warfighter,” said Young. “This report is a call to make sure the breakthroughs we pioneer are built, deployed, and secured here.”
The report identifies near-term priorities across four mutually reinforcing elements:
Discovery: match federal ambitions with sustained, predictable funding for foundational research, and create dedicated tracks for new quantum algorithms and applications.
Development: co-develop quantum software and hardware through a national program potentially modeled on the Exascale Computing Project, and build a NIST-led public-private benchmarking and interoperability effort.
Deployment: expand mission-relevant use cases, build repeatable integration pathways and accelerate migration to post-quantum cryptography across critical infrastructure and state and local governments.
Scale: secure supply chains, establish a National Quantum Foundry Access Program, build the full quantum workforce from technicians to Ph.D.s and forge an allied quantum market.
“Quantum has the potential to transform everything from navigation and health care to the security of our digital infrastructure,” said Luján. “Preparing for the future of quantum technology should not be a partisan issue. We must continue investing in a skilled workforce, supporting research and innovation, and strengthening partnerships between our National Labs, universities, and industry. New Mexico is home to some of the brightest minds in quantum research, and I will continue working to ensure our state is a leader in this emerging technology.”
The Commission’s final report, due in Spring 2027, will translate this framework into an implementation strategy with policy recommendations and infrastructure needs.
The Commission on U.S. Quantum Primacy (CUSP) is dedicated to ensuring that the emergence and diffusion of quantum technologies strengthen U.S. national power, driving national security, technological transformation, and economic might. Its Commissioners include leaders from IBM, Google Quantum AI, IonQ, SandboxAQ, IQT, Playground Global, DARPA, Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, Quantum Corridor, and the University of Maryland. Senators Young and Luján provided strategic guidance on the preliminary report but were not involved in formulating its specific policy recommendations.
About SCSP
The Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit project focused on strengthening America’s long-term competitiveness as artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies reshape national security, the economy, and society.
We’re using our custom-made robot to open and close the iPhone Duo hundreds of thousands of times. Watch along and get your questions answered by CNET editors live.
Criminal Bar Association and campaigners hail Mr Justice Bennathan for delivering remarks with ‘piercing clarity’
The judge who sentenced Russell Brand has been praised for dispelling rape myths with “piercing clarity”.
Mr Justice Bennathan’s sentencing remarks were particularly welcomed given that rape myths had played a part in the trial. He was also lauded for calling out “enablers” who witnessed sexual assaults by the comedian.
Jury finds Blade Silvano, who presented herself as a male army veteran, guilty of six counts of sexual assault
A woman serving a prison sentence for sexual assault after pretending to be a man and duping a woman into a physical relationship has been found guilty of tricking another woman into a similar abusive partnership.
In both cases, Blade Silvano, 44, met the women on an online dating site and falsely claimed she was a man who had served in the armed forces before meeting them in person and sexually assaulting them.
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
An official from Marana, Arizona, is seeking clarification from the private prison giant Management and Training Corporation about its handling of sexual abuse allegations at the former state prison in the town, following an investigation from LOOKOUT and The Intercept.
In an October 28 letter, reviewed by LOOKOUT and The Intercept, Marana Finance Director and License Inspector Yiannis Kalaitzidis asked MTC Senior Vice President Mary Calvin for a written explanation of what the town official called an “apparent inconsistency” between state records and the facility’s 2023 Prison Rape Elimination Act, or PREA, audit, a report required by the federal law.
MTC ran a former state prison in Marana, Arizona, and plans to reopen it as an ICE detention camp.
The request is part of the town’s review of MTC’s October 1 application for a business license to “Operate Marana Detention Facility.” The company ran a former Arizona state prison in Marana and plans to reopen it imminently as a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention camp.
The letter cites a September 29 LOOKOUT and Intercept investigation about how state records reference three allegations of sexual misconduct at the prison in 2022 and 2023.
PREA audits — which are required for jails, prisons, and detention centers at least once every three years — must record all allegations of sexual misconduct at detention facilities, whether they are substantiated or not. Certified in December 2023, MTC’s report for the Marana prison, however, recorded none.
Kalaitzidis noted in his letter that the audit says the finding of zero incidents was verified by the warden, chief of security, PREA compliance manager, and internal investigator. He also wrote that, despite the apparent reviews by several company officials, the report “does not appear to be certified or signed by any MTC personnel.”
The letter says the town of Marana is requesting the explanation as part of an investigation into whether MTC “made a material false statement in conducting the business” of the state prison facility, which would be grounds for denial of a business license according to the town’s code.
“The Town of Marana is currently reviewing MTC’s business license application,” said Andrea De La Cruz, the assistant town manager, told LOOKOUT and The Intercept by email. “As part of our review process and due diligence, the Town has contacted MTC to request additional information. The application remains under review, and no final determination has been made at this time.”
MTC did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Changing Political Context
Local residents and officials say the state, the federal government, and MTC left them out of meaningful discussions about reopening the prison as an ICE camp, LOOKOUT and The Intercept previously reported.
For now, a town business license is among the few levers local officials have.
In an October 2 letter from the local group Pima Resists ICE, or PRICE, to a Marana official who specialized in licensure, organizers cited not only the discrepancies between state investigations into sexual abuse and the PREA audit, but also alleged violations involving an escape from an MTC prison in Kingman, Arizona, in 2010, as well as abuses in a New Mexico immigration camp run by MTC as revealed in a 2017 DHS Office of Inspector General report.
The inquiry comes as Arizona’s political landscape is shifting. The midterm election gave Democrats control of both chambers of the state legislature as well as the governor’s office — a historic change in state power. Republicans will be in the minority at the state Capitol for the first time in 60 years.
That has Democratic lawmakers talking about taking on one of the most contentious laws in recent Arizona history. Following protests across the state, Democrats took up the cause of repealing a controversial 2010 anti-immigrant law known as Senate Bill 1070. In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down three of its provisions, leaving a requirement that police check the immigration status of people they stop under certain circumstances.
“I would absolutely love to see a repeal of SB1070,” state Sen. Analise Ortiz, a Democrat from Glendale, told LOOKOUT and The Intercept. “There are still parts of that law on the books that are enabling cities to collaborate with ICE to rip families apart, and that needs to stop.”
State Rep. Betty Villegas, D-Tucson, echoed Ortiz: “We already have bills aligned to focus on what other states have done to control ICE from coming into private property.”
Following the lead of neighboring New Mexico’s prohibition on local jurisdictions entering into contracts with ICE for immigrant detention camps, Villegas said Democrats in Arizona see an appetite for doing something similar in their own state.
“We do not want the Democrats to wait until things get bad to investigate conditions.”
Ortiz agreed, saying there is “likely an appetite” for something similar in Arizona, and that the Latino Caucus would address the issue.
Local nonprofits said lawmakers should also conduct a review of no-bid contracts like the one inked between the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, and MTC.
“This was literally handed to them with no review and no public input,” said Caroline Isaacs, the executive director of Just Communities Arizona, a nonprofit working on criminal justice reform. “We do not want the Democrats to wait until things get bad to investigate conditions.”
“We want them to do this now, before people get hurt.”
Blender 5.3 has been released with support for 3D Gaussian Splats, Nvidia DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction and Vulkan as the default graphics backend on Linux. Phoronix reports: Blender now allows importing Gaussian Splats from PLY, SPZ, and glTF files. Also new to Blender 5.3 is NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction support as a new denoiser. Blender 5.3 also brings support for NVIDIA RTX Spark devices.
For the Cycles code in Blender 5.3 the Principled BSDF for shader nodes now supports dispersion. Another notable change with Blender 5.3 is the Vulkan back-end now being the default on Windows (except for Windows on ARM) and Linux systems. Vulkan 1.1 or newer is required and should deliver better performance than OpenGL.
Nov. 10, 2026 — SC26 is next week, and the IBM Tape team is very excited to be attending. The team will be bringing in a physical IBM Climate Controlled Diamondback to display, so visitors can see it up close. Come find the team at Booth #1806 in Chicago, November 15-20.
Climate Controlled Diamondback
Tape is still one of the most cost efficient ways to store data long term. The catch is that it usually wants a cool, dry room, and a lot of data centers are running hotter than ever.
That is the problem the Climate-Controlled Diamondback solves. It is the first tape library designed specifically for data centers with high temperature and humidity. The whole thing is enclosed and insulated, and a rear-door AC unit keeps the inside stable. It can run in rooms up to 45°C (113°F) and 90% humidity, up to ASHRAE A4, so data centers don’t need a separate tape room.
What to Check Out at the Booth
The rear-door AC unit. It is self-contained, with no drainpipes or plumbing.
The “Request Door Open” button.
How much fits in one frame. Up to 14 LTO-9 or LTO-10 drives and 1,548 cartridges, which gets you up to 61.9 PB uncompressed with 40 TB LTO-10 cartridges.
How easy it is to set up and fix. It deploys in under 30 minutes with pre-loaded media, and most repairs take less than 2 minutes.
Why It Matters
Reduce tape costs by up to 30%, reducing co-location cost and/or eliminates tape rooms
Still about 10% of the power of comparable HDD systems
Neutral air pressure, so dust and debris from the room stay out
Works with IBM Deep Archive, and you still get tape’s air gap against ransomware
Reduce excursion risk by up to 90%, reduce tape failures from environmental excursions
Maintain all the benefits of tape, reduce energy consumption by 94%, up to 81% TCO advantage, up to 72% reduction in floorspace
IBM @ SC26 · Booth #1806 · Chicago | November 15–20
Stop by, take a look inside (and behind!) the Diamondback, and come chat with the IBM Tape team.
Jason Jones welcomes decision by privy council in London to overturn 2025 ruling that outlawed anal sex
A gay man has won a historic 10-year battle against Trinidad and Tobago’s homophobic laws with a landmark UK appeals court ruling that could help overturn similar anti-gay laws in other Caribbean countries.
The privy council, based in London, overturned a 2025 decision by Trinidad and Tobago’s court of appeal that recriminalised consensual anal sex, seven years after the Trinidadian activist Jason Jones secured a high court judgment declaring the country’s colonial-era “buggery” laws unconstitutional.
Hamish Falconer says UK has ‘not accepted principle’ of linking electricity trade to ‘cohesion fund’ but two sides will discuss issue
Britain is willing to discuss paying towards infrastructure schemes in poorer parts of the EU in return for access to the European electricity market, according to the minister in charge of renegotiating the bilateral relationship.
Hamish Falconer, the cabinet minister in charge of EU talks, told the Guardian he was sure the two sides would discuss the issue after this month’s summit, as ministers look to deepen ties with the union over the next few years.
Since the start of the year, the prediction betting site Kalshi has two hired former officials from Joe Biden’s White House as a policy adviser and a top lobbyist.
The company’s co-founders have also spent nearly $1 million on donations to federal candidates, with more than a third, or $377,000, going to Democrats like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., according to a new report.
Kalshi’s spending spree shows how much prediction market sites have ratcheted up their presence in Washington as regulators craft rules for the industry. While the sites’ close relationship with the Trump administration has drawn headlines, the report from the progressive group Demand Progress details how the industry’s influence operation crosses party lines.
“They’ve been hopeful that they can have Democratic champions for their policy agenda.”
The push for bipartisan relationships began months ago, but it could pay dividends as Democrats take over both chambers of a Congress, said Ella Fanger, the corporate power policy adviser for Demand Progress. A betting market critic, Fanger predicted that the companies will keep trying to win allies on both sides of the aisle.
“They’ve been hopeful that they can have Democratic champions for their policy agenda,” she said, “and not just have Trump’s cronies sticking out their necks for them.”
The hiring spree of former Biden officials and spending on Democratic candidates come as prediction markets are facing increasing scrutiny over betting on elections and a spate of suspicious trades from Washington about policy moves and even military action.
On Tuesday, Democrats on Capitol Hill called for Trump to bar White House staffers from using the betting sites and, with Democrats taking Congress, many observers expect investigations into their use in Washington.
In a statement, Kalshi said it was willing to work “across the ideological spectrum.”
“Kalshi has had substantive conversations with policymakers over the past year regarding legislation that protects consumers, keeps minors off our platform, makes insider trading bans standard across the industry, and ensures the CFTC” — the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — “has the resources they need,” said the company’s head of government relations, John Bivona, a former Democratic congressional staffer and Biden White House official.
“We’ve come out in support of legislation introduced by members across the ideological spectrum,” Bivona said, “and we’ve worked with dozens of lawmakers from both parties on these priorities.”
Hiring Republicans — and Dems
Kalshi and its rival Polymarket are the dominant players in the prediction market industry, which has flourished since Donald Trump became president thanks to his administration’s hands-off approach to regulation.
The ties between the prediction betting sites and Trumpworld go all the way to the president’s inner circle, as evidenced by Donald Trump Jr.’s financial stakes at both competitors.
Polymarket has also hired as a lobbyist a Republican former top official at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The federal regulatory body has, under the Trump administration, sued states for trying to regulate sports betting as gambling.
The Demand Progress report covers Trump Jr.’s ties to the industry, but it also shines a light on the role of former Democratic congressional and executive branch staffers.
Kalshi’s hires have tended toward establishment Democrats. Among them are Stephanie Cutter, a political strategist whose work spanned the Obama and Biden administrations as well as Kamala Harris’s campaign for president. Cutter was tapped as a policy adviser for Kalshi in April. Bivona was hired by Kalshi as its head of government relations in January.
Tripled Lobbying Spend
Overall, Kalshi has spent $1.8 million on lobbying in the first half of 2026, compared to $615,000 in all of 2025, according to the Demand Progress report.
Polymarket spent a relatively meager $180,000 during the same period this year, compared to $360,000 last year.
“It’s important for states to be able to regulate this industry as gambling, which is what it is.”
Fanger, whose group is critical of the prediction markets’ attempts to neutralize state sports gambling regulators, said she is worried that a pliant Congress could approve the Trump administration’s favorable regulations.
“The concern is basically just that we could get legislation that would codify the rulemaking that the CFTC has already begun,” she said, referring to the agency’s efforts to formally exercise jurisdiction over sports, political, cultural, and weather betting contracts. “And we think that it’s important for states to be able to regulate this industry as gambling, which is what it is.”
The industry may need all the lobbyists it can get if progressives gain power in the next Congress. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., who is angling to chair the House Financial Services Committee, said in a letter last week that she wants to “rein in predatory lending and predatory platforms, including prediction markets, so that our constituents keep more of their hard-earned dollars in their pockets.”
Waters is also a longtime foil to the crypto industry. Crypto currency interests alienated Democrats by spending tens of millions of campaign dollars on Republican Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio, who lost his seat to Democrat Sherrod Brown in the midterm election.
While crypto has lavished money on campaign spending through a super PAC, the prediction market industry has opted for a quieter campaign of smaller donations routed through more traditional channels.
Regulations under consideration could affect up to 150 platforms, including LegoPlay, Spotify and eBay, sources say
A substantial expansion of the social media ban for under-16s could inadvertently lead to a ban on YouTube Kids and other sites that had been thought exempt, sources briefed on the government’s proposals have said.
One source close to the talks said the regulations now under consideration meant up to 150 platforms, including games platforms such as Lego Play, could be covered by the ban, which is set to come into force in March.
New alliance with the Netherlands and Baltic and Nordic countries comes in response to 41% increase in Russian naval activity around UK
Russian naval activity around the UK has increased by 41% in the first nine months of the year, a British defence minister has said, as the Royal Navy announced plans to step up a 10-country maritime defensive effort in response.
Luke Pollard, the minister for defence readiness, described the figure as “a huge increase”, justifying a new drone and warship initiative from “the alliance of beer-drinking nations” – the UK, the Netherlands and the Baltic and Nordic countries.
The EU has said it stands ready “to come with a swift and united response” after France blamed Iran for a spate of cyber-attacks on supermarket freezers and chillers that caused millions of euros of damage.
We acknowledge that France has attributed these (cyber-attacks) to Iran. Pending discussions with member states, we as (the) European Union, we stand ready to come with a swift and united response.
We as the EU, we have consistently called on all states to refrain from malicious behaviour in the cyberspace. And we will continue to address such malicious behavior, making use of all the tools that we have also under the EU cyber diplomacy toolbox, including sanctions.
United expected to sack Michael Carrick after awful start
US men’s national team head coach Mauricio Pochettino is interested in a move to Manchester United, multiple sources told the Guardian, with those same sources characterizing the interest as mutual.
United are expected to sack their head coach, Michael Carrick, after a disastrous start to their season which leaves them at risk of relegation from the Premier League, their worst opening to a campaign in four decades.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Immigration and Customs Enforcement hired at least 19 officers with significant misconduct, criminal or employment red flags during its rapid expansion under President Donald Trump, according to a Washington Post investigation of leaked Department of Homeland Security records.
The Post reviewed roughly 300 newly hired officers and found five tied to prior use-of-force incidents, five named in lawsuits that ended in settlements, and at least six who had been fired, decertified or resigned while facing dismissal.
Among them was a former Detroit officer involved in a fatal shooting that led to a $2.5 million settlement, a former New York detective who pleaded guilty to stealing thousands of dollars in champagne, and recruits disciplined for dishonesty or threatening conduct.
Former DHS Inspector General John Roth told the Post that some of the conduct described should disqualify recruits from carrying a federal badge and firearm.
The findings add to earlier concerns about ICE’s accelerated hiring drive. A whistleblower previously alleged the agency hired some recruits before completing basic fingerprint and identity checks, while the Post separately found that ICE cut more than 40% of its basic training program during the expansion.
DHS defended its process, saying ICE follows required vetting rules and that some recruits may begin under temporary status while background investigations remain pending.
The 19 cases represent only a small share of the roughly 12,000 officers DHS says it hired, but they raise serious questions about whether the administration’s push for speed came at the expense of adequate screening.
Reddit is rolling out an AI-powered shopping feature called "Reddit Reviews" that summarizes user conversations about products and turns them into dedicated reviews. TechCrunch reports: Reddit's announcement points to its rules and its latest measures to combat automated abuse and spam, as well as its practice involving community moderators, as tools it will use to keep the reviews on the site legit. The Reddit Reviews feature itself taps into AI to organize the conversations people are having where they describe their product experiences. These posts will often see users discussing how a product works for them, or why it fails, or what the trade-offs are that someone should consider before buying.
The company has been testing the product reviews feature since February, initially with U.S. users in areas like Electronics, Video Games, and Health & Beauty products. In September, Reddit expanded the test to include the Home & Garden and Fashion & Apparel categories as well. Now, the company says Reddit Reviews is rolling out to all U.S. users on iOS, Android, and web, with an initial selection focused on around 10,000 products. Over time, it will roll out to more categories and expand beyond the U.S.
To use the feature, Reddit users can search for a product or category in the app's search bar or click on a highlighted product name they see in someone's comment. From there, the user is taken to a screen where important conversations are summarized under a "what people are saying" heading. This will also include a visual breakdown that shows how many of those comments are positive, negative, or mixed, and what sort of things people said they liked or disliked about the item.
US officials have said they are seeking a “final end” to the war between Russia and Ukraine as trilateral talks got under way in Abu Dhabi, the first substantive negotiations between the two countries since February.
The talks, which are set to go into a planned second day on Wednesday, are also the first since the US launched joint strikes with Israel against Iran, and they follow bruising midterm elections that have weakened Donald Trump at home.
Jason Leon Watford said he ‘snapped’ after verbal dispute with the woman, before allegedly killing her in a cabin
A passenger of a Texas-based cruise ship has been charged with murdering a woman in their cabin on Sunday on the first day of their voyage.
Crew members aboard the MSC Seascape found the unidentified victim deceased and face down on the cabin floor, with Jason Leon Watford sitting in a corridor outside scrolling through his phone, according to an FBI affidavit that details the alleged crime.
German chancellor has signalled he will block budget with no aid deal, complaining that burden is ‘carried mostly by only a few member states’
Friedrich Merz has signalled he will block the EU’s seven-year budget unless there is a deal on financial aid for Ukraine, triggering accusations of “typical blackmail” from some other European leaders and setting the stage for stormy talks later this month.
The German chancellor’s intervention has angered leaders in central Europe who are net beneficiaries of EU funds but do not want to take part in an upcoming funding round to support Ukraine’s war effort.
Conservative leader launches Welfare That Works policy document outlining benefit reductions of £36bn
Badenoch and Whately are now taking questions.
Q: [From Rob Powell from Sky News] We are running a report on the Netherlands, where youth unemployment is much lower than in the UK, but the amount they spend on getting people into work is much higher. Do you want to spend more on job training and support?
The impeachment resolution focuses on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's involvement in some of the most controversial episodes of President Trump's second term.
Chef Joseph Sakers of Delaware Tech will demonstrate how healthier food choices can help prevent chronic disease during a Nov. 16 event focused on nutrition, wellness, and practical cooking skills.
DOVER, Del. — Can the food on your dinner plate help you live a longer, healthier life?
The Delaware Breast Cancer Coalition hopes to help answer that question during its free Yes2Health Fall Retreat on Monday, Nov. 16, at Delaware Technical Community College in Dover.
The two-hour event, scheduled from 5 to 7 p.m., will feature Chef Joseph Sakers, chair of the Culinary Arts Department at Delaware Tech’s Terry Campus, demonstrating recipes built around the increasingly popular concept of “food as medicine.”
Participants will watch cooking demonstrations, sample healthier dishes and learn how everyday food choices can contribute to better health. The first 25 people to register will also receive a bag of fresh produce courtesy of the coalition.
What does ‘food as medicine’ mean?
The idea behind food as medicine is straightforward: What people eat can play a significant role in preventing illness, managing chronic conditions and improving overall health.
Rather than focusing exclusively on medications and medical treatments after a disease develops, the approach recognizes that good nutrition can be an important part of maintaining health.
The American Heart Association defines food as medicine more specifically as providing healthy foods through the health care system to help prevent, manage or treat diet-related chronic diseases. Such programs can include prescriptions for fresh produce, medically tailored groceries and meals designed for people with particular health conditions.
The concept has gained attention as medical professionals examine how nutrition can help address diabetes, heart disease, obesity and other chronic illnesses.
In June 2025, the American Heart Association released a review of 14 randomized clinical trials examining food-as-medicine programs. Researchers found improvements in participants’ diet quality and access to nutritious food, although evidence of long-term improvements in clinical outcomes remained inconsistent.
The findings suggest that nutrition-focused programs have potential, but researchers say more extensive studies are needed to determine their effectiveness in reducing disease and health care costs.
The connection to breast cancer prevention
For the Delaware Breast Cancer Coalition, the relationship between nutrition and disease prevention is particularly important.
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately one in five cancer cases is linked to a combination of excess body weight, physical inactivity, unhealthy diets and alcohol consumption.
The society recommends eating a variety of vegetables, fruits, whole grains and other nutrient-rich foods while limiting processed meats, sugary beverages and highly processed foods.
These recommendations are intended to reduce cancer risk and support overall health. No particular food or diet can guarantee that a person will avoid cancer, and healthy eating is not a substitute for recommended cancer screenings or medical treatment.
The coalition’s Yes2Health program puts these principles into practice by helping Delaware residents make healthier choices through nutrition education, physical activity and community support.
The program includes free 10-week health education sessions, walking activities and interactive cooking classes that teach participants how to prepare nutritious meals.
The coalition also offers online cooking programs and a cookbook club, creating opportunities for people to develop healthier habits without requiring expensive equipment or specialized culinary training.
Making healthy eating practical and enjoyable
Sakers will bring a professional chef’s perspective to the retreat, focusing on making nutritious food flavorful, approachable and enjoyable.
A graduate of Johnson & Wales University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1997, Sakers serves as department chair and a culinary arts instructor at Delaware Tech.
His teaching emphasizes nutrition, wellness and practical cooking techniques alongside the professional skills students need for careers in the hospitality industry.
According to the event announcement, Sakers believes culinary professionals can help people make better food choices without sacrificing the enjoyment of eating.
His demonstration will give participants an opportunity to see those principles applied in the kitchen, with samples available during the event.
Small changes can make a difference
One of the challenges surrounding healthy eating is translating nutritional advice into meals that people can realistically prepare and afford.
Fresh produce, whole grains and healthier protein sources can be part of a nutritious diet, but cost, convenience, access to grocery stores and cooking knowledge can all influence what families put on their tables.
Food-as-medicine initiatives increasingly seek to address some of those barriers by connecting nutritional education with greater access to healthy foods.
For individuals, the changes do not necessarily require a complete overhaul of their diet. Choosing water instead of sugary drinks, adding vegetables to familiar meals, preparing more food at home or replacing some refined grains with whole grains can be useful starting points.
The American Cancer Society emphasizes that an overall pattern of healthy eating, maintained over time, matters more than any single ingredient or so-called superfood.
The Yes2Health Fall Retreat is designed to make that message tangible by showing participants how healthy ingredients can become appealing meals.
Through the event, the Delaware Breast Cancer Coalition hopes to encourage residents to view nutrition not simply as a matter of weight management but as an important part of lifelong health and disease prevention.
To Go: Yes2Health Fall Retreat
What: Free cooking demonstration and health education event hosted by the Delaware Breast Cancer Coalition.
When: Monday, Nov. 16, 2026, 5-7 p.m.
Where: Delaware Technical Community College, Terry Campus, Technology Drive, Room 723, Dover.
Featured presenter: Chef Joseph Sakers, culinary arts department chair at Delaware Tech.
Cost: Free.
What to expect: Cooking demonstrations, healthy food samples and a fresh produce bag for the first 25 registrants.
The suspect, tracked down from surveillance video, claims to have had a medical emergency
An apparently sports-mad parent from a Michigan high school has stunned authorities and triggered a police investigation after allegedly entering a rival school and defecating in a corridor.
The bizarre case unfolded at the Grosse Pointe South school with the parent a fan of fierce local rival Bedford high school. The two schools were engaged in a district championship football game on Friday, the Detroit TV news outlet WXYZ reported.
Premature death risk also varies according to employment and qualifications, shows analysis ‘laying bare the scale of inequalities’
People living in the most deprived areas of England are more than twice as likely to die prematurely than their more affluent counterparts, according to analysis.
The research, conducted by the Health Foundation, took demographic data from the 2021 census to look at differences in premature mortality rates – defined as any adult who died before their 75th birthday – alongside further data on deaths from March 2021 to December 2023.
Chatham House Prize 2026 awarded to the women of AfghanistanNews releaseeoboko.drupal
Chatham House recognised the women of Afghanistan for their courage and resilience in the face of systematic gender persecution by the Taliban
The women of Afghanistan were awarded the Chatham House Prize 2026 at a ceremony on Monday 9 November.
Chatham House recognised the women of Afghanistan for their courage and resilience in the face of systematic gender persecution by the Taliban, and for their determination to defend the rights and futures of women and girls.
Speaking on a panel that brought together women from the Afghan diaspora, Zahra Joya, the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Rukhshana Media, said the prize ‘sends a powerful message that the world will not forget about us. They will listen to us. They will see our strength and power’.
In a conversation with BBC Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet, who moderated the panel, former Chatham House Academy Associate Shaharzad Akbar, said that for girls denied an education in Afghanistan, the Chatham House Prize shows them ‘they are being remembered, that they are not forgotten’. That, she said, ‘gives them courage’.
Dr Orzala Nemat, the founder and director of Development Research Group LTD, highlighted the voices of the women humanitarian aid workers with whom she collaborates, who asked that the audience help to ‘continue to raise our voices for girls’ education, continue to raise our voices for our right to work’.
Fawzia Koofi, former Deputy Speaker of the Parliament of Afghanistan and President of the Board of Women for Afghanistan, said the Taliban practised double standards in prohibiting girls from accessing secondary and higher education. ‘They have modernized themselves for their own daughters, not for our girls. Their own daughters go to school, university, probably the best universities in the world, but our daughters are confined,’ she said.
Assessing the international community’s engagement with Afghanistan, specifically the UK’s halt on issuing study visas to nationals from certain countries including Afghanistan, Dr Benafsha Yaqoobi, founder and director of The Rahyab Initiative, said the ‘world has failed us in fulfilling their responsibility towards Afghanistan’.
The Chatham House Prize is awarded to the person, persons, or organization deemed to have made the most significant contribution to the improvement of international relations.
In her opening remarks, Bronwen Maddox, Director and Chief Executive of Chatham House, said of the women of Afghanistan: ‘They have forced governments to ask what recognition of the Taliban would mean and on whose terms. They remind us that how a state treats women is not a domestic matter. It is a measure of whether that state can be trusted at all.’
On behalf of the women of Afghanistan, the award was accepted by Elaha Safdari, goalkeeper for the Afghanistan’s women’s national football team.
The Prize was presented to her by Chatham House’s president, The Rt Hon Baroness May of Maidenhead, who praised the women of Afghanistan for continuing to speak out and stated: ‘This award belongs to all of them, to every single one of them. But it is also a reminder, and we have heard this from our panel today, of our collective responsibility. We cannot allow the situation facing Afghan women and girls to fade from the international attention.’
Elaha, who had to leave Afghanistan for the UK when the Taliban returned to power in 2021, thanked the UK government and the sports organisation Girl Power, for supporting her. She told the audience: ‘Becoming a refugee was never my dream. Leaving Afghanistan meant leaving behind my home, my friends, my teammates, my family.’ She added that football and the work of Girl Power enabled women to be visible. Elaha highlighted there is much work to be done to advance the rights of women in Afghanistan. ‘There are girls who simply want to go to school, play sport, and decide what their futures will look like,’ she said.
The evening ended with a film that featured contributions from broadcaster Yalda Hakim, the UN’s Susan Ferguson and activist Onaba Payab. The interviews were weaved around personal reflections from women living in Afghanistan, whose words, for their safety, were read out by Dr Orzala Nemat.
A women’s activist said: ‘The international community must recognize that support for Afghan women cannot be episodic or symbolic – it requires sustained engagement, listening to local voices, and holding leaders accountable, all parties.’ A teacher and education activist said of young girls in Afghanistan facing extreme obstacles to education: ‘I hope audiences remember not only their courage but also the urgent need to ensure that every girl has the freedom, safety and opportunity to learn’.
The Chatham House Prize 2026 is supported by Axel Hansing and the International Organization for Migration.
XPeng says its $300k low-altitude device will soon be ready for emergency services and recreational use in rural areas
People could start taking trips in so-called flying cars in China as soon as next summer, the manufacturer of a two-seater vehicle with autopilot model has said.
Deli Zhao, the chief executive of the Chinese flying car company XPeng, said the $300,000 (£225,000) low-altitude device would be ready for use by recreational users in rural locations and by emergency services in the second half of 2027. After 10 years of development including trials of flying motorbikes at the company’s Guangzhou base, it has been approved by China’s civil aviation authorities for limited use.
Claude chatbot developer had been reported to be aiming for $2tn IPO on Wall Street before investors cooled on AI
Anthropic is seeking a valuation of up to $1.4tn (£1.1tn) in its imminent stock market flotation, short of the $2tn that had been expected before investors started to question the durability of the AI boom.
The developer of the Claude chatbot was widely reported to be targeting a $2tn initial public offering on Wall Street but its sights have been set lower, according to a US regulatory filing on Tuesday.
(The Center Square) – In the wake of Democrat Amy Acton’s gubernatorial victory, political experts and Democratic lawmakers have speculated Republican lawmakers in Ohio might take measures to limit the executive powers of the governor’s office.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The European Union must rethink security to take into account challenges and risks posed by the growing power of major technology companies that go beyond traditional competition concerns, European Commission Executive Vice-President Teresa Ribera said on Monday. "We need to review and to deepen our concept of security, including cybersecurity," Ribera told reporters in Lisbon, arguing that testing and monitoring devices connected to critical infrastructure was no longer sufficient and that security means also ensuring that the Big Tech companies are "governed by democratic and transparent patterns." "We need to be quite quick in the deployment of these new approaches ... This is one of the most critical topics for security, for democracy, and for (our) values," she said.
TORONTO, Nov. 10, 2026 — Xanadu Quantum Technologies Limited, a leading photonic quantum computing company, in collaboration with HyperLight Corporation, a leading thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) photonics company, today announced a significant hardware performance milestone using TFLN technology, reducing optical switch insertion loss to 7 millidecibels (mdB).
One of Xanadu’s ultra-low loss patterned TFLN wafers undergoing optical testing
This achievement represents a nearly threefold improvement over Xanadu and HyperLight’s previous breakthrough of 20 mdB in 2025, drastically reducing qubit signal degradation, which is one of the most critical challenges in scaling quantum computers. This industry-leading achievement was demonstrated using a high-volume wafer manufacturing line on HyperLight’s TFLN Chiplet platform and shows excellent yield and repeatability.
“This notable switch insertion loss milestone indicates that Xanadu’s quantum-compatible switches are ready to ramp to production, bringing scalable quantum hardware and utility-scale quantum computing (USQC) one step closer to reality,” said Dr. Christian Weedbrook, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Xanadu. “For Xanadu, minimizing optical loss is one of the most critical factors in making fault-tolerant photonic quantum computing commercially viable, and innovative partners like HyperLight are key to our go-to-market strategy.”
Optical switches are vital components in photonic quantum computers, responsible for routing light particles (photons) that carry quantum information. Because quantum signals cannot be conventionally amplified without destroying fragile quantum states, ultra-low insertion loss is paramount. Lowering switch loss preserves quantum state fidelity, prevents lost qubits, and allows photonic networks to scale efficiently without requiring exponential increases in laser power or physical hardware redundancy.
“Achieving 7 mdB switch loss, nearly 3x lower than our previous benchmark set just over a year ago and 10x lower than our closest competitor’s most recent published result, is a major hardware milestone that enhances performance and reduces overhead for utility-scale systems,” continued Weedbrook. “We expect that this advancement will translate into improved manufacturing economics, a reduced footprint, and direct progress along our commercial roadmap. Beyond quantum computing, we believe our ultra-low-loss photonic quantum technology could offer value across the broader data center ecosystem as data centers become faster and more energy intensive.”
“Our longstanding partnership with Xanadu continues to demonstrate the power and versatility of HyperLight’s TFLN Chiplet platform,” stated Mian Zhang, CEO of HyperLight. “The same platform that powers high-volume AI data centers and telecom networks has now delivered a record-setting 7 mdB switch loss for quantum computing with Xanadu, a testament to our platform’s ability to meet the most exacting demands.”
With this latest breakthrough, Xanadu continues to systematically and efficiently solve core physical scaling challenges in photonic quantum computing and aims to bring USQC closer to reality.
About Xanadu
Founded in 2016, Xanadu is a Canadian photonic quantum computing company with the mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere. Xanadu is building fault-tolerant quantum computers using light, with systems designed to compute at room temperature. Xanadu develops both hardware and software, including PennyLane, its open-source quantum computing platform. Xanadu was the first pure-play photonic quantum computing company to list on public markets (Nasdaq/TSX: XNDU) and is recognized globally for its breakthroughs in scalable quantum technologies.
About HyperLight
HyperLight delivers high-performance integrated photonics solutions based on thin-film lithium niobate technology. The company combines the electro-optic advantages of TFLN with scalable manufacturing, test, and integration to enable next-generation optical engines for AI data centers, telecom and metro networks, and emerging photonics markets.
Juan Vargas, a congressman, says he’s working to reunite the third-grader with loved ones
Relatives of an eight-year-old Haitian boy who was taken into custody by federal immigration authorities in California are unable to locate the child, according to a Democratic lawmaker who described the case as “despicable”.
Video obtained by NBC News shows the boy being led away by three armed officials after he was summoned to what his family said was a routine immigration appointment in San Diego on 4 November.
Seven-time F1 world champion tours border area and logistics warehouses operated by Egyptian Red Crescent
Lewis Hamilton has visited Egypt’s Rafah border crossing with the Gaza Strip to meet organisations sending humanitarian aid to the territory.
The seven-time Formula One world champion has spoken out about conflict and humanitarian crises in the region, and has called for peace. He has frequently posted on social media about children killed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza and called for a ceasefire.
New data comes after Republicans’ midterms losses – which were largely seen as a rebuke of the party over high prices
US inflation rose 0.4% from September to October, slightly above expectations but still a cooldown in price increases as the cost of gas dipped during the month.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics did not release the usual year-over-year inflation figure as part of the consumer price index (CPI), which measures the price of a basket of goods and services, as data was not collected in October 2025 during the government shutdown.
Host Turkey celebrates new oilfields as UN climate summit prepares to host world leaders from more than 90 countries
We’ve just heard from Patricia Espinosa, the former UN climate boss (succeeded by Simon Stiell) and now we are hearing from former US secretary of state and climate ambassador, John Kerry.
Kerry has congratulated Brazil for keeping the fossil fuel transition issue alive, and the room has erupted in cheers.
America's largest festival for nonfiction cinema, with more than 115 feature-length documentaries plus short film programs, opens in NYC theaters and streams online.
Hi Nico, Thanks for all your work on the Floathub app.
I recently obtained a 18s2p P65 P&P battery pack from Jelle at flightpack.eu and have installed it into my XRV (as a replacement for the stock battery pack). I made the adjustments according to Surfdado’s youtube video.
However, I want to be able to use the Floathub app to re-configure the board but I guess the Linkdata P65 battery is not yet present as selectable battery type. When will it be included?
Nov. 10, 2026 — Large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) training depends on collective communication among hundreds or thousands of graphics processing units (GPUs). As clusters grow, a congested network path, failed link, or failed network interface card (NIC) can interrupt collective communication, lower GPU utilization, and force a training job to stall or restart. For long-running training jobs, the resulting lost work and recovery time can be significant.
Credit: josefkubes/Shutterstock
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is introducing Oracle Collective Communications Library (OCCL) network plugin, a collective-communication network plugin designed for distributed AI workloads on OCI-supported GPUs and remote direct memory access (RDMA)-enabled AI infrastructure. OCCL works with NVIDIA Collective Communications Library (NCCL) and AMD Radeon Collective Communications Library (RCCL) to provide congestion-aware traffic distribution across available network planes and automatic recovery from supported link and NIC failures. It does this through the standard NCCL/RCCL network-plugin interface, without requiring changes to customer training applications, AI frameworks, or collective-communication calls.
The initial generally available OCCL network plugin has been released. It works with both NCCL and RCCL on supported RDMA over Converged Ethernet version 2 (RoCEv2) and InfiniBand cluster-network configurations. For supported version information, refer to the document.
Why Collective Communication Needs a More Resilient Network
Distributed training repeatedly exchanges model parameters, gradients, and other data among GPUs. These collective operations are sensitive to network congestion and failures because the overall step often waits for the slowest participating path.
OCI GPU clusters use RDMA networks that can be deployed with a multi-planar architecture, in which network capacity is provided through multiple independent planes. This design creates path diversity and helps isolate failures. To gain the full benefit, collective traffic must use capacity across the available planes and respond to congestion or failures without interrupting the training job.
Without congestion-aware traffic distribution, collective traffic can concentrate on some paths while others are underused. This uneven utilization can increase latency, reduce training throughput, and leave GPU capacity idle. On the other hand, a link or NIC failure can also interrupt collective communication and cause a job to stall, restart, or take longer to complete.
What the OCCL Network Plugin Does
The OCCL network plugin places the needed networking intelligence for congestion control and link/NIC failure recovery in the collective-communication transport layer. AI frameworks continue to use NCCL or RCCL, and the collective-communication library uses its standard network-plugin interface for inter-node data transfers. The OCCL network plugin uses this interface to manage the network paths used for those transfers.
For supported configurations, the OCCL network plugin provides the following capabilities:
Cross-plane congestion-aware load sharing: The plugin monitors per-queue-pair (QP) transfer behavior and dynamically assigns collective-communication data to less-congested available paths. This helps distribute traffic across network planes and improve path utilization.
Link failure recovery: When it detects a supported link failure, the plugin redirects traffic to a surviving path when one is available. It can automatically resume use of the link after the link is restored.
NIC-level failover and recovery: When a supported full NIC failure occurs, the plugin can move collective communication to a surviving NIC and alternate path, and automatically resume use of the restored NIC.
Hardware independence: The plugin is designed to operate on OCI-defined supported NICs, switches, and RDMA fabrics without requiring a specific network vendor’s product stack.
The OCCL network plugin supports both single-planar and multi-planar RDMA designs. This gives Oracle a software-based way to improve collective-communication resilience and traffic distribution while preserving flexibility in the underlying network hardware.
Figure 1 below shows AI frameworks using NCCL or RCCL with the OCCL network plugin. The OCCL network plugin manages inter-node collective traffic across available RDMA network planes and paths, without requiring any changes to the AI training framework.
Figure 1. The OCCL network plugin insertion point
Benchmark Results
In benchmark testing performed in September 2026 on NVIDIA GB300 systems, the OCCL network plugin demonstrated higher average NCCL bus bandwidth in the tested configurations than the same hosts using the same network configuration without the plugin. The tests used 16, 32, 64, and 128 nodes with four GPUs per node; message sizes from 1 GiB through 16 GiB; and 50 measured iterations for each message size. Results shown in the table below are the average of the out-of-place and in-place nccl-tests bus-bandwidth values.
Note that these results are specific to the tested hardware, software, network configuration, message sizes, and channel settings. The results illustrate the observed performance differences associated with the OCCL network plugin under the tested conditions. They do not represent a performance commitment for all workloads. Actual performance may vary depending on workload and configuration. Customers should follow the official deployment guidance for supported configurations and tuning.
Designed for Existing AI Training Environments
The OCCL network plugin is intended to fit into existing distributed-training environments. For supported configurations, customers do not need to modify their training applications, AI frameworks, or NCCL/RCCL collective calls. They also do not need to deploy a separate control plane, agent fleet, or application-side service.
OCI provides the plugin in two ways:
1. Oracle HPC images
The plugin is preinstalled in the supported versions of Oracle HPC images. Customers can enable the plugin with the following two CLI commands on the host launched with such an Oracle HPC image:
The OCCL network plugin is generally available at no additional charge for customers using supported OCI GPU and RDMA-enabled AI infrastructure. Customers continue to pay the standard OCI charges for GPU compute, networking, storage, and applicable support services. Customers can use Oracle HPC images for the preinstalled experience or use the open-source distribution for supported custom images.
Just two days before Veterans Day, the gilded statue – titled The Foot Soldier – appeared near the National Gallery of Art’s Sculpture Garden. Created by the Secret Handshake, a group of anonymous artists, the statue depicts Trump sitting down while rubbing his bare foot.
(The Center Square) – Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on Tuesday denounced an effort to impeach him over his handling of the war in Iran, calling it a politically motivated attack that would embolden America's adversaries.
A scandal tests Nvidia’s dominance as tech billionaires seek to mend ties with Democrats after the midterm elections
This was originally published in TechScape, a newsletter about how technology shapes our lives. Sign up to receive it here
Today in tech, we’re talking about Nvidia’s salacious scandal, tech tycoons trying to reconcile with Democrats, and what billionaires should spend their money on if not elections.
The Delaware Department of Education’s draft School Performance and Support Framework establishes five levels of intervention, beginning with support for all schools and escalating to possible state receivership — the highest level of state control. Image created based in photo courtesy of the Red Clay Consolidated School District using AI on 10/11/26
Draft five-tier accountability plan could give education officials greater control over struggling schools, but some changes would require legislative approval. Public comments are being accepted through Nov. 20.
DOVER, Del. — Delaware education officials are proposing a new accountability system that could eventually allow the state to take control of persistently struggling public schools, giving the Department of Education greater authority over school leadership, staffing, curriculum and spending when repeated improvement efforts fail.
The proposal represents a potentially significant change in how Delaware holds public schools accountable for student achievement. It also raises questions about local school board authority, taxpayer costs and how much power state officials should have over schools that consistently fall short of expectations.
The Delaware Department of Education’s draft School Performance and Support Framework establishes five levels of intervention, beginning with support for all schools and escalating to possible state receivership — the highest level of state control.
But the department acknowledges that some provisions cannot take effect without additional legislative or regulatory authority.
“Enactment and implementation of some elements of this framework will require legislative or regulatory action,” the draft states.
The proposal is open for public comment through Nov. 20, with a final virtual town hall scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 17.
A new approach to school accountability
Delaware already measures school performance through its Delaware School Success Framework, which evaluates academic achievement, student growth and other indicators.
The proposed framework would establish a more structured process for what happens after a school is identified as needing improvement.
Rather than simply identifying low-performing schools, the state would establish expectations, provide support, monitor results and increase intervention when schools fail to demonstrate meaningful progress.
The proposal establishes five tiers:
Tier 1 — Universal Expectations: Establishes baseline instructional and operational expectations for all schools.
Tier 2 — Targeted Support: Provides additional coaching, assistance and monitoring to schools showing early signs of performance problems.
Tier 3 — Comprehensive Support: Introduces more intensive improvement planning, resources and oversight for schools with significant or persistent academic challenges.
Tier 4 — Directed State Intervention: Gives the Department of Education a more active role in directing improvement efforts, including state-approved turnaround strategies and increased monitoring.
Tier 5 — State Receivership: Would permit the state, subject to applicable legal authority, to assume substantial responsibility for improving a school that continues to underperform despite previous intervention.
The department emphasizes that the objective is to strengthen schools through earlier assistance and increasingly intensive support rather than automatically move them toward state control.
What defines a failing school?
Monica Moriak, president of the Christina School District Board of Education, believes Delaware must answer those questions clearly before implementing a system that could lead to state intervention.
In written responses to interview questions from Delaware LIVE, Moriak said she supports stronger accountability and earlier assistance for struggling schools but believes the state must establish transparent, measurable standards for determining when intervention is justified.
“The part I would most ask DDOE to clarify is how underperformance is defined, and relative to what,” Moriak told Delaware LIVE. “Many Delaware schools could arguably be considered underperforming right now, so the framework should say plainly what the benchmark is and why it was chosen.”
Without those definitions, she cautioned, decisions about which schools require additional oversight could appear arbitrary to families and communities.
Her concern highlights a central issue in the state’s proposal: Schools can be evaluated using several different measures, including overall proficiency, year-over-year academic growth, attendance and other indicators of student success.
A school where relatively few students meet grade-level expectations might nevertheless demonstrate substantial improvement. Conversely, a school meeting baseline performance requirements might still have groups of students falling behind.
Moriak said the framework should account for those differences and give meaningful weight to student growth, not just overall proficiency rates.
She also questioned what happens when a school satisfies the framework’s Tier 1 requirements but continues to produce disappointing academic outcomes.
That question is especially important because Delaware’s existing accountability system already measures school performance through multiple indicators, including academic achievement and student growth.
The proposed framework would build on existing school identification processes rather than automatically assign every Delaware school to one of five new categories.
What would a state takeover mean?
Under the proposed receivership provisions, Delaware could appoint a state receiver or recovery leader to oversee improvement efforts at an individual school.
Depending on the legal authority established and the terms of the intervention, responsibilities transferred to the receiver could include selecting and evaluating principals, determining staffing assignments, directing school-improvement spending, choosing curriculum and managing certain operational decisions.
Local school boards and superintendents would retain responsibilities not specifically transferred to the state.
Placing an individual school into receivership would not automatically mean the state assumes control of its entire school district.
The framework also allows the department to examine district or charter school governance, staffing, finances and leadership when those conditions appear to contribute to a school’s poor performance.
The department describes receivership as a temporary intervention designed to restore school performance and ultimately return responsibility to local leadership.
How quickly could the state intervene?
The draft establishes annual reviews intended to prevent schools from remaining indefinitely in improvement programs that are not producing results.
A proposed implementation timeline identifies three accountability cycles as the earliest possible progression from Tier 2 targeted support to Tier 5 receivership.
However, more detailed provisions describe an initial Tier 4 intervention period of up to two accountability cycles and identify two consecutive cycles without meaningful improvement as one possible reason to consider receivership.
The department has not clarified how those provisions would work together in determining the earliest possible takeover.
School placement and escalation decisions would consider multiple measures rather than relying on a single standardized test score.
Those measures could include academic achievement, student growth, chronic absenteeism, literacy screening results, graduation rates, teacher vacancies, educator retention and evidence that required improvement strategies are actually being implemented.
The distinction between overall proficiency and measurable academic growth is one issue education leaders have raised during the review process.
Monica Moriak, president of the Christina School District Board of Education, supports earlier intervention and a graduated system of assistance but believes demonstrated student improvement should play a central role in determining whether stronger state action is warranted.
“Student outcomes, and growth toward those outcomes, should be the primary evidence in any decision to move a school into, keep it in, or exit a tier,” Moriak stated to Delaware LIVE.
Her comments also emphasize that schools showing improvement should not automatically lose the support that helped them make progress.
Safeguards for school boards and communities
The proposed framework includes procedural safeguards intended to make intervention decisions more transparent.
School districts and charter schools would have opportunities to submit evidence about their performance and improvement efforts.
The department would provide written explanations for placement decisions, establish conflict-of-interest protections and create a reconsideration process.
Those safeguards remain under development and would undergo additional legal and stakeholder review before final adoption.
Parents and community members also would receive public school profiles showing why a school was placed in a particular intervention tier, what support it is receiving, whether improvement is occurring, and when the next review will take place.
The department also proposes holding itself accountable by documenting the assistance it provides and measuring whether state support commitments are fulfilled.
Local control and school board responsibilities
One of the more consequential questions is how increased state oversight would affect the authority of locally elected school boards.
The proposal recognizes that a school’s difficulties may sometimes be connected to problems at the district or charter-management level.
If state officials conclude that district governance, leadership or operations are contributing to persistent underperformance, the department could conduct a broader review.
Such a review would not automatically trigger districtwide receivership.
Moriak, whose Christina district has experienced disagreements over governance and leadership, suggests the state consider a more limited intervention before full receivership when school board conduct contributes to problems at individual schools.
Her recommendation would allow the department, based on documented evidence, to temporarily restrict a board’s decision-making authority over affected schools while leaving the superintendent responsible for operations in consultation with the state.
“If a board continues to act outside its role in ways that harm particular schools, DDOE should be able to remove the board’s decision making authority over those schools,” Moriak wrote.
She also emphasized that local boards should retain meaningful authority to respond to their communities while remaining accountable for measurable student improvement.
Her suggestion is not part of the draft framework’s established intervention process, but it illustrates one of the governance questions the department will face as it considers how much authority should shift from local boards to state officials.
Funding and implementation costs remain unanswered
Although the draft describes extensive monitoring, technical assistance, intervention teams and potential receivership arrangements, it does not provide a comprehensive estimate of the cost to implement the system.
It also does not identify which Delaware schools would be most likely to enter the highest intervention tiers.
Those omissions leave important questions for taxpayers, parents and local school boards.
How much additional state spending would the framework require? Would participating districts need to redirect existing resources? Who would have final authority over staffing and instructional spending when the state takes a more active role?
And how would schools be evaluated if they lack the resources or personnel necessary to carry out required improvements?
Funding and staffing are among the concerns raised in stakeholder feedback.
Moriak argues that accountability requirements should be coordinated with Delaware’s ongoing school funding reforms and that districts need the resources to meet new expectations.
“District budgets also need to line up with what the framework asks, or we will be asked to do more without the means to do it,” she wrote.
She also questioned whether new state reporting requirements could duplicate performance-monitoring systems that districts already operate.
These concerns highlight the challenge of creating a system that demands stronger results without diverting additional time and money from classroom instruction.
Lawmakers may have the final say
Some elements of the framework could proceed under the Department of Education’s existing authority.
Others, particularly those involving greater state control, may require legislative or regulatory changes.
The draft specifically anticipates circumstances in which additional statutory authority would be necessary before a school could enter receivership.
That could bring portions of the proposal before the Delaware General Assembly in 2027, although no specific enabling legislation or legislative timetable has been announced.
Lawmakers would face questions about the extent of state authority, protections for local governance, the conditions required before receivership and the resources needed to support struggling schools.
The department has already consulted district superintendents, charter school leaders, educators, school-improvement officials, the Delaware State Education Association, the State Board of Education, the Delaware PTA and other education stakeholders.
Additional revisions and stakeholder discussions are expected during the 2026-27 school year.
Public has until Nov. 20 to respond
The Department of Education is accepting comments from parents, educators, school board members, students and community members before developing final recommendations.
A virtual public town hall is scheduled for Nov. 17.
The department says its goal is to provide stronger support earlier and resolve performance problems through the lowest level of intervention necessary.
The proposal would establish a more defined path for state action when schools repeatedly fail to improve, while also requiring the state to document its support and justify decisions to increase intervention.
For Delaware families, the central question is whether a stronger accountability system — including the possibility of transferring authority away from local school leaders — will result in better teaching, stronger schools and improved outcomes for students.
TO GO: Delaware School Performance and Support Framework
What: Public review and comment on Delaware’s proposed five-tier school-improvement and intervention framework.
Virtual town hall: Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2026, 6 to 7:30 p.m., via Zoom.
Public comment deadline: Friday, Nov. 20, 2026.
Who can participate: Parents, students, educators, school board members, charter school representatives and Delaware residents.
Conservation group acquires former US president’s family farm with plans to transfer it to the state in 2028
Jimmy Carter’s family farm has been acquired by a group dedicated to permanently protecting the south-west Georgia land where the late former president’s conservation ethic took hold, officials announced on Monday.
A statement from the Conservation Fund said it plans to open Carter’s family farm – on about 2,458 acres (995 hectares) outside his home town of Plains, Georgia – to the public for hunting, fishing and other outdoor recreation as soon as 2027, with the group set to transfer the land to the state’s natural resources department in 2028.
Multiple women allege David Walliams abused his power and position as a celebrity to prey on them for sexual purposes when they were young women, an investigation by the Guardian and ITV News has found. He denies the allegations. Maeve McClenaghan reports
Earlier doses for children, a focus on unvaccinated adults, a risk strategy based on geography – here’s how a functioning ACIP would address the measles outbreak
The US has announced three deaths associated with measles last week, among them a seven-month-old baby in New York and a postpartum woman in Pennsylvania, underscoring the need for a more aggressive vaccination approach – but US recommendations haven’t changed.
Dismantling the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) made it harder for the US to respond to the measles outbreak, with vaccine recommendations staying the same during a historic rise in cases and deaths, four former advisers say.
San Diego Police controlling traffic outside the Naval Medical Center after reports of gunfire inside the Military Hospital in San Diego, California, USA.
WAYNE, Pa., Nov. 10, 2026 — Cornelis today announced an expanded collaboration with AMD to help HPC and AI for science customers design, validate and deploy systems pairing AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct GPUs with Cornelis networking. The program combines AMD compute platforms and engineering with the Cornelis fabric, so customers get more choice in compute, systems validated on their own applications, and a direct path to buy and deploy through the OEMs and system integrators they already use.
“Every AMD EPYC generation puts more cores in a node, and every one of those cores needs its own path to the network,” said Lisa Spelman, CEO of Cornelis. “When the network can’t keep up, you pay for compute that sits waiting. The fix is to pair the network to the workload, because no two codes stress the fabric in the same way. Our expanded collaboration with AMD does that for EPYC and Instinct platforms, validated together and available through the OEMs and integrators customers already trust. GWDG shows what this looks like in production, across thousands of research codes.”
Global Design and Support for Customers’ Workloads
AMD and Cornelis are bringing engineering, field and partner teams together for each customer engagement, from architecture design and benchmarking through acceptance testing and production. Customers buy the combined solution through their preferred OEMs and system integrators and can run their own code at the AMD HPC Center of Excellence in Munich.
The program reflects AMD’s open approach to HPC and the way Cornelis works with system partners. Customers choose their compute, their network and their system builder, backed by AMD engineering and the AMD ROCm open software stack .
Cornelis CN5000 is qualified and in production on AMD EPYC 9005 Series platforms, validated on more than 25 platform configurations, and deployed at university, research, government and industrial sites across North America and Europe. Cornelis has also extended CN5000 qualification to AMD Instinct MI350X Series GPUs.
The program targets scientific and engineering workloads where compute and networking must scale together. These include computational fluid dynamics, climate and weather, life sciences, physics, materials science and other FP64-intensive codes. Joint pursuits span national laboratories, university research computing, industrial and automotive engineering, and sovereign supercomputing in Europe. AMD and Cornelis will publish joint reference designs and application performance data for leading ISV software and extend the program to each new generation of AMD EPYC and AMD Instinct platforms.
“AMD is the open platform behind the world’s leading supercomputers, and our strategy is simple: give customers leadership compute, leadership precision and the freedom to build around it with the partners they trust. EMMY P4 shows what that looks like in production, and with Cornelis we’re giving more HPC customers a validated path to scale, from traditional simulation to AI for science,” said Scott Tease, Corporate Vice President, HPC and AI Business Development, AMD.
Deployed at GWDG
At GWDG in Göttingen, Germany, the new EMMY P4 supercomputer runs approximately 300 dual AMD EPYC 9745 CPU nodes on a Cornelis CN5000 Omni-Path fabric. It serves NHR@Göttingen, one of nine centers in Germany’s National High Performance Computing (NHR) Alliance, and supports thousands of research codes across life sciences, physics, quantum computing, AI and the digital humanities. EMMY P4 adds capacity to an environment that runs approximately 3.5 million HPC jobs a year.
EMMY P4 joins a group of large European research systems built on AMD processors, including LUMI in Finland, Eni’s HPC6 and HPC7 in Italy, Hunter at HLRS in Germany, and the Alice Recoque exascale system in France.
“GWDG exists to give researchers the computing they need to advance science, whatever their field. On one shared system, we run thousands of different codes, from life sciences and physics to AI and the digital humanities. Each one puts different demands on the system. AMD EPYC processors and the Cornelis fabric give us the compute density, low latency and consistent performance to serve them well, so our users can focus on their research,” said Prof. Dr. Julian Kunkel, Deputy Head of High-Performance Computing at GWDG.
Leadership Performance Across HPC Workloads
AMD EPYC processors with Cornelis CN5000 have demonstrated strong performance and scaling across scientific and engineering applications including CONVERGE CFD, Ansys Fluent, OpenFOAM, Siemens Simcenter STAR-CCM+, and WRF. Cornelis has published its application-level performance results across these workloads, providing customers with additional data as they evaluate production configurations.
These HPC codes exchange large volumes of small messages, so performance depends on network latency and message rate as much as on compute. On an AMD EPYC 9755 CPU system, Cornelis testing found that STAR-CCM+ scaled better than linearly, running on average nearly nine times faster on eight nodes than on one. Across 132 CONVERGE CFD workloads, CN5000 delivered 20% higher average throughput than NVIDIA NDR InfiniBand at four nodes. For customers, that means faster time-to-results and more simulations from every node they deploy.
Ready for the Next Generation of AMD EPYC and AMD Instinct
The collaboration extends to the next generation of both companies’ technology. AMD EPYC 9006 Series CPUs is the first PCIe 6.0 server CPU, and the CN6000 PCIe 6.0 x16 interface gives an 800G adapter the host bandwidth that today’s HPC and AI applications require. CN6000 can give every core in a 512-core, dual-socket server its own dedicated connection to the network, so applications can use every core without cores competing for network access. It delivers an industry leading 1.6 billion messages per second and, in Cornelis measurements, 23% lower MPI latency than NVIDIA XDR InfiniBand.
The codes this program targets run in double precision, and AMD Instinct GPUs support FP64 in hardware, with the AMD Instinct MI430X GPU design to deliver up to 288 TFLOPS of native FP64.[2] Cornelis is also validating CN6000 with next-generation AMD Instinct platforms. OEM systems pairing CN6000 with AMD EPYC 9006 Series platforms are expected beginning in Q1 2027.
Getting Started
Customers can engage with the program through the OEM or system integrator they already work with, who can scope a validated AMD and Cornelis configuration for their workloads. Organizations that want to talk with the joint team directly can reach Cornelis at AMD@cornelis.com or AMD at HPCAI@AMD.com. Reference designs, application performance data and program details are available at www.cornelis.com/partners/amd. Cornelis will show AMD EPYC platforms with Cornelis networking at SC26 in Chicago, Nov. 15–20, at booth #1419.
About Cornelis
Cornelis delivers high-performance, scale-out and scale-up networking solutions that accelerate AI and HPC workloads. Cornelis technology enables lossless, congestion-free networking that reduces training time, improves inference, and maximizes compute utilization. From foundation model training to complex climate modeling and real-time analytics, Cornelis solutions power the most demanding workloads across commercial, academic, government, and cloud environments. With a focus on performance, scalability, and efficiency, Cornelis helps organizations achieve faster insights and greater return on infrastructure investments. Learn more at www.cornelis.com.
Pete Hegseth said moves to impeach him over alleged abuse of power in the Iran war were 'a farce' that would fail. The US defence secretary was speaking a day after Thomas Massie, Kentucky's Republican representative, introduced eight articles of impeachment against him
HAMBURG, Germany, Nov. 10, 2026 — Nominations for the 2027 ISC Jack Dongarra Award are now open. As this award recognizes up-and-coming researchers who have made significant contributions to high performance computing (HPC), the ISC team encourages the community to submit nominations for deserving candidates.
This award was first introduced in 2023 and it honors Professor Jack Dongarra’s lifelong contributions to the field and the HPC community. If you know a researcher making exceptional contributions to HPC in the areas of numerical algorithms and software libraries, computational sciences, mathematics, machine learning, or emerging technologies, they could be a deserving candidate for this award.
Nominees should have between four and 10 years of experience after completing their PhD. As careers do not always follow a straight line, ISC has extended the eligibility period by up to four years for researchers who have become parents, served as primary caregivers, or faced significant personal challenges after graduating. ISC encourages nominators to use this option and, in particular, to nominate outstanding women researchers. Nominations are welcome regardless of gender, nationality, ethnicity, social origin, disability, or sexual orientation.
During nomination, nominators should state the nominee’s graduation year and the reason for the extension. Nominations must be submitted by February 12, 2027 via an online submission site. Please be aware that self-nominations are not accepted.
The Award
The award recipient will be invited to deliver a presentation as part of the ISC Jack Dongarra Lecture Series on June 9, 2027, followed by the award ceremony on June 10, where Jack Dongarra himself will hand out the award. The winner will also receive a cash prize of 5,000 euros. The lecture will be published in the Elsevier Journal, Future Generation Computer Systems.
An international committee headed by Prof. Michela Taufer of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA, will review all nominations and select a winner.
ISC High Performance 2027 will take place June 7-11, 2027, in Hamburg, Germany. Now in its 42nd edition, ISC is renowned as the world’s oldest and Europe’s most-attended event for HPC, AI, and quantum computing. ISC brings together researchers, engineers, architects, technology providers, system operators, policymakers, and students to learn about the latest research and technologies, connect with the community, and showcase new solutions.
Jordon Hudson is suing two Airbnb hosts over a Ring doorbell camera video of a bare-chested Bill Belichick. Hudson says that the 2023 clip invaded her privacy by prompting public disclosure of her relationship with the former New England Patriots head coach.
Hudson, who went on to become a public presence by Belichick’s side, says in the lawsuit that the pair were keeping their romantic relationship private when they stayed at the Boston-area rental in the summer of 2023. However, the doorbell video – which showed a shirtless Belichick stepping out of the home – emerged that fall and soon made the rounds in the media.
The SS United States will sink off Florida coast to become an artificial reef, ending long-running wrangle over its fate
Final preparations were under way on Tuesday to sink the world’s fastest ocean liner in the Gulf of Mexico as an artificial reef, concluding a decades-long wrangle over the fate of the transatlantic icon.
A fleet of five tugboats moved the rusting hulk of the SS United States from a quayside in Mobile, Alabama, on Monday for its short journey to 25 miles off the coast of Destin, Florida, where it will be scuttled in a precision operation on Wednesday afternoon.
Pete Hegseth has dismissed a bid to impeach him as a “political spectacle”, accusing the Republican lawmaker who moved to force a vote of trying to stage a “show trial”.
At a press conference on Tuesday, the US defense secretary – accused of illegally waging war without congressional authorization, and abusing his powers – claimed he was simply being pursued by political opponents of Donald Trump.
Why Should Delaware Care? The New Castle County Council is in charge of creating local laws, approving the county’s budget and tax rates and setting regional regulations (like those on data centers). The council faces two new vacancies where the public, through a special election, will decide who will finish out the remaining terms.
Just as it appeared elections were over this year, the abrupt resignation of longtime New Castle County Councilman Jea Street Sr. and the election of Councilman David Tackett to county recorder of deeds will lead to a special election next month in Delaware’s largest county.
Street’s District 10 covers the southern half of the city of Wilmington and parts of the Route 9 corridor, while Tackett’s District 11 covers the greater Glasgow area.
Both Street, who resigned in a letter on Saturday, Nov. 7, and Tackett, whose position would become vacant no later than his Jan. 5 swearing in as recorder, have two years left in their four-year terms.
Jea Street Jr., the former 73-year-old councilman’s son, cited health concerns and his father’s desire to spend time with his grandchildren as the main reasons for Street Sr.’s retirement.
Street Sr., one of the council’s most-outspoken members, has largely not attended the monthly meetings in several years, choosing instead to attend virtually from home. He did not respond to a request for comment from Spotlight Delaware.
Who are Street & Tackett?
Street was New Castle County’s District 10 councilman for more than 20 years. The area he represented encompasses some of Wilmington’s Central and Southern neighborhoods, including Hilltop, Oakmont and Garfield Park.
During this time, he advocated against school closures, fought for the opening of the Route 9 Library and helped cap the height of a local landfill.
But Street became active in the community well before his elected position.
He worked alongside Delaware’s NAACP to obtain funding for all students in Delaware’s public schools. Before that he helped New Castle County families navigate the 1978 desegregation plan which sought to bring together Black and white children in public schools.
“I think the biggest gap I think that you’re going to see is the way that my dad is a lion for young Black kids, young minorities and just kids in general from the city,” Street Jr. said about his father’s advocacy work.
In a statement from the Delaware Democratic Party, leaders remarked that “Jea has never wavered in his commitment to making our communities stronger.”
“Your passion, advocacy, and leadership have made a lasting difference, and our community is better because of you,” the party said.
Tackett has represented District 11 since 2004. In those 22 years, the Newark resident led a strengthened vacant property law that helped reduce such properties, improved safety in county parks, and eliminated loopholes for developers to skip traffic studies and impact fees.
In the September primary election, he unseated six-time incumbent Mike Kozikowski Sr. for the recorder of deeds role, which keeps track of land transactions, mortgage records and land plot maps. The usually low-key race was marked by an accusation by Tackett that Kozikowski offered him a job in exchanging for not running in the election.
Tackett did not respond to a request for comment from Spotlight Delaware about his tenure on council.
What is a special election?
A special election is held outside of the normal election cycle when a Delaware legislator leaves a seat vacant. This may be due to a number of reasons, such as ineligibility or resignation.
Taxpayer dollars are used to fund such special elections including the election officers working the polls. Cathleen Carter, a Department of Elections spokeswoman, said the costs of such an election for one councilperson ranges from $140,00 to $170,000.
A presiding officer – in this case New Castle County Council President Monique Williams-Johns – is required to contact the Department of Elections within 10 days of a vacancy to schedule a special election.
The department has not yet received this notification but anticipates the election will be held by the middle of December, Carter said. It’s unclear whether the December special election would fill both seats or just Street’s as Tackett won’t officially leave his council seat until Jan. 5.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties for the 10th and 11th county districts will meet in coming weeks to select party candidates for the races. That candidate selection process drew significant criticism two years ago when Wilmington-area party organizers selected candidates to run for two open State Senate seats, and it is already drawing renewed scrutiny now.
In a Monday Facebook video, Councilman Kevin Caneco, an outspoken progressive member of the county council, called the special election nomination process “flawed” and decried that a few dozen “party insiders” could effectively choose two of the 13 council members. He called upon the state legislature to amend the special election law to allow for true primary elections.
“Primaries are necessary. Voters deserve the final word,” he said.
Non-party-affiliated candidates can also be listed on a special election ballot, but they must obtain the signatures of at least 1% of registered voters in the district.
Voters can participate if they are 18 or older, are a registered voter and reside in the district that is up for grabs.
The public can check the special election date on the state’s website, the Department of Elections’s page and the State’s public meeting calendar.
Transparency Notice: Jea Street Jr. routinely works as a freelance photographer for Spotlight Delaware.
California saw the most expensive opposition campaign in its history as funding of political campaigns broke records in the US midterms
In the hours after polls closed on election day, tech industry players began praising Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, on social media.
“Huge thanks to Sergey Brin here,” wrote Garry Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator. Venture capitalist Ilya Sukhar posted: “God bless Sergey Brin.” And David Marcus, a crypto entrepreneur, simply wrote: “Hero.”
The Paris prosecutor's office says investigators have determined that a cyberattack on grocery store chains was "carried out to serve a foreign power — in this case, Iran."
At least a dozen U.S. refueling planes and other aircraft departed on Monday from a British base that is a major hub for the U.S. Air Force. The reasons behind the move remain unclear.
The talks are expected to include a broad discussion of European security, a move observers described as a risky nod to a key Russian goal of having a greater say in Europe’s security.
Congressional investigations are only part of the solution. A civic project will do needed legal legwork
The Democrats’ midterm victory was resounding, but it will not be enough to re-establish the rule of law in the United States.
The basic principle that even the president and his officials and cronies are subject to the law has been profoundly undermined by Donald Trump through uncheckedICE violence, apparently large-scale official corruption, and frequent defiance of the law.
Computer records reveal College Republican Patriot Coalition’s web domain in account registered to Fuentes-managed company
A college Republican coalition claiming 31 affiliated student groups in 14 states that attacked the Trump administration from the right routed its email through the same Microsoft 365 account as a company controlled by white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
As Hollywood begins to adopt the technology, the professionals in most direct jeopardy are the illustrators mapping out directors’ first visions. They sketch out what could be lost
A film industry dominated by AI is a dystopian prospect: stories and dialogue generated by large language models, populated by reincarnated screen icons and uncanny humanoids. That is in the future, but the real-world impact of AI is already directly affecting jobs behind the scenes, as Hollywood’s biggest film-makers begin to adopt the technology. James Cameron – long an advocate for emerging technologies in film-making – is on the board of a gen AI firm, citing his interest in how AI will intersect with CGI; Steven Soderbergh used Meta-powered tech to create animations for his recent documentary about John Lennon; even Christopher Nolan, while dismissing the idea that AI will replace humans as “nonsense”, conceded that it will create some useful “imaging tools”.
The current canary in the coalmine however is the storyboard artist, whose work gen AI appears to have directly in its sights. Storyboard artists are the illustrators who draw the panels of images with notes and diagrams that map out scenes before they are filmed. Storyboards are used to work out how a film will look, and as a blueprint to communicate a director’s vision to cast and crew, andare one of the first steps in bringing a script off the page. Now they appear on the verge of replacement by programmes that use text prompts to create illustrations instead. Even an old-school diehard like Martin Scorsese has got on board; in June he announced a partnership with an AI firm whose text-to-image model he used in the storyboarding process for his next movie.
GLP-1 products such as Ozempic and Mounjaro spread but many in poorer countries struggle to get basic diabetes treatment
The gold rush into GLP-1 weight-loss drugs risks diverting pharmaceutical firms’ attention away from diabetes treatments such as insulin, the head of the Access to Medicine Foundation has warned.
GLP-1 blockbuster medications such as Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro have revolutionised obesity and diabetes treatment but there has been a greater focus by companies on weight loss, according to a report from the Netherlands-based non-profit group.
Move comes weeks after Washington withdrew bombers from RAF Fairford after a suspected security incident
Several US military aircraft have been evacuated from RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk after the US air force concluded they could be at risk from a possible Iranian threat if they remained at the British base.
Ten air tankers were relocated to bases in Germany, Spain and Scotland, while Osprey transport aircraft were sent to nearby RAF Lakenheath. It is the second time the US has undertaken a hasty redeployment in the UK after some of its bombers were pulled from RAF Fairford recently.
A military court in the Democratic Republic of Congo has sentenced 66 soldiers to death for cowardice and mutiny after they allegedly fled fighting with rebels.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is holding a rare Pentagon news briefing Tuesday morning, as lawmakers are expected to vote on his impeachment this week.
Nvidia and its chief executive, Jensen Huang, have been accused of misleading shareholders in a lawsuit over the Chinese spying scandal engulfing the $4.3tn (£3.2tn) company.
Voters in California have rejected a tax on the state's wealthiest residents, CBS News projects, following a campaign that has split traditional allies and shattered spending records for a tax-related measure in California.
If Democrats want to keep the blue wave going into 2028, they have to take on the billionaire class
Welcome back to How We Win, a Guardian opinion series with leading thinkers, offering bold ideas for America’s political future. Last week, Judd Legumshined a spotlight on the role of dark money in US elections. Today’s edition was written by Naomi Klein, Guardian US columnist and author of End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World, co-written with Astra Taylor.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is facing fresh turmoil after shareholders sued him and his company for allegedly misleading them over his affair with an accused Chinese spy.
@emilysmith Hiya :) The file size limit is currently 10MB with a max image size of 12800 x 5000 pixels as of typing. The platform will attempt to resize anything on the upper end of this scale so the topics load faster. The full size images are still available when clicking the image.
If you're able to get any pics you want to share below 10MB that will work natively here. I haven't increased this limit in a while so if it's needed I'll consider the implications against the existing storage pool.
China is leading the world in moving away from fossil fuels, and the rest of the globe – including the US – must now follow, the former US secretary of state John Kerry has told the Guardian, as Cop watchers wonder exactly how China is going to approach this year’s climate summit.
As Cop31 opens – this year the climate conference is in Turkey – there is plenty of speculation about whether China will finally step into the leadership role that it has long avoided. In its latest “five-year plan” adopted in March 2026, China for the first time pledged to “actively participate in and lead global climate governance”. Cop31 could provide the first indications Beijing is ready to put that rhetoric into action, something it has historically been reluctant to do.
David Walliams, one of Britain’s best-known television personalities and top-selling children’s authors, has been accused by multiple women of using his power and celebrity status to prey on young women and teenagers for sex.
The allegations include accounts from two women who said they first met the star when they were 15 years old.
Support for anyone affected by sexual abuse issues is available in the UK from Rape Crisis on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123. Other international helplines are available for people affected by sexual abuse, childhood abuse, and people in crisis.
The ITV News documentary David Walliams: Power and Silence is available to watch on YouTube and ITVX.
Comedian and former Britain’s Got Talent judge alleged to have groomed fans he met when they were as young as 15 and harassed women in the workplace over a number of years. He denies the allegations
The potential presidential contender has misread the electorate – and that’s just the start of his problems
The good news is that the dramatic results of last week’s midterm elections mean that Donald Trump and his administration will be much less able to immiserate and impoverish the American people for the next two years, that newly competitive states are likely to see an influx of investment from Democrats, and that states that were once under seemingly unbreakable regimes of Republican control now have Democratic state governments that will hopefully pursue more just, or at least less cruel, policy agendas.
The bad news is that the 2028 presidential cycle has already begun.
Arrest made by anti-corruption body set up to investigate alleged graft during former PM’s 16-year rule
Hungarian authorities have detained a brother of Viktor Orbán as part of an investigation into people-smuggling, the prime minister, Péter Magyar, has said.
The Hungarian anti-graft body, the national asset protection and recovery office, said in a statement that a joint operation with police had led to the arrests of four people and searches of homes in Budapest and Pest county.
Speaking in the White House, the president said the US remained ‘locked and loaded’ but escalation was not needed. Plus, how Grand Theft Auto became a cultural colossus
Good morning. Oil prices have dropped after Donald Trump unilaterally declared that the US war on Iran was “effectively over”. During a White House press conference, Trump said Israel and Gulf allies in the region were well protected from Iran and that an escalation was not needed.
He said, however, that the US remained “locked and loaded, ready to go for any reason”, adding: “We’re seeing momentum toward the end of this conflict. I think it’s going to be ending fairly soon.” Brent crude has dropped below $90, its lowest level since August.
What is the latest development with Pete Hegseth? A Republican lawmaker has moved to force a vote to impeach the US defense secretary. Thomas Massie, of Kentucky, introduced eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth, accusing him of illegally waging war without congressional authorization and abusing his powers.
What has happened at a US airbase in England? The US military has reportedly evacuated aircraft from a second airbase in Britain after a threat from Iran. Two US refuelling tankers that were using the RAF Mildenhall military base diverted to Germany on Monday morning, while several other tankers at the base were moved to Germany and other locations later in the day.
Nelson Mandela outside his Soweto home three days after his release from prison. (Photo by Gideon Mendel/Corbis via Getty Images)
Quote of the Day
“Education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world.”
― Nelson Mandela (1918-2013), 1st Black President of South Africa
There are heroes in this world, and then there is Nelson Mandela. Beginning in 1962, he spent 27 years in prison, 18 of them at the notoriously harsh and isolated Robben Island Prison, for the crime of wanting his people and himself to be free and equal citizens of South Africa. This long captivity was a burden that would have broken many lesser men. Yet, despite all that time, Mandela maintained his dignity and remained the moral leader of his people by never sacrificing his principles, including choosing to stay in prison when he could have accepted a conditional release. When he was finally freed in 1990, he led the negotiations to end apartheid, and in 1994 he was elected the country’s first Black president.
One of the main things that kept him going during all those years in prison was a commitment to education, both for himself and his fellow inmates. Reading was tightly restricted on Robben Island. Prisoners were allowed only approved books, censors screened everything, and privileges could be revoked at any moment. Even so, the island’s political prisoners turned their incarceration into a kind of university, and Mandela’s reading and instruction were at the center of it.
For the prisoners, reading was a means of survival. It was a form of discipline, preparation, and resistance, a way of ensuring that those who imprisoned their bodies could not confine their minds. Prison was designed to break their spirits through monotony and humiliation, and reading kept their minds active and gave structure to their days. It was also a source of moral strength. Stories of courage, resistance, and endurance gave Mandela and his comrades a shared vocabulary for the ordeal they were living through. The most famous volume in their communal library was a copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare, smuggled onto the island by fellow political prisoner Sonny Venkatrathnam’s wife. It was in the inmates’ possession for approximately five years before being confiscated.
“And one Sunday morning, a warder tells me, ‘The (Anglican) Church is here,’” Venkatrathnam recounted in the book Reading Revolution: Shakespeare on Robben Island. “I tell him I’m an Anglican, but I left my Bible in the storeroom… He takes out his keys, opens the storeroom and I pick out my book: The Complete Works of Shakespeare. The problem is how do we hide it. Providentially, it was Diwali [the Hindu Festival of Lights], and my parents sent me greeting cards. So I took those cards, cut them up and pasted them with porridge over the covers of the book. The warders would come and ask me, ‘What’s that?’ And I said, ‘It’s my Bhagavad Gita, my Bible.’ They did not touch it.”
(The Folger Library)
The book became known as the Robben Island Bible. It circulated among the political prisoners, each marking a favorite passage with his signature. Mandela chose a line from Julius Caesar: “Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once.”
Mandela read whatever he could get his hands on, especially fiction and classics. Tolstoy’s War and Peace made a strong impression on him, as did Dickens and Steinbeck. He studied Greek tragedy, and in a prison performance of Sophocles’ Antigone he played Creon. The play, about a woman who defies an unjust law on grounds of conscience, spoke directly to the prisoners’ own situation.
He also pursued formal study. While in prison, he worked toward a law degree through the University of London’s correspondence program, although restrictions imposed by the authorities prevented him from completing it. He finally earned an LLB (Bachelor of Laws) degree through the University of South Africa in 1989, shortly before his release. He also read everything he could find about his captors. He learned Afrikaans and immersed himself in Afrikaner history and literature. Those books helped him understand the people who held him prisoner, build relationships with his jailers, and eventually engage with the government to negotiate his release and the freedom of his people.
Throughout his time in prison, Mandela always thought of himself as a future leader, not merely a prisoner. Studying history, law, and the Afrikaner mindset prepared him for the negotiating table at which one day he planned to have a seat. That preparation paid off in the new South Africa he helped build, where the seat he finally occupied was at the very head of the table.
Donald Trump said war in Iran would end soon as he played down concerns US would escalate military campaign against Tehran after midterm elections. During a White House press conference, Trump said Israel and Gulf allies in the region were well protected from Iran and an escalation was not needed
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND — The United States became the first country to fully refuse participation in the United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review of its human rights record on Tuesday, preventing the scheduled examination from proceeding.
The review is designed to examine the human rights practices of every U.N. member state. Since the process began in 2008, all 193 countries have undergone three rounds of review.
The Trump administration withdrew from the U.N. Human Rights Council last year, accusing it of anti-American and anti-Israel bias. U.S. officials said participating in the review would lend legitimacy to an institution they believe fails to uphold its own stated principles.
Without U.S. representatives, the review could not proceed as planned. Questions prepared for the session included abortion, the death penalty, immigration enforcement and racial discrimination. Nearly 200 civil-society submissions had also been filed.
Critics argue the decision creates a damaging precedent. ACLU official Jamil Dakwar said the administration was effectively signaling that it does not care whether the United States is scrutinized internationally, while human-rights experts warned that other governments could now point to Washington’s refusal as justification for avoiding their own reviews.
The UPR’s recommendations are nonbinding, but the process has relied on universal participation to maintain credibility. The immediate consequence of the U.S. boycott is procedural rather than legal, yet its broader impact could be significant if other governments follow suit.
STATE COLLEGE, PENNSYLVANIA — The Justice Department has sued Penn State over a policy allowing some undocumented students to qualify for in-state tuition, arguing that the university unlawfully gives them a benefit unavailable to U.S. citizens living outside Pennsylvania.
Penn State’s policy does not automatically grant reduced tuition based on immigration status. Undocumented students must satisfy residency requirements that include attending an accredited Pennsylvania high school for at least four years and graduating from a Pennsylvania high school or obtaining a Pennsylvania GED.
The DOJ argues that federal law prohibits states or public institutions from offering undocumented residents a postsecondary education benefit based on residency unless the same benefit is available to U.S. citizens regardless of where they live. The lawsuit seeks to block Penn State from continuing the policy.
Penn State said it is reviewing the complaint.
The case is part of a broader Trump administration campaign against in-state tuition policies for undocumented students. The Justice Department says it has now filed 27 such lawsuits and obtained orders ending similar policies in six states.
Immigrant advocacy groups argue the policies primarily benefit young people who grew up and attended school in the states where they seek tuition benefits. They contend ending them makes higher education less accessible to students who often have lived in the United States since childhood.
The court will ultimately determine whether Penn State’s residency policy conflicts with federal immigration law.
What young students stand to lose is more than cognitive skill: it’s a reliable sense of their own minds
In August, OpenAI launched Teen Mode – a version of ChatGPT in which every user under 18 will automatically be enrolled – a year after a lawsuit alleged that ChatGPT had contributed to the suicide of a 16-year-old named Adam Raine.
For years, the tech industry has contested any causal link between its products and the harms named in a wave of similar lawsuits, each alleging that the companies had not merely failed to protect children but had deliberately designed products to exploit them.
Stephen Miller is an ideologue on a mission to reshape the world. But his appointment has a silver lining for Democrats
Has the midterms bloodbath made Donald Trump go all woke? Has his party’s historic rebuke finally made him reflect on his actions and forced a road to Damascus moment?
Of course not; this is the world’s least introspective man we are talking about. However, for about 30 seconds on Sunday, the usually incoherent president managed the amazing feat of speaking a little bit of sense.
With weeks left on the congressional calendar, House and Senate representatives have a host of issues they still need to tackle
On their first day back in the Capitol after comprehensive defeats in last week’s midterm elections, Republicans were divided into two camps: those who saw the catastrophe coming, and those who did not.
“I told you exactly what was going to happen. Over and over and over, I told you,” said West Virginia senator Jim Justice. “I said really and truly, if you weren’t concerned and you were a Republican, you were living in a cave. That was my exact words.”
Former top HHS aide Calley Means alleged in an interview with "Face the Nation" that Ballard Partners "controlled" White House policy. The firm and Wiles said the claims are false.
Uber is launching Uber Parking, integrating technology from its SpotHero acquisition to let users find and reserve parking garages and lots directly through the Uber app. "You can also filter your results based on criteria like whether you want to self-park or use a valet, or other specific amenities," adds Engadget. From the report: To book a spot, you'll need to provide the make and model of your car and a license plate number. Depending on your lot, Uber will then provide a QR code or you'll be able to enter the garage through license plate recognition. If you need to cancel, the company says the majority of parking options can be canceled for free up to the start time. Parking reservations can also be extended through the app. Uber One subscribers get 10 percent back in Uber credits on eligible reservations.
When it announced its acquisition, Uber said SpotHero offered garages and lots across more than 400 cities in the US and Canada, but the company isn't offering all of them at launch. For now, Uber says Uber Parking will be available in Chicago, Nashville, San Francisco, Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Philadelphia, San Diego, Seattle and Washington DC. The company also plans to experiment with using lots as a staging area for the autonomous vehicle fleets offered byÂUber's self-driving partners.
Former prime minister faces death penalty upon return after being sentenced in absentia over deaths in 2024 uprising
Sheikh Hasina is “confident” she will return to Bangladesh in December, according to exiled members of her party, after the disgraced former prime minister applied for a new passport this week.
Hasina has been living in self-imposed exile since August 2024 when she was toppled from power by a mass uprising against her authoritarian rule. She crossed the border to India, where she has since been allowed to live freely in Delhi.
Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, fell nearly 3% to $89.66, the lowest since 31 August, on Tuesday morning, after the US president downplayed the need for military action against Iran “at this point”. The fall came after a near 6% drop on Monday on signs that the conflict might be nearing an end.
"This irredeemable body makes a mockery of human rights through consistent failures to uphold its own 'values' as it pushes anti-American rhetoric," a State Department spokesperson said.
David Jones’s administrators have revealed they reviewed its finances six months ago and discussed restructuring the retailer three months before it fell into administration.
The new timeline raises questions over the department store group’s decision to keep buying new products and fall months behind in payments to some brands before it revealed last Thursday it could not pay its debts.
Want to get your steps in while working or watching TV? Our expert puts walking pads through their paces to find the best for comfort, noise and ease of storage
You don’t necessarily need to walk 10,000 steps a day to improve your health and wellbeing. In fact, the NHS encourages a slightly more manageable target of just 10 minutes of brisk walking daily to introduce more moderate-intensity physical activity and reduce your risk of early death by up to 15%.
However, even squeezing in “brisk walks” can be a chore, with busy schedules and increasingly desk-bound jobs forcing more of us to remain sedentary for long periods. That is where walking pads come in, being lighter, smaller and often easier to store than bulky and tricky-to-manoeuvre running treadmills.
Mark Harris for ProPublica. Source images: Getty Images, RMI.
In November 2015, world leaders descended on Paris to negotiate a historic agreement to limit global warming. But on the summit’s opening day, attention turned to a private citizen slouched awkwardly in a chair on stage: Bill Gates.
Gates, with his characteristic flop of sandy hair, grinned impishly as President Barack Obama called him a “visionary” and a “driving force” behind a pair of pledges that both saw as key to the larger agreement. First the world’s largest economies would double their spending on research into clean-energy technologies. Then investors like Gates would back the startups that emerged. The Microsoft cofounder had already enlisted two dozen other billionaires to join the effort.
For Gates, who’d become increasingly consumed by this unprecedented threat to human well-being, the moment marked his arrival as a leading figure in the fight against climate change.
“If we back over 50 different breakthrough approaches, we know that several of those will give us the solution that we need,” Gates said during his own speech. He would invest at least $2 billion of his own money in companies developing geothermal wells, new kinds of nuclear reactors and machines that pull carbon from the air, to name just a few.
With much less fanfare, however, Gates has put more than double that amount into a very dirty, old-school industry. At the time of the Paris summit, he was already the dominant shareholder of America’s No. 2 landfill operator, Republic Services. He has since increased his stake to 38% of the company, a position worth $29 billion.
Bill Gates’ Stake in Republic Services, a Landfill Operator, Now Exceeds a Fifth of His Net Worth
Note: “Other” includes stakes in other publicly traded companies and accumulated dividends and investment returns. Sources: Forbes’ The World’s Billionaires, Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, SEC filings, StockAnalysis.comChris Alcantara/ProPublica
While fossil fuels get most of the attention, scientists increasingly see landfills as a crucial climate issue. They’re responsible for as much as a fifth of the country’s emissions of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas, studies show. Republic alone generates as much climate pollution as 3 million gasoline-burning cars each year, according to its own reports.
One might imagine that a landfill operator with Gates as its largest shareholder — and with three people closely linked to Gates on its board — would lead the way in tackling those emissions. Even after seemingly softening his stance on global warming in a controversial blog post last year, Gates remains one of the world’s most prominent voices on the issue. As he did in his bestselling 2021 book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” he continues to advocate for cutting emissions, and he has called on his fellow business leaders to do their part.
Gates, though, has failed to make Republic live up to his own climate principles, a ProPublica investigation has found. Federal inspectors have repeatedly found methane escaping from Republic landfills at levels above federal limits. The company has refrained from adopting the ambitious emissions-reduction goal embraced by its main competitor. Republic has even lobbied against policies that could make the wider industry cleaner, including by keeping organic waste out of landfills in the first place.
“It seems very likely that Bill Gates has the power to influence Republic’s behavior to make it more climate-friendly, even if that costs the company profits,” said Ann Lipton, a legal scholar who studies corporate governance at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
As for whether he should, in her words, “put his money where his mouth is,” Lipton said, “you can leave it to the reader to make the moral judgment.”
Gates’ Climate Awakening
Gates didn’t respond to repeated requests to discuss his landfill investments, and ProPublica couldn’t find any public comments he’s made about them. But the bet has proven wildly lucrative. Since November 1999, when he emerged as the owner of 5% of Republic’s shares — “It’s ‘Garbage In’ for Gates,” the New York Post headline read — the company’s stock price has soared thirtyfold. And Gates has personally received $2.6 billion in dividends, a ProPublica analysis of securities filings shows.
In those early days, Gates hadn’t yet awakened to the threat of global warming. It was a different time. Microsoft Windows ran on more than 80% of personal computers. Gates was the world’s richest person, and his bespectacled face graced the cover of Time magazine twice that year. He was simultaneously criticized for what a federal judge determined to be Microsoft’s monopolistic practices and admired for establishing what was soon to become the world’s largest charitable foundation.
A rare clue to why Gates made his foray into landfills can be found in an interview he gave to Fortune that year. To fund his plan to give away virtually his entire fortune, he said he’d given his personal money manager, Michael Larson, a simple remit: Sell Microsoft shares, buy safe, boring assets.
Republic’s then-chairman, billionaire Wayne Huizenga, had flown Larson by helicopter to his private golf course in Florida, according to the article. It’s unclear if Huizenga pitched Republic there, but it fit the remit. America would always produce trash, ensuring a steady stream of revenue. After that initial investment, Larson progressively increased Gates’ stake in Republic over the years that followed. Larson would also acquire a small chunk of Republic’s main competitor, Waste Management — which Huizenga also once led — on behalf of the Gates Foundation.
It was only in 2006, when he asked two climate scientists to educate him, that Gates started to grasp the potentially “catastrophic” effects of greenhouse gases, he later wrote. But he also saw that the poorest people in the world needed more energy to improve their lot. The solution, he concluded, was something climate activists often underplay: innovation that could make clean energy cheap enough to naturally displace fossil fuels. That was the idea behind Breakthrough Energy, the initiative he launched in Paris in 2015.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, right, then-U.S. President Barack Obama, left, and then-French President François Hollande applaud a speech during the United Nations conference on climate change in Paris in 2015.Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
Around the same time, methane began to emerge as a focus of climate action. The gas can trap 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide in the near term, and it’s responsible for one-third of the global warming we experience today, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. But it also breaks down much more quickly, turning into CO2 and water vapor in about a decade — which means that cutting methane emissions now would reduce that warming within our lifetimes. This is especially urgent, scientists say, as the climate approaches tipping points that could doom rainforests, coral reefs and ice sheets.
In speeches and interviews, Gates has sometimes warned about methane, but usually from agricultural sources (“cow farts,” in his words). He has rarely mentioned landfills, even after Larson — who still runs Gates’ investment office, Cascade Asset Management — joined Republic’s board in 2009. Gates’ stake in the company, though, was a relatively small portion of his own net worth until fairly recently. And as Larson put it to Fortune, “I’ll call Bill about something I’m buying if he needs to know, but Bill might not have any idea what Cascade owns.” (Gates’ Republic holdings are publicly disclosed in securities filings.)
Elsewhere in Gatesworld, people started to home in on the climate threat posed by landfills. The root of the issue is that landfills store buried trash — and when organic waste decomposes underground, in the absence of oxygen, it generates methane. The Gates Foundation has funded research and advocacy aimed at solving that problem, and Breakthrough has backed at least two early-stage companies developing their own solutions. One, Windfall Bio, uses microbes to digest methane into fertilizer. Its product was actually tested last year at a Republic landfill in California, where the pink liquid was sprinkled on the soil covering the top layer of trash.
On the surface, Republic has pursued a path consistent with Gates’ mission. In 2019, it became the first U.S. landfill operator to sign up for the Science Based Targets Initiative, promising to cut its emissions by 35% by 2030. Not that this was charity. Republic’s “climate leadership” became part of its pitch for garbage-collection contracts in progressive cities and counties. The company also won placements on stock indexes for businesses that meet certain environmental, social and governance criteria, attracting sustainability-minded investors.
Still, a fundamental tension remained — one at the heart of Gates’ vision. As Republic’s then-CEO Donald Slager put it on a 2017 call with investors, “You can’t have sustainability without profitability.”
A Not-So-Model Landfill
Each day, Americans throw away melon rinds, salmon skins and half-eaten drumsticks, paper towels, cheese that was too funky and eggs a day past their sell-by date. They discard greasy pizza boxes with crusts still rattling around inside and unthinkable amounts of leftover Chinese takeout. Not to mention the occasional dead pet.
Dust is kicked up by trucks and bulldozers at Republic Service’s McCarty Road Landfill in Houston.Mark Felix for ProPublica
Most of that trash — 240 million tons a year, enough to bury Manhattan under 100 feet of refuse — is hauled to one of the country’s 1,400 active landfills, where hulking vehicles with spiked wheels crush it into thin layers. At the end of each day, bulldozers typically spread soil on top, and for almost everyone who produced that trash, it will forever remain out of sight and out of mind.
People who live near landfills, though, describe smelling rotten cabbage, rotten eggs and rotten fish, as well as ammonia and skunk. Or as a neighbor to one Republic landfill put it: “I started smelling this stench like burning diapers. … It was foul.” Some describe burning throats, burning eyes, headaches and nausea.And while methane itself has no scent, those odors indicate that the gas is being released, studies show.
Still, modern landfills are an undeniable improvement over what came before. Open dumping and burning remained widespread until the 1970s. It was only in the ’90s that federal regulators started requiring operators to collect leachate (garbage juice, which can contaminate groundwater) and, at larger facilities, landfill gas (which is typically about half methane and half carbon dioxide but can also contain carcinogens like benzene).
Industry experts often compare landfills to living, breathing creatures. Underground trash inevitably shifts and settles, making it difficult to keep that gas from escaping. Managing such a beast is costly, which helps to explain why smaller operations have increasingly given way to corporations like Republic, which can turn a profit through economies of scale.
Republic declined to make executives available for interviews or to allow ProPublica to visit a landfill. But in May 2022 — around the same time Gates was lobbying for the passage of President Joe Biden’s historic climate bill — the company invited the Houston Chronicle to its local McCarty Road Landfill. Opened a half century earlier, the facility had passed through two corporate owners before being swallowed up by Republic, and now it was the site of a very Gatesian kind of project.
On the day of the visit, gulls circled hungrily as workers in neon vests gave a tour of the gas-collection system. Like at most other large landfills in the country, wells had been drilled deep into the trash below — five hundred of them in total. The top of each well sprouted from the grassy slopes in the form of a stubby black pipe fitted with a valve for adjusting the flow of underground gas. The workers also showed off large, bright blue, snail-shaped “blowers” — machines that suck that gas into a network of pipelines, then push it to the clanking, humming on-site plant that turns it into a salable product.
A Republic worker stands next to a gas well at the company’s McCarty Road Landfill in Houston in 2022.Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers
Most landfills that are required to collect gas simply burn it off. But they can also process it into “renewable natural gas,” which is functionally equivalent to the version pumped by oil companies. In part because this reuses the carbon from decomposing waste, it’s generally considered more climate-friendly. It also turns an environmental liability into a source of revenue — exactly the kind of win-win that Gates has long championed.
Yet the technology is no guarantee that the climate is being protected. In fact, it may be just the opposite.
In September 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency issued an “enforcement alert” saying that landfills across the country were “violating monitoring and maintenance requirements.” While the EPA didn’t name the operators, ProPublica obtained the corresponding spreadsheet through a public records request, and a fifth of the facilities targeted belong to Republic.
McCarty, far from being a model landfill, was among the worst offenders. It would soon earn Republic a formal “finding of violation” for allegedly failing to detect “exceedances” — methane escaping at levels above federal limits — for years on end. The EPA also noted repeated failures to address flooded wells, gullies formed by erosion and trash peeking through the surface of the landfill. Despite Republic’s economic incentive to capture methane, EPA inspectors found evidence of “poor maintenance” and “careless operation” of the gas-collection system as well.
And McCarty is hardly an outlier. Recent studies suggest that landfills with renewable natural gas facilities can actually emit more methane than those that only burn off the gas or use it to generate electricity. One possible explanation is that methane concentrations can vary across different parts of a landfill. According to researchers at Carbon Mapper, a NASA partner that measures emissions from various industries, some operators may prioritize collecting gas with higher methane content, which is cheaper to process — allowing more of the remaining methane to leak out.
Republic spokesperson Rob Litt declined to comment on whether that happened at McCarty, but said in a statement, “We employ hundreds of environmental managers and engineers. … If issues are identified, we work to resolve them.”
“Protecting the environment is part of Republic Services’ business,” he added.
The issues aren’t exclusive to landfills with natural gas facilities. Since 2020, EPA inspectors have used handheld methane detectors to sweep at least 39 of Republic’s roughly 200 landfills, according to inspection reports obtained by ProPublica. Including the issues at McCarty, they documented more than 1,400 problem spots — ranging from animal burrows to choked-off wells — spewing excessive amounts of methane.
In some cases, methane could be seen bubbling up through dark, fetid leachate pools. In others, so much methane was being released — with concentrations between 100 and 300 times the federal limit — that it was an explosion hazard.
Methane Bubbles at a Republic Services Landfill
Methane bubbles up through a pool of liquid drained from the trash at Republic’s Apex Regional Landfill in Nevada, documented by EPA inspectors in 2024.Environmental Protection Agency
What the Satellites Saw
Around the time of the Houston Chronicle visit, Republic’s CEO, a former McKinsey consultant named Jon Vander Ark, was promoting a new slogan: “Sustainability in action.” Meanwhile, though, Republic was quietly shying away from true climate leadership.
In 2021, two years after Republic signed on to the Science Based Targets Initiative, the SBTI made its minimum climate goal much more ambitious. Waste Management (where the Gates Foundation owns a small minority of the shares) would soon adopt it.
This was just months after Gates published “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” in which he exhorted private companies “to embrace the harder steps” toward solving global warming. Republic staff calculated that the new SBTI target could require more than $1 billion in additional spending on gas wells and other improvements, according to a former employee. Though that is less than half of what Republic has spent on dividends for Gates alone, it would leave less money for the company to redistribute to him and other shareholders. Republic has also spent more than $8 billion buying its own stock in the open market, ProPublica’s analysis shows, likely boosting the value of shares held by investors.
The matter was finally presented to the board around the second half of 2024, this person said. By then the board included Larson, Gates’ longtime investment manager — whose “insight into sustainability issues” is cited in company filings — and three other people with business ties to Gates (one has since left). While that is only four board members among a total of 13, Gates’ dominant shareholding means that, “as a practical matter, on any matter that gets voted on, he will almost certainly control the outcome,” said Lipton, the corporate-governance expert.
Republic never made the leap, and now it walks an awkward line. It continues to tout its affiliation with the SBTI while saying, in a note buried deep in one of its many sustainability reports, that the more ambitious target is “not an immediate strategic priority.”
Per SBTI rules, Republic has until the end of this year to submit an updated target. But when ProPublica asked if it would, the spokesperson said only, “We are reviewing our goals.” He declined to comment on the estimated cost or the board discussions.
The entrance to Republic’s McCarty Road Landfill in HoustonMark Felix for ProPublicaGarbage trucks pull in and out of the McCarty landfill.Mark Felix for ProPublica
There is, though, an even larger issue with Republic’s climate claims.
In line with its existing SBTI goal, Republic says it has already cut its landfill emissions by 20% since 2017. But that figure isn’t based on actual measurements of methane escaping from its facilities. According to the method cited in its sustainability reports, Republic instead typically measures the methane collected by its wells. Then it extrapolates how much it’s failing to collect — and how much is being emitted — based on the characteristics of each facility.
This method is based on an industry study that, as the EPA has noted, excluded data from gas-collection systems that were “not working well.” The EPA’s own reporting rules allow the same basic approach, which can cause companies collecting less gas due to a “malfunction or inefficiency” to “erroneously report decreasing emissions,” according to a 2025 study using satellite data by researchers at Harvard, NASA and Carbon Mapper. The researchers specifically examined two Republic landfills, and at one of them, the company reported declining emissions to the EPA even though satellite measurements showed they had risen over a four-year period.
The reporting gaps can be enormous. A study led by Hannah Nesser, now at Georgetown, found Republic facilities to be the No. 1 and No. 2 emitters among the roughly 70 large U.S. landfills the researchers observed over the course of 2019. The first, the National Serv-All Landfill in Indiana, was found to be releasing an astounding 13 times as much methane as what the company reported to the EPA. And that pattern repeated to varying degrees across three-quarters of the Republic landfills in the study. (McCarty wasn’t in the study, but according to measurements by Carbon Mapper, it emits more than twice what the company has reported.)
In response to questions about these studies, the Republic spokesperson said, “We stand by the sustainability results we’ve achieved.”
He also pointed to a letter from the National Waste and Recycling Association, a major trade group, questioning the accuracy of satellite measurements. It is a tactic from the playbook of another major climate polluter, the oil and gas industry, said Katherine Blauvelt of Full Circle Future, which advocates for cleaning up landfills.
“Satellites, peer-reviewed research studies and EPA inspectors on the ground all keep finding the same thing: unchecked and underreported methane emissions,” she said. “There’s a fire alarm going off and instead of getting out the extinguisher, the waste industry is blaming the smoke detector.”
Quietly Fighting Climate Policies
Last year, Gates published a blog post criticizing the “doomsday view” of global warming — a striking shift for someone who’d once warned of the failing ecosystems, mass migration and soaring mortality that could result from hotter temperatures. That led climate skeptics, including President Donald Trump, to say that Gates had admitted he was wrong. But Gates called that a “gigantic misreading.” While he believed more lives could be saved by improving global health, where he’d decided to shift his resources, he remained a “climate activist,” he told one audience.
Gates has tried to lead by example. In 2019, he sold his shares in oil and gas companies because, he later wrote, “I don’t want to profit if their stock prices go up because we don’t develop zero-carbon alternatives.” He kept flying by private jet, but he “offset” those emissions by buying credits from a company that removes carbon from the air. He has also called on other business leaders to “make sure that they’re not holding back” climate policies, even if those policies could cut into profits.
Bill Gates attends the groundbreaking for TerraPower’s nuclear power plant near Kemmerer, Wyoming, in 2024.Benjamin Rasmussen/The New York Times/Redux
Republic has actively worked against such policies — and yet Gates, according to securities filings, has never sold a share.
In the final year of the Biden administration, the EPA announced a plan to update its landfill gas rules, which have changed little since the ’90s. Among other potential changes, the agency asked for comments on the newer technologies, such as satellites and drones, that research has found to be effective in monitoring and controlling methane pollution.
Some landfill operators were already experimenting with these innovations. But they wanted almost all of it to remain voluntary, according to a joint statement from the National Waste and Recycling Association and the Solid Waste Association of North America, both of which have Republic executives on their boards.
“We do not believe that any of these technologies are sufficiently developed,” the industry groups said, adding that the various innovations were “not cost-effective,” “reliable” or “transparent.”
The Republic spokesperson declined to comment on whether that lobbying goes against its climate commitments.
“A lot of the issue comes down to the profit of the corporate landfill operators and their resistance to do things that will eat into that,” said Darin Schroeder of the Clean Air Task Force, a climate advocacy group.
Gates’ press representatives didn’t respond to questions about whether he’s aware of the issues at Republic — or whether he has independently investigated the source of a fifth of his fortune. But ProPublica interviewed multiple former employees at Breakthrough Energy, Gates’ clean-tech investment arm, who all spoke on condition of anonymity. They each said they hadn’t even heard about his landfill holdings.
“I agree there’s a bit of a conundrum there,” said one high-ranking staffer who was laid off last year. But this person added, “Based on my time with him, I think he’s very serious about climate change. This isn’t a vanity thing for him.”
“My theory is that he probably doesn’t have much involvement in those investments,” said another laid-off staffer.
Gates’ investment managers, at least, can’t claim total ignorance. Larson and Thomas Handley, a Cascade senior adviser, both participate actively in Republic’s board discussions, according to a fellow director who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of those private discussions. The board also receives regular management briefings, including “high level” reports on the company’s lobbying and litigation over “practices we could do better,” this director said. (Larson didn’t return phone messages left by ProPublica at his office, and Cascade didn’t respond to a question about his and Handley’s involvement in Republic.)
It’s unclear if Gates himself ever learned of those reports. But he appears to have an even larger blind spot on the issue. The waste industry doesn’t fit neatly into his view of climate change as a problem to be solved mainly through technological breakthroughs. Innovations can help, but the root of the problem is the inescapable fact that, when organic waste decomposes in the absence of oxygen, methane is produced.
Properly managing the waste we’ve already buried is only the first step, said Riley Duren, the former NASA engineer who founded Carbon Mapper. “In parallel,” he said, “reduce food waste. Full stop. Then divert organic waste away from landfills to prevent future emissions.”
This isn’t a utopian fantasy. Germany started phasing out the landfilling of biodegradable waste in 1993, and its landfill methane emissions have plunged by more than 90%. (That compares to a decline of 40% in the U.S. over roughly the same period.) Within the U.S., California now requires food scraps and yard trimmings to be collected for composting or other uses, and state regulators found that the economic, climate and health benefits would ultimately outweigh the costs.
In its glossy sustainability reports, Republic says that “organics recycling plays an important role in our operations.” And in California, with its mandatory collection rules, the company processed close to a million tons of organic waste last year, much of that at composting facilities.
A steady stream of garbage trucks flows through Republic’s McCarty Road Landfill in Houston on a recent weekday. Mark Felix for ProPublica. Aerial support by LightHawk.
But that remains a small fraction of its business. Speaking to a different kind of audience — investors — Republic has described landfilling, along with dumpster collection, as its most profitable segments. So when the EPA floated a federal organics-diversion policy in 2024, the company, along with the rest of the landfill industry, opposed this, too. Their response invoked an argument often used by opponents to regulation: It should be left to the states to decide.
“It’s like you’ve got a mousetrap, and it catches mice,” said Robert Bullard, a Texas Southern University professor widely seen as the father of the environmental justice movement. “You’ve got a landfill, and it makes money — big money. So why tinker with it?”
Why Should Delaware Care? During the upcoming 154th General Assembly, the House Minority Leader must contend with a smaller caucus than in years past, and one that recently lost one of its few remaining levers of power when Democrats secured a two-thirds supermajority during last week’s midterm elections. Taking on the role will likely mean looking for unique ways to advance a Republican agenda in a statehouse that has become a Democratic stronghold.
Republicans within the Delaware House of Representatives tapped Rep. Danny Short (R-Seaford) as the next Minority Leader, after a health emergency prevented Rep. Tim Dukes from seeking the role.
In a phone call with Spotlight Delaware on Monday, Dukes said he was at Bayhealth Hospital’s Kent Campus, recovering from a weekslong battle against diverticulitis. Complications from the intestinal infection led to multiple surgeries and stays at four different hospitals over the past two weeks, he said.
As a result, Dukes said he was not able to attend the House Republican caucus’ organizational meeting last week where members voted for their leaders, let alone run for the role of Minority Leader himself.
But he sang Short’s praises, along with those of Rep. Valerie Jones-Giltner (R-Georgetown), who was elected Minority Whip. Dukes called them both colleagues and friends whom he values and trusts.
“I respect Danny Short and Valerie Jones-Giltner as much as anybody in Dover,” he said.
A spokesperson for the House Republican caucus said on Monday they were optimistic Dukes would make a full recovery, and Dukes himself said he still plans to lead during the 154th General Assembly, but just in a different way.
“I’d rather have my life and my health than have a title,” he said.
In the State Senate, Republicans voted to retain their leaders from the 153rd General Assembly for the next two years, keeping Sen. Gerald Hocker (R-Ocean View) as Minority Leader and Sen. Brian Pettyjohn (R-Georgetown) as Minority Whip.
A return to leadership alongside a fresh face
Short, who previously held the position of Minority Leader from 2013 to 2023, will take back the role from Dukes, who succeeded him in the role just two years ago.
After multiple retirements and election losses this year, Short finds himself the most tenured member of the House of Representatives, having first been elected in 2006.
“Someone needed to step up,” he told Spotlight Delaware on Monday. “And we lost a couple team members, so the crew looked at me to maybe come back as somewhat of a veteran and head this thing up for the next term.”
After House Democrats flipped three seats in this year’s midterm elections, Short retakes the helm of a depleted caucus as Republicans prepare to work alongside a new Democratic supermajority. It effectively strips away Republicans’ ability to block amendments to the state Constitution.
But this new tenure as Minority Leader is reminiscent of Short’s first time joining the Republican House leadership team in 2008, he said. During that election season, the GOP had just gone from the majority party in Legislative Hall to the minority.
Now, Short said he hopes to foster a more congenial than combative relationship with House Democrats. He pointed toward bipartisan bills he worked on during the last General Assembly alongside Rep. Cyndie Romer (D-Newark), who was recently elected Majority Whip, as an example of successfully working across the aisle.
But Short also said the caucus still plans to leverage its power over legislation that requires a three-fourths majority vote, like the annual bond bill and grant-in-aid bill.
Legislation that does any of the following things would require a three-fourths majority vote in both chambers, according to the state constitution:
Creates new debt, such as issuing bonds;
Loans money to a county, municipality or corporation;
Reappropriates money designated specifically for the state’s Transportation Trust Fund.
Two-term Rep. Valerie Jones Giltner (R-Georgetown) will join the Republican leadership team for the first time. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JACOB OWENS
Jones-Giltner, who was first elected in 2023, will be joining Short in leadership as Minority Whip. The role will be her first leadership position within the caucus. In a phone call with Spotlight Delaware, Short praised Jones-Giltner’s healthcare background, legislative knowledge and communication skills.
Rep. Jeff Spiegelman (R-Clayton), who has been Minority Whip since 2023, said he decided not to run again for the position because the time drain was too much on his growing family business.
Jones-Giltner did not respond to a request for comment.
“I couldn’t serve the people of the 11th district, serve my caucus, and run my family business all at the same time,” Spiegelman said.
The Biggs Museum of American Art in Dover has been inundated with curious characters painted by the late Philadelphia artist Peter Paone.
An untitled painting by Peter Paone. The Biggs Museum of American Art curator Laura Fravel refers to this character as “the cheese wizard.” | ARTWORK BY PETER PAONE, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST’S ESTATE
Pumpkin-headed creatures bare their teeth. A giant snail perches on the shoulder of a man in a blue balaclava. A couple of human-hare hybrids cradles their baby — a bunny rabbit — in a painting titled “Incest.”
Among Paone’s characters, curator Laura Fravel’s favorite is a bulldog of a man with sad eyes. She calls him “the cheese wizard” because he wears a yellow overcoat and blue wizard hat filled with holes.
“Hearing little kids, but also a surprising number of grown-ups, make up their own stories about the cheese man has been delightful. (Stories) of, ‘He lives on the moon and doesn’t have any friends because he is smelly, but is very sweet and calls his mother every Thursday,’” Fravel said. “There’s no background (in the painting). It’s very minimal. But those little inconsistencies in the design of the character open up so many possibilities.”
Paone flat-out refused to ever explain what his work meant, even to his closest collaborators and family members. Instead, he held up a mirror to the viewer and asked them to find their own meaning.
Visitors look at the artwork at the opening reception of “Before Words: The Art of Peter Paone.” | PHOTO BY SELENA MARTÍNEZ, COURTESY OF THE BIGGS MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
“Everybody always asks Peter, ‘What does that mean? What does that mean?’” said Alma Alabilikian, Paone’s wife of 50 years. “He said, ‘What does it mean to you? It’s not important what it means to me. I’m done. I did my job.’”
Get Involved “Before Words: The Art of Peter Paone” is on display at The Biggs Museum of American Art (406 Federal St., Dover, DE 19901) through April 25, 2027. The museum is open Thurs.-Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission is free.
As if intentionally hammering home his point about the death of the author, Paone died in May.
At that time, Fravel was planning to interview him about The Biggs Museum’s exhibition “Peter Paone: Before Words.” The opening reception in early October came mere days after what would have been Paone’s 90th birthday.
“It is unfortunate timing, but also, I think he actually would, in an odd way, enjoy that it is left open-ended, that we are kind of forced to piece this together and to talk to each other and make up those stories,” Fravel said.
Break-in and breakthrough
Paone was raised in South Philadelphia by Italian immigrant parents and began drawing and painting when he was 8, according to The Biggs Museum’s exhibition catalogue.
Paone’s interest in the arts was immediate and all-consuming. At 15, he climbed the locked iron gate of the Barnes Foundation, a Philadelphia art collection.
“Circus Bird Clown: Maternity” by Peter Paone. | ARTWORK BY PETER PAONE, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST’S ESTATE
“I knocked on the door, and (Barnes Foundation Director of Education) Violette de Maiza answered the door. She was shocked. And (I said), ‘I hear you have pictures here. I want to see them,’” Paone recalled in a 2019 documentary.
Though de Maiza initially insisted that Paone leave, she ended up giving him a tour and later invited him to study at the Barnes Foundation.
At 29, Paone received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a monetary award recognizing his artistic talent.
“If he were speaking to you, he could paint every stripe on your shirt, every hole in your buttons, every single detail, from memory, two weeks later. He had an incredible memory, as well as imagination,” said Paone’s archivist, Lori Bilodeau. “He never set up a still life and painted it, and he didn’t use models.”
With the funds from his Guggenheim Fellowship, Paone traveled to London, where he rubbed shoulders with (and painted) famed Beatles stars George Harrison and Ringo Starr.
After Paone returned to Philadelphia, he bumped into Alabilikian in Rittenhouse Square. The pair, who had first met when they were students at John Bartram High School, married six months later.
The late artist Peter Paone stands with his self-portrait. | PHOTO BY LORI BILODEAU, COURTESY OF THE BIGGS MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
“(He) hollered, ‘Hi, Alma!’ I didn’t know who he was. He had changed dramatically. In high school, he was thin. Brown, curly hair. Very, very good-looking. And then …” Alabilikian began, bursting out laughing.
Paone had transformed completely. There wasn’t a hair on his head other than his beard and handlebar mustache, and he’d already begun refining his fashion sense: tweed jackets, ascots and red-rimmed glasses.
“He had a kind of dapper quality that emphasized his sense of art being a serious business,” said Andrea Packard, Paone’s former drawing student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
At the university, Paone helped shape the printmaking program and taught from 1978 to 2009.
But in his later years, he was constantly in his home studio, where he would work 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day, sometimes blasting Carl Orff’s calamitous “O Fortuna” for inspiration.
“He never believed in these artists who said, ‘The muse hasn’t hit me today.’ He was a firm believer that if you were given a gift, then it was your responsibility to make sure you used it,” Alabilikian said.
‘Nobody understood him’
Visitors look at the artwork at the opening reception of “Before Words: The Art of Peter Paone.” The character Fravel calls “the cheese wizard” can be spotted on the right. | PHOTO BY SELENA MARTÍNEZ, COURTESY OF THE BIGGS MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
Fravel wrote a “fan letter” to Paone in 2024 when she saw one of his exhibitions in Pennsylvania. That led to a studio visit.
“You walk in, and it’s just this fantastical cabinet of curiosities,” she described. “The first thing you see is this library of, floor to ceiling, books. … As you walk in further, you start to notice his collection of early 20th century Halloween decorations and vintage tin toys.”
Paone also had hundreds of acrylic gouache paintings that had been “overlooked,” caught in the shadow of the artist’s other work, Fravel said. So, she pitched the idea of exhibiting some of these paintings.
“We had never been to (The Biggs Museum). We didn’t know anything about it. We took a chance. But Peter liked Laura (Fravel) so much, from the very beginning,” Alabilikian said.
Fravel whittled down hundreds of works Paone had painted since the 1970s. She landed on about 100 works, all painted within the last six years.
“I think the oldest one that is dated in the show is from the (COVID) pandemic,” she said.
During that time, Paone painted a series of masked figures, including our aforementioned friend in the balaclava. It’s a rare example of an identifiable, real-world inspiration in Paone’s work, though many have tried to attach meaning to his paintings.
An untitled painting by Peter Paone. | ARTWORK BY PETER PAONE, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST’S ESTATE
An untitled painting by Peter Paone. | ARTWORK BY PETER PAONE, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST’S ESTATE
An untitled painting by Peter Paone. | ARTWORK BY PETER PAONE, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST’S ESTATE
An untitled painting by Peter Paone. | ARTWORK BY PETER PAONE, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST’S ESTATE
For example, Bilodeau thought “The Dolls We Lost in 2021,” a painting of a figure hugging a large collection of dolls, may have been inspired by the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attack — but there’s no way of verifying that theory.
“He said nobody understood him. You get an idea of why,” joked Paone’s friend, Ron Callaghan, as he gestured to a landscape of a house on fire, a giant fish and a tree resembling a naked woman.
While there are some common themes in Paone’s work, like Halloween and the circus, his intentions will forever remain a mystery.
That’s why the exhibition is called “Before Words.” It extends an invitation to look at Paone’s characters and come up with your own story. In fact, Fravel is currently planning an event in which local writers will read short stories and poems inspired by Paone’s work.
Visitors look at the artwork at the opening reception of “Before Words: The Art of Peter Paone.” | PHOTO BY SELENA MARTÍNEZ, COURTESY OF THE BIGGS MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
“The bottom line is the human experience. Other curators have often spoke of loneliness and melancholy, joy. All of the things that are part of the human experience, you will find somewhere in this work,” Alabilikian said. That includes “Confusion,” she added with a laugh.
Fravel decided to place a painting called “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil” at the end of the exhibition. Three figures sit near each other but refuse to look at or interact with each other.
“I think that was something that concerned Peter Paone in recent years. He saw this division in society, of people who were next-door neighbors but weren’t really engaging with each other, were very set in their ways,” Fravel said. “He saw his art as a way to start to combat that, to encourage people to come together, to have discussions, to talk about new and exciting possibilities.”
Why Should Delaware Care? Housing availability and affordability dominate local government conversations up and down the state. A new residential sprinkler system requirement in Dover has generated substantial attention, as stakeholders weigh the need for adequate safety measures against the potentially detrimental impacts on housing costs.
The Dover City Council is considering walking back a new construction code provision it adopted just last month requiring a residential sprinkler system in all new homes.
After a near-unanimous vote by city council to approve an updated 2024 residential building code — which includes the sprinkler requirement — in mid-October, a number of city council members said they are rethinking the decision due to hearing more about the potential impacts on housing prices.
And while local and national fire experts largely defend residential sprinkler requirements as necessary for peoples’ safety in more newly constructed, lighter weight homes, the measure has generated substantial pushback from a number of central Delaware homebuilders.
The builders, who have shown up at recent city council meetings to voice their frustration with not having been consulted about the requirement before council voted on it, argue the sprinklers will substantially raise housing prices, preventing more people from buying homes amid an already dire lack of affordable housing.
“We’re really concerned because what the city has done is impose yet another cost upon developers, which will eventually make its way to the homebuyer,” said Patricia Kelleher, a director at the Dover-based affordable housing organization NeighborGood Partners.
A handful of other Delaware municipalities already have residential sprinkler requirements for newly constructed homes, including Lewes, Newark and Middletown. As the state’s second largest city, Dover would be the largest municipality in the state to have made the requirement though.
At a meeting Monday evening, the council voted to rescind the updated code it approved last month, due to what city officials described as incorrect language in the recently adopted code.
Get Involved Dover City Council’s Committee of the Whole will discuss the building code at 6 p.m. tonight, Tuesday, Nov. 10, inside Dover City Hall, located 15 Loockerman Plaza.
Following the strikethrough of the just-adopted code, the city is scheduled to discuss taking up the updated code once again at a council committee meeting on Tuesday, Nov. 10.
City Fire Marshal Jason Osika wrote in a message to Spotlight Delaware that despite the reconsideration of the measure, he is still urging the city to adopt the complete 2024 International Residential Code (IRC), “without any amendments.”
However, Councilman David Anderson, who leads the city’s Legislative, Finance and Administration Committee — under which the code discussion falls — said it is “a bad time” for the sprinkler requirement adoption, and he intends to have the committee rethink it.
It’s unclear what the majority of the council may think.
What is the requirement?
The controversial new sprinkler requirement is a part of the regulations outlined in the 2024 international building codes, which also include a number of less noteworthy updates to various building requirements, including for commercial buildings and fitness facilities.
Under the 2009 code, which the city of Dover was using until it approved the 2024 version this fall, sprinkler systems were required in most commercial buildings, while single-family homes were allowed to instead use a smoke detector system, which is less expensive.
The 2024 building code includes a sprinkler system requirement for all newly constructed one- and two-family dwellings and townhouses. While it does not require existing homes to be retrofitted, the city council approved an amendment that would require a sprinkler system if residents build an addition above a certain size to an existing home.
A home sprinkler system works to suppress flames at the fire source when triggered by a certain high temperature threshold, while a smoke detector functions to identify smoke particles and warn occupants through a loud sound.
Osika, the city fire marshal, described the code change, including the sprinkler provision, as “a life safety issue,” that needs updating because lightweight building materials, which are more commonly used in new construction, are more flammable than older construction materials.
National organizations like the National Fire Protection Association and U.S. Fire Administration recommend sprinklers for all new homes.
However, local stakeholders from a number of housing production-focused groups in the Dover area, including NeighborGood Partners, Central Delaware Habitat for Humanity and the Delaware Homebuilders’ Association have made their opposition to the requirement known through public comment at city council meetings and letters to city officials.
By many estimates, a sprinkler system costs between $8,000 and $10,000 to install in a medium-sized, single-family home. This, the home builders claim, would price out 4,000 families from being able to afford a median-priced home in Delaware.
Mike Riemann, a Dover-based engineer and former president of the Delaware Homebuilders’ Association, said at the Oct. 26 Dover City Council meeting the requirement is a misplaced attempt at safety when there was not a single fire death in a home built over the past 25 years without a sprinkler system in New Castle County.
“Modern construction standards and hardwired interconnected smoke detectors already provide an extraordinary level of life safety,” he said. “A sprinkler cannot save the life that the smoke detector has already saved.”
Kelleher, the NeighborGood Partners director, said the added stipulations — and the costs they impose on both developers and homebuyers — will simply lead developers to instead build new homes in unincorporated Kent County, which does not have the sprinkler requirement.
City council moves forward
Despite the city council’s 8-1 vote in favor of the new building code, a number of council members said they may change their tune on the sprinklers after hearing from stakeholders in opposition.
Councilman Brian Lewis was the sole vote against adopting the requirements, citing concern with the cost “trickling down on the buyer.”
Dover City Councilman Brian Lewis (left) was the sole vote against adopting the city’s residential sprinkler requirements. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY ELLA WALKER
Following the council’s mid-October vote to approve the code requirements, a number of residents called for Mayor Robin Christiansen to veto the measure. Christiansen ultimately did not veto the ordinance, and he told Spotlight Delaware he would not consider vetoing an updated measure that includes the sprinkler system requirement.
In addition to concerns about the impact of the sprinklers on housing costs, local developers said they were frustrated to not have been included in any discussions of the code until after the council voted on it.
Anderson, the Legislative and Finance Committee chair, said he intends to bring those groups to the table for a conversation before making a final decision on the measure.
Council members Donyale Hall, Julia Pillsbury and Roy Sudler similarly said they were reconsidering the requirement after hearing pushback.
Sudler said he still wants to “balance life safety and economic hardship,” so he would like to create an exemption to the requisite for some housing types, such as detached single-family homes, modular units and affordable housing projects under 2,500 square feet in size.
City Council President Fred Neil, however, said he still believes the sprinkler system is important to building safety, and he is not in favor of dropping it from the code.
Council members Tricia Arndt, Andre Boggerty and Gerald Rocha did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s request for comment.
It remains to be seen whether a majority of city council members have changed their position to support the removal of the sprinkler requirement.
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.
A Post review of records exposed in a DHS hack found that some immigration officers quickly hired last year were involved in past misconduct or criminality.
Europe faces faster cyberattacks than ever. But many of the solutions are long knownExpert commentthilton.drupal
Cyberattacks against Europe are becoming more frequent and more damaging. Yet while AI has lowered the barrier to entry, most attacks still exploit old and familiar weaknesses.
Last month, hackers caused tons of food to be thrown away after hacking into refrigerators in around 700 French supermarkets. Within weeks, similar incidents were reported in Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Ireland and elsewhere. Nobody has claimed responsibility, but France has accused Iran of carrying out the ‘unprecedented attack’ against it.
The freezer attacks come after a spate of cyber incidents across Europe in the last few years that have repeatedly exposed familiar weaknesses. Russia’s war against Ukraine has raised the stakes, putting Europe on the front line of hybrid attacks including through cyber operations.
Four problems stand out: old systems that are never fixed, new technology built without security in mind, increasingly capable attackers aided by AI, and states using cyberattacks as instruments of power, often through proxies.
Each requires its own response, and Europe is doing better on some fronts than on others. None is a European problem alone, and none will be solved by Europe alone.
Vulnerable legacy systems
The first problem lies in the weakness already built into the technology Europe runs on. Much of Europe still relies on legacy systems – technology that has reached the end of its life and no longer receives the security patches it needs. The result is a stock of known vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit.
The freezer attacks show what this looks like in practice. They were not technically complex: most of the hacked temperature controllers in France were reportedly legacy systems that no longer receive updates. Operational technology of this kind, which controls physical equipment, often stays in service for decades, long after anyone is updating it.
Organizations and governments often lack a clear picture of the technology they own and operate.
This is not just an issue for companies. The UK’s National Audit Office found in 2025 that government departments used ‘hundreds of ageing legacy IT systems.’ Germany’s federal audit office found in 2025 that parts of the federal government’s networks are so outdated they no longer receive security updates.
Part of the problem is visibility: organizations and governments often lack a clear picture of the technology they own and operate. Even when organizations know where the problems lie, replacing old systems is expensive and disruptive. But leaving them in place is becoming increasingly risky.
Replacing these systems is primarily the responsibility of national governments and companies that operate them. But the EU is also pushing for it. In July, the European Central Bank told Europe’s largest banks to replace or update legacy systems as part of planning for AI-enabled threats. The financial sector, however, is far ahead of most other sectors, and replacement will require money, expertise and political commitment.
In the meantime, basic measures, often referred to as ‘cyber hygiene’, can go a long way. According to ENISA, the EU’s cybersecurity agency, two-thirds of the vulnerabilities attackers exploit already have a patch available. Where equipment no longer receives security updates, organizations need to restrict its exposure or replace it.
Europe does not lack information or rules: ENISA maintains a European Vulnerability Database, national agencies issue regular alerts, and the NIS2 Directive makes managing these risks a legal obligation. What is missing is implementation: turning warnings into action, particularly in smaller organizations, and enforcing rules that many member states have been slow to adopt.
Technology built without security
The second problem is that too much technology is still being built without security in mind. This is due to market incentives; manufacturers compete on price, features and speed to market, rather than prioritizing security. The costs of insecurity have mainly fallen on customers and society.
The EU has sought to change this. From December 2027, under the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), connected products that do not meet basic security requirements will no longer be allowed on the EU market. Manufacturers will be responsible for their security throughout their lifecycle.
The underlying problem is poor-quality software.
However, the CRA has limits. Manufacturers are required to report actively exploited vulnerabilities, including those affecting products already on the market. But reporting a flaw does not fix it.
And for products that manufacturers no longer support, there may be no fix. Someone else then has to act: the shop, hospital or council operating the equipment must know it is affected and have the skills and resources to patch, isolate or replace it.
The underlying problem is poor-quality software. AI could help strengthen the security of software by identifying and fixing flaws faster than people can. But that depends on vendors using AI tools (with human oversight) before their products reach the market.
More attackers, moving faster
The use of AI by attackers is compounding these problems. AI is accelerating the process by which attackers are finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in insecure products and ageing systems. It is lowering the skills and resources needed to launch attacks and compressing the time defenders have to respond.
This year, frontier AI labs made a series of striking disclosures about their latest models’ cyber capabilities. These capabilities are real, particularly when it comes to exploiting vulnerabilities including in legacy systems. The labs were right to disclose them. But the disclosures also showcased their products, and the hype and catastrophizing that followed have not always helped clarify where priorities should lie.
AI is not yet changing the nature of the game so much as its speed and scale. ENISA found that attackers in 2025 relied mainly on off-the-shelf AI tools to sharpen skills they already had. Similarly, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre found that among the incidents it handled, AI had not enabled ‘a novel class of attack’.
Instead, the greater danger is that AI-assisted vulnerability discovery gives attackers more opportunities to strike before system owners can apply patches. In response, defenders must be able to act at the same speed.
Governments have not yet managed to achieve this. The EU, for example, created the European Cybersecurity Alert System to analyse threat and incident data across member states using AI. However, EU auditors recently found that the system had stalled and was not yet working as intended.
A separate challenge is dependence on external providers. Many of the most capable defensive AI tools are developed in the US. Access can be restricted or withdrawn, as US export controls showed in June 2026. Governments need to establish structured ways of working with these companies on early warning, model testing and making defensive tools available to operators of critical infrastructure.
Cyber as a tool of state power
The fourth problem is that states are increasingly using cyber operations as a routine instrument of power, often through proxies. As argued in this Chatham House paper, the war in Ukraine has exposed an entire ecosystem of proxies. The overlap between these actors blurs responsibility and complicates attribution.
Europe does not lack the tools to respond to state-backed cyber activity. It has mechanisms for public attribution, criminal investigations, sanctions and diplomatic pressure. But these measures have been slow and applied unevenly, which has reduced their collective impact.
The priority is therefore to use existing instruments more quickly and consistently. This requires coordinating responses across Europe and with international partners.
An EU-wide response is only as effective as the national systems underpinning it. Yet all but two member states missed the deadline to adopt the NIS2 Directive, which requires critical sectors to manage risks and report serious incidents. Member states need to improve information sharing, strengthen reporting and practise their responses to attacks.
Internationally, states have already agreed not to attack critical infrastructure or knowingly allow their territory to be used for malicious cyber activity. The UN’s new Global Mechanism on ICT security is where Europe and its partners should push to make those commitments count.
Familiar threats, less time
The attacks of the recent weeks may look new, but they tell a familiar story: known weaknesses, insecure products, more capable attackers and slow, fragmented responses. What has changed is the timescale.
Europe has already written many of the rules. Its member states now need to secure or replace existing technology, ensure that what comes next is secure by design, put AI to work for defenders, and rehearse a coherent response with partners.
That means not only strengthening Europe’s ability to withstand and recover from attacks, but also its capacity to disrupt those responsible and impose costs that deter future operations.
Sustained not by public opinion but by billionaire media owners, British rightwing commentators will embrace a Maga successor, not moderation
Hallelujahsand hosannas have been echoing around the democratic world over the last few weeks. The White House madman is a loser. Rejoice at Serbia, Hungary, Brazil and hold our breath for Israel.
Take heart from our best historians’ encouragements. Margaret MacMillan wrote in the Observer: “And now we can hope these elections will bring an end to cruelty, naked greed, contempt for decency, and the relentless vulgarity that tries to pass for boldness and authenticity. What a difference an election can make.”
TOKYO, Nov. 10, 2026 — Quantinuum, a leading full-stack quantum computing company, and RIKEN, Japan’s leading national comprehensive research institute, today announced an expanded partnership to advance quantum-AI hybrid supercomputing in Japan. Following a significant upgrade to Quantinuum’s Reimei quantum computer at RIKEN, the partners will pursue more advanced scientific and industrial applications, work with Japanese universities and suppliers toward the development of a “Made with Japan” fault-tolerant quantum computer, and collaborate with SoftBank Corp. to explore the connection of quantum computer with AI data centers in Japan.
Quantinuum’s quantum computer, Reimei, installed at RIKEN, has successfully completed its upgrade to System Model H2. Reimei is operated as part of the JHPC-quantum project, funded by NEDO. This upgrade further enhances the capabilities of the project’s quantum–HPC hybrid computing platform and enables researchers to investigate more complex quantum systems that are increasingly difficult to simulate using classical computing alone, broadening the scientific problems they can explore.
Quantinuum and RIKEN will use the upgraded platform to combine quantum computing, supercomputing and AI in support of use case development across electronics, energy and life sciences. Building on their years-long collaboration, the partners will also draw on their experience integrating and operating Reimei to inform the development of a fault-tolerant “Made with Japan” quantum computer.
“Japan’s quantum ambitions require advanced capabilities today and a sustained commitment to developing what comes next,” said Dr. Rajeeb Hazra, Quantinuum CEO. “The upgrade to Reimei expands what we can explore with RIKEN across electronics, energy and life sciences. Together, we are building on this work to develop a fault-tolerant quantum computer with Japanese universities and suppliers, while exploring with SoftBank how these capabilities can become accessible to industry through Japan’s AI data centers.”
Two research projects that have begun operations on Reimei before the public launch of its services illustrate how Quantinuum and RIKEN are leveraging the hybrid platforms upgraded capabilities to push the frontiers of scientific discovery:
Quantum-AI for materials simulation: The partners are using RIKEN’s JHPC-quantum GPU supercomputer, ROQUO, to train an AI model on Reimei-generated quantum data for magnetism simulations. Preliminary results suggest the model can make more accurate predictions than AI models trained on classical simulations alone and more precise predictions than the quantum computer itself. Understanding magnetism at the atomic level could inform the development of materials for next-generation technologies such as ultra-high-field MRI and smart power grids.
Quantum-AI for biomolecular simulation: The partners are combining Reimei, RIKEN’s Fugaku supercomputer, and NVIDIA’s evolutionary AI agent running on ROQUO to simulate a complex photoactive biomolecule, targeting unprecedented scale and detail. Better understanding of how biomolecules respond to light could inform the design of more efficient solar cells among other industrial opportunities that could arise from advances in biomolecular engineering.
This research supports RIKEN’s AI for Science initiative and aligns with U.S.-Japan efforts to advance AI-driven discovery, including a planned $1 billion partnership under the U.S. Genesis Mission.
“With the upgraded Reimei quantum computer, we will be able to tackle more complex and larger-scale scientific problems that were difficult to address with the previous H1 system, further advancing quantum–HPC hybrid computing through our ongoing JHPC-quantum project,” said Dr. Mitsuhisa Sato, Division Director, Quantum-HPC Hybrid Platform Division, RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS). “Furthermore, the newly signed Memorandum of Understanding will pave the way for expanding our research into the use of quantum computing for AI for Science, a key initiative being promoted by RIKEN.”
The partners’ joint research and development toward a “Made with Japan” fault-tolerant quantum computer will involve Japanese universities and domestic components suppliers. This “Made with Japan” effort will combine Quantinuum’s quantum technology with domestic research and manufacturing expertise, drawing on lessons from integrating and operating Reimei at RIKEN.
Under a separate agreement, Quantinuum, RIKEN and SoftBank will explore how quantum computing can be connected directly with AI data centers in Japan. The partners will assess infrastructure readiness and examine how connected systems could support commercial quantum-AI hybrid computing services, broadening access beyond the research community.
“Japan has established a strong foundation for hybrid quantum-HPC computing through the NEDO-supported JHPC-quantum project,” said Takenori Kobayashi, Vice President, Head of Product Research & Development Division at SoftBank Corp. “Our responsibility is to turn these achievements into industrial value. Together with RIKEN and Quantinuum, we aim to advance a Quantum AI Datacenter that connects quantum computing with AI and HPC, making these capabilities accessible to businesses across Japan.”
Learn more about the expanded joint Quantinuum-RIKEN research available here.
Research Support
This project is supported by New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), an organization under the jurisdiction of Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI)’s “Research and Development of Quantum-Supercomputers Hybrid Platform for Exploration of Uncharted Computable Capabilities” (Project Leader: Mitsuhisa Sato) as part of the “Project for Research and Development of Enhanced Infrastructures for Post 5G Information and Communications Systems (JPNP20017).”
About RIKEN
RIKEN, a National Research and Development Agency, is Japan’s leading national comprehensive research institution renowned for high-quality research in a diverse range of scientific disciplines. Founded in 1917, initially as a private research foundation, RIKEN has grown rapidly in size and scope, today encompassing a network of world-class research centers and institutes across Japan. To learn more, please visit https://www.riken.jp/en.
About SoftBank Corp.
Guided by the SoftBank Group’s corporate philosophy, “Information Revolution – Happiness for everyone,” SoftBank Corp. (TOKYO: 9434) operates telecommunications and IT businesses in Japan and globally. Building on its strong business foundation, SoftBank Corp. is aiming to activate the potential of AI across its businesses and drive implementation in line with its “Activate AI for Society” growth strategy. While further growing its telecom business, SoftBank is expanding its AI computing infrastructure and AI and Cloud service businesses with the aim of becoming a provider of Next-generation Social Infrastructure. To learn more, please visit https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp.
About Quantinuum
Quantinuum (NASDAQ: QNT) is a leading quantum computing company offering a full-stack platform designed to make quantum computing deployable in real-world environments. The company has commercially deployed multiple generations of trapped-ion based quantum systems built on the well-established QCCD architecture, which it has implemented with novel designs and capabilities to achieve the industry’s highest accuracy levels based on average two-qubit gate fidelity. Quantinuum has active engagements with market leaders across pharmaceuticals, material science, financial services, and government and industrial markets, as well as academic and research institutions globally. The company has a global workforce of approximately 800 employees, including top scientists and researchers. Over 70% of its technology team holds PhDs or Master’s degrees. Quantinuum’s headquarters is in Broomfield, Colorado, with additional facilities across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Qatar, and Singapore. For more information, please visit www.quantinuum.com.
As the largest annual HPC conference gets set to kick off, representatives of the three Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) centers are preparing for an active week of discussions, networking, and presentations.
Nov. 10, 2026 — The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, or SC26 for short, takes place this year Nov. 15–20 in Chicago.
The SC Conference brings together professionals and students from around the world representing a wide range of backgrounds and technical expertise in high-performance computing. The goal is to encourage new conversations, foster meaningful connections, and inspire innovative ideas while striving to create an environment where everyone can contribute to advancing science and research.
Just like the event itself, the centers that comprise the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS)—the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), and Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), and the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ)—will actively participate in paper presentations, panels, birds of a feather sessions, and more.
HLRS staff will be at booth #4106. Visitors are welcome to meet the HLRS team and learn about the latest activities in high-performance computing and related fields. Simulation in action and experiences in augmented reality (AR) can be explored. On Wednesday, November 18, 2026 – Starting at 4:00 PM the community is welcome to join the industry reception for informal conversations about HPC, emerging computing technologies, and applications in research and industry. For a full list of HLRS’s activities, please visit the center’s event page.
JSC will be represented at booth #2254. The Centre will celebrate its 65th birthday, which happens to coincide with the conference week. With 28 colleagues on site this year, the JSC presents itself under the slogan, “Unleashing Next-Gen Computing Power!” and focuses on topics such as HPC (Tools), Quantum Computing, Artificial Intelligence, as well as European projects and collaborations. Particular highlights will be two nominations for Gordon-Bell-awards: one for Gordon Bell Prize and one for the Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling. In addition, a JSC entry in the “Poster” category is among the finalists. Details and times of the JSC’s activities can be found on the center’s event page.
LRZ has joined forces with other research colleagues in Bavaria to host a Bavarian HPC experience on the conference floor. At booth #4254 LRZ colleagues, together with its partners from the Technical University of Munich, the Ludwigs-Maximillians-Universität in Munich, the Munich Quantum Valley, and NHR at Friedrich Alexander University in Erlangen will demonstrate how high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing work together to unlock new potential for research and innovation. A full overview of LRZ’s activities can be found on the center’s event page.
Furthermore, visitors have the opportunity to enter the Passport Stamp Collection contest by collecting stamps from all participating partners. The joint initiative and prize-giving is supported by GCS.
In addition to the centers’ participation, GCS will be represented by a GCS-supported team of students, representing the Erlangen National High Performance Computing Center (NHR@FAU) and Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) in the Student Cluster Competition (SCC). GCS is pleased to continue its commitment to supporting young talents within in the HPC ecosystem.
Reduce bottlenecks and accelerate data movement with purpose-made Ethernet, Fibre Channel, SAS, NVMe, and intelligent bridge connectivity solutions
Amherst, N.Y., Nov. 10, 2026 — ATTO Technology, Inc., a global leader in network and storage connectivity solutions, will showcase its connectivity and infrastructure solutions at SC26, the international conference for high-performance computing (HPC), networking, storage, and analysis, November 16–19, 2026, at McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois.
At booth #2858, ATTO will highlight technologies designed to move data efficiently between compute, memory, storage, and networks in demanding HPC and other data-intensive environments. The showcase will span high-bandwidth Ethernet, Fibre Channel, SAS, NVMe, intelligent storage bridging, and software for configuration, management, diagnostics, and performance optimization.
ATTO FastFrame Ethernet network interface cards (NICs) provide high-bandwidth connectivity for servers and systems where network performance is critical to moving data between compute and storage resources. ATTO360 Networking adds configuration, management, diagnostics, and performance tools to help infrastructure teams manage and troubleshoot connectivity.
ATTO360 Storage software unifies management, optimization, and analytics for ATTO Fibre Channel, SAS, and NVMe adapters in a single intuitive dashboard, combining ConfigTool, MultiPath Director, and ATTO ExpertAI for 1-click tuning profiles, dynamic load balancing, failover assurance, and real-time bottleneck detection.
ATTO Celerity 64Gb Gen 7 PCIe 4.0 Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) provide high-performance connectivity for Fibre Channel storage environments and demanding data-intensive applications. Designed for use in enterprise and HPC infrastructure, Celerity adapters help connect servers to shared storage across a range of system architectures.
“High-performance computing depends on more than compute power. Data has to move efficiently between compute, memory, storage, and networks to keep systems performing at their full potential,” said Tim Klein, president and CEO of ATTO Technology. “At SC26, we’ll show how connectivity hardware, software, and engineering work together to address real-world infrastructure and performance requirements.”
ATTO XstreamCORE 7600 extends Fibre Channel access to block storage for up to 64 servers over distances exceeding 500km with less than 4 microseconds added latency. ATTO XstreamCORE ET 8200/8200T intelligently bridges SAS block devices such as JBODs or tape libraries to iSER or iSCSI Ethernet networks with industry-leading performance to up to 64 servers with less than 2 microseconds of added latency.
ATTO XstreamCORE 8100T intelligent bridge offers a compact, energy-efficient bridge for integrating SAS tape drives into iSCSI environments, ideal for data centers and remote HPC facilities.
Visit ATTO at booth #2858 at McCormick Place in Chicago to discuss connectivity requirements, infrastructure performance, and solutions for existing and next-generation HPC environments.
Appointments with ATTO at SC26 can be set up now using the contact form at www.atto.com/sc26.
I ride my Onewheel around the neighborhood and some of the sidewalks here in Louisville are pretty rough. I've been thinking about adjusting the tire pressure to see if it makes a difference in how it handles bumps and cracks. The stock pressure feels a bit stiff to me, but I'm not sure if lowering it would hurt the range or make the board feel sluggish. I don't want to mess with anything that could cause a flat or wear the tire out faster either. I mostly ride on pavement but occasionally cut through grass or gravel paths. Curious what pressure other riders in this area tend to run, especially if you deal with similar surfaces. Has anyone found a sweet spot that balances comfort and control, or is it better to just stick with what Onewheel recommends? Any input would be helpful.
TEL AVIV, Israel, Nov. 10, 2026 — Quantum X Labs Inc. has announced a significant technological milestone in its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered quantum error correction technology, demonstrating up to 20% fewer logical decoding failures in preliminary benchmarks using experimental data from IBM quantum processors.
The results were achieved through the Company’s advanced noise-model calibration methodology, designed to improve the ability of quantum error correction decoders to identify and correct errors arising during quantum computations. The preliminary benchmarks demonstrated improvements in decoding performance, representing another step toward developing more reliable and scalable quantum computing systems.
The Company has expanded its experimental benchmarking program to datasets generated by three IBM quantum processors — IBM Fez, IBM Kingston and IBM Pittsburgh — establishing a comprehensive end-to-end workflow that integrates experimental quantum measurements, noise-model calibration, GPU-accelerated AI training and decoder performance evaluation.
Advancing Quantum Computing Reliability Through AI- Quantum error correction is widely recognized as one of the most critical technological challenges facing the quantum computing industry. Quantum processors are inherently sensitive to environmental interference, hardware imperfections and operational noise, which can introduce errors into quantum computations and limit their practical reliability.
Quantum X Labs is developing an AI-powered quantum error correction architecture designed to address these challenges by combining hardware-specific noise characterization with advanced machine-learning techniques and GPU-accelerated decoder training.
Through its latest benchmarking program, the Company demonstrated that improved noise-model calibration can enhance logical decoding performance, achieving up to 20% fewer logical decoding failures in preliminary tests on IBM processor datasets.
The latest milestone builds on Quantum X Labs’ earlier research using experimental surface-code datasets associated with Google’s quantum computing technology.
By expanding its testing to IBM quantum processors, the Company is broadening its validation activities across multiple hardware vendors and quantum error correction code families.
This multi-platform approach is an important component of Quantum X Labs’ long-term strategy to develop hardware-agnostic quantum error correction solutions capable of adapting to different quantum computing architectures, noise characteristics and operational environments.
“We believe that the ability to improve logical decoding performance on different quantum processors represents an important step toward the broader industry objective of fault-tolerant quantum computing,” said Prof. Nir Sharon, the Company’s Chief Quantum Scientist, “As quantum processors continue to increase in size and complexity, efficient quantum error correction is expected to become an essential component of practical quantum computing systems.”
These activities form part of Quantum X Labs’ broader strategy to develop advanced quantum computing infrastructure and software technologies designed to support the transition from today’s experimental quantum processors toward more reliable, commercially viable quantum computing platforms.
About Quantum X Labs Inc.
Quantum X Labs Inc. (NASDAQ: QXL) and its subsidiaries are focused on quantum technology, digital advertising and computing and enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. Quantum X Labs Ltd. is focused on developing and promoting quantum algorithms for the transportation, drug discovery and security segments as well as developing quantum- based GPS replacement and quantum atom accuracy solutions. Gix Media develops a variety of technological software solutions, which perform automation, optimization and monetization of internet campaigns, for the purposes of acquiring and routing internet user traffic to its customers. Metagramm is a developer of grammatical error correction software and offers tools for writing and reviewing, grammar, spelling, punctuation and style features, as well as translation and multilingual dictionaries, using artificial intelligence and machine learning technology.
Sport has long been regarded as great unifier but there is evidence that this era of hyper-partisanship may change that
Over the weekend, President Trump floated his latest wild idea: that the man behind the Ultimate Fighting Championship and Power Slap, the ethically dubious “sport” where competitors take turns smacking each other with an open palm, could be his new White House press secretary.
Trump’s post on Truth Social was about as subtle as a slap to the face. He Trump wanted the UFC chief executive, Dana White, whom he hailed as a “violent Fighter and Warrior”, to take the job. And for six of his fighters to join him “to defend us against the Lunatic Left”. But it also carried a certain logic. The UFC is Maga’s sport of choice. Why couldn’t it also be its praetorian guard?
From the assassinations of her husband and mother-in-law to press stonewalling under Modi, Belonging offers an insider’s account of India’s political evolution
Few love stories have been as closely entwined with a nation’s history as that of Sonia and Rajiv Gandhi. The former’s much-awaited political memoir, Belonging, offers a strikingly candid account of her journey from a small town in Italy to the highest echelons of power in India – all for love, she says.
The veteran Congress party leader has been fiercely protective of her personal world. In Belonging, she opens up for the first time about the extraordinary twists and turns of a life that has largely unfolded in full public view. (The Guardian’s Hannah Ellis-Petersen has a rare in-person interview with Gandhi, and you can read an excerpt from the book here.)
The writer Jojo Moyes is facing a two-year EU travel ban and €10,000 (£8,300) fine because of glitches with the bloc’s digital security controls.
She is one of a number of UK travellers who say their trips to the EU have not been properly recorded since the introduction of the EU digital entry and exit system (EES).
Redesigned flagship laptop has a fantastic display, killer performance and the first touchscreen on a Mac, but comes with a serious price tag
Apple’s MacBook Pro has been redesigned for the first time in five years, getting slightly slimmer, significantly lighter and adding a fantastic new OLED display with the first touchscreen on a Mac.
The new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR display comes in two sizes, 14in and 16in, but rather than replacing the standard MacBook Pro they sit alongside them as an even more expensive option. The OLED machines start at £2,899 (€3,299/$2,899/A$4,599) – a £400 or equivalent upgrade on the matching spec LCD models – serious prices for serious work machines, not helped by significant cost increases driven by RAMageddon.
Boston Dynamics has equipped its Atlas humanoid with wheels, allowing the robot to rapidly roll across flat terrain while still using its articulated legs to navigate obstacles and uneven surfaces. "The 'experiment' combined classical model-based motor control with whole-body reinforcement learning to maintain dynamic stability across unstructured, real-world terrain," reports The Robot Report. From the report: In addition to learning how to move with wheels for feet, Atlas also performs pirouettes and various aggressive actuation maneuvers. This demonstrates that Atlas can smoothly switch between fast rolling on flat terrain and articulated legged motion over obstacles or irregular surfaces.
[Andy Wu, controls engineer for Atlas at Boston Dynamics] trained the system in sim. The system learned all of the behaviors in sim and executed them in real life, with surprising accuracy, according to Wu. Wu said converting Atlas' locomotion style was "wonderfully simple." A single custom adapter mounts an off-the-shelf scooter rim onto Atlas' existing ankle actuator, and that's the only new part in the whole build. Because Atlas was designed from the start to be produced at high volume and to be easy to service, Wu said the retrofit was about as involved as swapping a wheel on a bicycle. The software side was just as straightforward, he said. Each wheel is modeled as an "ankle" that can spin continuously, so all Wu had to do was take the baseline robot model and swap the feet out for wheels.
The next question that Wu intends to answer is the policy response to failed actuators. This is key to safety and to understanding how the system will respond to a system failure. The primary takeaway for Wu and the controls engineering team at Boston Dynamics is to understand control synergy. The video demonstrates that merging classical motor controls (for baseline stability) with whole-body RL (for reactive adaptation) yields superior real-world agility compared to using either method alone.
Opposition politicians get first chance to take control of levers of power, even as they struggle to form government
Israel’s new Knesset will be sworn in on Tuesday, giving opposition politicians their first chance to take control of some levers of power, even as they struggle to form a new government to unseat Benjamin Netanyahu.
High on the agenda will be replacing the speaker, who wields immense influence by controlling the legislature’s agenda and committee chairs. The current speaker is Amir Ohana, a close ally of Netanyahu.
Jens Eskelund says Europe may need to allow its companies to become part of Chinese firms’ supply chains
Europe’s manufacturers could give up on attempting to compete with their Chinese counterparts by the end of the decade if current trends continue amid fears over mass job losses, the head of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China has warned.
In a case of “if you can’t beat them, join them”, Jens Eskelund said European companies operating in China were now thinking “Made in China for China” could be replaced by a philosophy of “Made in China for the world”.
OpenAI will not face criminal penalties over the Medicare data breach, but the prime minister has flagged changes to Australia’s criminal law to crack down on future breaches by artificial intelligence companies.
Anthony Albanese on Tuesday released the recommendations of a “rapid review” into the June breach of a Medicare statistics reporting service portal administered by Services Australia, but not the findings or the report itself, which he committed to releasing in the future.
Maintaining security controls across all stages of development and deployment.
Identifying and managing serious risks associated with their models.
Providing mandatory notification of incidents to the Australian government rapidly.
Allowing independent evaluation of their models.
Maintaining and publishing safety and security frameworks to ensure good governance, risk management and transparency.
Responding to updated standards and rules as technologies change.
Nov. 9, 2026 — Oklahoma State University (OSU) has announced that Cimarron, its newest supercomputer, is now available to researchers across the Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kansas (OAK) region. Operated by OSU’s High Performance Computing Center (HPCC), Cimarron provides 37,760 processor cores, 392 GPUs and more than 10 petabytes of storage.
Access extends to researchers at institutions throughout the three-state region, including those that were not founding members of the OAK Consortium.
Credit: OSU
The university is marking the opening with events Nov. 9–11. The program includes a ribbon-cutting ceremony and system tours on Nov. 9, the fourth OAK Consortium meeting on Nov. 10 and an NVIDIA workshop on building large language model applications on Nov. 11.
System summary:
150 compute nodes, each with dual 96-core AMD EPYC “Genoa” 9654 CPUs @ 2.4GHz and a base of 768 GB RAM
16 nodes contain 2x NVIDIA H100 GPUs with 80 GB VRAM and an additional 768 GB system RAM
100 compute nodes, each with dual AMD EPYC “Rome” 7002 series CPUs and 512 GB RAM
60 nodes contain model 7742 CPUs @ 2.25GHz
40 nodes contain model 7302 CPUs @ 3.0GHz and 3x NVIDIA QUADRO RTX6000 GPUs with 24 GB VRAM
392 total GPUs
32 NVIDIA H100
240 NVIDIA L40S
120 NVIDIA QUADRO RTX6000
200 Gb/s InfiniBand low-latency interconnect
10+ PB high-speed parallel file system (for paid use)
480 TB high-speed parallel file system (/scratch)
Slurm Workload Manager
OSU’s supercomputers and support team enable computational and data intensive research for hundreds of researchers throughout many of Oklahoma’s academic institutions and several national institutions.
Cimarron supports research in fields including physical sciences, engineering, mathematics and business. HPCC staff and system users have installed a range of research software, including GROMACS, LAMMPS, Gaussian and Quantum ESPRESSO, alongside compilers, programming languages and scientific libraries.
Funding for the system was announced in 2022, with a $4 million National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation award (No. 2216084) and $1.7 million from OSU.
This announcement was edited by HPCwire for clarity and supplemented with details from other pages on Oklahoma State University’s HPCC website.
Wentz has three turnovers starting for injured Murray
Buffalo have matched their best start since 1993
Josh Allen threw a touchdown pass with 44 seconds left before half-time, James Cook rushed 31 times for 107 yards and a late score, and the Buffalo Bills beat hosts Minnesota 23-6 on Monday night, sending the Vikings deeper into their unrelenting offensive slump.
Linebackers Terrel Bernard and Dorian Williams had interceptions and Tyler Bass made four field goals to stretch his franchise-record streak to 25 straight as the Bills (7-1) matched their best eight-game start since 1993. That season ended with their last of four straight Super Bowl losses.
I ride a Onewheel Pint around Austin, mostly on the hike-and-bike trails and short errands near downtown. With summer temps creeping past 100°F, I've been noticing my range isn't what it used to be on the same routes. I'm not sure if it's the heat affecting the battery, tire pressure changes, or just me pushing harder on the hills. I usually ride in the late afternoon when it's still pretty hot out.
I'm trying to decide whether to change up my riding schedule or look into any battery care habits for hot weather. I don't want to shorten the board's lifespan by riding in extreme heat, but evening rides are the only time I have. Has anyone here dealt with range loss in Texas summers? Any tips on managing heat with a Onewheel would be really helpful.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: The Food and Drug Administration said Monday that GLP-1 drugmakers must add a warning label about a rare eye condition that can cause sudden blindness. The condition, called nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, or NAION, affects the optic nerve, which carries signals from the eye to the brain. When blood flow to the nerve is reduced or blocked, it can cause sudden vision loss. The condition is permanent with no known treatment. The FDA said "there is a potential increased risk of rare NAION" in people taking GLP-1 drugs. The agency's requirement applies to all GLP-1s, including Novo Nordisk's Ozempic and Wegovy and Eli Lilly's Mounjaro and Zepbound, as well as several older GLP-1 diabetes medications. [...] Previous research has found that GLP-1 use may increase the risk of NAION, and Lilly has said it was aware of studies on the potential link.
The FDA said it began looking into a possible link after a 2024 study published in JAMA Ophthalmology that found diabetes patients prescribed semaglutide were four times as likely to develop NAION as those not prescribed the drug. The agency said it reviewed reports of side effects submitted to its adverse event monitoring system and analyzed data from multiple clinical trials. Cases of NAION have been reported for all currently marketed GLP-1 drugs, the FDA found. However, FDA scientists were not able to identify a mechanism for how the drugs could increase the risk of the eye condition. Risk factors for NAION can overlap with conditions seen in people taking GLP-1 drugs, including Type 2 diabetes, obesity, sleep apnea and hypertension. "Patients and caregivers should be aware of a potential increased risk of NAION, a rare condition that can result in acute, painless, decreased vision in one eye, including permanent vision loss," with GLP-1 use, the FDA said in the release.
Why Should Delaware Care? Mass shootings are rare in Delaware. But on Halloween night, towns at opposite ends of the state suffered two of the worst shootings in recent years. The subsequent investigation into the Newark shooting moved forward this week, when police charged two teens with attempted murder.
Two teenagers have been charged with attempted murder for the Halloween night shooting that wounded seven people near the University of Delaware, Newark police announced Monday.
The incident, which occurred on East Main Street in Newark, was one of two mass shootings in Delaware that night. About an hour earlier, gunfire at an outdoor party in Ellendale, in Sussex County, killed a 17-year-old girl and wounded eight others.
Together, the shootings unnerved people across a state that rarely sees such levels of violence in rural areas or in the biggest college town.
During a Monday press conference, Newark Police Chief Mark Farrall said that a 17-year-old male from North East, Md., and an 18-year-old male from Wilmington were arrested and indicted on multiple charges, including attempted murder, firearm possession, conspiracy, reckless endangerment, and carrying a concealed weapon.
The 17-year-old was also charged with possession of a firearm by a person under the age of 21. Both were indicted by a New Castle County grand jury on Monday morning. Detectives determined the two teens were the people who fired weapons that night, Farrall said.
Neither suspect was identified by Newark PD in keeping with House Bill 59, a new state law that limits when police can identify suspects charged with crimes who have not been adjudicated. The identities of those charged will soon be available in public court records.
Speaking alongside Newark officials and those from the Delaware Attorney General’s Office, Farrall also said police had been monitoring Main Street closely the night of the shooting. Police had previously become aware of plans circulating online for large gatherings in the area, referred to as “teen takeovers,” Farrall said.
Although the arrests mark a significant development in the investigation, Farrall said investigators still have “a lot of questions to answer,” including what events led up to the gunfire and whether anyone else was involved.
“Our investigators continue to work to determine what precipitated this incident, the sequence of events that unfolded, and whether or not any other additional individuals are involved,” Farrall said.
Young people walk along Main Street in Newark near to where a mass shooting had occurred days earlier on Halloween. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY BRIANNA HILL
Gunfire on Halloween night
Officers responded to the Oct. 31 shooting shortly after it occurred around 11:11 p.m. on East Main Street near Choate Street, Farrall said.
At the time, the popular bar district was packed with costumed University of Delaware students and locals celebrating the holiday.
According to videos that circulated on social media, multiple shots can be heard, sending hundreds of bystanders fleeing, and leading to at least one person being struck by an oncoming car. That individual was able to walk away, according to the video.
Farrall said officers arrived within 20 seconds of receiving the alert, but the gunfire had already stopped.
As crowds were dispersing from Main Street, the suspects fled in a vehicle about 30 seconds after the shooting, Farrall said.
Seven victims were ultimately identified, including five teenagers.
Those injured included two 15-year-old boys, who were shot in the back and foot, respectively. The victim shot in the back remains hospitalized in stable condition, while the other was treated and released. One was from Wilmington and the other from New Castle.
A 19-year-old man from Plymouth Meeting, Pa., also suffered a gunshot wound to his back and remains hospitalized in stable condition.
A 20-year-old man from Wilmington was also shot in the back and suffered a collapsed lung but has since been released from the hospital. A 21-year-old woman from Wilmington sustained a graze wound to her leg and was treated and released.
A 16-year-old boy also suffered gunshot wounds to his midsection and lower body and remains hospitalized in stable condition. He was also found in possession of a handgun and was later charged with possession and other charges. Police did not confirm whether the teen played a direct role in the incident.
Two days later, police found the seventh victim, a 17-year-old from New Castle who suffered a graze to his lower body and did not initially report his injuries. The teen was treated and released from the hospital.
During their investigation, police used the Newark Police Public Safety camera system and automated license plate readers to track down the suspects, Farrall said.
“I can’t emphasize enough the value of that technology,” he said.
Intentional shootings in Newark, which has its own city police department along with the University of Delaware Police Department, are exceedingly rare. One of the last such incidents occurred in 2023.
Leading up to the Halloween shooting, Farrall said police were aware of plans for large gatherings that night, which he referred to as “teen takeovers.”
Police contacted adolescents believed to be involved in organizing or attending the gatherings. Officers also monitored social media activity and encouraged people to stay away from Newark and avoid participating in the events.
Some individuals told police they would not come to the area in response to the department’s planned police presence, Farrall said.
Newark police increased staffing throughout the weekend, particularly near the downtown business district. Officers were also assisted by the University of Delaware Police, Delaware State Police, New Castle County Police and the Delaware Division of Alcohol, Tobacco and Marijuana Enforcement.
“We had no actionable intelligence or information to corroborate that there was any legitimate threat of violence to our community. Nevertheless, we recognized the potential for extremely large crowds in Newark as part of Halloween weekend,” Farrall said.
Following the shootings in Newark and Ellendale, several state and federal officials condemned the violence and expressed support for those injured and their families.
“This is not normal. We must never accept gun violence as a part of life in Delaware,” Gov. Matt Meyer said in a public statement.
Police seek public’s help The Newark Police Department asks the public for assistance in identifying any additional individuals who were involved in the shooting or the circumstances that precipitated it. Anyone who wishes to share information can contact Detective Paige Klein at 302-366-7100 ext. 3480 or by email at pklein@newark.de.us. Individuals can also submit information related to the incident to submit it through a secure link.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Former Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once one of Donald Trump’s loudest supporters of his false 2020 election-fraud narrative, is now openly accusing the president of recycling the same unsupported claims after Republicans’ disastrous 2026 midterms.
Trump questioned the legitimacy of last week’s election Monday, asking whether anyone really believed it was “honest,” citing supposed early-voting “dumps” and again suggesting voting machines were responsible for Republican defeats. He offered no evidence of manipulated machines, fraudulent ballots or widespread wrongdoing.
The claims also conflict with the available evidence. Polling broadly anticipated Democratic gains before Election Day, although many surveys underestimated their magnitude. Democrats subsequently won control of both chambers of Congress, including Senate victories across several Republican-leaning states.
Greene responded bluntly.
“For anyone who believes his bullshit,” she wrote, voters should ask why Trump has not produced prosecutions stemming from the massive 2020 fraud he repeatedly alleged. She accused Trump of attempting to “build the same narrative” again rather than accepting responsibility for Republicans’ losses.
The criticism is especially notable because Greene herself spent years promoting Trump’s discredited 2020 claims.
She instead blamed the 2026 defeat on millions of Republican voters staying home and argued that Trump’s own political team knew the party was heading toward significant losses.
Trump had repeatedly acknowledged the 2026 results in the days immediately following the election before returning to fraud allegations Monday.
Democratic Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, currently the House minority leader who is poised to become new Speaker next year, told CBS News that the Trump administration will hold a closed-door congressional briefing today to discuss Jensen Huang’s affair with an alleged Chinese spy.
Last week the Republican chairs of three key House committees also called on Huang to appear before lawmakers in a closed-door hearing on 18 November.
Campaign over Prop 40, as measure was known, was most expensive in state history, flush with Silicon Valley dollars
California billionaires won a contentious ballot measure campaign, defeating a proposed one-time tax on their wealth.
The bruising campaign over Proposition 40 was the most expensive in state history and witness to back-and-forth dealing from tech billionaires and democratic leaders, including Gavin Newsom, the governor, who steadfastly opposed the measure.
Key environmental groups come out against bipartisan Baaja bill over fears it could spur datacenters and ICE jails
The Senate on Monday advanced bipartisan legislation aimed at speeding up permitting reviews for datacenters and other infrastructure projects, in the first major action since last week’s election that soundly repudiated Donald Trump and congressional Republicans.
It’s a bill that would make it easier to build big infrastructure projects in America – everything from fossil fuel pipelines to transmission lines that would add more clean energy to the grid. And it would roll back environmental and social protections to achieve this goal. That is why climate advocates are torn over the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs act (Baaja).
Runners seek medical treatment as 13-mile race held amid unusually high November temperatures
Police in southern California are investigating the circumstances that led to the hospitalization of nearly 30 runners who participated in the Santa Barbara Half on Sunday.
Santa Barbara police said in a statement to the Associated Press that they had opened an investigation after receiving reports from Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital about multiple half-marathon participants seeking medical treatment for “unusual symptoms”.
Caroline Harvey scores three as unbeaten USA cruise
Hilary Knight extends worlds record to 70 goals
Canada thrash hosts Denmark 10-0 to stay perfect
Caroline Harvey scored a hat trick as defending champions the United States routed Austria 11-1 at the women’s ice hockey world championship on Monday.
Canada followed suit by thrashing hosts Denmark 10-0 to maintain their own perfect record.
Donald Trump defended defense secretary Pete Hegseth, who is facing an impeachment resolution from Republican senator Thomas Massie, saying Hegseth 'won two wars'. The president, who said he had spoken to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, said he was 'amazed' by claims Huang conducted an affair with an alleged Chinese spy, and that the FBI was now looking into the issue
Qantas is preparing to cut 850 local jobs and outsource work offshore under an AI-driven overhaul, marking a growing wave of disruption to the Australian workforce.
The changes represent the third major corporate layoff plan announced in Australia in three weeks, after restructuring moves flagged by the design company Canva and National Australia Bank.
Chamber voted 73-25 to formally take up bill that will shorten timelines to start energy and datacenter projects
The Senate on Monday advanced bipartisan legislation aimed at speeding up permitting reviews for datacenters and other infrastructure projects, in the first major action since last week’s election that soundly repudiated Donald Trump and congressional Republicans.
The Senate voted 73-25 to formally take up the bill, which senators and the president have pushed as a way to meet growing demand for electricity and other forms of energy that now face years-long delays in getting to the grid.
The Food and Drug Administration is adding a new warning about possible rare cases of vision loss reported with GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and other brands.
A fraternity at Ohio State University has been temporarily suspended while authorities investigate a video that appears to show two people engulfed in flames.
(The Center Square) – The U.S. Senate has voted to advance the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, a colossal permitting reform bill that would expedite the buildout of energy-related infrastructure.
AI is supercharging scientific discovery. There’s little doubt about that. However, in some cases, you can get too much of a good thing. This is particularly true in materials science, where AI can create a glut of new hypotheses to test, thereby creating new bottlenecks. An AI for science startup called Radical AI is hoping to alleviate that bottleneck with its AI materials flywheel, which is being deployed at Sandia National Laboratories.
Joseph Krause co-founded Radical AI two years ago to tackle a big opportunity he saw emerging in material discovery and physical AI. While AI models could think up all sorts of new materials for use with semiconductors, aerospace, and energy production, scientists lacked a platform that could automate the process of analyzing the results from lab experiments and feeding that data back into the AI model.
“Our whole pitch to customers is you need to have all of these things together in a flywheel,” says Krause, who co-founded Radical AI two years ago with Jorge Colindres and Gerbrand Ceder. “If you just do AI generation and you never make anything, you have no ground truth around that. You need to smash those two things together to build a learning loop on top of that, and then go forward from there.”
Feedback loops are central to how AI works. Without feedback from the real world, an AI model has no data to improve upon. That’s the central thesis for how Radical AI builds its materials intelligence layer, which takes the output data from AI models, analyzes them, and then feeds the learnings from that data back into the AI model so it can be optimized and improved.
The “aha” moment for Krause came while he was working as a venture capitalist and read about AlphaFold2, the Google AI model that can predict a protein’s three-dimensional atomic structure from its amino acid sequence. Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis and John Jumper were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the model.
“I think AlphaFold2 really catalyzed the moment in science for a lot of people,” Krause tells HPCwire. “I think that that was a moment where those things come together, people watched, and holy crap–it just did science for real using models plus data.”
Krause–who was enrolled in a PhD-level material science program at Rice University before becoming disenchanted with academia and leaving to join a venture capital firm for three years–researched the impact AI was having on the discipline, and came to the conclusion that there was an opportunity to develop new AI-for-science software to plug the gap in physical AI.
“Our whole thesis is that AI for science entirely depends on the physical infrastructure in the lab,” he says. “We think we are the picks and shovels to actually enable AI for science to be an impactful industry.”
There are several core areas where Krause and his team at Radical AI hope to make an impact with what he calls the flywheel. The big goal is to gather data from lab experiments and use that as feedback in the models themselves. That opens up an array of additional technical challenges that need to be solved, often using additional AI.
(asharkyu/Shutterstock)
For starters, there’s lots of different types of data that must be gathered, organized, and analyzed. Machine learning algorithms can help with that.
“The data is multimodal in nature,” Krause says. “You see images from the lab. You analyze your own work as a scientist. You get CSV files or other type of spectra. You might even look at synthesis conditions like temperature or pressure or oxidation.”
In addition to the variety, there is the volume problem, which also can be addressed with more AI.
“The volume of data from experimentation is too large for a human scientist to analyze,” he says. “When we run a thousand experiments in our lab, we’ll get 60, 70 million data points from that coming out of the back end. A human scientist can’t rectify all that. And so that’s where that learning layer comes in. This is why self-driving feeds and analyzes data so much better in the AI for science realm.”
Radical AI utilizes a variety of AI models with its mixture of experts-based approach. On the physics-informed side, it uses AI models like Equiformer, CHGNet (Crystal Hamiltonian Graph Neural Network), Allegro-FM, and Microsoft’s MatterGen. It also uses large language models where appropriate. On the autonomous lab side, the company buys robots and instruments from manufactures like Rigaku, Thermo Fisher, Mettler Toledo, and Verder Scientific.
The launch of the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission nearly a year ago has supercharged the move toward autonomous labs, which has been beneficial for Radical AI.
“When we first started the company two years and nine months ago, there were a lot of questions on self-driving labs,” Krause says. Labs would say ‘We don’t know. They’re expensive. Is this AI thing a bubble? Is it ever going to be moved to science?’
Radical AI CEO and Co-Founder Joseph Krause
“Once the Genesis Mission came out and it pushed academia and research to move towards running AI driven technology, they started getting calls from all of their big customers,” he continues. “A shift on this is happening. Everyone is here. There is funding for this.”
In September, Radical AI announced that Sandia National Laboratories was adopting its software to conduct research on hydrogen, including research on metal-hydrogen interactions and discovering new materials to enhance the separation of hydrogen from waste streams.
“There is a lot of work in high-throughput predictions, but the ability to drive robotic synthesis and feed those experimental findings back into our research is a big part of why we’re so excited to partner with Radical on the discovery of new materials for hydrogen purification,” says Sandia Staff Scientist Vitalie Stravila. “Simulation only gets you so far; the experimental data is what we think will really accelerate the discovery of new materials.”
Currently, palladium is the gold-standard material for membrane-based hydrogen separation, according to Sandia. But it’s expensive. Scientists have attempted to create alternatives to palladium that involve painstaking work creating and coating special alloy ribbons, but they are very fragile and the process of creating a single sample takes days or weeks.
Armed with AI and Radical AI’s flywheel approach to connecting the lab with the model, Sandia Labs could make headway on new materials to reach the DOE’s goal of dropping the cost of hydrogen production to $1 per kilogram, thereby turning hydrogen into a feasible fuel for transformation and other needs.
New York City-based Radical AI has 48 employees and has raised $65 million in funding so far. The company is working with some early adopters like Sandia National Labs, but it has yet to launch its product. That is expected to happen in the first quarter of 2027, Krause says.
Almost two-thirds of school leaders polled say new regime is much more intense than previous framework
More than half of headteachers in England who were polled after their schools were inspected under Ofsted’s new regime are considering cutting short their careers as a result of the experience.
In response to the question “Has the inspection affected how long you intend to stay in your role?”, 52% of those who responded said they were thinking of leaving their job sooner than planned.
Microsoft is testing a Windows 11 option that lets users permanently disable the Sticky Keys and Filter Keys activation prompts directly from the pop-ups themselves, ending a 31-year-old annoyance without requiring a trip into Settings. Windows Latest reports: Sadly, the dialog is still the same aging Win32 window, but we spotted Microsoft's design boss replying under an X post reply about this, saying he is working on modernizing legacy dialogs. The popup might be annoying, but did you know that it exists because of a pinball game from 1995? [...] The change is in Build 26340.9882 (Experimental) and Build 26320.9876 (Beta), both released on November 6 and based on Windows 11 version 26H2. Microsoft says you can "choose not to be asked again" from the Sticky Keys and Filter Keys dialogs, but it's a Controlled Feature Rollout in Experimental, so you may not see it yet.
Ruling said law enacted by Congress reflects preference for border control over environmental and recreational harm
The US supreme court has allowed Donald Trump to continue his administration’s construction of a border wall in Texas’s Big Bend region, including parts of Big Bend national park.
In an unsigned, five-page ruling, the nation’s highest court granted the Trump administration’s emergency request to suspend a lower court order that had temporarily stopped the project last month.
Donald Trump, Elon Musk and prominent finance moguls have expressed their support for embattled Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, as the head of the world’s most valuable chip company faces an internal investigation over a romantic relationship with an alleged Chinese spy.
Trump said he has spoken to Huang on Monday as the scandal reverberated across Silicon Valley and the Nvidia CEO faced an uncertain future.
Tom Brady has ended his three-year involvement as a minority investor in Birmingham City, the English second-tier club said on Monday, thanking the seven-times Super Bowl champion for his support.
“Birmingham City Football Club expresses its sincere gratitude to Tom Brady for his involvement with and unwavering support for the club over the last three years,” the Championship side said in a statement.
(The Center Square) – A coalition of energy and policy organizations sent a letter to President Donald Trump expressing concern over the harm to national security that is posed by publicly traded U.S. companies – such as Amazon, Apple, and…
If your understanding of a VA home loan starts and ends with “it’s for the military,” you’re not alone. For many eligible veterans and service members, the intricate workings (and benefits) of this U.S. government-backed mortgage are obscured behind lackluster…
In an emotional press conference, CF Montreal’s founder and owner Joey Saputo refused to rule out relocation
In a rare press conference, CF Montreal owner Joey Saputo announced that his family was beginning the process of “initiating a structured sale process” of the MLS club. Saputo informed the public of his intentions on Monday afternoon, pausing multiple times to fight back tears after over three decades of owning the Quebecois club.
“This decision is neither driven by urgency, nor dictated by circumstance,” Saputo said in his initial scripted remarks. “It’s the result of a careful and deliberate reflection on where we stand today, and more importantly, on the opportunities that lie ahead for the club.”
One of the top officials at the U.S. Marshals Service has been placed on administrative leave pending an internal investigation over his alleged involvement in a racist incident targeting a Black colleague, sources told CBS News.
(The Center Square) - The U.S. Department of Justice has dropped its federal lawsuit seeking to require California election officials to set aside roughly 20,000 mail-in ballots cast by individuals suspected of being noncitizens, concluding a rapid legal fight that…
President Donald Trump says the FBI is investigating Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's affair with a woman alleged by U.S. intelligence to have gathered information for Beijing. "I know the FBI is looking into it in terms of something else, and I think that he'll be in good shape," Trump said at a White House briefing. The Associated Press reports: Trump suggested the extraordinary step of directly involving himself in a counterintelligence investigation, a sign of his friendly relationship with Huang and the possible geopolitical stakes. "I did speak to him today just to see if he's feeling all right, how you're doing," Trump said. "He said he had absolutely no idea that the person in question was a spy."
Trump is slated to meet next week with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Shenzhen, China, at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, but he was noncommittal about bringing up the situation with Xi. "No, I don't think so," Trump said. "I mean, maybe. I'm sure President XI will ask me about it. I just know Jensen very well. I just think he's a very honorable man."
Nvidia has launched its own independent investigation into whether Huang was targeted by a foreign intelligence operation. Meanwhile, China has denied the allegations. "The so-called Chinese spy allegation is unsubstantiated. It is nothing but smears against China," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said during a regular news briefing Monday.
Further reading: Commerce Dept. Chip Inquiry Was Halted After Nvidia Intervention
While Democrats notched major midterm wins in Senate and House races, the blue wave extended further down the ballot – into races that received far less attention but could have major consequences in the years ahead. Shrai Popat, Guardian US politics reporter, explains some of the Democratic wins you may not have heard about
President, after talks with Qatari PM, suggests end to war coming ‘fairly soon’ and military escalation not needed
Donald Trump has said that the war in Iran is “effectively over” as he played down concerns that the US would escalate its military campaign against Tehran after the midterm elections.
During a White House press conference, Trump said that Israel and Gulf allies in the region were well protected from Iran and that an escalation was not needed.
See how organizations can set up, monitor, and manage BeeGFS alongside the rest of their cluster with ClusterVisor at Advanced Clustering Technologies’ booth 4523.
Nov. 9, 2026 — As high-performance computing (HPC) environments grow in complexity, organizations need infrastructure management tools that simplify operations across compute, storage, and the systems that connect them. At SC26, ThinkParQ and Advanced Clustering Technologies will demonstrate how their complementary technologies help organizations streamline cluster deployment and day-to-day management, bringing BeeGFS storage into the same management workflow used to operate the broader cluster.
Attendees are invited to register for a live demonstration at Advanced Clustering Technologies’ booth 4523 to see how ClusterVisor, the company’s cluster management solution, can be used to set up, monitor, and manage ThinkParQ’s parallel file storage solution, BeeGFS, alongside the rest of their cluster infrastructure.
“Our long-term partnership with Advanced Clustering Technologies is built on a simple goal: give customers a storage solution that is powerful and easy to operate,” said Frank Herold, CEO at ThinkParQ. “BeeGFS brings the performance and scalability that demanding workloads require, and ClusterVisor brings the management simplicity that administrators need. Together, they give end users one coherent, production-ready environment, from first deployment through the whole cluster lifecycle. We are proud to show this combined solution at SC26 and to keep investing in this partnership.”
BeeGFS delivers high-performance parallel file system capabilities for demanding technical computing workloads. ClusterVisor provides a unified approach to cluster provisioning and management. Together, the technologies offer organizations a practical way to integrate storage management into their broader cluster operations, helping reduce the need to manage infrastructure through disconnected tools and workflows.
“ClusterVisor is designed to simplify the way organizations deploy and manage their HPC infrastructure,” said Kyle Sheumaker, President and Chief Technical Officer at Advanced Clustering. “By bringing BeeGFS into the same management environment used to run the rest of the cluster, we help administrators take a more unified approach to setting up, monitoring, and managing their systems. Our collaboration with BeeGFS gives customers a practical way to streamline operations, reduce management complexity, and get more out of their cluster infrastructure.”
One Tool for the Broader Cluster
Managing an HPC environment involves more than deploying compute nodes or configuring storage independently. Administrators must ensure that the different components of their infrastructure work together and remain manageable throughout the cluster lifecycle.
With BeeGFS and ClusterVisor, attendees can explore how a common management approach can help simplify key operational tasks, including:
Set up BeeGFS: See how BeeGFS can be incorporated into the cluster setup and deployment workflow.
Monitor storage and cluster operations: Explore how administrators can monitor BeeGFS as part of their broader cluster environment.
Manage the complete infrastructure: See how the same management tool used for the rest of the cluster can also support BeeGFS operations.
The result is a more cohesive approach to cluster management, giving administrators a way to work across compute and storage without treating BeeGFS as an entirely separate operational environment.
See BeeGFS and ClusterVisor at SC26
SC26 attendees can experience the complementary capabilities of BeeGFS and ClusterVisor firsthand at Advanced Clustering Technologies’ booth 4523. Live demonstrations will show how organizations can bring BeeGFS into their existing cluster management workflows and explore the benefits of managing storage and compute infrastructure through a common tool.
Register for a demo at booth 4523 to see how BeeGFS and ClusterVisor can help simplify the setup, monitoring, and management of your HPC environment. Learn more or schedule a demonstration here.
About BeeGFS
BeeGFS is a high-performance parallel file system designed to meet the demanding storage requirements of high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), and other data-intensive workloads. By providing scalable, high-throughput access to shared data across multiple servers, BeeGFS helps organizations make the most of their compute resources. Its flexible architecture supports a wide range of environments, from research and academic computing to enterprise and large-scale AI infrastructure.
About ClusterVisor
The ClusterVisor appliance holds your cluster’s configuration, operating system images and history. A lightweight agent on every node reports health and applies changes, and Slurm, user accounts, logs and hardware management all plug into the same platform, whether we built your cluster or another vendor did.
About Advanced Clustering Technologies
Advanced Clustering Technologies helps organizations deploy, manage and support high-performance computing and AI infrastructure. Our company was founded in Kansas City in 2001 with a specific mission: helping organizations get HPC right. That focus shapes everything we do, from how we design a system to how long we support it.
(The Center Square) - Members of Congress and advocacy organizations are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a $16.1 billion case tied to Argentina nationalizing a private oil company that Americans invested in.
(The Center Square) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled against Texans trying to stop the Trump administration from building a border wall system in the Big Bend region of Texas.
The justices did not seem ready to overturn a 1971 precedent that let individuals harmed by federal officers in violation of their constitutional rights sue for monetary damages.
(The Center Square) – Following an Oval Office meeting Monday with the Qatari prime minister, President Donald Trump said Gulf partners are urging him to keep the status quo with Iran, though he warned the U.S. remains “lock and loaded.”
ONTARIO, CALIFORNIA — A Southern California man shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer last year has filed a $25 million lawsuit against the federal government, alleging excessive force, false arrest and malicious prosecution.
Carlos Jimenez, a U.S. citizen and father of three, says he stopped near an ICE operation in October 2025 to warn agents that children would soon arrive at a nearby bus stop. His lawsuit alleges officer Eusebio Ortiz fired multiple times as Jimenez tried to leave, striking him in the back and shoulder.
Federal authorities gave a sharply different account, alleging Jimenez rapidly reversed his vehicle toward an officer. Prosecutors charged him with assaulting a federal officer using a dangerous weapon.
Jimenez’s attorneys disputed that account and sought officers’ communications and other records. After a federal judge ordered prosecutors to produce additional material, both sides entered a diversion agreement. The assault charge was dismissed last week after Jimenez completed its conditions.
The lawsuit further alleges FBI agents interfered with Jimenez’s hospital treatment and questioned him while he still had a bullet lodged in his body. Those claims have not been proven in court.
The Justice Department says Jimenez voluntarily requested diversion rather than proceed to trial and notes that a grand jury had previously found probable cause to indict him.
The case now shifts from the dismissed criminal prosecution to a civil fight over whether federal agents used unlawful force and then improperly pursued charges against him.
Epic Games says it plans to support its new Linux launcher on as many distributions as possible, specifically naming Fedora, SteamOS, CachyOS and Omarchy. GamingOnLinux's Liam Squires-Hand reports: Speaking to Jake Jones, Communications Director at Epic Games, they said: "Hey Liam! The new Epic Games Launcher is still in Preview and we plan to support as many Linux distributions as possible, including Fedora, SteamOS, Cachy, Omarchy, and more. We're testing and evaluating packaging formats for distribution, and we'll restore AppImage this month."
With that in mind, until things settle down, you might see different packaging types appear or disappear until they decide firmly how they plan to support different distributions each with their own different packaging formats. Or, perhaps they might see the Flatpak light and just put it up officially on Flathub. Would make it even easier for SteamOS then too with Flathub, since it would just be a quick pop to Desktop Mode to install it directly in the Discover app.
Lawsuit also alleges agents followed Carlos Jimenez to a hospital and ‘interfered’ in his care, with bullet fragments still lodged near lung
A US citizen who was shot by an immigration officer in southern California has filed a $25m lawsuit against the federal government, alleging he was wrongfully shot and arrested, then subjected to a “malicious prosecution”.
Carlos Jimenez, a father of three from Ontario, a city east of Los Angeles, was on his way to work at a food pantry on 30 October 2025 when he drove by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents carrying out an operation. It was around 7am, and Jimenez approached officers “calmly and slowly” to inform them that children in the neighborhood would soon be arriving at an adjacent bus stop, according to his complaint filed in federal court on Friday.
Hosted by the Delaware Department of Veterans Affairs and Delaware Commission of Veterans Affairs, the ceremony is intended to recognize veterans from across Delaware and the generations of Americans whose military service has helped preserve the nation’s freedoms. created on 11/9 by using AI
Annual New Castle observance will focus on service and sacrifice, with Vietnam veteran who endured 406 days in captivity delivering keynote address
NEW CASTLE, Del. — Delawareans will gather Wednesday at the Delaware War Memorial Plaza to honor the men and women who have served in the U.S. Armed Forces, with former Vietnam War prisoner of war Ralph Galati delivering the keynote address.
The annual Veterans Day ceremony begins at 10:30 a.m. Nov. 11 at the memorial plaza, 163 Cherry Lane in New Castle.
Hosted by the Delaware Department of Veterans Affairs and Delaware Commission of Veterans Affairs, the ceremony is intended to recognize veterans from across Delaware and the generations of Americans whose military service has helped preserve the nation’s freedoms.
Galati brings to the ceremony a story of combat, captivity, resilience and decades of continued service to fellow veterans.
A Philadelphia-area native and graduate of St. Joseph’s University, Galati was commissioned into the U.S. Air Force in 1970 and earned his flight wings the following year. He became a weapons systems officer aboard the F-4 Phantom and served as a laser-guided bomb lead and forward air controller while stationed at Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base in Thailand.
On Feb. 16, 1972, Galati and his pilot were shot down over North Vietnam. Galati was captured and taken to Hanoi, where he remained a prisoner of war for 406 days.
He was released March 28, 1973, as part of Operation Homecoming, which returned hundreds of American prisoners of war from Southeast Asia.
Galati has described captivity as long periods of uncertainty and isolation punctuated by fear. During a 2014 visit to Dover Air Force Base, he told service members that training, faith, trust and reliance on fellow prisoners helped sustain him during his imprisonment.
His military decorations include the Silver Star, two Bronze Star Medals with Valor, two Purple Hearts, multiple Air Medals and the Prisoner of War Medal. His Silver Star recognized his actions as an F-4 weapons systems officer on the mission during which he was shot down.
After returning home, Galati continued serving in the Air Force as a flight instructor, curriculum developer and member of the Secretary of the Air Force’s legislative liaison staff at the Pentagon. He completed active duty in 1978 and later served in the Air Force Reserve.
His commitment to veterans continued long after his military career ended.
Galati spent 28 years with IBM before retiring in 2007. He later served as veterans liaison for Delaware County, Pennsylvania, and founded the Office of Veterans Services at St. Joseph’s University, where programs included assistance and entrepreneurship training for veterans. He remains involved with veterans organizations, including the Delaware County Veterans Memorial Association.
His appearance in New Castle comes more than half a century after his captivity and provides a personal connection to the purpose of Veterans Day: remembering not only those who fought in America’s wars, but everyone who accepted the obligations and risks that come with military service.
Veterans Day traces its roots to the end of World War I, when fighting stopped at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918. Originally observed as Armistice Day, the holiday was renamed Veterans Day in 1954 to honor American veterans of all wars and all eras of service.
Unlike Memorial Day, which specifically honors those who died while serving the country, Veterans Day recognizes all who have served in the nation’s armed forces.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs describes the purpose of the day as honoring veterans for their patriotism, service and willingness to sacrifice for the common good.
Wednesday’s ceremony will include state and federal officials, but its central focus will be Delaware’s veterans and the experiences represented by Galati and other former service members in attendance.
The Delaware Department of Veterans Affairs and Delaware Commission of Veterans Affairs also work year-round to help veterans and their families obtain benefits and services, including disability compensation, employment and housing assistance.
TO GO
What: Delaware Veterans Day Ceremony
When: 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, Nov. 11
Where: Delaware War Memorial Plaza, 163 Cherry Lane, New Castle
Keynote speaker: Retired U.S. Air Force Capt. Ralph Galati, Vietnam War veteran and former prisoner of war
Who may attend: Veterans, military families and members of the public
Learn more: Delaware Department of Veterans Affairs
“Fighting has always been a part of who I am,” five-time Olympic gold medalist Teddy Riner said. As president, he would try to compete in the 2028 Games.
Rep. Thomas Massie on Monday introduced articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, accusing him of waging war against Iran without congressional authorization.
The more than 500-mile stretch of road, cameras, vehicle barriers and sensors is planned in and around Big Bend National Park. It is one of the longest sections.
DENVER, COLORADO — Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert has lost her bid for reelection in Colorado’s 4th Congressional District, with CNN projecting Democrat Eileen Laubacher will flip the traditionally Republican seat.
Laubacher, a retired Navy rear admiral who served more than three decades, led Boebert by more than 3,000 votes Monday with roughly 98% counted. Her campaign emphasized affordability, health care and government accountability.
Boebert has not conceded. Her campaign previously said it was investigating unspecified “unusual voting patterns” and expected a recount. No evidence of election fraud has been presented.
The Associated Press had not yet called the race Monday evening, noting that several thousand ballots remained outstanding. Laubacher nevertheless declared victory and traveled to Washington for congressional orientation.
Colorado automatically recounts a race only when the margin is no greater than one-half of 1% of the winning candidate’s vote total. Laubacher’s current lead is well outside that threshold, although Boebert could request and pay for a recount after counting concludes.
Boebert moved from Colorado’s competitive 3rd District to the more Republican 4th District before the 2024 election. Her defeat adds another seat to the expanded Democratic House majority following last week’s midterm sweep.
France has accused Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of being behind last month's cyberattacks on fridges and freezers across the country. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said the attack was "unprecedented in both its scale and its level of aggression," adding those who were responsible would be hit with sanctions "at the European level." The BBC reports: The cyber-attack last month saw fridges and freezers in hundreds of supermarkets across France heated up, which spoilt fresh and frozen food estimated to be worth millions of euros. Then last week, dozens of supermarkets across several other European countries were also impacted by a cyber-attack that targeted fridges and freezers. It is not known if the instances are linked.
Barrot said the attack on France's supermarkets "marks the first large-scale cyber-attack aimed at sabotage on our national territory, and it constitutes a major attack on the nation's interests and the security of the French people." He said the government had summoned the Iranian ambassador to Paris to "lodge a very strong protest against this extremely grave act." France will take "any other necessary and proportionate measures" to respond to the incident and "deter anyone who might seek to repeat it," Barrot added.
Separately on Monday, the Paris prosecutor said an investigation had been opened into the head of an offensive cyber unit associated with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as well as his two deputies. Laure Beccuau named the unit as Shahid Kaveh, which she said had an affiliation with the electronic and cyber centre of the IRGC. Shahid Kaveh is the name given to a cluster of hackers thought to be directly employed by the Iranian regime. [...] The French government has not said how it reached the conclusion that Iran was responsible, and attribution of cyber attacks is extremely hard as hackers are able to hide their locations.
Loss costs fall 3.99% Dec. 1 for a 10th straight year after regulators and the ratepayer advocate reviewed a 1.40% filing; safety discounts of up to 12% are also being restored
DOVER, Del. — Delaware employers will get a larger workers’ compensation cost reduction than initially proposed when new rates take effect Dec. 1, extending a decade-long streak of decreases.
The Delaware Compensation Rating Bureau originally proposed a 1.40% average reduction in voluntary-market loss costs and a 1.53% reduction in residual-market rates.
After review by the Delaware Department of Insurance, an independent actuarial firm and the state’s Ratepayer Advocate, the approved filing instead reduces voluntary-market loss costs by an average of 3.99% and residual-market rates by 4.11%.
That makes the voluntary-market reduction about 2.85 times the decrease originally proposed.
Insurance Commissioner Trinidad Navarro approved the amended filing Oct. 12 for new and renewal policies effective Dec. 1. Insurance carriers must submit filings reflecting the new values by Dec. 11.
The rating bureau said the final numbers followed discussions and a settlement involving the bureau, the Department of Insurance and the Ratepayer Advocate, which retained a second independent actuary.
The bureau cautioned that the amended figures represent a “negotiated outcome” and do not necessarily mean all parties agreed on what the appropriate rate level should be.
“I am pleased to announce that for a decade, we have been able to approve rate decreases which help attract new companies and jobs to Delaware,” Navarro said in an Oct. 20 statement. “Delaware’s businesses used to pay some of the highest workers’ compensation premiums in the country.”
Actual savings will vary from employer to employer. Loss costs are the estimates of future claim costs that insurers use as a foundation for setting workers’ compensation prices. An employer’s final premium can also depend on factors including payroll, industry classification, claims history and the insurer’s pricing.
Lower insurance costs do not reduce benefits paid to workers injured on the job, according to the Department of Insurance.
Safety discount restored
Employers may eventually have another opportunity to reduce their workers’ compensation bills through changes to Delaware’s Workplace Safety Program.
The program provides premium credits to eligible employers that undergo safety inspections and address recommended improvements.
A 2024 law, Senate Bill 306, expanded eligibility, but changes associated with a new experience-rating plan unintentionally reduced the maximum Workplace Safety Program discount available to some businesses.
Senate Bill 248, enacted June 10, changes the formula used to calculate the workplace safety credit from 20% times one minus an employer’s credibility factor to 40% times one minus the credibility factor.
The change restores a maximum credit of 12%. Credit determinations using the new formula may be communicated beginning Dec. 1, 2026, and apply to workers’ compensation policies effective Aug. 1, 2027, or later.
“This legislation provides Delaware business owners the opportunity to save money by maintaining a good workplace safety program,” said state Rep. Ed Osienski, who co-sponsored the legislation with lead sponsor Sen. Nicole Poore.
“This legislation invests in safe workplaces, rewards responsible business practices, and strengthens our commitment to protect every Delaware worker,” Poore said.
As of the end of 2025, 853 Delaware employers had saved an estimated $3.6 million through the Workplace Safety Program, according to the Department of Insurance. Eligible businesses are notified seven months before renewal, and failing to qualify for the program cannot be used as a reason to increase an employer’s premium.
The department’s revised guidance also reminds insurers that carrier-run workplace inspection procedures must be recertified twice a year. The department said the reminder was prompted by instances in which carriers had not kept those procedures properly certified.
What it means for Delaware businesses
The larger-than-proposed rate reduction matters most to businesses with significant payrolls or jobs carrying higher workers’ compensation costs, including construction, manufacturing, retail, restaurants and other labor-intensive industries.
The 3.99% figure, however, should not be interpreted as a guaranteed 3.99% reduction in every employer’s final bill. Insurers begin with DCRB loss costs and then apply their own approved pricing factors along with the employer’s classification, payroll and claims experience.
The Workplace Safety Program creates a separate potential savings opportunity for employers willing to undergo inspections and maintain qualifying safety practices.
The Dec. 1 workers’ compensation decrease is Delaware’s 10th consecutive annual reduction. Last year, the state approved an 11.6% average reduction in voluntary-market loss costs.
Delaware Public Media reported Nov. 4 on the 3.99% and 4.11% reductions and the expansion of workplace safety discounts. DCRB’s filing documents provide additional context showing that the voluntary-market decrease initially proposed was 1.40% before the regulatory and actuarial review produced the larger reduction.
To Go Box
What: Delaware workers’ compensation rate changes and Workplace Safety Program
Workers’ comp rates: Average voluntary-market loss costs decrease 3.99%; residual-market rates decrease 4.11%.
Effective: New and renewal policies beginning Dec. 1, 2026.
Workplace safety credit: Eligible employers can qualify for discounts of up to 12% under the revised formula.
New safety formula: Credit determinations may be communicated beginning Dec. 1, 2026, for policies effective Aug. 1, 2027, or later.
Learn more: Delaware Department of Insurance Workplace Safety Program.
PALO ALTO, Calif., Nov. 9, 2026 — Quantum computing pioneer Diraq has installed the world’s first silicon spin quantum computer inside a commercial data center, now live at Equinix in Sydney, Australia. As quantum computing moves into the everyday infrastructure that businesses rely on, Diraq is also launching Quantum at Work, a new report exploring how the technology could be put to work on some of the world’s hardest problems including medicine discovery.
Credit: Diraq
“We are now at a point where quantum computing can start to reach industries and the people they serve,” said Andrew Dzurak, CEO and Founder of Diraq. “That shift matters more than any single milestone, because it changes what’s possible for every field quantum touches, from medicine to materials to logistics. Our silicon spin approach is what puts that within reach in five years, not decades. It gives us a manufacturing path already proven at industrial scale, a cost curve that improves as we add qubits, and a system designed to run inside today’s existing computing infrastructure.”
A New Benchmark for Commercial Deployment
The deployment marks a significant step for silicon spin quantum technology, taking it from the lab and into Equinix’s data center, home to everyday computing infrastructure for banking, healthcare, utilities, manufacturing and retail industries.
Diraq’s quantum computers are designed to scale without requiring data centres to scale around them. Its silicon spin architecture is built using the same semiconductor manufacturing processes used to produce today’s conventional computer chips. This allows customers to increase computing power by upgrading the quantum processor, with minimal changes to the surrounding infrastructure. The system at Equinix currently operates with eight qubits, and Diraq is targeting up to 256 qubits in the same deployed system within the next year.
That strategy impacts the system’s power and physical footprint. The current quantum computer draws less than 20 kW, and Diraq expects a future utility-scale system to draw around 300 kW, less than a third of the power demanded by a single next-generation AI rack. The current system takes just 170 square feet of floor space, and future utility-scale deployments could be as small as 50 square feet. By keeping quantum computing compact and relatively low power as it scales, Diraq aims to avoid the costly and disruptive infrastructure expansion that other quantum technologies would require.
“The next chapter of computing won’t be defined by AI, cloud or quantum in isolation, but by how these technologies work together,” said Harmeen Mehta, Executive Vice President and Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, Equinix. “Diraq’s deployment in our data center is an important proof point for quantum, demonstrating a path for these systems to operate alongside the digital infrastructure enterprises already rely on.”
The deployment follows Diraq’s recent advancement to Stage C of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, a program testing paths to utility-scale quantum computing, one of just six companies to reach the program’s final stage with potential funding of up to US$300 million. Diraq also signed a US$38 million letter of intent with the Department of Commerce under the CHIPS and Science Act, the only company focused on silicon spin qubits in that funding round.
A future case for medicine
Alongside the deployment, Diraq is launching Quantum at Work, a new report examining how quantum computing could contribute to progress across fields including medicine, energy, materials, climate and transport. This makes up part of Diraq’s broader work outlining what future, utility scale quantum computers will make possible.
“Quantum computing’s economic value isn’t a distant promise,” said Matt Langione, Managing Director and Partner, Boston Consulting Group. “Our research shows that technologies leveraging advanced quantum physics have already compounded $19 to $27 trillion in value today, through semiconductors, GPS, MRI and early drug discovery. We think quantum computing can unlock a further $3.5 trillion at maturity.”
Developing a new medicine costs more than US$2 billion and takes up to 15 years, with fewer than 1 in 10 candidates ever reaching a patient. New Diraq analysis, built on a 2010 industry cost study published in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery and modeled on FDA approval data, developed for the Quantum at Work report, found:
More medicines reaching patients: Lifting clinical trial success rates by just 10 percentage points could mean around 50% more potentially lifesaving medicines reaching patients each year, up to 25 additional medicines in a market the size of the US alone, as fewer viable candidates are abandoned due to cost.
Economics that stack up: A 10 percentage point improvement in clinical trial success rates could save around US$600 million per medicine by ruling out failed candidates earlier. Other quantum modalities can become increasingly expensive as they scale, requiring significant cooling, wiring and control infrastructure. Diraq is targeting at most tens of millions of dollars for its utility-scale systems, helping make the potential economic benefits of quantum computing achievable in practice.
“Being inside a commercial data center is how we start proving that claim,” said Dzurak. “This deployment puts the system where it will actually operate, running alongside the infrastructure it’s designed to work with. If we get this right, it could mean more lifesaving medicines reaching the people who need them, and our target of scaling to 256 qubits in the next year is the next proof point on that path.”
Diraq has operations in Palo Alto, Los Angeles, Chicago and Albuquerque, alongside its Australian research operations.
About Diraq
Diraq is building silicon-based quantum computers designed to be economical, compact and deployable at scale. The company’s proprietary silicon spin-qubit technology uses the same CMOS manufacturing processes that produce today’s semiconductor chips, creating a pathway to millions of qubits on a single processor without the need for custom fabrication infrastructure. Diraq’s technology is based on more than 20 years of research led by Founder and CEO Andrew Dzurak. Its mission is to unlock the scale needed to make quantum computing commercially useful and accessible. Founded in Australia, Diraq has more than 130 team members globally, with operations in Palo Alto, Los Angeles, Chicago, Albuquerque, Sydney and Melbourne.
About Equinix
Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX) shortens the path to boundless connectivity anywhere in the world. Its digital infrastructure, data center footprint and interconnected ecosystems empower innovations that enhance our work, life and planet. Equinix connects economies, countries, organizations and communities, delivering seamless digital experiences and cutting-edge AI—quickly, efficiently and everywhere.
Utah judge sets timeline for trial of Tyler Robinson, accused of fatally shooting the far-right activist in September 2025
Tyler Robinson, the 23-year-old man accused of killing the far-right pundit and activist Charlie Kirk, will stand trial for murder in early July 2028, a Utah district judge ruled on Monday.
Judge Tony Graf said the trial will remain in Provo, Utah, and jury selection would begin on 21 June 2028. Attorneys for Robinson had asked to start the trial in January 2029 while Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, had pushed for an October 2027 date.
Huang is receiving support from some fellow tech executives, including Elon Musk.
Musk commented “I agree” on a post by Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire that said Huang “did something incredibly dumb” that was “bad for America” but that “Jensen is irreplaceable for America’s AI leadership”.
“While Nvidia has sought to reassure us all, there are several layers here, beginning with the unfortunate timing.
“For example: The company is systemically important for tech, markets and the economy; Investors tend to struggle to price in key-person and governance issues; and there are fluid national security and geopolitical dynamics.”
The Supreme Court agreed to lift a district court order that temporarily stopped construction of the border wall and other infrastructure in the Big Bend sector.
Massachusetts judge rejects bid by Clancy’s attorneys to have the case against her dismissed
A Massachusetts judge cleared the way on Monday for Lindsay Clancy to be tried again on murder charges for killing her three young children at her home in 2023, saying a retrial would not unconstitutionally subject her to a double prosecution for the same crime.
Judge William Sullivan in Plymouth rejected a bid by Clancy’s attorneys to have the case against her dismissed. The judge on 4 September declared a mistrial after the jury reported that a holdout juror was preventing it from reaching a unanimous verdict.
Huang built Nvidia as a family business but after the co-founder had an affair with an alleged Chinese spy, its board faces a difficult decision
For more than 30 years, Jensen Huang has been the seemingly unshakable public face of Nvidia. He co-founded the company as a young engineer in 1993 and oversaw its growth into a multitrillion dollar chipmaker and bellwether of the AI industry at large.
He’s also made it a family business. His children, Madison and Spencer, have taken leadership roles at the firm. While not a company executive, his wife, Lori Mills Huang, leads the family foundation which, as of 2024, controls over 60m Nvidia shares.
Anthropic has released Claude Mythos 5.2 and Fable 5.2 with "improvements in areas like coding, reasoning, and vision," while cutting Fable's input price and claiming 30% faster responses. TechCrunch reports: It's Anthropic's first model release since the arrival of a third-party report from the assessment group METR, which suggested the lab might be approaching recursive self-improvement (RSI) -- or the ability for AI models to carry on model training independently. The METR report found internal models were speeding up Anthropic's AI progress by roughly 2x, although many uncertainties remain. Still, Anthropic's release notes significant ongoing challenges in accurately testing model capabilities. "Claude Mythos 5.2 and Fable 5.2 each voice suspicion that they are being evaluated more often than any of our recent models, which challenges our ability to assess how they will act in real-world settings. As these settings expand and capabilities increase with future models, we expect this challenge to grow."
Anthropic maintains that the new version of Mythos does not have the ability to act covertly against its user, a verdict that's detailed further in Mythos 5.2's system card. "Claude Mythos 5.2 shows stronger covert capabilities than prior Claude models on several of our evaluations, particularly when its reasoning is hidden from the monitor," the system card reads. "That said, we believe that low levels of absolute performance on our new covert evaluations support claims that rely on detection of harmful actions in high-stakes situations." Fable 5.2 has been available to select parties in pre-release for some time, and Anthropic says the model has already "solved two open problems in theoretical physics, formalized Fermat's Last Theorem, and supported numerous other research projects."
Surprising midterm elections that create new majorities on Capitol Hill look to be revolutions in the days after they occur. Years later, they often appear to be more complex – and less significant.
Jensen Huang’s close relationship with president means Nvidia CEO’s affair with woman alleged to be working for Beijing is under intense scrutiny
A hand on the back, a kiss on the cheek; the footage of Alice Huang’s interaction with Jensen Huang in a Taipei venue last year does not seem particularly remarkable at first glance.
But the Nvidia chief executive’s revelation on Sunday that he had an affair with Ms Huang has given it new significance.
Former builder got his big break after restoring the home of a producer who was working on a precursor to the show
Tommy Walsh, the building and DIY expert who appeared on television shows including Ground Force, has died aged 69 after a long illness.
Walsh started his career as a professional builder before rising to fame alongside Alan Titchmarsh and Charlie Dimmock on the popular BBC garden makeover show from 1997 to 2005.
Caucus had 100 members in the last Congress, and six of the nine candidates it endorsed won, flipping seats
House progressives, long dismissed as the Democratic party’s leftwing outliers, are heading into the next Congress in larger numbers than ever and vowing to push the new Democratic majority to the left.
The Congressional Progressive caucus said on Sunday it will welcome more than 25 new members, including a record number who won in red districts, expanding its ranks to more than 105 lawmakers.
‘Not particularly complex’ defrosting hack has been attributed to Iran, with presumption it is linked to others across Europe
Iranian hackers like to send a message.
In 2023 a state-backed group interrupted TV streaming services in the United Arab Emirates to broadcast a deepfake report on the war in Gaza. In the same year, hackers affiliated with Iran displayed the slogan “down with Israel” on the screens of water-control equipment made by an Israeli firm.
US representative accuses defense secretary of illegally waging war without congressional authorization and abusing his powers
A Republican lawmaker has moved to force a vote to impeach Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, setting the stage for a showdown over one of the most divisive figures inside Donald Trump’s administration.
Thomas Massie, of Kentucky, introduced eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth, accusing him of illegally waging war without congressional authorization and abusing his powers.
Jemima Goldsmith has said Russell Brand physically assaulted her and she accused him of “violence, coercive control and abuse”.
The 52-year-old TV producer said she has always been “strongly and unequivocally” on the side of Brand’s victims as she opened up about her own “painful” experience with her former partner in a social media post on Monday.
Calls for self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s ouster have grown louder on Capitol Hill as a possible impeachment vote looms this week. At the same time, Hegseth has shored up support at the White House and among MAGA faithful, according to dismayed Pentagon officials.
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., introduced articles of impeachment on the House floor Monday afternoon, charging Hegseth with “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Top Democrats have indicated a desire to join Massie’s effort since their midterm election landslide. “I am a hard yes on the Hegseth resolution,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who is poised to be the next House speaker, told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the current House Oversight Committee chair, told Newsmax on Friday it is “very possible” the votes exist to impeach Hegseth.
Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., one of the leading voices for Hegseth’s impeachment, agreed. “I think there’s a high chance that it will be successful,” she told The Intercept of Massie’s effort. In April, Ansari filed six articles of impeachment against Hegseth, including violations of the law of armed conflict and targeting of civilians, abuse of power, and obstructing congressional oversight. She called for a floor vote on his ouster this week.
“Hegseth has demonstrated that he is wholly incompetent. He’s committed what I believe to be war crimes in Iran and the Caribbean and he is ill-equipped for the job,” said Ansari. “My reason for introducing the articles of impeachment back in April had a lot to do with his conduct and the war crimes in Iran, including the bombing of the children’s school. But it’s refreshing to see that since then, more and more Republicans are also recognizing that his leadership has failed and that he’s putting all of us in danger.”
In the wake of a devastating election rout of the GOP that handed Democrats firm control of the House and the Senate, Congress begins a five-week lame-duck session on Monday. With dozens of Republican lawmakers ending their tenure in the House, it’s unclear how many will even show up for votes. Such absences, as well as outright defections in the GOP ranks, make it increasingly likely that Massie’s measure will pass, staffers on Capitol Hill told The Intercept.
On Sunday, GOP Rep. French Hill of Arkansas left open the possibility of backing the measure. “I want to hear the debate on it to see if it merits impeachment versus some other disciplinary action or action by the president,” he said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.” Outgoing House speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., did not answer when asked by Politico if GOP leaders would whip the Hegseth impeachment vote. House leaders must take up the matter within two legislative days; opponents could table the resolution or refer it to committee instead of voting directly on impeachment.
After narrowly being confirmed by the Senate, which required Vice President JD Vance to break a 50-50 tie, Hegseth’s tenure has been marked by fiascos and failures beginning with Signal-gate, the sharing of secret war plans in a chat group with a journalist. In that case, according to the Pentagon’s own inspector general, “Hegseth violated security protocols and endangered U.S. troops and objectives.” Since then, Hegseth has been under perpetual fire for the unsuccessful Iran war in 2026, specifically a strike on an elementary school in Minab, Iran, that killed more than 150 civilians, most of them children. He faces pressure over his campaign of extrajudicial killings in attacks on so-called drug boats in the waters off Latin America. And questions continue to mount about his purge of top military leaders — many of them women and minorities.
“The fact that many career officials from the department have left citing his leadership, I think, is very telling,” said Ansari. Last week, The Intercept published an exposé quoting six current and former defense officials who currently serve or served under Hegseth and called for his ouster. “He is conducting state terrorism. He is 100 percent a war criminal. He needs to be prosecuted,” said Wes J. Bryant, one of those officials and, until last year, a senior targeting adviser and policy analyst at the Pentagon who was pushed out of his job for blowing the whistle on Hegseth’s efforts to undermine protections for civilians.
As calls for his ouster have grown louder, Hegseth launched a desperate bid to whip up support at the White House, including a nakedly obsequious video seeking Trump’s support that he posted on X. It was accompanied by a coordinated campaign of social media posts by Pentagon underlings tying Hegseth’s fortunes to the president with the text “STAND. FIGHT. DEFEND THE REPUBLIC.”
Hegseth’s hand was strengthened on Friday when Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles stepped down and was replaced by his hard-line domestic policy adviser, raging xenophobe, and illegal boat strike proponent Stephen Miller, according to two Pentagon officials. The embattled war chief was quick to offer “Huge CONGRATS” to Miller on X, and posted a photo of himself alongside Trump’s new consigliere. The same coterie of Hegseth devotees at the Pentagon followed with similar posts featuring Miller.
Wiles had reportedly soured on Hegseth, blaming his woeful management of the Iran war for flagging Republican fortunes. A senior Trump administration official also told MS Now that Miller and Hegseth “have been extremely close since the beginning of the administration.”
If the House impeaches Hegseth, removing him from office would require a two-thirds vote in the Senate — a high bar, even when Democrats take control of the chamber in January. Neither of the two Cabinet secretaries impeached by the House — William Belknap, the secretary of war, in 1876; and Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, in 2024 — were convicted by the Senate.
An Armed Services Committee staffer who spoke with The Intercept was skeptical that Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., would bring the measure to a vote. Ansari held out hope. “Thune is very much aligned in terms of his view that Hegseth is not fit for the job,” she said, adding, “I do think that the resounding victories on Tuesday night will impact the way Republicans operate moving forward.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who is retiring at the end of the year, has said for months that he regrets his vote to confirm Hegseth and rebuked the war chief for his desperate video address aimed at Trump. “[C]abinet secretaries shouldn’t be wasting taxpayer dollars on campaign style videos. Kristi Noem learned that the hard way,” he wrote on X on Friday, also laying into Hegseth for “the incompetence you’ve displayed, the bad advice you’ve given to president, and your shameful and embarrassing episodes from firing our top generals to texting war plans to reporters.” Tillis had also previously said Hegseth “needs to go.”
Massie suggested his impeachment resolution is the legislative equivalent of a mercy killing, calling it “a much gentler version” of what Democrats will do when they take control of Congress in January. Congressional committees have broad investigative powers, and Ansari said that if Hegseth survives this year’s impeachment push, there were “many ways” for Democrats to hold him accountable in the next session, specifically compelling him to testify before the American people. “I would be surprised to see him last the next two years in this administration,” she told The Intercept. “I think that he is not only one of the most incompetent members of the administration, but also the most unpopular — and it’s on a bipartisan basis. So the pressure will continue to grow for there to be some change at the Pentagon.”
Trump expressed mild “confidence” in Hegseth in a “60 Minutes” interview taped on Friday, touting the U.S. victory over Venezuela, but stopped short of praising his Pentagon chief for it. Asked if he credited Hegseth for what he considers a major victory, Trump replied: “No, but he was a part of it.” On Saturday, Trump wrote on Truth Social that calls for impeachment of administration officials amounted to “extortion at the highest level” and ordered the Justice Department to investigate those making the push.
Attorney General Todd Blanche, himself a potential target of impeachment, said on Sunday that the Justice Department would represent Hegseth during any impeachment proceedings. He added that he “would be very worried” if he were a Democrat threatening to investigate administration officials. Asked if he considered those threats to be a crime, Blanche said, “It depends on what’s said. So yes, there could be.”
The White House did not respond to questions about Trump’s support for Hegseth.
Update: November 9, 2026, 2:50 p.m. ET The article has been updated to note that Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., introduced articles of impeachment against War Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday afternoon.
Particles from fireworks and bonfires likely to have contributed to levels well above WHO’s daily guideline
Air pollution soared to “very high” levels across urban parts of England on Monday as still, foggy weather kept emissions trapped after a weekend of fireworks and bonfires.
Government monitoring showed 11 sites, mainly in London and Greater Manchester, reached the highest band on its 10-point index for particulate matter in the 24 hours to 10am. A further 27 sites recorded “high” levels across the capital, the north-west, the Midlands, Yorkshire and the east of England.
The space agency is recruiting its next class of astronauts as the U.S. plans a new mission to the moon. Here's the kind of person NASA is looking for.
Company will cut jobs through a mix of layoffs and attrition as it moderates the pace of ramping up jet production
Boeing will cut about 5% of its commercial plane workforce as it moderates the pace of ramping up jet production, the company said on Monday.
The company will eliminate the posts through a mix of layoffs and attrition because of a slower ramp-up to “provide our factories and supply chain partners additional time to achieve stability”, said a message to employees from Boeing commercial chief Stephanie Pope.
In President Donald Trump’s post-midterm election interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” Nov. 8, correspondent Ross Douthat pressed him about his massive net worth gains while president.
“There’s a Forbes story that said that your net worth, maybe it’s changed with the stock market recently, but your net worth went up by $3 billion,” Douthat said.
“So did everyone’s,” Trump replied.
“My net worth did not go up by $3 billion for the record,” Douthat said.
Despite some ups and downs, the stock market has performed well since Trump took office in January 2025. But Trump’s financial disclosures show that’s not where the majority of his net gains originated.
We fact-checked a similar statement by Trump back in July when he said “You know why I’m profiting? Because the stock market’s going up. … I’m profiting because I have a lot of money and a lot of cash.” We rated that Mostly False.
Of the $2.2 billion to $3 billion that Trump took in during 2025, based on The New York Times and Forbes analyses, respectively, his financial disclosures showed that $1.4 billion came from cryptocurrency ventures such as World Liberty Financial and crypto meme coins he launched.
The same 2025 disclosure showed another $400 million from sources such as real estate, legal settlements, overseas licensing agreements and branded merchandise, including watches and footwear.
Based on The New York Times’ estimate of a $2.2 billion in net wealth growth from 2024 to 2025, that would mean more than 80% of his total gains came from non-stock sources.
Following the “60 Minutes” interview, Forbes editor Dan Alexander, who reports on Trump’s financial earnings, broke down the numbers on X, calling Trump’s televised response “nonsense.”
“In the fall of 2024, we estimated that the president’s liquid assets totaled about $415M. After analyzing his financial disclosure, we pegged about 10% of that in stock,” Alexander posted on X.
From early September 2024 to September 2025, the S&P 500 rose by 14% on average. That would have boosted Trump’s stock holdings by around $6 million dollars, based on Forbes’ analysis. But during the same period, Trump lost significant stock value in his Trump Media company — around $226 million, according to Alexander.
“Almost none” of Trump’s $3 billion gains from fall 2024 to fall 2025 came from stock, Alexander said.
Forbes in September estimated Trump’s net worth slipped by about $300 million in 2026, bringing his total net worth down from $7.3 billion to $7 billion.
Our ruling
Trump credited a $3 billion rise in his net worth while in office to stocks.
Trump has made money in stocks, but his financial disclosures show the majority of his net gain came from non-stock sources, specifically cryptocurrency ventures.
We rate this claim Mostly False. PolitiFact Chief Correspondent Louis Jacobson contributed to this report
Editor’s note: HPCwire contributor Steve Conway conducted a three-part interview with Frederick H. Hausheer, MD and Fellow of the American College of Physicians (FACP), a medical oncologist and clinical pharmacologist who heads Hausheer BioMed, an oncology and pharmaceutical-industry research and development consulting firm. Part 1 of the series, “AI and Medicine: Who’s the Doctor?,” ran on October 29. This is part 2.
HPCwire: Multiple factors will contribute to recommendations by an AI. If a physician thinks an AI recommendation is problematic, I assume it will be important to identify the troublesome factor.
Dr. Hausheer: Safety evaluation must extend beyond determining that a final AI recommendation was “wrong.” One needs to distinguish between a data defect, a model error, a medication error, a near miss, an expected treatment toxicity, and an event attributable to the underlying disease or another cause. These categories can overlap, but they require different investigations and corrective actions.
HPCwire: Does a standard pre-AI format already exist for storing all this information?
Dr. Hausheer: Yes. Standardized industry and regulatory-compliant pharmacovigilance reporting formats exist; “structured safety record” is a descriptive term I will use for this, not the name of a single universal format. Such a structured safety record should preserve the reported findings, appropriate Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA) terminology, timing of onset and resolution, baseline abnormalities, and relevant clinical context.
Fredrick Hausheer, M.D.
HPCwire: I assume there are standard codes used to describe the findings, and that these also apply when AI is involved.
Dr. Hausheer: Coding standardizes the description, but it does not establish severity or causality. The National Cancer Institute’s Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events (CTCAE) provides severity grading, using the version specified for the study or application. For U.S. Investigational New Drug (IND) safety reporting, seriousness is a separate assessment involving outcomes such as death, immediate risk of death, inpatient hospitalization or its prolongation, significant incapacity, or congenital anomaly/birth defect.
Important medical events may also qualify when they jeopardize the patient and may require intervention to prevent a serious outcome. For U.S. IND safety reporting, expectedness is assessed against the investigator’s brochure or, when one is not required or available, the risk information in the general investigational plan or elsewhere in the current application, as amended. Here, specificity and severity matter in the context of other actual findings. It is not determined by whether the AI anticipated the event. Severity, seriousness, causal attribution, and expectedness should not be collapsed into one score.
HPCwire: If a drug is suspected of causing a problem, whether AI is involved or not, how extensive is the investigation of the drug?
Dr. Hausheer: The pharmacological assessment could examine the actual drug, formulation, route, administered dose and schedule, treatment duration, pharmacokinetic profile, systemic and relevant tissue exposure, organ function, and concomitant medications. Depending on the therapy, relevant questions include mechanism of action, class effects, active metabolites, cytochrome P450 (CYP) inhibition or induction, transporters, renal and hepatic elimination, and overlapping pharmacodynamic toxicities.
Speaking more technically, protein binding or possible displacement should prompt an assessment of unbound exposure and clinical consequences, not an assumption of a harmful interaction from binding percentages alone. FDA’s ICH M12 guidance provides a framework specifically for enzyme- and transporter-mediated pharmacokinetic interactions; the broader clinical assessment also includes pharmacodynamic and other relevant mechanisms.
For example, an observed abnormality after a new combination might reflect increased drug exposure, additive toxicity, disease progression, infection, or another medication. One could assess the temporal relationship, exposure–response evidence, changes after treatment interruption, and any clinically observed recurrence after re-exposure. A temporal association should trigger appropriate investigation, not automatic attribution. The immediate safety response and the eventual causal conclusion are separate decisions; protecting the patient need not wait for definitive causality.
Validation, Monitoring, and Prevention of Recurrence
HPCwire: Is having enough patient examples, enough data, sometimes a problem in identifying the cause of pharmaceutical or other medical errors?
(FOTOGRIN/Shutterstock)
Dr. Hausheer: Too few relevant events can make estimates of error imprecise, but predictive accuracy does not by itself establish the cause of an error. Validation is directed at clinically consequential errors, but in a hypothetical dataset of 1,000 patients with 10 serious events, a model predicting “no event” in every patient achieves 99% accuracy while missing every event. Accordingly, one should prespecify event sensitivity, false-negative and false-positive rates, predictive values, subgroup performance, and calibration—whether predicted risks correspond to observed frequencies. Uncertainty around these estimates matters, particularly when serious events are uncommon. Precision depends on the number of relevant events and independent cases, not simply the total size of the dataset.
HPCwire: That sounds like the challenge of diagnosing intermittent automotive problems. What elements should an evaluation program include?
Dr. Hausheer: An independently governed evaluation program could include, for example, 1,000 adjudicated clinical cases covering common and uncommon presentations, straightforward and complex decisions, errors, and near misses. This is an illustrative case bank, not a universal sample-size requirement or proof of clinical safety. The number and mix of cases should follow the intended use, important errors, and required precision. An enriched challenge set could test rare or complex adverse event hazards, while a separate representative dataset would estimate performance in the intended population. The reference assessment should allow multiple reasonable clinical choices and distinguish decision quality from the eventual outcome. A patient can have a poor outcome despite appropriate care.
HPCwire: What about elements specifically for AI safety?
Dr. Hausheer: Test cases should be independent of development and tuning, with safeguards against training-data contamination and repeated adaptation to a supposedly held-out benchmark. When prior inclusion of test cases in a foundation AI model’s pretraining data cannot be ruled out, that limitation should be disclosed and the evaluation strengthened with appropriately protected, new, or prospectively collected cases. A release report could identify the tested configuration, intended scope, acceptance criteria, results, unresolved limitations, and documented internal release authorization. For defined classification tasks, it should include true-positive, true-negative, false-positive, and false-negative counts. More complex treatment rankings require task-appropriate adjudication. Performance should be assessed across the actual data interfaces, retrieval sources, software, and human workflow—not only the model in isolation.
HPCwire: What safety measures can be taken after deployment of an AI model?
Dr. Hausheer: After deployment, one could combine immediate checks for detectable input and output hazards with periodic review of clinical outcomes, emerging safety signals, complaints, overrides, and near misses. Clinically important deterioration should have predefined thresholds, named reviewers, and an escalation pathway. Not every outcome is observable in real time; some require follow-up or accumulation of sufficient events. FDA’s 2023 risk-based monitoring guidance supplies a useful clinical-research model for concentrating oversight on the processes most consequential to safety and reliable results.
HPCwire: How are corrections categorized?
Dr. Hausheer: Suppose an AI interface change causes laboratory units to be misinterpreted. Correcting the current output is a correction. Taking action to eliminate the cause and prevent recurrence is corrective action. Addressing analogous potential failures that have not occurred is preventive action; addressing other instances of the same existing defect remains part of corrective action. The response could include containment, identification of affected recommendations, clinical review where needed, root-cause investigation, revalidation, and verification of effectiveness. ICH Q10 provides a CAPA (corrective and preventive action) and change-management framework that can be adapted to organize these activities.
Changes to the model, prompts, retrieval sources, connected tools, or clinical workflow should undergo documented impact assessment and proportionate revalidation. Improvement should not mean uncontrolled modification during clinical use. A previously validated model can become unreliable when its environment changes, even if its weights remain fixed.
HPCwire: All of this tells me that medicine and pharmacology have developed a large array of safety measures over the years, and that these measures can also help ensure safety when AI is involved.
Dr. Hausheer: The central proposition is that established quality and risk-management principles can be adapted to AI development now. Their applicability as management and risk-control methods should be distinguished from the legal scope of any regulation or guidance. ICH E6 addresses the clinical-trial context; other AI uses require their own regulatory analysis. The quality and risk management framework is transferable, but the effectiveness of each AI-specific control must still be demonstrated. In my opinion, companies should provide documented evidence that their controls work in the intended application and remain effective during use.
Data Availability, Quality, and Clinical Meaning
HPCwire: At SC16 I was the facilitator for the opening plenary on precision medicine. The panelist from the pharma then called GlaxoSmithKline said there was a woeful shortage of depersonalized, usable data for precision medicine and early AI research. Has that situation changed?
Dr. Hausheer: The scale has changed substantially, but available data and usable medical evidence remain different things. The All of Us Research Program’s 2026 Curated Data Repository version 9 includes information from more than 747,000 participants, whole-genome sequencing data from more than 535,000, and electronic health records from more than 481,000. These categories overlap; not every participant has every data type. The specified participant-data cutoff is January 1, 2025, illustrating why a dataset’s release date should not be confused with the period its observations represent.
HPCwire: Even where patient data seems plentiful and usable, are there cautions about interpreting the data?
Dr. Hausheer: For a particular medical question, one must establish whether disease stage, treatment exposure, relevant covariates, and outcomes are captured adequately. An explicitly negative test is different from a test never performed. A written prescription is different from confirmed drug administration. Absence of a recorded adverse event is different from evidence that none occurred. FDA’s July 2024 guidance on electronic health records and claims data provides useful principles for evaluating relevance, reliability, variable definitions, and traceability.
Consider a hypothetical comparison in which treatment A was preferentially given to fitter patients and treatment B to patients with more advanced disease. A survival difference could reflect treatment selection rather than treatment effect. Adding more observations might make that association more statistically precise without resolving the bias. The essential question is not just whether the model recognizes who did well, but whether the evidence supports changing what is done for a future patient.
HPCwire: Are there established methods for testing the validity of data?
Dr. Hausheer: Data validity should first be assessed through provenance, completeness, consistency, and verification against appropriate source records. Evaluating how the AI uses those data is a separate question. One useful evaluation method for AI systems could be described as time-restricted clinical replay, or back-casting. A well-characterized historical case could be reconstructed at successive decision points: the initial presentation, the first laboratory results, the availability of imaging, and the arrival of pathology or molecular findings. At each stage, the system would receive only the information actually available then—not later results, retrospective diagnostic labels, or narrative clues derived from the eventual outcome.
One could then assess when the system first identifies a clinically important possibility, what additional information it requests, whether it recognizes urgent risks, and whether it recommends an appropriate next step. For a hypothetical evolving toxicity, the question would be whether the system recognizes a concerning pattern early enough to permit useful investigation or intervention, without generating an unacceptable number of false alarms. This measures the trade-off between earlier recognition and reliability, rather than assuming that identification sensitivity and accuracy must improve as information is removed.
Steve Conway is an HPCwire contributor
HPCwire: So, there are multiple types of evaluations. How do they differ?
Dr. Hausheer: Within this replay back-casting validation framework, there are two different evaluation questions that should be kept separate. First, applying a current model and current medical knowledge to earlier patient information asks whether today’s system could support an earlier decision. A second type, reconstructing what could reasonably have been decided at the historical date, additionally requires control over the medical knowledge, guidelines, and model information available at that time. Both can be informative, but they answer different questions. Prompting a current model to disregard later knowledge does not establish that historical knowledge boundary; where it cannot be established, the replay should be described as using current knowledge on earlier patient information.
HPCwire: Have these approaches been used yet where an AI model is involved?
Dr. Hausheer: Related approaches with AI involvement already exist. Tomašev and colleagues reported retrospective, time-dependent prediction of acute kidney injury from longitudinal records in 2019. Hager and colleagues subsequently evaluated language models in a clinical decision-making framework extending beyond examination-style questions. These precedents support expanding staged, clinically realistic evaluation; they do not establish that every present-day system has been adequately tested.
HPCwire: Can back-casting be used to investigate whether AI, if it had been available at the past time, would have improved the patient outcome?
Dr. Hausheer: Back-casting has a causal limitation. It can evaluate earlier recognition and the appropriateness of a recommendation, but the observed outcome under the treatment actually received does not reveal what would have happened under an alternative treatment. Claims that an AI-directed intervention would improve survival or reduce toxicity therefore require an appropriate causal study design, often including prospective comparative evaluation. In my opinion, rigorous temporal replay is an important bridge between static benchmarks and clinical trials, but it is not a substitute for the latter.
HPCwire: So, is there a useful way of comparing the conclusions and recommendations of physicians and AI?
Dr. Hausheer: For any physician–AI comparison, the evaluation report should also identify what information each participant or system received, which references and tools were available, how time was allocated, and what the task actually required. When appropriate, one could compare a clinician using contemporary resources, the AI model alone in a nonclinical evaluation, and the clinician using the model, i.e., the combined physician-AI approach. The comparison should reflect the intended use rather than favor one approach through an artificial information advantage. Material differences between conditions should be transparent.
HPCwire: Who should judge these comparisons and perform a kind of medical “Turing test”?
Dr. Hausheer: The reference assessment deserves independent scrutiny. A historical physician decision is not automatically the correct answer, and a model’s disagreement with it is not automatically an error. Conversely, a plausible alternative is not superior merely because it differs from what was done. Independent expert adjudication, blinded to the source of the answer where feasible, appropriate diagnostic confirmation, and prespecified rules for multiple reasonable choices can strengthen the evaluation. The adjudicators should also separate information available at the decision point from information learned afterward. These are methodological proposals, not conclusions established by the societies’ statement.
Transparency, Trust, and the Meaning of ‘Show Your Work’
HPCwire: What about the AI transparency and trust issue? The medical field is replete with patent and practice lawsuits. Is it much of a problem that if you ask AI to “show me your work,” it may not be able to?
(Shutterstock)
Dr. Hausheer: The important distinction is between a plausible explanation and an auditable evidentiary record. A persuasive narrative does not prove that a recommendation made by AI is correct. For a consequential decision, one should be able to identify the patient information used, the supporting clinical evidence, the applicable decision rules or calculations, and the uncertainties and limitations affecting the recommendation.
A genuine citation can still be misapplied. For example, an oncology publication may concern a different disease stage, prior-treatment setting, molecular subgroup, or treatment combination. The system should therefore identify the relevant finding and explain the match and fit—or mismatch—between the evidence and the patient. It should distinguish randomized comparative evidence from uncontrolled observations, mechanistic plausibility, and exploratory subgroup findings rather than present them as equally persuasive.
HPCwire: What’s the relationship between a prognosis and an outcome prediction?
Dr. Hausheer: Prognosis is itself a prediction of the likely clinical course or outcome. The important distinction here is between prognosis and prediction of treatment benefit. A prognostic factor informs the likelihood of an outcome; a predictive biomarker can help identify differences in response to a particular intervention. FDA and NIH make this distinction in the BEST resource. Identifying a patient at high risk is not equivalent to identifying which intervention will reduce that risk.
HPCwire: I gather it’s very important to make fine distinctions where possible, even within narrow diagnostic categories.
Dr. Hausheer: Yes. For example, EGFR-mutated non-small-cell lung cancer is a subgroup in which the tumor harbors mutations in the epidermal growth factor receptor gene. FDA’s February 16, 2024 approval of osimertinib with pemetrexed and platinum-based chemotherapy concerned first line treatment of locally advanced or metastatic disease with EGFR exon 19 deletions or exon 21 L858R mutations. That evidence should not automatically be extrapolated to every EGFR alteration. Most EGFR exon 20 insertion variants are poorly responsive to conventional EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors at standard doses, although specific exceptions exist. C797S can confer resistance to osimertinib. In contrast, T790M—which may be present before treatment, including as a germline variant, or emerge as acquired resistance—confers resistance to first-generation EGFR inhibitors but is a target of osimertinib.
Not every EGFR alteration is interchangeable, not every patient responds, and prior treatment and de novo and acquired resistance mechanisms remain relevant. That historical approval illustrates the importance of matching the mutation, regimen, and disease setting to the evidence; the FDA approval does not provide an exhaustive current treatment algorithm. An AI recommendation should preserve those distinctions rather than reduce the problem to “an EGFR activating mutation is present, therefore use an EGFR inhibitor.”
Clinical reasoning should be evaluated as a sequence and hierarchy of decisions: interpretation of the history and examination; recognition of urgent alternatives; selection of useful tests; interpretation of their results; and selection of treatment in light of evidence, pharmacology, comorbidities, previous therapy, and patient priorities. A correct diagnosis appearing somewhere in a long list is not equivalent to identifying and managing the clinically important problem.
(Have a nice day Photo/Shutterstock)
HPCwire: How might this diagnostic sequence be adapted so the AI work is more transparent and trustworthy?
Dr. Hausheer: One could maintain an audit record linking relevant source data, timestamps, model and software versions, retrieved evidence, calculations, recommendations, warnings, overrides, and the resulting clinical action. The documented justification should be evidence-linked and distinguish recorded system activity from a narrative explanation generated afterward. It need not purport to expose every internal computation of a neural network. Access, retention, and disclosure should protect patient privacy and follow applicable requirements. The objective is a record sufficient to investigate error, assess whether the system operated within its validated scope, and evaluate responsibility. ICH E6(R3)’s data-governance and computerized-system provisions provide a useful foundation within clinical research.
Before release, an accompanying validation report should make clear what was tested, against which reference assessments, with what error rates and uncertainty, and under which limitations. In my opinion, this combination of traceable evidence and reproducible evaluation is more important than an AI system’s ability to sound as though it has “shown its work.”
Transparency in the Claims Made About AI
HPCwire: How do we avoid AI companies hyping their products, making misleading performance claims?
Dr. Hausheer: The same evidentiary discipline should govern public statements about performance. An AI company should identify the model and configuration tested, the intended task, the comparator, the study population, the outcome measured, uncertainty around the result, and the important limitations. A composite score on written cases should be described as such; it should not be translated into a percentage of patients correctly diagnosed or a demonstrated improvement in survival. Nor should absence of a statistically significant difference be described as proof of equivalence.
HPCwire: Would outside reviews be needed to police AI companies’ claims?
Dr. Hausheer: One could incorporate a claims-review procedure into the Quality Management System (QMS) for an AI-based system. Clinical, statistical, and quality reviewers would link each substantive performance claim to a controlled validation report and verify that the wording does not exceed the evidence. A result obtained with a selected set of completed case summaries should not quietly become a claim about autonomous care of patients presenting with incomplete information. This proposed control would extend traceability to research communications and product descriptions, without implying that applicable legal obligations are limited to the measures described here.
HPCwire: What about AI companies’ communications with patients and potential patients?
Dr. Hausheer Communication with patients deserves comparable care. The American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (ASCO) separate principles address understandable disclosure, fairness, accountability, oversight and privacy, and the preservation of human interaction. In practice, one could explain what role the tool played, the information and limitations relevant to the decision, and who remains responsible for care. Neither reassurance based solely on a brand name nor language implying that a physician is untrustworthy without AI would substitute for that explanation.
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA — Sen. John Fetterman is facing his first Democratic primary challenger for 2028, as Palestinian American writer and businessman Ahmed Moor launches a campaign built around sharply different positions on Israel, economic policy and the direction of the Democratic Party.
Moor, 42, was born in Rafah in the Gaza Strip and now lives in West Philadelphia. He told The Philadelphia Inquirer that he is “not really running against Fetterman,” but instead for “good government,” constitutional rule and broader structural change.
The contrast with Fetterman is especially stark on Israel. Fetterman has become one of the Senate’s most outspoken defenders of Israel since the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks and has said an officially anti-Israel Democratic platform would be a “red line” for him. Moor supports ending U.S. military aid to Israel and imposing sanctions aimed at securing equal rights for Palestinians.
Fetterman has also frustrated many Democrats by increasingly siding with Republicans on selected issues, appearing by video at a GOP convention and occasionally praising President Donald Trump. He nevertheless insists he remains a Democrat and votes with his party the overwhelming majority of the time.
Moor is unlikely to be Fetterman’s only challenger. Pennsylvania Democrats are openly discussing other potential candidates, including Rep. Chris Deluzio, as dissatisfaction with Fetterman grows inside the party.
With Democrats now holding a larger Senate majority, Fetterman’s individual vote carries less leverage than it would have under a narrowly divided chamber.
The university and local police are conducting investigations into Sigma Alpha Epsilon and have placed them on interim suspension
A fraternity at Ohio State University has been temporarily suspended while authorities investigate a video that appears to show two panicked men engulfed in flames.
A video shared on social media shows one individual with his sweatpants on fire who then lunges at a second individual and tackles him to the ground. The second man’s clothing also catches fire, and they both roll on the ground while removing their clothes as several onlookers intervene.
IONOS bare metal servers provide the foundation for companies, researchers, and developers to run AI models on Q.ANT’s photonic hardware.
STUTTGART, Germany and KARLSRUHE, Germany, Nov. 9, 2026 — Q.ANT, a pioneer in commercial photonic computing, today announced the launch of a joint pilot program with IONOS, the leading digitalization partner and trusted cloud enabler for small and medium-sized businesses, to bring photonic computing to commercial bare metal server environments for the first time.
Credit: Q.ANT
The pilot program gives software developers the opportunity to test and evaluate their AI models on real photonic processors running in a bare metal infrastructure on dedicated hardware. This opens up a new way of computing: developers can build leaner AI models to run faster by making direct use of complex nonlinear mathematical functions. These efficiency gains come at a decisive moment. As AI workloads keep growing, the cost of running them is becoming a real limit on how far AI can scale. For data center operators, photonic computing promises lower energy consumption and operating costs.
The launch represents the next step toward commercial adoption of photonic computing, extending access beyond specialized research institutions. Following the launch of Q.ANT’s open-source software development kit (SDK) in September, developers who could previously build and simulate applications only on the SDK can now, for the first time, run their workloads on physical photonic processors through IONOS’s bare metal infrastructure. By making its hardware accessible through IONOS, a leading commercial server hosting provider, Q.ANT paves the way for a new developer ecosystem and a new generation of AI applications.
“Promising computing technologies from Europe need sovereign European infrastructure to make the leap into business use,” said Achim Weiss, CEO of IONOS. “In the pilot program, Q.ANT’s photonic processor runs in an IONOS data center under German jurisdiction. Users can explore processing with light on their own workloads. The results will show which applications benefit most and will feed directly into our future development work.”
“A new computing architecture only becomes commercially relevant when customers can test it against the workloads that matter to them. When we launched our SDK, developers could begin building applications for photonic computing. Now, with IONOS, they can take their work and run those applications on the real processor,” said Dr. Michael Förtsch, Founder and CEO of Q.ANT. “This matters because the conversations around AI are shifting from what the models can do to what it costs to run them. Photonic computing can make the next generation of AI models leaner: complex functions that inflate digital models can be computed with fewer data and parameters with light, resulting in less energy requirements for the same workloads.”
Through the IONOS website, approved applicants will gain access to Q.ANT’s second-generation Native Processing Unit (NPU) via a bare metal server in a German IONOS data center, where they can run and evaluate their own workloads with their own data and software. Developers can also explore new algorithms and AI architectures that use the NPU’s ability to compute complex nonlinear functions natively in light, rather than breaking them down into long sequences of digital steps as CMOS-based chips must. This can deliver comparable or better results with fewer parameters, fewer operations, and fewer resources. At the same time, the program will identify where photonic processing offers the greatest advantages, providing the real-world validation needed for broader commercial deployment.
This pilot marks the next step in the collaboration IONOS and Q.ANT announced in May 2026.
From HPC Testing to Commercial Workloads
Q.ANT’s photonic processor has already been evaluated in operational high-performance computing environments. In March 2026, the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) received Q.ANT’s second-generation processors for testing across HPC and artificial intelligence workloads. The research center subsequently evaluated the hardware on its performance, execution time, energy consumption, error rates, and other metrics.
Q.ANT systems are also operating at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC).
Building for Photonic Computing
The pilot program begins in November 2026 and will be available free of charge to a limited number of selected participants. Applicants must submit a concrete use case through the IONOS website and have the technical expertise required to independently administer a bare metal server.
The program is open to a broad range of AI and computational workloads. Operations such as matrix multiplication and nonlinear mathematical functions are particularly well suited to Q.ANT’s architecture. Potential areas for evaluation include industrial image processing, time-series prediction, scientific simulation, and robotics.
Participants will receive direct support from Q.ANT and IONOS throughout the program. Each engagement will include technical onboarding, project support and workload review by Q.ANT, followed by a final workshop to evaluate results and performance metrics, while IONOS supports participants on the underlying bare metal infrastructure. Feedback from participants will help form further development of Q.ANT’s processor and software stack.
The pilot systems will be hosted in Germany within IONOS infrastructure. IONOS data centers are ISO 27001 certified and provides European data residency for workloads hosted in Germany.
Q.ANT is commercializing photonic accelerators for AI and high-performance computing, offering a scalable alternative to transistor-based systems. Its Native Processing Units (NPUs) perform mathematical operations directly on Thin-Film Lithium Niobate (TFLN)-based photonic integrated circuits, enabling energy-efficient, high-performance co-processing for complex computational tasks.
Q.ANT was founded in 2018. Its European headquarters is in Stuttgart, Germany, where it operates its own TFLN chip pilot line, and it maintains further offices in Munich and a U.S. office in Austin, Texas. The company secured Europe’s largest Series A for photonic computing in 2025 and introduced its second-generation processor the same year. Its systems are now installed and running at leading scientific computing centers, with commercial deployment through IONOS.
About IONOS
IONOS is the leading digitalization partner and trusted cloud enabler for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The company serves ~7 million customers and has a presence in 17 markets across Europe and North America, with its services being accessible worldwide. As an AI-first company, IONOS integrates AI across its entire product portfolio, which caters to all digitalization needs: from domains, web hosting, website and app builders to eCommerce and online marketing tools, powered by AI. IONOS also offers cloud solutions for scaling businesses and the public sector looking to move their operations to the cloud as they expand.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky formally filed eight articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday, setting up a House vote that could come as soon as Wednesday.
Massie accuses Hegseth of violating the War Powers Resolution by continuing military operations in Iran without congressional authorization, ignoring congressional efforts to terminate hostilities, and carrying out other allegedly unlawful military actions. Additional articles accuse Hegseth of failing to minimize civilian casualties, authorizing extrajudicial killings, retaliating against critics, and suppressing protected speech.
The accusations remain allegations contained in Massie’s impeachment resolution, not judicial findings. Hegseth and the Pentagon reject them, calling the effort politically motivated and insisting the department has acted lawfully.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries says he is a “hard yes” on impeachment, while several Republicans are also considering supporting the measure. Axios reported GOP leaders are preparing for enough Republican defections that the resolution could pass the narrowly divided House.
Even if impeached, Hegseth would remain in office unless two-thirds of the Senate votes to convict and remove him. That remains a substantially higher hurdle.
Massie first introduced similar charges in September, but House leaders adjourned before a vote could occur.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Investigators at the Commerce Department were deep into a monthslong investigation of a Singaporean company that they suspected of smuggling Nvidia's artificial intelligence chips into China when their work came to a sudden halt late last year. The investigation centered on Megaspeed, a data center company led by an executive who U.S. officials now believe to be a Chinese spy who had a relationship with Nvidia's chief executive, Jensen Huang. But the case was abruptly transferred to the Justice Department last year. The shift came after Commerce Department investigators working on the case received an email from Nvidia's general counsel seeking information about the inquiry into Megaspeed.
It is not necessarily unusual for Commerce Department agents working on a case to speak with a company's representatives about issues involving their firm. But what was unusual was the content of the message. Tim Teter, Nvidia's general counsel, said that Jeff Kessler, a top official at the department, had given Nvidia permission to reach out about the case. The agents were alarmed that Nvidia had invoked the name of Mr. Kessler, their superior, who was nominated to his role by President Trump. Some viewed Mr. Kessler's interaction with Nvidia as violating government procedure and potentially tainting the case, according to current and former government officials and others familiar with the incident.
It is not clear what led to Mr. Teter's outreach to the department, but the recent revelations about Mr. Huang's acknowledged affair with a Megaspeed executive have only intensified scrutiny of Nvidia's role in influencing policy on chip sales to China. [...] The incident raised questions about what Mr. Kessler, who reports directly to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, had discussed with Nvidia. It also raised the possibility that those discussions could become their own subject of inquiry. Perhaps inadvertently, some officials said, Mr. Kessler had opened himself to accusations of undue influence and potentially jeopardized his department's work on Megaspeed. The case was quickly transferred to the Justice Department in an effort to avoid any potential compromise of the government's investigation of Megaspeed, these people said. The Justice Department is conducting a criminal inquiry into Megaspeed, according to people familiar with the matter.
Calley Means claims officials abandoned Maha agenda and took money from sugar industry leading up to midterms
A former top Trump administration health adviser accused Susie Wiles, whom Donald Trump removed as the White House chief of staff last week, of stalling the so-called “Make America Healthy Again” (Maha) agenda by prioritizing special interest groups and fundraising before the midterm elections.
Calley Means, who resigned two weeks ago from his job advising Robert F Kennedy Jr, blamed Wiles and other Trump staffers for dropping the ball on the Maha agenda to take money from the sugar industry to fuel the midterms – which Republicans ultimately lost.
John Fetterman, the maverick Democratic senator who has provoked widespread anger by increasingly siding with Republicans, is to be challenged for his Pennsylvania seat by a democratic socialist candidate who is originally from Gaza.
Ahmed Moor, a Palestinian American, said he would run in a primary to be the Democratic nominee in 2028, when Fetterman’s seat is up for re-election.
Cerabyte Joins Los Alamos National Laboratory to Discuss Storage Innovation
SANTA CLARA, Calif. and CHICAGO, Nov. 9, 2026 — Cerabyte today announced that it will join experts from Los Alamos National Laboratory for a panel discussion at Supercomputing 2026 (SC26). The experts will examine how industry consolidation, limited investment in long-cycle research/development and growing AI and HPC demands are creating new challenges for the future of data storage.
The discussion will explore why traditional storage technologies are struggling to meet growing AI, HPC and hyperscale demands, and how emerging approaches, including ceramic data storage, are driving future innovation.
Who: Panelists: Gary Grider, Los Alamos National Laboratory; and Candace Culhane, Los Alamos National Laboratory; Steffen Hellmold, Cerabyte
Moderator: Matt Klusas, West Ox Advisors
When: Friday, Nov. 20, 2026, at 10:30 a.m. to 12 noon CST
Where: McCormick Place Convention Center, Room W185abc
“The data storage industry is facing a vertical market failure, creating two fundamental challenges – meeting growing demand and developing technologies for emerging use cases,” said Christian Pflaum, CEO of Cerabyte. “AI and HPC are creating new demands that traditional data storage technologies are struggling to meet. Innovations such as Ceramic Data Storage offer a new approach to addressing these challenges and shaping the future of data storage.”
Cerabyte’s ceramic-on-glass technology is designed for long-term, immutable data retention across applications including AI infrastructure, digital preservation, scientific and medical research, hyperscale computing and organizations managing petabyte- to zettabyte-scale datasets.
Cerabyte is at the forefront of developing sustainable, accessible, permanent data storage technology. Our innovative ceramic-based technology uses advanced laser-matrix writing and high-speed microscope reading technologies, forming the cornerstone of a system that can store immense amounts of data virtually forever, with no data migration required and retrieval within seconds. Our cost-effective, immutable data storage offers virtually unlimited media life and is fully recyclable, helping to reduce environmental and carbon footprint. Leveraging semiconductor manufacturing tool technology, we scale density and speed and are uniquely positioned to pave the way to the yottabyte era, leading the emergence of the industry’s newest storage tier. Learn more at www.cerabyte.com.
The AI chip boss’s actions raise urgent questions about corporate influence, national security and the US president’s willingness to listen to intelligence warnings
It could be the plot of a spy thriller. One of the most powerful figures in the AI revolution admitted to having an affair with a Chinese businesswomen said to have passed intelligence to Beijing. When Donald Trump was briefed about the Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang’s liaisons with Alice Huang, he took no action. Perhaps he thought only marriage vows had been broken. Or perhaps Mr Trump was willing to overlook the conduct of a friend who championed his unpopular datacentre expansion, whose company donated to his White House ballroom and who echoed his opposition to AI safeguards against expert advice.
Nvidia became the cornerstone of AI by supplying brute computing power. As tech giants scrambled for the firm’s graphics processing units (GPUs), Mr Huang sold the picks and shovels for the AI gold rush – and amassed a $160bn fortune. When China joined the race for tech supremacy, Nvidia’s microchips became a national security issue. In October 2022, the US slapped export controls on GPU sales to China. Thirty months later, Nvidia was effectively banned from selling to Beijing. Mr Huang lobbied for looser controls. Such was his sway with Mr Trump that the White House scrapped Biden-era global AI chip restrictions and then permitted sales of Nvidia’s prized H200 processors to Chinese customers.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Women say move will be ‘massively detrimental’ to services for vulnerable children, and hit their own pensions
The 33 women waving banners outside a nursery in the South Yorkshire village of Grimethorpe have never been on strike before.
Passing cars beep their horns in support of the workers, who have taken action at six nurseries run by Barnsley council after its Reform UK leadership agreed to transfer them to private companies. They say the move will have a hugely negative impact on the services they provide to vulnerable children, and to their own pensions.
Will the US and Iran return to war? Expert commentjon.wallace
That is not only President Trump’s decision. Iran may also reignite the conflict, in an attempt to break the US blockade.
In recent weeks there has been considerable speculation that the US would carry out new attacks on Iran once the US midterm elections were concluded. But with the vote complete, Washington’s next move remains unclear.
In a recent 60 minutes interview US President Donald Trump said he did not see ‘any reason’ to escalate the war. It is possible that the president chooses not to resume military operations against Iran and settles for continuing the current policy of economic strangulation. But even in that case, a return to armed conflict cannot be ruled out. Tehran is unlikely to absorb US pressure quietly while its economy further deteriorates. This is the irony of the US naval blockade of Iran. There’s evidence to suggest it has effectively hurt the regime’s finances. Iran loaded no oil onto tankers in September according to some analyses.
But the blockade is unlikely to succeed in achieving the strategic objective of forcing the regime to make significant concessions at the bargaining table. Instead, it might push Tehran to lash out, which would take all parties back to square one in this conflict.
Stalemate
The blockade of Iranian oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz has evolved over the past few months. Washington launched the operation back in April; eased it after agreeing to the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Iran in June (which allowed for the reopening of the Strait); then reinstated it on 14 July as the deal unravelled.
Iran wants the blockade lifted and its conditions met before it reopens and stops its attacks in the Strait. Washington wants concessions on Iran’s nuclear programme before resuming any talks on maritime security.
It’s a stalemate. But it may not last long. The deep distrust between the two sides will make Iran doubt that US concessions will be durable enough to bring it lasting economic relief. Some in the regime will believe it is better for Iran to fight on its own terms than collapse from within as the economy is throttled.
It will not necessarily require a new US military strike on its territory for Iran to lash out at its neighbours. In 2019, Iran responded to Trump’s economic ‘maximum pressure’ tactics with a series of attacks. In May and June of that year, it struck tankers near Fujairah and in the Gulf of Oman and shot down a US surveillance drone.
Then on 14 September, drones and missiles hit Saudi Aramco’s Abqaiq processing facility and the Khurais oil field. The Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen claimed responsibility, but the US and Saudi blamed Iran. The message from Tehran was clear: We will respond to extreme economic pressure by attacking Gulf energy infrastructure.
Defending a founding narrative
There are two main reasons why Iran responded this way to economic pressure before – and why it may do so again.
The first is ideological. Iran isn’t just defending its shipping lanes and oil exports in this war. It is protecting its founding narrative of sacrifice and endurance. This is what Washington still doesn’t seem to get.
Since its founding, the Islamic Republic has staked its reputation on not just resisting outside pressure but also defying it. Sanctions, isolation, and military threats won’t coerce or bring down the regime: that’s the message Tehran keeps telling its constituencies and adversaries. The war with Iraq of 1980 to 1988 provides the clearest illustration of the regime’s commitment to that principle. Iran fought the war almost on its own, against an adversary backed by the US and Gulf states, and it survived. A difficult year or two as a result of a blockade is hardly comparable to what the regime endured at that time.
The Iranian leadership is betting that if it holds out long enough, those with the most to lose from this economic crisis…will press Washington harder to find an exit.
The second reason is practical: Iranian defiance, unlike during the Iraq war, is now aided by outsiders. The biggest source of support is China, through its purchasing of Iranian oil. No wonder US officials have reportedly urged Beijing to play a more constructive role in ending the conflict. They understand that without China, the regime’s staying power will drastically diminish.
Tehran also knows that the Gulf states want the blockade to end. The status quo is causing them tremendous economic pain. The Iranian leadership is betting that if it holds out long enough, those with the most to lose from this economic crisis – Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Kuwait – will press Washington harder to find an exit.
There are limits to Iranian resilience, of course. In 1988, after Operation Praying Mantis (a one-off US strike against Iranian naval resources ordered by President Ronald Reagan) and months of mounting losses, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a ceasefire with Iraq. He famously likened it to drinking poison. Yet it showed that when its survival was at stake, Iran could concede (if not surrender).
But the blockade is not the same situation at all. In 1988, there was no way Iran could have won the war. Continuing would have probably led to military collapse.
Today Iran believes it has the upper hand. Listen to statements by Iranian officials, and it is clear they believe they have already won this contest. That’s partly true. The Iranian regime will, most likely, survive this conflict and possibly avert a new major US attack, which it would define as victory.
But it still has to address the blockade. If history is any guide, Iran will at some point resort to violence to try to force Washington to reconsider. That, in turn, is unlikely to succeed: the US has its pride, too, and its interests. US officials are convinced that the blockade is working, so giving it up won’t be easy. If anything, Washington is doubling down by giving US Central Command the green light to establish a new task force meant to ‘prevent Iran from using ground routes to transport advanced weapons and other materials.’
There’s only one way out of this stalemate: phased diplomacy, which the two sides are apparently considering. The basic sequencing is clear: In the first phase, Washington would need to partially lift the blockade in exchange for Iran reopening the Strait and ceasing all attacks against shipping. In the second, nuclear talks could take place, including the gradual lifting of sanctions and the release of frozen Iranian funds.
The two sides are keen to end the conflict. But they appear equally determined to avoid any perceived humiliation and Israel remains an unpredictable factor. Even now, it is not clear that sense will prevail.
Partnership Pairs IonQ’s Full-Stack Quantum Platform With Carahsoft’s Government Procurement Network to Support Public Sector Quantum Adoption
COLLEGE PARK, Md. and RESTON, Va., Nov. 9, 2026 — IonQ and Carahsoft Technology Corp. today announced a strategic partnership. The collaboration intends to drive quantum computing, networking, sensing and security adoption across Federal agencies and their industry partners. Under the agreement, Carahsoft will serve as IonQ’s Public Sector distributor, enabling Government agencies to purchase IonQ technology through its reseller partners.
The IonQ-Carahsoft partnership comes as the Federal Government accelerates its commitment to quantum innovation. Executive Order 14413, Ushering in the Next Frontier of Quantum Innovation, directs a Government-wide strategy to advance quantum commercialization, deployment and collaboration with U.S. industry. Through this partnership, IonQ and Carahsoft aim to expand Federal access to emerging quantum technologies, streamline procurement and support mission-critical national security objectives.
“IonQ and Carahsoft will have a powerful partnership across the entire Public Sector, including higher education, State, Local Government, Department of [Defense], civilian and the integrator and partner community,” said Steve Harris, IonQ Senior Vice President and General Manager, Public Sector. “Through this relationship quantum solutions ranging from computing, networking, security to sensing will be more readily accessible during this important time when quantum progress is an immediate and critical requirement.”
IonQ’s full-stack quantum platform extends beyond computing to include networking, security and sensing. These technologies serve complementary roles: sensing provides precise measurements, networking connects systems, security protects information and computing addresses complex analytical challenges. Together, they give agencies and partners a foundation for coordinating how information is collected, connected, protected and processed.
Carahsoft will support procurement and pricing, access to applicable contract vehicles, channel sales, product resale and distribution. This arrangement is intended to help resellers and Federal systems integrators align their offerings with agency requirements.
“We are pleased to partner with IonQ to expand access to innovative quantum technologies that help address the evolving mission needs of Federal agencies and the broader Public Sector,” said Alex Whitworth, Program Executive for Quantum Solutions at Carahsoft. “Together with our reseller partners, we look forward to simplifying procurement, fostering collaboration across the Government technology ecosystem and helping Public Sector organizations explore how quantum innovation can strengthen national security, mission resilience and the nation’s technological leadership.”
This announcement builds on IonQ’s strong track record of Government collaboration. The company has advanced to Stage C, the third and final stage of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, where its approach to utility-scale quantum computing will undergo independent verification and validation. Its collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) includes a quantum network delivered in Rome, New York and follow-on work to extend the network’s optical, hardware and software capabilities toward operational interoperability.
IonQ’s solutions are available through Carahsoft’s reseller partners. For more information, contact the Carahsoft Team at (571) 662-4771 or IonQ@carahsoft.com; or learn more about IonQ’s solutions here.
About IonQ
IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ) is the world’s leading quantum platform and foundry – delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. IonQ’s newest generation of quantum computers, the Superion, is the latest in a line of cutting-edge systems. Earlier systems have helped customers and partners including Amazon Web Services, AstraZeneca, and NVIDIA achieve a 20x performance increase over previous quantum solutions and accelerate innovation in drug discovery, materials science, financial modeling, logistics, cybersecurity, and defense. In 2025, the company achieved 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity, setting a world record in quantum computing performance.
About Carahsoft
Carahsoft Technology Corp. is The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider, supporting Public Sector organizations across Federal, State and Local Government agencies and Education and Healthcare markets. As the Master Government Aggregator for our vendor partners, we deliver solutions for Cybersecurity, MultiCloud, DevSecOps, Artificial Intelligence, Customer Experience and Engagement, Open Source and more. Working with resellers, systems integrators and consultants, our sales and marketing teams provide industry leading IT products, services and training through hundreds of contract vehicles. Visit us at www.carahsoft.com.
After hitting a curb at 5 mph the motor for a second spun up to max duty cycle and pulled 140amps. Now the board does not turn on. Pulled the Little focer 4 ( black diamond). Resistor 490 labeled was open. Replaced it now it heats up and still nothing. One of the chips I broke lsc43(u19). I cannot find any part number and the marking don’t pop up anywhere. Removed some of the caps in that area and regulators. There still shows that there is a ground problem. The black is from the potting material
I removed the 3.3regulater and supplied my own 3.3v and it booted up. Now I’m trying to locate that chip SC43 or an equivalent one.
High winds and heavy rain triggered collapse of sand bank overlooking camp for displaced families
Witnesses have described the frantic struggle to save three members of a family buried by a landslide triggered by high winds and heavy rain in Gaza.
A sand bank overlooking a camp for displaced families south of Deir al-Balahcollapsed on Sunday, killing five people and crushing at least three tents.
Russell Brand was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison on Monday after a judge praised his victims’ bravery and accused him of living “unhindered by the rules by which decent people live”.
As the judge, Mr Justice Bennathan, sentenced Brand for raping one woman and sexually assaulting three others, he said he had told the trial “a series of lies”. The disgraced comedian had displayed a “casual, arrogant disregard of any woman’s right to say no”, he said.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas is pushing back against calls from some progressives to abolish or defund Immigration and Customs Enforcement, arguing that most Democrats support keeping the agency while imposing tighter limits on how it operates.
Cuellar, who represents a South Texas border district, is expected to chair the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee when Democrats take control of the chamber. That position would give him significant influence over ICE funding and immigration enforcement policy.
“I don’t believe in defunding ICE, and I think the majority of the Democrats do not believe defunding ICE,” Cuellar told Fox News Digital.
At the same time, he said the agency needs “serious guardrails,” particularly when enforcement targets undocumented immigrants without violent criminal records. President Donald Trump made a similar acknowledgment Sunday, saying parts of his deportation policy had been “too tough.”
Cuellar also criticized the Biden administration’s border policies, saying Democrats should not return to an approach that allowed large numbers of asylum seekers to enter while their cases were pending.
His comments place him between two competing factions within the Democratic Party: progressives calling for major structural changes to ICE and centrists who favor continued enforcement with stronger oversight.
Cuellar won reelection last week by more than 36 points in a district Trump carried in 2024, strengthening his influence within the party’s border-policy debate.
Google is expanding its AI chip lineup with two specialized TPUs arriving next year: the TPU 8tx, which encrypts sensitive data at the chip level for confidential computing, and the TPU 8i Max, which combines two TPU chips to provide more processing power and memory for long-context workloads. The move broadens Google's challenge to Nvidia as demand outstrips supply, with Google saying every TPU it currently has is already committed to customers. Quartz reports: The 8tx is designed for sensitive, privacy-focused jobs run by clients including public-sector bodies and businesses in heavily regulated sectors, according to Bloomberg. It pairs with a central processing unit from Advanced Micro Devices and encrypts data at the chip level. Normally, data must be decrypted in memory as the machine works on it, [said Amin Vahdat, Chief Technologist for AI & Infrastructure at Google].
The 8i Max is meant for AI applications that need long context windows, meaning the volume of information a model can take into account within one request. Vahdat said that matters for drug discovery, math and coding. The chip packs two TPU chips together, giving it extra processing muscle and memory.
Both variations are reconfigured versions of existing silicon rather than new designs, Vahdat said. Google changed them to handle tasks customers have requested. They follow two TPU models Google released this year, according to Bloomberg, which said the chip unit used to release one new processor every two years. "We could build a single chip that tries to address the whole market, or by building specialized versions of the chips, we actually can deliver much more value," Vahdat said, according to Bloomberg.
Exclusive: WhatsApp messages show firm pressuring Zubir Ahmed MP to help bring sensitive data into its platform
Palantir lobbied a health minister to consider extending its AI technology into GP records, stretching its reach into the NHS in a way doctors fear could undermine trust with patients.
The US company, co-founded by the Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel, used a direct WhatsApp channel to argue that “the logic of joining up primary and secondary [care] data is unarguable” and said its software was “ideal” for the job. The push came in February this year despite GP data being expressly ruled out of the scope of Palantir’s existing £330m contract with NHS England to run its federated data platform (FDP), which it says has helped cut surgery waiting times and discharge delays.
The lack of public information about the Megaspeed boss is fuelling claims she is a Chinese intelligence asset
There is little public information available about Alice Huang, the woman reportedly at the centre of the Jensen Huang honeypot allegations, a fact that has only added fuel to claims she is a Chinese intelligence asset.
She was the chief executive of a Singapore-based datacentre company reportedly suspected of evading US export controls and routing Nvidia chips to China.
French foreign minister vows European sanctions against Tehran over ‘unprecedented’ hacks last month
France has said Iran was responsible for a massive cyber-attack on supermarket freezers and chiller cabinets that was described by its foreign minister as being an act of “unprecedented scale and unprecedented aggression”.
Jean-Noël Barrot said “Europe-wide sanctions” would be imposed against those responsible, adding that the attacks – which took control of digital thermostats to push temperatures up to above 50C – constituted “a major violation of the nation’s interests”.
Dianna Russini will return to sports media with a weekly one-hour show focused on the NFL backed by offshore sportsbook BetUS, she announced Monday.
The Russini Report will stream on BetUS TV’s website and X account, accompanied by a weekly analysis column. BetUS has described the program as a “live NFL betting show” that will run through the remainder of the season with game previews, matchup breakdowns and guest interviews.
Simon Stiell makes opening address at summit in Turkey, where talks are under way about speeding up shift to electrification
A global fossil fuel price crisis is “spreading inflation like a cancer” around the planet, the UN’s climate chief, Simon Stiell, told the opening plenary of critical UN climate talks in Turkey.
Stiell joined Cop31 hosts Turkey and Australia, which is leading the negotiations, in promoting renewable energy and a new electrification goal as an optimistic alternative to a planet still tied to oil, coal and gas.
LONDON, Nov. 9, 2026 — The UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) has signed an enterprise license agreement with Phasecraft to give UK organizations access to Phasecraft’s quantum software with the aim of accelerating the use of quantum computing for real-world problems across the UK as part of the NQCC’s wider SparQ Access initiative.
As part of the collaboration, the NQCC and Phasecraft will invite proposals from UK businesses and researchers to leverage Phasecraft’s software for their own challenges in areas like materials science, chemistry, and optimization, with support from Phasecraft’s scientists and engineers. Places are also reserved for the NQCC and academics to carry out non-commercial research.
Simon Plant, Deputy Director at the National Quantum Computing Centre, said: “Our mission at the NQCC is to ensure that UK businesses, academia and the public sector are well positioned to realize the benefits of quantum computing. This new partnership with Phasecraft marks the first time we are making quantum software available through our SparQ program, helping organizations develop the skills, knowledge and experience they need on their journey towards quantum readiness.”
Ashley Montanaro, co-founder and CEO of Phasecraft, said: “The NQCC has long been a leader in providing UK businesses and researchers with access to cutting-edge quantum hardware. Now, with this groundbreaking partnership, these organizations will also have access to the world’s best quantum software. We’re thrilled to put Phasecraft’s technology to work and make quantum computing useful for pioneering teams across the UK.”
Phasecraft’s Tools
Participants will work with one of three Phasecraft tools:
Magritte: a quantum-enhanced materials and molecular modeling tool for exploring quantum simulation applications through resource estimation and quantum circuit construction.
Monet: a quantum-enhanced density functional theory (DFT) tool for modeling materials and molecular systems.
Mondrian: a quantum-enhanced optimization platform for accelerating the solution to complex problems in areas such as finance, logistics or infrastructure, available through a web interface or API.
How the Program Works
The NQCC will invite expressions of interest from late November 2026, and the first cohort will start in Spring 2027. For more information, please contact the NQCC at SparQAccess@stfc.ac.uk or Phasecraft at partnerships@phasecraft.io.
Phasecraft is the UK and US-based quantum algorithms company whose mission is to accelerate the practical application of quantum computing by redesigning quantum algorithms for the imperfect quantum computers of today. Phasecraft was founded in 2019 by Toby Cubitt, Ashley Montanaro, and John Morton, expert quantum scientists who have spent decades leading top research teams at UCL and the University of Bristol. Phasecraft works in partnership with leading quantum hardware companies, including Google, IBM, Quantinuum, and QuEra, academic and industry leaders, to develop high-efficiency algorithms to move quantum computing from experimental demonstrations to useful applications.
Five-times Olympic judo champion Teddy Riner says he is neither leftwing nor rightwing but would seek to ‘bring people together’
The French judo star and five-times Olympic gold medallist Teddy Riner has announced plans to run in next year’s presidential election, describing himself as someone neither leftwing nor rightwing but who would seek to “bring people together”.
With more than five months before the April-May ballot to replace Emmanuel Macron, the race has been shaping up to be a showdown between political extremes. Polls point to a hollowing out of the political centre, suggesting that the anti-immigrant National Rally leader Marine Le Pen could be the frontrunner, with the radical-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon trailing behind.
Power Four conference title games to be eliminated
Five teams will auto-qualify with rest picked by panel
The College Football Playoff will double in size to 24 teams beginning next year, bringing an end to a three-decade era of conference title games that were among the marquee events of the season.
College leaders announced the new format Monday, after ESPN agreed to rework its contract to add the 11 new games. Terms were not announced, though ESPN said it was a deal for five years and an additional $1.7bn, on top of the $7.8bn contract that runs through the 2031 season.
Too big – and too well-connected – to sack? One doesn’t have to be overly cynical to think Jensen Huang, the Nvidia boss, starts with one huge advantage as the chipmaker’s board starts its independent investigation into the alleged honeytrap spy scandal. The world of US big tech is not, to put it mildly, strong on checks and balances on a founder’s power.
Huang does not enjoy the supercharged voting rights that are par for the course elsewhere – his shareholding is a plain vanilla 3.6%. On the other hand, Nvidia’s board does not appear to have spent much time worrying about succession planning and “key person risk” or other standard concerns of corporate governance wonks outside the US.
Stephen Miller, the architect of Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy and hardline crackdown on immigration, took up his new role as White House chief of staff on Monday.
Miller, 41, began his new role serving as Trump’s right-hand man after Republicans suffered massive losses nationwide in the midterm elections. He was previously serving as a deputy chief of staff.
Disgraced British television personality and Hollywood actor Russell Brand has been sentenced to prison for raping a woman in 2009 and sexually assaulting three others.
Investors are questioning whether Huang's future as Nvidia's CEO may be at risk amid allegations that he was targeted in a Chinese intelligence operation.
Huawei has unveiled the Qingyun HM650, a desktop PC it claims is made entirely from Chinese-manufactured components, including its own 10-core Kirin X90 processor and an enterprise version of HarmonyOS. "While Huawei has reportedly claimed local companies manufactured 100 percent of the components in the machine, it is unclear if all those components use Chinese designs," notes The Register. From the report: A single Chinese government agency has reportedly signed up for 600 of the machines. That's not an indication this machine is a curiosity, because Beijing has ordered all government entities to shift from Wintel boxes to local alternatives. [...] Even if Huawei is using some parts that aren't entirely Chinese, the debut of the Qingyun HM650 is bad news for Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm, as all are suffering as the PC market shrinks due to the rising cost of memory. China's government is an enormous buyer, and losing the chance to bid for its business is unlikely to be helpful.
Exclusive: MP Chris Ward believes ditching pledges and forming closer ties with EU would protect it from global threats
One of the architects of Keir Stamer’s Brexit red lines has called for Andy Burnham to abandon them at the next election, saying a new relationship with the EU would protect the UK from global threats.
Hospital consultants are set to go on a two-day strike at the end of October
Downing Street has insisted that the government remains committed to the principle of the zero emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate – while not denying today’s Guardian report saying interim targets to achieve it are set to be watered down. (See 9.26am.)
Asked about the story at the daily lobby briefing, the PM’s spokesperson said:
The government is fully behind the zero emission vehicle mandate, and no decisions have been taken yet.
We’re sticking to our commitment, phasing out new cars that run only on petrol or diesel by 2030, every new car and van will be zero emission by 2035, and our legally binding net zero targets. None of that is changing.
Kim Kardashian's SKIMS apparel brand has faced backlash from TikTok creators over its Advent calendar, which includes various small accessories and costs $148.
Nov. 9, 2026 — SC26 is less than a week away. This year’s event will be held in Chicago, from Sunday, Nov. 15 to Friday, Nov. 20, at McCormick Place. The U.S. National Science Foundation ACCESS program will have a booth at the conference, and the ACCESS team will be presenting at several events.
Topics cover AI, NSF’s cyberinfrastructure future, research software engineering and more. Here’s a sampling of ACCESS-affiliated content at SC26 to put on the calendar:
ACCESS at Booth 850
You can find a map of the SC26 exhibits here. ACCESS will host its ACCESS the Experts series on Tuesday, Nov. 17, with a high concentration of experts and Principal Investigators (PIs) on hand to answer questions (full schedule below). ACCESS will continue to have a booth staffed with experts throughout the duration of the conference, who will be available to offer guidance about the program and its resources.
The ACCESS team will also have some goodies for visitors to the booth to take home. When you stop by, look for ACCESS-branded keychain phone stand! The team will also have the new Program Year 4 booklet highlighting some of the many accomplishments and research enabled by ACCESS over its fourth year.
ACCESS Resource Providers will also be at SC26, and their booths have exciting events planned as well. Here’s a list of ACCESS Resource Provider (RP) booth locations:
Check out some highlighted RP events in the schedule below to see what ACCESS-affiliated events are happening throughout the conference:
Sunday, Nov. 15
Workshop: 13th Annual International Workshop on Innovating the Network for Data Intensive Science — INDIS
Data networks are the circulatory system for science, discovery, society and industry. But scientific data networking is not a solved problem, and significant challenges remain. These challenges reflect scientists’ persistent needs from data networks: ever-increasing capacity, flexibility, consistency and collaboration. The theme for the 13th INDIS workshop is Connected Science: Bridging Research and Industry – reflecting not only the role of networking in connecting scientific infrastructure, but also our community’s collaborations across different types of organizations to advance data-intensive science. This year, INDIS plans to continue its tradition of having a discussion- and interaction-oriented schedule. INDIS 2026 complements the HPC-focused SC26 Technical Program, providing a dedicated platform for HPC researchers to explore data-intensive computing, interconnects and networking.
Workshop: hpcGPT: A Flexible Framework for Agentic User Support in HPC
High-performance computing centers spend significant staff time addressing recurring user questions about account management, software environments, job scheduling and system architectures. Analyses of historical support tickets show that a small number of topics account for a disproportionate share of user requests, yet much of this knowledge remains buried in closed tickets and dispersed documentation. We present hpcGPT, an agentic command-line support assistant that combines OpenCode, a provider-independent terminal interface, with Model Context Protocol tools. The system delivers contextualized responses by integrating site documentation, historical ticket knowledge and live cluster information, while preserving the ability to escalate unresolved issues through existing ticketing workflows. We describe the system architecture, MCP tool ecosystem and ticket knowledge pipeline, including data ingestion, PII scrubbing and retrieval mechanisms. Finally, we report on a pilot deployment in a production HPC environment and discuss its potential to improve user support, accelerate access to expertise and reduce staff workload.
Workshop: From Answering to Acting: An AI Agent for Research Computing User Support
RCD/HPC centers increasingly run support chatbots, but these rely on static documentation and cannot handle changing information or act when a user needs something done. We describe our experience building an agent for a national cyberinfrastructure program that both answers questions from live infrastructure data and takes actions on the researcher’s behalf, such as registering them for events, posting announcements, and filing tickets, under their own federated identity, with user data kept inside institutional infrastructure and a confirmation step before consequential writes. Because help is only useful if it stays good, we evaluate answers with a judge validated against human reviewers, which separates the agent from plain retrieval (0.97 vs. 0.47), and we run that evaluation two ways: a release gate that catches our own regressions and a drift detector that catches when the underlying information has gone stale.
Workshop: Quantifying Workload Exposure in HPC Power Telemetry at Operational Sampling Rates
HPC centers publish power telemetry to support monitoring, scheduling and optimization. While this telemetry is published for operational use, it can also reveal information about the workloads on a system. Prior work shows workloads leave signatures in high-frequency telemetry. How much of that signature survives at the coarse rates used in production is unknown. We study workloads using CPU power telemetry from Intel RAPL at approximately 1 kHz, downsampled to intervals as coarse as 60 s, measuring recoverability for resource classes and for individual workloads on unseen problem sizes. Recoverability declines as sampling coarsens, from 0.87 to 0.71 for resource class and 0.74 to 0.54 for workload identity. In short jobs, temporal information distinguishing individual workloads disappears under coarse sampling, while the steady power composition remains. At coarse rates, distinct workloads remain identifiable while similar ones become indistinguishable. Thus, coarsening the sampling rate is a practical but incomplete privacy control.
Monday, Nov. 16
Workshop: Research Software Engineers in HPC (RSE-HPC-2026)
9:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m., Location: W181c (link to event)
Research software engineers (RSEs) are critical to the impact of HPC, data science and the larger scientific community. They have existed for decades, though often under different names. In the past several years, however, the RSE concept has developed, along with common job titles and career paths; professional networks connecting RSEs; and RSE groups at universities, national laboratories and in industry. This workshop will bring together RSEs and allies involved in HPC from all over the world to grow the RSE community by establishing and strengthening professional networks of current RSEs and RSE leaders. We’ll hear about successes and challenges that RSEs and RSE groups have experienced, and discuss ways to increase awareness of RSE opportunities and improve support for RSEs. The workshop will be highly interactive, featuring panels, an invited talk and short submitted talks.
Workshop: The Relationship Between AI and Research Data Management
With the scientific world focused on becoming ‘AI Ready’, a new opportunity has emerged: revisiting long-standing challenges and unmet needs in research data management and computation-heavy science. This talk examines that opportunity from two angles and the relative value propositions of both:
As newer AI technologies become more ubiquitous in science, what new approaches to research data management do they require?
How can research data management practices be applied to mine computational artifacts (e.g., benchmarks) for insight?
Tuesday, Nov. 17
Panel, Regional Tech Hub: From Discovery to Patient Impact: Bridging the Translational Gap
10:30 a.m. – 12 p.m., Location: W184bcd (link to event)
Bringing biomedical discoveries from the research environment to the bedside requires more than technology. It requires collaboration across disciplines, institutions and perspectives. This panel brings together participants from the Regional Technical Hub representing academia, national laboratories, industry and clinical practice to share their experiences using AI, high-performance computing and other advanced technologies to accelerate biomedical research and translation. Panelists will explore the opportunities and challenges of cross-disciplinary collaboration, translating innovation into practice, integrating new tools into clinical workflows and responsibly working with sensitive biomedical and clinical data. Together, we will consider how to bridge the translational gap and harness emerging technologies to improve patient outcomes.
BoF: Reproducibility of Computational Research: Building a Community of Practice for the AI Era
Reproducibility remains a fundamental challenge for computational science and AI-enabled research. Building on successful BoFs at SC22, SC24, and PEARC22-PEARC25, we established the Reproducibility of Computational Research Community of Practice, which now includes an active mailing list, public website, webinar series and emerging working groups. This interactive BoF will engage the SC26 community in shaping the next phase of this effort by sharing community progress, launching working groups, and exploring how AI can improve the capture of reproducible computational artifacts while addressing new challenges. The session welcomes researchers, research computing professionals, software developers, librarians and cyberinfrastructure practitioners.
BoF: Advanced Architecture Testbeds: Community Resources for HPC-AI Research
Testbeds play a vital role in assessing the readiness of novel architectures for upcoming supercomputers for the exascale and post-exascale era. These testbeds also act as co-design hubs, enabling the collection of application operational requirements while identifying critical gaps that must be addressed for an architecture to become viable for HPC. Various research centers are actively deploying testbeds, and our aim is to build a community that facilitates the sharing of information, encouraging collaboration and understanding of the available evaluation resources. This BoF will facilitate the exchange of best practices, including testbed design, benchmarking, system evaluation and availability.
BoF: Building the Scientific Data Fabric Community for AI-Driven Discovery
Artificial intelligence is transforming scientific discovery, but today’s cyberinfrastructure was designed for workflows in which data are collected, stored, analyzed and archived as largely independent activities. Modern science increasingly requires continuous interaction among instruments, data repositories, workflows, AI services, edge devices, HPC systems and scientists across institutional boundaries. This BoF brings together researchers, facility operators, cyberinfrastructure developers and domain scientists to discuss the next generation of scientific data infrastructure. Through examples from astronomy, geosciences, materials science, medicine and high-energy physics, participants will identify common infrastructure challenges and define a community roadmap for interoperable, federated scientific data ecosystems.
Booth events: ACCESS, Booth 850
ACCESS the Experts – come visit the ACCESS booth to speak with the experts.
Amit Majumdar, ACCESS Coordination Office 10 – 11 a.m.
Virginia Trueheart, Resource Provider 11 a.m. – 12 p.m.
From understanding the promise of quantum technologies to seeing how they could become part of the communications and computing infrastructure of the future, the two invited talks will give attendees both a big-picture view of the quantum landscape and a concrete look at how quantum networking is becoming a reality while exploring how we can structure quantum technologies today for the needs and success of future users.
Panel: The 50-State AI Plan: A Grassroots Approach to Building a U.S. AI Continent
This session examines how state and regional initiatives can strengthen U.S. leadership in AI and quantum computing. Using Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Oklahoma and others as examples, the panel will explore how states are aligning regional assets with America’s AI Action Plan, the Genesis Mission, and the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR). The discussion frames this work as a grassroots U.S. counterpart to the EU “AI Continent,” built through state-led, place-based innovation rather than a top-down model. Building on the NSF-CASC Workshop on Envisioning NAIRR State and Regional Hubs for Educational Transformation, the session will highlight pathways for expanding workforce development, research access and regional cooperation. Panelists will discuss partnerships among academia, government, industry, philanthropy and federal agencies, along with strategies to broaden access to computing and data resources, streamline deployment, and engage states in AI capacity building. Inclusive state-led hubs can drive innovation, attract investment and grow the AI workforce.
BoF: Inference Services and Agents on HPC: Scaling Scientific AI for Academic Community
Initiated at SC25 to explore AI inference services in the academic HPC community, this BoF returns to address the fast-evolving landscape of inference services, agentic AI, tool services and AI4Science. This practitioner forum brings centers and researchers together to share practical insights and experiences spanning infrastructure, software and use cases. This session aims to cultivate collaborative solutions for AI development. The goal remains to foster a sustained, cross-institutional “community of practice” that bridges academic and governmental HPC centers and the user community to support collaboration in this area.
Booth events: Booth 3829
Coffee with CaRCC: Stop by the Internet2booth at 10 am for Coffee with CaRCC, the Campus Research Computing Consortium. Good coffee, better conversation with research computing and data peers!
Democrats won seats on anti-datacentre tickets and Musk wasted nearly half a billion dollars. Big tech may be losing its grip, but it won’t go quietly
Photos That Precede Unfortunate Events: a couple of months back, Donald Trump hosted some of the world’s most powerful tech executives at the White House for a “Super Intelligence luncheon”, which by coincidence is also how my mum described her tuna sandwiches in a forlorn attempt to get me to eat them. Sitting either side of the president were Elon Musk, making a rare offline appearance in daylight hours, and Jensen Huang, the Nvidia chief executive carving out a precious slot in what we now know was an extremely busy schedule.
Over a delicious meal of microchips and rare-earth metals, the billionaires sketched out a utopian future of an AI industry unencumbered by regulation or safeguards, powered by their heroic strongman leader, a political genius effortlessly able to impose his will upon an entire nation. And perhaps it should have been apparent even at the time that these (mostly) men were putting their faith in a guy who had recently been defeated by pond algae. But as the drinks and the good times flowed, it was still possible to believe that the sun would never set on the thousand-year American superintelligence empire.
Jonathan Liew is a Guardian columnist
The Guardian’s year in review 2026. On Tuesday 1 December 2026, join your favourite Guardian writers for an evening of candid conversations, witty remarks and surprises as we look back on the year-defining stories of 2026. With Zoe Williams, Lucy Mangan, Jonathan Liew, Heather Stewart, Pippa Crerar, John Crace and host, multi-award-winning comedian Suzi Ruffell.
Book tickets here or at guardian.live
Exclusive: Cross-party call for ethnicity options to be broadened beyond ‘English’ being only within ‘White’ category
Britons should be able to define themselves as both black and English, according to senior MPs who are calling to broaden the range of ethnicity options in the census.
The cross-party push is a riposte to Reform UK politicians who have claimed that people from minority ethnic backgrounds cannot have English ethnic identity.
Nov. 9, 2026 — At the National Quantum Technologies Showcase, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) published an evaluation of a decade of UK quantum investment. UKRI’s evaluation, published Nov. 6, 2026, finds that a long-term, coordinated approach to investing in quantum research, skills and commercialization has helped create:
More than 2,000 highly skilled jobs
74 spinout companies
An estimated £482 million of private investment
The National Quantum Technologies Showcase 2026 opened in London last week. More than 3,500 delegates from industry, academia, government and the investment community attended. They explored how quantum technologies are moving from research laboratories into real-world applications.
The showcase took place a week after the Chancellor unveiled £138 million of funding for cross-government quantum sensing procurement in the Budget. The funding will help accelerate adoption in healthcare, transport and defense. It will also increase the UK’s own quantum capability.
This includes a £30 million commitment from the Ministry of Defence, the department’s single largest investment in Quantum technology.
New Investments
Building on the foundations established over the past decade, UKRI is also announcing a series of new investments designed to help the sector grow, commercialize and scale.
UKRI’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has selected the UK Quantum Super Connector to establish a national Quantum Commercialisation Skills Centre.
The center will receive £12 million of funding. The Super Connector is a partnership led by Imperial College London with the universities of Bristol, Cambridge, Glasgow and Oxford.
The initiative will strengthen entrepreneurship, and the ability to bring cutting-edge Quantum tech to market, tackling one of the major barriers to companies starting and scaling on British shores.
Meanwhile £35 million from Innovate UK will support two new funding calls for quantum networking testbeds. Launching in February 2027, they will enable UK companies and researchers to develop and test technologies.
A Strategic Decision
In 2014, quantum technology was largely a laboratory curiosity. EPSRC took an early strategic decision to invest at scale, committing to a coordinated, long-term national program rather than a series of isolated projects.
A decade later, an independent evaluation looked at that £300 million investment. It covered quantum technology Research Hubs, skills programs and doctoral training. The findings show that coordination, sustained funding and an integrated hub model emerge repeatedly as the key differentiators behind the UK’s progress.
The program has helped create more than 2,000 highly skilled jobs, most at above average wages, and supported 74 new spinout companies. It has drawn in an estimated £482 million in private investment.
Beyond this financial return, the program has strengthened the UK’s ability to retain quantum talent in an increasingly competitive global market.
Building on the foundations needed to deliver the National Quantum Strategy and Skills Taskforce’s ambition of 1,000 quantum-related PhD studentships by 2034.
For every pound invested, the evaluation found that the program generated more benefits than costs. Using a standard cost-benefit methodology, the evaluators estimated £547 million in total monetized benefits against £442 million in program costs.
This figure includes benefits already realized, such as jobs, spinouts and private investment, alongside benefits expected to accrue in 2030 to 2031 as quantum technologies continue to mature.
A Broad Investment
Across the UK, cities including Oxford, Bristol, Birmingham, Glasgow and Edinburgh have seen local ecosystems grow up around the hubs.
West of England Combined Authority invested £35 million in a new Quantum Technologies Innovation Centre, a direct result of the research infrastructure already in place locally.
In addition, UKRI will invest over £4 million in capital equipment for the QT Research Hubs. This priority program will support the UK’s quantum missions at our world-leading Quantum Technologies Research Hubs.
An additional £600,000 will be invested in key research infrastructures across the UK that underpin work to create the UK’s quantum internet.
Science with Real-World Uses
The research has practical applications that go well beyond the lab. Quantum sensors developed at the University of Birmingham are being tested for use in medical diagnostics. They could also be used in underground surveying, where they could make it far cheaper and less disruptive to build and maintain the infrastructure beneath our streets.
Quantum imaging systems from the University of Glasgow’s QuantIC hub have uses in healthcare and environmental monitoring. Examples include helping to reduce methane leaks in industrial processes that significantly contribute to climate change.
Work at the University of York’s Quantum Communications Hub is focused on fundamentally more secure data networks, that can contribute to protecting public services and personal information.
Researchers have also been connecting quantum science with artificial intelligence, opening up new avenues in areas like drug discovery and logistics.
Keeping Talent in the UK
One of the evaluation’s more striking findings is about people.
Without the hubs and doctoral training centers, a significant number of the researchers trained through the programme would likely have taken their skills abroad.
Students from mathematics, engineering and chemistry were drawn into quantum research, and have since gone on to found companies, lead research groups, and work across industry.
Some 87% of Research Hub survey respondents said the program had contributed to upskilling the UK workforce.
Internationally, the UK now sits alongside the United States at the top of quantum research impact rankings. The hub model the UK developed in 2014 is now being replicated elsewhere.
American activist and trade unionist who fought for the rights of farm workers
Although she was never the president of the United Farm Workers union, Dolores Huerta, who has died aged 96, was one of the most significant American trade union leaders of the 20th century. Her battle cry, “Sí, se puede!”, coined in the midst of tensions with police in Arizona in the 1970s, was adapted to the English “Yes, we can” and became Barack Obama’s slogan during his successful campaign for the US presidency in 2008.
While the UFW leader Cesar Chavez was the public face of the union as its president, Huerta was the organiser who helped break the resistance of California’s grape growers by building bridges to secondary boycotts by unions packing and transporting grapes, and by organising boycotts of national supermarket chains such as A&P and Finast, who sold them. “To take on agriculture, which to this day is still a powerhouse, that took a lot of guts,” her son Emilio said.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Alexis Ohanian wants to figure out the future of user-generated content. According to the Reddit cofounder, building social media apps is "not cool anymore" and so much of the internet has been compromised. "I'm expecting some better version of the group chat to be that new version of UGC," Ohanian told WIRED senior correspondent Lauren Goode at the inaugural WIRED World Fair. [...] Ohanian is a proponent of the "Dead Internet Theory"—the idea that a lot of online activity and content is being generated by bots. Large language models have turbocharged this, with AI agents outrunning human users. "The internet that I grew up on that was really built for humans first; user interfaces and experiences are going to go away," said Ohanian, "because more of the internet is going to get created for these agents to use, [rather] than for people."
In some ways, the advance in generative AI has been lucrative for sites like Reddit, which has licensed its vast archive of human conversations to companies including Google and OpenAI to train AI models. "Platforms like ours became very, very valuable to LLMs," Ohanian said. But the technology has also undermined the business. Reddit shares plunged 29 percent last week after the platform warned that Google's AI-powered search was hurting referral traffic. Ohanian also worries the commercialization of these conversations means they are full of "bullshit." "The internet has gotten so manipulated because it is so incredibly valuable to do so," he said.
Reddit recently said it would require users to sign in to fight third-party scraping and keep up user engagement. While Ohanian declined to say whether he agrees with the move, "there has to be provable humanity on the internet without being creepy." An early Anthropic investor, Ohanian is nonetheless optimistic about the potential benefits of AI. He is especially excited to see medical breakthroughs from the technology. "There is still a very real chance that this technology can cause a lot of harm for sure," he said. "I think we have to be sober about how we're building and what we're doing, but I still can't help but see all of the things that can get so demonstrably better."
ST. FLORIAN, Austria, Nov. 9, 2026 — EV Group (EVG), a leading provider of innovative process solutions and expertise serving leading-edge and future semiconductor designs and chip integration schemes, today announced that it is supporting quantum chip developers and manufacturers in addressing the complex manufacturing requirements associated with scaling quantum computing systems.
Artist’s rendition illustrating the role of EV Group’s semiconductor manufacturing technologies in quantum chip development. EVG combines advanced process equipment, manufacturing expertise and cleanroom capabilities to help customers develop and validate new quantum chip designs. Created with AI assistance. Source: EV Group.
Building on its ongoing contributions to quantum chip development, EVG is applying its established expertise in advanced packaging, heterogeneous integration and photonics manufacturing to help customers develop and validate new product designs and manufacturing processes for increasingly complex quantum architectures.
EVG will highlight its suite of process solutions for quantum computing and other critical technologies at SEMICON Europa, the premier microelectronics and semiconductor manufacturing supply chain event in Europe, taking place this week on November 10-13 at the Messe München in Munich, Germany.
New Manufacturing Approaches Need to Scale Quantum Computing
According to McKinsey & Company, quantum computing could create up to $2.7 trillion of economic value worldwide by 2035. As quantum computing advances beyond early research demonstrations toward increasingly capable systems, one of the industry’s greatest challenges is scaling the number of qubits—the fundamental units of quantum information—while maintaining the performance and reliability needed for practical applications. Because qubits are extremely sensitive to errors, achieving fault-tolerant quantum computing requires significantly increasing the number of physical qubits to support error correction.
Meeting these requirements presents significant manufacturing challenges. Different quantum computing architectures rely on a wide range of materials and device structures, creating demanding requirements for high-density interconnections, heterogeneous materials integration and precision manufacturing. Advanced packaging technologies will play a key role in enabling the integration of increasingly complex quantum chips and other critical components while preserving their performance.
EVG addresses these challenges through its broad portfolio of process technologies, including fusion and hybrid bonding, high-vacuum oxide-free bonding, digital and nanoimprint lithography, and thin-wafer processing. These technologies provide the precision needed for demanding wafer alignment, bonding and patterning requirements across different quantum computing architectures. Combined with the company’s materials and process integration expertise through its Heterogeneous Integration Competence Center (HICC) and NILPhotonics Competence Center, these capabilities enable quantum computing companies to explore, develop and validate new quantum chip designs and manufacturing approaches.
“Quantum computing is not a single technology, but a collection of fundamentally different approaches, each with its own materials and manufacturing requirements. As developers work to scale these technologies, the challenge is not simply increasing the number of qubits but finding ways to integrate them in increasingly complex chip architectures without compromising performance,” stated Dr. Bernd Dielacher, director of business development at EVG. “This is where EVG’s broad portfolio of process solutions, combined with our experience in advanced packaging and heterogeneous integration, can play an important role in helping customers develop practical manufacturing solutions for a new generation of quantum devices.”
Process Technologies Supporting Quantum Computing Development
Quantum computing encompasses a variety of approaches, including superconducting, photonic, spin, trapped-ion, neutral-atom and nitrogen-vacancy diamond qubits, each presenting distinct materials and manufacturing challenges. EVG’s technologies address a range of manufacturing requirements across different quantum computing approaches.
For example, with superconducting quantum devices, oxide-free bonding processes can support the formation of superconducting interconnects and 3D device integration. In photonic quantum devices, fusion and oxide-free bonding enable the integration of III-V and high-Pockels-coefficient materials on waveguides, while hybrid bonding supports ultra-high-density interconnects in emerging spin qubit architectures. For trapped ion quantum computing, EVG has collaborated with researchers to develop low-temperature metal bonding processes that enable the integration of ion-trap and photonic chiplets made from different substrate materials. EVG is also a strategic partner of Silicon Austria Labs in support of the CHAMP-ION pilot line project, Europe’s first open-access pilot line for industrial-scale production of ion-trap quantum chips. Additional capabilities, including nanoimprint lithography, digital lithography and temporary bonding and debonding, can support specialized optical structures and advanced packaging processes.
EVG’s involvement in quantum computing development includes its recently announced collaboration with Xanadu, a developer of quantum photonic computing technology, as well as participation in research activities addressing emerging quantum device manufacturing requirements. These engagements reflect EVG’s active commitment to advancing qubit integration, building on its established expertise in semiconductor and photonics manufacturing to address the specialized requirements of quantum hardware.
About EV Group (EVG)
EV Group (EVG) provides innovative process solutions and expertise that serve leading-edge and future semiconductor designs and chip integration schemes. The company’s vision of being the first in exploring new techniques and supporting next-generation applications of micro- and nanofabrication technologies enables customers to successfully commercialize new product ideas. EVG’s high-volume-manufacturing-ready products, which include wafer bonding, lithography, thin-wafer processing and metrology equipment, enable advances in semiconductor front-end scaling, 3D integration and advanced packaging, as well as in other electronics and photonics applications. More information about EVG is available at www.EVGroup.com.
These days, we know where almost everything comes from. Everyday items like food, clothes and pens all carry labels listing where things are grown, manufactured or even designed.
So why is it so hard to find where prescription drugs are made?
That question set off a 14-month investigation into where our medications are made, how the FDA polices drug manufacturers and what happens when inspectors report issues inside factories.
The vast majority of prescriptions filled in the United States are for generic drugs, which are often far cheaper than brand-name alternatives.
For years, Congress, doctors and watchdog groups have questioned the quality of generic drugs made overseas. India produces about half of all generics used in the U.S., but the labels on pill bottles often don’t list where a drug is manufactured. Inspection reports describe unsafe manufacturing conditions at generic drug factories, but the Food and Drug Administration redacts the names of the medications made in those factories. That means if drugs made in errant factories wind up in your medicine cabinet, you’d have no way of knowing.
To better understand how the FDA regulates the generic drug industry, Debbie Cenziper and Megan Rose interviewed current and former factory inspectors, tested medications in a lab and sued the federal government for critical documents.
Here’s what they found:
Birds defecated on boxes of sterile equipment. Inspectors reported finding dirty labs, mold and foul water at factories. Records referenced vials of medication that were “blackish” from contamination. Inspectors found what appeared to be metal shavings on equipment.
Drug manufacturers manipulated and destroyed drug-testing records. At one factory, an analyst poured acid on records stuffed in a trash bin. At another, inspectors said in a report that records were “routinely manipulated” to cover up the presence of particulate matter — which could include glass, fiber or other contaminants — in generic drugs.
A lifesaving generic drug contained a lower amount of a key ingredient. We worked with an independent lab to test generic versions of tacrolimus, used to prevent organ rejection. We found some pills contained a lower amount of the key ingredient in the drug. Doctors and experts said that underdosing can leave patients vulnerable to organ rejection.
The FDA allowed generic drug imports from banned factories — and didn’t inform the public. The agency gave some manufacturers a special pass to continue to ship drugs made in factories whose manufacturing practices were so bad they had been banned from the U.S. Over a dozen years, the FDA exempted at least 150 drugs or their ingredients from banned factories.
A transplant patient’s lungs failed after she took generic versions of tacrolimus. Hannah Goetz had a double-lung transplant as a teenager and had to take tacrolimus twice a day. Her lungs failed in 2023, and she died at 21 years old, after years of relying on the generic drug made by two manufacturers with documented problems. Lawyers told Goetz’s mother that it was impossible to draw a straight line from Hannah’s death to a generic manufacturer, but her mother said she wonders if her daughter would still be alive if she took a different brand of tacrolimus.
In a response to ProPublica, a spokesperson for the FDA said in a statement that the exemptions given to banned factories are “thoroughly evaluated through a multi-disciplinary approach” but declined to say exactly what those evaluations entailed. The agency also said it requires manufacturers to conduct additional quality checks with third-party oversight before sending drugs to the U.S. The agency did not respond to questions about how it can know that generics are safe without a more robust testing program.
In statements to ProPublica, drug companies said that they take patient safety seriously, adhere to quality standards and are committed to working with the FDA on any regulatory issues.
Use our tool to find where your prescription drugs were made.
ProPublica’s Brandon Roberts and a team of data journalists made a tool called Rx Inspector that will show you the facility that manufactured your generic prescription drugs and any inspection reports, warning letters and import bans we have from the FDA.
The data isn’t perfect; it’s possible the FDA hasn’t published everything it knows about a given facility, for example. Also, one company may have acquired another or moved the factory somewhere else. This tool also isn’t meant to provide you with medical advice: If you find something troubling, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your drug is compromised. Doctors and pharmacists advise that you not stop taking your medications. Instead, you should talk to your healthcare provider about any concerns.
Step 1: Enter the name of your prescription drug, as well as the company name found on your pill bottle or drug label.
Step 2: If there are multiple matches in our database, you can narrow your search using the markings found on a pill, for example.
Step 3: When you click on a drug, we’ll show you any manufacturing facilities we’ve been able to connect to it. Click on a facility to see any information we have from the FDA.
FDA inspections come with compliance outcomes, such as import alerts or warning letters. The best possible outcome of an inspection is “acceptable state,” which means the FDA took no compliance action and ProPublica found no issues documented by inspectors. Search your prescription here.
ProPublica described Rx Inspector and the methodology used to build it to the FDA, which did not comment. The agency previously told ProPublica that it doesn’t reveal where drugs are made on inspection reports to protect what it deemed to be confidential commercial information.
Terrorism investigation will continue after suspect who killed six after opening fire in market square died
Polish prosecutors have said they do not currently have any evidence tying the man who killed six people and injured 16 in a rare mass shooting in Kraków to any particularly political ideology.
Lawmakers are returning to Capitol Hill for the first time since the midterm elections, which delivered a slew of Democratic victories that will dramatically reshape the balance of power in Washington in the new year.
Under the terms of a new defense agreement between Greenland, Denmark and the United States, Greenland remains a self-governed territory of Denmark with the right to declare its independence in the future. The U.S. did not “get” Greenland, nor does it now “own” Greenland, as President Donald Trump has misleadingly said recently.
In January, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump talked about wanting the U.S. to have “ownership” of Greenland, an Arctic island home to about 57,000 people, in order “to defend” it, and as part of a broader American national security strategy. “And all we’re asking for is to get Greenland, including right, title, and ownership, because you need the ownership to defend it. You can’t defend it on a lease,” he said.
He initially wouldn’t rule out taking Greenland over by force, as he had teased, but then said in his Davos speech: “I won’t use force.”
The new trilateral agreement doesn’t go as far as giving Greenland to the U.S. Primarily, it indefinitely allows the U.S. to expand its military presence in Greenland and prevents U.S. adversaries from doing the same. But as we’ve written, the previously existing defense framework already gave the U.S. great latitude to expand military operations in Greenland.
Greenlandic lawmakers formally approved the agreement on Nov. 3. It will go into effect if Danish lawmakers approve it after debate on the agreement later this month.
Trump talked about the pending deal at some of his midterm campaign rallies and in recent interviews, but he sometimes made it sound like something it’s not.
In a Fox News interview on Nov. 3, Trump said, “I got Greenland. We have Greenland, and nobody talks about it.” He said, “If I didn’t get it, there’d be massive fanfare, I can tell you. But we got it, and it’s permanent. It’s forever.”
In another Fox News interview earlier that day, Trump said Europe “gave the United States the greatest gift we were ever given … Greenland.”
Before that, during remarks in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 2, he said that “we also have Greenland now,” saying it was on “an unlimited basis.” When Trump brought up the military deal at an Oct. 25 campaign rally in Michigan, he said that “we own Greenland.”
He has also said the U.S. “got it for nothing” and that there was an “acquisition” of Greenland “for zero dollars.” (During his first term, Trump expressed interest in buying Greenland.)
We asked the White House about the president’s claims but have not received a response.
Update, Nov. 9: After publication, a White House spokesperson said the deal “secures permanent American security control over Greenland, ensures that Greenland will forever be a part of the strategic defense area of North America, and excludes any adversary from Greenland and the surrounding region.”
What’s in the Agreement
The agreement was originally signed on Sept. 22 by Trump, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen. It amends and supplements a 1951 defense pact, updated in 2004, that allowed the U.S. to establish a military base in Greenland.
Greenland served as a foothold for the U.S. amid competition with the Soviet Union in the Arctic during the Cold War. American interest in the region, which lapsed during the post-Cold War period, has been renewed in recent years because of “strategic competition” with Russia and China, according to a Congressional Research Service report from July 2025.
Under the new deal, activities at the U.S. base in Greenland, renamed Pituffik Space Base in 2023, can be modernized and expanded. The base conducts space surveillance and provides missile warning and defense.
Trump, Frederiksen and Nielsen at a signing ceremony on Sept. 22, at the United Nations headquarters in New York City. Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok.
In addition, the agreement says the U.S. “shall be allowed to establish an additional Defense Area at Narsarsuaq and Mestersvig in accordance with modalities and technical details to be mutually agreed” upon. It adds that the U.S. “may establish additional defense areas in Greenland and strengthen its military operations or facilities,” as long as those additional defense areas are agreed upon as well.
The new agreement also grants U.S. vessels and aircraft free movement between defense areas, including undersea access to Greenland’s territorial waters.
Unless the signatories all agree, nations that are not members of NATO will not be allowed to establish military installations in Greenland nor have “a persistent presence of military forces” in the territory. The U.S. will also get a say in whether countries that are not in NATO, a NATO partner or in the European Union, can invest in “sensitive sectors or activities” in Greenland, such as for the extraction of minerals and natural resources.
At the same time the agreement grants the U.S. more access in the region for defense purposes – including the establishment of a “Golden Dome” missile defense system that Trump has proposed – it also reiterates in its preamble that Greenland remains a part of Denmark with the right to self-determination, as was reaffirmed in a 2009 Greenland self-government law.
Should Greenland ever exercise its right to become an independent country, the agreement says the treaty will remain binding and Greenland will stay in NATO. The U.S. and Denmark are already members of the international defense alliance.
Not Much Different Than Before
While Trump has boasted about the new deal, experts in international relations have said it doesn’t grant the U.S. much more access in Greenland that it didn’t, or couldn’t, already have.
In a commentary piece published Oct. 2, Otto Svendsen, an associate fellow with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said, “The deal gives the United States greater flexibility to augment its Arctic military posture, binds Greenland to NATO even if it achieves independence, and boxes U.S. adversaries out of the island.” But he also called it “only a marginal improvement” over the previous defense agreement.
“Existing agreements already allowed the United States to expand its presence in Greenland, and Copenhagen had long kept U.S. adversaries from investing in Greenland,” Svendsen wrote.
As we wrote earlier this year, Danish Minister of Foreign Affairs Lars Løkke Rasmussen said in January, following a meeting between U.S., Danish and Greenlandic officials, that “the U.S. has already a wide military access to Greenland,” and could ask for more under the 1951 defense pact. “We would examine any such request constructively,” he said.
For a story that same month, Mikkel Runge Olesen, a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen, told the New York Times, “The U.S. has such a free hand in Greenland that it can pretty much do what it wants.”
And Svendsen wrote in his October piece, “The one genuinely new breakthrough — permanently binding a future independent Greenland to NATO and to U.S. basing — would likely have been on the table without threats to use military force against a treaty ally. Those threats have alienated one of the United States’ staunchest allies and damaged U.S. credibility across Europe.”
He said given that Trump once demanded full control of Greenland, “the deal is a considerable climb-down.”
Others have also said that the new agreement is a lot of what existed before.
Writing for the Council on Foreign Relations in a Sept. 29 piece, Diana Roy, the senior editor, and Jonathan Masters, the deputy managing editor, said, “Despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s previous calls to acquire Greenland, the deal preserves the status quo, maintaining the island’s status as a semiautonomous territory of Denmark.”
Similarly, Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a nonresident senior fellow with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, wrote in a Sept. 24 piece, “Substantively, the new deal entrenches the existing status quo, making it a significant accomplishment for Danish and Greenlandic diplomacy, while affording Trump just enough changes to also claim victory.”
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Assault on Michel Zecler in 2020 is rare case of police brutality reaching court, at time of heightened tensions
Three French police officers have gone on trial over the beating of a black music producer who they say was not wearing a face mask during the Covid pandemic, in a rare case of police brutality reaching court.
The assault on Michel Zecler, now 47, triggered outrage in France over police violence, which victims and researchers say is systemic but authorities and law enforcement unions claim is limited to isolated cases.
Officers pelted with bottles, stones and fireworks after people try to get their hands on special introductory offer
Police were called to a doner kebab shop in Dortmund, western Germany on Sunday after hundreds of customers stormed the premises in the hope of securing a portion for a one-off rock bottom introductory price.
The owner of the outlet was forced to call the police after becoming overwhelmed by the crowds that turned up for its opening.
Fall in the Pacific Northwest is beautiful, with cooler days, crisp nights and a kaleidoscope of gold, red and orange leaves on the trees. There’s ... Read moreThe post Fall might just be the best time to visit the Pacific…
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said that Democrats will focus "relentlessly" on addressing affordability in their majorities, while also setting their sights on combatting corruption.
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SANTA CLARA, Calif., Nov. 9, 2026 — AMD today announced that 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors are powering the host infrastructure for Google Cloud TPU 8tx, the first cloud Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) system to deliver hardware-enforced confidential computing. The expanded collaboration between the companies combines AMD EPYC CPU performance, AMD Infinity Guard security capabilities and x86 software compatibility with Google Cloud TPU AI acceleration to help enterprises deploy inference, fine-tuning and reinforcement learning workloads. With Google Cloud’s confidential computing architecture on TPU 8tx supported by 5th Gen AMD EPYC host processors, organizations can run their most sensitive AI workloads at scale in the cloud without compromising on data protection.
Credit: Google Cloud
The deployment extends the role of AMD EPYC processors as a foundation for accelerated AI infrastructure. Across systems built with GPUs and custom accelerators, AMD EPYC CPUs are the choice for host processing – preparing data, coordinating workloads and managing communication with accelerators. With TPU 8tx, AMD and Google Cloud bring those capabilities together with hardware-rooted security to address a critical requirement for production AI: protecting data while it is in use.
“The most capable AI systems need a CPU foundation that can match the demands of the accelerators they host,” said Dan McNamara, senior vice president and general manager, Compute and Enterprise AI, AMD. “Across generations of EPYC, we have built leadership capabilities in the performance, memory bandwidth and I/O that keep accelerated systems productive, backed by years of engineering collaboration with the world’s leading cloud providers. Our work with Google Cloud brings that strength to TPU 8tx, helping customers scale AI with the performance and protection their most important workloads demand.”
“When teams move AI agents into production, they need confidence that their data and intellectual property stay private, even from the underlying infrastructure,” said Mark Lohmeyer, vice president and general manager for AI and Computing Infrastructure, Google Cloud. “By pairing 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors with our 8th-generation TPU architecture inside the AI Hypercomputer, we are bringing hardware-enforced confidential computing to cloud TPUs for the first time. Customers get silicon-level data protection alongside the low-latency performance needed for modern reasoning models.”
Enabling Confidential AI with AMD EPYC Processors
In TPU 8tx systems, 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors manage workload orchestration, data preparation and high-throughput communication with TPU accelerators. The system utilizes the AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) capabilities in the AMD EPYC CPU, which together with the TPU, extends confidential computing protection beyond the CPU to connected accelerators, helping protect sensitive data as it moves among them.
Verifying an accelerator’s identity and security configuration before granting it direct access to protected memory helps customer prompts, model weights and intermediate data remain encrypted in CPU memory and in transit among the host and accelerators, with hardware isolation during accelerator execution. These protections help enterprises use sensitive information with confidence in reasoning and agentic AI applications.
AMD EPYC processors also underpin the broader Google Cloud confidential computing portfolio: AMD SEV technologies help protect workloads across Confidential VMs, Confidential GKE, Confidential Space, Confidential Managed Service for Apache Spark, and Confidential Dataflow. TPU 8tx extends that collaboration to confidential AI acceleration.
A Proven Host CPU Foundation Across AI Architectures
As hyperscalers, frontier labs and model providers build increasingly specialized AI infrastructure, CPU selection remains central to system performance and deployment. Accelerators depend on host processors to supply data, schedule work and connect AI workloads with the applications and services around them. AMD EPYC processors are the host CPU of choice for more than 10 leading hyperscalers and frontier AI labs, spanning GPUs and custom AI accelerator ASICs.
AMD EPYC processors support this role across systems using AMD Instinct GPUs, Nvidia GPUs and custom silicon. This breadth gives customers a proven CPU platform across accelerator choices, supported by the established x86 software ecosystem.
Building on Generations of AMD and Google Cloud Collaborations
AMD and Google Cloud have collaborated across multiple generations of EPYC processors, supporting general-purpose, compute-intensive, storage-intensive and accelerated workloads leading up to current Google Cloud Compute Engine C4D, N4D, H4D, Z4D and G4 virtual machines. The companies have also worked together for years on security technology at the corporate level, including deep reviews of AMD security processor firmware by Google security experts.
With TPU 8tx, this expanded collaboration helps enterprises run modern reasoning and agentic AI workloads in production without compromising on data protection.
About AMD
AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) drives innovation in high-performance and AI computing to solve the world’s most important challenges. Today, AMD technology powers billions of experiences across cloud and AI infrastructure, embedded systems, AI PCs and gaming. With a broad portfolio of AI-optimized CPUs, GPUs, networking and software, AMD delivers full-stack AI solutions that provide the performance and scalability needed for a new era of intelligent computing. Learn more at www.amd.com.
CHICAGO, Nov. 9, 2026 — IBM, the University of Chicago, the State of Illinois, and Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP) today unveiled an IBM Quantum System Two in Chicago, IBM’s first quantum computer in Illinois and the company’s most advanced system available. Initially located at Hyde Park Labs and hosted by the University of Chicago, the system is fueled by IBM Quantum Nighthawk, the most powerful quantum chip IBM has ever built.
IBM’s first quantum computer in Illinois extends the company’s industry and academic partnerships across the state, enabling the Illinois ecosystem and beyond to scale quantum algorithms and applications. Credit: IBM.
Today, organizations across Illinois are already working with IBM to explore how quantum computing can scale to computationally difficult challenges. The new system aims to catalyze the state’s robust ecosystem of scientists, universities, national laboratories, startups, and enterprises, many of whom are collaborating with IBM in Chicago within IQMP’s National Quantum Algorithm Center (NQAC) to develop the next generation of algorithms and applications. As the anchor system of NQAC, which was established in 2024 by Illinois Governor JB Pritzker with IBM as a leading member, the new quantum computer will ultimately be moved to IQMP, a first-of-its-kind campus in Chicago currently being built to develop and scale quantum technology and microelectronics innovation.
“IBM is proud to deploy our first quantum computer of IQMP — an IBM Quantum System Two. Today, it can deliver scientifically useful results to organizations across the state of Illinois and beyond,” said Arvind Krishna, Chairman and CEO, IBM. “As IBM’s first quantum computer in Illinois, the system’s deployment marks a milestone for Illinois’ quantum community and builds on IBM’s partnerships across the state as we expand quantum research across academia and industries.”
“I want the next generation of breakthroughs to happen in Illinois and the jobs and opportunity that come with them to benefit the people of Illinois,” said Governor JB Pritzker. “With the unveiling of IBM’s Quantum System Two in Hyde Park, we are giving researchers and businesses the tool to turn big ideas into real-world solutions. With our growing partnership with IBM, we are building an industry that will give Illinoisans more career opportunities and build a future right here at home.”
“The presence of IBM’s first quantum computer in Illinois, the company’s most advanced system available, is a testament to what’s possible when partners across government, industry and academia work together toward a shared vision,” said Harley Johnson, CEO of the IQMP. “Today reflects the unique strength of Illinois’ quantum ecosystem. We’re thrilled to see IBM Quantum System Two at Hyde Park Labs while the Park is under construction, and we’re more energized than ever to welcome it to the IQMP, where it will anchor the National Quantum Algorithm Center and further establish Illinois as the global destination for quantum innovation.”
“The deployment of IBM’s Quantum System Two represents the culmination of a years-long partnership that brought together academia, government, and private industry to usher in a new generation of discovery. I am delighted that this machine is being unveiled here in Hyde Park, where our neighbors and community will have a view into the future,” said University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos.
“IBM Quantum System Two brings another critical capability to Illinois’ growing quantum ecosystem and showcases the collaboration that makes our state such a draw,” said Illinois Economic Development Corporation President and CEO Christy George. “For companies developing quantum technologies and applications, access to advanced computing systems, leading researchers, and industry partners in one place is a powerful advantage. This investment strengthens Illinois’ position as a destination for companies looking to innovate, grow, and help shape the future of quantum computing.”
This new IBM Quantum System Two advances IBM’s mission to bring useful quantum computing to the world and extends the company’s commitment to advancing Illinois as a global epicenter for quantum innovation.
Since NQAC’s founding, IBM has helped grow the center into a hub within Chicago where industry leaders work side-by-side with IBM researchers to build quantum applications that can scale alongside technical progress in the field. This includes NQAC Grand Challenge participants Deloitte and AbbVie, who are working with IBM and Northwestern University to build quantum molecular simulation approaches for researchers engaging in drug discovery.
Other Grand Challenges participants working with IBM include EPRI and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U. of I.) to explore how quantum optimization algorithms could lead to more efficient power grids.
Additionally, research institutions and national labs such as Fermilab are working with IBM in Illinois to accelerate high-energy physics research with quantum and advance technologies for distributed quantum computing.
IBM is also teaming with leading universities such as the University of Chicago and U. of I. to push technological progress in quantum computing. For example, IBM and the University of Chicago recently demonstrated quantum advantage over leading classical methods using an approach with guaranteed correctness.
Now, IBM’s quantum computing technology is being brought physically into Chicago. Through NQAC, the new quantum computer will empower Illinois’ quantum community to develop new algorithms and applications that will translate to real-world impact. And it will serve as a catalyst for developing Illinois’ current and future quantum workforce. Earlier this year, IBM announced it would establish the FutureNow Chicago center at the IQMP in partnership with City Colleges of Chicago, to bring 750 jobs to the region across AI, cybersecurity, data science, quantum computing and other technologies.
With the arrival of IBM Quantum System Two, Chicago and the State of Illinois will be cemented as a leading destination for quantum innovation, industrialization, and workforce development.
IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider, helping clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of governments and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and business services deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service. For more information, visit https://research.ibm.com.
Integration of OQC’s quantum processing unit (QPU) with Horizon Quantum’s Triple Alpha enables pulse-level program execution, qubit characterization, and gate calibration within a unified programming environment.
SINGAPORE and LONDON, Nov. 9, 2026 — Horizon Quantum, a pioneer of software infrastructure for quantum applications, and OQC, a global leader in quantum computing, today announced the successful pulse-level integration of OQC’s QPU with Triple Alpha, Horizon Quantum’s integrated development environment, as part of an ongoing collaboration.
This integration provides access to the hardware control layer, enabling Triple Alpha users to perform pulse-level operations on the OQC’s 32-qubit device Toshiko, allowing them to build hardware characterization and gate calibration procedures within the same environment they use to develop and execute quantum applications.
Characterization is a key step in preparing quantum hardware for practical use. By measuring the physical properties of QPUs, characterization helps build an understanding of processor behavior and informs the calibration of quantum gates, ultimately improving computational fidelity. QPUs need a universal gate set to execute quantum programs, and each gate must be calibrated. This process involves sending pulses to the processor, measuring qubit responses, and adjusting the pulses to achieve the desired operations. Because quantum systems are highly sensitive, frequent recalibration is necessary.
The Horizon Quantum team used Triple Alpha’s pulse-level control capabilities to access OQC’s 32-qubit superconducting QPU and characterize parameters such as T1 and T2, which describe qubit relaxation and phase coherence, respectively. The team also used Triple Alpha to execute a high-level quantum program on Toshiko to perform gate calibration.
The results of the collaboration demonstrate how Triple Alpha’s pulse-level control can support hardware characterization and gate calibration directly on a QPU, with the potential to streamline workflows that might otherwise rely on separate tools.
Many quantum computing modalities, including superconducting systems, make use of precise electromagnetic pulses to control the QPU and drive logical operations. Programming at the pulse level requires specifying not only the precise schedule according to which pulses are transmitted to the QPU, but also specifying the physical properties of these pulses. Traditionally, this has required making use of distinct frameworks or programming languages designed specifically for pulse scheduling.
Triple Alpha allows developers to harness pulse-level control within the same programming languages that are used to develop quantum applications. This portable approach lets users write programs once and execute them across different control systems. As a result, pulse-level control enables users to create and deploy characterization and calibration routines and other programs which explore the physics of the QPU itself, and integrate them into their workflow via a simple web-based API.
The ongoing collaboration between Horizon Quantum and OQC reflects both companies’ commitment to unlocking broad quantum advantage and commercial applications for quantum computing.
“Exposing pulse-level control of OQC processors through Triple Alpha will enable users to interact with the physics of the quantum processors, rather than just the data they contain,” said Dr. Joe Fitzsimons, CEO of Horizon Quantum. “We expect this to enable the development and implementation of new techniques for characterization, noise mitigation and improved performance. We are grateful to OQC for working with us to make this integration possible.”
“Making quantum computing useful requires close integration between hardware and software,” said Simon Phillips, OQC’s Chief Product Officer. “By bringing OQC’s device’s pulse-level capabilities into Triple Alpha, we’re giving developers greater control to characterize qubits, calibrate gates, and build quantum programs within a single environment—a practical step towards simplifying quantum application development.”
About Horizon Quantum
Horizon Quantum (NASDAQ: HQ) is on a mission to unlock broad quantum advantage by building the software infrastructure that empowers developers to use quantum computing to solve the world’s toughest computational problems.
Founded in 2018 by Dr. Joe Fitzsimons, a leading researcher and former professor with more than two decades of experience in quantum computing, the company is bridging the gap between today’s quantum hardware and tomorrow’s applications through the creation of advanced software development tools. Its software infrastructure moves beyond the constraints of static circuit execution, making it possible for developers to express any conceivable quantum computation. Its integrated development environment, Triple Alpha, enables developers to write sophisticated, hardware-agnostic quantum programs at multiple levels of abstraction. Learn more at www.horizonquantum.com.
About OQC
OQC is the UK’s leading quantum computing company, building and deploying the world’s most accessible superconducting quantum computers. With its cloud-ready quantum systems, OQC enables customers across sectors, from finance to energy to national security, to explore quantum advantage today. OQC’s mission is to make quantum computing useful, accessible, and sovereign.
A bright fireball was spotted in skies over North Carolina and Tennessee, zooming by at 47,000 mph before disintegrating above a city near Chattanooga, NASA said.
OpenIndiana is a rolling-release illumos distribution, but they do release snapshots twice a year to serve as a base for installations, which they call Hipster. The project’s just released OpenIndiana Hipster 2026.10, and it brings a number of welcome changes. First, there’s UEFI framebuffer support on the live image, which is automatically configured when loading up the image. Second, Firefox and Thunderbird versions have been bumped to 159.0, and a whole slew of development tools have been updated to newer versions as well.
This snapshot also brings QEMU 11.1.2 and VirtualBox 7.2.22, and a number of new applications have been added as well. In addition, SPARC build support has been improved to enable new and updated packages for Sun’s dead ISA as well.
Former president’s new book Promise Me America provides an inside look at January 6, Covid-19 response and more
Joe Biden will undertake only limited promotion of his upcoming White House memoir because of advancing cancer, the former president said in a social media post on Sunday night.
His new book, Promise Me America, which will be published on 17 November, is Biden’s account of a one-term presidency that began in 2021 in the shadow of the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 by supporters of Donald Trump eager to overturn the outgoing Republican president’s defeat by his Democratic rival in the 2020 election.
Creator and lead developer of Chimera Linux, Nina “q66”, write about their efforts to get NVIDIA drivers to work properly on musl-based distributions.
As you may be aware, one of the limitations of musl-based distributions is that they will not function to their proper extent when used in computers with various NVIDIA graphics cards.
This is due to the proprietary nature of the driver, being built for glibc. I have been experimenting with trying to make this work, and this post is the summary of that effort.
What follows is a deeply technical exploration of the problem, and the steps Nina q66 and the Chimera team are taking to try and fix it. With how popular and widespread NVIDIA hardware still is, this is a hugely important issue to try and address, and I’m grateful they’re trying to address it.
Nearly 200,000-square-foot research hub will connect Rice, industry and entrepreneurs to accelerate discovery, collaboration and commercialization
HOUSTON, Nov. 9, 2026 — Rice University broke ground on the Arc in the Ion District, a nearly 200,000-square-foot research, corporate innovation and office building designed to bring researchers, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, investors and top talent together to accelerate innovation and move ideas from discovery to real-world application.
Pictured L to R: Bobby Tudor, Rice alumnus, chairman of the Houston Energy Transition Initiative; David Sholl, executive vice president for research; Reginald DesRoches, president; Robert T. Ladd, chairman of the Board of Trustees; Kelly Fox, executive vice president for operations, finance and support; Amy Dittmar, provost; and Steven Kean, president and CEO, Greater Houston Partnership. (HKS is the project architect; renderings courtesy of Bogza)
Located in Houston’s Ion District powered by Rice, the Arc will feature seven floors of flexible, future-ready lab and office space for Rice and other organizations seeking proximity to leading research, highly skilled workers and Houston’s dynamic innovation ecosystem. Rice will be a lead tenant, occupying nearly 80,000 square feet, or about 40% of the building.
“The Arc is a significant investment in Rice’s future and in Houston’s continued growth as a center for innovation,” said Robert T. Ladd, chairman of the Rice Board of Trustees. “It will create new opportunities for industry leaders, researchers and students to work together on ideas with the potential for lasting impact.”
The Arc will share a plaza with the Ion building, extending the 12-block Ion District and placing researchers in close proximity to companies, startups, investors and entrepreneurs.
“The Arc will bring Rice’s extraordinary research and talent and Houston’s impactful innovation ecosystem into even closer connection with the industries and innovators working to solve some of the world’s most consequential challenges,” said Rice President Reginald DesRoches. “That constant exchange of ideas and expertise will help move discoveries more rapidly from the laboratory to real-world impact.”
Built for Advanced Research and Collaboration
The facility will offer flexible lab and office environments that can adapt to evolving research and business needs. Floor plates will range from 28,000 to 31,000 square feet, with 15-foot floor-to-floor heights and infrastructure capable of supporting advanced HVAC, high-capacity electrical and emergency power systems and core laboratory requirements.
The building will also include conference and meeting spaces, an amenity lounge, fitness center, outdoor plazas, underground parking, secure bike storage and on-site retail and dining — creating opportunities to build solutions in the lab, develop partnerships across the district and connect informally throughout the day. The project is designed to meet LEED Gold criteria and will incorporate smart-building and energy-saving features.
“We are creating more than a high-performance business and research building,” said Kelly Fox, Rice executive vice president for operations, finance and support. “The Arc is being designed as a destination where companies can access sophisticated infrastructure, connect with one another and build the relationships that lead to new ideas and opportunities.”
Work within the building will span areas including artificial intelligence and machine learning, data science, robotics, quantum science and engineering, energy and more.
The groundbreaking event comes on the heels of the university’s recent announcement of a transformational universitywide AI initiative to recruit 75 faculty members working across disciplines and expand AI-related courses and degrees. The initiative is accelerating Rice’s emergence as a global leader in advanced computing and responsible AI.
“The closer researchers are to the people confronting real-world problems, the more opportunities there are to identify important questions, test ideas and improve solutions,” said David Sholl, Rice executive vice president for research. “The Arc gives us an environment built specifically for that kind of sustained collaboration.”
AI Foundry to Call the Arc Home
Rice’s new AI Foundry will be located inside the Arc, where faculty AI experts will have offices and work with industry partners to tackle complex challenges, rapidly develop practical solutions and help organizations build long-term AI capabilities.
The effort will address a growing challenge: AI is advancing faster than many traditional industry innovation models can adapt. Instead of relying on lengthy, linear development cycles, the Foundry will bring Rice experts and industry partners together to identify high-value opportunities, design and test solutions, deploy them in real-world settings and continually refine them based on results.
The Foundry is envisioned to support organizations through AI readiness assessments, feasibility studies, proofs of concept, deployment-ready solutions, executive education and customized workforce training.
“The AI Foundry is exactly the kind of collaboration the Arc is designed to enable,” said Amy Dittmar, the Howard R. Hughes Provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. “By bringing Rice researchers together with industry partners in a shared environment, we can accelerate the movement of ideas from research into practical applications while helping organizations build the capabilities they need to succeed as AI continues to evolve.”
Responsible AI is a key catalyst in Momentous: Personalized Scale for Global Impact, Rice’s strategic plan, which also calls for strategic faculty growth and specifically identifies cross-disciplinary cluster hiring as a way to build depth and breadth in areas vital to the university’s future. The institution’s four AI cluster areas are foundational AI; two applied areas including AI for health and AI for energy, the environment and resiliency; and responsible AI: society and ethics.
Building on the Ion’s Momentum
The Arc will complement the Ion building, the namesake centerpiece of Houston’s innovation corridor and home to corporate and industry partners including Chevron, Microsoft, Aramco, ExxonMobil, Oxy, Shell, United, Transocean and Woodside Energy.
Co-working space in the Ion managed by Industrious is fully occupied, with more than 250 member companies. Activate, an organization that scientists and engineers become founders and move research toward commercialization, recently launched its third cohort of fellows. Twenty-five startups have participated in the program to date.
Companies based in the Ion, including Persona AI, CES Renewable, Greenflash Infrastructure and Cognite, also have experienced significant growth, reinforcing the building’s role as a home for emerging companies and technology-driven organizations. The Ion’s development also extends beyond offices and laboratories. MADabolic, a strength-training gym, recently opened in the building. Greentown Labs, Community Artists’ Collective and Pickle Lab are also among the organizations that call the district home.
Together, the Ion and the Arc are intended to create a more connected environment where researchers, entrepreneurs, established companies and the broader Houston community can work, meet and exchange ideas.
“Houston has an extraordinary concentration of industry expertise, capital, talent and entrepreneurial energy,” said Bobby Tudor, Rice alumnus and chairman of the Houston Energy Transition Initiative. “The Arc will help turn that concentration into action by creating more opportunities for breakthrough research to become technologies and companies.”
The project is being developed by Rice Real Estate Co. Construction is expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2028. Preleasing opportunities are now open for companies and organizations interested in locating alongside Rice researchers and joining the broader Ion District ecosystem.
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Texas, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of architecture, business, continuing studies, engineering and computing, humanities and arts, music, natural sciences and social sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy and Kinder Institute for Urban Research. Internationally, the university maintains the Rice Global Paris Center, a hub for innovative collaboration, research and inspired teaching located in the heart of Paris, and Rice Global India in Bengaluru, India. With 4,793 undergraduates and 4,185 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked in the top 10 for best quality of life by the Princeton Review.
Troubled utility lobbies for deadline on part of the debt to be extended to March 2028
Thames Water has asked creditors for more time to pay back billions of pounds in debt, as the water company scrambles to keep itself afloat.
The UK’s largest water company said it had proposed an “interim” deal under which the deadline to pay off an unspecified portion of the £20bn of debt on its balance sheet would be extended from 2027 to March 2028.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump said Sunday that his administration’s immigration crackdown was “too tough” in some cases and acknowledged that deporting undocumented immigrants without criminal records hurt Republicans in the midterm elections.
In a CBS 60 Minutes interview, Trump defended removing people convicted of violent crimes and drug offenses but said longtime workers in hotels, landscaping and other service industries should potentially be allowed to remain in the country.
“Get the killers out. Get the rapists out,” Trump said, before adding that people who have lived in the United States for 10 or 15 years and held steady jobs could be offered “some kind of legal status.”
Trump explicitly conceded that his deportation policy had “helped and hurt” Republicans, saying many voters believed the administration went too far by removing people whose primary offense was entering the country illegally.
The comments represent a significant rhetorical shift after nearly two years of aggressive enforcement and roughly 1 million deportations. Polling before the election had shown declining public support for the administration’s approach.
Trump first floated a bipartisan immigration agreement on election night, when Republicans lost both chambers of Congress. He said Sunday he believes some incoming Democrats, including Sens.-elect James Talarico and Annie Andrews, could be open to negotiations.
The shift comes even as Trump has elevated hardline immigration adviser Stephen Miller to White House chief of staff.
Company says schools should control student AI use, but if they block its AI tools, they’ll lose access to search engine
Parents and teachers across the US are criticizing Google’s announcement that schools choosing to block AI tools could also lose access to Google Search.
Google announced last week a range of new AI tools for schools and classrooms, alongside options allowing teachers and administrators to restrict their use. The company said schools should have control over whether students use AI in the classroom, but that schools that choose to block Google’s AI tools will also lose access to its search engine.
Timothée Chalamet’s comments earlier this year about opera and ballet have continued to stir the pot across the internet and multiple communities. The words “no one cares about [opera and ballet] anymore” have struck a chord, and while many considered the statement to be dismissive and arrogant, it has brought much-needed attention to the broader and important conversation about the arts in today’s society.
While Chalamet may have caused an uproar of online criticism, the truth is that the arts are struggling and have been for a while.
In the current corporate-centric world that we live in, studying and working in the arts have been deemed less lucrative and opportunistic paths, thus making them “unworthy” of pursuing. Chalamet’s viral moment did nothing to dismantle that notion, and the statement coming from an actor, nonetheless, felt like salt in the wound. However, the responses from opera and ballet companies across the globe have resurfaced the long-lived discussion that the arts are vital to a working society and need to be treated as such.
Among the many respondents to Chalamet’s statement was pop singer Doja Cat, who made a TikTok saying that Chalamet “had the nerve” to disrespect these century-old art forms.
Although some feel this has elicited unnecessary reactions, Doja Cat was correct in saying that these art forms have been around for centuries. While they may not be as popular to the general public today, they were once quite mainstream.
Both opera and ballet originated in the 15th and 16th centuries, and were initially meant to entertain the royal and elite. Over the years, opera and ballet became staged productions, and while some of them are exactly the same as they were hundreds of years ago, the talented artists and powerful stories they tell transcend time and keep bringing diverse audiences back to the theaters.
These traditions have found their way into schools and community arts centers and continue to be a competitive area in higher education and the performance industry. So, if there are endless amounts of people trying to make their way into these artistic spaces, then why do they go so severely underfunded?
Cuts in federal funding for arts programs have had major impacts on theaters around the country. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) funds numerous programs, and the prospect of the NEA being eliminated completely by the current administration has outraged the community.
In May of 2025, NPR reported that “Since its founding by Congress in 1965, the National Endowment for the Arts has awarded $5.5 billion in grants. It is the largest arts funder in the U.S. — yet one of the smallest federal agencies.”
Besides national and federal impacts on arts programs, there are ways that the arts community can be countering these challenges. In addition to fundraising and persistent arts advocacy, a mental shift within the community may be needed as well.
Blake Smith is the artistic director of the UD Lyric Theatre, Voice Area Coordinator and a professor at the university. For years, Smith has been trying to break the barrier between the opera world and commercial music, and is passionate about creating diverse musical experiences for his students.
“I refuse to accept that there’s anybody who’s not interested in the arts,” Smith said. “That person doesn’t exist. Everybody is interested in the arts.”
Smith continues, “What we do wrong as an arts community is that we have convinced people that opera is somehow separate from their lives.”
Maybe the issue here is not just how the world treats opera and ballet, but rather how the communities present themselves to the world.
While performing companies have been known to be some of the most inviting and accepting spaces for artistic and personal expression, perhaps there is still a quality of inaccessibility and elitism that opera and ballet project, thus drawing a line between those artistic expressions and others.
While of course they are some of our oldest art forms, both communities might need to take a step in a direction that does not distinguish itself from, but rather accepts all forms of music and performance as sophisticated and vital forms of storytelling and expression.
As for the Timothée Chalamets of the world, and other well-known artists and storytellers, they too can make an effort to uplift and support all artistic expression, even if it is not their own. This just may be the underlying factor that, in addition to the current advocacy, will help the arts reach new audiences who have yet to experience the joy and fulfillment that they bring.
Cece Cummins is a staff reporter at The Review. Her opinions are her own and do not represent the majority opinion of The Review staff. She may be reached at cecehc@udel.edu.
EVs and home batteries are in Treasury’s crosshairs despite a better economic case for scaling back nuclear-powered submarines and diesel fuel rebates for miners
As Jim Chalmers, the treasurer, comes under increasing pressure to fight inflation by slashing spending in the midyear budget update, the drumbeat is loudest for cuts in one specific area: green energy subsidies for households.
Receiving the most focus is the cheaper home batteries program, which from July last year has offered a taxpayer-backed 30% rebate to households and businesses.
Nov. 9, 2026 — SC26, Nov. 15-20 in Chicago, brings together industry leaders and the research and education (R&E) community to explore the latest advancements across high performance computing, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, advanced networking, and next-generation computing infrastructure. This year’s conference highlights the power of collaboration in advancing scientific discovery.
Internet2 Industry members will be on the SC26 exhibit floor showcasing products, services, and solutions to collaborate and support the diverse and evolving needs of the R&E community.
Visit the exhibitor booths to connect with experts and discover how Internet2 industry members are advancing HPC and research through collaboration.
AWS, booth #4819: AWS invites you to explore live demos, technical sessions, and partner solutions showcasing advanced computing’s future. Discover how HPC is evolving with AI, and how AWS integrates HPC, AI for science, and quantum computing to tackle demanding workloads. Connect with solutions architects, account managers, and ask your cloud questions.
Ciena, booth #5035: Building on its 20+ years of supporting SCinet, Ciena will provide high-capacity optical transport, switching, and routing solutions connecting the show floor to Seattle, McLean, and the StarLight International Exchange in Chicago. The infrastructure includes encrypted 400GE and 800GE circuits, an integrated C&L-band point-to-point Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer (ROADM) solution, 8190 and 8192 platforms, and 2.4 Tb/s of bandwidth over the Ciena Environment for Network Innovation (CENI) testbed. Ciena’s booth will showcase innovations with research and industry collaborators highlighting quantum-secure communications powered by Waveserver, 800G coherent networking powered by WaveLogic 6 Nano (WL6n), cryogenic electron microscopy over Ciena FABRIC nodes, privacy-preserving federated learning, Kubernetes-native security, and Data Center Out-of-Band Management (DCOM).
Cisco Systems, booth #3626: Secure AI Factory. Rack to fabric, at extreme density. Cisco brings high-performance networking, security, and observability together to help organizations get more from accelerated compute and operate complex AI and HPC environments with confidence. Visit Cisco to see the infrastructure behind AI and HPC at scale with hands-on demonstrations and technical conversations. Stop by the Cisco booth for a Pre-Gala Reception from 4:45 p.m. to 6:45 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 16, with food, beverages, and insightful conversations about the opportunities and challenges shaping AI and HPC infrastructure.
Google Cloud, booth #3418: Visit Google Cloud to connect with their team to learn more about AI and HPC solutions.
HPE, booth #3017: HPE will be showcasing its latest HPC, AI, and networking technologies. Along with the HPE booth, HPE is a Diamond-level contributor to SCinet and is supporting ESnet’s 40th anniversary. Together, these activities reflect HPE’s continued work with the R&E community and the high-performance networks that support research and scientific discovery.
IonQ, booth #5328: Visit IonQ and connect with their team to learn more about its full-stack quantum platform and foundry.
IQM, booth #1243: Visit IQM to see how quantum computing is moving from research into real-world applications. Experts from IQM will discuss the latest advances in superconducting quantum computers, quantum-HPC integration, and practical use cases. Stop by to meet the team, explore collaboration opportunities, see a life-size quantum computer, and learn how IQM is shaping the future of quantum technology.
Microsoft, booth #3411: Visit Microsoft to connect with their team and learn more about their work in AI acceleration and HPC solutions.
Nokia, booth #3426: R&E networks play an integral role in fostering global collaboration among research institutions. In the fast-paced AI-driven era, it is critical to stay ahead of the game. With Nokia’s high-performance data networks and advanced switching, IP routing, optical transport technologies, and data center fabric solutions, Nokia is committed to providing R&E institutions with the networks they need to collaborate and innovate. Stop by the Nokia booth for a chance to listen in on speaking sessions on Tuesday, Nov. 17, at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., and Wednesday, Nov. 18, at 11 a.m., 2 p.m., and 4 p.m.
Omnibond, booth #3723: Visit Omnibond and connect with their team to learn more about their HPC and AI cyberinfrastructure solutions.
Oracle, booth # 2511: Visit Oracle to explore Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for high-performance computing and AI. Meet with Oracle experts, see demonstrations, and join in-booth theater sessions to discuss your research computing and infrastructure priorities. Attendees can also connect with the Oracle team to explore how cloud infrastructure can support demanding scientific workloads and evolving AI initiatives.
Don’t forget to visit the Internet2 booth #3829 to meet the leadership team and staff. Learn how Internet2 supports and enables the R&E community to collaborate on mission-critical infrastructure and services that collectively advance research.
Building a coalition with religious parties will probably require ex-military chief Gadi Eisenkot to backtrack on pledges to enforce universal military conscription.
Deputy Editor Tim Carlin joins “Beyond the Headlines” to discuss all things related to midterm elections in Delaware. He shares a little about how Spotlight reporters spent their day on Tuesday, November 3, sorts through how the results may change things for Delawareans, and looks ahead to how Democrats may lead in the next two years.
The podcast was hosted by Director of Community Engagement David Stradley.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
We are recording this mid to late afternoon on Wednesday, November 4th. Talk me through your day yesterday, and the day of your fellow reporters. What were you all doing to try to cover election day for Delawareans?
Throughout the day yesterday, we had reporters in the field up and down the state from Claymont all the way down to kind of Selbyville, talking to voters after they cast their ballots, trying to really understand what was motivating the electorate in this year’s midterm elections.
From really the times that polls opened to later in the evening – I won’t say until polls closed, I think I was the last reporter out there and I called it at around 6:30 PM – just really trying to understand what voters were hoping to see from the candidates that they chose, and then why they chose some of those candidates.
After the poll reporting ended, a select group of reporters were working well into the night to monitor results and write a slew of stories that covered our statewide and federal delegation races, our state house, general assembly races, as well as some of the more down-ballot, county council races throughout the state.
We do have a full team of reporters, and they were all over the state. I’m a “Claymonster.” We had Brianna Hill going to the polls in Claymont. Nick Stonesifer down there in southern Delaware was going to some of the border communities. That’s a lot of reporter capital on this day.
Why is it important to Spotlight Delaware to spend that time, to have the reporters out there at the polls talking to people, not just following the results?
That’s a good question. I mean, I think that you don’t get the full picture of a story unless you are kind of boots on the ground, in the field to really tell it, right?
There’s something unique about election day, in that there are a slate of set locations where people from all different walks of life will be convening to do their civic duty. To take part in kind of the most vocal, the most public check on government power – not to get too kind of Aaron Sorkin about everything. There’s just a beauty in being able to pull people aside and ask them what they think.
It’s oftentimes much harder to do boots on the ground, we call it man on the street reporting. You literally have set locations where you know there are going to be people that are there voicing their opinions in one way or another. And some people are more willing to talk than others, but that’s okay.
I think it would be a disservice to not do that type of reporting and to instead just wait for results to come in. If you don’t do the poll reporting, you don’t get the full picture of the story. It can guide you. You can hear how people are thinking about the candidates and the biggest issues.
Otherwise, you’d be kind of sitting twiddling your thumbs waiting for results to come in, and if there are shocking wins or upsets, you may be wondering, “Well, how did this happen?” But poll reporting, ideally, can help you avoid some of that from happening.
As you said, you were up until about 2:00 AM last night. You are a coffee drinker.
I sure am.
If somebody walked up to you this morning at your favorite coffee shop while the dust was still settling on election day and asked you, “Hey, Tim, you’re a reporter. What the heck happened last night?” How would you try to quantify what happened in Delaware in that 30-second line to get your latte?
Well, they wouldn’t have seen me this morning because I was definitely sleeping in.
But no, I think the biggest story of the night is that Democrats won a two-thirds supermajority in the legislature. Democrats had already held this two-thirds majority in the Senate, and they achieved the same margin in the House of Representatives. They did so by flipping three seats that were previously held by Republicans. A three-seat pickup for Democrats, albeit in a state that already does lean toward the Democratic Party, is definitely interesting.
The reason that this two-thirds majority is so important and why it’s such a key number is because having a two-thirds supermajority allows the Democratic Party to amend the state constitution without any Republican support. So before last night, in order to make changes to the state constitution, Democrats needed at least one Republican to break with their party and vote with them on those proposed constitutional changes.
But going forward, for at least the next two years, Democrats will be able to propose new amendments to the state constitution and at least start the process of enacting those amendments without a single Republican vote.
We will circle back and talk more about that. But I wanted to ask you, as someone whose job it is to closely follow elections, what surprised you the most of the results last night in Delaware?
The biggest surprise to me was the Annie Norman win in the Camden-Wyoming area house district.
So Annie Norman, a first time candidate, is a long time civil servant. Worked for the state government. She’s the former Delaware state librarian. She unseated a Republican representative, Lydon Yearick, by about 150 votes. So, a win, but a close race, in a district that I personally was not closely watching until I received a tip about mid-evening last night that that was probably a district to keep my eyes on, and that tip turned out to be correct.
I think that Annie Norman’s win was the most surprising because it was the only Democratic flip where a Democrat actually unseated a sitting Republican candidate. And I don’t think that it was a race that was on a lot of people’s minds as a potential seat that could be flipped or that would have been flipped.
Moral of the story there is don’t mess with librarians.
Yeah. I guess so. I guess you’re right.
To the point of that being a race that people weren’t really watching, midway through yesterday, we put up a list of races [on the office white board], and were trying to get staff to guess who was going to win which races – and that race was not on there because no one thought that was going to be one that was going to maybe go to the Democrats.
Exactly. It didn’t make our internal leaderboard of races to even watch. Which, I guess, maybe that’s bad on us. But hey, it all worked out in the end.
As far as good on us goes, due to our advanced analytics, I guess, you were actually the one that broke it to Annie Norman that she was going to be the winner. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Yeah. So, I called Annie Norman after all of the votes were counted. There are 11 voting precincts in that house district and all the votes had been counted. There were no outstanding votes, and she was the winner.
Spotlight Delaware has our results tracker on our homepage, and those numbers are pulled directly from the Department of Elections website. It’s as accurate as you can get.
I called Annie Norman and I introduced myself and I said, “Hi, I’m with Spotlight Delaware. I would love to chat with you about your win.” And she seemed a little surprised and said, “So, you’re projecting that I’m the winner?” I said, “Well, it’s not really a projection. The votes have been counted, but based on the numbers I’m looking at I’m pretty certain that you’ve won.”
She was at a watch party in Kent County, and I asked her if she wanted a few minutes to try and consult with members of her team. She thanked me for calling her and said she would call me back. And she ultimately did, once she had a moment to kind of absorb the information.
She said that she had received a few congratulatory texts, but she wasn’t certain. And even when I talked to her the second time, she kept saying, “I keep asking everyone, are you sure? Are you sure?” And I had to tell her, “Yes, we’re sure you have won this race.”
So, a little bit of a funny moment last night.
Spotlight Delaware’s reporting is really focused on the impact of public policy decisions on Delawareans. I want to get your take on some of the impacts of the results from last night.
You’ve already referenced this supermajority that the Democrats now have in both the House and Senate in Delaware, and the fact that that is so important is because constitutional amendments can now get passed without any Republican say.
What is that actually going to mean on the ground? Are there amendments that have already been introduced that need this vote or are we still kind of up in the air about what might this mean as far as amendments that might be coming towards Delaware?
You know it’s hard to predict what new amendments could be introduced during the next general assembly. But there are a slew of outstanding amendments to the constitution that are halfway through the approval process.
Taking a bit of a step back, in order for Delaware to amend its constitution, the legislature needs to vote to approve the proposed constitutional change in two consecutive general assemblies.
A general assembly is one of the two-year sessions of our state legislature. One of the biggest examples of an outstanding or in-process amendment, and there are a slew of them, I don’t have all of them in front of me, forgive me. But one of the biggest ones from the end of or earlier this year was the right to equal marriage for gay marriage and interracial marriage. The legislature passed that proposal I think on the last day of this year’s session, at the end of this year’s session. It kind of all blurs together
So the first half of the approval process is done. But in order for that to pass, it required at least one Republican to vote with Democrats in order to enact that change.
Now, when that proposal, this equal marriage constitutional amendment is brought up for a second vote sometime within the next two years, Democrats will not need a single Republican vote in order to enshrine the right to gay marriage and the right to interracial marriage in the Delaware State Constitution.
So that’s just kind of one example of how this new two-thirds supermajority will make it easier for Democrats to push forward their own policy agenda in a very permanent way. It’s one thing to pass a law, but it’s another thing to enshrine a policy into the state constitution.
But if Republicans or Republican voters are concerned that now that this supermajority exists that a whole slew of changes are coming at them right away, that actually is not the case because it has to be voted on twice.
There would need to be votes in the next assembly as well two years from now.
Correct. It still takes at a minimum three years because you could introduce something during the second year of one general assembly, and then it must go through the second general assembly before it can become law.
I think the long-term fear for Republicans here is that now that Democrats have achieved a two-thirds supermajority, that they will hold onto that two-thirds supermajority in perpetuity, or at least for the next several years.
But, I have not heard that there is kind of a slate of new constitutional amendments that are going to be introduced on January 1 of 2027.
Let’s shift to the county level and specifically Sussex County Council. The reporting team was looking closely at two contested races there that in many ways were going to serve as a referendum on land use policy and the building boom in southern Delaware.
What ended up happening in those two races?
Sussex County Council also saw one Democratic flip. Democratic challenger Jill Hicks, a longtime land preservation community advocate activist voice, beat out incumbent Councilman John Rieley to win the kind of Millsboro-Georgetown-still somewhat coastal Sussex area seat.
But, in the other Sussex County Council race that was on the ballot, Democrat Justine Cuccia did not win and was unsuccessful in her challenge to Doug Hudson, who is another longtime Republican. So a bit of a mixed bag there in Sussex, where you had one Democratic challenger win, another Democratic challenger lose.
The kind of balance of power, if you will, for those keeping track is three-two for Republicans. There are three Republicans on County Council and now two Democratic council members.
What do you think the impact of that split result from last night will be on land use policy in Sussex County?
I think that last night’s vote kind of follows the 2024 election where a slate of three new candidates all won and all kind of came in running on issues about growth and development as well. But I think that the tenor is a little bit different this time.
I think that Jill Hicks was very focused on wanting to have her voice and have a say in the development of Sussex County’s next comprehensive plan, which is a ten-year document that guides growth and development for Sussex County.
I think that she really was hoping or is hoping to focus on creating a plan for growth and development in Sussex County that is more holistic, if you will, and less kind of piecemeal and moves away from fights over individual projects – I think about a lot of the drama surrounding Atlantic Fields, the kind of big commercial development off Route 24 last year – and really thinking about ways to integrate infrastructure improvements, mixed use developments, affordable housing issues as well, into the development conversation in Sussex County as it continues to grow kind of at warp speed almost.
Final impact question here. I wonder if you can just speak a little bit about your thoughts on the cumulative impact on rank and file Republican voters. Once again, no statewide offices went to Republicans. They had some unexpected flips of Republican House seats.
How can Republican voters make their voices heard as their party reach continues to shrink in Delaware?
I think you kind of hit the nail on the head for what the Republican leadership is probably going to be asking themselves or, you know, if I was a Republican state party leader, it’s the question that I would be asking myself.
I don’t have a good answer for what it means. There were three flips in the House of Representatives last night. I think it will be interesting moving forward to see if Democrats retain those seats in 2028, or if this was kind of a trickle-down from national rebuke that we saw of Trump administration policies and the “blue tsunami” that we saw across the country.
For Republicans it kind of comes down to coalescing around a message. I think that at the statewide level we saw Republicans really struggled to find what their message was going to be as a party. I don’t know if I have any words of encouragement or advice for Republicans, but I think that it’s a dynamic that will be interesting to see how it continues to shape up in coming years.
And for those rank and file Republican voters – you are still a Delawarean. You know, those are still your representatives. You can still make your voice heard. Show up at Leg Hall, go to committee hearings, talk.
Exactly. And I think that one thing that I also heard from some winners last night – I’m thinking about Greg Lindner down in the fourth House district near Long Neck and Oak Orchard, he was very clear that he plans to be a representative for the entire district and not just for those that voted him into office.
I think that that’s really telling about where the state is.
I also heard from Alonna Berry that she told me that throughout her day, her tour of the district yesterday, that she had heard from voters that they were really looking for political leaders to turn down the temperature, to put an end to the division. It’ll be interesting to see how some of that takes shape.
A lot of these big issues that people said brought them out to the polls – the cost of living, housing costs, gas prices, those are things that affect everyone. These aren’t partisan issues.
Like you said, casting your vote, speaking at public meetings, going to legislative hall, these are all kind of levers that you can pull to engage civically in ways that let your elected officials know what you want from them.
So let’s end on this: this didn’t necessarily play out last night, it played out more in the primaries, this center left/far left divide in the Democratic Party.
But in about three hours, as we record this, the House Democrats are going to be voting for who will be the speaker of the House. What are you looking for as that center left-far left divide perhaps plays out in that election?
Just a quick clarifying point that the meeting that’s taking place tonight – again, we’re speaking on Wednesday, November 4th – is the kind of an internal Democratic House caucus meeting where they will determine their majority leader, majority whip.
And I believe how it works is they will vote on who they would like to nominate as their House Speaker, but the Speaker of the House does formally need to be approved by the entire House of Representatives. Though in years past, it’s my understanding that Republicans have just elected who is put forth as the nominee for that position. So just to be super crystal clear.
But later tonight, Democrats will kind of have their first intraparty test of how they’re going to govern together. This meeting of choosing Democratic House leadership – in some ways it’s the first litmus test for this new kind of state of progressive lawmakers that were thrust into office after the primary election.
I think it’ll be most interesting to see who ultimately comes out on top of that race. I think it’ll help maybe be a bit of a guide post or a guiding light for what we can expect for the next two years from the Democratic caucus.
It’s been reported that the current House Speaker, Melissa Minor-Brown, is being challenged by a vocal progressive lawmaker, Medinah Wilson-Anton. In my own reporting, I’ve heard any number of possibilities for how that race could ultimately turn out. The votes are conducted via secret ballot internally within the Democratic Party, so it will be interesting to see how they ultimately shake out. It will help us understand how longtime, maybe more center left candidates and then some of these more progressive left candidates are going to get along with one another, are going to come together.
If they can kind of agree quickly and easily on a leadership team, that might say one thing. I’ve also heard the idea kind of bandied about that neither the current House Speaker Minor-Brown nor Representative Medinah Wilson-Anton will win out, and that somehow there will be a kind of third choice – a dark horse candidate – maybe put forward as a kind of consensus pick. I think that also will tell us that maybe there’s coalition building happening.
Ultimately, I think just the political nerd in me is kind of interested to see how it shakes out, but I don’t want to make too many guesses. You know, this all could be a moot point and maybe it will be a moot point by the time this comes out. But it does speak more broadly to the possibility of these friction points between the more progressive Working Families Party-backed candidates and the more longtime, establishment or center left candidates, if you will.
That was a big talking point during the primaries. The Working Families Party and progressive candidates, I want to say they unseated four or five Democratic incumbents. Again, forgive me for not having the exact number, but they’re sending a larger contingent to Dover than they have in years past.
So it will be interesting to see how these different factions that have not always gotten along in the past, now that the progressive faction has more numbers, how they will fare over the next two years. It’ll be interesting to see.
Well, thank you for your insights, Tim, and for your continued reporting as our elected officials get to work for Delawareans.
Of course. Happy to be here and happy to do the work.
Democrats have taken control of Congress in a sweeping blue wave – now the real work begins
Welcome to a special edition of How We Win, a Guardian opinion series with leading thinkers, offering bold ideas for America’s political future. Sign up here to receive future editions in your inbox.
The US president sees Europeans as the mirror image of his ‘woke’ domestic foes. They should brace for further betrayal this winter
Europeans have greeted the blue wave that crashed down on Donald Trump and his Republican party with jubilation and relief. Jubilation, because Trump’s second presidential administration has been the most destructive in the history of the transatlantic relationship. His disdain for Europe and his evident delight in attacking its governments – in particular that of Ukraine – have been hard to swallow.
Relief, because the midterm election results confirm that Europeans are not unique in being appalled by Trump’s actions: a large majority of Americans are too. I was in Washington immediately after the vote, and the mood was one of excitement and a newfound confidence. And like many Americans, in these results Europeans see hope that US democracy can be saved, American foreign policy moderated and the transatlantic partnership revived.
Nathalie Tocci is a professor of practice at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Europe, and a senior fellow at Bocconi University’s Institute for European Policymaking
Tuesday was a victory for equity and inclusivity and a rejection of hate and fear. The biggest losers? Megadonors and Super Pacs
Rather than regurgitate the particular wins and losses that occurred on Tuesday, I thought it more useful, at this point, to look at the big picture and identify the largest overall winners and losers for the country as a whole.
Biggest winner: a diverse, equitable and inclusive America. It’s Donald Trump’s DEI nightmare. Georgia voters elected Keisha Lance Bottoms, the first Black female governor in the country. Texas chose Gina Hinojosa, the state’s first Latina governor and first Democratic governor in more than 30 years. California elected Xavier Becerra, the state’s first Latino governor. New Mexico chose Deb Haaland, the country’s first female Native American governor. Florida elected Byron Donalds, the first Black governor in Florida’s history (a Republican).
Black women and girls represent an outsized share of LA homicide victims – frustrated with police and legislators’ failures, they’re stepping up and speaking out to stop the violence
As a child, Tioni Theus was a ball of energy. After school she liked to play golf and dance. On weekends, she’d go to the movies and the mall with her older cousin. Driving back home at the end of the day to her family’s apartment in South Los Angeles, California, she’d ask: “What are we doing next?”
Everything changed when Tioni was 13. Her mother was hit by a car and critically injured, leaving her unable to take care of her daughter. While her mom recovered, Tioni lived with other family members. But the accident left Tioni angry, her older cousin Nafeesah Kincy said, and she struggled to understand that her life had permanently changed.
Dozens of migrants trying to reach the Greek island of Crete or Spain died on boats and scores were rescued as the steady stream of such migrants showed no signs of diminishing, authorities said.
Terrorism investigation was opened after attacker opened fire in a market square
AFP has a quick snap that Ukraine is to hold “separate” meetings with Europeans and Nato in Abu Dhabi. The Kremlin earlier insisted no other European nations would be involved. The US-mediated talks are expected to start tomorrow.
Canada is expanding its Russia-related sanctions to target another 38 entities and 24 individuals, including actors involved in ballistic missile technology development and cyber activities, Reuters reports.
Futurism reports:
While many scientists have long held that Mars is "geologically dead" inside, new research is adding to the growing body of evidence to the contrary.
As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Science Advances, an international team of researchers examined data collected by the European and Russian ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter in 2021, which found that Mars is slowly belching hydrogen chloride gas. The researchers suggest this gas is being released from hot magma deep beneath its surface after discovering intriguing new fissures along a massive volcano, indicating the planet may be geologically active after all — or at least it was until relatively recently.
The research could have significant implications for the possibility of ancient life on the Red Planet, hinting at a far warmer and thicker atmosphere — and an abundance of liquid water on its surface — in its not-too-distant past.... The team discovered new fissures measuring thousands of feet in length... suggesting ongoing activity underneath the surface. The researchers discovered discolorations along these fissures, concluding that they may be the result of seeping gases leaving mineral deposits similar to volcanic gas vents on Earth... The fissures could also be a perfect place to find evidence of past life on the Red Planet [argued Daniel Mège, the study's colead author and a Polish Academy of Sciences professor]... "If hydrothermal systems are active, they could contain the ingredients and energy needed for microorganisms to develop, and shield microorganisms from the hostile and changing environment above the surface."
Old-school dishes still earn a place on the menu. These 17 retro recipes span casseroles, quiche, chowders, chicken, and classic sides, with familiar flavors for family dinners, brunches, and gatherings.The post 17 retro comfort food picks that never needed a…
Donald Trump said on Sunday that he was 'only kidding' when he announced a day earlier that he had offered the job of White House press secretary to Dana White, the chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)
With Thanksgiving groceries on the way, use up vegetables, cooked turkey, rice, pasta, and cheese in these 17 casseroles. The mix includes hearty dinners and familiar sides, so less food gets left behind.The post 17 casseroles to clear out the…
Election wins of Annie Andrews, Abdul El-Sayed and more who ran on healthcare issues are viewed as a sign of hope as Trump administration unravels US health policy
Public health leaders and politicians whomadehealthcare a central part of their platforms swept into office in the US midterm elections last week, setting the stage for national, state and local changes.
Voters, faced with an unprecedented rise in vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles, alongside devastating outbreaks of foodborne illnesses, chose national candidates who prioritized public health, healthcare affordability, reproductive health and the impeachment of Robert F Kennedy Jr, among other key issues.
Jensen Huang reportedly had close relationship with Chinese businesswoman accused of passing information to Beijing. Plus, tennis legend Billie Jean King tells all
Good morning. Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang, has been placed under “independent investigation” by the tech company after reports emerged he had been “the target of a foreign intelligence effort”, namely a close relationship with a Chinese businesswoman who is accused of passing information to Beijing. Nvidia stock is down 5% in pre-market trading as a result.
The company’s board said in a statement that while it had no reason to believe that either US national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised, its inquiry would examine all available information. Republican lawmakers have expressed alarm, asking Huang to give the House foreign affairs and intelligence committees a closed-door briefing next week on Nvidia’s “security protocols against foreign adversary espionage”.
An Israeli airline shipped thousands of pounds worth of parts for controversial “bunker-buster” bombs through John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York during the height of the Israeli–U.S. war against Iran, according to a new investigation by a left-wing research group.
Challenge Airlines, a cargo hauler based in Israel, made three flights this spring carrying the bomb casings for BLU-109s — a 2,000-pound munition that has been tied to numerous mass-casualty attacks on civilian neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, and Iran in recent years — according to open-source data obtained by the Movement Research Unit and reviewed by The Intercept.
The airline also made more than 100 shipments of guidance kits known as joint direct attack munitions, or JDAMs — which are used to convert so-called “dumb bombs” into GPS-guided munitions capable of striking a specific target — according to data shared with The Intercept. Many of the guidance kits were marked for use on the MK-84, another 2,000-pound bomb Israel used in its campaign to level Gaza, where fragments of JDAMs have repeatedly been found at the site of airstrikes.
The 2,000-pound bombs present a serious risk of civilian casualties, according to Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned at the outset of the war in Gaza to protest the Biden administration’s sale of weapons to Israel.
“If you look at historic U.S. use of 2,000-pound bombs, in the entire counter-ISIS campaign, there were just two that were dropped in the vicinity of the city of Mosul precisely because there is no way to use a 2,000-pound bomb discriminately in an urban environment,” Paul said, referring to an American air war during the final years of the Obama administration to end the Islamic State’s control of the Iraqi city of Mosul.
Israel hasn’t shared the United States’s reservations. The country made extensive use of the weapons to attack targets in Gaza and Lebanon, including a deadly strike on Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp that killed dozens of civilians, according to an analysis by the New York Times.
“If you look at a picture of Gaza right now, I would say Israel’s use of these weapons is functionally indistinguishable from indiscriminate bombing,” Paul said.
“There is no way to use a 2,000-pound bomb discriminately in an urban environment.”
Challenge Airlines, and the Israeli military did not respond to request for comment.
“We work closely with all airport partners to ensure the safety of public, neighboring communities, and airport personnel,” said a spokesperson for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates JFK Airport. “The federal government and commercial airlines have primary responsibility as to what is allowed to be shipped on aircraft. We are pre-empted under federal law from interfering with these activities.”
While the shipments of JDAMs and bomb bodies for BLU-109s did not include active munitions, previous shipments of weapons through JFK have included explosives, including 14 tons of nitrocellulose bound for Israel in May 2025.
The Intercept verified the data showing all three shipments of bunker-buster bomb bodies, and verified a portion of the data showing shipments of JDAM kits. Movement Research Unit, an investigative outlet whose prior work has uncovered shipments of drone tech to Israel and the transport of fighter jet parts by United Airlines onboard civilian passenger flights, shared the data on the condition that some specifics of its methods be withheld to prevent a crackdown on the availability of such data.
In response to the flow of weapons and materiel through JFK, the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America has been organizing a campaign to stop the flow of weapons to Israel through the airport.
“This is another example of a growing body of reporting that shows how civilian infrastructure is used for the genocide in Gaza,” said a DSA member named Henry, who asked to be identified without his last name in order prevent retaliation from his employer. “Civilian air travel should prioritize passengers, travelers, and the international community — not weapons — and no worker should be forced to serve the militarized supply chain.”
Tons of Pressure
Challenge Airlines shipped the bunker-buster bomb bodies on flights leaving JFK for Tel Aviv on March 12, April 30, and May 6, according to the data shared with The Intercept.
They shipped the guidance kits far more frequently, with 109 shipments leaving JFK for Tel Aviv between December 22, 2024, and June 7, 2026. Cargo documents indicate that most of the shipments were of JDAM kits designed for 2,000-pound MK-84 bombs but also included at least one shipment of kits for bunker-buster bombs.
In total, the airline shipped 175,884 pounds of BLU-109 casings and more than 5 million pounds of JDAM kits between December 22, 2024, and June 7, 2026, according to the data obtained by Movement Research Unit.
JFK Airport is the main export hub for such munitions flying by air to Israel, according to federal data: More than half of all Israel-bound air shipments of weapons that fit the government export category for bombs and missiles was sent abroad from JFK.
It was not immediately clear where the bunker buster and JDAM shipments originated, but sales of military hardware to Israel typically either come from deals between the Israeli and U.S. governments or direct commercial purchases under a special export license made by the Israeli military from private companies.
In the first two years of Israel’s war on Gaza, the U.S. spent $21.7 billion on military aid to Israel, according to a study by analyst William Hartung. That has included multiple shipments of 2,000-pound bombs like the BLU-109 and the MK-84, as well as JDAM kits to equip the weapons with GPS guidance.
The Biden administration in May 2024 halted the shipment of MK-84 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, citing the potential harm to civilians, but President Donald Trump resumed shipments of the heavy munitions within weeks of retaking the White House.
News of the shipments comes just over a month after the Associated Press revealed plans in the works for the U.S. to ink a vast $2.8billion arms sale to Israel that would include thousands of 2,000-pound bombs.
The ongoing sale of such heavy weapons to Israel underscores the need for a federal solution, according to Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., who sponsored last year legislation dubbed the “Block the Bombs Act,” that would bar the U.S. from selling BLU-109s, JDAMs, and other munitions central to Israel’s war effort.
“It’s good that people are putting pressure locally, but ultimately it is Congress’s responsibility to make that happen.”
“It’s the only bill that prohibits these weapons transfers from happening, and the only bill that creates a comprehensive process of oversight,” Ramirez told The Intercept. “There’s been a big push, particularly in New York and around JFK, to block these transfers and it’s good that people are putting pressure locally, but ultimately it is Congress’s responsibility to make that happen.”
First introduced in May 2025, the bill has gathered more than 80 co-sponsors but has thus far languished in legislative limbo. With the House of Representatives soon to be under Democratic control, Ramirez said she plans to bring the bill to the floor next session.
The same technical limits that prevent superintelligence make these systems dangerous. But we know how to regulate them
Many Silicon Valley leaders believe superintelligence is an imminent threat to society. The White House even published an accord about it. This isn’t enough.
Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, estimates the risk of human extinction is at least 10% within the next few decades. The Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, argued that unchecked AI “could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems”. In response, 1,300 leaders and employees from many leading AI companies signed a letter calling to “deliberately pace” development.
The new Congress cannot maintain the culture of political impunity that got us here in the first place
Fresh from an overwhelming victory, Democrats might quickly divide over what should be seen as unnecessary fracture.
Establishment figures demand a focus on “kitchen table issues”, while others insist that successful candidates did not just campaign on the cost of living, but managed to connect people’s daily struggles with the unprecedented corruption of the Trump administration.
Winning candidates promised to cut costs, rein in corporations, curb billionaire power and improve the economy
Don’t worry, cash-strapped Americans, “relief is on the way”, the senator Chuck Schumer promised last week in a press conference celebrating Democrats’ massive midterms win.
Winning candidates promised to cut food and healthcare costs, rein in corporations ripping off consumers and workers, curb billionaire power and make the world’s biggest economy better serve the working class.
Donald Trump Jr., left, and Eric Trump, right, watch as their father, Donald Trump, center, speaks to members of the media in 2024. Justin Lane/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The Trump administration awarded a small biosecurity company nearly $40 million to screen for Ebola and other infectious diseases just months after a firm linked to President Donald Trump’s elder sons invested in its parent company, according to records and interviews.
The contracts, one to screen for Ebola in several U.S. airports and the other to respond to disease outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo, are seven times the total value of government contracts the company had directly received before.
The company, XpresTest, has years of experience monitoring for COVID-19 and other diseases for the government at U.S. airports. That makes its parent, XWELL, an unusual hybrid, selling both spa treatments and biosecurity services. Last year, it made most of its money from waxing salons and airport spas that offer manicures, massages and “chakra beds.”
The contracts are the latest example of the president’s family benefiting financially from his administration’s actions. And the stakes for these deals are particularly high. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, an Ebola outbreak has killed more than 5,000 people this year, and the federal government is trying to stop the pathogen from coming to the U.S.
XpresTest has never worked with Ebola or provided biosecurity services abroad, let alone in the kind of volatile locales it’s now expected to work in. The CEO of its parent company, Ezra Ernst, said XpresTest won both contracts in a competitive bidding process and pointed to its years of experience doing screening for COVID-19 and other pathogens at American airports. But even he acknowledged that working internationally is “a new thing for us” and expressed uncertainty about being able to complete the work in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“This is a risky contract. I’m not sure we can do it,” Ernst said in an interview.
Jeremy Konyndyk, who helped oversee the U.S. government’s response to a 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, said there are some parallels between monitoring for COVID-19 and Ebola at airports, but he said it’s concerning that the government would award such a lucrative contract to a company that has no experience in Africa.
“There are countless organizations in the world that have decades of experience doing this work,” Konyndyk said. “I have to wonder why the hell they’re not going with someone who has actually done this before.”
Under previous administrations, the U.S. government addressed international disease outbreaks in partnership with the World Health Organization. But Trump withdrew from the group last year, dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, which handled much of this work, and dramatically scaled back the global presence of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At the same time, the State Department launched the America First Global Health Strategy, which calls for the U.S. to use aid to foreign countries to “promote American companies and American innovations abroad.” This March, the State Department announced it would be giving up to $4.5 billion in funding for various purposes, including responding to infectious disease outbreaks.
Under that program, XPresTest was awarded $20 million. Other funding went to better-known global aid nonprofits, including International Medical Corps, Save the Children and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, whose awards ranged from $25 million to $35 million.
The CDC also awarded XPresTest a contract, for $18.8 million.
In response to questions from ProPublica about XPresTest and its parent company, XWELL, the State Department noted the firm’s previous work screening for diseases at airports under a contract with the CDC and said its own award was made “through a competitive process that builds on this successful model.”
The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.
A spokesperson for the president’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric Trump said that they are “merely passive, minority investors in a fund that invested in this company,” and that they had no “involvement in or knowledge regarding the negotiation or procurement of any of its contracts, including any government contracts.”
“Both are private citizens who hold no government positions, broken no laws and who have every right to pursue lawful business and investment opportunities,” the spokesperson said.
The Trump sons’ connection to XWELL was established in February, when a fund called American Ventures invested in the company. The fund was launched by Dominari Holdings, a small financial firm with offices inside Trump Tower in New York. The leaders of Dominari hired the Trump sons as advisers after their father was elected to a second term and granted them a stake of more than 10% in Dominari.
Anthony Hayes, the CEO of Dominari Holdings, told ProPublica, “We have never seen or even heard of Don or Eric using their family name to influence the granting of a government contract.”
American Ventures has taken stakes in other companies that have benefited from Trump administration actions. The Florida-based drone company Powerus got a contract worth up to $90 million from the U.S. Air Force five months after the Trumps’ involvement was announced. Through American Ventures, Donald Jr. and Eric Trump also are acquiring a stake in a critical minerals group that has received U.S. government support to mine for tungsten in Kazakhstan. The Trumps have described themselves as passive investors who do not advocate for the companies they have stakes in before their father’s government.
XWELL was founded in 2006 as a line of airport-based spas that provided massages and facials. During the pandemic, the company, then known as XpresSpa Group, got $5.5 million from the CDC to offer travelers COVID-19 testing. It also collected waste from airplane toilets to check for new viral strains. It has done similar work for at least one other company that has received government contracts.
In January, XWELL announced that it was hiring a former senior adviser at the CDC who created and led the agency’s traveler surveillance program. The firm said the move was part of a plan to expand “its traveler-based pathogen surveillance capabilities to support international travel hubs and large-scale mass gathering events worldwide.”
The following month, American Ventures invested about $30 million in XWELL. The company had lost money the previous year. “We were so cash-strapped, close to bankrupt,” its CEO said.
Its valuation before the cash infusion was just $3 million. In exchange, American Ventures got a roughly 10% stake in the company to start, with an option to essentially print and sell millions of shares in the future.
Why American Ventures would invest so much in XWELL is unclear. In other cases, when the fund has invested in similar tiny publicly traded companies, some of those firms have moved into hot new sectors and drawn publicity for their connection to the Trumps, then Dominari has offloaded shares. In this case, there is no indication it has sold any of its stake yet.
In June, XpresTest was awarded the CDC contract for what a public notice about the grant said was “Ebola entry screening services.”
XpresTest then received the State Department grant for “rapid, effective, and coordinated outbreak response” to infectious disease threats in theDemocratic Republic of Congo, which began in September, according to a government database. The company is also planning to work in Kenya and Morocco. XWELL’s website shows it is now hiring specialists in Ebola response training and biosecurity in the U.S.
An XpresSpa at Miami International AirportKarston Tannis/Monmouth Media House
In July, after XpresTest was awarded the CDC contract, XWELL announced plans to sell the subsidiary along with its line of spas to a private facial spa company. Ernst, the CEO, said the government contracts played a role in the $13 million sale price and will follow XpresTest to the new company.
That means XWELL, the company that the Trump-linked investment fund took a stake in, will benefit financially from the Trump administration contracts if the sale closes, even though it won’t be involved in doing the work for the government.
XWELL said in a public filing that the sale was part of an effort “to pursue a new direction in the national security sector.” Ernst said he didn’t know the exact plans but thought the parent company might be looking to work with the Department of Defense.
XWELL did not announce either of XpresTest’s biosecurity contracts, which recently became public in federal contracting disclosures. Public companies like XWELL are required to report so-called material events, developments that could affect their share price, such as a large government contract. XWELL has publicized previous work for the federal government, including a $2 million, eight-week pilot program for testing COVID-19 in 2021.
When asked why his firm didn’t announce the awards, Ernst gave various reasons, including the possibility that XPresTest might wind up not being able to do the work — either because of its own inexperience working internationally or because the Trump administration might suddenly shift priorities and only pay for a fraction of the contract.
“None of these contracts are guaranteed,” he said.
The biosecurity awards add to the questions about the Trump family’s enrichment during his second term. The Trump family’s business activities extend far beyond Dominari and American Ventures. The president himself has made more than $1 billion from cryptocurrency ventures whose value has ballooned as his administration has taken a friendly stance to the industry. And other companies backed by his sons Donald Jr. and Eric have received billions of dollars in federal deals. Earlier this year, ProPublica reported that the Pentagon granted a small North Carolina startup linked to Trump Jr. a $620 million loan after a top aide to the president intervened on the company’s behalf. The Pentagon denied preferential treatment, and a spokesperson for Trump Jr. said he played no role.
The Trumps’ financial ties to government deals and actions are expected to be a primary focus of Congress in the coming months after Democrats won control of both the Senate and the House in last week’s midterm elections.
“When the government is corrupted for personal gain over the public interest, Americans lose trust and taxpayer dollars are wasted,” Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, wrote in a letter to colleagues last week.
Soon after Democrats retook the U.S. Senate, comedian Jon Stewart stirred the pot on his weekly podcast, criticizing Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who could become his party’s majority leader in the coming weeks.
“One of the first things you need to do is remove that system of seniority from Democratic politics,” Stewart said Nov. 5, two days after the election. “It is a b——- system, and it needs to go. … (People are) already like, ‘Chuck Schumer deserves a lot of credit for putting together this (victory). … Enough. Chuck Schumer fought tooth and nail against half of these f—— people, and even if he didn’t, he does not understand the urgency of the moment and what the future demands.”
Stewart’s remark echoes the complaints of some progressives, who have criticized Schumer’s support for Rep. Haley Stevens over the more progressive Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Senate primary race. El-Sayed won the general election, days after Stevens endorsed his opponent, Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers. Schumer also faces discontent from some Democrats who want a new generation of leadership; Schumer is 75 and has been in Congress since 1981.
Even when accounting for comedic hyperbole, Stewart ignores that Schumer actively recruited at least five of the winning Democratic Senate candidates — enough to supply the margin that flipped the chamber blue. Schumer did support an alternative candidate before the primary in three states, but he closed ranks once the nomination was settled.
In a Nov. 6 interview with The New York Times’ The Daily podcast, Schumer said he didn’t expect to face any challenge in the election for Senate majority leader. Schumer said: “Our caucus is focused on moving forward. Everyone’s very happy with what we all did.”
Michael Cohen, a Democratic commentator and MS NOW columnist, said he gives “most credit (for the Democrats flipping the Senate) to Donald Trump, but I would put Schumer second. He recruited these candidates.”
Representatives for Stewart did not respond to our inquiry. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which is the political arm of Senate Democrats aligned with Schumer, did not respond, either.
Which candidates did Schumer support from the beginning?
For the North Carolinarace, Schumer recruited former Gov. Roy Cooper, who ended up winning by 20 points. As long ago as April 2025, Axios reported that senior Democrats were describing Cooper as a potential “coup” for Schumer, given his popularity during his two terms as governor.
In Ohio, Schumer also recruited former U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown. In his interview with The Daily, Schumer said he flew to Columbus twice to persuade Brown to run. Brown won by five points.
Schumer also worked to get candidates in Alaska and Iowa. Schumer recruited former U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola in Alaska and state Rep. Josh Turek in Iowa, The Washington Post reported in January 2026. Peltola was narrowly ahead as of Nov. 6, while Turek won his race by five points. Schumer and his allies pushed for Turek in his successful primary bid instead of a primary rival, state Sen. Zach Wahls.
In Mississippi, Schumer was an early backer of Scott Colom, who is leading in a close and uncalled Senate race. Schumer told The Daily that he invited Colom and his father to his Brooklyn home before he was in the race and urged Colom to run. In a Nov. 5 appearance on MS NOW, Schumer said he had been trying to recruit a candidate in Mississippi for three or four years. Colom initially declined, but Schumer said he told Colom “we’ll back” him.
In several cases, we were unable to confirm that Schumer recruited a winning Democratic candidate, but we also found no evidence that he backed anyone else or stood in the way of their efforts. That’s the case for U.S. Rep. Chris Pappas in New Hampshire, pediatrician Annie Andrews in South Carolina, state Rep. James Talarico in Texas and pastor Adam Hamilton in Kansas. Another winning Democrat, Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, was an incumbent and always had Schumer’s support.
“He’s just a very effective recruiter,” Cohen said of Schumer.
Where did Schumer bet on the wrong horse?
The biggest irritant for many Democratic voters was Schumer’s role in Michigan’s primary. There, Schumer backed Stevens over El-Sayed. El-Sayed won the primary by less than a percentage point, then went on to win the general election by eight points.
In Minnesota, the primary featured U.S. Rep. Angie Craig, another moderate, and Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan. Schumer did not endorse either candidate, but other establishment Democrats openly or tacitly supported Craig. Flanagan won the primary and had unified party support going into the general election.
Maine was more complicated. Schumer recruited Gov. Janet Mills to challenge Republican Sen. Susan Collins, but Mills struggled and suspended her campaign before the primary and oyster farmer Graham Platner won the nomination. Platner withdrew after sexual assault allegations. After Troy Jackson won the nomination at a party convention, Schumer endorsed him.
Schumer’s aligned campaign committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, supported all the Democratic nominees, regardless of whether they received Schumer’s initial backing.
What do these candidates think of Schumer?
In public, even some of the candidates Schumer backed have not returned the favor when asked whether they would support him as Senate majority leader.
Among the winners who have said on the record that they will not support him for leader are Hamilton of Kansas, Andrews of South Carolina, Jackson of Maine, El-Sayed of Michigan and Flanagan of Minnesota. The winners in three other states — Talarico of Texas, Pappas of New Hampshire and Turek of Iowa — have declined to affirm their support for him when asked.
The majority leader is not chosen by seniority, as Stewart described. The leader is chosen by a secret ballot of the Senate Democratic Caucus. So there’s nothing stopping Democratic senators from choosing someone else.
After the 1994 elections, Senate Democrats elected Tom Daschle of South Dakota minority leader when he was in the bottom half of the caucus’ seniority, said Steven Smith, an Arizona State University political scientist.
There’s also no way of knowing how a senator voted unless they volunteer that information publicly.
“Seniority was never how party leaders are chosen, and it’s been several decades since it was how committee chairs were elevated,” said Donald Wolfensberger, a former senior congressional aide. “Today, party caucuses are king.”
Schumer has been caucus leader since 2017 in both the minority and the majority.
Our ruling
Stewart said Schumer “fought tooth and nail against half of these” Democrats who won Senate races.
Schumer spearheaded the recruitment of winning candidates in North Carolina, Ohio and Iowa, plus candidates who are leading uncalled races in Alaska and Mississippi. Together, these races would be enough to flip the Senate Democratic.
Schumer initially backed different candidates in Michigan and Maine, but he and his allies supported the eventual nominees. Progressives also disliked his decision not to affirmatively back Flanagan in Minnesota. That’s three candidates that he didn’t back, out of 12 competitive races Democrats won or may win against Republicans or in open seats.
The statement contains an element of truth, because of Schumer’s initial opposition or reluctance to support a few Democrats who eventually won seats. But by ignoring his more numerous efforts to recruit at least five other winning candidates, Stewart gives a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.
The new Democratic Congress is expected to try to roll back key changes the president made to federal education policy, including the dismantling of the Education Department.
Violent storms lash northern Iraq and parts of Iran, while Portugal faces strong winds and Japan braces for further snowfall
Deadly flash floods hit northern Iraq on Saturday as severe thunderstorms swept across the region, including in neighbouring Iran. The city of Erbil, in Iraq, was particularly badly hit, with extensive damage to homes and businesses. Streets were inundated as torrential rain fell over a short period.
Rainfall exceeded forecasts, with an estimated 80mm falling in the city, compared with expectations of 30mm. Two people were killed in the floods.
What is the right size for an AI factory? Around the world, the answer is increasingly counted in gigawatts. Europe is asking a complementary question: what does each watt deliver?
The answer is already taking shape. Thirteen AI Factories have been selected by EuroHPC since December 2024, six have signed procurement contracts, and consortia are preparing AI GigaFactories. Alongside the global push for scale, Europe is building on three pillars: an integrated AI environment, sustainability and sovereignty.
An integrated AI environment: power only counts if it delivers
Peak figures flatter. Compute outpaces memory and storage bandwidth, networks take more time as clusters grow, and Amdahl’s law still caps the gains: with 5% sequential code, no number of processors beats 20 times faster. AI sharpens all three limits.
The answer starts with hybridisation, the right processor for each task, from GPUs and AI accelerators to CPUs as conductors and soon, quantum processors. The building blocks are mature; the opportunity now is industrial-grade integration, with software that orchestrates the mix, so users don’t have to.
It also means tying infrastructure investment to measurable objectives, from accelerating scientific discovery and researching brain and medical diseases to enabling digital twins. Performance matters, but so does utilisation, efficiency and return on investment.
Image supplied by Bull
That is where the market is heading, from racks of accelerators to integrated environments. Bull builds its systems on that principle, and its Centre of Excellence in Performance Programming helps customers turn peak figures into results.
Sustainability: more value per watt
Efficiency is a design criterion, not a constraint. An AI rack can exceed 120 kW, against around ten for a typical enterprise one, and the grid is the new frontier: you can order a machine tomorrow and still not know when you can switch it on. At scale, an AI factory draws 100 MW or more, and a Gigafactory a gigawatt, while energy access and infrastructure lead times in the United States can reach 3 to 7 years for major generation assets. Over its lifetime, a machine’s energy bill can rival its hardware amortisation cost. The goal shifts from more compute to more value per watt, tracked alongside accuracy, latency and cost.
The biggest gain may sit above the hardware. Software that makes applications hardware-aware, for instance by matching each workload to the right resources, can cut cost and energy significantly. Regulation is also taking shape: Germany’s Energy Efficiency Act requires a PUE of 1.2 for new data centres, and European industry must get ready. Bull has more than ten years of experience building infrastructures that reach a PUE below 1.2, notably with its patented warm-water Direct Liquid Cooling, which removes heat at the source. On LUMI-AI, due in Finland in the second half of 2027, the excess heat will feed Kajaani’s district heating network, with the site running entirely on renewable electricity
Yet PUE and Green500 describe the building and the machine, not the science they enable. Bull’s answer is Science Usage Efficiency (SUE), a metric presented at the Teratec Forum In Paris by Bruno Lecointe, SVP HPC, AI & Quantum Business Line: useful science per unit of energy, such as simulated nanoseconds per megajoule in molecular dynamics or simulated years per megajoule in climate modelling. Read like an energy label, SUE would reward software progress as much as hardware and give buyers a common target to write into tenders.
Image supplied by Bull
Sovereignty: a European model that travels
Sovereignty is a global aspiration, not just a European one. Every country wants control over its digital future; from the data it generates to the technologies its critical infrastructure relies on. That takes more than local hardware: it takes secure, trusted systems that can be operated independently over the long term. Europe’s opportunity is a model others can adopt while empowering local ecosystems.
And the momentum is real. LUMI-AI, shared by six countries and backed by a €387.8 million contract, is expected to deliver ten times the AI capacity of today’s LUMI. Alice Recoque, France’s first exascale system, shows the European supply chain maturing, pairing Bull’s BXI interconnect with SiPearl’s Rhea2 processor from 2027, alongside AMD accelerators.
The outlook
AI factories require expertise and ecosystems; GigaFactories will bring scale. Europe’s strength will not come from computing power alone, but from combining performance, governance, sustainability and sovereignty in a repeatable model of trusted, secure and economically sustainable environments. In a market where energy is the bottleneck, that may matter more than the hardware, and the next chapter is only getting interesting.
Planning an AI factory? Meet Bull’s experts at SC26, booth #2011, and find out how to turn peak figures into results. For more info or to book a meeting visit bull.com
Lawsuit filed last year against IBM, Atos and Leonardo after delays to passengers blamed on the system, first reported in the FT
The EU has filed a lawsuit against IBM and two other companies involved in its troubled border-management system, an internal document has revealed.
The bloc’s IT agency, EU-Lisa, filed a case last year against IBM, the French IT company Atos and Italian defence contractor Leonardo, the three members of a consortium to implement and maintain the EU’s entry/exit system, which was launched in October 2025.
To accelerate scientific discovery without spending weeks configuring infrastructure or hand-tuning legacy code, high-performance computing (HPC) teams need purpose-built hardware and AI-driven software engineering working together. As the supercomputing community gathers for SC26, computational scientists face two converging priorities: lowering the operational barrier to running massive-scale simulations in the cloud, and integrating generative AI directly into the scientific computing lifecycle.
Historically, moving HPC workloads to the cloud meant navigating steep operational hurdles—translating decades-old Fortran or C++ codebases for modern accelerators, assembling complex storage hierarchies, and hand-tuning job schedulers. At the same time, effectively leveraging AI in science requires moving beyond basic chatbots to systems that modernize, orchestrate, and optimize complex numerical workloads.
At Google Cloud, we are tackling both challenges by pairing Google Antigravity and AlphaEvolve with our purpose-built supercomputing infrastructure, compressing months of engineering overhead into hours so you can go straight from hypothesis to insight.
Reduce operational friction with Google Antigravity
Scientists want to focus on physics, climate modeling, or molecular dynamics—not corralling infrastructure, diagnosing node failures, or refactoring serial code.
Google Antigravity is an agentic development platform that removes friction across the entire scientific software lifecycle. Built around a single co-optimized agent harness, Antigravity meets engineering teams across every surface they already use: the 2.0 Desktop App, CLI, IDE extensions, and SDK. Your project context, domain skills, and governance follow you everywhere through a transparent loop that you review and steer via inspectable artifacts:
Legacy code modernization: Antigravity automates the refactoring, vectorization, and accelerator offloading of serial C, C++, or Fortran kernels for modern parallel hardware.
Natural language cluster orchestration: Instead of error-prone manual setup, Antigravity translates natural language requests into validated, production-ready HPC clusters with complex storage and specialized interconnects.
Automated runtime recovery: When long-running jobs hit hardware faults or memory bottlenecks, Antigravity diagnoses root causes and orchestrates recovery workflows to keep simulations on track.
Push algorithmic boundaries with AlphaEvolve
Once your cluster is running and your code is modernized, maximizing hardware efficiency is the next frontier. Developed by Google DeepMind and available on Google Cloud, AlphaEvolve is a Gemini-powered evolutionary coding agent that autonomously discovers, designs, and optimizes complex algorithms. By combining LLMs with evolutionary computation, AlphaEvolve iteratively writes, tests, and refines code against measurable performance metrics.
Across Google, AlphaEvolve has already recovered roughly 0.7% of global compute resources via a custom Borg scheduling heuristic, optimized Gemini matrix multiplication and FlashAttention kernels, improved Verilog arithmetic circuits for TPUs, and advanced state-of-the-art solutions to decades-old mathematical problems like the kissing number problem.
In HPC pipelines, AlphaEvolve tackles bottlenecks that hand-tuned heuristics struggle to solve:
Kernel and compute optimization: Wrap compute-intensive routines (such as matrix multiplications, tensor operations, or Fast Fourier Transforms) in # EVOLVE-BLOCK-START and # EVOLVE-BLOCK-END tags, and AlphaEvolve tests permutations to discover faster hardware-specific execution paths.
Simulation and solver tuning: In fields including computational fluid dynamics (CFD), molecular dynamics, and semiconductor simulation, AlphaEvolve discovers more efficient convergence rules for numerical solvers and smarter criteria for dynamic grid refinement.
Cluster scheduling heuristics: AlphaEvolve evolves custom scheduling policies for heterogeneous nodes to minimize job turnaround time and reduce idle gaps.
Paired with high-throughput accelerators and JAX integration on Google Cloud, AlphaEvolve runs millions of evaluation cycles asynchronously over hours—simultaneously optimizing speed, memory footprint, and energy usage across search spaces that would take human teams months to explore.
Purpose-built infrastructure live at SC26
Agentic workflows and evolutionary algorithms perform best on infrastructure built for tightly coupled simulations and large-scale AI:
New H4D VM shapes:Purpose-built H4D instances powered by Titanium offload and Cloud RDMA conquer traditional MPI scaling bottlenecks now available in a new high-memory 3 TB shape.
Next-generation accelerators:TPU 8t and 8i systems alongside GPU-accelerated VMs deliver high-density compute for traditional simulations and hybrid AI-HPC workloads.
High-throughput parallel storage:Google Cloud Managed Lustre provides sub-millisecond latency and massive parallel I/O throughput without the overhead of manually managing parallel file systems.
Joining us at SC26? Stop by the Google Cloud booth to experience this stack in action:
See TPU 8t and 8i up close: Inspect our latest TPU hardware in person and explore how TPUs accelerate scientific and technical computing workflows.
Test-drive the HPC Prompt Playground: Go hands-on and see how natural language prompts spin up functional HPC environments and running jobs in minutes.
Explore demos: Watch demos showcasing Antigravity agentic workflows, prompt-to-simulation HPC tools, AlphaEvolve physics optimization, and 10 TB/s Managed Lustre storage, alongside interactive TPU kiosks and a hands-on agentic lab.
Learn at our in-booth theater: Hear directly from Google Cloud engineers, researchers, and our partner community on real-world breakthroughs in AI-powered HPC.
Okinawa's governor says he is going to request a review of a pact seen as giving the U.S. military preferential treatment in Japan, following a murder allegedly committed by an American Marine.
Thick fog will shroud much of the southern half of England, the eastern half of Wales and most of Northern Ireland throughout the early part of the week, forecasters have said, as commuters are told to expect delays.
There was disruption to flights at Heathrow airport on Monday, while an incident involving 30 vehicles closed a major road in Kent on Saturday evening.
The Polish man suspected of killing six people in a shooting attack in Krakow, described as an "act of terror" by senior officials, has died of his injuries.
COLUMBUS, OHIO — Ohio voters delivered a sweeping rejection of large data center development in Tuesday’s election, with all 21 ballot measures tied to restricting, regulating or opposing such projects producing results unfavorable to the industry.
The measures appeared across 18 communities and included outright bans, zoning restrictions, financial safeguards and referendums on proposed development. In Wilmington, roughly 80% of voters rejected four separate rezonings that could have enabled data center projects.
In Piqua, voters approved a charter amendment prohibiting data centers by about a 2-to-1 margin and also recalled three city commissioners associated with approval of a Meta project. Upper Sandusky voters backed a data center ban with nearly 77% support, while 87% of voters in Perry approved a requirement that developers receiving tax incentives provide financial guarantees.
The results reflect growing local concern over electricity demand, water use, farmland conversion, tax incentives and whether large data center projects provide enough long-term employment or community benefit to justify their infrastructure demands.
Ohio was not alone. Ballotpedia found voters favored limiting data center development in 40 of 41 local ballot measures nationwide on Nov. 3.
Industry groups responded by promising greater transparency and community investment, while opponents are now pushing Ohio lawmakers to consider a statewide moratorium on large projects.
The Ohio results do not amount to a statewide ban, but they send a clear message that communities increasingly want more control over where and whether hyperscale data centers are built.
Ever since it crashed on to PC and consoles in the late 90s, GTA has been tearing up the game-making rulebook. We explore how its cultural references, rebel spirit and sprawling sense of freedom make it a definitive work of art
In the 00s, when the Grand Theft Auto developer Rockstar Games revealed a new project, video game writers from all over the UK would make the journey to the company’s office in London. They would be ushered one by one into a darkened room to sit facing an enormous TV. There would be a dish of sweets on a low bench in front of them but, in the reverential hush that descended, it was never entirely clear if it was acceptable to eat them.
After a few moments, the screen would come to life. Rockstar would sometimes begin its presentation not with footage from its new game, but clips from classic movies. This is the context of what we are making, Rockstar was saying, and that is where we belong.
What happens when Elon Musk and a bunch of tech bros try to rip up the US government? Journalist Michael Lewis – the acclaimed author of Moneyball and of The Big Short – talks to Nosheen Iqbal about his new book Blockers, which tells the story of the civil servants who stood up to Musk’s ‘department of government efficiency’ as it tried to dismantle the US government
Trump has long relied on sports to project strength and fuel his culture wars. But after a crushing midterm defeat, even his UFC ally cannot distract from the political fallout
In the wake of being destroyed in the midterm elections, it was only a matter of time before Donald Trump did something outrageous in an attempt to misdirect public attention away from his catastrophic losses. Before the midterms, published reports suggested the possibility of apocalypse, global or domestic – a nuclear strike on Iran, martial law to suspend last week’s, the invalidation of individual races, such as in Alaska – but Trump opted for banality over Armageddon, offering his vacant press secretary opening to Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White.
It was absurd, and widely posited that a confused Trump had erroneously conflated UFC’s White with the Dana White who made more sense, former Heritage Foundation staffer Dana White. Because the public reactions made him look even more lost, confirming the sentiments of recklessness and disorder, utter chaos and buffoonery that led to the Republicans being routed in the midterm elections, the president said his offer to White was all a joke. As a disciple of the notorious McCarthyite Roy Cohn, who taught Trump one of his main political pillars – never apologize or admit wrongdoing. Ever. – Trump should not, of course, be taken at his word.
When a person challenging their conviction can’t afford a lawyer, a judge will appoint one. Last year, Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Frank Palumbo advised a newly appointed lawyer that his case looked “like it’s going to be a … dismissal.” Illustration by Mark Harris for ProPublica. Source images: The First Judicial District of Pennsylvania; David Swanson/The Philadelphia Inquirer.
One morning in July 2025, I was the lone spectator in Judge Frank Palumbo’s courtroom in Philadelphia, watching prosecutors and public defenders haggle over the fates of defendants.
Palumbo paused the proceedings to talk to a lawyer he’d appointed to help a prisoner who had ineptly challenged his conviction. The lawyer profusely thanked the judge for the job. Then, Palumbo offered a bit of guidance: “I think I know where this is going to go. I don’t want to make it overly complicated. It’s real simple.”
The judge said he’d pass along a brief that a different lawyer had filed arguing that there was no merit to the man’s claims in a related case. “I’m not saying plagiarize,” the judge said.
The attorney told the judge he got the message. “So it’s called a Finley letter,” he said, using the common legal term for that no-merit brief, in which an attorney can argue against the client’s claims and ask to withdraw from the case.
“It’s looking like it’s going to be a Finley dismissal,” the judge agreed after a bit more discussion, “but every option is open.”
I’ve spent years covering criminal justice in Pennsylvania, including the post-conviction system that allows people to argue that their lawyer had mishandled their case or to raise newly discovered evidence. That day, I left the courtroom wondering how what I’d observed squared with the state’s promise of effective legal representation in cases like this.
That question sent me on a yearlong reporting odyssey, during which I read hundreds of Finley letters, tracked down court financial records from all 67 Pennsylvania counties, interviewed dozens of lawyers and analyzed thousands of court dockets. What I wanted to know was: Why has it become the norm for Pennsylvania’s lawyers to argue against their own clients? And who is this system serving?
I found that lax rules, low pay and heavy caseloads have compromised legal representation under the state’s Post Conviction Relief Act. Over the past year, I’ve reported on how lawyers, working under fee structures banned in other states, fell years behind on their cases. I spoke with prisoners who’d waited nearly a decade for their lawyers to file anything and others whose lawyers filed Finley letters despite compelling evidence of innocence. I also looked at three years’ worth of invoices and found that, three quarters of the time, Philly lawyers who wrote Finley letters had never spoken with their clients, contacted the trial lawyer or obtained available police files before deciding their claims had no merit.
None of those seemingly basic steps, I was surprised to learn, is required under the law. In fact, dozens of lawyers I spoke to expressed sharply divided opinions about the extent of their obligations to these clients.
But court-appointed lawyers are not working unsupervised. Judges are largely in charge of appointing them to cases, and those same judges are supposed to make sure they’re doing a timely and diligent job.
I noticed that judges continued to assign lawyers more cases even after appeals courts flagged serious issues with their work. And when it came to Finley letters, judges accepted almost all of them over the three years of cases I reviewed, despite the lawyers’ minimal investigative efforts. Some of the letters they approved contained obvious factual errors or even named the wrong client.
Last fall, after Palumbo gave the lawyer a copy of a Finley letter, the lawyer followed the template. His no-merit brief said that his client’s claim could not be considered because he’d missed his filing deadline. The bulk of the document was, in fact, identical to the other lawyer’s brief.
Palumbo, who didn’t respond to my requests for comment, accepted the Finley letter anyway, let the lawyer drop the client and dismissed the claim.
Who Judges Judges?
I thought a fair way to evaluate judges would be to look at the rulings of the Pennsylvania’s Superior Court, the state’s appeals court that hears hundreds of challenges to judges’ rulings on post-conviction matters each year.
And boy, did the Superior Court have thoughts on how judges are handling post-conviction cases.
In one withering opinion, a judge bemoaned an “embarrassing saga” of deficient lawyering that a Berks County judge had tolerated. Another derided a Philly judge and the five attorneys she’d appointed who all missed appeals deadlines, writing, “As Hall of Fame manager Casey Stengel said of the hapless 1962 New York Mets, ‘Can’t anybody here play this game?’”
After logging hundreds of rebukes laid out in Superior Court opinions by hand, I asked some colleagues with data skills to help identify as many of these cases as possible across the last 14 years, the time frame for which opinions were reliably posted online.
In an excerpt from a court opinion, a judge mentions that at least five attorneys had abandoned a client.Obtained by ProPublica
We found that the appeals court flagged more than 250 cases in which judges didn’t intervene as lawyers provided what the court labeled ineffective representation: “sandbagging” a client at a hearing, stonewalling a petitioner who’d mailed two dozen letters to the lawyer’s office or filing boilerplate appeals so vague that they doomed their clients’ cases. In hundreds more cases, judges failed to appoint a lawyer at all, held hearings where petitioners went unrepresented or allowed a lawyer to drop a case, leaving the client stranded on appeal. More than 200 times, they oversaw lawyers who abandoned clients, tanking their appeals or stalling their cases for years.
“Judges are in a terrific position to be able to prevent these kinds of injustices,” said Marissa Boyers Bluestine, a longtime post-conviction lawyer who now works at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school.
The scathing reversals aside, the Superior Court affirms about 80% of lower-court rulings. That’s expected given the strict deadlines and complicated rules about how appeals must be filed. The appeals court is also required to defer to the lower court’s factual decisions. And when it reverses due to an error, the recourse is generally limited to ordering a do-over or, on rare occasions, instructing the lower court to explore sanctions. In one opinion, the court resorted to using boldface to call out an egregious failure: “The PCRA court did nothing in this case for 20 years.” Then, it told the lower court to try again.
Marissa Boyers Bluestine leaves court with her newly exonerated client, Willie Veasy, center, in 2019. At the time, she was working for the Pennsylvania Innocence Project. She said judges have a duty to report unethical lawyering.Heather Khalifa/The Philadelphia Inquirer
Judges do have the authority — and, in fact, an obligation under state rules — to make disciplinary referrals. Because complaints are confidential, there is no way to know how often they do so. But only six lawyers in the last decade have been publicly sanctioned for work on court-appointed post-conviction cases.
Judicial discipline is even rarer. No lower-court judge in at least a decade has been publicly disciplined for mishandling a post-trial matter. Judges who, according to the Superior Court, exhibited biases, imposed vindictive sentences or improperly denied recusal requests remained on the bench.
Even after the Superior Court raised alarms, more than 100 cases ricocheted between the appeals court and county judges two, three, four or more times, as judges repeated errors or reappointed lawyers to cases they’d already mishandled.
One such case played out after Jefferson County’s only judge, John Foradora, sentenced a woman to up to 22 years in prison for passing two narcotics pills in prison. Her lawyer failed to object to or appeal the lengthy sentence. After she filed a PCRA, the Superior Court found that her lawyers’ inaction enabled the “unduly harsh and clearly unreasonable” punishment to stand. But each time the Superior Court reversed, Foradora again imposed a lengthy term. After three such reversals, the woman wound up serving more than eight years. Foradora said through a court spokesperson that he was unable to comment.
Shannon McDonald, an attorney in the Philly suburbs, said that “some judges don’t consider PCRA a priority.”
She described waiting as a petition languished on a Delaware County judge’s desk for two years, until her client had finished his sentence and been released from prison. Then, the judge finally ruled, dismissing the claim.
The Finley Problem
Like lawyers, judges I’ve spoken with seem to be divided on their obligations, especially when it comes to the no-merit letters known as Finley letters. The state Supreme Court says that when a lawyer submits a Finley letter, the judge needs to conduct a review of the merits of the case.
Attorney Rob Perkins, who leads the nonprofit Allegheny Lawyers Initiative for Justice, told me that while he’s encountered some judges who take post-conviction matters seriously, others seem to view them as a nuisance. He said several lawyers told him that they were afraid that if they litigated cases too aggressively, judges would withhold future assignments. The no-merit letter becomes the simplest path forward: “When a judge is handed a no-merit letter that sounds good, I think their inclination is to accept that the attorney did their job.”
Rob Perkins, an attorney and founder of Allegheny Lawyers Initiative for Justice, says some court-appointed lawyers fear that litigating post-conviction cases aggressively would be bad for business.Justin Merriman/The Philadelphia Inquirer
Superior Court opinions reflect this pattern as well. In my review, I found hundreds of cases overruling lower-court judges who accepted flawed Finley letters. The appeals court noted that lawyers claimed, incorrectly, that their clients had missed filing deadlines, rejected legitimate claims as meritless or failed to notice that their clients were serving illegal sentences.
In dozens of cases, judges approved defective Finley letters that did not fulfill basic rules, such as including a notification to the client or addressing all the claims the client wanted to raise.
Several judges told me that Finley letters serve an important purpose, in shutting down frivolous challenges that waste resources.
“Not all [claims] have merit,” Judge John J. Mead of Erie said. “A lot of them initially you could look at and make a determination [as to] whether or not it’s going to require a hearing.”
I’ve noticed that the system makes accepting Finley letters the simplest choice for judges. A judge who rejects a Finley letter must either find a new lawyer willing to take the case, or force the same lawyer to pursue a matter they previously deemed meritless.
Judges who take that path risk pitting a lawyer against his own client, the Superior Court wrote in one recent case, finding the judge’s actions resulted in the denial of a man’s right to counsel. His lawyer, forced to handle a hearing after writing a Finley letter, treated it “more like a cross-examination of a witness that [he] does not believe than a direct examination of his client.”
Jon Auritt, who retired after more than 50 years as a lawyer in Delaware County, said that these failures stem from a common cause: Instead of working independently, lawyers are beholden to the local judges who appoint them.
Even if judges are not as explicit as Palumbo was with their instructions, Auritt said, their message is often clear: “The judges are never incentivized to appoint a lawyer who might earnestly find a reason to overturn the conviction.”
Why Should Delaware Care? Local school boards are the governing authority for school districts. Their responsibilities include deciding whether to hold a referendum and hiring or firing superintendents. Last month, a Laurel staff member, whose son is a member of the Laurel Board of Education, was named as one of two employees to take over superintendent responsibilities.
Last month, Laurel school board members narrowly voted to approve an undisclosed set of recommendations that they had discussed during a private meeting.
The next day, the Laurel School District announced that its superintendent would be replaced by two school district individuals — Susan Whaley and Ashley Giska .
Whaley’s son, Zach Whaley, is the Laurel Board of Education member who had motioned the board to vote in favor of the undisclosed recommendations.
In the days since, one other member of the five-person school board has spoken out, telling Spotlight Delaware he voted against the motion because he knew his colleague’s mother would be one of the two people to assume superintendent responsibilities.
“To me, anything that [Zach Whaley] votes on in the district is going to be a conflict of interest,” said the board member, Brent Nichols.
In response to questions of a conflict, Board President Jana Pugh said in a statement that “there is no conflict of interest” because the Oct. 21 vote only approved then-Superintendent Shawn Larrimore’s leave.
“The practice of Mr. Giska and Mrs. Whaley assuming the duties and responsibilities of the superintendent is something that has occurred before, years before Zach Whaley was elected to the board,” Pugh said in the statement.
Zach Whaley declined to comment for this story.
The vote occurred during a public meeting that did not state on its agenda that the school board members were considering parting ways with the superintendent — meaning the public would have had little notice that such a decision was being made.
Instead, a relevant line on the agenda stated only that there would be “Possible Action on Executive Session Items.” It then listed, “personnel.”
An executive session is a private meeting that a public body is allowed to hold for certain legally allowed purposes.
Prior to the vote during the public meeting, Pugh read aloud, “Attachment E: administrative … to approve the personnel report with recommendations as discussed in executive session.”
Zach Whaley, a member of the Laurel Board of Education. | PHOTO COURTEST OF THE LAUREL SCHOOL DISTRICT
Zach Whaley then made a motion for the board to approve the recommended personnel report. The board approved the motion in a 3-2 vote, with Whaley voting in favor.
None of the board members who voted in favor of the recommendation announced that Zach Whaley’s mother, Susan Whaley, and Ahsley Giska would be taking over superintendent duties, despite it being a “practice” that Pugh said occurred before Zach Whaley was elected in May.
Nichols and Sabrina Isler were the only two board members to vote against the measure.
In its subsequent social media post on Oct. 22, the board said Larrimore would be “concluding his duties” as superintendent on Oct. 30 “following discussions with the Laurel School District Board of Education.”
The social media post did not provide reasoning for Larrimore’s departure from the Laurel School District after 13 years of service.
However, his service was interrupted in 2024 when the school board announced that he would be “away from his duties as superintendent for an indefinite amount of time,” following a charge of driving under the influence, as first reported by The News Journal.
Larrimore returned to his position in July 2024.
After he returned, the board released a statement expressing confidence in his ability to lead the district “with integrity and commitment to the safety and well-being of our students, staff, and community.”
Larrimore did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s request for comment for this story.
A question of ethics
Two weeks after the vote, Delaware Public Integrity Commission Chairman Ron Chaney told Spotlight Delaware in a statement that the state’s Code of Conduct “generally” requires public officials to recuse themselves “from any matter in which they or a close relative, such as a parent, have a personal or financial interest.”
Susan Whaley and Giska will not receive additional compensation for the extra responsibilities, Pugh said.
Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia Law School who studies government ethics, said he recognizes that school boards in small towns, such as Laurel, may have limited numbers of people involved in various activities, and so “it may be hard to avoid family members.”
Still, Briffault said participation in any employment decision that impacts a close relative gives “the appearance of corruption.”
“There’s the fact that the decision-maker may benefit personally from this financially, or only through ties of affection, and because of these close ties, the public official may not necessarily be motivated by what’s in the best interest of the community,” he said.
Although Giska and Susan Whaley have not received pay increases, Briffault said Zach Whaley should recuse himself from any potential future cases when the board considers the superintendent’s salary, benefits or contract renewals, if they were to impact his mother.
Kevin Warsh’s September calendar didn't reflect a conversation the president said he had with the Federal Reserve chair about how to vote at a meeting.
Why Should Delaware Care? In recent years, Wilmington has seen its share of debates over monuments in public spaces. Last month, a statue of President James A. Garfield, which stood in the city’s north side for over a century, was shipped to Ohio at a cost of nearly $21,600 in public dollars. Now, some elected officials and community leaders are arguing the move took place with little public notice.
A backlash has erupted over last month’s removal of a statue of President James A. Garfield from a small plaza in Wilmington, with several state lawmakers and transparency advocates demanding it be returned from its new location in small-town Ohio.
City Councilman Nathan Field has also called for a formal investigation into the move. Field met with Mayor John Carney’s office on Friday to discuss the statue and said he is working on a plan to return the monument to a new location in the city.
In response to the calls to bring back the statue, City Councilwoman Shané Darby — who pushed for its relocation as part of a revitalization of Concord Avenue — said, “No, it’s gone. Not coming back.”
Last month, a contracting crew took down the statue from its perch along Concord Avenue and 23rd Street, where it had stood for 110 years. Mayor John Carney had authorized the removal.
City officials then shipped the monument to Hiram, Ohio, where Garfield attended college and later served as principal for the school.
Wilmington taxpayers covered the $21,595 cost to remove, crate and ship the statue, according to a city invoice.
The move marked the end of the statue’s 130-year residence in Wilmington. It also came in the wake of two separate controversies over the removal of statues in the city in recent years. Those included the Christopher Columbus statue, whose proposed reinstallation drew support and backlash from city residents back in February, and the Ceaser Rodney statue, which some lawmakers called for the return of after it was removed during the 2020 George Floyd protests. The Rodney statue is currently on display in Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., as part of the America 250 anniversary.
Is Garfield significant to Wilmington?
On Memorial Day in 1895, a group of Wilmington civic leaders and Union veterans — called the Garfield Monument Association — first dedicated the statue at a location along Delaware Avenue, near downtown Wilmington.
By 1918, the city moved it north to Concord Avenue at a location that became known as the Garfield Triangle. In recent years, the statue sat mostly unnoticed in the small neighborhood plaza.
A newspaper article from 1895 discusses the installation of the Garfield statue in Wilmington.
“This was never simply about removing a statue. It was about addressing neighborhood concerns, investing in a neglected public space, and ensuring that residents have a voice in shaping their own community,” she wrote.
In the post, Darby asserted that Garfield had no “significant documented personal connection to Wilmington or Delaware,” while Hiram, Ohio, has a direct historical tie to the former president.
Darby said she had been in conversation with community members and local artists for the past two years about revitalizing the area, which has been ridden with loitering, drug solicitation, and poor conditions overall, she said. She noted that residents were surveyed about the statue and did not express a strong connection to the monument.
Darby said the goal is to create an art space and to rename the triangle.
Carney’s deputy chief of staff, Daniel Walker, told Spotlight Delaware that conversations with Darby about relocating the statue began in February.
“Monuments are not stop signs or park benches. They are collective property owned by the people of Wilmington and a key part of the city’s cultural history,” Field said in a statement to Spotlight Delaware.
Following Field’s letter, a group of state lawmakers and other Delaware residents also formally called for answers from the mayor about what they said was a lack of input from residents and council members.
They argued the relocation was done in a “highly non-transparent process.” They also named their advocacy group, The President Garfield Citizens’ Monument Association, after the organization that existed a century earlier
An empty platform sits at the Garfield Triangle in Wilmington where a statue of President James Garfield once stood. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY BRIANNA HILL
John Flaherty, a prominent transparency advocate who organized the association’s letter, said he learned of the move from The News Journal report and from Field’s letter to Carney.
Signing onto the letter were five elected officials, including Field, Wilmington City Councilman James Spadola, and Republican state lawmakers, Rep. Jeff Hilovsky, Sen. Eric Buckson and Sen. Gerald Hocker.
Other signers include former-state Rep. Gerald Brady; New Castle County Recorder of Deeds Mike Kozikowski; Delaware Justice of the Peace James Hanby Sr.; and Wilmington Land Bank board member Rick Gessner.
Civic groups also signed the petition, including the Southwest Civic Association, the Delaware Society Sons of the American Revolution, and the Brandywine Village Civic Association.
In an interview, Flaherty said the statue merits continued reverence in Wilmington. He also said he hoped it was just a mistake by the mayor’s office to move it “out of the city where this monument association spent a lot of time, energy, and money collecting funds, making citizens aware of President Garfield.”
In response to the backlash, Walker said the mayor had the authority to remove and relocate the statue. But he reiterated that the process began with Darby, her conversations with residents and her “desire to reimagine what happens at that location.”
The $21,595 spent to de-install and transport the statue was split between Carney’s office and Darby, who used $7,000 of her discretionary council funds. Hiram, Ohio, covered the costs to reinstall the statue.
“Relocating the statue allows for President Garfield’s statue to move from a place of obscurity and to be celebrated and recognized in a location with deep connections to his work and efforts,” Walker said.
Asked if the statue would be returned to the city, officials from Carney’s office acknowledged they had been in contact with Field, but asserted that next steps should be directed to Darby, who they said initiated the statue’s removal.
Asked about council members not being involved in the process, Darby said that nothing in the city code required other council members to be a part of the conversation.
She also emphasized that the statue would not be brought back to Wilmington.
Could the statue return?
In her blog post, Darby noted that the relocation of the Garfield statue was not done in secret.
In addition to a dialogue with the neighbors, she said her office researched potential areas in the city and contacted historical and museum institutions in Delaware to see if there was an alternative location for the monument.
Darby did not respond to a Friday request for comment about the institutions she contacted.
Wilmington City Councilwoman Shané Darby. | PHOTO COURTESY OF WILMINGTON CITY COUNCIL
In an emailed statement, officials from the Delaware Historical Society said they were unaware of the statue’s relocation.
“The Delaware Historical Society did not advise or facilitate the transfer of the statue in any way and was not aware of the move until the [News Journal] article was published,” officials wrote.
Other civically engaged residents also said they had no clue of its removal.
John L. Pittas, treasurer and former president of the Second District Neighborhood Planning Council, said he and two other council directors met with Darby at the statue in May 2021 to talk about its future, but said there was not an appetite to move it at the time.
He learned of the removal the morning it happened, when a colleague texted him photos of crews packing up the statue, he said.
“There was no consultation by either the city or Councilwoman Darby,” said Pittas, who is also president of the Brandywine Village Civic Association and signed the association’s letter. The planning council’s office sits across the street from the statue’s former Concord Avenue site.
Pittas also argued that the statue held significance in Wilmington, pointing to the president’s Civil War service and support for civil rights for freed slaves.
“Those folks back then in Wilmington thought that he was worthy of recognition, and that’s why the statue was put up,” he said.
Pittas said he has a proposed spot if the statue returns: the small triangle across from the Central YMCA on Delaware Avenue, near where it originally stood.
Who was Garfield?
Garfield served as the 20th president of the United States. He was born in 1831 in northeast Ohio. He worked his way through the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute in Hiram, and later returned to lead the school, now Hiram College.
When the Civil War broke out, Garfield served in the Union Army. He served for two years, leading troops at the Battle of Shiloh and the Battle of Chickamunga, and retired a major general. He pursued politics at the insistence of President Abraham Lincoln, who believed more Union leaders were needed in Congress.
Garfield was elected to Congress while still serving and spent 17 years in the U.S. House of Representatives for Ohio, where he opposed slavery and backed voting rights for Black Americans.
Garfield won the presidency in 1880, but served only about 200 days. He died in 1881 after he was shot by Charles Guiteau, a disappointed office seeker, at a Washington, D.C., train station.
After his death, communities nationwide, including Ohio, D.C., California, and Wilmington, raised money for memorials in his honor.
Hiram Mayor Ann Haynam confirmed that she was introduced to the idea of relocating the statue earlier this year.
“This has been a community fundraising effort to honor one of our local historical figures. Hiram is one of four sites on the Garfield Trail where he went to school, preached, became the President equivalent of what is now Hiram College, led area residents as a Civil War general, and became a congressman,” she said.
The city plans to honor the Garfield statue at their dedication ceremony on Nov. 15.
Chital Mehta, the Middletown author of the recently published novel “Have You Seen Romit?”, came across the news article in 2018: an IT worker and bachelor in Bengaluru, the most populous city in South India, had been reported missing.
Mehta didn’t know the man, and there was nothing particularly striking about the case. It was, from a certain point of view, relatively pedestrian. After all, more than half a million people went missing in the country of 1.4 billion in 2024 alone, according to India’s National Crime Records Bureau.
Get Involved Middletown author Chital Mehta’s novel “Have You Seen Romit?” is available to purchase through various national sellers listed on her website, as well as local stores like Huxley & Hiro Booksellers (601 N Market St, Wilmington, DE 19801) and Hockessin BookShelf (7179 Lancaster Pike, Hockessin, DE 19707).
Mehta will also table the Holiday Fall Fair at Kirkwood Library (6000 Kirkwood Hwy, Wilmington, DE 19808) on Saturday, Nov. 28, 11 a.m.-3 p.m.
Still, the man haunted Mehta, keeping her awake as she wondered what had happened to him and how his family was grappling with his disappearance.
So, she began writing about a fictional family whose 25-year-old adopted son, Romit, suddenly vanishes. The family first responds by talking to those who last saw Romit, reporting him missing and posting on social media. But as time passes by, they begin to move on.
Well, everyone except for his mother, Usha, who runs away on her daughter’s wedding night to search for Romit in the treacherous forests of southern India where he went missing.
“I wrote a couple of drafts with the father who went to look for Romit, because I grew up seeing men making the decisions in my household, or in society in general,” Mehta said.
But Usha took up residence in Mehta’s mind and refused to be ignored.
The character — a woman who has followed the lead of her controlling husband her entire marriage — was inspired by many women Mehta has met. Mehta was intrigued by the familial friction that might emerge from such a woman stepping out of the roles she’s played her entire life.
Letters to Usha
Mehta grew up in Tiruppur in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. She read so voraciously that her parents begged her to slow down. There were only so many books they could offer her, since they didn’t live close to a library.
Mehta realized she wanted to be an author in her 20s and began writing drafts of young adult novels and short stories. She set her eyes on higher education as soon as she immigrated to the United States.
Mehta wrote her first draft of “Have You Met Romit?” in 2018 as the thesis for her MFA in Creative Writing from Lindenwood University in Missouri.
Middletown author Chital Mehta speaks at Huxley & Hiro Booksellers during her book launch event for “Have You Seen Romit?” | PHOTO BY ARUNKUMAR PALANIAPPAN, COURTESY OF CHITAL MEHTA
“I was kind of steering away from cultural points because I kept telling myself that I want to write for the white audience, for an American audience. I wanted to make it easy for them,” Mehta said. “(My MFA professor) said, ‘You have to stop doing that. Just focus on telling a good story.’”
After her thesis, Mehta kept tinkering with the novel’s point of view and ending, repeatedly starting from scratch, scrapping characters and reworking the climax.
What kept Mehta going through her six-year writing process and countless revisions was her fixation on understanding Usha.
“I started writing three pages every day to Usha, just to strike conversations with her. … ‘What is it that you want me to do? Why are you telling me your story? Could you tell me more about your settings? What is it that you like to eat for breakfast? What makes you angry? What kind of clothes are you wearing?’” Mehta said. “All of these details don’t make it into the book … but it gave me an inside view of her life.”
As Mehta raised her own two children, Usha was always in the back of her mind, and the author found herself learning valuable lessons about parenting from her character.
“Now, I have a middle schooler.. … He’s being independent, and he wants to start keeping secrets,” Mehta said. “One of the things that I’ve learned as a parent is, no matter how much you try to know everything about your children, there are going to be parts that you may not have access to.”
‘Storm inside my head‘
Mehta’s fixation on her novel did not always manifest itself in positive ways.
“I felt like I was carrying a storm inside my head all the time. I kind of struggled socializing with people because this story was very urgent,” she said.
When Mehta began submitting “Have You Seen Romit?” to literary agents in 2024, she was hit by rejection after rejection — about 150 in less than one year.
A stack of copies of “Have You Seen Romit?” at Chital Mehta’s book launch at Huxley & Hiro Booksellers. | PHOTO BY ARUNKUMAR PALANIAPPAN, COURTESY OF CHITAL MEHTA
“I considered meeting a therapist. And I kept wondering, ‘What would I talk (about) with the therapist? I have a book, and I don’t know what to do with the book.’ It felt very silly at that point, but it was real,” she said. “I was glad I was able to connect with my writer friends.”
Some of the agents offered feedback in their rejections, so Mehta took their advice and revised the novel three times in just one year.
Mehta’s work finally paid off when “Have You Seen Romit?” was named the 2025 winner of the James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel. Mehta’s award included $5,500 and publication by The University of Nebraska Press.
The contest was judged by R.O. Kwon, author of national bestsellers “The Incendiaries” and “Exhibit.”
Even when she was named a finalist, Mehta never expected to win the award, telling herself she was content with the idea of Kwon having read her novel.
Mehta was eating with her family at Honest Indian Restaurant in Wilmington when she got a phone call with the news. She immediately burst into tears.
“I remember I was not able to talk much to the editor, and he understood,” Mehta said. “I could not eat the rest of the meal. … My kids were terrified. (When I told them about the award,) my son immediately said, ‘So, now can I get a PS5?’ And I said, ‘No, that’s not happening.’”
Mehta has been busy with her book tour for the past month, but she’s itching to return to writing. Already, a new protagonist has taken up residence in Mehta’s mind — a mother who becomes disabled after the birth of her child.
“I feel like I’m cheating on her by not paying attention to her,” Mehta said with a laugh. “I’ll probably do 20 minutes a day, 30 minutes a day. That’s all I can do. But I’m going to go back to her soon. This time, hopefully, it doesn’t take six years.”
Why Should Delaware Care? Government works best when its citizens are knowledgeable and engaged. Delaware’s government has scores of commissions, working groups, agencies and legislative committees. All must hold meetings that are open to the public. Below we highlight a few of those meetings that are happening this week.
Below are some of the most important or interesting public meetings happening around the state this week.
Georgetown could end tiny homes
City of New Castle considers data center rules
State budget office to talk next year’s spending
Kent County planners consider new Felton-are homes
Record store asks Newark to let it host live music
Georgetown could ban tiny homes
The Georgetown Town Council is set to vote Monday night to repeal a long-debated ordinance that would allow up to 12 tiny homes to be built on a single acre of land.
The repeal is likely to pass the five-member council, as three council members have publicly expressed their support, and another plans to recuse herself from the vote.
The measure has been a topic of debate in Georgetown for more than a year. The previous town council originally approved the ordinance in December 2025, before a new council makeup elected last May began taking steps to repeal it.
Recently elected Mayor Angie Townsend has been a vocal advocate of the repeal, citing a belief that many residents do not want tiny homes in town, and that the previous town council went against residents’ wishes by approving the measure.
Adding to the complicated picture is an ongoing lawsuit against the town by Springboard Delaware, a local organization that already operates its pallet village, a transitional homeless shelter, in town and also is seeking to build a 122-unit tiny home development.
Springboard sued the town in September, after council members enacted a pause on reviewing all new tiny home projects in July. That pause has prevented Springboard’s project from moving forward.
�� The Georgetown Town Council will meet at 6:30 p.m. Monday inside Georgetown Town Hall, located at 39 The Circle in Georgetown. For more information, including on virtual attendance, click here.
Another town to consider data center regulations
The City of New Castle is considering regulating data centers, and could soon add itself to a list of local governments that have imposed restrictions on the fast-growing industry.
The draft ordinance would require data centers to be located 1,000 feet from homes and schools, and to use energy-efficient backup generators, among other regulations.
The council on Tuesday will also do a first reading of a potential moratorium on data centers and will host a public hearing at a future date.
��The New Castle City Council will conduct a public hearing about the data center regulations at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at 400 South St. in New Castle. Residents can submit comments about the proposal via email to info@newcastlecity.delaware.gov until 3 p.m. on the day of the hearing. For more information about the hearing, click here.
State gets a head start on budget discussions
Delaware’s government could be flush with cash during the upcoming fiscal year, which begins next July. And this month, its budget office is holding a series of hearings to begin discussions about how the spending might look.
Distinct from the legislature’s budget hearings to be held next year, these will involve discussions between agencies and budget officials from the Delaware Office of Management and Budget. Included within the discussions will be mandatory reports showing how agencies could cut their respective budgets by 1%.
Still, any such cuts could be unlikely following a report last month that the state could bring in more than $360 million more than previously estimated, according to an article from Delaware Public Media.
This week will feature three days of hearings about the budgets of 12 state offices or agencies. Included within those are the University of Delaware’s budget on Monday; the new Office of Inspector General’s budget on Tuesday; and the state judiciary’s budget on Thursday.
�� The Delaware Office of Management and Budget will meet 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Monday and Tuesday and then from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on Thursday. The meetings will take place at the Delaware Public Archives, located at 121 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in Dover. For more information, including about virtual attendance, click here. Additional hearings will take place the following week. Click here for the full November hearing calendar.
New subdivision near Felton?
The Kent County Regional Planning Commission will consider a proposal to build 265 new homes near Felton on Thursday.
Dubbed Spartan’s Village, the plans call for 265 single-family homes to be built on a 100-acre plot of land on Killens Pond Road near its intersection with South Dupont Highway just south of Felton town limits.
The property is located within Kent County’s growth zone overlay, meaning it falls within an area where county leaders typically anticipate and welcome growth.
�� The Kent County Regional Planning Commission will meet at 6 p.m. Thursday inside Levy Court Chambers, located at 555 Bay Rd. in Dover. For more information, including on virtual attendance, click here.
A new music venue in Newark?
Delaware’s third largest city could get a new spot for live music.
On Monday, the Newark City Council will discuss a request from Rainbow Records to allow the company to host live music at its location along East Main Street. City planners previously recommended that the city approve the permit request.
�� The Newark City Council is scheduled to meet at 6:30 p.m. Monday at the Council Chambers at 220 S. Main St. in Newark. For more information, including on virtual attendance, click here.
The quarterback has led Cincinnati to four straight wins with stat lines that put him in the company of Tom Brady. At this rate, the trophy seems his to lose
At the end of the 2021 season, the Cincinnati Bengals came up three points short in Super Bowl LVI against the Los Angeles Rams. Near the end of the 2022 season, the Bengals came up three points short – a 23-20 score line again in the AFC championship game against the Kansas City Chiefs. But from 2023 through 2025, those Bengals had to walk the desert for a while. Between injuries to quarterback Joe Burrow, an offensive line that was problematic at best, and one of the NFL’s worst defenses from year to year, Cincinnati had a combined regular-season record of 24-27, and no playoff appearances.
Now, the new Bengals are 6-2 after their 34-17 shellacking of the Atlanta Falcons on Sunday at the Santiago Bernabéu stadium in Madrid. And Burrow is on a tear we’ve rarely seen from any quarterback. Over the last four weeks, his 16 touchdown passes is the most in a four-game span in Bengals history (which goes back to 1968). He is the second quarterback in pro football history with 16 or more passing touchdowns and two or more rushing touchdowns in any four-game span, putting him up with Tom Brady in 2007 – the season in which the New England Patriots’ offense scored 36.8 points per game, and Brady was at his best. Burrow has been pressured on just 30.2% of his dropbacks this season, as opposed to 33.8% in 2025 and 34.2% in 2024.
A crowdfunded sequel to the movie Return of the Living Dead was uploaded last weekend — but producer Richard Driscoll is drawing criticism for what he did to the 1985 punk/zombie classic.
Kotaku reports:
[The release of the movie came as a] surprise to the original cast, who were attached to star in the follow-up. Instead it seems Driscoll opted to use AI to generate the film...
In 2024, Driscoll, who operates his own no-budget streaming service "DragonFLIX," launched an Indiegogo page for "TRASH's REVENGE Return of the Living Dead Universe." Unlike other fan projects, this one had a large portion of the original cast involved, with stars Randolph and Linnea Quigley acting as producers. It also threw in Quigley's fellow Sorority Babe in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama Michelle Bauer and the Oscar nominated Eric Roberts, who has seemingly been in everything except The Living Dead....
But after some confusion and radio silence between the cast and director, this incredible movie did not come to be. Last Halloween night, Driscoll pushed out [the almost entirely AI-generated] The Return of the Living Dead: Aftermath... The results won't surprise you. Robotic line delivery. Nonsensical sequence of events. Object impermanence. Everything's wet. Everyone looks shocked. At one point the video just flips around like you're watching on a phone someone dropped. And while the Return cast didn't film any of this footage, their likenesses are peppered throughout.
"It turned out to be a fiasco," says Quigley. "I warned him, "Whatever you do, don't do any AI, because people don't like it, the fans don't like it." Living Dead alumni, even those who weren't attached to this film, have spoken out against Aftermath. They seem most concerned about the existing and continued use of their likeness, given that Driscoll has seemingly pivoted 'Trash's Revenge' into an additional project. Randolph encourages those who provided any funding to ask for a refund through their credit card company. While Romero's original film was public domain, Return of the Living Dead was not. Randolph also encourages Amazon, who bought MGM in 2022, to take legal action.
A review on Reddit calls it "the worst 'film' I've ever seen," a production that "manages to not only be the worst zombie film ever made but is also the nadir of exploitation filmmaking.
[T]hings quickly descend into madness and we get lots of bits of A.I. reporters out on the streets being attacked by A.I. zombies... [T]here are some A.I. cops battling it out too...
President makes unusual acknowledgment that one of defining policies of his second administration had become a political liability
Donald Trump has admitted that his deportation policy was “too tough” and has offered to strike an immigration deal with Democrats in a concession after the Republicans’ disastrous defeat in the midterm elections.
In an interview on the CBS network’s 60 Minutes broadcast on Sunday, the president acknowledged that the aggressive crackdown had hurt him politically and said he was open to an arrangement to allow some undocumented immigrants to remain in the US.
From Serbia to Bangladesh and India to France, young people are pushing back against authoritarianism and reshaping political landscapes
In Brazil, they rallied online by the millions, sharing videos and spreading memes. In Serbia, they cycled across Europe and ran ultramarathons to make their voices heard.
Both movements burst into international public view last month as they became central during election campaigns to the pushback against authoritarianism. What they also offered, however, was a window into a wider phenomenon playing out across the globe, as youth-led movements reshape political landscapes.
Trump’s most controversial aide begins his first day as White House chief of staff
Stephen Miller, the influential architect of Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown, is due to start as White House chief of staff today. His promotion has horrified many, handing even more power to the president’s most controversial aide.
The 41-year-old has been with Trump since the beginning of the US president’s political career – serving as a speechwriter during his 2016 presidential campaign – and has long been seen as a hardliner on the right, serving as the driving force behind first-term Trump policies such as family separation at the US-Mexico border and the travel ban on people from many Muslim-majority countries.
Residents of Astley in Greater Manchester will tell public inquiry next week of ‘cacophony’ of noise causing sleep deprivation and depression
When Stephen Retford retired from the police in 2006, he looked forward to a quiet life after nearly three decades catching villains. But now the former detective has landed another big case – one that is extremely close to home.
“It’s the total injustice of it,” the 70-year-old seethed, staring up at the 18-metre-high mega-warehouse that looms over the quiet village of Astley in Greater Manchester. Residents are up in arms about the “monster” construction, likening it to having a “cruise ship in our back garden”.
British-Somali boxer claims first world titles in Texas
Kreps outlands Ali but loses disputed split decision
Baumgardner wins 135lb belt as Dubois feud heats up
Australia’s Nicolson retains junior featherweight title
British-Somali boxer Ramla Ali became a world champion for the first time at the age of 36 on Sunday night after escaping with a highly contentious 10-round split decision over former sparring partner Mikiah Kreps to claim the vacant WBO and IBF women’s junior featherweight titles in Arlington, Texas.
Ali, who grew up in east London after fleeing Somalia’s civil war with her family and went on to become the first boxer to represent the African country at the Olympics, completed her remarkable journey to the top of the 122lb division at College Park Center on her second attempt at a world championship – but only after a controversial verdict rewarding her for a fight that appeared to be largely controlled by her opponent.
Mouser will be your best friend. This forum will be your best friend. It has parts, the bootup sequence and flow, and breaks down microchip and battery chip and where to source them.
When you get into the weeds, make sure you have a inline fuse because i have fried to esc due to shorts. I had one where it was a xt60 with a fuse between it just incase. The bms really does not have a known failure on paticular parts ( im on a og pint, they are tanks) and i just opted to buy a broken bms from a local seller as a donor for parts. On pint or xrbms its really easy to knock a cermaic cpacitor (the little things around the big bms chip in the middle). Ive onlt worked on pints a xr so cant say anything on the gt and up. Rest is really trial and error.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump said that he could move to Israel and try to become prime minister if Americans eventually “get tired” of him, while also claiming he enjoys a 99% approval rating there.
The comments came during a Fox & Friends interview in which Trump also reiterated plans to end roughly $4 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel after 2026, while continuing arms sales. Trump said Israel no longer needs the assistance.
Trump’s claim of near-universal support in Israel is not supported by recent polling. An August survey by the Jewish People Policy Institute found only 10% of Israelis had “a great deal of confidence” in Trump to do the right thing on U.S.-Israel relations, while 46% said they had no confidence in him.
His suggestion that he could become Israeli prime minister was also largely rhetorical. Israel’s prime minister must be a member of the Knesset, meaning Trump would first need to satisfy Israeli citizenship and electoral requirements before such a scenario could even become legally possible.
The remarks come as U.S.-Israel relations enter a more uncertain period following Democrats’ takeover of Congress and weakening bipartisan support for unrestricted military aid. Reuters reported that Democrats plan greater scrutiny of aid to Israel, although Trump retains broad authority over foreign policy.
We can’t allow our health data to be locked into the control of a US tech firm. It won’t be easy, but next spring the job of clawing it back must begin
Ben Coleman is Labour MP for Chelsea and Fulham and a member of the health and social care committee
Next March, Palantir’s £330m contract to run NHS England’s federated data platform (FDP) ends. Ministers must decide by Christmas whether to extend it. They should move on from Palantir, and transition to new suppliers that put the NHS in full control of its technology and patient data.
I sit on the health and social care committee. In June, we recommended no extension – people don’t trust Palantir, its benefits are contested and other tools could deliver the same or similar advantages. The debate so far has been whether to drop Palantir. The harder question is what replaces it. The tempting solution is to hire a single British firm. But that would not give the NHS the control it lacks: the freedom to switch supplier without losing what it has built.
Ben Coleman is Labour MP for Chelsea and Fulham and a member of the health and social care committee
ANTALYA, Türkiye, Nov. 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- As COP 31 gets underway today, leading standards organizations IEC, ISO and ULSE, along with 13 other international partners, will reconvene the Standards Pavilion in Antalya, Türkiye, continuing joint efforts to position International…
@lemur appriciate the looking out. I hit a wall this week with the microchips. They are from 2.0.7 revision so im guessing the chips are locked out from erasing. They pass and write properly according to mplab. Tired 3 i had around and all three lied about success. Im gonna have to replace the 1788 with a new blank one. Orderd them yesterday and will update when everything comes in. My board is on 4212 and already have a owie inline so the only issue is the fw.
The environment minister, Murray Watt, has urged ministers to stop undermining the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, as Labor struggles to sell its budget and looks to cut popular clean energy subsidies to help with the fight against inflation.
Cabinet ministers met again on Monday to discuss potential budget savings to be included in next month’s mid-year update, part of efforts to reducing spending to ease pressure on the economy.
It's FOSS reports:
Asahi Linux is the reason you can run Linux on an Apple Silicon Mac today. For years, the project put most of its own code under the MIT license so that anyone, including the BSDs, could reuse it as needed... They have announced that Asahi is moving all of its repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward, all Asahi Linux code will be under strong copyleft licenses only.
Asahi Linux compares their dilemma to the 1990s, when "permissively licenced projects were viewed by tech companies as free real estate to pilfer and exploit," adding that "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it... The malicious practices of the 90s and 2000s have reared their ugly heads once again, this time driven in large part by both the insatiable appetite of frontier AI labs for high-quality training data, and militant animosity toward the Free Software community." In short, they argue that for Asahi Linux, using the permissive MIT license "is no longer viable."
Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors. As such, we made the difficult decision to begin the process of transitioning all of our repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward all Asahi Linux code will be licenced under strong copyleft licences only.
It's FOSS explains that "Under the GPL, anyone who distributes a modified version has to release the source under the same license. You can't legally build a closed, paid Apple Silicon distro on top of GPL code. And if a product's source has to be public, the copying is easier to spot."
And their article also points out that before AI, bad actors attempting code laundering "usually meant manually rewriting code line by line, renaming variables and stuff, and shuffling functions around until it no longer looked like the original. LLMs made it much more easy and cheaper of course."
In case you did not know, Asahi Linux forbids AI generated code contribution... As far as I can tell, this is the first time a major open source project has moved to copyleft specifically because of AI-assisted code laundering. Projects have relicensed before, but usually to stop cloud providers from reselling their work as a service. This one is specifically about AI...
The move has drawn criticism, particularly from the BSD side, which was one of the main reasons Asahi chose MIT in the first place. OpenBSD's Apple Silicon support relies on Asahi's m1n1 bootloader.
The writer and podcaster on why politics is made to seem more complicated than it is and his mission to unpack world events for everyone
Why did you get into comedy?
My mum was a professional dancer and always encouraged me to perform. Given that I have zero rhythm, comedy was my other option. She wrote me a poem called Mrs Brown’s Moggy, about a cat that was often very soggy, for my school’s talent show. Because you can’t tell the difference between real and polite laughter at the age of six, I assumed I’d killed my first gig and convinced myself I was born to do nothing else.
I'm in Austin and usually squeeze in a FloatWheel session after work, but lately I've been spending way too much time scrolling sports headlines before I even get out the door. I'm trying to figure out a better routine so I actually ride instead of reading about other people competing. I'm not sure whether it's better to set a hard cutoff before I go out or just accept that I'll ride later in the evening when it cools down. My concern is that if I leave it too late the paths get crowded and I lose motivation. Nothing online has really settled it for me, it's just general sports news chatter that eats the time. Curious how other riders here in Texas balance screen time with actual float time, especially when there's a big game or event on. What's worked for you?
69 million people people live in the United Kingdom. And now >Electrek reports:
Battery-electric cars took 32% of the UK's new car market in October, while petrol cars fell to just 37.2%, according to new data from the SMMT. That's the closest the two have been. At the current pace, electric cars will outsell petrol in the UK within a year. And it could happen as soon as this December.
The UK registered 152,730 new cars in October, up 5.4% year-over-year and the 11th straight month of growth for the overall market. All of that growth came from plug-ins. Battery-electric vehicle registrations jumped 32.7% to 48,858 units, and plug-in hybrids rose 30.1% to 22,898. Meanwhile, petrol fell 11.6% to 56,876 units, diesel dropped 15.9%, and even conventional hybrids were down 5%...
The brands growing fastest in the UK are mostly Chinese. BYD registered 6,065 cars in October, up 73%. Jaecoo more than doubled to 6,089 units, Chery nearly tripled to 3,707, and Leapmotor doubled to 1,773. MG was up 85%.
Looking at trend lines, EV car sales surpass petrol sales "around August 2027 at roughly 33% each," the article points out. "But that's the slow scenario, because it ignores December."
UK battery-electric vehicle share spikes every December as automakers push volume to get closer to their zero-emission vehicle mandate targets... Petrol's days as the UK's default car are numbered. The only question is whether the milestone comes in December or sometime in 2027.
Pontiff tells Argentina’s president the economy must benefit all on second stop of 12-day Latin America tour
Pope Leo XIV has delivered a stinging critique of Argentine president Javier Milei’s harsh austerity measures, insisting growth must benefit all in a speech met with rapturous applause in Buenos Aires.
“The economy must be at the service of the people, rather than people being at the service of the economy,” he said on Sunday, shortly after landing in Argentina on the second leg of a Latin America tour.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump is showing little sign of backing away from his hardline immigration agenda despite Republicans’ sweeping midterm losses and evidence that aggressive enforcement helped drive some Latino voters back toward Democrats.
Trump defended his immigration policies over the weekend and argued that Republicans should continue emphasizing border enforcement and deportations rather than moderate their approach. The stance comes as party officials debate why Republicans lost both chambers of Congress.
Reuters found that Republican support dropped sharply across many majority-Latino counties compared with 2024. In 64 such counties with Senate races, the GOP vote share fell by about 14 percentage points. Immigration enforcement and deportations were among the issues repeatedly cited by Latino voters, alongside the economy and cost of living.
Trump’s approval on immigration has also declined. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found just 37% approved of his handling of the issue, down from 50% at the beginning of his second term.
Rather than signaling moderation, Trump has elevated Stephen Miller, one of the architects of his mass-deportation strategy, to White House chief of staff.
Republicans remain divided over whether immigration enforcement contributed substantially to the defeat or whether economic concerns and the Iran war mattered more. But the administration’s early post-election moves suggest Trump intends to stay the course.
President says it was ‘just a little fun’ to picture White, UFC boss and Trump’s friend, in briefing room with fighters
Donald Trump said on Sunday that he “was only kidding” when he announced a day earlier that he had offered the job of White House press secretary to Dana White, the chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).
Speaking to reporters on his way back to the White House from his beach club in Florida, Trump explained the premise of his joke, that if the UFC boss, a devoted fan of the president, took over the briefing room, flanked by six fighters, reporters “wouldn’t mess around with him so much”.
He said building a governing coalition would require “creative and unconventional political steps” and added that change was needed to restore “sanity.”
CEO reportedly had close relationship with a Chinese businesswoman who passed information to Beijing
Nvidia said on Sunday it “is initiating an independent investigation in light of recent reporting that founder and CEO Jensen Huang has been the target of a foreign intelligence effort”.
The New York Times reported in October that Donald Trump had been briefed last year on intelligence that Huang had a close relationship with a Chinese businesswoman who passed information to Beijing.
Larson clinched his third Cup Series title in six years early in Sunday’s 400-mile season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway, becoming the first back-to-back champion since Jimmie Johnson in 2010. Johnson won five consecutive titles beginning in 2006.
CrowdStrike's "Falcon Guardian" protects Windows systems by enforcing policy, restricting unauthorized applications and blocking USB devices, notes Gartner.
And now CrowdStrike says they're giving security teams "the ultimate human control over AI agents" with — an "AI Kill Switch... a defender can terminate it where it runs, block it from launching again, and cut off its enterprise network access."
"When you deploy agents with a kill switch, you stay in control," said George Kurtz, CEO and founder of CrowdStrike... "The AI Kill Switch puts power in the hands of the people to realize AI safety...." In the case of a rogue agent, the AI Kill Switch will give the security decision-maker the final control: terminate the agent at its root, where it runs. It starts on the endpoint, where the Falcon sensor already operates, and builds on what Falcon Guardian already sees: what an agent is told to do, what it communicates, and what it executes... An authorized administrator triggers the action, and every action is recorded in the audit trail.
CrowdStrike also announced it's acquiring Fiddler AI, a company it describes as "a leader in AI agent observability and explainability" that will give their Falcon platform "pre-deployment evaluation, continuous behavioral accountability, and agent explainability."
Together with the Falcon Guardian innovations announced today, CrowdStrike will deliver comprehensive AI security and AI safety: Guardian secures agents from attack and misuse; Fiddler validates they behaved as intended. "Every company is deploying agents and asking the same thing: what are agents actually doing?" said George Kurtz, CEO and founder of CrowdStrike. "When a regulator or your board asks what an agent did, saying 'the model did it' is not an answer. Fiddler is the flight recorder for every agent: the observability to explain exactly what an agent did and why. This level of agent visibility and control enables AI safety."
AI agents are goal-seeking. They hit an obstacle, find another path. An agent can hold valid credentials and approved tools and still make unsupported decisions, ignore instructions, or claim work it never completed. They don't have to be compromised to create risk. AI observability gives enterprises visibility into agent behavior. Explainability goes further, showing why agents make decisions and where things go wrong. Enterprises have to be able to say what an agent actually did, and why, a conversation they will increasingly have with auditors, regulators, boards, and heads of risk.
CrowdStrike is promising pre-deployment evaluation for "accuracy, task completion, and policy compliance," as well as agent traceability and behavioral accountability ("Detect behavioral drift, hallucinations, and unintended actions in production, and show exactly what happened.") It's announcement also touts auditable governance: "Track agent decisions and actions across first-party, third-party, and coding agents, providing evidence for compliance and audits."
And CrowdStrike also acquired Dreadnode, the company behind an automated AI security testing platform, to "continuously test every AI model, application, and agent for security weaknesses before deployment."
"Enterprises are deploying AI faster than they can prove it is secure," said George Kurtz, CEO and founder of CrowdStrike. "A model can be jailbroken, an agent can be manipulated, and most organizations have no way to find those flaws until the AI is already in production. With Dreadnode, CrowdStrike will give every enterprise the power to trust AI and deploy faster, with confidence."
Quartz notes that CrowdStrike's push "follows legislative efforts to require shutdown capabilities in AI systems" Reps. Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran introduced the Kill Switch Act after OpenAI disclosed an incident in which rogue models circumvented a sandboxed testing environment and accessed Hugging Face. The bill would require AI companies to maintain the ability to shut down, throttle or suspend their models.
In short, the new capabilities "lets security teams terminate an AI agent, block it from restarting, and cut off its network access," writes CSO Online. But they add that a kill switch "should be viewed as an emergency brake, not a rewind button, said Apeksha Kaushik, senior principal analyst at Gartner."
She added that it may prevent additional actions, but it might not necessarily reverse all the data that has already been accessed, every system that has already been changed, all communications that have already been sent, or transactions that have already been initiated. Its effectiveness will also depend on how quickly abnormal behavior is detected, which environments are covered, and whether the agent or security infrastructure has been compromised.
An AI Kill Switch looks promising from the details provided, but its actual effectiveness will come in after it is used extensively in live systems, warn analysts. Also, it may be a good starting point, but it cannot be viewed as a standalone solution to enterprise AI security. "CISOs would need a more integrated approach that brings together AI discovery tools to identify unauthorised agents, runtime monitoring to track agent behaviour, robust identity and access management, and incident response and recovery mechanisms," added [Devroop Dhar, co-founder at Primus Partners].
He noted that equally important is the need for stringent AI security testing and clearly defined policies governing what agents can access and execute. There should be no ambiguity around permissions, access controls or the boundaries within which these agents are allowed to operate. The objective should be to ensure that security controls are built into the entire AI agent lifecycle rather than relying on a kill switch to intervene after something goes wrong. Dhar added that enterprise AI agents often have access to sensitive systems, databases, applications, credentials, and APIs. A compromised or misdirected agent could therefore become a point of vulnerability. The challenge is compounded by the fact that such activity may go undetected for some time, making it difficult for organisations to identify and contain the threat.
Lucy Powell says proposals to end widespread practice will be included in overhaul of England’s national curriculum
Pushing GCSE subjects on younger pupils risks turning England’s secondary schools into “early exam factories”, the education secretary has said, warning that it is increasing disengagement from education.
Lucy Powell wants schools to end the widespread practice of teaching GCSE topics to pupils in year 9 or earlier, before they officially start in year 10, and says she plans to reduce the amount of GCSE content to make it easier to fit into the official timetable.
In a wide-ranging conversation, President Trump discusses Republican losses in the midterms, his potential successors, the Iran war, immigration, allegations of corruption, and artificial intelligence.
In an interview with 60 Minutes, President Trump said his administration's deportation policy might have been "too tough" in pursuing immigrants with "good jobs."
60 Minutes visits France to understand who and what are driving protests and interviews populist, far-right politician Marine Le Pen, who could benefit from the strife in the streets.
£40m scheme in England aims to keep most vulnerable people well at home and avoid unnecessary hospital stays
Hundreds of thousands of vulnerable patients in England are to receive extra support from their GP as part of a £40m drive aimed at keeping them out of hospital this winter.
As the NHS gears up for the pressures of the coming months, family doctors will offer 300,000 people with frailty and long-term conditions health checks, medication reviews and respiratory tests designed to prevent avoidable hospital admissions.
CBS News spoke with several Democratic representatives-elect who say their priority is making life affordable for the American people, but they also plan to hold the Trump administration accountable.
Calley Means, a White House senior adviser and aide to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who resigned last month, said on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" that some Trump administration officials are catering to special interests.
Bengals joint-top of AFC North with 34-17 win in Madrid Myles Garrett returns in Rams win with three sacks
Broncos 0-0 Panthers 14:56, 1st quarter
Here we go! Carolina kick it away to Denver. The Broncos run it back to the 45-yard line. Nice trot from Sean Fresch. Excellent field position for Bo Nix to go to work.
CNBC reports new details about the relationship of alleged Chinese spy with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang:
Huang told Nvidia staff in a email on Sunday that he had an affair with the woman and that Nvidia's board of directors had opened an independent investigation into the spying allegations. "I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did," Huang wrote in the message. "I am deeply sorry."
Nvidia's board "said an independent committee, assisted by outside counsel, will investigate the matter," reports Axios:
The board said it has no reason to believe national security or company secrets were compromised and expressed confidence in Huang's leadership... Huang has been a key voice in Washington pushing to loosen restrictions on AI chip sales to China. He argued that keeping American technology in the Chinese market strengthens U.S. competitiveness and prevented China from developing their own potentially more advanced chips.
The board's statement added that their inquiry "will examine all available information," CNBC reports. But "An Nvidia spokesperson said that Huang was committed to continuing as CEO of Nvidia without interruption."
"I love our country and our company," Jensen Huang wrote in his letter to Nvidia's staff (as reported by CNBC), "and I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America's national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American."
But while U.S. lawmakers have requested Huang appear for closed-door committee briefing, Jensen has not confirmed he'll appear, notes CNBC:
When asked by the New York Times whether Huang would appear before lawmakers to discuss the matter, Nvidia spokesman John Rizzo declined to comment. "Our chief executive has an outstanding security team that accompanies him where needed," Mr. Rizzo said in a statement to the Times...
Rizzo said [Thursday] the Nvidia CEO's interactions with [alleged Chinese spy Alice] Huang were consistent with meetings he has had with any of Nvidia's customers.
Jakub Kulik critically injured and Artur Morański also wounded after actions that ‘prevented further casualties’
Two Polish police officers who were injured as they pursued and detained the gunman in Kraków on Saturday have been hailed as heroes.
One of them is Jakub Kulik, a former paratrooper and volunteer firefighter, who was left critically injured after a close-range exchange of fire with the suspect, a 24-year-old Polish national who killed six and injured 17 in an attack believed to have been inspired by far-right ideologies.
Nationwide, voters elected at least 75 Native women or non-binary candidates in Tuesday’s elections, report says
The US midterm elections saw voters elect a slew of historic representatives – from the country’s first Muslim senator to the first Black female governor – but among the most significant gains were those for Native American women.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the Democratic Socialists of America policy he believes is most acceptable to mainstream Americans, while distancing himself from several other positions associated with the organization.
During an interview with Fox News Sunday, host Shannon Bream asked Mamdani which parts of the DSA platform he believed ordinary voters would support. Mamdani pointed to abolishing ICE and “making sure we have humanity back in our immigration enforcement.”
Mamdani also rejected eliminating the Senate, the Supreme Court, national borders and jails, making clear that membership in the DSA does not mean he supports every proposal associated with the group.
His position on ICE is not new. In January, Mamdani said publicly that he supports abolishing the agency, arguing that its enforcement practices have gone far beyond what he considers legitimate immigration enforcement.
As mayor, Mamdani has also said New York City agencies will not assist ICE with civil immigration enforcement and has sought to prevent federal agents from using city property for staging operations.
The comments come after immigration enforcement became a major issue in the 2026 midterms, particularly in cities that experienced expanded federal operations.
The following is the full transcript of the interview with Calley Means, former senior adviser to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a portion of which aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Nov. 8, 2026.
The New York Times reports:
After chatting for months with Google's artificial intelligence on a school-issued Chromebook laptop, a 13-year-old student made plans to end her life, according to a lawsuit filed in California Superior Court on Monday, the latest in a wave of litigation over Big Tech's effects on young people. The lawsuit, which refers to the girl as Emma, said that her parents first learned she had access to Google's AI in mid-March after their daughter's school sent a message warning them that she was in "imminent danger" of self-harm. Emma's mother logged into the teen's school Google account and found her daughter composing a suicide note on Google Docs, the complaint said. Her parents, named as John and Jane Doe in the lawsuit, immediately took Emma for an emergency psychiatric evaluation, and she now goes to therapy every week.
Emma, a seventh grader in Charlotte, North Carolina, had grown convinced that she had multiple mental health disorders following interactions with AI Mode, a chatbotlike feature on Google Search, the complaint said. She also searched for "what is a suicide note" and made comments like "I am planning my own funeral" to the AI, the complaint said. The lawsuit is likely the first to claim that Google "hastily integrated" AI features into company apps used on K-12 Chromebooks, Google-powered laptops provided to millions of children by U.S. school districts, while failing to notify their parents of the potential risks...
The case underscores how public school districts have come to depend on classroom laptops, tablets and apps from companies like Google and Microsoft for teaching and learning. In recent years, some Big Tech companies have used their own infrastructure in schools to promote their AI chatbots for teachers and students. The new lawsuit argues that Google's "sprawling digital ecosystem" of laptops and apps has enabled the tech giant to spread its Gemini AI chatbot across public schools — as well as turn on some students' access to AI features by default — without parents' awareness or permission. While school administrators can toggle company apps like YouTube and Gemini on or off for students in different grades, school administrators have complained that Google's system has not allowed them to disable AI Mode and AI Overview, features that are embedded in Google Search...
The new lawsuit against Google is part of a wave of litigation this year over Big Tech's effect on young users... Several parents have also sued AI companies over allegations that their children died by suicide following interactions with chatbots.
In a possibly-related development, Google announced a new policy of disabling its AI tools by default for schools this week. And schools that re-enable searches will have a new choice, the New York Times points out: "to enable student access to the AI features that the company has already embedded in search or to a new AI feature intended to assist students with schoolwork."
But Google still isn't offering schools an option to turn off AI altogether in search, a company executive told the New York Times, because "search and AI are deeply integrated."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.
Man taken to hospital after falling off Royal Caribbean ship in Pacific Ocean, with Coast Guard investigating incident
A pianist for a Royal Caribbean cruise ship is expected to survive after two Newport Beach, California, fishermen discovered him treading water in the Pacific Ocean nearly 20 miles (32km) offshore on Friday.
The unidentified man was taken to the hospital after the rescue, according to the US Coast Guard, which is now investigating how he went overboard from the cruise ship.
"It has been an extraordinary privilege," says the subheading on Thursday's announcement. After 31 years Salon.com will stop publishing, according to an announcement which appeared on the site under the byline "Salon". It remembers that Salon "was an idea about what journalism could be, born at a moment when the internet was still a largely unexplored frontier."
When Salon launched in November 1995, the web was a very different place. A small group of journalists set out to create something original: a publication with a strong voice, a curiosity about the world and a belief that the internet could bring journalism and readers together in new ways. They helped pioneer a form of journalism that would come to define an entirely new era of publishing. Over three decades, Salon has brought together politics, culture, criticism and ideas in a way that was distinctly our own...
Our writers and editors helped shape conversations about the forces changing our lives. The work was never simply about keeping up with the news. It was about making sense of it... To the founders who imagined it, the staff members who built it, the contributors who gave it their voices and the alumni who carried its spirit into the world: Thank you. Salon's legacy belongs to all of you...
The business realities of independent digital journalism have changed profoundly over the years. After careful consideration, we have reached the difficult decision that our publishing model is no longer sustainable...
Thirty-one years is a remarkable run, but what matters most is what happened during those years: the journalism, the ideas, the voices, the conversations and the community that grew around them. Salon helped demonstrate what digital journalism could be and could become. We hope that legacy will continue to matter long after today.
Thank you for being part of our story. It has been an extraordinary privilege.
Slashdot reader oumuamua remembers Salon as one of the internet's first digital-native publications. Slashdot linked to Salon many times over the years — for example, this 1998 story headlined "Linus Story in Salon".
Peter Neves was the first of many who wrote in to tell us about an article in Salon Magazine that describes an
"...analogy between MS and the Catholic Church, and Linus and Martin Luther. "
The Associated Press remembers Salon as "an early staple of internet discourse."
And while Salon told them there were no immediate plans to take down Salon's online archives, the Associated Press notes the site's announcement "did not immediately indicate what would become of its employees, though some reported they had lost their jobs." (Longtime staff writer Amanda Marcotte
wrote on her Patreon that she and "everyone" are "the latest victim of AI's predations.") "A spokesperson for the outlet said 19 full-time employees had been affected, as well as a handful of private contractors," writes the Associated Press.
Variety adds that Salon "joins later-arriving sites such as Buzzfeed and Gawker that found it difficult to monetize cultural and topical reporting for a general audience and eventually shut down."
No one was injured after emergency landing in Fort Myers 50 minutes after takeoff with two people onboard
A small plane crashed into the rear of a pickup truck as it made an emergency landing on a busy Florida highway on Saturday but miraculously no one was injured in the dramatic incident.
Video footage obtained from the sheriff’s office shows a Cessna 172 grazing over the truck as it approached the ground for a complete landing on a road in Fort Meyers at about 11.45am on Saturday.
The following is the transcript of the interview with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Nov. 8, 2026.
On this "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" broadcast, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Robert F. Kennedy health adviser Calley Means join Margaret Brennan.
The following is the transcript of the interview with Rep. French Hill, Republican of Arkansas, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Nov. 8, 2026.
House Democrat is a ‘hard yes’ on impeachment resolution against defense secretary who ‘has abused his power’
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, poised to become majority leader, said on Sunday that he strongly supports impeaching defense secretary Pete Hegseth as a Republican lawmaker prepares to force a House vote.
The top Democrat made his position clear during an appearance on ABC’s This Week, declaring himself a “hard yes” on the impeachment resolution targeting Hegseth.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump shared an AI-generated video Sunday depicting UFC fighters physically attacking members of the White House press corps while UFC CEO Dana White stands behind the briefing-room podium.
The animated clip, originally posted by an X account and later reposted by Trump on Truth Social, shows reporters asking White questions including whether Trump threatens democracy and about the president’s pronouns. UFC fighters then tackle, restrain or remove the animated journalists. The video ends with Trump looking into the room as several reporters lie on the floor.
The post came one day after Trump publicly offered White the vacant press secretary job and suggested that several UFC fighters join him as assistants to help “defend us against the Lunatic Left.”
White said Saturday he planned to meet with Trump Monday but noted that he already has “a lot of jobs.” He has not publicly accepted the position. Reuters reported that Trump and White have maintained a close relationship for years, with White repeatedly supporting Trump politically.
The video is fictional and AI-generated, and Trump did not explicitly direct anyone to attack journalists. Still, it portrays physical violence against members of the press from inside the White House briefing room, adding another unusual element to the administration’s ongoing search for a permanent press secretary.
The crash occurred in al-Ayyat district in Giza province, about 32 miles south of Cairo, when a train traveling to the southwestern Fayoum province crashed into the rear of another train.
Be careful with the file .claude/settings.local.json, warns The Hacker News:
Passwords and API keys that developers typed into commands they approved in Claude Code are sitting in public GitHub repositories, where anyone can read them. When a user selects "Yes, and don't ask again," Anthropic's AI coding assistant can save the command, word-for-word, including the secret, in a project settings file. Software security company Apiiro said that 1,122 public copies of that file hold at least one secret, though it did not test whether any still work. One company the researchers notified earlier this week confirmed its key had been live...
Removing [the file] from a project does not undo the leak, because older versions stay in git history and in forks of the repository. The researchers' advice is to rotate first: change every password, token, and key the file has ever held, then clean up...
Claude Code tries to keep the file out of git. The first time it writes the file in a git repository, it adds the file to the user's global git excludes, its settings documentation says. Git on that computer then ignores the file in every repository. That protection stays in one user's git settings on one computer. It does nothing for a file that was already committed, the researchers say. Claude Code never adds the file to the project's own .gitignore, so the protection does not travel with the project. In 539 of the 1,105 repositories the researchers traced, a commit listing Claude as a co-author changed the file. They take this to mean Claude often commits the file itself.
Apiiro's search of public GitHub found 104,185 copies of the file in 103,617 repositories, its research write-up shows. About 1.1% of them, or 1,122 copies, hold at least one secret. Together they hold 1,379 different secrets... ]And "in half of those repositories it had been there for at least 217 days."] More than a third of the secrets open a database directly, including 379 database passwords. Others include 43 SSH logins for public servers, 42 tokens for GitHub, GitLab and npm, and 23 AWS keys. Among the owners of these files are 63 organizations, mostly software companies of all sizes. The strongest cases include a database vendor's own admin-level cloud key and the owner password of a medical-records database, the researchers say.
Boris Cherny, Anthropic's head of Claude Code, responded to the story in a comment on Hacker News:
"Historically Claude Code has not done secret scrubbing (there are many good tools for that), but we are looking into what we can do to prevent this.
That said, a few thoughts:
1. .claude/settings.local.json is meant to stay local. This is not a file you should check into source control. We automatically gitignore it when Claude creates the file, so in this case the files were manually created and checked in (docs: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings)
2. Permission rules are old hat. Everyone should be using auto mode instead. It is safer and also does not require manually maintaining finicky allow/deny lists. Auto mode is enabled by default and is included for free in all plans.
3. Regardless of what agent you use, you should have secret scanning enabled. GitHub and other source control hosts offer it. There are many threat models that it protects against and you should absolutely use it if you can. (see https://github.com/security/plans)"
Cherny also named approaches Anthropic plans to prototype, Apiiro notes in an update, citing Cherny's goal of
"making sure auto mode catches this, building in basic secret scanning," and, when a reader noted the same can happen in auto mode when it asks about a sensitive command, answered "good catch."
Claude Code users had already filed a bug report on the issue on August 11, 2025, notes The Hacker News, but "An automated bot closed that report as 'not planned' on January 3, after 60 days without activity."
Three more bug reports were then filed, according to the researchers. "None got a reply from Anthropic, and three were closed automatically as inactive or duplicate."
Two people arrested after Robinson’s presence inflames tensions in scenes witnessed by many on social media
Two people were arrested at an influencer boxing event that descended into a riot in Ireland after the presence of the far-right activist Tommy Robinson inflamed tensions in the crowd.
The riot took place at about midnight on Saturday at an event organised by the controversial internet personality HSTikkyTokky, whose real name is Harrison Sullivan, at the Hub events venue in Kilkenny.
Bengals beat Falcons 34-17 in Madrid for fourth straight
Giants win in Philadelphia for first time since 2013
Dak Prescott threw for 335 yards and CeeDee Lamb caught 10 passes for 195 yards before the Dallas defense made the decisive play to help the Cowboys escape Indianapolis with a 27-23 victory on Sunday.
Cowboys rookie safety Caleb Downs intercepted Daniel Jones with 35 seconds remaining to seal the victory for Dallas.
Culture secretary pushes back against talk of revisiting Brexit but says closer ties would fulfil referendum promises
One of Andy Burnham’s cabinet ministers has said she wants to avoid “circular arguments” about whether the UK should rejoin the EU, underlining divisions at the top of government over revisiting Brexit.
Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, appeared to suggest she was not in favour of rejoining the trade bloc, but she said the prime minister should still pursue closer ties to fulfil the promises made at the time of the referendum.
Andy Burnham insists he is committed to the green transition, but his MPs worry that in decision after decision, he is showing that other priorities come first.
Americans outscore opponents 12-0 through two games
Sweden bounce back with 4-1 victory over Finland
Emma Peschel celebrated her international debut with a goal as the United States shut out Germany 5-0 at the women’s ice hockey world championship on Sunday.
The 22-year-old defender scored with a wrist shot from the point to make it 2-0 in the opening period of the Group A game.
Trump poised to double down on immigration crackdown and refuse concessions to new Democratic majority in Congress
Donald Trump set the stage for his administration to lurch further to the right this weekend, claiming the US had taken a “giant step back” by widely rejecting his party.
Former military chief says prime minister brought Israel to historic crisis and it is approaching ‘point of no return’
Israel’s former military chief Gadi Eisenkot started the tough task of forming a government on Sunday, reaching out to Benjamin Netanyahu’s allies as he said the veteran prime minister had brought the country to a historic crisis.
Eisenkot, 66, the leader of the Yashar party, who has vowed to bridge Israel’s deep polarisation under Netanyahu, formally received a mandate from the president, Isaac Herzog, who gave him 28 days to form a government despite his bloc lacking a clear majority.
President orders prompt investigation after one train derails in collision in al-Ayyat about 50km from Cairo
Seven people were killed and at least 125 injured when two trains collided on Sunday south of the Egyptian capital, Cairo, officials said.
The crash occurred in al-Ayyat district in Giza province, about 50km (30 miles) south of Cairo, when a train travelling to Fayoum province crashed into the rear of a train heading to the southern province of Aswan, according to the transport ministry.
Ministers are expected to make steep cuts to the government’s electric vehicle (EV) targets this week, in a move that will relieve carmakers but alarm many Labour MPs who are worried about the government’s commitment to the green agenda.
Louise Haigh, the de facto deputy prime minister, will finalise the plan after a crunch meeting in Downing Street on Wednesday to settle a long-running dispute between the transport, energy and business departments.
In "The Altruists," the Emmy-winning star of "Ozark" plays Caroline Ellison, girlfriend of Sam Bankman-Fried and business partner in a multi-billion-dollar cryptocurrency fraud. Julia Garner talks about how, for her, the eyes truly are the windows to the soul.
"According to a new study by researchers at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, data centers are probably having only a small effect on residential electricity prices," reports the Washington Post.
"The researchers calculated that these operations were responsible for just 4% of the utility rate increases over the last five years..."
There are certainly some areas — like in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio and other states covered by grid operator PJM — where data centers have skyrocketed demand, pushing some costs onto residential customers. But multiple studies by different researchers and organizations have failed to find a strong connection between data centers and the overall trajectory of U.S. electricity prices in recent years. Another analysis earlier this year by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that, between 2010 and 2024, data centers increased average electricity prices for residential customers by just 2.1%. Last year, research from the Brattle Group and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that data centers were actually decreasing costs in certain regions. And another study by the Electric Power Research Institute found that a doubling of data center capacity between 2019 and 2024 resulted in a 4 percent drop in home electricity prices...
The new Harvard and Penn study found a slightly higher impact on industrial electricity prices — the price paid by manufacturers and large facilities. For those customers, data centers were responsible for 15% of the price increase between 2020 and 2025. But for ordinary Americans... the changes simply were not substantial [according to Wharton School professor Serguei Netessine, one of the study's authors]. "So far we have no evidence that data centers increase prices all that much," Netessine said. Instead, he said, prices are rising due to more quotidian factors: rising gas prices, an aging electricity grid, and wildfires and hurricanes requiring improvements to the grid and recovery after disaster...
If the number of data centers continue to boom, experts say, residential prices could be affected more down the line. Data center electricity demand is expected to increase steeply over the next few years, requiring new power generation — wind, solar or natural gas — to be put onto the grid. And residents have issues with data centers that go beyond the price of electricity. The new developments have been singled out for loud noise, polluting power generation, and for disturbing residential neighborhoods and natural landscapes. According to the Pew Research Center, more than half of Americans say that data centers are mostly bad for the environment. Others feel that the AI race — which could ultimately leave many Americans out of work — is being forced upon them.
"I think generally what we're seeing is a broader range of reasons the public has opposed data centers," [said Ryan Hledik, principal at the Brattle Group]. "Concern about AI leading to loss of jobs — all of that is getting packaged together."
Culture secretary says there is still a problem with exploitation and abuse in the industry and public life
The culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, has said there is still a problem with exploitation and abuse in the media industry and a failure to properly deal with allegations after Russell Brand’s conviction for rape and sexual assault.
She said women who came forward were too often not protected by institutions across public life, including in politics, and that huge power imbalances meant speaking up came at a very heavy cost.
The following is the full transcript of the interview with Rep.-elect Nancy Lacore, a portion of which aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Nov. 8, 2026.
Two Newport Beach fishermen found a Royal Caribbean cruise ship employee treading water nearly 20 miles off the coast while returning home from a fishing trip near Catalina Island on Friday.
The university has become a hub for human and artificial intelligence (AI) collaboration.
With the development of the First State AI Institute (FSAII) and collaborative efforts with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create the AI Institute for Human-AI Cooperation (HAIC), the university is aiming to stay ahead of the curve.
The NSF awarded the university a $21.5 million, five-year grant to develop HAIC, headquartered at the university’s Data Science Institute within the Ammon Pinizzotto Biopharmaceutical Innovation Center on STAR Campus.
Other universities involved are Delaware State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Florida and Princeton University.
HAIC is a program that brings professionals in health care, engineering, robotics, neuroscience, rehabilitation and artificial intelligence together to make advancements in physical therapy. Its goal is to transform AI into a “teammate” that works alongside clinicians, personalizes rehabilitation and supports decision-making to improve patient outcomes.
“UD is advancing AI that sharpens a clinician’s judgment rather than replacing it — that’s innovation with intention,” University President Laura Carlson said to UDaily.
“We feel like Delaware has a very strong foundation for us to come up with a team for a very competitive application, and so basically that’s what we did,” Cathy Wu, director of the NSF HAIC Institute, said. “We hosted a workshop, brought teams together, and then came up with the UD ideas.”
Wu, who is also a professor in the university’s computer information sciences department, hopes that AI can interact in dynamic partnerships with health care systems.
“By developing AI that enables personalized models tailored to individual needs and decision-making, our institute will chart a new path for health care and cultivate the next generation of leaders in AI,” Wu said.
HAIC is focusing on collaborating with AI models to encourage mass data analysis. The more patient data collected and updates made, the better the AI can spot trends in treatments and medications, which can support patients everywhere, explained Wu.
“Being able to control these systems and not rely on other third-party vendors who are selling us the AI is critically important for how we actually do this research,” John Huffman, director of research computing at the university, said to NBC 10.
Austin Brockmeier, the deputy director of NSF, is very enthusiastic about the possibilities for future collaborations across the university and wider Delaware community.
“There’s, you know, many, many physical therapy clinics across the nation, many of them independent, each using their own sort of system,” Brockmeier, who is also an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the university, said. “We’re trying to unify the health records in Delaware alone, so that it could be used more efficiently for tracking a single patient’s health records.”
This program will also encourage students to get involved in various events and research opportunities, both in undergraduate and graduate programs.
“Students, you are the future,” Wu said. “You are going to be the drivers who really help us elevate what we will be able to accomplish from this grant, and so we would love to engage students in various types of activities that we will be developing.”
The FSAII, situated on STAR Campus and directed by Sunita Chandrasekaran, will focus on research, enhanced teaching and learning, optimized business operations and ethical AI leadership. It will invest in AI infrastructure, including large language models (LLMs) trained to understand and generate human-like language.
“The goal of the proposal was to be able to provide the UD community with an AI-enabled tool that UD faculty, operations and students can use without needing to pay a subscription towards external models,” Chandrasekaran, an associate professor in the university’s department of computer and information sciences, said.
With these recent adaptations and discourse about the fast-paced development of AI, the FSAII is developing opportunities for university- and Delaware-specific AI deployment.
The FSAII strategic plan states it will bring together the university’s expertise and computing resources to advance research, prepare Delaware’s AI workforce and partner with state agencies, industry and schools to teach responsible AI use to every Delawarean.
Since its inception in June 2025, the FSAII has hosted several events open to both the university and Newark community members, including a yearly Ignite AI Challenge in March and the Hennovate the State Hackathon hosted in August, both focused on encouraging smart engagement with AI models.
Professor Chandrasekaran explained that the institute will be available not only to the university but also to Newark community members.
Chandrasekaran’s ultimate goal is to “educate our community on [how to] use it with a purpose.”
Bailiffs reportedly seized digital records before court case over alleged intellectual property breaches on Land Rover Defender
Bailiffs acting for Jaguar Land Rover raided the Dutch offices of a Chinese “copycat” rival before a legal showdown this week over whether its “Defender clone” infringes intellectual property rights.
Bailiffs acting on behalf of JLR reportedly seized digital records from the offices of Chinese carmaker BYD in Schiedam and Hoofddorp in August, according to the Sunday Times.
Travel may be disrupted until Monday morning in areas including most of southern England and across Midlands
The Met Office has said weather conditions in the UK are creating a “perfect recipe” for fog as it warned that travel may be disrupted.
A yellow weather warning lasting from 6pm on Sunday until 11am on Monday has been issued by the service, with the affected areas including most of southern England, excluding the south-west, and the entirety of the Midlands.
ole (Slashdot reader #19,909) writes in about his free, Norwegian open-source music recording studio for GNOME called GarageJam, which he says allows musicians to compose, record, and share original music seamlessly on the Internet.
The latest release, GarageJam 8.0.1, is available in C and Python. It records audio immediately to Ogg Vorbis (.ogg) files in the current working directory and lets you edit metadata in .gjxml XML files from a GTK/GNOME wizard — all built on the Gingerblue Recording Studio API.
Ole shares links to its IETF GarageJam XML draft and GitHub repositories, and there's also GarageJam Studio, "a commercial music and audio recording app for the World Wide Web written by Aamot Innovation from Norway.".
ole is also spreading the word about GNOME Media, which "puts internet radio and your photographs on one OpenStreetMap... built from GNOME Radio 85.0.1."
Click a station on the map to listen. Cities with several stations show a count and a menu.
Open a folder of pictures or import from a camera. Photos with a GPS position in their EXIF data appear on the map. Double-click a thumbnail to open it. The search box filters the station list and the map together.
ole also announces:
GPhoto 3.0.1. ("After 25 years, libgphoto2 2.5.34 now supports more than 2,500 camera models, and GPhoto 3.0.1 is built on it.")
Skolelinux 13.6.0. Built on Debian 13 âoetrixieâ, Skolelinux is "a complete, ready-to-use Free Software operating system for schools, classrooms and home computers... an office suite, web browser, educational programs and network services for an entire school, all set up out of the box."
(The Center Square) – The Republican-controlled 119th Congress is facing a backlog of legislative duties it can no longer ignore – yet it has only eight weeks left in session until Democrats take the helm in both chambers.
The State Department is also offering "possible relocation" for informants who have information on Iranian "facilities, equipment and associated personnel."
(The Center Square) – Democrats promised voters they would end President Donald Trump’s tariffs. The arithmetic says they cannot do it without Republican help.
Scheme in Derry aims to sow confidence by getting people with learning and physical disabilities into wrestling
The music thumped, the lights blazed and from the ring the announcer did a countdown. “Who is ready to rumble?” he roared. The bellows and cheers indicated that the crowd at St Columb’s Hall in Derry on Saturday night was more than ready for the Foyle Rumble, and so began a wrestling extravaganza of heroes and villains in leotards, masks and kneepads.
The blend of athleticism and scripted storytelling would have been familiar to fans of WrestleMania, but this Northern Irish version came with a twist: many of the performers have learning or physical disabilities, and the characters they play in the ring do not quite stay in the ring.
In the last year CVEs have increased 3x for Python and its package manager Pip, according to Python's security developer in residence Seth Larson. "And the amount of malware published and removed from the Python Package Index (PyPI) is up 60%." Securing Python's ecosystem is getting more complex, he writes, especially given "the evolving role of AI in both security risks and security response."
Their response includes bringing on a new Security Developer "to address the increasingly demanding scale of security response for the Python ecosystem."
Providing prompt security response services and innovating to prevent future threats... is more difficult now than ever before... [Security developer Brett Smith] will help us keep pace with critical ongoing work such as vulnerability remediation, providing vulnerability data as a CVE Numbering Authority, and removing malware from PyPI. He'll also give the team bandwidth for new projects such as scaling PyPI's autonomous quarantine program to reduce manual effort on malware remediation and streamlining processes for the PSRT to handle the new vulnerability report volume.
The role was made possible by an "ecosystem security" grant from Anthropic. And having the new security developer "will both build capacity for security work the PSF already does and enable new, proactive work," concludes Python's security developer in residence. (He discussed Python's security challenges in a June presentation with Python security engineer Mike Fiedler> .)
In June, Curl's Daniel Strenberg reported Curl's CVEs have also tripled.
Michigan senator-elect’s former peers recall his time at university in Britain – and his love of coronation chicken sandwiches
In the cold, twilight days of 2008, inside the University of Michigan’s fortress-like Fleming administration building, one student was given a particularly adulatory sendoff.
Mary Sue Coleman, president of the university at the time, convened a ceremony for the latest Rhodes scholar heading to the University of Oxford: Abdul El-Sayed. “There is no doubt among anyone who crosses his path that he will achieve all he sets out to accomplish and more,” she declared to a room full of the university’s leaders, calling the medical PhD student the “epitome of the engaged intellect”.
Smalltown Nephi, Utah, was where the musical sensibilities of Killers frontman Brandon Flowers started to take form, before finding success as a rock star in Las Vegas. Now his solo album, "Thrasher," is filled with country songs like those beloved by his dad.
In last week's historic elections, voters were asked to weigh in on whether our nation will maintain the ideals of equality, dignity, fair play, and the rule of law; historian Jon Meacham says that Americans overwhelmingly answered, and democracy prevailed.
A film producer once told Judi Dench she had "everything wrong with her face." One Oscar and a Damehood later, she's had the last laugh. The actress, now 91, talks about her new memoir, "Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?"
Resilience is often presented as feats of bravery and endurance. But everyday practices like journaling, drafting a text or even writing a to-do list are manifestations of a capacity to adapt.
Lesson for teenagers included how cattle’s methane emissions contribute to climate crisis, but it was then scrapped
A beef industry-funded effort to teach teenagers about cattle’s climate impact was quietly scrapped following backlash from some ranchers, who disputed the premise that cows contribute to global heating.
The episode is the latest example of the livestock industry’s decades-long battle to determine what US children learn about cows and the climate.
Choosing a healthcare plan can be extremely complicated, but it’s necessary to attract and retain good workers
Again, healthcare costs are going up. According to a recent study from Mercer, total health benefit cost per employee in 2027 is expected to rise 8.2% – after employers’ planned cost-reduction measures (without action, employers told Mercer their existing plans would rise about 11%). This would be the highest increase since 2003.
And, again, we see the same reaction from employers. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that even as healthcare costs have gone up, the share of these costs coming out employees’ paychecks has “shot up” even faster.
From the military to healthcare, Trump systematically dismantled Obama-era protections for transgender rights
Shelby Chestnut remembers turning on the news in 2016 and hearing something he didn’t expect. Then- attorney general, Loretta Lynch, had just announced a federal lawsuit to block HB2 in North Carolina, otherwise known as the “bathroom bill”. Lynch said the law, which made it illegal for transgender people to use a public restroom that did not align with the sex listed on their birth certificate, was reminiscent of those passed during the Jim Crow era that restricted public facility use by race. Then, she addressed transgender Americans directly: “But no matter how isolated or scared you may feel today, the Department of Justice and the entire Obama administration wants you to know that we see you; we stand with you; and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward.”
HB 2 was repealed within the year. Chestnut said he thought at the time: “Oh this is the next phase of protections for trans people.”
(The Center Square) – Democratic Socialists will now lead America’s two most populous cities and the nation’s capital, raising questions over the Democratic Socialist of America platform.
Much-loved passenger ship has traversed Atlantic swells between islands and Cornish mainland for almost 50 years
Tears were shed, sea shanties sung and tales of stormy voyages exchanged as one of the UK’s most characterful ships set sail for the final time.
Scillonian III, also known as the “vomit comet” because in stormy weather it tended to rock a little too much for the comfort of those susceptible to sea sickness, has chugged between the British mainland and the Isles of Scilly, for just shy of half a century.
She was the fastest ocean liner in history. But the jet age took the SS United States out of service, and she wound up docked in Philadelphia for nearly 30 years. Now, she's scheduled to be scuttled off Florida, to become the world's largest artificial reef.
Knesset has been deadlocked since the election last month when Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition lost its majority
Israel’s president has chosen Gadi Eisenkot, the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strongest rival, to try to form a new government, after a deadlocked election that left neither man with a clear path to power.
Isaac Herzog’s office said he had informed Eisenkot, the leader of the Yashar party, on Saturday night “of his intention to task him with forming a government”.
The midterms marked one of the biggest rebukes of the Republican Party since Watergate. What is the fallout from this year's elections, and how are Democrats going to address a lame-duck President Trump?
Tuesday’s winners offered a new politics at a time when ‘there is something broken in America’
As the US election returns came in throughout the night on Tuesday, there was ebullience at the size of the margin. It was comparable to the significant thumpings over the years. Yet bigger.
In 2006, Americans were exhausted by the war in Iraq (by simply changing the last letter to “n”, we have a similar situation today). But even that big win paled in comparison.
Australia weakening copyright protections to aid AI companies would be “ridiculous and dangerous”, the global peak body for the music recording industry has warned as it watches with concern how the Albanese government responds to big tech’s demands.
While local creatives have raised constitutional issues and threatened political backlash, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), representing recording industry bodies worldwide, said its members were worried about Australia potentially agreeing to demands other nations had rejected.
Authorities said that the gunman opened fire in Krakow’s Old Town, and that the suspect was “fascinated by far-right ideologies.” Fifteen others were injured.
Five of seven facilities in England and Wales never reached operational stage as Tories vacillated over plans to check goods
The UK wasted at least £100m in taxpayers’ money to set up zombie Brexit border inspection posts that were never used, it has been revealed.
The overall cost of Brexit was put at an estimated £4.7bn by the National Audit Office last year but this included years-long transformation of the software used for customs declarations and other systems built to cope with the UK leaving the single market.
Some residents of the Villa Vie Odyssey cruise are trying to reclaim the ship, which could potentially be auctioned off by its lender, CBS News has learned.
The high-stakes meeting begins on Monday, as countries around the world grapple with the strongest El Niño weather system on record, supercharged by fossil fuels, which is set to take hundreds of thousands of lives and cause damage costing trillions of dollars.
Bring familiar sweets to the holiday table with 17 old-fashioned desserts, including classic pies, cakes, brownies, bread pudding, chocolate mousse, and apple turnovers. Find a nostalgic treat for sharing after dinner.The post 17 old-fashioned desserts your grandparents will recognize at…
Andy Burnham takes part for first time alongside about 12 second world war veterans, as ceremonies held across UK
Second world war veterans outnumbered former prime ministers for what could be the last time at the national service of remembrance at the Cenotaph in central London.
The number of surviving service personnel from that conflict attending the service has dwindled from 20 last year to about a dozen, the oldest of whom was Jeffrey Brereton, who served in the RAF. He volunteered for the air force in 1940, at the age of 19, and served as a mechanic on Hurricane aircraft during the Battle of Britain.
The Trump administration is unlikely to scale back its aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration following the results of the midterm elections, multiple U.S. officials told CBS News, citing the elevation of Stephen Miller as White House chief of staff.
A New York City Department of Education employee is facing a murder charge in the stabbing death of a 28-year-old woman last week in Brooklyn, authorities announced Saturday.
The movement founded by Greg Glassman grew into an empire, helping popularize the masculinity aesthetic embraced by Pete Hegseth and RFK Jr
Comparative machismo is hardly new, but when Donald Trump publicly admired Senator Jon Husted’s backside earlier this month, later telling advisers it made the since-defeated Ohio incumbent more “interesting” to voters, the senator leaned into the compliment, saying it gave him extra motivation to “get down to the gym”.
Would that odd exchange have taken place without CrossFit, the fitness empire founded by college dropout and gymnast Greg Glassman in the 1990s that grew to 15,000 gyms across 160 countries before he was drawn into public controversy at the height of #MeToo and the social justice movement in 2020?
“What happens if I walk in and survivors’ names are just plastered everywhere?” Bensky wondered about the reading room, a traveling exhibition of Epstein investigative files, first held in a New York City gallery this May. “I was a little worried in the beginning that this would be a form of exploitation for survivors.
The report, compiled by the Environmental Integrity Project, also found pipelines are being built to meet demand for natural gas exports fueled by wars in Ukraine and Iran. Federal records identified almost 200 pipeline projects that are proposed or in the works, and would collectively span 17,000 miles (27,000km).
Skip the seasonal coffee shop line and bring pumpkin to breakfast, dinner, dessert, or the party table. These 15 recipes range from savory risotto and soup to waffles, cookies, cakes, bars, and a shareable cheeseball.The post 15 pumpkin recipes that…
"Aaron Swartz would have turned forty this year," writes FSF deputy director Sean O'Brien. "November 8 is Aaron Swartz Day, when we remember a pioneer of free software and information sharing whose contributions helped shape the modern internet."
The Internet Archive will host a hackathon Sunday in San Francisco celebrating Aaron's Swartz's life "and the projects he worked on, many of which are still going strong today," including SecureDrop, OpenLibrary, and Creative Commons. "We are also spreading the word about projects he inspired," including OnionPress and the EFF's Atlas of Surveillancedocumenting police tech use through open source research, now a collaborative effort with volunteers, the University of Nevada, Reno, and the Reynolds School of Journalism. The event is also supported by Free Law Project, and organizers are asking attendees to "bring a color print out of your favorite photos of Aaron for a huge collaborative collage."
From the Internet Archive's blog:
Aaron was also a co-founder of Creative Commons, where he worked with Lisa Rein developing the RSS-enhanced HTML code that sits behind Creative Commons licenses, much of which is still in use today. The "Quantifying the Commons" project was designed to help measure open-licensed and public-domain works worldwide, and is one of the projects participants can work on. Aaron loved Tor and created tools such as "Tor2web" (with Virgil Griffith) to help more people publish Tor-accessible websites. Onion Press is a Tor-based publishing system designed for decentralized, censorship-resistant publishing, and participants can work on the code base...
We also encourage you to have a hackathon in your own town using our materials — or materials of your own. Please let us know if you plan to do this (although it's not required!). If you do let us know, we can include you on our website and help you spread the word about your event. So far, there is an event in Portland sponsored by Portland Civic Lab where they will be screening The Internet's Own Boy and celebrating Aaron's life.
"EFF was proud to call Aaron a friend and ally," the digital rights organization posted this week. And the FSF's deputy director writes "It is particularly striking that some of the world's largest companies now rely on technology Swartz helped to develop."
One of Swartz's most important technical contributions was his collaboration with John Gruber on Markdown, the simple text formatting system introduced in 2004. Markdown allows users to create structured documents using ordinary text, without requiring proprietary software. More than twenty years later, Markdown has become one of the most popular formats for documentation and publishing, and is widely used in community websites such as forums and wikis. This is not a minor contribution. Companies developing LLMs use Markdown extensively in their products and development tools. OpenAI, for example, recommends Markdown for organizing instructions and communicating structure to its ChatGPT models... Swartz also developed web.py, a public domain framework for building Python applications, and contributed to RSS 1.0, a public internet standard for distributing news and other information between websites.
Swartz developed web.py while rewriting the software running Reddit after Reddit acquired Swartz's company Infogami.
Reddit recently licensed its content to AI companies, and the FSF's deputy director notes "the enormous scale of the alleged 'piracy' by giant technology corporations" while Aaron himself had "faced criminal prosecution for downloading academic research that he wanted to distribute with no monetary gain."
In 2011, federal prosecutors charged Swartz with computer fraud and related offenses after he downloaded millions of academic articles from the JSTOR collection through MIT's university network... Although he was not charged with copyright infringement, he faced aggressive federal prosecution and the possibility of decades in prison before he tragically died by suicide in January 2013, at just twenty-six years old...
Swartz helped build tools that made the internet more useful and accessible, and his contributions continue to shape a world he never lived to see. On Aaron Swartz Day, we should remember his achievements and the access-to-knowledge principles that guided them. The companies benefiting from his legacy should respect those same principles by giving users true freedom and control, rather than imposing more restrictions on us all.
When the evenings turn cold and the daylight slips away, these 13 slow cooker recipes bring pork roasts, chicken, beef stews, soups, and meatballs to dinner with the crock pot doing most of the work.The post 13 easy slow cooker…
Last week’s midterms may not have cowed Donald Trump, but they should be a wake-up call for the grinning tech broligarchs who lined up at his inauguration two chaotic years ago.
Clearly, the cost of living squeeze unleashed by Trump’s war in Iran was a big driver of the Democrat wave. But AI was also on the ballot – in many places, literally.
See My World, an event highlighting the pan-African thought via film, poetry and dance, builds on momentum sparked by local activists and creatives
African philosophies including exploring how lessons from the past can shape the present and near future have inspired a film festival coming to Manchester.
See My World, a day dedicated to independent creators from across the African diaspora in the north of England, will take place at the Contact theatre on 21 November.
The once-bearded New York mayor has downsized his facial hair. Does it work?
I’ve battled with facial hair almost my entire adult life.
I started growing it early, turning me into a pubescent villain from a spaghetti western. I was told by my parents not to shave it off, lest it grow back more furious than before. I just had to walk around high school looking like a hungover bond trader, which did nothing for my popularity.
Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist
The blue wave, while a rebuke of Trump’s policies, was also a referendum on the party’s status quo
On election night I stood in a crowd at Harlem Tavern, a restaurant in New York City, at the electoral party for Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member and congresswoman-elect from New York’s 13th congressional district. The crowd cheered as what came to be called the “blunami” rolled in: Iowa blue, Kansas blue, Talarico in Texas, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, House, Senate, gubernatorial races overwhelmingly going for the Democratic party.
The victories were a clear rebuke of Trump’s politics, but also a referendum on the Democratic party’s own centrism that is complicit in the violence of masked men hunting immigrants, the funding of a genocide and the denial of healthcare to citizens of the world’s wealthiest country.
Midterms success gives party potent leverage over Trump – expect tough campaigns of investigating and lawmaking
“Costs, chaos, corruption”: after almost two years spent relentlessly criticizing Donald Trump for failing to address those three, broad political concerns, Democrats won a monumental return to power in Tuesday’s midterm elections that will give them potent new leverage over the president.
Now the question becomes: what will they do with it?
More people recognize opioid overdoses, but education about stimulant overdoses hasn’t been as clear-cut
Overdoses involving stimulants are on the rise in many parts of the country, according to recently available data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but experts say recognizing and responding to them is more complex when compared with opioid overdoses.
“The rate of overdose decline was not nearly what we expected” in California, said Dr Taylor Nichols, an emergency and addiction medicine physician based in Sacramento.
From roundabouts to the stock market, relentless streamlining could be making the world more dangerous
We have all been there: packed shoulder to shoulder on the train while the person beside us coughs and sneezes. A protective flu jab offers some reassurance, but so does the thought that there will be a hospital bed for you, should you need it. Yet, in England, about 95% of adult hospital beds were occupied at the height of flu season last year.
If hospitals were hotels, that level of occupancy would be good business, and we would commend them for their efficiency. But do we really want a hospital to have so few beds in reserve that it’s just one bad flu week away from having to treat patients in corridors?
Six people killed in attack probably inspired by far right, according to officials, as police say suspect’s parents and sister found dead at his home
Polish prosecutors have opened a terrorism investigation after a 24-year-old man opened fire in a busy market square in Kraków, killing six people including a Briton and injuring 17, in an attack that authorities said was probably inspired by far-right ideologies.
Police confirmed on Sunday that three people found dead at the gunman’s home after the attack on Saturday afternoon were his father, 53, mother, 52, and sister, 21.
What are the relationships and dominant interests in play, as the summit kicks off after a bitter row over its hosting?
Hosting Cop was a key pledge from Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese in 2021, while in opposition, before his successful election campaign. But arcane rules meant the country had to wait its turn to bid and was then embroiled in an angry row with Turkey over the hosting. The final compromise put Australia in charge of the negotiations which will take place in the Turkish city of Antalya. The bitter taste left by the row lingers and Australia has seemed to some a rather half-hearted host. The country’s media has been much quieter on Cop than previous host countries, and although Albanese will speak at the opening of the leaders’ segment, he is unlikely to stay long.
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After her body was found near the Seine in September 1949, city police wrote off the young woman, immortalised as “the girl of 100 portraits”, as loose, libertine and – worse – an unmarried mother. They closed their investigation after just four months having made little effort to find her killer.
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On paper, the second-largest city in the country has its first democratic socialist mayor.
Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman declared victory on Thursday over the embattled incumbent Karen Bass, joining a list of socialist mayors who have risen to power in recent years, including Zohran Mamdani in New York; Seattle’s Katie Wilson; and most recently Janeese Lewis George in Washington, D.C., who won in a landslide this week.
Raman, however, did not campaign unabashedly as a socialist. Though she ran as an endorsed member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s Los Angeles chapter, the national DSA threatened to override the local chapter and rescind the endorsement over concerns around her stances on Israel and Palestine.
Unlike her counterpart in New York, to whom she drawsmostcomparisons, Raman did not make sweeping socialist promises, such as free public transit, universal childcare, or taxing the rich. Instead, she focused on what’s wrong with the city. Riding a wave of resentment for Bass’s alleged mismanagements of the Palisades fire and the Lineage Logistics warehouse fire in Boyle Heights, Raman talked about filling potholes, fixing street lights, and making roads safer for pedestrians and cyclists.
In addition to DSA-LA support, she earned the endorsements of popular anti-corruption City Controller Kenneth Mejia and Unite Here 11, a major local hospitality workers union, whose large membership canvassed for her in the general. But she lacked endorsements from most key labor groups and social justice nonprofits, and the organizing base they provide. Her fellow DSA members on the Los Angeles City Council all pulled for Bass, forcing Raman to battle back the perception that she struggles to build coalitions.
While Mamdani, 10 months into his term, now finds himself under pressure from New York’s left for refusing to fire NYPD’s police commissioner, his massive base of organizer support offers a buffer to criticism. Raman won over the city’s voters, but it’s not clear how much time that will buy her to tackle the city’s most vexing problems once she takes office.
“Folks in New York are willing to cut Mamdani more slack on the movement side, because he was one of them on a bunch of issues,” said David Levitus, executive director of LA Forward, a progressive nonprofit that endorsed Raman in the general election. ”I think Nithya” — who did not come from the ranks of DSA organizing like Mamdani — “has more skepticism from parts of the left because of that.”
Raman will face scrutiny from LA’s progressive left on a host of issues: bloated police department spending amounting to roughly a quarter of the city’s nearly $15 billion budget; fear of collaboration between ICE and law enforcement agencies; the 2028 Olympics prompting an expansion of surveillance; rising homelessness; and failing infrastructure.
Weeks before the November election, Raman seemed less concerned with movement-based allegiances or ideological labels, saying she is “a capitalist and I’m also a democratic socialist.” Before the primary in June, she said she was “one of the most independent voices in City Hall” when asked about her membership with DSA. The statements and her votes in city council have prompted intense debate among DSA-LA’s members over whether Raman holds up to democratic socialist ideals.
While most Angelenos do not care about such fine distinctions, Raman’s measured embrace of the socialist mantle has created among some activists the perception of a more responsive audience in city hall compared to previous administrations. Yet to others on LA’s progressive left, Raman’s ideological elusiveness reads as political unreliability.
“I don’t think Nithya Raman is accountable to anyone in the movement,” said Kris Rehl, an activist who volunteered for Raman during her 2020 city council run and now runs the mutual aid group LA Street Care. “If you do not subscribe to any ideology, you can’t be held accountable to it.”
Rehl, who advocates for abolishing anti-camping bans that criminalize homeless encampments near schools and daycares, expressed dismay over Raman’s previous votes on expanding the police department despite running on defunding the police in 2020.
Others like Tal Levy, a member of DSA-LA’s electoral politics committee, remain more optimistic about what Raman can deliver as mayor. While DSA-LA is pushing for reallocating funds from the police budget into social services, Levy sees the value of Raman’s pledge to support LA Forward’s initiative of citywide expansion of unarmed crisis response teams, which divert certain 911 calls to teams of social workers and clinicians, rather than police.
“Even if Nithya were a fire-breathing abolitionist, it would still be a long fight to make those changes,” said Levy, who has been organizing with DSA-LA for nearly a decade. “But I believe there is plenty of room for us to make material wins in the short term.”
Room to Push
While there is debate over how much power DSA-LA has within LA’s political landscape, the group provided Raman additional attention and credibility among leftist voters, which was only bolstered by the successes of other DSA-endorsed candidates in New York and in congressional races across the nation.
The DSA’s National Political Committee, however, spurred one of the biggest public rifts during Raman’s campaign. The committee held a vote to un-endorse Raman over her perceived lack of support for the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which hadn’t been included by the DSA-LA on its endorsement questionnaire. After a week of debate and dueling resolutions, and an email from Raman, in which she wrote, “the best way for working Angelenos to stand in solidarity with Gaza is through non-violent protest, legislative action, and diplomatic pressure, including BDS,” the national committee decided against rescinding its endorsement of Raman by a narrow margin.
Frances Gill, one of three DSA-LA members on the DSA national political committee, voted against rescinding the group’s endorsement. She opposed the idea of alienating the organization’s second largest chapter as “bad organizing and bad leadership,” especially in a high-profile race when the stakes for the regional and national chapters were so closely intertwined.
“The public ties us to one another,” Gill said of the DSA and Raman, “and there’s not a lot of other key players who have also played such a critical role in her being able to win. So I think that gives us an outsized seat at the table.”
She was a part of the faction among national leadership that instead called for a long-term pressure campaign on Raman on the issue of Israel and Palestine. The group is planning to push Raman on what she can do as mayor to halt the transportation of military hardware that makes its way through the Los Angeles International Airport to Israel. Organizers also plan to call for an end to real estate events in LA facilitating the sale of housing illegally built in the occupied West Bank. They will also examine whether the city itself is invested in companies that are profiting off Israel’s genocide in Gaza and apartheid rule of Palestinians.
“I think there is room to push,” Gill said.
Another major public spat between progressives and Raman took place in January before she announced her candidacy for mayor.
Catching housing advocates by surprise, Raman introduced a motion to reform the city’s “mansion tax” to make exemptions for developers. Raman claimed that the tax, known as Measure ULA, was inadvertently preventing construction of new multi-family housing. Organizers opposed the idea, since the tax generates funds for services to support existing affordable housing and keep people housed, and that carveouts for developers would only fuel displacement of low-income renters, possibly pushing more people to the streets.
LA Forward was among those blindsided by the motion, which she eventually withdrew. Before endorsing Raman, Levitus and the group met with the candidate alongside organizers in an activist’s home.
“She talked about, ‘The times when I’ve succeeded, it’s because I built a coalition, the times when I failed, it’s because I didn’t, and I didn’t bring people along,’” Levitus recalled from the July meeting. “She really owned her mistake. I don’t know how much her mind has changed intellectually about the policy, but think clearly she recognizes that she needed to do something different — and that might lead to her pushing for a policy that is different from what she had pushed for before.”
Police Chief Dilemma
Among Raman’s early tests progressives will be watching for is how she fulfills her pledge to fire LAPD police chief Jim McDonnell. Raman was among the councilmembers who approved his appointment in 2024, despite concerns around his track record of collaborating with ICE as LA County sheriff. She has since said she would fire McDonnell over his response to the ICE raids and his refusal to enforce a state law that banned federal agents from wearing masks.
Yet the pledge to replace McDonnell may present a political quagmire for Raman, given that the mayor in LA cannot unilaterally force out a police chief. The city’s police commission, consisting of five civilians appointed by the mayor, must make that decision. Raman first will need to assemble her own commission, but that process also requires approval from a city council that remains largely supportive of the police department.
William Gude, a vocal police accountability advocate who supported Raman in the election, said he planned to push the mayor to circumvent the process by asking McDonnell to resign. “I’m putting pressure on her from day one,” he said. “There’s some promises that she made, and those promises need to be kept.”
In her first press conference as mayor-elect, Raman sidestepped a question about whether she still planned to fire McDonnell, amid public threats from the police union warning of “Armageddon.” “Public safety is the most important service the city is delivering to its people,” said Raman, noting the chief was one of her first phone calls after winning.
Activist pressure could be a burden for Raman — or a tool she could use to force legislation through a city council she knows well, according to Gude. “Does she want to have activists coming after her, also while battling 15 council members?” said Gude, who goes by @FilmthePoliceLA on social media. “Or would she rather have the activist base going after the council members that are coming after her, to create a buffer, to do a lot of her heavy lifting? It’s a choice she has to make.”
Hamid Khan, who heads the Stop Spying LAPD Coalition, is among those who is closely watching who Raman appoints to her police commission. But he sees Raman’s pledge of firing McDonnell as “a band-aid” for the more glaring structural issues of the department. While crediting Raman’s opposition to automated license plate readers from Flock Safety and Axon, Khan also pointed to Raman’s historic support for expanding the police department.
While in city council, Raman voted to expand LAPD’s budget three times: in 2021, 2022, and 2023. But she also voted against police raises in 2023, and this year, she opposed a plan by Bass to hire 170 more officers. She has said on the campaign trail she does not wish to expand the police budget, but also said she would not cut into it either.
In the span of her time in city council, the LAPD has expanded its surveillance reach, Khan said. The department is slowly unrolling its Real-Time Crime Centers, which meld automated license plate reader technology, social media monitoring software, and CCTV cameras into a constant surveillance tool. He warned such a technology, while marketed to curb retail theft, will disproportionately harm Black and brown Angelenos.
“We have to situate the people’s expectations in Los Angeles that they’re not based upon the comment, ‘I’m gonna fire Jim McDonald,’” said Khan, who advocates for abolishing the budding police outposts. “What does that do? The fundamentals still remain the same.”
A True Outsider
There is a notion among some on the left that Raman is very much a part of the political machine that bred some of LA’s ongoing problems. She has served on city council for five years and was an ally to Bass, having endorsed Bass just weeks before jumping in the race herself. Yet Raman, a Harvard-educated urban planner and former entertainment director of Time’s Up, is in many respects an outsider to the political establishment.
Former City Councilmember Mike Bonin, who now runs the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles, called Raman’s victory a “reordering of the governing class in Los Angeles.” For the past several decades, LA politics has been run by establishment Democrats, such as Bass or her predecessor, Eric Garcetti, son of a former LA County district attorney; the chambers of commerce; lobbyists; longtime city hall staffers; all riding the influence of homeowners.
Lex Steppling, an organizer with Los Angeles Community Action Network and a critic of Raman’s time in city council, said in his personal capacity that the “political recalibration” with her victory in city hall was a welcome sight.
Steppling grew up in a generation of LA political activists who got their start organizing with Community Coalition, which Bass founded in 1990 and for a long time was the only progressive organization in the city offering paid political work. He watched as his peers grew to leading campaigns on issues such as policing and mass incarceration, then began running for elected office. They brought with them their organizing chops, but also their relationships with the organizations that gave them their start. Steppling described this as a “relational ecosystem,” in which movements would be co-opted into electoral politics — in which scoring political points became more important than addressing the issues.
He blamed the lack of gains on policing and mass incarceration since the 2020 George Floyd uprising on such a relational ecosystem. A victory for Raman could mark a reset to such an establishment, and he hopes activists will capitalize on the opening.
“The right kind of openings to do the right kind of work will reemerge,” said Steppling, who helped lead a successful anti-incarceration measure in 2020. “It’s gonna once again start to be about the demands.”
Raman’s election evoked for Bonin memories of the last time an LA incumbent mayor was ousted. In 2005, then-state Assembly member Antonio Villaraigosa beat James Hahn, becoming the city’s first Latino mayor. Villaraigosa, previously director of Southern California ACLU, was seen as a progressive candidate at the time. That’s not how he governed. An early sign of his establishment politics was hiring a longtime political insider as his chief of staff.
Raman will also signal her governing priorities with the hires for her transition team and cabinet.
Some organizers were encouraged to see progressive figures added to her campaign, such as Faizah Malik, a civil rights attorney and former city council candidate also endorsed by DSA-LA, and Jamie York, an advocate for greater transparency in city politics whose high-profile rejection by the city council as an ethics commission appointee drew public scrutiny. It remains unclear what if any role they would play in city hall.
The LA Times reported that Rick Cole, former deputy mayor, is expected to supervise Raman’s transition team alongside Andrea Conant, Raman’s chief of staff in city council.
“How big is the table,” Bonin said, “and how much of the activist community is at the table?”
Update: November 9, 2026 This story has been updated to note that Lex Steppling was speaking in his personal capacity, not as a representative of the Los Angeles Community Action Network.
A picture of the pylon at Delaware Stadium during the Fightin’ Blue Hens first game of the 2026 season against Merrimack. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder.
The Kennesaw State Owls (3-6, 2-3 CUSA) defeated the Fightin’ Blue Hens (4-5, 2-3 CUSA), 42-40, on November 7, making the Blue Hens chance at a CUSA title improbable.
Delaware quarterback Nick Minicucci received the shotgun snap and took his drop while surveying the Kennesaw State defense. Minicucci kept his eyes downfield on fourth and six, but felt the Owl pass rush closing in. The Owl’s outside pass rushers forced Minicucci to step up in the pocket where their interior teammates awaited the senior’s arrival.
Minicucci tried to navigate himself out of the pocket, but all the Owl pass rushers converged on him as he attempted to escape. Linebacker Tywon Christopher was the player to take him down, giving the ball back to the Kennesaw State offense with over four minutes to play in the third quarter.
Christopher’s third quarter sack was one of three sacks the Kennesaw defense accumulated throughout the game in the Owls’ 42-40 victory over UD, Saturday evening.
The Delaware offensive line struggled against the Kennesaw front seven throughout the night allowing the three sacks along with nine quarterback hurries. Minicucci seemed like he was scrambling on many of his dropbacks and the running game never gained any momentum, rushing for 85 total yards.
Despite the struggles up front, UD still had a chance to come away with a win.
Following the turnover on downs, Conference USA (CUSA) interception leader, George Mullins, picked off Owl quarterback Landon Varnes and returned it into Owl territory. The interception led to a Tucker Smack field goal that put the Blue Hens ahead, 34-33, near the end of the third quarter.
Varnes and the Kennesaw offense immediately bounced back, scoring 42 seconds into the fourth quarter on a 63-yard touchdown pass to Reed Jesiolowski. Jesiolowski was wide open running down the numbers on the left side of the field behind the Delaware secondary when Varnes hit him in stride for the long touchdown. The Owls attempted a two-point conversion, but the try was intercepted by Blue Hen defensive back Kevin Moore.
A Delaware punt followed the Kennesaw State scoring drive and the Owls added a field goal on their next possession, increasing their advantage to eight with 8:25 left to play.
Delaware’s offense continued to struggle after the field goal and ended their next two drives with a lost fumble and punt. The Blue Hen defense made key stops down the stretch and forced the Owls to punt the ball away late in the fourth quarter. The Delaware defense gave the offense one last shot to tie the game with a minute and 47 seconds remaining and 82 yards of field to traverse.
Delaware’s offense capitalized on the opportunity and marched down the field to the Kennesaw State 17 yard line with thirty seconds remaining in the game. Minicucci attempted a pass on first down, but the throw was hurried and fell incomplete. Delaware’s signal caller attempted a second pass on second down and connected with receiver Bryson Graves running across the middle of the field. Graves out ran the Owl defense and crossed into the endzone with 24 seconds remaining in the game.
The Blue Hens lined up for the two-point conversion and schemed up a play that seemed designed for Graves to sneak out into the left flat out of a condensed formation. Graves slipped as he started his route and Minicucci quickly pivoted his focus from Graves to the Owl pass rush bearing down on him. Minicucci scrambled to his right and threw on the run to Donovan Lewis in the back right of the endzone. Lewis made a diving effort for the throw, but was unable to come up with the catch.
Delaware’s onside kick attempt was recovered by the Owls and Kennesaw State went into victory formation to secure the win.
The Blue Hens finished the game with 493 total yards of offense with 408 of those yards coming from the passing game. Minicucci finished with 35 completions on 54 attempts and two throwing touchdowns putting him two away from second place on Delaware’s all-time passing touchdowns list. Graves finished the game with a team-high seven catches and 125 receiving yards (both are career highs) notching his first career game of over 100 receiving yards. Jo Silver led the running back room with 39 yards on the ground.
The Owls offense finished with similar totals with 446 total yards, 309 of which through the air. Kennesaw State did out rush the Blue Hens, 137 to 85, accumulating 107 of those rush yards in the second quarter.
The Owls scored 17 points in the second quarter with both of their touchdowns coming via the run game and running back Boogie Woods III. Woods finished the game with 90 rushing yards on 15 carries to go along with the two scores.
Blue Hen running back Viron Ellison Jr. also finished the first half with a pair of touchdowns, scoring one in the first quarter and his second in the second quarter.
The first quarter got off to an explosive start after the Owls scored in the first 20 seconds of action. Redshirt senior Davis Bryson fielded the game’s opening kick-off and found a hole near the left side of Delaware’s kick coverage. Bryson took advantage of the opening and streaked down the left sideline passing the lone defender in his way, kicker Tucker Smack, en route to a 99-yard return touchdown.
The Blue Hens answered with a methodical drive that lasted nearly seven minutes and ended with the first of Ellison’s two touchdowns. The Delaware defense followed with defensive tackle Trace Scott III’s first career interception and touchdown, giving the Blue Hens a 15-6 lead with a little less than seven minutes to play in the quarter.
The Owls bounced back from the turnover and cut the lead to two with a drive that ended in a Rickie Collins eight-yard touchdown run along the right sideline. Originally called out of bounds before the score, the play was reviewed and deemed a touchdown due to Collins’ ability to reach the ball out past the pylon as his body was pushed out of bounds.
That was the last snap Collins played in the game. Collins was on the sideline with ice on his right shoulder and his pads off when the Owls’ offense took the field at the start of the second quarter. Junior Landon Varnes took over under center and played the rest of the game finishing with 254 passing yards and a quarterback rating of 112.5.
The Owls’ win keeps them in the hunt for a bowl game with their overall record sitting at 3-6 with three games remaining on their schedule.
The Blue Hens’ loss makes it very improbable they end the season with a chance at the CUSA title.
Delaware sits behind Jacksonville State, Liberty, Middle Tennessee and is tied with New Mexico State in the CUSA standings. Delaware has already lost to Liberty and Middle Tennessee this season and will play New Mexico State and Jax State within the next three weeks. The Blue Hens would need to win out and hope for a pair of losses from Middle Tennessee and three straight losses from Jax State to have a shot at playing in the CUSA championship game.
Delaware is also a couple wins away from being bowl eligible. The Blue Hens will need to win two of their next three games to play in their second bowl game in just their second season at the FBS level.
The Blue Hens’ next game is against FIU at home on Saturday, November 14. Kick-off will be at 3:00 p.m.
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Gwen Biesenbach at 11 days old Courtesy of the Biesenbach family
The emergency room was a mile from their Texas home. Stephanie and Eric Biesenbach took comfort in that when their newborn daughter, Gwen, wouldn’t stop bleeding from her belly button. They buckled Gwen into her car seat and made the drive over.
Medical records from that warm August evening in 2023 described her condition as a “generic problem” of a bleeding umbilical cord stump. The doctor on duty, Nicole Malouf, had treated plenty of those as an emergency room specialist. She covered Gwen’s oozing belly button with a special gauze to stanch the flow, and when it appeared to stop, she sent Stephanie, Eric and Gwen on their way.
They made it as far as the parking lot before they noticed Gwen had bled through her footed pajamas. Eric slid his arm under the car seat handle and lifted his 11-day-old daughter out of the car. They walked back toward the glaring lights of the Lonestar 24HR ER, a freestanding emergency department in New Braunfels next to a car wash, a McDonald’s and a deli.
Stephanie told Malouf that Gwen had been bleeding a bit after the scab that replaced her umbilical cord stump fell off. The amount of blood they saw that night worried them. She ticked through Gwen’s history. No fever. No vomiting. Exclusively breastfed. She mentioned that she and Eric had declined a vitamin K shot when Gwen was born and instead had been giving Gwen oral vitamin K drops, which they trusted would protect her.
Malouf tried another type of pretreated gauze. When that didn’t work, medical records show, she turned to silver nitrate, a chemical applied to the tip of a long matchlike stick that cauterizes blood vessels. Malouf rotated one stick after another inside Gwen’s belly button.
Since the 1960s, the vast majority of newborns in the United States have received a vitamin K shot. The injection virtually eliminated vitamin K deficiency bleeding, a rare condition that can cause catastrophic bleeding and even death.
But a shift in recent years has threatened to upend the unwavering protection that many doctors and hospitals had taken for granted. Families — mistrustful of medical interventions, misled by social media and devoted to a birth experience they deem natural — have begun to shun the vitamin K shot.
A pair of studies published last week, both of which involved millions of births, found that babies who didn’t get the vitamin K shot had an increased risk of bleeding. One of the studies found that between 2017 and 2025, the rate of vitamin K deficiency bleeding increased a staggering 347%.
Without the single, inexpensive shot — which is not a vaccine — babies are dying. Autopsies reveal how babies’ systems shut down without warning and well-meaning parents who declined the vitamin K shot were left mourning the loss of their children.
Malouf kept trying to stop the bleeding. Over the course of nearly three hours, she used seven methods. At one point, she applied so much pressure to a bandage that, Stephanie said, Gwen threw up. The remedies essentially treated the symptoms and not the cause, like putting a cover on a leaking faucet.
Malouf said she called her husband, who’s also a doctor, as well as a nurse at a local hospital, to see if she was missing something. They, too, were at a loss. The nurse’s only suggestions were the ones that Malouf had already tried.
Malouf decided to transfer Gwen to a small, local hospital, which at least had pediatric specialists and a neonatal intensive care unit. But while she waited for a call back to confirm the hospital would accept Gwen, Stephanie walked out of the room to tell her that Gwen had bled through the latest dressing. Malouf, according to the records, quickly checked to see how long it was taking her blood vessels to refill. It was slower than when she arrived.
Gwen’s condition was growing more dire, and Malouf had reached the limits of what she could do. What followed also wouldn’t be enough.
Stephanie and Eric Biesenbach took Gwen to an emergency room a mile from their house.Brenda Bazán for ProPublica
Stephanie had given birth to Gwen without complications in an inflatable tub in their living room. She was perfect, with doelike eyes and a full head of brown hair that, when the light hit it, hinted at the red of her father’s beard.
Her older brothers and sisters fussed over her like a birthday present. Her aunts from California and Louisiana came in to meet her. When the house quieted, Gwen fell asleep to the calming rhythm of Stephanie’s chest rising and falling.
Stephanie marveled at the way Gwen seemed to study the faces of everyone who carried her. She wasn’t two weeks yet, but the corners of her mouth constantly turned up to form what her parents insisted were smiles. Even when her siblings passed her around, she rarely cried in protest.
Stephanie and Eric met in 2010, when they both worked at Chili’s. Texas natives, they had just returned home after spending time in Florida, where Stephanie spent a semester interning at Walt Disney World Resort.
“I was doing lawn care work and maintenance on restaurants,” Eric said before Stephanie interjected. “He moved there for a girl,” she said as the two erupted in laughter.
He proposed to Stephanie on Christmas Eve. They married at a vineyard on Halloween. The venue capped off the night with fireworks.
Life moved quickly after that. They had a daughter and two sons, then adopted the daughter of a relative who was too young to care for the child herself. Just when they thought their family was complete, Stephanie got pregnant with Gwen.
Overjoyed, they decided to name her after Stephanie’s grandmother, Gwendolyn, who passed down her flowered baby blanket with “Gwen” embroidered in the corner.
There were no signs something could be wrong with Gwen until the day her parents took her to the ER. Stephanie had texted her midwife first.
“So sorry to bother you,” she typed into her phone, writing that Gwen’s belly button had been bleeding most of the day and they couldn’t get it to stop.
“How much blood is too much blood,” she asked.
The midwife told her to send a photo. Stephanie sent two, one of dried blood on Gwen’s stomach and the other of a pile of bloodied tissues. The midwife instructed Stephanie to tape some gauze over Gwen’s belly button. About 90 minutes later, just before going to bed, she checked on Gwen again. She snapped another picture, this one with bright red blood soaking through the gauze and diaper, and texted it to the midwife. “Are you sure this is fine?”
The midwife told her to go to the emergency room.
Stephanie texted her midwife about Gwen’s bleeding before going to the emergency room.Courtesy of the Biesenbach family
In many states, all emergency rooms are in hospitals, where patients can be transferred to other units for more care. Not so in Texas, where more than 200 ERs are freestanding, separate and distinct from a hospital. At the ER, Gwen grew increasingly pale. Her heart raced at 177 beats a minute. Around 1:40 a.m., Stephanie and Eric received their first piece of good news: Malouf was transferring Gwen. She had scrapped her plan to send Gwen to the local hospital and would instead transfer her to North Central Baptist, a larger hospital in nearby San Antonio with more specialists. North Central was only about half an hour away, and it was sending a NICU transport team to get Gwen.
Eric’s eyes fixated on the large clock hanging in the room. Ten minutes passed, then 20, then 30, then an hour. He couldn’t understand what was taking so long. He stepped into the hallway and asked if he could just drive Gwen to the hospital.
But, he said, Malouf told him he couldn’t because it would be too dangerous. Malouf, however, said she told him that if he did leave, he would have to sign paperwork acknowledging he was doing so against medical advice. The transport team, she told him, would have blood and IVs. Besides, she said, Gwen was stable. Malouf called to check on the status of the ambulance; she was told they were on their way.
Stephanie and Eric said that was the last time they spoke to Malouf that night.
By the time the ambulance arrived, it had been nearly two hours since Malouf had requested it. One of the team’s first questions was whether Gwen had received a vitamin K shot.
The ER nurse told them they didn’t have the shot on hand.
It was the first time since walking into the ER, Stephanie said, that anyone suggested that vitamin K may be the culprit — and the cure.
At 3:45 a.m., within minutes of the ambulance team’s arrival, they gave Gwen a vitamin K shot in her left thigh. They spent the next two hours at her bedside, hooking her up to an IV, drawing blood for lab tests and giving her antibiotics — all things that, the records show, hadn’t been done yet. Malouf didn’t respond to questions about why not.
Stephanie and Eric observed the ambulance team as they worked, bantering, discussing another call that had come in and, just as they were about to leave, waiting for one of them to go to the bathroom. Between what they viewed as the team’s laidback pace and Malouf’s reassurances that Gwen was stable, Stephanie and Eric were encouraged enough to split up. Eric went home to the kids, who had been with his mom all night, to get them ready for their first day of school. Stephanie stayed and planned to ride with Gwen in the ambulance.
“Grab me a change of clothes and coffee,” Stephanie called to him as he was leaving.
The team transferred Gwen to a temperature-controlled enclosed incubator. As they packed up to leave, Gwen began to whimper. With each breath, Stephanie said, she let out a weak, high-pitched sound. It was unnatural. Stephanie reached through the incubator’s opening and ran her hands back and forth across her daughter’s chest.
The team loaded Gwen onto the ambulance and flipped on the sirens and lights. At 5:55 a.m., they headed down Interstate 35. It had been seven hours since Gwen was first admitted to the ER.
GwenCourtesy of the Biesenbach familyA cutout of Gwen’s footprint held next to that of one of her sistersCourtesy of the Biesenbach family
Stephanie appreciated the importance of vitamin K. All of her other children got the vitamin K shot shortly after they were born. But over the years, she and her husband had grown wary of medical intervention. When their youngest son was nearly 2, they fell behind on his vaccines. After getting several vaccines at one appointment, they said, he developed a high fever and suddenly stopped talking for about a year. He was later diagnosed with autism.
“I think that they just gave him too much at once,” Eric said.
Research studies from numerous sources have found that multiple vaccines taken at once do not overwhelm or weaken a child’s immune system. They also do not increase the risk of serious or long-term adverse effects.
Still, seeing their son struggle to speak, Stephanie and Eric were convinced there was a connection. They stopped vaccinating their children after that.
Before Gwen’s birth, Stephanie’s midwife gave her a five-page handout on newborn vitamin K. It covered why babies need vitamin K to help their blood clot and cautioned that babies who don’t have enough of it can start to bleed without warning.
The handout compared the pros and cons of the vitamin K shot with oral vitamin K drops, noting that the drawbacks of the drops are that some babies may not be able to absorb them or may spit them up. They also don’t eliminate the risk of bleeding entirely. Stephanie initially signed the document agreeing to the shot, but as her due date neared, she and Eric changed their minds. If both are effective, they reasoned, why not go for the option that didn’t involve sticking their baby with a needle?
“We did our own research. I don’t remember feeling like there were red flags,” Stephanie said. “I felt like the information we had was sufficient.”
She doesn’t recall exactly what sources she consulted, but she read articles online and spoke to some people who worked in the medical field. No one, she said, warned her against the drops. But she didn’t ask her mother, Lauren Hoel, a longtime family nurse practitioner. Stephanie knew exactly what her mom would say.
Many medical experts consider the drops inferior for several reasons, including those mentioned in the handout. There are also concerns about harried parents of a newborn forgetting a dose and the fact that cases of vitamin K deficiency bleeding have been reported even when drops are used.
Only limited data exists about vitamin K drops, and much of it is from Europe, where the drops are more common. In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration does not provide oversight of the drops. Instead, parents can simply add them to their Amazon carts without any verification of what’s in them, or whether they’re safe or effective.
A single vitamin K shot acts quickly, and then the liver stores the rest of the vitamin K to slowly release into the baby’s system over months.
For decades, the recommendation from doctors, hospitals and medical organizations has been the shot. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the World Health Organization call for giving the shot to all newborns.
“While some countries outside of the U.S. sometimes administer vitamin K orally, it has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration,” the American Academy of Pediatrics wrote in May, reiterating its longstanding position, “and it is less effective than an intramuscular injection.”
Stephanie and Eric’s choice to opt for the drops reflects a broader trend. Vaccine skepticism grew after the COVID-19 pandemic, and under the direction of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a fierce vaccine critic and champion of the Make America Healthy Again movement, the federal government has fed those doubts. Stephanie and Eric, who voted for President Donald Trump and are ardent supporters of both Kennedy and MAHA, welcomed the change.
In December, the CDC stopped recommending that all newborns get the hepatitis B vaccine. In January, the agency revised its childhood vaccination schedule, reducing the number of routinely recommended shots by six. A federal judge temporarily blocked that move in March, but the CDC’s decisions appear to have caused a ripple effect beyond vaccines.
After the January change to the vaccine schedule, an analysis of more than a million newborns found a rise in the rate of babies not receiving the vitamin K shot so sharp that it resembled a hockey stick. Between January and June of this year, the analysis found, the rate jumped from 5.2% to 8.1%. Despite being asked multiple times at a congressional hearing to assure parents that the vitamin K shot is safe, Kennedy responded by declaring that he has not said anything publicly about the shot. An HHS spokesperson did not answer ProPublica’s questions but said that the CDC recommends that parents give newborns the vitamin K shot within six hours of their birth to prevent vitamin K deficiency bleeding.
North Central Baptist Hospital in San Antonio, where Gwen was transferred after being treated at a standalone emergency roomBrenda Bazán for ProPublica
In the ambulance, Gwen’s blood pressure dropped.
“Infant looks much more lethargic,” the team wrote in their notes.
They placed a mask on Gwen to increase her oxygen and gave her an infusion of saline in hopes of improving her blood volume.
Gwen’s condition continued to deteriorate. Almost immediately after they arrived at the hospital, her heart stopped. Doctors inserted a breathing tube then began pressing down on her chest with two fingers to manually pump blood through her body. They pushed epinephrine into her IV to stimulate her heart. That appeared to work.
Stephanie couldn’t comprehend what was happening. All night, she said, no one had acted like Gwen’s life was in danger. Suddenly, her daughter was covered in tubes and doctors were performing CPR.
Stephanie said she heard someone yelling into a phone, “Where is the blood?”
She texted her family. “I need you to pray for Gwen like her life depends on it,” she wrote.
She called Eric. “You need to get here now,” she told him.
Eric pressed on the gas pedal of Stephanie’s Honda and sped to the hospital. There, he pushed through a clutch of doctors to find Stephanie crying in the corner of the room. The same wave of shock that had washed over his wife minutes earlier crashed over him. For the first time, he worried he might lose his daughter.
They prayed together, and the chaplain stopped by the room to check on them. He noted, according to records, that they were anxious but hopeful.
Less than two hours after she was admitted, Gwen crashed again. The medical team called a code blue. Doctors performed CPR for the next 34 minutes. They gave her epinephrine four more times. She had lost so much blood. Her heart was barely pumping. Doctors told Stephanie and Eric that they could keep trying to resuscitate Gwen or they could take her off the machines for her parents to hold her.
Stephanie sobbed. Eric collapsed at her knees. She told him she couldn’t make the call. Eric said they wanted to spend the final moments with their daughter. The doctors unhooked Gwen from the beeping machines and handed her to him. Stephanie and Eric told Gwen how much they loved her and how much they were going to miss her.
Shortly after 9 a.m., nearly 11 hours after they’d first brought her to the ER, Gwen took her last breath. The team ushered them to another room where families can mourn in private. They spent hours there. They gave Gwen a bath. Family stopped by. Stephanie’s sister picked up their kids from school so they could say goodbye to their baby sister. Two nurses came in to create molds of Gwen’s hands and feet.
When Eric and Stephanie finally left the hospital, Gwen’s car seat was empty. Their two youngest children slept in their bed that night. At one point, Stephanie jolted awake. She turned to Eric. The look in his eyes told her that it hadn’t been a dream. Without making a sound that could wake their kids, they cried themselves back to sleep.
Eric’s grief soon morphed into anger. His brother-in-law drove him to the Lonestar ER to ask for Gwen’s medical records. He didn’t trust himself to go in, so he asked his brother-in-law to retrieve them.
The file was just 15 pages with the payment and registration forms. They searched for any clue that could explain what happened to their daughter.
“I was constantly assured that it wasn’t that bad,” Eric said. “I can’t tell you how many times they said, ‘Don’t worry, babies are very resilient.’”
They planned Gwen’s funeral. When they couldn’t find a coffin small enough to fit her tiny 8-pound body, Eric’s brother, who makes custom cabinets, built one. They wrapped Gwen in the flowered baby blanket from Stephanie’s grandmother for the viewing.
Stephanie and Eric operated on parallel tracks those next several months: mourning their daughter and trying to understand what led to her death. The family attended a grief camp put on by a local hospice group. They painted a garden pole with things that reminded them of Gwen. When Thanksgiving approached, they escaped to Stephanie’s sister’s house in Colorado to avoid questions about how they were doing.
Eric got Gwen’s handprints tattooed on his chest, the last place he felt them before she died. Stephanie picked Gwen’s footprints, but the tattoo artist had to size them down to fit.
“She had such big feet,” Eric said. “She was gonna be a tall girl.”
“Or clown,” Stephanie said, half laughing, half crying. “One of the two.”
They also reached out to Byron Miller, a medical malpractice attorney, who sought records from Malouf, the ER, the ambulance company and the hospital. Miller investigated whether negligence in Gwen’s care resulted in her death. But the medical expert hired to review the case homed in on Stephanie and Eric’s decision to give Gwen the vitamin K drops instead of the shot. Without an expert’s supporting opinion, which Miller said was a state requirement, his office was unable to continue pursuing a case. Miller recommended that Stephanie and Eric follow up with the Texas Medical Board.
The ER, the ambulance company and the hospital did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The nurse on duty at Lonestar that night also did not respond to requests for comment.
Stephanie had several conversations with her mother, who remembers learning in the 1980s, while in nursing school, that all babies need a vitamin K shot at birth. Hoel didn’t know that Stephanie and Eric didn’t get the vitamin K shot for Gwen.
“It never occurred to me that people would refuse the vitamin K shot,” she said.
Even with that, Hoel couldn’t look past Malouf’s actions that night.
“She should have said, ‘That’s a newborn. Take it to a NICU,’” Hoel said. “And by not doing that, the fate was sealed.”
That next December, Stephanie sat down at the kitchen table and pulled out her laptop. Someone, she said, had to hold Malouf accountable. She found the website for the Texas Medical Board and followed the instructions to file a complaint.
“When Dr Malouf decided to provide medical care to our daughter, despite her lack of training in neonatal emergency care, and lack of appropriate monitoring equipment,” Stephanie wrote to the board, “Gwen was deprived of any potential life saving intervention.”
The seven hours they spent at the ER that night, she continued, could have been used to save Gwen’s life. And she stressed that the ER nurse said the facility didn’t carry the vitamin K injection.
“If Vitamin K was a vital part of the evening,” she wrote, “then we should have been pointed to another location that was fully equipped sooner.”
Malouf became the target of her anger and her anguish. She described how painful it was to drive by the Lonestar billboard with Malouf’s giant photo near her house every day. She wrote that Malouf failed to recognize that her daughter’s life was in danger. “I just don’t understand how it can go from a calm relaxed environment to all of a sudden your child is dead,” she wrote to the board. She recounted feeling intimidated when Eric asked if they could leave when Gwen’s color began to change and Malouf advised against it.
“To this date,” she wrote, “Dr Nicole Malouf does not even know that my daughter died under her care.”
A garden pole the Biesenbachs made to memorialize Gwen stands in the family’s yard.Brenda Bazán for ProPublicaA baby blanket embroidered with the name Gwen was passed down by Stephanie’s grandmother, Gwendolyn.Brenda Bazán for ProPublica
After Gwen died, Malouf said, a doctor from the hospital called. The news, she said, came as a surprise.
Sitting in her home office, her framed degrees hanging on the wall behind her, Malouf spoke to ProPublica for nearly three hours about what happened. Malouf and her husband have three daughters, for whom she is team mom for cheerleading and president of the Fine Arts Boosters. Racks of uniforms filled her home’s entryway in preparation for an upcoming sale.
She said she repeatedly relived the details of that night with her therapist. The first few sessions, she said, were just the two of them crying. She said they discussed what was in her control and what wasn’t. Every life is precious, she said, but it’s one thing to lose a 95-year-old grandmother with a long list of medical problems. It’s another to lose a baby.
“I still have my three daughters,” Malouf said, pushing back her long, dark hair, “and now she has lost hers.”
Malouf said the doctor who called said the hospital would conduct its own review. Malouf said the doctor mentioned that they had already identified some issues, including questions about the transport team.
The hospital wasn’t the only one probing the night’s events. The state Medical Board also launched an investigation. The board subpoenaed records and reviewed the medical documents.
In September 2025, the board held a virtual hearing, which was closed to the public. Stephanie and Eric appeared, as did Malouf and her attorney. The board staff attorney charged that Malouf did not meet the standard of care in her treatment of Gwen and that she failed to halt or limit Gwen’s bleeding. Her lack of timely care, the board’s attorney alleged, ultimately resulted in Gwen’s death. Citing confidentiality, the board would not release a recording or transcript of the hearing.
The next month, the board issued its decision. It found that Malouf failed to recognize that Gwen had a life-threatening vitamin K-dependent bleeding disorder. The ER did not have vitamin K shots on site, and Malouf failed to immediately transfer Gwen to a regional pediatric referral hospital better equipped to handle Gwen’s condition. Finally, the board found that Malouf had failed to quantify the amount of blood lost by Gwen.
The Texas medical board found that Dr. Nicole Malouf failed to recognize Gwen’s vitamin K-dependent bleeding disorder and failed to immediately transfer her to a pediatric hospital.Obtained and highlighted by ProPublica
The board required her to take 24 hours of continuing medical education; she said she completed her hours in courses on pediatric advanced life support, communicating with patients and vitamin K deficiency bleeding. She also had to inform her employers that she had been disciplined. Malouf neither admitted nor denied the allegations but agreed to abide by the board’s final order.
A board spokesperson would not answer specific questions about Gwen’s case but said the board expects all licensees “to provide appropriate treatment and, if the necessary supplies are not available, to make arrangements for transport to a higher level of care.”
“I felt that I had done everything that I could with the resources I had,” Malouf told ProPublica.
She said she did know that Gwen had vitamin K deficiency bleeding, even though she did not immediately give Gwen a vitamin K shot. Malouf said she thinks the board didn’t believe that she knew because she didn’t act “in a panicked manner.” It remains unclear, even to her, whether the ER carried the vitamin K shot at the time or if it was just in a spot where the nurse couldn’t find it. But she said she asked the nurse for it.
Either way, she believed that giving Gwen vitamin K at that point would just be to make her chart look good.
“It’s really not even going to take effect at that stage,” Malouf said. “As soon as you give vitamin K, the earliest it’s even going to start working is 10 to 12 hours.”
But several doctors told ProPublica that vitamin K should be given immediately if there’s even a suspicion that a baby has vitamin K deficiency bleeding. It’s so vital to stopping the bleeding that they don’t even need to wait for a confirmation. There is no downside, they said, to giving it. Vitamin K, they said, may need to be followed up by blood or blood products, such as fresh frozen plasma, which is rich in the proteins that help the blood clot.
While vitamin K can quickly help to halt the bleeding, it can’t reverse the bleeding that’s already occurred. It also has to be given in time, and some babies need more than one dose of vitamin K to recover. Gwen, as one doctor who reviewed her medical records put it, needed vitamin K, blood and blood products much sooner than she got them.
Malouf said she had learned about vitamin K deficiency bleeding in medical school and during her residency, but she doesn’t recall ever seeing it in practice. Nearly every medical student learns about the coagulation cascade, but not all doctors know or remember how to diagnose and treat an infant who shows up in an ER bleeding, often in the brain and invisible to the eye. Some completed their training at a time when vitamin K deficiency bleeding was still considered a historic condition, much like measles.
The ER staff, Malouf said, has been subsequently trained on the importance of vitamin K, and the ER keeps it in stock. All ERs, she said, should carry vitamin K.
“I still gravely regret that the outcome was still the same,” she said, “even after again assuming that, ‘Hey, I’m putting this baby in y’all’s hands. You guys are the experts. Fix her.’”
Malouf doesn’t understand how the board found that her care that night fell short. She didn’t intentionally harm her patient.
“I can state my whole case and literally one of the board members goes, ‘Well, I just don’t believe you,’” Malouf recalled. “I said, ‘Well, then I don’t know what more to tell you.’”
In addition to working at the ER, she had a part-time job doing telehealth. The telehealth company that employed her, she said, fired her once she disclosed the board’s action. As of August, she was still working some shifts at Lonestar ER; the board’s decision didn’t affect her ability to practice. Following the interview with ProPublica, she declined further comment.
“I feel like the only way to change the outcome is to go back to the beginning, that fork in the road,” Malouf said. “And go, ‘OK, well let’s give vitamin K after birth.”
Eric and Stephanie at Gwen’s grave in San AntonioBrenda Bazán for ProPublica
Stephanie and Eric also have asked themselves what they would have done differently. They wished they had left the ER that night and driven Gwen to a hospital.
“We were just trusting that the person who went to school their whole life for this would know more than us,” Eric said.
In their minds, the role of vitamin K has overshadowed the medical mistakes they believe are most responsible for their daughter’s death. By the time Gwen had arrived at the hospital, her organs were already starting to shut down. The autopsy found that she had tiny spots of bleeding in her kidneys and small intestine and a small scrape on her chest where doctors pushed down for CPR. The medical examiner noted Gwen’s precipitous decline and listed her cause of death as vitamin K deficiency bleeding.
If they could go back, both agreed they would get the vitamin K shot for Gwen.
“I don’t trust a lot of things,” Stephanie said, “but get peace of mind and get the vitamin K shot.”
A few months after Gwen’s death, Stephanie found out she was pregnant with a little girl. They were so ready to love a baby again. She gave birth to her in 2024. This summer, they welcomed another baby girl.
Three more people found dead at home of suspect, who minister says held ‘ultra-nationalistic’ views
Six people were killed and 16 wounded after a gunman opened fire in a busy market square in Kraków, authorities said, in what Poland’s defence minister called an “act of terror” on the people of the city.
The suspect, a 25-year-old Polish citizen, opened fire with an automatic weapon in the city’s main square at about 3pm on Saturday before being apprehended by police.
President has opposing views on many issues, and once called Leo’s predecessor the ‘representative of the Evil One’
Trees are being planted in the garden. The brightly coloured buildings are getting another coat of paint. The choir rehearses. Hundreds of other residents, several of them using wheelchairs, practise their positions outside the sanctuary. Excitement is in the air, because on Monday 9 November, the Cottolengo Don Orione – a Catholic-run home for disabled people – will be the first stop on Pope Leo XIV’s first full day of his trip to Argentina.
But the pope’s visit to Claypole, about 26km from Buenos Aires, does not come at an especially happy time for the home, which counts about 400 residents with disabilities. Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, has made wide-ranging cuts to disability funding.
Saturday NASA officials announced it's accepting applications for a new astronaut class, reports the Associated Press:
With only 32 active astronauts, the space agency needs more recruits as it looks to expand humanity's presence beyond low-Earth orbit as quickly as possible... "We have far more work than we have astronauts," Artemis III commander Randy Bresnik told The Associated Press on Saturday. Aspiring astronauts have between now and Dec. 3 to submit their applications... [They'll begin their training by early 2028]. By then "we're going to have people on the moon — so don't delay," Bresnik urged potential candidates.
Bresnik and his three crewmates will blast into orbit next summer to practice docking their capsule with a pair of lunar landers, one built by Elon Musk's SpaceX and the other by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. Their mission will stick close to Earth — no lunar flyby — and serve as a dress rehearsal for the following year's Artemis IV mission that will attempt to land two astronauts near the lunar south pole. The moon base will materialize as more rovers, robots, structures and power grids are launched.
The article notes NASA's last call for new astronauts was two years ago, and "More than 8,000 applied, with 10 making the final cut in September 2025."
Event regarded as Oscars of fashion industry replaces John Galliano retrospective with homage to the ‘extra ordinary’
A few months after the planned John Galliano Met Gala retrospective was cancelled amid a backlash focused on the designer’s past, a more commonplace theme has been announced: “extraORDINARY: fashion and the poetics of the everyday.” It has left some commentators speculating that celebrities might replace the couture “omelette dresses” and four-part red-carpet performances with jeans and a nice top.
While the dress code for the next Met Gala, which will be held on 3 May 2027, is yet to be announced, it traditionally derives from the exhibition theme.
Naturalists divided over potential impact of proposals to increase number of wild raptors in England and Wales
White-tailed eagles reintroduced into England and Wales imperil endangered seabird populations and risk wiping out some colonies, ecologists and conservationists are warning.
Puffins, guillemots, razorbills, fulmars and kittiwakes are among the birds for which breeding populations could collapse if large numbers of white-tailed eagles are released, according to some academics and conservationists.
MPs, local authorities, lawyers, schools and more are receiving floods of grievances, requests and legal challenges, often complex to read and respond to
‘It started as a trickle in 2024 and now it’s an onslaught.” Hollie Wickens, a senior caseworker in a Labour MP’s office, is explaining the daily reality of dealing with surging volumes of artificial intelligence-generated correspondence.
“Half the emails we receive are some form of AI,” she says, adding that this has made requests and complaints much more complex and time-consuming to read and deal with, despite her decade of experience in the role. “It is definitely more taxing.”
David Lammy among those raising concerns after errors found in rejected applications for indefinite leave to remain
Concerns have been raised over the sudden rise in number of Turkish nationals facing removal from the UK as a result of mistakes, prompting accusations that the Home Office has failed to learn the lessons of the Windrush scandal.
Since the start of the year, there has been a sharp rise in the number of rejected applications for indefinite leave to remain for those on European Community Association Agreement (ECAA) visas, a longstanding route to residency for Turkish nationals seeking to set up a business in the UK.
President claimed to have ushered in a ‘golden age’ even as prices soared and war dragged on – and midterm voters did not buy his looking-glass narrative
A new “golden age of America” is under way, Donald Trump repeatedly declared in his final pitch to voters before the US midterm elections.
The war in Iran was not really a war, because “we’ve done very little fighting”, the US president stressed. The stock market had hit 88 all-time highs. “They’re saying,” he said, that on his watch the US has become “the hottest country anywhere in the world”.
Farmers face big drop in production from extreme weather during this year’s super El Niño event
Banana producers in Latin America are calling for better pay to help cope with the impact of the climate crisis, as they face big drops in production resulting from extreme weather during this year’s super El Niño event.
High winds in parts of Colombia, one of the biggest suppliers to the UK market where droughts are predicted in some regions this year, and heavy rainfall in Peru and Ecuador are already affecting production, according to the Fairtrade Foundation ethical trade body. In the Dominican Republic, farmers are expected to face drought conditions, with forecasts of drier and warmer than usual conditions.
A lifestyle podcast or brief TV clip is less taxing than a full press conference – but No 10 insists the PM is not ducking accountability
In an interview this week Andy Burnham said he believed the traditional media was less relevant and the world was “not like that any more”. But some people are now asking: does this change in approach mean less scrutiny?
The question was in part prompted by Burnham’s decision to travel to the Commonwealth heads of government meeting (Chogm) without the usual accompanying pack of reporters, instead bringing just one TV crew and a news agency journalist.
Mumbai facility is part of Reliance Industries, owner of world’s biggest oil refinery and funder of controversial mega-zoo
The Prince of Wales’s Earthshot prize will host its forthcoming annual awards ceremony at a venue owned by the billionaire Ambani family conglomerate, drawing criticism from conservationists over their fossil fuel businesses and their foundation’s controversial mega-zoo.
A spokesperson for the Earthshot prize, which awards £1m to five winners every year to invest in conservation work, confirmed to the Guardian and the news outlet Mongabay that this year’s ceremony will be held at the Jio World Convention Centre in Mumbai on 17 November.
As AI exposes flaws in IT systems and geopolitics plays out on the cyber frontline, some experts say the events of recent weeks could soon be a common occurrence
Alex Pearce was doing the morning rounds at his fruit and vegetable wholesale business in London on Monday last week when he noticed something odd.
The defrost light on refrigeration unit 2 was on, and the panel reading was 150C. Unit 4 was the same.
With the global tide turning against him, the US president’s lame duck status could still aggravate old tensions and spark new explosions
It was a victory for the world, too. People in the many countries that suffered pain, loss and cruel indignities at the hands of Donald Trump over the past two chaotic, fearful years celebrated a moment of glorious, shared redemption. The monster, like others of his kind, still lurks in his gilded White House lair; far-right authoritarianism still casts a dark shadow over many nations. But the power of this most destructive of presidents is shattered, his malignant spell broken. The triumphant roar of US midterm voters was a rallying cry of democratic defiance that, echoing the American revolution of 250 years ago, reverberated around the globe.
For Iranians, Trump’s electoral humiliation raised hopes, perhaps misplaced, that his murderous war of choice against Tehran’s oppressive regime may soon cease. In Israel, many among the majority who voted for change last week will welcome the humbling of the foremost supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu’s as-yet-unvanquished extremist coalition. Ukrainians voiced optimism that a Democratic-controlled Congress will curb the sickening appeasement of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. In Europe, the beginning of the end of the Trump era brought a sense of relief – and hope that toxic transatlantic relations can be drained of Maga poison.
Netherlands physical commodity merchant executes direct volume off-take for used beverage can scrap and spot-to-recurring supply of 99.7% primary aluminium ingots across European and international routes.
Carr throws for 319 yards and three TDs in 31-24 win
No 4 Irish avenge loss that cost them playoff berth
Miami comeback falls short after disputed late call
CJ Carr threw for 319 yards and three touchdowns as No 4 Notre Dame avenged their most damaging loss of last season, racing to a 21-point lead before holding on to beat top-ranked Miami 31-24 on Saturday night.
Micah Gilbert caught two of Carr’s touchdown passes, Jordan Faison had the other and Nolan James Jr added a rushing score for Notre Dame (8-1, No 11 College Football Playoff), who entered the game knowing another defeat to Miami could derail their national championship hopes.
NEW YORK, Nov. 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Travelzoo® (NASDAQ: TZOO), the club for travel enthusiasts, announces six of many new Club Offers for Club Members in the U.S.
In a war driven by drones and battlefield sensors, access to space is essential. After Starlink speed restrictions and Russian Oreshnik missile strikes, Kyiv is racing to develop its own space capabilities
For people in the Russian industrial city of Samara on the banks of the Volga, the first they knew of the Ukrainian attack were detonations that sent a column of smoke into the air.
If the Kremlin was vague about the target, video footage on social media soon made it clear what had been hit in the early hours of 15 August: the Progress Rocket and Space Centre, manufacturer of Russia’s Soyuz-2 rockets.
Slashdot reader sandbagger brings news about the classic science ficdtion magazine Starlog. It's 33-year run from 1976 to 2009 is now available on the Internet Archive.
And 17 years after publishing its final issue, Starlog is relaunching, publishing one issue a year starting November 13, according to The Hollywood Reporter:
The magazine launched in 1976 and gained a fanbase for being one of the few places to get reliable news and interviews about geek culture. It launched with a cover focusing on Star Trek, one of its key areas of expertise, but the magazine's editors and writers also pioneered coverage of Star Wars. (The new issue chronicles some of the rumors it put out a year before the movie opened). In all, Starlog published 374 issues and more than 25,000 pages... In addition to the film and TV-focused features Starlog was known for, the new Starlog will also delve into futurism, as the cover from Gabriel Yeganyan highlights. The opening story of issue No. 1 looks at the viability of humans farming crops on planets outside of Earth, for example... The revival was announced earlier this year, and includes a podcast hosted by Jordan Hoffman, a veteran journalist who has contributed to The Hollywood Reporter.
Kayson McAllister completes a pass in a recent game for the Wildcats. He threw for 126 yards and a touchdown during Friday’s playoff win over Fleming County.
Lionel Messi won his second consecutive MLS Golden Boot award on Saturday, but Inter Miami squandered a three-goal lead in a 3-3 draw with Charlotte on the final day of the regular season.
The Argentinian superstar failed to score but set up Miami’s first two goals from corners at Nu Stadium as the defending champions secured second place in the Eastern Conference and home-field advantage for the first two rounds of the playoffs.
One person was killed and at least a dozen others injured when a driver suspected of being impaired struck a group of more than 40 cyclists in North Carolina, authorities said.
Activists fear Bangkok will give in to pressure from Beijing despite reports of torture and human rights abuses against the mostly muslim ethnic minority
The deportation of two more Uyghurs to China from Thailand would put their lives in grave danger, activists have said, with one of the men saying he would be “like a slave” if he was sent back.
MADISON, WISCONSIN — A 21-year-old Wisconsin State Patrol trooper has been released from federal immigration custody after ICE detained him at Dane County Regional Airport while he was preparing to board a domestic flight.
Carel Aaron Van Der Merwe, a South African national, was arrested Thursday during what the Department of Homeland Security called a “targeted enforcement operation.” His attorney says Van Der Merwe came to the United States legally as a teenager, is included in his father’s pending asylum application and has federal work authorization valid through 2030.
DHS says Van Der Merwe entered legally in March 2019 but overstayed his authorized admission in September of that year. The agency emphasized that work authorization and a pending asylum application do not themselves confer lawful immigration status.
Van Der Merwe’s attorneys said ICE agents detained him despite his explanation that he had a valid work permit and unresolved asylum case. He was later released under an order of supervision requiring regular check-ins and electronic monitoring while his removal proceedings continue.
The Wisconsin Law Enforcement Association publicly backed Van Der Merwe, calling for fair treatment and due process. He has worked for the State Patrol since July 2025 and has no known criminal record.
National party will be largest in parliament but ultimate shape of next government won’t be settled for some time
New Zealand could be facing a weeks-long wait to know the shape of its next government, after its nail-biting election failed to hand a decisive victory to either the incumbent rightwing coalition or opposition left bloc.
On preliminary results, the centre-right National party, led by the prime minister, Christopher Luxon, managed to secure enough seats to govern alongside its traditional coalition partners, the libertarian Act and populist New Zealand First parties.
Lproven (Slashdot reader #6,030) shares his article about a new OS in the BSD family "combining NetBSD's kernel and libc with a port of the Alpine Linux userland" — and promising it won't use AI-generated code:
AlpineBSD is so new that it barely exists yet. There are no installation media available, though it's possible to manually bootstrap an installation. What AlpineBSD does already have is an AI policy, and the plan is to avoid "the output of generative AI models (e.g. LLMs)" as far as possible:
"Any software whose code, documentation, binaries, or other assets include, in any part, the output of a generative AI tool such as an LLM, is considered 'tainted' for our purposes...."
Back in 2024, the NetBSD project made its position on AI plain. Its commit guidelines say that "code generated by a Large Language Model [...] is presumed to be tainted code...."
AlpineBSD's ports repository and source code are hosted on Sourcehut, under the account of sircmpwn, better known as Drew DeVault... We will follow AlpineBSD with interest. There's strong appeal in the plan of combining perhaps the best-known, longest-established AI-free Unix-like kernel with the user-facing parts of pretty much the smallest and cleanest Linux distro there is. The AI advocates often warn LLM skeptics that they risk being left behind. Well, here's an OS for those who don't want to surf the AI wave.
The article does acknowledge difficulty installing software using the pkgin package manager (an optional extra), explaining that since 1993 the NetBSD community has had "its own ideas about what is normal... Some folks on the mailing list told us that they never use binary packages anyway — they compile what they need from source code."
White says he has meeting with Trump in Washington DC on Monday, without saying whether he will accept the job
Donald Trump has offered the job of White House press secretary to Dana White, the chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the president said in a social media post on Saturday.
Trump described White, who staged a cage-fighting spectacle at the White House to mark the president’s 80th birthday in June, as “a violent Fighter and Warrior”, credentials unlike any ever used to describe previous press secretaries.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — UFC CEO Dana White reportedly turned down President Donald Trump’s offer to become White House press secretary just hours after Trump publicly announced the proposal.
CNN reported Saturday that a source familiar with the matter said White declined the job. Earlier reports had suggested White planned to meet with Trump at the White House to discuss the position. White has not publicly explained his decision.
Trump announced the offer on Truth Social, describing White as a longtime ally and suggesting several UFC fighters could join him as assistants to help “defend us against the Lunatic Left.” White initially appeared to play along, sharing Trump’s post and publishing an image of himself behind the White House briefing-room podium.
The announcement also revived scrutiny of a 2022 incident in which White was recorded striking his wife during an altercation at a nightclub in Mexico. White later publicly acknowledged the incident and said there was “no excuse” for his actions.
The press secretary position has been vacant following a period of unusual turnover. Karoline Leavitt left the job in August, and Katie Zacharia reportedly lasted only five days in the role.
White’s refusal means Trump will need to continue searching for a permanent spokesperson as his administration reorganizes following Republicans’ sweeping midterm losses.
White and Trump have been close for years, with White repeatedly supporting Trump politically and Trump frequently attending UFC events.
Windows 11 offered a PC-to-PC Migration feature that "moved files and settings directly between two PCs over Wi-Fi or Ethernet," reports Ghacks. But according to an updated Microsoft support page, the tool is no longer available.
"Microsoft's support documentation now redirects users to Windows Backup, a tool that relies on OneDrive cloud storage instead of a direct connection between two computers..."
Windows Backup works differently. It requires a personal Microsoft account and backs up supported folders (Desktop, Documents, Pictures, Videos and Music) to OneDrive. Free OneDrive accounts include only 5GB of storage, and Microsoft's own promotional screenshot for Windows Backup shows 4.5GB of that allowance already in use. Years of photos, documents and downloads can exceed the free tier quickly.
Windows Backup does carry some extras. It can remember installed apps, Wi-Fi networks, passwords and some settings to speed up setup on a new device. Apps still have to be reinstalled, and supported files are restored from the cloud.
Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article.
Carel Aaron Van Der Merwe immigrated to US at 14 and has been waiting seven years for asylum case to be heard
A Wisconsin state patrol trooper, whom federal immigration agents detained on Thursday at an airport, has been released from their custody.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents approached Carel Aaron Van Der Merwe, a South African national, as he waited to board a domestic flight, according to his law firm Christopher & De León.
The former military chief has 28 days to build a coalition, with a possible extension of up to 14 more. If he fails, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to get his chance.
Rather than racing toward their net-zero targets, Amazon and other AI/cloud computing companies "are driving emissions sharply higher," reports the Washington Post:
To support their data centers, tech firms are driving construction of a new generation of supersized, gas-fired power plants that could lock in hundreds of millions of tons of climate pollution for decades to come, according to corporate disclosures and an analysis conducted for The Post by a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Industry estimates show these projects have put the tech sector on course to grow from a modest driver of industrial carbon pollution into one of the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases. Some anticipate that its share of global carbon emissions will increase as much as fivefold from 2020 to 2030. That would leave the tech industry churning out more than half the climate pollution created by global aviation or shipping — sectors long associated with driving warming...
Already, Amazon's carbon footprint reached 80.85 million metric tons last year — 58% larger than when [Amazon CEO Jeff] Bezos pledged to shrink it. The company has veered far from the path laid out in the Paris agreement, which would have emissions falling steeply by now and dropping to 43% below 2019 levels by 2030. The tech companies say in corporate disclosures and public statements that they remain committed to their net zero targets, and they suggest the emissions surge is temporary — to be mitigated down the road, when new energy technologies enable the data centers to run cleaner and more efficiently. They also stress that they continue to invest in clean energy and rank as some of the world's biggest consumers of it. With some complicated accounting maneuvers and carbon credit purchases, their solar, wind and geothermal installations partly cancel out their gas emissions, according to corporate disclosures.
A June report from international insurance/asset management Allianz found the world's data center emissions are on track to double to 643 million tons of CO2 annually between 2020 and 2030, the article points out. And they cite American data centers contributing to the problem:
Just two gas projects Amazon signed on to for data centers planned in Texas and Pennsylvania "would produce more carbon pollution than the dirtiest facility in the country," an Alabama coal plant powering 1 million homes.
Meta is building a nearly six-square-mile campus in Louisiana "that will consume as much electricity as three cities the size of New Orleans."
"A sprawling Microsoft project in West Texas involving a giant gas plant built by Chevron and a Google project in Wyoming that would consume five times as much electricity as every household in that state would vastly expand the emissions associated with those companies."
"A data center campus in Pike County, Ohio, that will support OpenAI's artificial intelligence operations will consume significantly more gas power, and, therefore, emit more carbon pollution, than the Microsoft and Google projects combined."
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump said Saturday that he offered UFC CEO Dana White the job of White House press secretary, continuing a post-midterm personnel shakeup that has already elevated Stephen Miller to chief of staff.
Trump announced the offer on Truth Social, calling White a “Fighter and Warrior” and suggesting he bring six current or former UFC champions as assistants, including Islam Makhachev, Khabib Nurmagomedov, Justin Gaethje, Daniel Cormier, Kayla Harrison and Amanda Nunes. Trump said the fighters could help “defend us against the Lunatic Left.”
White and Trump have known each other since the early 2000s, when Trump’s Atlantic City casino hosted UFC events. White later became an outspoken Trump supporter and appeared at Republican National Conventions on his behalf. Trump has also repeatedly attended UFC events, and the White House hosted a UFC card earlier this year.
The press secretary position has been vacant since Katie Zacharia left last month after serving less than a week. Karoline Leavitt had departed the role in August.
Despite Trump’s public offer, CNN reported that White declined the job, according to a source familiar with the matter. White and UFC parent company TKO had not publicly commented as of Saturday.
The offer comes one day after Trump named Miller as his new chief of staff following Republicans’ sweeping midterm losses.
Systems provide 360-degree view of airport operations, but concerns have been raised about the technology
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has announced that the first digital air traffic control towers in the US are officially operational, bringing new technology first to smaller airports in Florida and Alaska as the Trump administration presses ahead with updating the country’s ageing aviation infrastructure.
The systems are now online at the Bartow executive airport (KBOW) in Florida and the Kenai municipal airport (PAEN) in Alaska, with five additional regional airports slated to receive the technology next.
The 2026 DIAA Boys Soccer State Tournaments begin on November 10 with the first round of the division two state tournament. Salesianum earned the No. 1 seed in division one and Newark Charter earned the honor in division two.
Delaware high schools’ sports postseason is underway with the 2026 DIAA Field Hockey and Volleyball State Tournaments already in the midst of competition. Boys soccer is joining the postseason calendar with the division two tournament beginning on Tuesday, November 10.
The top-seed in the division two tournament is the Newark Charter Patriots who finished the season with a 14-0-1 overall record. The Patriots one tie this season came in their game against the Charter School of Wilmington Forces. The Forces earned the fifth seed in the division one tournament.
Salesianum claimed the top spot in the division one tournament with a record of 13-2. The Sals two losses were against out-of-state opponents from Kentucky and New Jersey. Salesianum won the state championship last season and have finished as state champions or the runner-ups the last 13 seasons.
The division two state tournament will start with a first round played on November 10 and then be followed by the quarterfinal round on November 14. The top four seeds in the division two tournament earn a first round bye. Those teams are: Newark Charter, Tower Hill, St. Mark’s and St. Andrew’s. They’ll play their first games in the quarterfinal round. The division one tournament opens with the quarterfinal round played on November 12. All eight teams will participate in the quarterfinal round.
Here’s a look at the upcoming boys soccer postseason schedule:
Division One
Quarterfinals: (All games played on November 12)
Salesianum boys soccer posing with the state championship banner after winning the 2025 DIAA Division One State Tournament. Photo credit: Ryan Colasanti
No. 1 Salesianum vs No. 8 Caesar Rodney: Sallies and Caesar Rodney will play each other for the second time this season in their quarterfinal matchup. The Sals beat the Riders, 9-0, earlier this season with a pair of goals apiece from senior Sawyer Valle and juniors Bryan Perez-Herrera and Brady Esser. The quarterfinal will be played at Abessinio Stadium at 5:30 p.m.
No. 2 Cape Henlopen vs No. 7 Sussex Central: The Vikings enter the state tournament with a 12 game winning streak that includes a win over Sussex Central on November 3. Viking junior Brooks Whaley scored two goals in the win and sophomore goalkeeper Kasen Adams earned eight saves preserving the shutout. The quarterfinal rematch will be played at Cape Henlopen at 6:00 p.m.
No. 3 Appoquinimink vs No. 6 Middletown: The Jaguars and Cavaliers renew a rivalry that spans across all athletic programs in their quarterfinal game which will be played at Appoquinimink at 6:00 p.m. The two teams played each other during the regular season with the Jaguars winning a close game, 1-0.
No. 4 Delcastle vs No. 5 Charter School of Wilmington: This the lone quarterfinal matchup in which the two teams didn’t play each other during the regular season. The Forces enter the contest winners of three straight, shutting out their opponent in each win. Delcastle begins the postseason on a five game winning streak earning four shutout victories in that stretch. The game will be played at Abessinio Stadium at 7:30 p.m.
Division Two
Round One: (All games played on November 10, at 6:00 p.m.)
No. 5 Caravel vs No. 12 Glasgow: The Buccaneers and Dragons play each other for the first time this season when they match up at Caravel on Tuesday. This is the Dragons first playoff game since 2018 and the Buccaneers first since making it to the semi-final round in 2024.
No. 6 Woodbridge vs No. 11 Brandywine: The Blue Raiders and Bulldogs will play each other for the first time this season in round one. Woodbridge enters the game winners of three of its last five games. Brandywine has won four of its last five. This game will be played at Woodbridge.
No. 7 Concord vs No. 10 Lake Forest: This a rematch of both teams’ first game of the season. The Raiders and Spartans finished that September 9 game with a 0-0 tie where both defensive and goalkeeping units performed well. The Raiders and Spartans have since finished the season with 9-4-2 records. This game will be played at Odyssey Charter.
No. 8 Sussex Academy vs No. 9 Delmar: The Seahawks and Wildcats will meet for the second time this season when they play at Sussex Academy in the first round. The Seahawks won the regular season matchup, 4-0, in late September with help from a two goal performance from senior Dominic Catlett. Junior Bodhin Williams and freshman Anderson Martin-Chilel also scored in the game.
Quarterfinals: (All games played on November 14)
No. 1 Newark Charter vs Winner of No. 8 Sussex Academy/No. 9 Delmar: This game will be played at 7:00 p.m. at Newark Charter.
No. 2 Tower Hill vs Winner of No. 7 Concord/No. 10 Lake Forest: This game will be played at Tower Hill at 6:00 p.m.
St. Mark’s Spartans boy’s soccer team taking a picture with the division two state championship banner after winning the 2025 state championship. Photo Credit: Ryan Colasanti
No. 3 St. Mark’s vs Winner of No. 6 Woodbridge/No. 11 Brandywine: This game will start at 6:00 p.m. and be played at St. Mark’s.
No. 4 St. Andrew’s vs Winner of No. 5 Caravel/No. 12 Glasgow: This game will be played at St. Andrew’s and begin at 1:00 p.m.
Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Denmark say cooperation on clean energy will benefit both sides
Five European leaders have called for closer ties with Britain ahead of a keenly anticipated EU-UK summit.
The leaders of Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Denmark, said deeper cooperation on clean energy would benefit both sides in a letter to Ursula von der Leyen and António Costa.
Tech companies like the idea, as they largely eliminate community opposition, and could cut down on utility costs
While Elon Musk has often touted putting datacenters in space, reports suggest that another geographic area may soon become a widespread target: our lakes and oceans.
Two underwater datacenters are already in operation off the coast of China, and recent reports suggest that the Trump administration is considering plans for four proposed underwater, sealed-pod datacenters to be built off the shores of Maine and Alaska.
Tech giant leaped to shore up relationship even as company was roiled by worker protest over its role in the war
A year into the war in Gaza, the networks of Israel’s military intelligence community were plagued with technical problems. There were major, multi-hour outages to their systems, and repeated crashes. Built-in debugging mechanisms failed.
The problems, which started as intelligence operations were undergoing updates to digital infrastructure, became so persistent as to undermine the “confidence” of Israeli intelligence agencies in one of their top network providers: the multinational tech conglomerate Cisco.
In a reversal of longstanding assumptions, strong criticism of Israel’s actions may have helped put candidates over the top
“You took a chance on the unlikeliest of candidates,” Abdul El-Sayed told a Detroit crowd on Wednesday, declaring victory in Michigan’s hard-fought, often ugly, Senate race. In what was predicted to be a squeaker, the Democrat beat his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, by a healthy seven points.
In some ways, El-Sayed was an unlikely candidate. At 34, in his first Congressional run, he set his sights almost cockily on a US Senate seat. He ran on what has become an uncontroversial affordability platform but also championed the socialist-adjacent Medicare for All.
Maga’s regret voters were all-in for Trump’s racism. Then they found out they couldn’t afford it
For the first time in a decade, election predictions far exceeded public expectations. What pollsters anticipated as a blue wave billowed into a blue tsunami. Wins that held ground for already blue seats eased nerves, and the flips of swing states such as Georgia, North Carolina and Ohio – and the victory in Michigan – energized the blue base. But red-belt-busting wins in Republican strongholds like Texas, South Carolina and Kansas alongside pending races in Alaska and Mississippi left mouths agape. The explanation was that Democrats turned out far more supporters than their regulars, and that the “regret voter” (both swing voters and partisan Republicans) expanded the wave across districts Trump previously won. Elation and sighs of relief rolled over consistently Democratic voters who suffered multiple sucker punches from recent years of Republican upsets. Regret voters, who run the gamut from gen Zmen to Latinos, farmers and the white working class, hope a different party can deliver on the economy Trump promised them.
Blue voters look at the dismantling of democracy, multiple wars, mass deportations and Trump’s unchecked power in these last two years and see how it all could have been avoided. Regret voters, however, either co-signed or conceded to Trump’s naked racism and brutish bullying of marginalized people, but switched their votes as soon as the consequences hit their pockets. While some of the president’s backers may have been turned away by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) gunning down American citizens, the final straw for most wasn’t ICE’s brutality, but rather the price of eggs. Some may have been upset by the Tomahawk missile assault that killed 120 schoolgirls in Iran, but most fumed at the rocketing costs at the gas pump that followed. Few demanded answers for the nearly 60 deaths of innocent people detained in DHS detention centers since the start of 2024, but many felt scorned by lost immigrant labor that cut into owners’ profit margins. Maga’s regret voters were all-in for Trump’s racism. Then they found out they couldn’t afford it.
ANCHORAGE, ALASKA — Democrat Mary Peltola’s Senate campaign sued Alaska election officials Friday seeking immediate access to records identifying rejected absentee ballots as her race against Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan remains separated by roughly 600 votes.
The campaign says it requested the records under Alaska’s Public Records Act on Oct. 27 and again after Election Day but was denied immediate access. It wants the names of voters whose absentee ballots were rejected and the reasons for rejection, arguing that without the information it cannot determine whether lawful ballots were improperly excluded.
Alaska officials say the records are preliminary and historically treated as confidential while ballot processing continues. The state argues that releasing them now could burden election workers and interfere with counting.
Importantly, the lawsuit does not establish that any ballots were wrongly rejected. It seeks information that could allow the campaign to contact affected voters or challenge individual decisions if problems are found.
The dispute comes as Alaska continues accepting absentee ballots from remote communities through Nov. 18. If neither Peltola nor Sullivan reaches 50% of first-choice votes, the state will conduct its ranked-choice tabulation that day.
The race is one of only two unresolved U.S. Senate contests, alongside Mississippi.
DataVita has revised plan for Chapelhall development’s 1GW power requirement to be wholly drawn from renewable energy
A datacentre company that said it would power a massive AI development near Glasgow with renewable energy has admitted that the scheme will be entirely served by the national grid.
DataVita, a key plank of the UK’s AI strategy, had promised that the Lanarkshire project would draw 1GW – the equivalent output of a small nuclear reactor, or Britain’s largest windfarm – from green sources. But when the Guardian raised questions about the pledge, it said the arrangement was “subject to final commercial agreements, planning, grid and consenting processes”.
SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA — California voters have rejected Proposition 40, the closely watched measure that would have imposed a one-time 5% tax on residents worth more than $1 billion, according to a projection from Decision Desk HQ.
With roughly three-quarters of ballots counted, about 54% opposed the measure and 46% supported it. The Associated Press had not yet called the race Friday, but Proposition 40 had consistently trailed by a substantial margin.
The proposal would have applied to roughly 250 California billionaires and generated tens of billions of dollars, according to state estimates. Ninety percent of the revenue would have gone toward healthcare, with the remainder funding food assistance and education programs.
Opponents dramatically outspent supporters. Billionaires and business groups poured more than $300 million into efforts opposing Proposition 40 and promoting competing measures that could have blocked it. Google co-founder Sergey Brin alone contributed more than $100 million.
Gov. Gavin Newsom also opposed the measure, arguing it could encourage wealthy residents to leave California and destabilize state revenues. Supporters, including Sen. Bernie Sanders and the California Democratic Party, argued billionaires should contribute more toward healthcare and social programs.
The defeat does not necessarily end the wealth-tax debate. Democratic leaders nationally have already indicated that taxing extremely wealthy Americans will remain part of their agenda.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries sharply condemned President Donald Trump’s promotion of Stephen Miller to White House chief of staff, calling the longtime immigration hardliner a “dangerous xenophobe” and demanding that Trump “fire him today.”
Jeffries also described Miller as a “reckless extremist,” arguing that elevating him after Republicans’ sweeping midterm defeat showed Trump was doubling down rather than changing course.
The criticism comes against a substantial public record. Miller was a principal architect of Trump’s first-term family-separation policy and travel restrictions targeting several Muslim-majority countries. In Trump’s second term, he has helped direct the administration’s mass-deportation strategy, pushed for thousands of daily immigration arrests and advocated broader use of executive power.
Miller has also repeatedly described immigration in stark terms, including portraying migration as an “invasion” and saying the country was being “conquered.” He has defended family separation and advocated suspending habeas corpus in some immigration cases.
Other Democrats joined Jeffries. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto said Miller should be investigated rather than placed in charge of the White House, while Rep. Don Beyer accused Trump of continuing a politics of “hatred, lawlessness, and failure.”
Trump has defended Miller as one of his most trusted advisers. Miller is scheduled to replace Susie Wiles as chief of staff on Nov. 9.
Nov. 6, 2026 — Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC) has announced its 12 Rising Stars for SC26. The program recognizes exceptional early-career researchers from underrepresented groups for their research contributions and individual excellence.
Applications for the Rising Star program undergo a competitive peer-review process, typically with an acceptance rate of less than 50%.
As part of both the ISC and SC programs, WHPC Rising Stars receive mentorship support, a lightning talk opportunity, eligibility for the best WHPC submission award, and eligibility for travel support. These up-and-coming researchers are the future of the HPC workforce, and bringing them to large conferences connects them to the HPC community.
WHPC is grateful to its sponsors for making it possible to offer funding to all 12 members of the SC26 Rising Stars cohort. Four of this year’s Rising Stars will receive full travel support to attend the conference.
SC26 Cohort
Ashwini Naik is a Computational Scientist and Visualization Laboratory Operations Lead at the Research Computing Center (RCC) at the University of Chicago, where she integrates scientific visualization, artificial intelligence, and high performance computing into collaborative research workflows spanning the physical sciences, biological sciences, social sciences, and humanities.
She holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Chicago, where she conducted research at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) in visual data science, immersive analytics, and human-computer interaction. Her doctoral work included designing and executing user studies, mentoring more than fifty students in AR/VR development and visualization, and publishing in venues including IEEE ISMAR and the Journal of Neuroscience Research.
At the RCC, Ashwini leads technical collaborations spanning AI-assisted biomedical image analysis using 3D Slicer and MONAI on NVIDIA A100 and V100 GPUs, immersive cultural heritage reconstruction deployed across display walls and Meta Quest Pro VR headsets from a single Unity pipeline, and an active digital twin initiative using XGRIDS PortalCam for spatial capture. She is currently developing a custom tool for stitching multi-capture Gaussian splat scans into unified, navigable environments. She has delivered workshops reaching more than 75 researchers across five sessions on topics including foundation models for biomedical imaging, AI-enhanced image analysis, and interactive data visualization.
Prior to her doctoral studies, she held engineering roles at Scientific Games, Olenick & Associates, and Birlasoft across the United States and India.
Olivia Maynard is a second year PhD student in Computer Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University, supervised by Dr. Suren Byna. Her work involves profiling I/O and data movement for scientific computing, particularly within scientific deep learning; she additionally has interests in architecture and security within scientific computing. Outside of her research, she is a passionate educator in engineering education and computer science, currently serving as the lead Graduate Teaching Associate for Ohio State’s first-year Engineering Foundations sequence in the Honors track. She graduated with her B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from Ohio State in 2025.
Eva Fernandez Amez is the Community Manager for Digital Research Infrastructure at Durham University. Her work focuses on developing training opportunities, fostering communities, and supporting the skills development of research technical professionals across the research computing landscape, with a particular focus on advanced and accelerated computing. She works closely with researchers, technical specialists, and community stakeholders to identify skills needs and create resources that support collaboration, knowledge exchange, and professional development. Alongside her community-building and training activities, she contributes to outreach and communications through website development, graphic design, video production, and science communication. She holds a degree in Physics and combines her scientific background with expertise in digital education and communication to make complex technical topics more accessible to diverse audiences.
Yuqian Huo is a PhD student in Computer Science at Rice University, advised by Dr. Tirthak Patel in the Positive Technology Lab. Her research focuses on making quantum computers more reliable and efficient through better system design, compilers, and performance optimization. She works with both superconducting and neutral atom quantum computers. She is also interested in quantum machine learning, as well as security and privacy in quantum computing.
Her research has been published at SIGMETRICS, ICCAD, AISTATS, and QCE. She also shares open-source code and tools with her papers so that other researchers can use and build on her work. She received the SandboxAQ Global Travel Scholarship in 2025 and was selected as a DAC Young Fellow in 2024.
Daria Godorozha is an MSc by Research student at the London School of Economics, where she founded the LSE Beavers HPC team. LSE has no STEM departments apart from statistics and mathematics. The team includes two women and members from a range of ethnic backgrounds, and finished 1st in one of two challenges and 3rd overall at the CIUK Cluster Challenge. It was also one of two student teams accepted onto an AMD/DIRAC UKRI funded residential research development programme, and received GPU and RSE support. She has spoken at Imperial College London HPC SIG on the topic of creating a successful HPC educational initiative. Previously, she completed an MSc in AI and Data Science with Distinction.
This year she has led research teams working on NLP and LLMs at the University of Oxford and ETH Zurich. She has also worked in medicine, health and life sciences, leading a research project at the Swansea University Faculty of Medicine, Health and Life Sciences, where she engaged with the Welsh Parliament and is contributing to a health consultation. She presented “Compute Optimal Diffusion on Learned Conformer Manifolds” at the AIBIO BBSRC funded network conference and came 2nd at the Edinburgh BIOAI conference.
From September she will be a teaching assistant in data at Imperial College London further to her work on the QMUL Designing an Inclusive Curriculum project. Her interest in HPC includes its role in regional economic development, particularly in Wales and in its ability to empower diverse regional talent.
Elizabeth Koleva is an HPC software engineer at the Discoverer petascale supercomputer in Sofia, Bulgaria, and works on agentic AI workflow management and deployment at BRAIN++, the Bulgarian AI Factory under EuroHPC, where she is sole developer of the organisation’s internal platform.
She recently completed an MSc in Innovation and Research in Informatics, specialising in High Performance Computing, at the Facultat d’Informàtica de Barcelona, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – a double degree with Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski through EUMaster4HPC. Her thesis, “Predicting and Explaining Alzheimer Disease Using UK Biobank,” built a leakage-controlled, cost-sensitive machine learning pipeline that treats auditability as a primary result, supervised by Prof. Jordi Torres Viñals and Prof. Petia Radeva.
Her earlier work spans knowledge graphs, disinformation-prevention research, and fine-tuning NLP models for Bulgarian at the European Software Institute. She won the EuroHPC Summit Student Challenge 2025 in Kraków, placed second in the EUMaster4HPC Student Challenge 2025–2026 for benchmarking AI Factories on MeluXina, and received the Most Innovative Business Solution award at the AmCham Bulgaria Hackathon 2025.
Elizabeth serves as an HPC Student Ambassador Mentor for the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, having been an ambassador herself, and represents EUMaster4HPC at information sessions. She previously chaired the Supervisory Board of the Sofia University Students Council and sat on the Transform4Europe Student Council. She began her career teaching C++ to secondary school students and has taught computer graphics at Sofia University. She is preparing to begin a PhD at the intersection of HPC, explainable AI, and health research.
Emma Urquhart is a 3rd year PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on accelerating unstructured scientific methods on wafer-scale hardware. Her research interests include computer architecture, low-level software performance optimizations and scientific computing. Emma completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Galway, followed by the MPhil in Advanced Computer Science at the University of Cambridge, ranking first in her cohort.
Serena Ma is a PhD researcher at the University of Leeds working at the intersection of high-performance computing, compiler optimization, and quantum computing systems. Her research journey has spanned CPU-side compiler optimization, large-scale GPU and AI infrastructure, and emerging quantum computing. Her broader research goal is to develop software and compiler techniques that maximize the useful performance of emerging computing hardware. Her interests include HPC, compiler optimization, heterogeneous systems, reinforcement learning for systems, and quantum software systems.
Suné Toerien is a South African engineering student and high-performance computing (HPC) enthusiast based in Johannesburg. She holds a Bachelor of Engineering Science in Biomedical Engineering (BEngSc) from the University of the Witwatersrand and is currently a fourth-year Information Engineering student. Her interdisciplinary interests include computational methods, HPC performance, and applications in biomedical contexts. Suné’s earlier work includes a paper on skeletal muscle oxygen tension in COVID-19, exploring its potential as a disease severity marker. She also contributed to a collaborative HPC study on the productivity-to-energy trade-off via DVFS, core scaling, and C-state control. The work placed second in the ACM Student Research Competition at PASC26 in Switzerland and won Best Student Short Paper at PEARC26 in the USA.
Preetika Kaur is a final-year Ph.D. candidate in Civil Engineering (Hydrologic Sciences) at the University of Wyoming, where she works on snow remote sensing. Her dissertation asks where satellite radar can be trusted to measure mountain snowpack. She built the first feasibility map of L-band InSAR snow water equivalent retrieval for the western United States, published in Geophysical Research Letters, and runs the Fortran-based SnowModel system on Wyoming’s Medicine Bow HPC cluster to simulate snowpack liquid water content across large mountain domains. She is now quantifying snow density variability at Arctic tundra and boreal forest sites in Alaska. She came to computational hydrology sideways. After a B.S. in agricultural engineering at Punjab Agricultural University in India, she completed an M.S. at Auburn University using X-ray computed tomography to quantify how tillage and cover crops reshape soil pore networks, producing three first-author publications and Auburn’s outstanding master’s student and thesis awards. Her HPC and cloud computing skills were assembled through hackweeks and summer schools rather than coursework, an experience that shapes how she teaches. She helped organize a University of Washington eScience Institute hackweek and taught a hands-on Google Earth Engine workshop at Wyoming. She is Vice President of the Society of Women Engineers at Wyoming and secretary of both its ASPRS student chapter and Wyomingites in Math, Science and Engineering. She won second prize in Wyoming’s Three-Minute Thesis competition and a Boyd Scott graduate paper award from ASABE, and completes her Ph.D. in May 2027.
Nada Abdalgawad is a PhD candidate in the Computer Science and Engineering department at University of Michigan. Her current area of research is computer architecture with focus on memory architectures. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates in 2020.
Sonal Jha is a Ph.D. student in Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, where her research focuses on early and explainable health risk assessment through Graph AI and high performance computing (HPC). To improve the accuracy of risk assessment, Sonal developed graph-based methods that model clinically useful information from irregular and sparse clinical data. Her work has progressed from a graph-based approach using a single clinical variable to Graph AI methods for multivariable and multimodal clinical data. To improve the scalability, she studied bottlenecks in Graph AI training and developed distributed approaches for efficient multi-GPU training. On the professional front, Sonal serves as a Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) with Virginia Tech’s Advanced Research Computing (ARC@VT), where she provides HPC and AI consulting to faculty, postdocs, and students across 26 departments. Her work spans migrating, profiling, optimizing, and scaling scientific workloads; debugging parallel and distributed jobs; managing large-scale data; installing scientific software; and helping researchers integrate AI workflows on ARC’s HPC systems. She has interned at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) as an HPC and AI Visiting Scholar and at Los Alamos National Laboratory as a Data Science at Scale Intern.
PHOENIX, ARIZONA — Democrats have captured both chambers of the Arizona Legislature while Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs retained the governor’s office, giving the party complete control of state government for the first time in 60 years.
The Associated Press called enough remaining legislative races Friday to confirm Democratic majorities in both the state House and Senate. Republicans had controlled the Arizona House continuously for 60 years and the Senate since the early 1990s.
The victory dramatically changes the political environment for Hobbs. During her first term, she vetoed more than 540 measures passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature, covering issues including immigration, elections, taxes and education.
Hobbs has said her next-term priorities include addressing water shortages and affordability while tightening oversight of Arizona’s expansive school-voucher program.
Arizona was part of a much broader Democratic surge at the state level. Democrats also secured full control of government in Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Wisconsin, while winning the Texas House and governorship.
Nationally, Democrats also captured both chambers of Congress, making the 2026 election one of the largest shifts in political control since the Republican wave of 2010.
For Arizona, however, the result is especially historic: the state will enter 2027 with unified Democratic government for the first time since Lyndon Johnson was president.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has blamed high electricity prices in Democrat-led states on climate policies. Prices do tend to be higher in blue states than red states, but climate policies explain at most a modest portion of the price difference.
Longstanding structural and geographical factors — combined with more recent price increases from wildfires, extreme weather and, in certain areas, anticipated rapid load growth from data centers — have also contributed to high electricity prices in certain states and regions.
Wright’s recent commentshaveemphasized political differences between states while omitting many of these other factors, at times misleadingly blaming large price rises on climate policies.
“Electricity prices are almost 50% higher in states run by Democrats,” he saidOct. 1 on Fox News. “For 17 years since President Obama came to office, the Democrat position has been to constrict the growth of energy and drive the prices up so Americans could afford less and we would solve climate change.”
In other interviews, the secretary has suggested state-level requirements for adopting renewable energy — called renewable portfolio standards — are to blame for the price differential.
“Subsidizing and forcing wind and solar onto electricity grids around the country has been a disaster,” he saidOct. 28 on the Bloomberg show “Balance of Power.” “You can see it in the states with renewable portfolio standards that have forced wind and solar. They have 50% higher electricity prices than the states that don’t have those. I haven’t met anyone that wants their electrical bill to go up 50%.”
“Half of the states have renewable portfolio [standards], half of them don’t,” Wright also said at a Sept. 23 event hosted by the New York Times. “Forty-five percent more expensive electricity in the states that have them. That’s not coincidence.”
Wright’s math approximately checks out when comparing average retail electricity prices in states with and without current renewable portfolio standards, or states with Republican versus Democratic governors as of fall 2026. But renewable portfolio standards have not on their own made electricity prices rise by 50%, experts told us, nor do all states with these policies have higher-than average prices.
“The correlation is real, but this does not establish causality,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers Fischer J. Espiritu Argosino and Christopher R. Knittel told us in an email. Their 2025 working paper found that renewable portfolio standards aren’t a driver of electricity prices once other differences between states are accounted for.
Other research has indicated a partial role for renewable portfolio standards in raising electricity rates in certain states, particularly if the standards are very strict. Still, “[m]ost of the electricity price differences between Democratic and Republican states are not attributable to RPS,” Devin Hartman, president of the Lighthouse Energy Institute, a newly founded energy policy nonprofit, told us.
The data also do not indicate a relationship between renewables in general and rising prices, despite Wright’s claim at the New York Times event that everywhere renewable energy has had “meaningful penetration has meaningfully higher electricity prices.”
“That’s just demonstrably false,” Paul Donohoo-Vallett, an independent energy consultant who previously worked for the Department of Energy, told us, pointing to Texas, Iowa, South Dakota and New Mexico as examples of places that added relatively high levels of wind and solar in recent years while maintaining relatively low prices. “There’s no inherent connection between more wind and solar and higher prices,” he said.
“Renewable portfolio standards or net-zero goals lead states to force reliable power sources, such as coal-fired power plants, to close, which drives up prices,” DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich told us, in response to questions about the data supporting a link between the renewable portfolio standards and electricity prices.
As for the counterexamples of states with relatively low prices and high renewable energy penetration, they “still have strong reliance on coal, nuclear and/or natural gas power which prevents their electricity prices from being higher,” he said. “In that sense, penetration of wind and solar is not as meaningful there.”
Structural Reasons for Expensive Electricity
The high average electricity prices among blue states is driven largely by a few specific areas of the country: Hawaii, California and a group of states clustered in the Northeast. Electricity prices have been elevated in these areas for many decades. Experts pointed to several major factors that help explain why prices are higher in these states.
For Hawaii, a major underlying cause is geography. The island relies heavily on oil to produce electricity, which puts it at the whims of the global oil market. The state’s electricity prices have soared recently in part due to the war in Iran.
Similarly, isolation from the rest of the country and a large number of unconnected microgrids contribute to high prices in Alaska, a Republican-led state without renewable portfolio standards that nonetheless has high electricity prices.
Geography plays a role in the lower 48 states, too. “Utility-scale wind and solar resources are predominantly located in Republican-led Midwestern and Southwestern states, whereas Democrat-led Northeast states are highly reliant on pipeline-capacity-constrained natural gas,” Michelle Levinson, a senior manager at the nonprofit research organization World Resources Institute, told us.
“A large number of blue states are small geographic states that are all clustered in New England, which just happens to not have any natural gas production,” Donohoo-Vallett said. This leads these states to pay elevated prices for natural gas to be piped in via limited pipelines, he said.
Price increases may in some cases be related to implicit climate policies, Hartman said. In the case of New England, “policy decisions that suppressed pipeline development” played into high regional natural gas costs, he said.
In California, wildfires have been the “big driver” of increasing costs, Hartman said. Wildfire risk has driven up transmission and distribution costs in the West, while also leading to liability costs, he said. Transmission lines carry electricity over long distances while distribution lines take it the rest of the way to customers.
“California stands out among all states with a massive 64% increase in rates since 2019 (30% after adjusting for inflation), driven by significant and unique wildfire-related expenses accounting for 40% of the rate increase at least through 2024,” an April 2026 report from the research firm the Rhodium Group concluded.
In 2018, Pacific Gas and Electric Company equipment started the deadliest fire in California’s history, the Camp Fire, one of a number of highly destructive fires in recent history in the state to be started by electrical equipment.
In addition, a “big issue is transmission is old, so replacing that aging infrastructure is expensive, especially in New England,” Hartman said. New England has older transmission infrastructure than some other areas of the country, he said, and it is also relatively expensive there to upgrade infrastructure due to high land values, labor and taxes. California and the Northeast have also had relatively high distribution cost increases, Hartman said.
In some cases, the aging of equipment and wildfires or extreme weather come together to necessitate spending, said Donohoo-Vallett, who was the first author of the Rhodium Group report. Aging infrastructure is “colliding with increasing threats from extreme weather and climate change,” he explained. “That’s just accelerating the need to replace this stuff.”
For example, he said, the Camp Fire occurred after a metal hook holding up a century-old transmission line broke. “The power price had been low for a long time because we just weren’t paying for this stuff,” Donohoo-Vallett said.
Between 2019 and 2025, average residential electricity prices nationwide rose 33%, but only 5.6% above the rate of inflation, according to a July analysis from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to which Donohoo-Vallett contributed. LBNL is a government research center affiliated with the DOE. However, residential prices rose significantly more in California and some New England and mid-Atlantic states.
The LBNL researchers cited recovery and mitigation from wildfires and extreme weather, as well as the need to replace or improve aging distribution and transmission infrastructure, as top drivers of electricity price increases above inflation during this period.
Madalsa Singh, an energy researcher at Rochester Institute of Technology, also pointed out that tying average electricity prices to state-level policies ignores the wide variation within states in prices, which are set by utilities.
Singh and her colleagues studied electricity prices in California from 2019 through 2023, finding that electricity prices were relatively flat in publicly owned utilities while investor-owned utilities had price increases that made them “some of the most expensive power providers in the United States.”
“Neighboring utilities in states — red or blue — can have different price trajectories,” Singh said.
Renewable Portfolio Standards and Prices
As we said, analyses have come to mixed conclusions on whether renewable portfolio standards have contributed to electricity price increases.
A 2025 working paper by economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tried to rigorously answer this question by comparing states to themselves over time between 1998 and 2023. The researchers found that even though having more stringent renewable portfolio standards shows a “clear, positive correlation” with higher electricity prices, the standards are not the cause of this pattern.
In an aerial view, high voltage power lines run through a sub-station along the electrical power grid on Jan. 14 in Miami, Florida. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.
After controlling for both longstanding, fixed differences between states and national drivers of price increases during the period of the study, “the escalation of a state’s RPS has no detectable effect on residential electricity prices,” Knittel and Argosino told us.
Instead, they said, “states that already had high electricity prices were more likely to adopt an RPS in the first place … creating the correlation.” Further factors continued to raise electricity prices as more states adopted the standards and strengthened them. But again, this doesn’t mean the standards were the cause. Rather, “the big rate increases over the past two decades line up with waves of capital spending on transmission and distribution, not with renewable mandates,” the researchers said.
Other analyses have found that RPS does increase prices in certain circumstances – although not to the degree that Wright claims.
Noah Kaufman, an economist and senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told us that “policies that mandate increases in renewables, regardless of costs, do tend to increase electricity prices,” but that such rules “have not been the main driver of increases in electricity prices in recent years.”
As of 2026, 27 states had standards mandating a certain level of renewables, according to LBNL, and most of those states are controlled by Democrats. (A larger number of states has had RPS at some point in the past, including some red states that have gone on to have robust levels of renewable energy outside of any requirements.)
Current policies vary, with states requiring anywhere from 9% to 67% renewable energy in a utility’s energy mix in 2026. States have various ways to allow utilities to comply with the policies, such as requiring them to have a certain number of renewable energy credits, which they can either obtain by acquiring or generating energy from renewables or simply buying the credits themselves.
Standards requiring a limited amount of renewable energy “generally don’t affect prices” because “market-driven renewables have exceeded” these requirements, Hartman said, but policies with very high levels “are becoming infeasible to meet” and can raise prices.
The Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s July analysis of the drivers of electricity price increases between 2019 and 2025 concluded that renewable portfolio standards have “often increased prices” if they require renewable energy adoption beyond what would be driven by the market. However, the researchers found that the majority of wind and solar development during this timeframe — occurring outside of any RPS requirements — does not “appear to have driven price increases.”
The standards raised electricity prices approximately 1 cent per kilowatt hour in a few New England and mid-Atlantic states between 2019 and 2025, according to the LBNL analysis, with much lower impacts on average among states with these standards. For context, the price of electricity in Maine, one of the states with a 1-cent increase from RPS, rose more than 5 cents per kilowatt hour in total during this period.
A version of the LBNL analysis that looked at the drivers of rising rates between 2019 and 2024 concluded that RPS played a “medium” role in pushing up prices above the rate of inflation. For context, the researchers concluded that replacing or improving aging distribution and transmission infrastructure also played a medium role in increasing prices, but over a broader geographic area. Wildfires and extreme weather had a larger effect than renewable portfolio standards, over a similar geographic breadth.
Donohoo-Vallett said that the LBNL and MIT analyses came to different conclusions because they used different methods of estimating the impact of RPS. The LBNL work is based on calculating the costs of complying with renewable portfolio standards. But this does not fully measure what would have happened to prices if there weren’t renewable portfolio standards, he said, whereas the MIT work attempts to account for this counterfactual scenario.
The MIT paper found that utility-scale renewablesadoption wasassociated with lower electricity prices. Investing in renewables can also mitigate costs from spikes in prices of other forms of energy, such as natural gas, Donohoo-Vallett said.
“On the substance, we largely agree,” Knittel and Argosino said of the LBNL analysis. “Neither analysis supports the claim that renewables or RPSs explain a 40 to 50 percent price gap.”
Exception for Some Versions of Rooftop Solar
While renewable energy adoption overall is not associated with rising electricity prices, both the MIT and LBNL analyses concluded that rooftop solar in some cases can increase prices.
Knittel and Argosino explained that a method of compensating people with rooftop solar for the power they send back to the grid — called net metering — can drive up electricity prices for everyone else.
Under this system people are charged only for the net amount of electricity they pull from the grid — their use minus the amount they produced. But electricity rates are meant to cover the cost of maintaining the grid, not just the cost of the electricity itself. As people with rooftop solar pay for less power, they pay less to maintain the grid, and electricity rates rise. Net metering in effect “shifts the fixed costs of the grid onto households without solar,” the MIT researchers told us
Rooftop solar had a small effect on electricity prices in most states in recent years, the LBNL analysis concluded, and a higher effect in a few others, including Maine and California.
These states have now made changes to lower how much they compensate people with solar panels to alleviate the problem.
Even in those states, the LBNL researchers found that rooftop solar and renewable portfolio standards were only responsible for a portion of the price increases. For Maine’s primary utility, net energy metering policies for rooftop solar contributed to an increase of 1 to 1.5 cents per kilowatt hour between 2019 and 2024. Winter storm recovery costs played a slightly bigger role in cost increases, at 1.6 cents per kilowatt hour, while distribution-related spending and renewable portfolio standards each contributed about a cent to the increase.
For California’s largest three utilities, the researchers calculated that net-metered solar policies led electricity prices to increase by around 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour over this period — less of an impact than wildfire costs, at 4.3 cents per kilowatt hour, and inflation in distribution and transmission costs, at 3.7 cents per kilowatt hour. Renewable portfolio standards contributed to less than half a cent per kilowatt hour of the increase.
“California’s prices are high mainly because of wildfire costs, distribution spending, and rate design, not because it has a lot of solar on the grid,” Argosino and Knittel said.
Electricity Price Increases During the Trump Administration
Wright has often spoken about electricity prices in Democrat-led states as a response to questions about affordability or criticisms of electricity prices under Trump. At the Sept. 23 New York Times event, he responded to a question about rising electricity prices by suggesting Democratic policies were to blame for rising prices during the Trump administration.
“Electricity prices in red states that have followed the United States federal policy have not seen a rise in inflation-adjusted electricity prices during the Trump administration,” he said. “Electricity price rises that are well above inflation are all limited to states with aggressive climate policies. California, Massachusetts, New England — those are the places with the fastest rise and the most expensive electricity prices.”
Price rises, however, have not been limited to blue states and are not just due to climate policies. Nor have all blue states seen major increases. California, for example, saw its 2025 electricity prices rise more slowly than inflation.
Between 2024 and 2025, 39 states had electricity price increases above inflation and 26 had increases of 2% or more above inflation, according to data from the Energy Information Administration analyzed by the nonprofit Institute for Progress. The largest increases — between 7.1% and 11.9% above inflation — were in New Jersey, Maine, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Illinois and New York, all states with renewable portfolio standards whose governorships and legislatures were at least partially controlled by Democrats as of fall 2026.
However, Republican-controlled states without RPS also had some significant price hikes. Indiana, Louisiana and Utah, for example, had increases between 4.2% and 5.7% above inflation.
One driver of the cost increases was a 36% rise in the price of natural gas after hitting a low in 2024, according to the LBNL analysis. The greatest natural gas-related increases affected grid operators in New England and New York, followed by those in the mid-Atlantic and parts of the Midwest. “It’s not really about who’s leading the state,” Levinson said. “It’s about … your exposure to natural gas prices.”
“PJM spans 13 states and DC, many of them red or purple states,” Singh said.
The LBNL report listed clean energy policy and wildfire costs as lesser contributors to price increases in 2025.
There has been more limited analysis on electricity prices in 2026 so far, but the available datacontinue to show price increases in both blue and red states.
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Vice President JD Vance delivers remarks during a midterm campaign rally at JRJ Construction on Oct. 29, 2026, in Weatherford, Texas.Photo: Evan Vucci-Pool/Getty Images
To say that Americans were pissed off is an understatement.
On Tuesday, Democrats didn’t just seize control of both houses of Congress. They redrew the American political map, capturing offices that had remained reliably Republican for generations, from the Deep South to Kansas and Texas. The Lone Star State alone, with its 40 Electoral College votes, now raises the possibility of a seismic shift in the calculus of future presidential elections.
The sheer scale of the historic Democratic surge delivered an unmistakable rebuke to America’s supposedly populist president. The message was clear and simple: We do not like you.
Much of Americans’ rapid disillusionment with the Trump administration can be traced to a single word — Iran — and the cascading economic hardships Americans have endured as the war has dragged on.
The Iran war has gone from a Republican loyalty test to a political albatross.
For the GOP, the threat is existential. The war has gone from a Republican loyalty test to a political albatross for many of its former supporters, one that many Republicans are now jettisoning themselves away from to salvage their own political futures.
By Wednesday, it had become the chief explanation for the party’s sweeping electoral defeat, with Vice President JD Vance declaring unequivocally on X that “the reason we lost is the war.”
“If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest,” he wrote. “But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.” Coming from Trump’s own vice president, it was a striking about-face.
The tirade also raised an awkward question ahead of the 2028 presidential race: How does a potential successor to the MAGA mantle campaign against a war waged by his own administration?
Trump, however, has not gone nearly as far as his VP. Although the president acknowledged the war hurt Republicans, he still defended it on its merits. Speaking with reporters Wednesday after expounding at length about his White House ballroom, Trump said, “The Iran thing we had to do, and we continue to do it.”
Where Did All the Warmongers Go?
But on the campaign trail, Republicans were not completely oblivious to Americans’ collective frustration with the Iran war.
In September, ABC News identified 17 Republican lawmakers and candidates who had called for ending the war through public statements or votes. Much of the pressure came in competitive midterms races, as the conflict’s effects on oil, diesel, and fertilizer prices reached American households.
In Iowa, Republican Senate candidate Ashley Hinson called for a “successful and immediate end” to the war in September, warning that voters were paying the price at gas pumps and grocery stores. Yet she voted six times against House measures directing Trump to halt the attacks. During an October 25 ABC interview, Hinson said she would not rule out a post-election U.S. offensive and said she trusted Trump and the military to choose the right timetable. Despite the president praising her weight loss at a recent rally, tepidly breaking with Trump wasn’t enough to get Hinson over the line, and she lost to Democrat Josh Turek by 4.5 percentage points.
Michigan also had its share of Iran backtrackers. Republican Senate hopeful Mike Rogers described Iran as an “imminent threat” when the bombing began on February 28. In May, he called the conflict a potential “win-win-win.” But with the midterms fast approaching, Rogers released a campaign ad declaring “the war with Iran needs to end” quickly and warned Michigan families could no longer afford the economic fallout.
Rep. John James, the Republican candidate for Michigan governor, likewise praised Trump’s use of force early in the war, saying the president “had the balls” to “assure the survival and success of liberty.” He voted against six House war-powers resolutions, including as recently as September. Days after that vote, he said the war needed to wrap up “quickly.” https://bridgemi.com/michigan-politics/fact-check-mike-rogers-john-james-shift-positions-on-iran-war/He went on to declare in an interview, “the position has always been, I hate war.”
Even Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a possible contender in the Republican Party’s next presidential contest who could reportedly be up for Pete Hegseth’s job, warned Monday that the war was a “big, big drag” on his party. Trump, DeSantis pointed out, campaigned against another Middle Eastern war. Now voters are dealing with higher fuel costs, and Republicans who refuse to acknowledge the connection are “gaslighting” them. But back in spring, DeSantis defended the strikes on Iranian leadership, describing its government as “a fanatical, apocalyptic, militant Islamist regime.”
The polling helps explain the Republican panic. An Associated Press poll found roughly 6 in 10 voters believed the U.S. made a “wrong decision” in attacking Iran. And it’s not as though Republicans weren’t warned. A handful within their own ranks, including Thomas Massie and Rand Paul, opposed the war from its earliest days and backed efforts to rein it in. But those criticisms seemed to fall on deaf ears.
A Hasty Retreat
With plenty of blame to go around, the criticism has gone beyond candidates and into the conservative media ecosystem.
During the network’s primetime Election Night coverage, Fox News host Sean Hannity told his colleague Bret Baier that the results would have been different without the Iran war. Conservative commentator Matt Walsh called the war a betrayal of America First principles, demanded new Republican leadership, and labeled the conflict a “catastrophically stupid decision.”
Other commentators placed the responsibility squarely on Trump himself for sucking his own party into a political quagmire. In The Federalist, senior editor John Daniel Davidson blamed the party’s collapse on Trump’s undermining of a GOP coalition built upon rejecting the interventionist politics of the George W. Bush era.
Some prominent Republican operatives are sure to be thrown under the bus by their own party in the retreat. The first to get the boot may be none other than Hegseth, America’s chief “warfighter,” who has been one of the war’s most enthusiastic, and public, cheerleaders. The defense secretary responded to the criticisms in a nearly six-minute-long video posted online on Thursday, in which he seemed to make the case for keeping his job, touting his elimination of the “Marxist ideology” of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and tarring transgender troops as having a “mental illness.”
“Regardless of how people care about the war, which I believe is a courageous and historic effort that will ensure Iran never gets a nuclear weapon, we need to continue, as President Trump did in his first term, to rebuild our military,” he said. “This is not about me, but of course, the other side, in case you noticed, they’re obsessed.”
Already facing growing Republican dissatisfaction and a ballooning roster of disgruntled and ousted senior military officials, Hegseth now faces the prospect of investigations by a Democratic-controlled Congress and an impeachment effort led by Massie. And while Trump has so far publicly defended his defense secretary, he has also reportedly consulted allies about whether to hit the ejector seat on Pete.
Tuesday’s results show voters are increasingly willing to hold politicians accountable for needless war.
But while Republicans and Democrats read polls and calculate the political currency of war and economic hardship, the human cost cannot be measured in votes. At least 3,636 people had been killed in Iran as of early April, including 1,701 civilians and 254 children, according to human rights monitors. More fighting has followed and likely driven that number far higher.
At least 23 American service members have died in operations connected to the war, with almost 900 wounded by enemy fire. But these are estimates, and the Trump administration has worked to actively obfuscate the true casualty rates of the war. These are not electoral statistics. They are lives lost, families shattered, and consequences that will endure long after administrations swap office spaces.
For Republicans now scrambling to distance themselves from a deeply unpopular war, the political consequences may be harder to escape than their own voting records. Tuesday’s results show voters are increasingly willing to hold politicians accountable for needless wars, and the suffering inherited from them.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump announced Friday that longtime adviser Stephen Miller will become White House chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles in the administration’s first major personnel shakeup since Republicans lost control of Congress in the midterm elections.
Trump said Miller, currently deputy chief of staff for policy, will take over Monday. Wiles will move to Trump’s political operation rather than leave his orbit entirely. Trump praised both aides, calling Miller one of his most trusted advisers.
The move comes just three weeks after Trump publicly insisted there was “zero chance” he would replace Wiles and said she would remain “for a long time.”
Miller has been one of the administration’s most influential figures, particularly on immigration. He has played a central role in designing Trump’s mass-deportation strategy and has also been involved in planning how the White House could rely more heavily on executive authority once Democrats take control of Congress in January.
Republicans have been openly debating changes after their sweeping midterm defeat. Reuters reported that some GOP officials urged Trump to overhaul his staff and reconsider policies including the Iran war, tariffs and immigration enforcement.
Miller’s promotion suggests Trump is responding to the electoral setback not by moderating his agenda, but by elevating one of its principal architects.
New Wilmington community center combines education, health care and recreation in a major public-private investment. Its long-term success will be measured by opportunities created for families and lasting neighborhood improvements.
By George Rotsch, Delaware LIVE
WILMINGTON, Del. — A new chapter in Wilmington’s Riverside neighborhood began Friday, Nov. 6, with the opening of the $56 million Kingswood Community Center, an investment designed to expand educational opportunities, improve access to health care and help families build more prosperous futures.
The two-story, 81,000-square-foot facility is nearly five times the size of its predecessor, which served Riverside residents for generations. The new center brings together services for children, families and seniors while serving as a cornerstone of a broader effort to revitalize one of Wilmington’s historically underserved neighborhoods.
For residents, the new building represents an opportunity for greater neighborhood stability and access to services. For taxpayers, donors and community leaders, it also raises an important long-term question: Will the investment deliver measurable improvements in education, employment, family well-being and economic independence?
The answer will ultimately be determined not by the size of the building but by the opportunities it creates for the people who use it.
U.S. Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester, Gov. Matt Meyer, Attorney General Kathleen Jennings, Wilmington Mayor John Carney and City Council Member Zanthia Oliver joined community leaders for Friday’s opening ceremony.
Building opportunities for families
The expanded Kingswood Community Center brings several important services together under one roof, making it easier for residents to access programs that support education, health, recreation and family stability.
Among its features are:
A gymnasium accommodating more than 600 basketball spectators or up to 1,500 people for community gatherings.
A Nemours pediatric care center providing access to children’s health services.
The Ernest L. Webster Montessori Academy, expanding early childhood educational opportunities.
An expanded Jimmy Jenkins Senior Center in a separate building, serving older residents.
A commercial kitchen and dining room supporting food programs and community activities.
Flexible meeting and event spaces for neighborhood organizations and families.
The services could have practical economic benefits beyond their immediate purposes.
Reliable early childhood education can help working parents maintain employment. Accessible health care can reduce the time and transportation challenges families face when seeking treatment. Recreational and educational programs can provide young people with constructive activities and opportunities to develop skills.
Together, these services are intended to help address barriers that have limited economic opportunity for some Riverside families.
Public and private partners share the investment
The Kingswood project illustrates how government agencies, nonprofit organizations, financial institutions and private partners can combine resources to address longstanding community needs.
The project received substantial government support, including state funding and federal resources. The state described Kingswood as a $56 million development when construction began in August 2024.
Its financing also involved New Markets Tax Credits, private financial institutions and philanthropic support, demonstrating an approach that extends beyond traditional government-funded community programs.
One notable partner is Nemours Children’s Health, which provided an eight-figure, low-interest community impact loan to help advance the project’s construction.
In a September 2026 account of the partnership, Nemours President and CEO R. Lawrence Moss said the loan helped unlock additional financing and was repaid in full ahead of schedule.
Nemours is also establishing a pediatric care center at Kingswood and working with community partners to connect neighborhood residents with skilled employment opportunities at its hospital.
The arrangement demonstrates how private institutional investment can support neighborhood development while connecting residents to health care and potential careers.
It also highlights the importance of financial planning and responsible stewardship in projects involving both public and private resources.
An 80-year commitment to Riverside
The opening comes as Kingswood celebrates 80 years of serving Wilmington residents.
Founded in 1946, the original community center became a gathering place and support system for generations of Riverside families, offering youth development, educational programs and services for older adults.
“The Kingswood Community Center had an amazing 80-year run rooted in humble beginnings,” said Logan Herring, CEO of the WRK Group, which includes Kingswood Community Center, REACH Riverside and The Warehouse.
Herring credited generations of community leaders and volunteers for adapting Kingswood’s programs to meet changing neighborhood needs.
“The new Kingswood Community Center builds on all of this. It will continue that same legacy of rising to meet the needs of Riverside by providing the community with more resources, support and opportunity,” he said.
The new building provides significantly more space, but the organization’s challenge remains much the same: helping residents strengthen families, develop skills and build better lives.
Connecting education, employment and economic mobility
The new center is part of the WRK Group’s larger effort to transform Riverside through a coordinated approach involving housing, education, health care and economic opportunity.
Other investments include Imani Village, a mixed-income residential development that began opening in 2022; The Warehouse, which provides programs for Wilmington teenagers; and expanded STEM educational opportunities at EastSide Charter School.
The strategy recognizes that improvements in one area often depend on progress in others.
Children are better positioned to succeed academically when they have stable housing, access to medical care and strong educational support. Parents are better able to pursue employment when reliable child care and other family resources are available.
The new Kingswood Center is intended to bring many of those resources within easier reach of Riverside residents.
Of particular importance is the potential to connect young people and adults to workforce development programs, employers and career opportunities.
The WRK Group has described economic mobility and self-sufficiency as central goals of its Riverside redevelopment effort.
Success in those areas could help create a stronger local economy, greater household financial stability and an environment more attractive to private investment.
Measuring the return on investment
The opening of Kingswood marks a significant construction and fundraising achievement. The larger challenge will be sustaining the facility and demonstrating its impact over time.
The building will require ongoing expenditures for staffing, maintenance, utilities, security and programming. Long-term financial planning will be essential to maintaining services without placing unsustainable demands on government or philanthropic resources.
Equally important will be demonstrating whether the programs achieve their intended results.
Potential measures of success include the number of children benefiting from early education, improvements in school readiness, participation in job training, employment outcomes, health care access and residents’ progress toward greater economic independence.
The redevelopment also presents an important question for longtime Riverside residents: Will neighborhood improvements create opportunities for existing families to remain, prosper and participate in the area’s changing economy?
New housing, improved community facilities and expanded services are important signs of progress. But lasting revitalization also depends on stable neighborhoods, family advancement, employment and a growing base of private economic activity.
Public reporting on program outcomes, operating expenses and funding sources would help residents, donors and taxpayers evaluate the results.
Those measures will become increasingly important as the Riverside transformation moves from major construction projects to the long-term operation of its facilities and programs.
A new chapter, with work still ahead
For Herring, the opening is both a tribute to Kingswood’s history and a commitment to future generations.
“We are opening a new chapter, opening new doors to space built to serve generations to come,” he said.
The grand opening also reflects years of collaboration among Riverside residents, nonprofit leaders, government officials, businesses and philanthropic organizations.
With the center completed, the focus now turns to making the most of its expanded capabilities.
For Riverside families, the opportunity is immediate: improved access to education, health care, recreation and community support.
For Wilmington, the larger opportunity is to demonstrate that a combination of public investment, private participation and strong community institutions can help produce lasting neighborhood improvements.
The new Kingswood Community Center provides the facilities and resources to pursue that goal.
The next chapter will be measured by what Riverside residents accomplish with them.
Community invited to celebrate Saturday
The WRK Group will continue its grand-opening weekend Saturday, Nov. 7, with Kingswood Community Day, a free celebration offering residents and visitors an opportunity to explore the new center.
Activities will include building tours, family entertainment, youth activities and opportunities to learn more about the educational, recreational and community programs available.
The celebration also recognizes Kingswood’s 80-year history and the generations of residents, volunteers and community leaders who helped make the institution an important part of Riverside.
TO GO: Kingswood Community Day
What: Grand-opening community celebration and open house.
When: Saturday, Nov. 7, 2026, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Where: Kingswood Community Center, 2500 Rosemont Ave., Wilmington.
Admission: Free; advance registration requested.
Activities: Building tours, family entertainment, educational activities and information about community services.
JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI — The unresolved Mississippi Senate race has turned into a legal and procedural fight over thousands of affidavit ballots that could determine whether Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith keeps her seat or Democrat Scott Colom pulls off a historic upset.
As of Friday, Colom held a razor-thin lead of roughly 49.0% to Hyde-Smith’s 48.8%, with 12,000 to 20,000 affidavit ballots still awaiting eligibility review, according to Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson.
Hyde-Smith’s attorneys have asked election officials in all 82 counties to preserve and separately handle those ballots while challenges are considered. Colom’s campaign argues that request is not authorized by state law and could result in inconsistent treatment from county to county.
Affidavit ballots are cast when a voter’s eligibility cannot immediately be confirmed and require additional verification before they are counted. They are not automatically invalid.
The stakes are unusually high. Mississippi does not provide an automatic recount for statewide races, though candidates can challenge ballots in court. Counties must certify their results by Nov. 13.
The Associated Press has not called the contest. If elected, Colom would become Mississippi’s first Black U.S. senator since Reconstruction-era Republican Blanche Bruce left office in 1881.
With Democrats already controlling the Senate, the Mississippi result could further expand their majority.
From helping children play sports to supporting families facing illness and hardship, Delaware’s weekend races give walkers and runners a chance to improve their health while helping their neighbors.
WILMINGTON, Del. — Getting healthy and giving back to the community can go hand in hand this weekend as Delaware hosts a series of 5K races and walks benefiting charitable organizations across the state.
From Wilmington to Lewes, events scheduled for Saturday, Nov. 7, and Sunday, Nov. 8, will bring together runners, casual walkers, families and volunteers to raise money for causes ranging from childhood epilepsy and rare diseases to youth athletics and support for first responders.
And participants don’t have to be experienced runners to make a difference.
A 5K covers 3.1 miles, a manageable distance for many recreational walkers. At a comfortable walking pace, most people can complete the course in about 45 minutes to an hour.
For those looking to become more physically active, a community 5K can provide extra motivation. It offers a specific goal, an opportunity to exercise with friends and family, and the satisfaction of knowing that participation helps support a worthwhile cause.
The benefits extend well beyond the finish line.
Many Delaware charity races help nonprofit organizations raise money, introduce their missions to new supporters and recruit volunteers. For participants, they offer an opportunity to turn a healthy weekend activity into a contribution to the community.
Here are several opportunities to get moving for a good cause this weekend, along with a preview of the annual Bishop’s 5K, now called the Igniting Hope 5K, later this month.
Saturday, Nov. 7: Four ways to get moving
Nicola Pizza 5K Run/Walk — Lewes
The fourth annual Nicola Pizza 5K Run/Walk begins at 8 a.m. at Nicola Pizza in Lewes.
The event benefits the Warrior Weekend Program, which supports military veterans. Participants will follow a course through the Five Points area and onto the Georgetown-Lewes Trail before gathering for a post-race celebration.
Organizers welcome both runners and walkers, making it an opportunity for families and friends to enjoy exercise while supporting veterans.
Seashore Striders
Delaware Dash for Rare — Wilmington
The second annual Delaware Dash for Rare begins at 9 a.m. at Kelly’s Logan House in Trolley Square.
Organized in support of the National MPS Society, the event raises awareness and money for individuals and families affected by rare diseases.
Participants can choose a 5K race, a 1-mile walk or a virtual option. The shorter distance provides an accessible way for people who may not be ready for a full 5K to participate in the fundraising effort.
Make Today Count 5K — Newark
The Make Today Count 5K begins at 9 a.m. at Canal Little League on Glasgow Avenue.
The race supports the JB12 Foundation, established in memory of Jack Birch to help children participate in sports regardless of their families’ financial circumstances.
Proceeds help cover registration fees, uniforms, equipment, camps and other athletic expenses.
The event’s message connects two aspects of physical fitness: encouraging adults to exercise while making it possible for more children to enjoy organized sports. Casual walkers are welcome.
Harvest Hustle 5K — Camden-Wyoming
One of Delaware’s longtime fall races returns for its 20th anniversary at 10 a.m. at Fifer Orchards.
The Harvest Hustle benefits the American Cancer Society of Delaware and is held in memory of Patricia Vincent and Shelly Eckert.
The course takes runners and walkers through the countryside surrounding the farm, including a stretch through the apple orchard.
Participants and their families also receive admission to Fifer’s U-Play and corn maze, making the fundraiser an opportunity for a family outing.
Sunday, Nov. 8: Walking together for others
Walking Beside Kaden 5K Run/Walk — Newark
The Walking Beside Kaden 5K begins at 10 a.m. at Autumn Arch Beer Project on Pencader Drive.
The event supports Kaden Dennis, a young child whose experience with epilepsy inspired his family to create a fundraiser benefiting the Epilepsy Foundation of Delaware.
The organization provides awareness, advocacy and resources for individuals and families affected by epilepsy.
The race includes a dedicated competitive walking division, giving walkers an opportunity to participate without running. Teams and individual participants also can raise additional money for the cause.
Jack o’ Lantern Revenge 5K — Wilmington
The Jack o’ Lantern Revenge 5K begins at 10 a.m. at Kelly’s Logan House in Wilmington.
The race benefits the Trauma Survivors Foundation, which supports people affected by traumatic experiences, including first responders and health care workers.
The organization also uses proceeds to support its annual Thanksgiving meal for police officers and other first responders working on the holiday.
The event welcomes runners and walkers of different ages and abilities and concludes with a community celebration in Trolley Square.
Looking ahead: Bishop’s 5K returns with a new name Nov. 21
The charitable running season continues Saturday, Nov. 21, when the Diocese of Wilmington hosts its annual Bishop’s 5K, now renamed the Igniting Hope 5K.
The event will take place from 9 to 11 a.m. at Saint Mark’s High School in Pike Creek, with registration beginning at 8 a.m.
Organized to benefit Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Wilmington, the race supports programs that provide food, emergency shelter, housing assistance, counseling and other services to individuals and families experiencing hardship.
The organization serves communities across Delaware and Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Last year’s Bishop’s 5K attracted 260 participants, raised nearly $30,000 and collected 75 pounds of donated food for people in need.
This year’s organizers are encouraging families, businesses, churches, schools and community groups to form teams. The event includes activities for children, food and refreshments.
Registration is $40 for adults and $25 for participants 18 and younger, with adult pricing scheduled to increase after Nov. 10. Walkers are welcome.
Participants are also encouraged to bring nonperishable food donations to support Catholic Charities’ hunger relief programs.
The race offers another example of how a community fitness event can help an organization provide assistance long after participants cross the finish line.
A small commitment can make a difference
For Delaware residents who have been thinking about becoming more active, participating in a charitable 5K can be a practical first step.
Walking regularly can improve cardiovascular fitness, support healthy weight management and help reduce stress. Participating with friends or family members can also provide encouragement to maintain an active lifestyle.
And unlike some competitive sporting events, many community 5Ks emphasize participation and charitable support as much as finishing times.
Whether someone runs the entire course, walks with friends or volunteers along the route, the weekend offers opportunities to improve personal well-being while helping others.
For Delaware’s nonprofit organizations, that combination of exercise, generosity and community involvement is what makes a charity 5K about much more than a race.
Registration fees and deadlines vary. Visit each event’s registration page for participation information, costs and any last-minute changes.
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Editor’s calendar note: The former Bishop’s 5K is confirmed for Saturday, Nov. 21, not the immediately following weekend of Nov. 14. Also, the Jack o’ Lantern Revenge 5K and Delaware Dash for Rare use the same Wilmington venue.
Cash and Target gift cards collected through Dec. 7 will help local children shop for gifts, clothing and other necessities
DOVER, Del. — The Dover Police Department is asking residents and businesses to help make the holidays brighter for local children by supporting its 14th annual Holiday Heroes program.
The department is accepting cash and Target gift cards through Monday, Dec. 7, for the annual shopping event, which pairs Dover police officers and department staff with children selected with the help of Capital School District teachers and counselors.
The children are taken on a shopping trip to the Dover Target, where they can choose gifts for family members and themselves while also purchasing everyday necessities such as winter coats, shoes and hygiene products.
The amount raised will help determine how many children are able to participate.
Community support drives program
Holiday Heroes is supported by donations from residents, local businesses and Target, a longtime partner in the program.
The goal is to give children from families facing financial challenges an opportunity to enjoy the experience of holiday shopping while also helping meet practical needs.
Dover Police said the program has become an annual tradition connecting officers and department employees with children and families in the community.
Donation rules changed this year
People who have donated by check in previous years should note that updated purchasing policies mean the department can accept only cash or Target gift cards for the 2026 program.
Target eGiftCards also may be purchased online and emailed directly to the department.
TO GO
What: Dover Police Department’s 14th annual Holiday Heroes program
Deadline: Monday, Dec. 7, 2026
Donate in person: Cash or Target gift cards may be dropped off at the Dover Police Department, 400 S. Queen St., Dover. Identify the donation as a Holiday Heroes contribution.
Donate by mail: Send Target gift cards to Dover Police Department, Attn: Holiday Heroes, 400 S. Queen St., Dover, DE 19904. Mailed donations should arrive by Dec. 7.
Donate electronically: Purchase a Target eGiftCard at Target.com and have it delivered to contact@doverpolice.org.
Accepted donations: Cash and Target gift cards only.
The 10-day general firearm deer season runs Friday, Nov. 11 through Sunday, Nov. 22, and typically accounts for about 40% of Delaware’s annual deer harvest, according to the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control. Image created on 11/6 using AI.
Hunters in parts of Sussex County face mandatory check stations as state responds to first confirmed cases of chronic wasting disease
DOVER, Del. — Delaware’s most popular deer hunting season opens Friday, Nov. 13, but this year hunters will head into the woods under new rules designed to contain chronic wasting disease after the fatal wildlife disease was detected in the state for the first time.
The 10-day general firearm deer season runs through Sunday, Nov. 22, and typically accounts for about 40% of Delaware’s annual deer harvest, according to the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control.
The biggest change affects hunters in Wildlife Management Zones 11, 14 and 16 in Sussex County, which DNREC has designated as Delaware’s Chronic Wasting Disease Management Zone.
Any deer harvested in those zones during the general firearm season must be brought to a DNREC check station, where wildlife officials will collect samples for CWD testing.
Delaware has confirmed three cases of chronic wasting disease in wild white-tailed deer this year. The first, announced in April, was also the first confirmed case on the Delmarva Peninsula. A third case announced in September prompted DNREC to expand its management zone to include Wildlife Management Zone 11.
Why CWD matters
Chronic wasting disease is a fatal neurological disease affecting deer, elk, moose and other members of the deer family.
It is caused by abnormal proteins known as prions that can spread through saliva, blood, urine, feces and contaminated soil, food or water. There is no treatment or vaccine, and infected deer ultimately die from the disease.
No transmission of CWD to humans has been documented. However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that hunters in areas where CWD is present have deer tested before eating the meat and not consume meat from animals that test positive.
Delaware had tested deer for CWD for more than two decades before detecting its first case this year. DNREC says it has tested nearly 13,000 samples since surveillance began in 2003.
Mandatory check stations
Hunters who take deer in Wildlife Management Zones 11, 14 or 16 during the Nov. 13-22 firearm season must report to one of three check stations:
The stations will operate from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. each day of the firearm season.
Hunters should bring their deer registration information, including the new QR code generated during registration. Hunters without the QR code can still have their deer sampled.
Deer harvested outside the management zone may also be voluntarily submitted for testing. Hunters can drop deer heads at designated Delaware Hunters Against Hunger locations, and DNREC staff also plan to collect samples at selected deer processors in Middletown, Camden and Milton.
Movement and bait restrictions
DNREC has also imposed restrictions intended to reduce opportunities for CWD to spread.
Baiting and feeding deer are prohibited within the management zone, and natural urine-based deer attractants are prohibited statewide. Hunters moving deer harvested inside the management zone to other parts of Delaware also face special transportation and disposal requirements.
DNREC adopted emergency regulations after the first CWD cases were discovered and expanded the management area following the third confirmed case in September.
Other hunting rules changed this year
CWD is not the only change hunters will notice during the 2026-27 season.
Delaware expanded Sunday hunting to all game species, broadened the types of straight-walled pistol-caliber rifles and muzzleloaders that can be used and eliminated the minimum-age requirement for DNREC special youth hunts.
State law also now allows 16- and 17-year-olds who have completed basic hunter education to hunt and practice shooting without direct adult supervision if they have permission from a parent or guardian.
DNREC has published an addendum to its 2026-27 Hunting and Trapping Guide outlining the CWD rules and other regulatory changes.
Hunters part of the response
Wildlife officials say the concentrated firearm season gives Delaware an opportunity to collect a large number of samples in a short period and better determine how widely the disease has spread.
DNREC Wildlife Section Administrator Joe Rogerson said information gathered during the season will help officials assess the disease’s distribution and prevalence and shape Delaware’s approach for the 2027-28 hunting season.
That makes this year’s deer harvest about more than recreation.
Thousands of hunters heading into Delaware’s woods this month will also provide wildlife managers with information that could influence how the state manages its deer population for years to come.
To Go
What: Delaware general firearm deer season
When: Friday, Nov. 13, through Sunday, Nov. 22
CWD requirement: Deer harvested in Wildlife Management Zones 11, 14 and 16 must be brought to a DNREC check station during the firearm season.
Check station hours: 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily
Learn more: DNREC’s Chronic Wasting Disease page and the 2026-27 Delaware Hunting and Trapping Guide contain regulations, maps, testing information and updates.
Archmere senior Grace Mahoney rises up for a kill in the Auks first round game against Charter School of Wilmington in the 2026 DIAA Girls Volleyball State Tournament. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder
The first round of the 2026 DIAA Girls Volleyball State Tournament is complete with all the higher seeds moving on to the second round.
CLAYMONT, Del. — The Archmere Auks defeated the Charter School of Wilmington Forces, 3-0, in the first round of the 2026 DIAA Girls Volleyball State Tournament on November 5.
The Auks took control of the match early in set one scoring six straight points to take a 8-3 lead at the start of the set. The Forces fought back to cut the Auk lead to three near the middle of the frame, but the Auks rattled off another run of five straight points to spring ahead by six. The final point of that run came on a Caroline Hahn kill after a couple diving efforts from Archmere’s back line players — including senior Madeline Frampton — kept the possession alive garnering cheers from the Archmere contingent of fans. The Auks won the first set, 25-16.
“Most importantly what I saw tonight was the ability to keep the ball in play,” Archmere head coach Jerry McCarthy said postgame. “Our back row with Michaela [Iacono] and Maddie and Olivia [Borsello] and then the setters in and out, you know, what do you say? They kept the ball in play and they gave us the ability to terminate and get the point.”
Archmere held Charter School of Wilmington to 13 points in the second set and won the frame, 25-13. Six different Auks recorded a kill in the set and the team was paced by senior Grace Mahoney and junior Brooke Maddox who each had four kills in the set.
The Auks won the final set getting significant contributions from their serving unit. The Auks recorded seven aces in the set from Frampton and fellow senior Michaela Iacono.
“Tonight they were 100 percent focused and they wanted to move on,” McCarthy said. “I think the serving can make us dangerous throughout the tournament.”
Archmere junior Vivienne Govatos sets the ball for a teammate during the Auks first round game against the Forces. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder
Mahoney led the team with four kills in the frame and freshman Elise Shahan earned the game winning kill with a hit to the back left corner of the court.
Shahan’s score secured the Auks’ their fifth straight second round appearance in the DIAA Girls Volleyball State Tournament and an upcoming battle with No. 8 Sussex Central. Archmere and Sussex Central will play their second round game on Saturday, November 7, at 6:00 p.m.
More First Round Games:
No. 10 Lake Forest defeated No. 23 Sussex Academy, 3-0: Spartan junior, Coryn Louder, led the team with 13 kills, helping Lake Forest defeat Sussex Academy for the second time this season. The Spartans will play No. 7 Dover on Friday, November 6.
No. 11 St. Georges defeated No. 22 Delmarva Christian Academy, 3-0: Sophomores Jocelyn Ball and Lena Garland combined for 29 kills in the Hawks first round win. The Hawks are advancing to the second round for the second time in the last three seasons. St. Georges will play No. 6 Saint Mark’s on Friday, November 6.
No. 12 Appoquinimink defeated No. 21 Wilmington Friends, 3-0: Four Jaguar players recorded five or more kills in their win over the Quakers, Thursday night. Appoquinimink senior Julia Sobczynski led the team with ten kills and juniors Riley Robino and Bridget Archer contributed to the win with 22 assists and 16 digs, respectively. The Jaguars face No. 5 Tower Hill in the second round.
No. 13 Caravel defeated No. 20 Concord, 3-0: The Buccaneers earned their first win against the Raiders this season and held Concord to 15 points or less in each set. Caravel will face No. 4 Newark Charter on Friday, November 6.
No. 14 Cape Henlopen defeated No. 19 Sanford, 3-0: Six different Vikings recorded a kill in Cape Henlopen’s opening round victory. The Vikings are moving on to the second round of the DIAA Girls Volleyball State Tournament for the third season in a row and will face No. 3 Padua in the next round. Senior Camilla Willis led the Vikings with eight kills in the game.
No. 14 Smyrna defeated No. 18 Mount Pleasant, 3-1: The Eagles continued their strong run of play earning their fifth straight victory and a ticket to the second round of the 2026 DIAA Girls Volleyball State Tournament. Smyrna has made it to the second round in every season since 2020 and won the state championship in 2023. Smyrna will move on to play No. 2 Middletown on Saturday.
Smyrna senior Emma Mayew keeps a ball in play during one of Smyrna’s regular season games. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder
No. 16 Conrad defeated No. 17 Delaware Military Academy, 3-1: Similarly to these two teams’ first game in early October, this matchup was close throughout. Conrad sophomore Delani Camilli led the way for the Red Wolves with 19 kills and one ace. Junior setter Payton Singleton contributed 24 assists and three Red Wolves each had three aces, helping Conrad reach the second round of the DIAA Girls Volleyball State Tournament for the first time since 2019.
Image: The contributions of veterans extend far beyond the battlefield. Generations of Americans have served to defend the nation, protect its constitutional system and preserve the freedoms that shape everyday life — from voting and speaking freely to building businesses, raising families and pursuing individual dreams. Created with AI on 11/6
Parades, ceremonies, free meals and opportunities to volunteer offer Delawareans ways to recognize military service and the freedoms veterans have helped preserve.
DOVER, Del. — Delawareans will honor the men and women who served in the U.S. Armed Forces with parades, ceremonies, community events and special offers as the state prepares to observe Veterans Day on Wednesday, Nov. 11.
Events begin Saturday with a parade in Dover and a veterans luncheon in Georgetown. Additional observances are scheduled in Wilmington, New Castle and Milford.
Businesses and public agencies will also offer free meals, transportation and other benefits to veterans. For residents looking to participate, organizations throughout Delaware provide opportunities to volunteer and support veterans year-round.
Why Veterans Day matters
Veterans Day began as Armistice Day, marking the end of fighting in World War I on Nov. 11, 1918. In 1954, the holiday was renamed Veterans Day to recognize Americans who served in the military during war and peacetime.
Unlike Memorial Day, which specifically honors those who died while serving, Veterans Day recognizes all who have worn the nation’s uniform, living and deceased.
The contributions of veterans extend far beyond the battlefield. Generations of Americans have served to defend the nation, protect its constitutional system and preserve the freedoms that shape everyday life — from voting and speaking freely to building businesses, raising families and pursuing individual dreams.
That service often comes with considerable personal sacrifice, including time away from families, physical injuries and challenges that can continue long after military service ends.
Many veterans also continue contributing to their communities as teachers, business owners, first responders, volunteers and civic leaders.
Veterans Day is an opportunity to remember that the security, freedoms and opportunities Americans enjoy have been protected through generations of military service.
Attend: Veterans Day events in Delaware
Saturday, Nov. 7 — Dover Veterans Day Parade and Festival
Dover’s Veterans Day parade begins at 11 a.m., celebrating military service and America’s 250th anniversary.
The parade starts at Jerusalem Way and Forrest Street, travels through downtown and concludes at Water Street. A community celebration featuring speakers and veterans organizations will take place near Legislative Hall. Admission is free.
Saturday, Nov. 7 — Veterans Luncheon in Georgetown
A free luncheon and ceremony honoring veterans will be held from 10 a.m. to noon at 40 Ingramtown Road in Georgetown.
Veterans and guests are invited. RSVP by calling 302-856-4551.
Nov. 7-10 — Free Admission at Hagley Museum
Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington will offer veterans free general admission Saturday through Tuesday.
Beginning Nov. 7, the museum will also conduct daily signal cannon demonstrations at 1 p.m., weather permitting.
Wednesday, Nov. 11 — Veterans Breakfast in Wilmington
Delaware Technical Community College will host a Veterans Day breakfast from 8 to 9:15 a.m. at its Wilmington campus, 300 N. Orange St.
A continental breakfast will be served. Information: 302-571-5305.
Wednesday, Nov. 11 — Delaware Memorial Bridge Ceremony
The Delaware Commission of Veterans Affairs will hold its annual ceremony from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. at War Memorial Plaza, 163 Cherry Lane, New Castle.
The event is hosted by the Delaware River and Bay Authority.
Wednesday, Nov. 11 — Veterans Ceremony in Dover
Kent County Veterans Memorial Park will host a ceremony from 2 to 4 p.m. recognizing 250 years of American military service.
Retired Brig. Gen. Karen A. Berry, Delaware’s first secretary of Veterans Affairs, is scheduled to deliver the keynote address.
The park is located at 760-816 S. Little Creek Road in Dover.
Saturday, Nov. 14 — Special Forces Veteran Speaks in Milford
Christopher VanSant, a retired Delta Force soldier and Caesar Rodney High School graduate, will speak at 1 p.m. at the Milford Public Library, 11 S.E. Front St.
VanSant served in 11 combat deployments and will discuss his military experiences, the challenges of injury and recovery, and his transition to civilian life.
The program is sponsored by the Milford Museum and Milford Public Library.
Veterans offers: Free meals, transportation and discounts
Veterans and active-duty military personnel can take advantage of special promotions on Nov. 11. Most require proof of service, and participation varies by location.
DART Offers Free Rides Statewide
DART First State will provide free rides on its statewide bus services to veterans presenting qualifying military identification or a DD Form 214. Certain spouses and partners with qualifying identification are also eligible.
Several national restaurant chains are advertising Veterans Day promotions:
Applebee’s: Free entrée from a special Veterans Day menu.
Chili’s: Free meal from a select menu.
Denny’s: Free Original Grand Slam breakfast, 5 a.m. to noon.
Red Lobster: Free Shrimp & Chips.
Red Robin: Free Red’s Big Tavern Burger and bottomless fries.
Golden Corral: Free buffet during its Military Appreciation Night.
Wendy’s: Free Dave’s Single at participating Flynn Group-operated restaurants.
Starbucks: Free 12-ounce brewed coffee for eligible veterans, service members and military spouses.
Great Clips and Sport Clips are also advertising haircut promotions, while participating national parks will waive entrance fees Nov. 11.
Veterans should confirm offers before visiting. Promotions may be limited to participating locations, and identification, dine-in or other conditions may apply.
Give back: Supporting Delaware veterans year-round
Veterans Day is an opportunity to express appreciation, but the needs of veterans and their families continue long after the ceremonies end.
Volunteer at the Delaware Veterans Home
The Delaware Veterans Home in Milford welcomes community support through donations and volunteer activities, including reading, music, arts, gardening and special events.
The Wilmington VA Medical Center offers volunteer opportunities assisting patients, providing transportation support and helping with hospital programs.
Residents can honor veterans by inviting them to speak at schools or civic organizations, writing letters of appreciation, supporting local veterans groups or helping preserve veterans’ personal histories.
Churches, Scout units, businesses and neighborhood organizations can organize activities that continue throughout the year.
Remembering those who served
The Wilmington VA recently recognized World War II Marine Corps veteran Robert Leroy James Quinn with its 2026 Wall of Honor award.
Quinn, a Purple Heart recipient who fought in the Pacific campaign, died in 2025 shortly before his 101st birthday.
His daughter, Karen Quinn, encouraged veterans to share their stories with their children and families.
Her message reflects the broader meaning of Veterans Day: preserving the experiences of those who served while recognizing the sacrifices made by veterans and their families.
For Delawareans, Veterans Day is more than a single day of remembrance. It is an opportunity to recognize that the freedoms, security and opportunities of American life have been preserved through generations of military service.
Attending a ceremony, listening to a veteran’s story or offering meaningful support are ways to ensure that service is never taken for granted.
Editor’s note: Event details and Veterans Day promotions are subject to change. Readers should confirm information with organizers or participating businesses before attending.
‘Low-hire, low-fire’ labor market shows sluggish growth but few layoffs, with an interest rate hike expected in December
The US added 165,000 jobs to the economy in October, a sign of resilience in the labor market amid war in the Middle East and inflation, according to new data released on Friday.
Economists had said the labor market has been stuck in a “low-hire, low-fire” state, in which job growth is sluggish but layoffs also remain low, but October’s data surpassed economist expectations. The unemployment rate went down slightly to 4.1%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported.
Why Should Delaware Care? “The Delaware Way” was on full display during Georgetown’s biannual Return Day celebration, where winning and losing political candidates alike gathered in the Sussex County seat as a show of statewide unity in the face of political differences. But during this year’s celebrations, the message of unity was undercut, at times, by moments where partisanship peeked out.
Dozens of Delaware’s newly elected officials, along with some of their losing opponents in this week’s midterm elections, gathered together in Georgetown on Thursday to literally “bury the hatchet” as part of a centuries-old celebration of post-campaign unity in the Sussex County seat.
Return Day — which dates back to at least 1811, and even earlier by some accounts — is a biannual tradition in which Election Day winners and losers from up and down Delaware’s ballot ride together in a parade through the center of Georgetown, the Circle.
And many historians agree that Sussex County is the only place in the country with a post-election celebration tradition like this one.
The all-day festival also features hatchet-burying ceremony, where Sussex County’s Democratic and Republican Party leaders literally and proverbially “bury the hatchet” in a box of sand from nearby Lewes Beach. The tradition is meant to symbolize the end to a contentious campaign season and declare a renewed sense of camaraderie and commitment to “The Delaware Way.”
“Today, we are all Americans. Not Democrats, not Republicans — all Americans,” Sussex County Republican Party Chair Tom Molnar said after burying the hatchet with his Democratic counterpart, Loretta Benson.
As Georgetown Town Crier Kirk Lawson and Sussex County Sheriff Robert Lee read the election results from a balcony on the county courthouse building, attendees clapped for the candidates and munched on barbecued ox sandwiches, another Return Day tradition.
But while the day’s events proceeded as planned, there were some hints that politicians and attendees alike may no longer heed the day’s message of First State unity amid an increasingly politically polarized climate.
Parading through Georgetown
More than a thousand people gathered in and around The Circle in Georgetown to witness the day’s festivities, which some attendees described as a showcase of Delaware’s unique collegiality among elected officials and their opponents.
Julianna Puchalsky-Szabo and Erle Eaton, who recently moved to Georgetown from Nevada, said the event struck them as an introduction to “what Delaware has to offer.”
More than 1,000 people gathered in Georgetown to celebrate Return Day. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY TIM CARLIN
“It’s kind of a nice model,” Eaton said. “Delaware just being the First State, leading the way. I don’t think other states have that in them.”
The roughly hour-long parade featured a couple dozen candidates from Tuesday’s election riding in a mix of old-timey carriages, truck beds and cars decorated with their campaign logos. The candidates were interspersed with lively marching band music from various local high schools and universities and a showing of classic cars.
Historically, the winners and losers of any given race ride together in the parade, but this year that tradition seemed to have faded.
Some pairs of candidates kept the tradition alive, like Attorney General Kathy Jennings and her opponent Dave Graham, State Auditor Lydia York and her opponent April Callaway, Rep. Bryan Shupe (R-Milford South) and his opponent Andy Gorlich, state Representative-Elect Carlie Carey (R-Frankford) and her opponent Maureen Madden, and state Senator-Elect Emily Thompson (R-Hartly) and her opponent Nisha Lodhavia.
Losing Democratic candidate Joshua Pennington also rode with the winning Republican Morgan Hudson, who will now represent their Milford-area House district. Pennington said he and Hudson “very much stayed cordial” throughout the campaign, so they wanted to ride together in the parade.
“We both agreed to physically show bipartisanship,” Pennington said. “Delaware is a more purple state than anything, and we all know each other most of the time, so it’s very indicative of what Delaware can look like.”
In other cases, a grouping of candidates of the same party rode together, like Jill Hicks and Justine Cuccia, the Democratic candidates for Sussex County Council, and Republican Councilmen Doug Hudson and Matt Lloyd.
Some losing candidates in closely watched races, including Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Katz, incumbent Sussex County Councilman John Rieley, and Democratic statehouse candidate Ryan Stuckey did not participate in the parade at all.
Instead of riding in a traditional carriage, the other Republican federal candidate, Joe Arminio walked the parade, wearing a safari helmet and bouncing around to shake hands and pass out pamphlets about his policy platform.
After a series of marching band performances from Sussex County high schools, a group walking from the Daughters of the American Revolution dressed in traditional Revolutionary War-era garb and local beauty pageant winners, the parade concluded with a lively performance by the Delaware State University marching band.
Some pairs of candidates, like state Senator-Elect Emily Thompson (R-Hartly) and her Democratic opponent Nisha Lodhavia, kept up the Return Day tradition of candidates riding in the parade together. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JACOB OWENS
“The vilification of one another is not the Delaware Way,” Hunter Landon, a WBOC news anchor who served as the event’s master of ceremonies, said after the parade concluded.
And while unity was the message of the day, some attendees still shared their dissatisfaction with Tuesday’s election results while Lawson, the town crier, read the vote tabulations aloud.
People generally cheered for winners, and sometimes losers, too. But when Lawson read the results of the 41st House District race, a smattering of boos at John Atkins’ win echoed through the crowd.
Atkins, who faced controversy throughout the campaign season over his past domestic violence convictions, was the only candidate audibly booed during the ceremony. He has previously said those incidents are safely in his past after committing himself to his faith. Atkins won with more than 53% of the vote Tuesday night.
What is Return Day?
Held on the Thursday after Election Day on even-numbered years, Return Day celebrates the tradition of Sussex County residents — who once had to travel to Georgetown, the county seat, to cast their ballots – returning to hear the results from those elections read aloud by the town crier.
Georgetown native Russ McCabe, who served as this year’s “expert color commentator” and is the former state archivist, said the first Return Day was held in 1811, after the county started splitting up voting by election districts.
Other accounts trace the event’s start date back to 1792, when the county seat was moved from Lewes to Georgetown, but McCabe said he believes the true beginnings were a couple decades later, when representatives from the newly created election districts had to come to Georgetown to tabulate the results.
The event expanded from a simple gathering to tally the votes to a bigger event with a parade and elected officials from the northern two counties coming down to participate in the 1830s or 1840s, he said.
“There would be excursion trains where the candidates for a party would charter a train to come down to Georgetown,” McCabe, who has attended every Return Day of his life, said.
The day’s parade historically featured opposing candidates riding together in horse drawn carriages, with the winner facing forward and the loser facing backward. Nowadays the carriages have largely been replaced with convertibles or other vintage cruisers, and opposing candidates do not face different directions — or sometimes ride together at all.
A slew of Delaware’s newly elected officials, along with some of their losing opponents in this week’s midterm elections, gathered together in Georgetown on Thursday to literally “bury the hatchet” as part of a centuries-old celebration of post-campaign unity in the Sussex County seat. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JACOB OWENS
State Senator-elect Emily Thompson (R-Hartly) and her Democratic opponent Nisha Lodhavia ride together during the 2026 Return Day parade. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY TIM CARLIN
A Delaware State Police bug. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY TIM CARLIN
The Georgetown Town Crier and Sussex County Sheriff read the 2026 midterm election results aloud. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JACOB OWENS
Statewide unity was the theme of the day, and political opponents stood side by side to literally bury the hatchet. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY TIM CARLIN
Sussex County Democratic Party Chair Loretta Benson leads Delaware GOP Vice Chair Dan Willis and Sussex County GOP Chair Tom Molnar during the Return Day Parade. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JACOB OWENS
More than 1,000 people gathered in the Circle in Georgetown to celebrate Return Day. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY TIM CARLIN
Delaware’s Auditor of Accounts Lydia York rode in the parade alongside her Republican challenger April Callaway. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY TIM CARLIN
The Georgetown Town Crier read election results aloud from a balcony within the Sussex County Courthouse. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY TIM CARLIN
A furry face takes part in the 2026 Return Day parade. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY TIM CARLIN
Delaware Attorney General KAthy Jennings waves to the audience during the 2026 Return Day ceremony. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY TIM CARLIN
State Representative-elect Ayanna Khan-Flowers danced her way through the Return Day parade. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JACOB OWENS
A parade-goer snaps their own photo of one of the many classic cars that took part in the parade. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JACOB OWENS
Multiple generations took part in the Return Day festivities. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY TIM CARLIN
Rep. Bryan Shupe (R-Milford) rode alongside his Democratic challenger Andy Gorlich during the parade. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY TIM CARLIN
A Member of the Delaware State University March Band plays the trumpet during the Return Day Parade. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY TIM CARLIN
Outgoing State Treasurer Colleen Davis embraces the newly elected Kent County Recorder of Deeds Ramona Bracy. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JACOB OWENS
Some parade participants rode through on two wheels as opposed to four. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY TIM CARLIN
Democratic candidates pose for a photo during the Return Day celebration. SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY TIM CARLIN
Another lifelong Return Day attendee, Georgetown resident Patti Towers, walked in the parade this year in 18th-century attire as part of the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Towers described the day as a meaningful way to honor tradition and “mingle” with other community members.
“If we can come together for one day, we can come together a lot more,” she said.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Sen. Bernie Sanders is urging Democrats to use their sweeping midterm victory to revive Medicare for All, arguing that voters expect the party to deliver major changes on health care and affordability rather than simply oppose President Donald Trump.
Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, said the party should move beyond defending the existing system and pursue universal health coverage through a single-payer program. His proposal would expand Medicare to all Americans while eliminating premiums, deductibles and most out-of-pocket costs.
The push comes as Democrats debate what mandate voters gave them after taking control of both the House and Senate. Party leaders have emphasized more immediate goals, including reversing Medicaid cuts, extending Affordable Care Act subsidies and lowering prescription-drug and household costs. Progressives, however, argue the results justify a broader economic agenda.
Sanders has pointed to recent research estimating that a Medicare for All system could reduce overall U.S. health spending by more than $1 trillion annually, though the proposal remains politically divisive and would require a fundamental restructuring of how Americans receive health insurance.
Even before the election, Sanders acknowledged that Medicare for All did not have majority support within the Democratic Senate caucus. That means the party’s new congressional majorities do not automatically translate into enough votes to enact it.
The debate is likely to become one of the clearest tests of how aggressively Democrats use their new power in Washington.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump blamed voters and Democrats for Thursday’s sharp stock-market sell-off, just one day after claiming personal credit for a post-election rally.
“The Stock Market crashed today because the Dumocrats had a big Tuesday,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding that Americans had “only yourselves to blame.” In another post, Trump blamed Democratic election victories for falling 401(k) balances.
The comments represented a dramatic reversal from Wednesday, when Trump celebrated record market levels and told Americans their retirement accounts were “through the roof.” That rally occurred immediately after Democrats captured both chambers of Congress.
Thursday erased those gains. The Dow fell 3.4%, the S&P 500 dropped 4.4%, and the Nasdaq plunged 5.5%, its worst performance since the 2025 tariff shock.
Investors were particularly concerned about AI and semiconductor stocks. Reuters reported that fears of tougher Democratic scrutiny of massive data-center projects contributed to the sell-off, alongside concerns about high borrowing costs, debt and whether enormous AI investments will generate sufficient returns.
The contrast is striking: Trump credited himself when stocks rose following a Democratic victory, then blamed those same election results — and voters themselves — when markets fell one day later.
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is not currently being considered to replace Sen. Marsha Blackburn when she leaves the Senate to become Tennessee’s governor, according to a person familiar with the private discussions.
Blackburn, who won the governor’s race Tuesday, plans to remain in the Senate until she takes office in January. She would then appoint a replacement to serve until the next statewide election. Rep. Tim Burchett has already said he wants the appointment, telling the Associated Press, “Absolutely. Absolutely.”
Hegseth had been mentioned as a possible contender, particularly as questions grow about his future at the Pentagon. But the source said Blackburn is focused on her transition and described talk of appointing Hegseth as speculation rather than an active plan.
At the same time, Hegseth faces renewed impeachment pressure in Washington. Republican Rep. Thomas Massie says he plans to force a House vote when lawmakers return for the lame-duck session, with several Republicans reportedly open to supporting the effort.
Hegseth has dismissed the impeachment push as political retaliation, while President Donald Trump publicly said Wednesday that he believes Hegseth is “doing a very good job.”
For now, the Tennessee succession contest appears to be moving forward without Hegseth.
TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA — The Council on American-Islamic Relations has suspended operations in Florida after a federal judge declined to block the state’s designation of CAIR and its Florida chapter as “domestic terrorist organizations.”
The designation stems from a 2026 Florida law allowing state officials to identify domestic terrorist organizations and restrict their access to public funding, contracts and other benefits. The law also creates penalties for certain forms of material support.
U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor, a Trump appointee, acknowledged that Florida’s designation system is unusual but rejected CAIR’s request for emergency relief. He did not resolve the lawsuit’s broader constitutional claims.
CAIR and the ACLU argue the law violates First Amendment protections for speech and association as well as due-process rights. The ACLU says it plans to appeal.
An important distinction is that CAIR is not designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government, and the organization has not been accused by federal authorities of carrying out terrorist attacks. Florida’s action is a state designation under its newly created system.
The dispute is separate from Gov. Ron DeSantis’ 2025 executive order targeting CAIR, which another federal ruling previously blocked on First Amendment grounds. That litigation also remains ongoing.
Delaware’s latest government efficiency report shows how artificial intelligence can help voters look beyond official press releases, examine the facts and make better-informed decisions about government performance.
DOVER, Del. — For generations, voters have relied on government officials, news organizations and political campaigns to explain how government is performing and how their tax dollars are being spent.
But those explanations often come through press releases designed to highlight accomplishments, defend policies or promote the priorities of elected officials.
The full story may be buried in lengthy government reports, budgets and financial documents that few citizens have the time or expertise to examine.
Artificial intelligence is beginning to change that relationship between voters and government.
Today, an ordinary Delaware voter can upload a government press release and the full report behind it into an AI tool and ask a simple question: “Does this press release accurately represent what the report says?”
What once might have required hours of research can now begin in minutes, giving voters a new opportunity to evaluate government claims for themselves.
Delaware LIVE recently tested that capability using Gov. Matt Meyer’s Nov. 5 announcement of the state’s 2026 Government Efficiency and Accountability Review (GEAR) annual report.
The results demonstrate how AI could become a valuable tool for government accountability — particularly for voters who want to judge elected officials by results rather than political messaging.
The $117 million question
The governor’s two-page press release highlighted approximately $117 million in estimated lifetime savings from 164 government improvement projects.
It pointed to reductions in state real estate expenses, the elimination of underused government vehicles, faster permitting and improved public services.
Those accomplishments are supported by the underlying 79-page GEAR report.
But when the press release and full report were compared using AI, an important qualification emerged.
The full report explains that the $117 million represents planning estimates rather than savings actually recorded in state budgets.
That’s a distinction taxpayers should understand.
Reducing the time employees spend processing government paperwork may make an agency more efficient. Eliminating unnecessary vehicles or negotiating lower rents can directly reduce spending.
But making an existing employee more productive does not automatically mean government costs taxpayers less.
The press release correctly described the savings as estimated, so the claim itself was not false. However, the full report provided information that could change how voters interpreted the number.
AI made that difference easier to discover.
What voters might not have learned from the announcement
The AI comparison also identified significant financial issues discussed in the full report but omitted from the governor’s announcement.
Among them:
A technology modernization initiative expected to cost more than $150 million. Delaware has already appropriated $130.5 million toward replacing aging state financial, payroll, pension and human resources systems. The report says total costs may exceed $150 million.
Rapidly rising state employee health benefit expenses. Gross spending on GLP-1 weight-loss medications is projected to increase from $84.1 million in fiscal 2026 to $127.5 million in fiscal 2027.
Additional costs associated with handgun permitting. The report estimates that implementing Delaware’s permit-to-purchase law would require 29 additional civilian employees and 10 sworn personnel positions.
The possibility of another permanent government office. GEAR proposes transitioning toward a multidisciplinary service-improvement operation, with decisions about permanent staffing and funding potentially coming in fiscal 2028.
None of these omissions establishes that the administration was deliberately misleading voters.
Government press releases are intended to summarize selected accomplishments, not reproduce every finding in a comprehensive report.
However, the comparison illustrates something important: What government chooses to tell voters may be accurate without being the complete picture.
And voters now have a practical way to investigate that difference.
Voters no longer have to accept the summary
For years, one of the challenges of government transparency has been that information can technically be public while remaining difficult for ordinary citizens to understand.
A school district may publish a 200-page budget. A county government may release a complicated financial review. State agencies may post reports filled with statistics, technical language and explanations of programs unfamiliar to most taxpayers.
Making those documents public is important. But availability alone does not guarantee understanding.
AI tools can help close that gap.
A voter can ask an AI system to explain a government budget in plain English, identify spending increases, compare current and previous reports or distinguish actual savings from projected financial benefits.
The same tools can help residents examine campaign statements, legislative proposals and the financial implications of public policies.
For example, a Delaware voter might ask:
Did this agency actually reduce spending, or did it simply spend less than originally projected?
Does the governor’s announcement describe accomplishments from the current administration or include work completed under previous governors?
What important financial risks appear in the full report but not in the public announcement?
Has a new government program achieved the goals that were promised when it was created?
How much will a proposed law cost taxpayers to implement?
These questions are not inherently Republican or Democratic.
They are the questions citizens should be able to ask of any government, regardless of which political party is in power.
A new advantage for the independent voter
The opportunity may be especially valuable for voters who do not automatically accept the interpretation offered by either political party.
Campaigns and elected officials naturally emphasize their accomplishments and criticize their opponents. Political organizations select facts that support their arguments.
Voters are left to determine which claims are accurate, which are exaggerated and which leave out important information.
AI cannot eliminate political bias, and AI systems can introduce inaccuracies or biases of their own. But when used to examine original documents, they can help voters move beyond competing political messages and focus on evidence.
Consider Delaware’s GEAR report.
A voter skeptical of government spending can use the document to question whether projected efficiencies have actually reduced the cost of state government.
A voter supportive of the administration can point to legitimate improvements in permitting, property management and public services.
Both conclusions can be informed by the same report.
The important development is that voters no longer have to depend exclusively on someone else’s interpretation to begin examining the evidence.
The technology still requires a skeptical eye
AI is not an infallible fact-checker. It can misunderstand financial information, overlook important context, misinterpret tables or reach incorrect conclusions.
A responsible voter should ask the system to identify the specific page or passage supporting an answer, then check that information against the original document.
When AI identifies a difference between a press release and the underlying report, that finding should prompt further questions rather than an immediate accusation of dishonesty.
The GEAR comparison is an example.
It revealed legitimate accomplishments, important financial qualifications and significant information that the press release did not discuss.
It did not establish that the governor or his administration falsified the report.
That’s an important distinction in a political environment where accusations can spread much faster than corrections.
The goal should be better-informed voters, not faster accusations.
Government accountability between elections
Voters generally have an opportunity to hold elected officials accountable at the ballot box every two or four years.
But the decisions that determine government performance happen throughout those years — when budgets are adopted, contracts are awarded, programs are expanded and regulations are implemented.
AI creates new possibilities for citizens to follow those decisions without needing advanced training in public finance or government administration.
A parent could examine whether increased school spending produced better educational outcomes.
A homeowner could compare county reassessment claims with underlying property and tax data.
A business owner could evaluate whether promised permitting reforms actually shortened approval times.
A taxpayer could review whether government efficiency initiatives eliminated expenses or simply moved employees and resources to different activities.
And as voters become more comfortable examining original documents, public officials may face greater pressure to provide clear, measurable and defensible explanations for their decisions.
That could strengthen accountability even when no election is approaching.
A more informed Delaware electorate
Delaware’s small size makes this opportunity particularly relevant.
State government, county councils, school boards and local municipalities make decisions that directly affect taxes, education, economic development, public safety and the cost of living.
Many of those decisions are documented in reports that are publicly accessible but seldom closely examined outside government.
AI will not replace informed judgment, public debate or independent journalism.
But it can put powerful research capabilities directly into the hands of voters who previously lacked the time, resources or expertise to examine government claims on their own.
The recent GEAR announcement demonstrates both the opportunity and the responsibility that comes with those capabilities.
The administration highlighted approximately $117 million in estimated efficiencies. The full report supported the figure but added important qualifications about what those savings represent.
Neither document needed to be dismissed. Instead, the comparison provided a more complete understanding of both.
For voters, that may be the most important lesson.
Government transparency is no longer simply about whether officials make information available. It is increasingly about whether citizens can use that information to independently evaluate what their government tells them.
And with AI, Delaware voters have a new way to do exactly that.
Editor’s note: Delaware LIVE used artificial intelligence to compare the Meyer administration’s Nov. 5, 2026, press release with the full 2026 GEAR annual report. The comparison examined financial claims, qualifications and significant information not included in the announcement. It was a document-based analysis, not an independent financial audit. AI-generated findings require verification against original sources.
SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA — California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Thursday that he intends to commute all 548 death sentences in the state to life without the possibility of parole, effectively clearing California’s death row if the required approvals are granted.
Newsom, who imposed a moratorium on executions in 2019, said capital punishment is incompatible with California’s values and has failed as a criminal justice policy. California has not carried out an execution since 2006.
The action covers 529 men and 19 women. Newsom can commute some sentences directly, but 382 cases involve prisoners with multiple felony convictions and therefore require approval from the California Supreme Court.
Newsom acknowledged the pain the decision may cause victims’ families, while supporters argued that the death penalty is costly, error-prone and applied unevenly. Opponents, including prosecutors and victims’ advocates, said a blanket commutation fails to account for the severity of individual crimes.
The move does not repeal California’s death penalty statute. Voters previously upheld capital punishment in statewide elections, meaning future governors could theoretically resume executions unless the law itself is changed.
Newsom’s announcement comes near the end of his second and final term as governor and amid widespread speculation about a possible 2028 presidential campaign.
Smyrna sophomore, Terrell Ingram, runs the ball against Red Lion in the Eagles first game of the season. Photo credit: Dave Reeder
The penultimate week in Delaware High School Football’s regular season begins this weekend (November 6 and 7) with critical matchups across the DIAA’s three classifications.
The Delaware High School Football postseason is fast approaching with only two weeks of regular season competition remaining. There are only a couple opportunities for teams on the playoff bubble to earn their way into the state tournament and only a couple shots for teams trying to win their district and a top-seed in the postseason.
With that being said, here are a few games throughout the state to keep an eye on:
Class 3A:
Smyrna vs Dover @ Dover at 6:00 p.m. on Friday, November 6
The Eagles are currently 3-0 in the Class 3A District Two standings and can win the district with a win against the Senators. Cape Henlopen and Caesar Rodney are both 2-1 in District Two, but Smyrna defeated both of them this season, giving the Eagles the tiebreaker should they all have the same record at the conclusion of the regular season.
Middletown vs Hodgson @ Middletown at 7:00 p.m. on Friday, November 6
Middletown’s win over Salesianum last week put the Cavaliers in the top spot of the Class 3A District One standings. The Cavaliers are undefeated in district play and have two more games against district opponents this season — Hodgson and Appoquinimink. The Cavaliers’ will most likely have to clinch the District One title when they face the Jaguars on November 13, but there is a chance they clinch the district this weekend. Middletown would need to win on Friday and Appoquinimink to lose on Saturday against William Penn. The Cavaliers hold the tiebreaker over Salesianum.
Class 2A:
Archmere vs Tower Hill @ Tower at 6:00 p.m. Friday, November 6
The Auks and Howard Wildcats are both 3-0 in Class 2A District One. The Tower Hill Hillers sit behind them in the standings at 2-1 and could play an integral role in how the district shakes out.
Should Tower Hill defeat Archmere on Friday, the Hillers would own the tiebreaker over the Auks. The Wildcats have already defeated the Hillers this season and Archmere and Howard play each other on November 14 during the regular season’s final week. All three of the teams could end the regular season with a 4-1 district record in which case the determination of who wins the district would come down to a series of tiebreakers that includes head-to-head matchups, overall winning percentage and fewest points allowed per game. With a win and a pair of Wildcats losses, Tower Hill could win the district outright.
Archmere will not be able to clinch the district this week no matter the outcome of this week’s games.
Odessa senior Thomas Ngateh leaps into the air and focuses on catching the ball for an interception against the Newark Charter Patriots earlier this season. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder
St. Mark’s vs Odessa @ Odessa at 7:00 p.m. on Friday, November 6
The Spartans own a Class 2A District Two record of 2-1 tied with Delaware Military Academy and a game behind the district leader Red Lion Christian Academy. The Red Lions lead the district with a 3-0 record. The Spartans and Red Lions play each other in the final week of the regular season.
Similarly to the scenario in Class 2A District One, should the Spartans win their next two games and finish with a 4-1 record alongside DMA and Red Lion there would be a three-way tie for the district winner. DMA defeated St. Mark’s earlier this season and Red Lion defeated DMA last week. Red Lion’s remaining schedule includes Polytech and St. Mark’s. DMA finishes the season with games against Milford and Odessa.
The district champion will come down to the results of the final week of the regular season.
Lake Forest vs Woodbridge @ Lake Forest at 7:00 p.m. on Friday, November 6
The Lake Forest Spartans currently lead the Class 2A District Three standings with a 3-0 district record and 7-1 overall record. The Spartans have a chance to clinch the district title if they win their matchup against the Blue Raiders on Friday and Indian River is defeated in its week nine game against Delmar. Should Indian River win in this scenario, the district would come down to the final game of the regular season when Lake Forest plays Indian River.
There is also a scenario in which Woodbridge comes out atop the district three standings. The Blue Raiders would have to win both their games against Lake Forest and Sussex Tech and the Indians would have to lose one of their next two games. Sussex Tech could win the district with a pair of Lake Forest losses and a pair of wins against Laurel and Woodbridge.
Class 1A:
Concord vs John Dickinson @ Concord at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, November 7
The Concord Raiders and Brandywine Bulldogs are tied for the top spot in the Class 1A District One standings with 3-0 district records. Dickinson remains a game behind the pair with a district record of 2-1, the lone loss to Brandywine. Neither the Raiders nor Bulldogs can clinch a district crown during this weekend, but Dickinson could fall out of the race with a loss to the Raiders. A Concord win would make their game against the Bulldogs in week ten the deciding game.
Should Dickinson defeat Concord and win its week ten matchup against AI duPont, the Rams could force a three-way tie for first place. In that scenario, Concord would need to beat the Bulldogs in week ten and the Bulldogs would need to win against McKean this weekend.
Charter School of Wilmington vs Christiana @ Charter School of Wilmington at 11:00 a.m. on Saturday, November 7
The Forces are currently second in the Class 1A District Two standings with a district record of 2-1. Conrad leads the district with an undefeated district record and two more games left on their schedule. Should Conrad win and the Forces lose to Christiana, the Red Wolves would win the district this weekend. A Forces win would make their game against the Red Wolves in week ten the deciding game in the district.
Newark Charter senior Cayden Anderson leaps over the defender to make the catch in Newark Charter’s game against Seaford. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder
Newark Charter vs St. Andrew’s @ St. Andrew’s at 1:00 p.m. on Saturday, November 7
The Patriots are undefeated both overall and in district play this season and have a chance at winning Class 1A District Three title with a win on Saturday afternoon. The Saints could make the race interesting if they defeat the Patriots.
A win would put St. Andrew’s ahead of Newark Charter in the standings with a 3-0 record and a week ten matchup against Seaford to close out the regular season. Should the Saints win and the Blue Jays lose to Early College, the Saints would win the district this weekend.
If the Blue Jays and Saints win this weekend, their matchup in week ten would be crucial in deciding the victor of the district.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Secretary of State Marco Rubio is reportedly preparing to leave President Donald Trump’s Cabinet as he weighs a 2028 presidential campaign, according to The Independent, though both the White House and State Department strongly deny that he is planning to resign.
The report, citing unnamed sources in Washington and the British government, says Rubio believes he needs greater distance from controversial Trump administration policies — particularly the Iran war — if he intends to challenge Vice President JD Vance for the Republican nomination.
The timing follows Republicans’ sweeping midterm losses, which cost the party control of both the House and Senate and have intensified speculation about the GOP’s post-Trump future. Reuters identified both Rubio and Vance among prominent possible 2028 contenders.
Rubio’s reported plans would also mark a reversal from his public position just weeks ago. In September, he said he had “no plans” to run in 2028 and was focused entirely on his State Department duties.
Vance has meanwhile begun separating himself from parts of Trump’s record, publicly blaming the Iran war for the Republican midterm defeat.
For now, Rubio remains secretary of state, and no resignation has been announced. The report therefore represents an early indication of possible 2028 maneuvering rather than a confirmed Cabinet departure.
On Nov. 15, schools, libraries, families, writing groups and individuals around the country will mark I Love To Write Day, a grassroots campaign founded in 2002 by Delaware writer and author John Riddle.
I Love To Write Day returns Nov. 15, encouraging people of all ages to put their thoughts on paper
WILMINGTON, Del. — A Delaware writer’s idea scribbled on a diner napkin more than two decades ago has grown into a nationwide invitation to write.
On Nov. 15, schools, libraries, families, writing groups and individuals around the country will mark I Love To Write Day, a grassroots campaign founded in 2002 by Delaware writer and author John Riddle.
The premise is intentionally simple: Write something.
It could be a poem, a letter, a greeting card, an essay, a short story or perhaps the opening sentence of a book someone has been thinking about for years.
“I Love To Write Day continues to grow as more people discover the enjoyment and importance of putting their thoughts on paper,” Riddle said.
The idea itself came while Riddle was traveling to teach workshops at the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Conference near Asheville, North Carolina.
He stopped at a diner for lunch and wrote four words on a napkin: “I Love To Write Day.”
“A few months later, the grassroots campaign was launched,” Riddle said.
Since then, Riddle says thousands of writers, teachers, librarians, students, families and community organizations across the United States have taken part.
The campaign also has a notable Delaware connection beyond its founder.
In 2008, then-U.S. Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware recognized I Love To Write Day in the Congressional Record. Riddle also says governors in nine states have issued proclamations recognizing Nov. 15 as I Love To Write Day.
Riddle, a Delaware freelance writer, author and ghostwriter, said the campaign’s mission has remained largely unchanged since its beginning.
“My goal for I Love To Write Day remains the same as it was when I launched the campaign,” he said. “People of all ages are encouraged to write something.”
That could include beginning or finishing a novel, writing a family story, sending a letter to someone important or simply taking a few minutes to record thoughts that otherwise might never make it to paper.
Schools and libraries can organize writing activities, while families can write stories or letters together. Businesses, churches, senior centers, bookstores and community groups also can create their own programs.
Riddle said the value of the day is less about producing polished work and more about giving people permission to begin.
“You never know what might happen when someone is encouraged to write,” he said. “A young person may discover a lifelong love of words. An adult may finally begin the book they have always wanted to write. Someone may write a letter that becomes a treasured family keepsake.”
Riddle also created the “I Love To Write Day Creative Writing Journal,” featuring 30 writing challenges and advice about creativity from more than 80 writers, authors, artists, musicians, actors and other creative professionals.
For Riddle, however, the most important part of Nov. 15 still comes down to the idea he first wrote on that diner napkin in 2002: Sit down and write something.
To Go
What: I Love To Write Day
When: Nov. 15
Who can participate: Anyone, including students, families, schools, libraries, businesses, churches, senior centers and writing groups
How to participate: Spend time writing a poem, letter, story, essay, journal entry or another piece of your choosing
GradBridge, which specializes in what it calls “second-look” private student lending, launched its lending platform in March. The company announced in June that it planned to create 49 full-time, salaried, benefits-eligible positions in Delaware over five years.
Delaware-founded fintech has added nine employees and says its new Iron Hill Corporate Center office can support continued expansion
NEWARK, Del. — Delaware-founded financial technology company GradBridge has opened a new headquarters in Newark, establishing a base for a planned expansion that could add nearly 50 full-time jobs over the next five years.
The company officially opened its 9,321-square-foot office at 750 Prides Crossing in the Iron Hill Corporate Center on Wednesday, Nov. 4, with state, county and business leaders attending a ribbon-cutting and open house.
GradBridge, which specializes in what it calls “second-look” private student lending, launched its lending platform in March. The company announced in June that it planned to create 49 full-time, salaried, benefits-eligible positions in Delaware over five years.
Nine full-time employees have recently joined the company, bringing GradBridge’s workforce to 19 people, including six contractors, according to the company.
“Delaware has a longstanding reputation of being a leader in the financial services industry. This opening builds on that by growing our innovation economy and attracting fintech investment,” Delaware Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez said.
She said the company’s decision to build its headquarters in Delaware reflects confidence in the state as a place for financial companies to invest and grow.
GradBridge’s new office will house executive leadership as well as finance, compliance, credit, data and analytics, and management operations.
The company said it spent more than $290,000 with six local contractors and suppliers to build out the space, which includes offices, shared work areas, conference rooms and employee facilities.
New Castle County Executive Marcus Henry said the company represents the type of entrepreneurial growth county leaders hope to encourage.
“GradBridge recognized a need and built a business around helping address it,” Henry said. “That’s the kind of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit we want to see in New Castle County.”
A Delaware fintech connection
Founder and CEO Jen O’Donald has deep ties to Delaware’s financial services industry.
O’Donald said she received her education in Delaware and has spent more than 25 years working in the state’s financial services sector.
“Less than two years ago, GradBridge was just an idea,” O’Donald said. “Since then, we’ve turned that vision into reality, launching an innovative lending platform, building a talented team and now opening our new headquarters.”
Delaware has long been home to major banking, credit card and financial services companies, giving startups such as GradBridge access to a workforce experienced in lending, credit analysis, compliance and financial technology.
O’Donald said the company intends to build on that base as it expands nationally.
“I’m especially proud to be building a company that creates meaningful career opportunities, contributes to Delaware’s growing fintech community and helps students across the country achieve their educational goals,” she said.
A ‘second look’ at student borrowers
GradBridge is targeting a specific segment of the private student loan market: upperclassmen and graduate students who are turned down under traditional lending criteria but are making progress toward earning a degree.
The company says more than 1 million students each year are declined for private student loans because they fall outside traditional credit standards.
GradBridge’s underwriting approach considers academic progress along with conventional credit factors in an effort to identify borrowers the company believes have a strong likelihood of completing their degrees.
“At GradBridge, we believe a student who is making progress toward a degree deserves a meaningful opportunity to finish,” O’Donald said.
The company says its focus is not on replacing federal student aid, but providing another private lending option for students who might otherwise be unable to secure financing needed to complete school.
The Newark headquarters marks the next stage of the company’s expansion after launching its lending platform earlier this year.
O’Donald credited Gov. Matt Meyer’s administration, New Castle County, Delaware Prosperity Partnership and other organizations with assisting the company.
“This celebration is about more than opening an office,” she said. “It’s about building a company that creates opportunity for our employees, our community and the students we serve.”
TO GO
What: GradBridge, a Delaware-based financial technology company specializing in private student lending
Headquarters: Iron Hill Corporate Center, 750 Prides Crossing, Newark
Expansion: Company plans to create 49 full-time jobs over five years
Current workforce: 19 people, including six contractors
New employees: Nine full-time employees recently added
Local investment: More than $290,000 spent with six Delaware-area contractors and suppliers to build out the headquarters
What’s next for the EU-UK relationship?
18
November 2026 — 09:00 TO 10:00 GMT
Anonymous (not verified)
Chatham House and Online
Learn how the Burnham government may try to reshape London’s relationship with Brussels at the EU-UK Summit on 20 November.
Learn how the Burnham government may try to reshape London’s relationship with Brussels at the EU-UK Summit on 20 November.
The upcoming EU–UK summit tests ambitions for cooperation under the Burnham government. David Lammy, Sonyja Hyland and Emma Aparici Vázquez de Parga assess what it means for defence, trade and shared priorities. Their discussion examines the direction of London–Brussels relations, and Britain’s continuing debate over Europe.
This event discusses
What are the main aims of the upcoming EU–UK summit?
What could the summit outcomes mean for EU–UK relations?
Where can the UK and EU deepen cooperation on defence?
What barriers remain to closer trade and economic ties?
How does the Burnham government approach relations with Brussels?
How could Britain’s debate about Europe shape future policy?
Reforming Ukraine’s veteran support system: What’s working and what’s at stake?
2
December 2026 — 14:00 TO 15:15 GMT
Anonymous (not verified)
Chatham House and Online
Learn how veteran reintegration can strengthen Ukraine’s recovery and European security, and the risks of policy failure.
Learn how veteran reintegration can strengthen Ukraine’s recovery and European security, and the risks of policy failure.
Ukraine faces the historically unprecedented challenge of implementing a comprehensive support framework for millions of veterans and their families while actively fighting a high-intensity, protracted war with Russia. Effective support for the transition will be critical to social cohesion, recovery, and national security. Getting this right will also matter for wider European security.
This event discusses:
Is Ukraine’s current veteran reintegration model working?
What can Ukraine learn from international approaches to veteran support?
What barriers could undermine successful reintegration?
How can a successful reintegration model support Ukraine’s long-term recovery and European deterrence?
What can international partners contribute to Ukraine’s veteran reintegration efforts?
The event will open with welcome remarks from Vitalii Kim, Minister for Veterans Affairs of Ukraine.
The event is conducted with financial support from the UK Government, provided through the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, and from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).
Gifts now available celebrating 100 years of the Chatham House Rule in 2027 News releasejon.wallace
Mugs, water bottles, tote bags and more are now available via our online shop, celebrating the timeless and trusted principle of the Chatham House Rule.
This week Chatham House opened a new online shop offering a range of products celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Chatham House Rule – the timeless and trusted principle that helps encourage open discussion around the world. The Rule will be 100 years old in 2027.
Zara Berry, Director, QEII Academy and Head of Individual Membership at Chatham House said:
‘We are delighted to offer this new range of gifts celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Chatham House Rule in 2027. The Rule is used around the world to bring people together, break down barriers, generate ideas and agree solutions – so these gifts make the perfect present for anyone with an interest in international affairs.’
Carry the conversation wherever you go with this specially designed blue tote bag made from sturdy 10oz cotton canvas, featuring the wording of the Chatham House Rule in white on one side. Perfect for carrying books, shopping, work essentials or everyday belongings.
This elegant Ash-style mug features the wording of the Chatham House Rule on one side, with the Chatham House logo and the words Supporting the future of trusted dialogue on the other. An ideal addition to home or office.
This this machine-washable and tumble dryer-safe tea towel features a design reproducing the wording of the Chatham House Rule, alongside the Chatham House logo and the words Supporting the future of trusted dialogue.
Stay refreshed on the move with this reusable 500ml double-walled water bottle made from recycled stainless steel, featuring a white finish with distinctive artwork in Chatham House blue.
Give someone the opportunity to explore the people, ideas and conversations shaping global affairs in 2027 with a Chatham House gift membership – offering exclusive member events, subscriptions to our publications and powerful unique networking opportunities.
AUSTIN, TEXAS — Elon Musk deleted several pro-Republican election posts after Democrats swept Congress, capping a costly political setback for the billionaire who spent nearly half a billion dollars backing GOP candidates.
Musk had posted “Vote red today!” on Election Day and pinned another message urging support for Republican Senate candidates. Both disappeared after results showed Democrats winning both chambers. Musk has not publicly explained why he removed them.
Reuters reported Musk spent nearly $445 million on federal races. Of 43 House Republicans he backed, only three had won by late Wednesday, while six of seven Senate candidates he supported lost, with Alaska still unresolved. He also spent heavily in Texas, where Democrats won several marquee races.
The election aftermath also hit Musk financially. Tesla and SpaceX shares fell more than 3% Wednesday, wiping roughly $100 billion from their combined market value and reducing Musk’s estimated net worth by about $30 billion to $33 billion on paper.
Musk did not disappear from X entirely. He joked that his “election-interfering space lasers” had failed and quickly returned to promoting his companies.
The political consequences may last longer. Democrats have already signaled plans for increased scrutiny of Musk’s federal contracts, government ties and businesses once they take control of Congress.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Democrats are preparing a broad wave of congressional investigations into President Donald Trump, his family’s business interests and several major administration policies after winning control of both the House and Senate.
House Democratic leaders, including Hakeem Jeffries, Robert Garcia and Jamie Raskin, say they plan to use subpoena power to examine what they describe as possible conflicts of interest, self-enrichment and abuses of government authority.
Among the potential targets are Trump family real estate and cryptocurrency ventures, federal contracts, immigration enforcement operations, the administration’s handling of files related to Jeffrey Epstein and major White House construction projects.
Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said Democrats intend to investigate what he called the “tentacles of corruption” surrounding the administration. Those claims remain allegations unless supported by evidence gathered through congressional inquiries or other investigations.
The expanded oversight agenda reflects a major shift in Washington. Republican control of Congress had largely insulated the administration from Democratic subpoenas and committee investigations. That changes in January, when Democrats take control of committee gavels and investigative staffs.
The political backdrop is significant. The AP Voter Poll found that roughly three in 10 voters identified democracy as the country’s most important issue, and about eight in 10 of those voters supported Democratic candidates.
Trump has previously dismissed Democratic investigations as partisan attacks.
Wilmington Friends and Delaware Military Academy play in the first round of the 2026 DIAA Division Two Field Hockey State Tournament. Photo Credit: Ryan Colasanti
The first round of the 2026 DIAA Division Two Field Hockey State Tournament concluded with all but one of the higher seeds moving on to the quarterfinal round.
WILMINGTON, Del. — Wilmington Friends defeated Delaware Military Academy, 5-2, on November 4, during the first round of the 2026 DIAA Division Two Field Hockey State Tournament.
The Quakers scored three goals in the first half while controlling most of the action on their offensive end of the field.
Sophomore Tillie Hopkins started the scoring with a backhand shot to the back left of the cage with nine minutes left in the first quarter. The Quakers scored twice in the second quarter on goals from freshman Palmer Jenney and sophomore Ava Clothier and entered halftime ahead, 3-1. The Seahawks one goal came from junior Elena Sheets in the first quarter.
Friends scored two more goals in the second half, both in the fourth quarter.
Senior Schuyler Hopkins scored her first goal of the playoffs on a ball that bounced around near the front of the cage. The ball bounced out of the scrum of players fighting for possession and right to Hopkins near the middle of the cage. Hopkins fired and scored giving Friends a 4-1 advantage. Freshman Peyton Galbraith gave the Quakers a 5-1 lead with her score off a penalty corner assisted by her sister, senior Keeley Galbraith. The Quakers finished the game with 18 shots, 17 penalty corner opportunities and five goals scored by five different goal scorers.
“We try to look up before we shoot and find the best option and I think that’s kind of what we’ve been teaching for a few years now,” Wilmington Friends head coach Scott Clothier said postgame. “Rather than just relying on one player that can be easily defended we try to dish the ball around, look up, get our head up and just find that open player.”
Sheets scored DMA’s second goal with a little less than three minutes remaining in the game, scoring both of the Seahawks goals. DMA senior Rebecca Wolhar played a strong game in goal, saving 13 of Friends’ 18 shots.
“The girls executed the gameplan, which has been our gameplan since really August until today, and I thought DMA played really well. Their defensive unit played strong, their goalie had some great saves, but ultimately I think we wore them down a little bit there,” Clothier said.
The Quakers move on to face No. 3 Caravel on Saturday, November 7. The game will begin at 11:30 a.m. and be played at Caravel High School.
More First Round Games:
No. 5 Indian River defeated No. 12 Mount Pleasant, 5-0: The Indians are advancing to the second round of the DIAA Division Two Field Hockey State Tournament for the first time since 2020. Indian River will face No. 4 Archmere in the next round.
No. 7 Concord defeated No. 10 Sussex Academy, 1-0, in shootouts: Concord and Sussex Academy played an extremely close game finishing regulation and double overtime tied, resulting in the first round matchup going to penalty shootouts. Both teams scored twice in the shootout period, before a save by junior Abigayle Lake gave the Raiders an opportunity to win. Freshman Hailey Mullenix scored the winning goal for Concord. Senior Elizabeth Layton and junior Maeve Lawson scored for Sussex Academy. Concord will face No. 2 Newark Charter in the quarterfinals.
No. 9 Ursuline defeated No. 8 Lake Forest, 2-1: Ursuline is the only lower seed to win in the first round advancing to the quarterfinals for the second season in a row. Ursuline juniors Molly Anderson and Kendall Gulli scored for the Raiders. Sophomore Morgan Perna scored for Lake Forest. Ursuline will play No. 1 Tower Hill on Saturday, November 7.
After Trump’s midterm defeat, Russia and China will encounter a cooler US Expert commentjon.wallace
They may seek to exploit the president’s weakness, as domestic opposition to war with Iran hardens.
The comprehensive rebuff that American voters have given to President Donald Trump and Republican candidates in the midterm elections is likely to produce a small but important constraint on how the US behaves abroad. But it will also change how other countries treat it – allies, trading partners and rivals alike.
Even with the Democrats in control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the president retains much power over foreign policy – but not all. Congress is now likely to challenge any sustained deployment of forces in the Gulf. And it will reassert its authority over trade and tariffs, even if it does not amend the latter.
The most immediate change is likely to be on the conflict with Iran. Voters put the cost of living – ‘affordability’ – top of their concerns. Yet, as they went to the polls, gasoline prices at the pump hit a high. Rising costs are largely a result of the continued conflict in and around the Strait of Hormuz, which Americans know Trump initiated alongside Israel and has failed to end. Trump could now indeed ‘lash out’ as some have predicted with more strikes, in an attempt to secure concessions from Tehran. But there is no reason to believe that a military solution will fare any better than before.
The Republican party has been among the biggest losers from the war. The race for the presidency in 2028 started the moment the midterm results became clear. And GOP candidates are likely to be vehemently against continuing the conflict. Pressure within the US for a resolution will rise even if Benjamin Netanyahu, now Israel’s caretaker prime minister after his own electoral setback, urges a new assault.
Ukraine
The change in Congress will probably not mean more arms or money for Ukraine. There is deep, rare consensus among both Democrats and Republicans that Europe should now pay its way on its own defence – and that supporting Ukraine is part of that. Trump has won that longstanding argument, they feel, and they have no desire to undermine that victory.
However, the new Congress does not share Trump’s apparent warmth towards Russian President Vladimir Putin. Traditional hostility or wariness towards Moscow prevails.
Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and envoy Steve Witkoff might still dangle business deals before the Kremlin, hoping for peace in return. But they will be constrained by a tougher mood and even formal opposition in Congress. No wonder that Putin’s spokesperson said, as the results became clear, that he hoped peace-making efforts would continue.
China
The same congressional wariness may well extend to China. One of the biggest disruptions that Trump could cause in his remaining two years would be to try to strike a deal with Beijing that included explicit acknowledgement of Taiwan as the sovereign territory of China. Trump’s recent decision to pause a $14 billion arms sale to Taiwan, to avoid aggravating trade relations with China, could be interpreted by Beijing as support for its views. Congress has, again across the political divide, been much warier of China. It now seems that some tech companies are leaning that way too.
Most of all, the elections may change how the world looks at America.
The fate of Trump’s tariffs is unclear. For the moment they will stay, although Congress has been challenging the president’s right to impose them without its consent, through the Supreme Court.
Politicians of all stripes find tariffs attractive for the revenue they bring. But others will look at the disruption to trade they cause (US car manufacturing was until last year interwoven with Canada’s) and their impact on inflation. That last point is hotly debated among economists given that inflation did not rise as much as expected when the tariffs were first imposed. But politicians in search of securing a lower cost of living may look again at arguments for repealing the tariffs.
A city on a hill?
Most of all, the elections may change how the world looks at America. They go some way to answering the big questions raised by Trump’s second presidency: Have Americans changed? Are his actions what they really want, given they have voted for him twice? And is US democracy robust and capable of securing peaceful changes of power? To that extent, some will find the results reassuring.
For US allies in Europe, Japan and South Korea, they may feel more confident in asserting their interests and values – although they will still be nervous of losing US support. Trump’s sudden apparent removal of arms support to Israel in the days before the election shows how whimsical that can be.
For the US’s enemies and rivals, this result will inject uncertainty into their calculations. But it will also give them reason to probe for weakness, even if that is just by exploiting the repeated changes in policy inherent in the democratic system. Both Russia and China will brace themselves for a cooling of relations. But they will also explore the implications of the US being unable to hold consistently to its key positions for more than a few years.
Given Trump’s personality and desire for attention, nothing can rule out impetuous and dramatic action, for instance on Iran or Taiwan. But he has lost any aura of being a winner that he retained. Politicians seeking to run in two years’ time will begin to distance themselves from him and try to constrain him from actions that could tarnish their chances. They may hope that he restricts his attention to the memorials in his name he is so keen to create.
‘Very clear that China isn’t neutral’ in Ukraine war, says former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy YatsenyukNews releasethilton.drupal
Speaking at a public event at Chatham House, Yatsenyuk also suggested it was unrealistic that Ukraine could regain territory ‘right now’ and called for additional financial support.
Ukraine’s former prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said that Chinese support for Russia was helping it to continue the Ukraine war as he discussed the war’s trajectory at Chatham House on Tuesday 3 November.
Yatsenyuk said that while the Russian economy is in a ‘dire state’, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin still has ‘enough resources to prosecute the war.’ He said the reasons for this included higher oil prices due to the Iran war and Chinese support for Russia.
Yatsenyuk said:
‘I want to be very clear that China isn’t neutral. China actually supports this war, and China is an ally to Russia. Let’s call a spade a spade.
I do understand that it’s around 1.5 billion of people, nukes, a huge global powerhouse. But the truth is that China is actually the closest strategic partner to the Russian Federation, and China provided the way to circumvent sanctions for Russia.’
He also said: ‘There is no clear evidence that China provides weaponry to Russia, but there is no doubt that China provides dual-use materials to Russia.’
Asked which side would break first in the conflict, he said that he believed Russia would ‘back down’ eventually if various developments took place, including Ukraine receiving more financial support from the European Union. He said Ukraine was facing a ‘huge budgetary gap’ of around €70 billion for the next year, with around €40 billion of this needed for ammunition.
Asked about whether Ukraine could recover territory from Russian forces, Yatsenyuk said: ‘I want to be very realistic. Whether we can regain territory right now: Not really.’
But he said if the Ukrainian state is preserved, the war ends and various other conditions are met, including Ukraine getting ‘something similar to the Marshall Plan’, then ‘the time will come when Ukraine will regain its complete territorial independency.’
He said he disagreed with the framing of the war as ‘Putin’s war against Ukraine’: ‘This is the war of the Russian people who support Putin against an independent and sovereign nation, which is Ukraine.’
‘If Putin dies, another successor from KGB will take over the throne. That’s my calculus. And it means that we have to be strong enough to survive, strong enough to defend, strong enough to preserve our country,’ he said.
Yatsenyuk, who was Ukraine’s prime minister from 2014 to 2016, is the founder of the Open Ukraine Foundation and chairman of the Kyiv Security Forum.
What will historic US midterm results mean for the future of Democrats and Republicans?Expert commentLToremark
After a huge win for Democrats, both parties now face a reckoning as they prepare for the 2028 presidential race – and the post-Trump era.
American voters delivered a resounding victory for Democrats in the 2026 midterms, the scale of their win surpassing all expectations. With control of both chambers of Congress – the House of Representatives and the Senate – Democrats will now preside over powerful tools of investigation and oversight, federal spending constraints and the ability to block Trump’s nominees, including for Supreme Court vacancies.
President Trump will remain an enduring presence into the 2028 election cycle, especially on matters of foreign policy. But attention will increasingly move to his potential successors and the parties’ respective visions for the future. How – and whether – Democrats and Republicans use the two years ahead to constrain Trump’s widely unpopular foreign policy and define a clear alternative will determine both their success in claiming the White House and in shaping the global landscape its next resident will inherit.
Both parties now face a reckoning, with consequential choices ahead on the key issues to prioritise, the ideological purity tests they may seek to impose and the presidential candidate they nominate for 2028.
Democrats face a competitive primary season for the first time in eight years. This offers an opportunity for genuine debate but also risks stoking significant infighting.
Moderates and conservative Democrats gained significant ground in traditionally Republican bastions. Progressives also notched key victories – from Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (AOC) re-election in New York City. But the incoming Democratic caucus will hold very diverse views on issues like the US relationship with Israel, use of military force, defence spending and immigration.
Republicans, meanwhile, face the massive task of revitalizing a party defined by Trump for the last decade – while also managing his likely moves to compel loyalty and cement a MAGA succession plan. The midterm results offer the clearest evidence yet that proximity to Trump will be increasingly untenable. This could open the door for greater independence – and some resistance – among the Republican Congress, particularly on the Iran war and Trump’s entreaties to Vladimir Putin.
As the Republican party looks ahead to 2028, Trump himself may be one of their biggest obstacles to forging a new platform that retires some of the more unpopular elements of Trump’s legacy – expensive wars, tariff-related economic disruption and allegations of corruption – while retaining winning elements for their base.
Democrats’ strategy worked. But foreign policy divisions will resurface
The midterms showcased the strength of the Democratic coalition built ahead of the elections, reaching into deep red states and districts like Texas, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio and South Carolina. Progressive and moderate wins showed that an inclusive, ‘big tent’ strategy can succeed. Economic populism, labour rights and affordable housing featured across progressive campaigns, while centrist candidates emphasized pragmatic governance, national security and economic competitiveness. Most candidates spoke about lowering the cost of living, ending the Iran war, expanding access to healthcare, and managing AI risks and data centre buildouts. Democrats will now seek to coalesce around an agenda in the House and Senate, stressing party unity.
But the foreign policy fissures that emerged in the midterm primary races have not gone away. After conceding the Congressional losses, President Trump told Fox News he could imagine working with Democrats on immigration – one of the Democratic party’s most persistent fault lines. Reductions in US military spending will also divide the caucus, with many progressives in favour of redirecting overseas funds to domestic revitalization. The US relationship with Israel will be one of the most contested discussions, with a growing number of centrist Democrats pushing for huge foreign assistance cuts for Israel and greater conditionality – if not outright suspension – of arms sales. The rancour in the Michigan Senate race – where Israel featured prominently – offered a preview of fights to come.
The left will continue to be unified in their opposition to Trump. But he will soon be gone. Shaping an affirmative governance agenda in the face of deep intra-party divisions will be the big test into 2028.
A competitive primary season that fosters open debate among the Democratic presidential candidates will expose these divisions. But the anointing of Biden/Harris in 2024 denied the party the chance to grapple with genuine differences and work to shape an inclusive, representative platform. This process will be painful but necessary. The final presidential nominee among the dozen plus anticipated to enter the field – from Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff to New York’s AOC – will offer the clearest signal of the party’s direction of travel.
The Republican party has suffered one of its worst defeats in years, if not decades. It now turns to the sobering reality of navigating both the future of the party and the end of the Trump era. Their vision for the future will need to resonate not only with MAGA voters, but also centrist Republicans and Independents whose absence in the midterms cost the party dearly. Although candidates’ messaging around illegal immigration and violent crime align with Republican voter concerns, they failed to break through.
Trump’s record disapproval ratings was a further drag on Republican and Independent turnout. Loyalty tests meant candidates had to run on Trump’s record, a tricky proposition as voters connected the war in Iran with affordability. Republicans were also saddled with several troubled, scandal-marred candidates like Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton and Ohio House incumbent Max Miller. Trump himself is unlikely to do much soul searching, exclaiming on Truth Social ‘I wasn’t on the ballot, and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!’. But the Republican party will be forced to reckon with these results as they forge their post-Trump future.
Trump’s relationship with the party will be biggest fissure on the right. As 2028 approaches, Republican candidates may see greater peril in sticking with Trump than beginning to distance themselves. Republicans may also struggle to hold the caucus together and avoid backstabbing and defections, particularly if Democrats’ investigations succeed in unseating senior officials.
On substance, Republicans may be increasingly divided on whether to change course on some of Trump’s unpopular foreign policy moves. Some Republican officials have publicly criticized Trump on Greenland and the Iran war, but more may see political value in critiquing wider swaths of his foreign policy – beginning with Trump’s interest in a trade deal with China or an accommodation with Putin. This will be particularly challenging for the anticipated Republican nominees, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who will remain closely associated with Trump’s unpopular policies. Vance has publicly blamed the Iran war for the midterms defeat and also cited Republican voters’ desire for a different relationship with Israel, likely a factor in Trump’s surprise election day announcement that he would suspend $4 billion in annual assistance to Israel.
Trump will soon be departing after a decade as darling of the right and foil for the left. This leaves both parties facing difficult choices. Whether Democrats can unite around a broad coalition or Republicans can wrest their political fate from Trump remains to be seen. Two years from now, a new president may still inherit many of problems created or exacerbated by Trump, including a global tariff regime, a protracted war in Iran and fractured alliances. The central challenge for both Republicans and Democrats will be not simply to reconstitute what has been broken, drawing on what worked in the past. Each will need a new vision.
ATLANTA, GEORGIA — Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp says he will not call a special legislative session to redraw political maps or restrict the powers of incoming Democratic Gov. Keisha Lance Bottoms before she takes office in January.
“The voters of our state have spoken,” Kemp said Wednesday, adding that Georgia should respect the results of “secure, accessible, and fair elections” and abide by state law and the constitution.
His decision closes off a potential postelection showdown after Bottoms’ victory ended 24 years of Republican control of the governor’s mansion. Some Republicans had discussed using a special session to revisit redistricting or reduce executive authority before the transfer of power.
Kemp explicitly rejected both ideas.
“I will not be calling a special session of the Georgia General Assembly in order to curtail executive branch powers or debate redistricting changes,” he said.
The decision echoes Kemp’s refusal in 2020 to call a special session aimed at helping Donald Trump overturn his presidential election loss in Georgia.
Kemp did leave open one narrow possibility: lawmakers could still be called back before January if unresolved budget issues require action.
Bottoms, the former Atlanta mayor, will become the first Black woman to serve as governor of a U.S. state when she takes office.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky is threatening to reintroduce articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth unless he resigns, adding to growing Republican criticism of the Pentagon chief following the party’s devastating midterm losses.
“There is one contingency in which I won’t reintroduce the articles of impeachment: Hegseth resigns,” Massie wrote Wednesday on X. He told CNN he intends to force a House vote when lawmakers return next week, with multiple Republican sources reportedly predicting the measure could pass.
Massie previously introduced eight articles of impeachment in September, accusing Hegseth of violating congressional war powers, authorizing unauthorized military operations, failing to protect civilians and retaliating against Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly. The effort never reached a floor vote after Speaker Mike Johnson adjourned the House early ahead of the midterms.
The renewed pressure comes as Republicans increasingly blame the unpopular war with Iran for their election losses. Vice President JD Vance directly identified the conflict as the primary reason Republicans lost control of Congress, writing, “The reason we lost is the war.”
Several Republicans have also accused Hegseth of persuading President Donald Trump to launch the conflict and continuing to advocate military escalation despite limited results.
Trump publicly defended Hegseth Wednesday, saying he was doing a “very good job.” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell likewise insisted Hegseth remains committed to serving through the end of Trump’s term.
Massie, who lost his Republican primary earlier this year to a Trump-backed challenger, is nevertheless moving forward with his impeachment effort.
BETHESDA, MARYLAND — Lockheed Martin has agreed to pay about $29.5 million to resolve federal allegations that some of its workplace diversity practices discriminated against white employees and violated anti-discrimination requirements attached to government contracts.
The settlement includes $22 million paid to the federal government under the False Claims Act and about $7.5 million distributed among more than 1,000 employees through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Federal investigators alleged that Lockheed’s “Compensation Adder” program used statistical race and sex “flags” when reviewing additional pay awards. The Justice Department says some human resources officials pressured managers to remove nonminority employees and add minority employees until those disparities were eliminated.
The government also alleged that Lockheed considered race or sex in some hiring, promotion, mentoring and leadership-development decisions while certifying that it complied with federal nondiscrimination rules.
Former Lockheed vice president Tim Booher brought the underlying whistleblower case and will receive $4.4 million under the False Claims Act settlement.
Lockheed denied wrongdoing and said it settled to avoid the cost and distraction of prolonged litigation. The agreement explicitly states that the federal claims are allegations and that there has been no determination of liability.
The case is part of the Trump administration’s broader use of the False Claims Act to challenge diversity-related employment practices at federal contractors.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin says the Trump administration will continue its mass deportation campaign despite Republicans losing control of both chambers of Congress in Tuesday’s midterm elections.
“Deportations will continue,” Mullin wrote Wednesday, later adding that ICE operates “365 days per year” and would keep arresting and removing undocumented immigrants.
The comments came after Democrats won sweeping congressional victories, fueled partly by Latino voters who shifted away from Republicans amid concerns over immigration enforcement, rising costs and the broader direction of the country. Reuters found Republican support fell sharply across many majority-Latino counties compared with 2024.
Mullin emphasized that ICE would continue targeting people with serious criminal records. However, broader deportation data show the administration’s enforcement campaign extends well beyond that group. The Migration Policy Institute estimates roughly 980,000 deportations occurred between January 2025 and July 2026, with a large majority involving people without criminal convictions.
Democrats have promised increased oversight of ICE once they take control of Congress in January and may pursue funding restrictions and investigations into detention practices and enforcement operations.
Their ability to immediately halt deportations will be limited, however, because Republicans previously approved multi-year immigration-enforcement funding extending into 2029.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump celebrated record stock-market gains Wednesday, just one day after voters handed Democrats control of both chambers of Congress, an outcome Trump had repeatedly warned would trigger economic disaster.
“Stock Market just hit another Record High,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding that Americans’ 401(k)s were “through the roof.” The Dow surged more than 1,500 points Wednesday, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq also posted strong gains.
The timing was striking. At an Oct. 26 campaign rally in Corinth, Mississippi, Trump told voters that if Democrats won Congress, the country would face a “1929-style economic depression” and potentially a “massive recession or depression.”
Instead, markets rallied immediately after Democrats captured the House and Senate. Analysts cited expectations of divided government, lower oil prices and reduced concerns about further escalation in the Iran war as contributing factors.
Trump nevertheless claimed the market performance as evidence of his own economic success, without acknowledging that the surge followed the exact political outcome he had predicted would devastate markets.
The president has spent much of the post-election period distancing himself from the Republican losses, blaming candidates, Fox News and weak MAGA turnout. Reuters reported that Democrats won sweeping victories fueled in part by dissatisfaction with the economy, high living costs and Trump’s handling of the Iran war.
TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis offered one of the Republican Party’s bleakest assessments yet of Tuesday’s midterm elections, calling the nationwide losses “close to an extinction-level event” and warning that the damage could take years to repair.
Speaking Wednesday in Tallahassee, DeSantis said Republicans may emerge with Democrats holding as many as 55 Senate seats and roughly 250 seats in the House. Those figures were his projections rather than final totals, with several races still unresolved Wednesday morning.
What is already clear is that Democrats captured control of both chambers of Congress and flipped seats across territory Republicans had considered secure. The Associated Press reported Democratic Senate victories in traditionally Republican states including Texas, Kansas and South Carolina, while the party gained more than two dozen House seats.
DeSantis said the consequences could extend well beyond President Donald Trump’s remaining two years in office, arguing that Republicans now face a difficult rebuilding process.
The losses have already triggered significant Republican infighting. Trump has blamed candidates, Fox News and insufficient MAGA enthusiasm, while Vice President JD Vance pointed to the Iran war as a major factor.
Republicans also lost governorships and state legislative ground, while Democrats made gains among voters who cited the cost of living, the economy and dissatisfaction with Trump as major concerns.
Democrats’ new legislative supermajorities, a widening gap in statewide votes, and limited campaign resources leave Republican leaders confronting difficult questions about the party’s future.
By George D. Rotsch, Delaware LIVE News
DOVER, Del. — Delaware Republican Party Chairman Gene Truono is calling for unity, stronger candidate support and a reassessment of party operations following Tuesday’s election, which left Republicans without a statewide elected office and reduced their representation in the General Assembly.
The Nov. 3 results underscore the challenges facing a party that has struggled for years to compete statewide, particularly in heavily Democratic New Castle County, while relying increasingly on Sussex County and portions of Kent County for its electoral base.
Democrats won all five federal and statewide contests, captured three Republican-held House seats and secured more than two-thirds of the seats in both chambers of the legislature. The result gives Democrats the votes needed to approve constitutional amendments without Republican support, provided their members remain united.
In a statement Wednesday, Truono thanked Republican candidates and their families, volunteers and supporters but acknowledged the organizational challenges confronting the party.
“Every candidate faces unique challenges, from fundraising and organizing volunteers to communicating with voters,” Truono said. “While candidates are ultimately responsible for managing and running their individual campaigns, the Delaware Republican Party recognizes those challenges and remains committed to strengthening the resources, coordination, and support available to them.”
His remarks come as election results and campaign finance reports raise questions about whether the Delaware GOP has the financial resources, organizational reach and voter support necessary to compete more effectively.
Election results reveal the size of the challenge
Republican House seats 11 Down from 14
Statewide offices held 0 Five GOP losses
Registered Republicans 24.6% Of Delaware voters
Sources: Unofficial Nov. 3 election returns and Delaware Department of Elections registration report, Nov. 1.
Republicans entered the election holding 14 of the 41 House seats. They will begin the next legislative session with 11, compared with 30 Democrats.
The GOP also will hold six of the 21 Senate seats, while Democrats control 15. That gives Democrats approximately 73% of House seats and 71% of Senate seats.
Three House races illustrate the Republican losses:
Kent County, District 34: Democratic challenger Annie Norman defeated Republican Rep. Lyndon Yearick, 4,905 votes to 4,755 — a margin of just 150 votes.
Sussex County, District 4: Democrat Gregg Lindner defeated Republican Dan Zitofsky, 8,039 votes to 7,658, capturing the seat being vacated by Republican Rep. Jeff Hilovsky.
New Castle County, District 9: Democrat Ayanna Khan-Flowers defeated Republican Jamar Money, 8,451 votes to 4,753, winning the seat being vacated by Republican Rep. Kevin Hensley.
Republicans did retain several competitive or open seats, including House districts 33, 38 and 41 and Senate District 15. Republican Mike Smith also won reelection in his Pike Creek-area district, while Republican Emily Thompson won the open Senate seat previously held by Dave Lawson.
The results leave Republicans with fewer legislators to influence policy, negotiate legislation or prevent Democrats from acting along party lines.
Republicans can still participate in legislative debates, negotiate with Democratic lawmakers and build coalitions on individual issues. But without sufficient votes to block constitutional amendments on their own, their influence will depend increasingly on public opinion and disagreements within the Democratic caucuses.
Statewide vote totals show a persistent Republican disadvantage
The results were similarly one-sided in statewide races. Democratic candidates received between 60% and 65% of the vote in each of the five federal and statewide contests.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Chris Coons won reelection with 63.6% of the vote against Republican Mike Katz, while U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride received 64.3% against Republican Joe Arminio.
In the open state treasurer’s race, Democrat Ted Lauzen defeated former Republican House Minority Leader Mike Ramone, 62.4% to 37.6%. Attorney General Kathy Jennings and Auditor Lydia York also won reelection.
Those figures suggest the GOP’s difficulties extend beyond individual candidates or particular campaigns. Republicans are attracting support beyond their registered voter base, but that support has not been sufficient to seriously challenge Democratic control of statewide offices.
Voter turnout increased, but Republicans failed to capitalize
Delaware’s statewide turnout increased to 47.5%, compared with 42.7% in the 2022 midterm election, according to unofficial results.
A total of 384,862 ballots were cast, up from 325,558 four years earlier.
Delaware midterm voter turnout
Despite the stronger participation, Republicans did not gain ground in the legislature or statewide offices.
Registration figures help explain the challenge. As of Nov. 1, Delaware had 333,488 registered Democrats, compared with 199,294 Republicans and 276,849 voters registered as unaffiliated or with other parties.
That gives Democrats a registration advantage of more than 134,000 voters. Republicans account for approximately one-quarter of the electorate, while more than one-third are not registered with either major party.
Party registration
Registered voters
Share
Democratic
333,488
41.2%
Republican
199,294
24.6%
Unaffiliated and other parties
276,849
34.2%
Total
809,631
100%
Source: Delaware Department of Elections, Nov. 1, 2026.
Republicans retain a registration advantage in Sussex County, where they outnumber Democrats 78,779 to 68,370. But in New Castle County, Democrats have more than twice as many registered voters as Republicans.
The GOP’s dependence on its Sussex County base presents a mathematical challenge. Winning strongly Republican districts is not enough to offset Democratic margins in the state’s most populous county.
Final turnout figures by party registration were not yet available Wednesday. Mid-afternoon Election Day data showed Democrats voting at a higher rate than Republicans, although those numbers did not represent final turnout.
Republicans have historically demonstrated an ability to turn out their registered voters at competitive rates. In 2022, for example, 52.1% of registered Republicans voted, compared with 42.6% of registered Democrats. That advantage in participation was not sufficient to overcome the Democratic registration lead.
Fundraising gap raises questions about party resources
Financial records indicate that the Delaware Republican Party also entered the final weeks of the election with substantially fewer resources than its Democratic counterpart.
According to Federal Election Commission filings covering Jan. 1, 2025, through Oct. 14, 2026, the Republican State Committee of Delaware reported approximately $556,572 in total receipts and $583,180 in expenditures.
The committee reported just $4,954 in cash on hand at the end of that reporting period, along with $11,000 in outstanding debt.
The Democratic State Committee reported approximately $1.52 million in receipts over the same period, nearly three times the Republican total.
Party committee receipts, 2025-26 cycle through Oct. 14
Federal Election Commission committee receipts, including transfers and other noncontribution income
FEC figures represent receipts, not exclusively donor contributions. They include transfers and other income, and do not encompass every state or local committee.
The money gap was even more pronounced in the federal campaigns.
In the U.S. Senate race, Coons reported raising approximately $7.69 million through Oct. 14, compared with about $190,000 reported by Katz through the same date.
In the U.S. House race, McBride reported raising about $5.56 million through Oct. 14, while Arminio reported approximately $12,300 through Sept. 30. The latter comparison uses the candidates’ latest available reports, which cover different ending dates.
Fundraising advantages do not guarantee electoral victories, and statewide party committee filings do not capture all fundraising by candidates, county organizations and outside groups.
Nevertheless, the differences demonstrate the scale of the financial challenge. Campaigns with limited resources face difficulties maintaining paid advertising, voter outreach, data operations and professional staffing across an election cycle.
Truono’s statement recognizes fundraising as a candidate responsibility while also acknowledging the need for stronger party assistance. It does not specify new fundraising commitments, staffing changes or financial targets.
Truono acknowledges divisions and looks to Democrats for lessons
Perhaps the most revealing portion of Truono’s statement is his recognition that Delaware Democrats have managed to coordinate electoral efforts despite significant disagreements within their own party.
“There are also lessons to be learned from our political opponents,” Truono said.
“Despite significant ideological and policy disagreements within the Democratic Party, including among progressive and Working Families Party-aligned candidates, Democrats have often demonstrated an ability to set aside public divisions and come together around shared electoral objectives.”
The comments follow a Democratic primary season in which progressive candidates defeated several incumbent lawmakers, creating differences within the party over its direction and leadership.
Those disagreements have not prevented Democrats from retaining statewide control, although the next General Assembly will test their ability to remain united on legislation and constitutional amendments.
Truono also acknowledged criticism within Republican ranks.
“We also recognize that there are differing opinions and constructive criticisms concerning the direction of our Party,” he said. “Those perspectives deserve to be heard respectfully.”
He urged Republicans to turn disagreements into solutions rather than allow internal disputes to overshadow shared objectives.
The statement, however, provides few specifics about how the GOP will change its operations. It does not identify organizational decisions that may have contributed to Tuesday’s defeats or establish measurable goals for improving future campaigns.
In a separate election-night interview with Delaware Public Media, Truono expressed disappointment that the party had failed to achieve its objectives in competitive legislative races. He said Republicans had hoped to gain House and Senate seats and expected to continue concentrating on local contests rather than statewide offices.
What comes next for Delaware Republicans?
Tuesday’s results offer evidence of both the GOP’s difficulties and the limits of Democratic dominance in certain parts of the state.
Republicans won several open legislative races, retained their advantage in Sussex County voter registration and remained competitive in some districts. The 150-vote loss in House District 34 and the 381-vote defeat in District 4 show that relatively small shifts in local elections can change legislative representation.
But the broader statewide picture is less encouraging for the party.
Republicans have not held a statewide elected office since 2018. They now face even smaller legislative minorities, a substantial disadvantage in registered voters and significant gaps in campaign fundraising.
The party’s challenges cannot be attributed entirely to internal disagreements or limited financial support. The results also raise questions about the appeal of Republican candidates and policies to unaffiliated voters and moderate Democrats, particularly in New Castle County.
For Republicans, improving campaign operations alone may not be enough. A significant change in electoral performance would also require building a broader coalition of voters.
For Democrats, their expanded majorities create additional responsibility for governing. The party will have the votes to advance major policy changes, but its increasingly diverse caucuses may not agree on every issue. Democratic leaders will also face scrutiny over the decisions they make with that authority.
Truono closed his statement by congratulating those elected and expressing a willingness to work constructively across party lines.
“This election presents an opportunity to reflect, listen, and build,” he said. “We remain committed to representing Delaware voters, strengthening our organization across all three counties, and advancing responsible government, affordability, accountability, and meaningful representation.”
Whether that reflection produces meaningful organizational changes remains to be seen.
For now, the election leaves the Delaware GOP with a clear set of challenges: fewer elected officials, a smaller voter base than its principal opponent and substantially fewer financial resources.
The question confronting Republican leaders is no longer simply how to compete in individual elections, but how to rebuild a party capable of competing consistently across Delaware.
The Health Literacy Council’s program “Establishing Equity Through Literacy,” centers on helping everyone gain the knowledge needed to make informed health decisions. Greg O’Neill, co-chair of the Health Literacy Council of Delaware, accepts the proclamation in June 2025.
For Delawareans, Health Literacy is practical: clearer information, greater understanding and a stronger foundation for making health decisions.
By John Riddle, Contributing Journalist, Delaware LIVE
A healthcare decision can begin with a question. But when the answer comes wrapped in unfamiliar terms, complicated instructions or confusing paperwork, understanding what to do next can become a challenge of its own.
The Health Literacy Council of Delaware wants to help change that.
Formed in 2022, the council brings together healthcare leaders, community partners and advocates with a shared goal: making health information and healthcare easier for Delawareans to understand.
Its vision, “Establishing Equity Through Literacy,” centers on helping everyone gain the knowledge needed to make informed health decisions. Its work includes advocating for education and policy changes, strengthening partnerships and encouraging clearer communication throughout the healthcare system.
For Greg O’Neill, co-chair of the Health Literacy Council of Delaware, collaboration is an important starting point.
“Delaware has strong momentum around health literacy, bringing together healthcare systems, community organizations, and public health leaders around a shared goal: making health information and healthcare easier to understand for everyone,” O’Neill said.
Turning that momentum into lasting improvements requires more than distributing information. The council’s strategies address how health information is developed, shared, taught and supported across the state.
One priority is creating policies and guidelines that provide ongoing support for health literacy programs. Another involves engaging healthcare and government leaders to encourage consistent practices throughout Delaware.
The council also promotes health literacy campaigns that reach public and private audiences, emphasizing the importance of helping people understand information that affects their health.
Clear materials are another focus. The council helps leaders identify and use health information that is accessible, accurate and easy to understand. Its education goals include incorporating health literacy into school lessons and professional training programs.
Together, those efforts aim to make understandable communication a regular part of healthcare and community education.
Still, measuring progress presents a challenge.
“We still have work to do as health literacy has yet to be built into the systems that we use to measure progress,” O’Neill said.
The council is developing proposals to build on existing data, gather testimonials and highlight community needs. Those efforts could help document experiences while providing a clearer picture of where additional support is needed.
Building the organization itself also takes time.
“Like any new organization, HLCD is still working on building our network, solidifying stakeholder commitments, and raising awareness about the size of the health literacy issue,” O’Neill said.
Much of that work depends on people contributing their time and expertise alongside other responsibilities.
“The majority of the work comes through hours of volunteer time from leaders around the state and most of the work is grant funded so in that sense HLCD is like any small non-profit enterprise working for the public good,” he said.
Competing demands in healthcare delivery, changes in health communication and evolving community needs add to the challenge, according to O’Neill. Those pressures reinforce the council’s case for investing in health literacy, even as they make securing attention and resources more difficult.
The council’s approach places responsibility on organizations and leaders as well as the people seeking information. Making healthcare easier to understand requires examining the messages people receive and the systems they must navigate.
For Delawareans, the goal is practical: clearer information, greater understanding and a stronger foundation for making health decisions.
For the council, the next steps involve expanding partnerships, strengthening support and finding better ways to demonstrate progress.
Its work begins with a straightforward idea: health information can serve people better when they can understand it. Bringing that idea into everyday practice is the mission connecting the council’s volunteers, healthcare partners and community advocates across Delaware as they work toward lasting improvements in health communication.
Cyanobacteria blooms in a tributary of Lake Champlain in the town of St. Albans, Vermont, in August. Caleb Kenna for ProPublica
This summer, Vermont’s Clean Water Board celebrated a milestone: Over the past decade, the state has invested nearly a billion dollars to clean up its polluted streams, rivers and lakes. The vast majority of that money has gone toward Lake Champlain.
“I think that’s something to be extremely proud of,” said Douglas Farnham, the board’s chair.
Vermont was supposed to get an independent evaluation of what it has gotten for all that money. But that study was never done.
A decade ago, Vermont lawmakers mandated that the board submit an audit from an outside environmental consultant to determine whether the projects the state had invested in to improve water quality were working. The audit also was meant to examine whether the state’s agriculture and natural resource agencies are doing enough to enforce water quality regulations on farms, which are the biggest source of phosphorus in Lake Champlain.
Seven Days and ProPublica have teamed up to investigate the cleanup of Lake Champlain. Have you been affected by this issue? We’d like to hear from you.
Lake Champlain has been overloaded with phosphorus-laden runoff from farms, roads and urban sewers for decades. That pollution fuels potentially toxic blue-green algae blooms that have raised health concerns and hurt the state’s tourism industry. Under sustained pressure from citizens, environmental advocates and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Vermont’s leaders embarked on an ambitious initiative to improve the lake’s water quality, enshrined in the state’s landmark 2015 Clean Water Act.
Now, halfway through a 20-year cleanup effort mandated by the EPA, some lawmakers worry they don’t have enough information to ensure that the state is pursuing the most cost-effective cleanup strategies.
When lawmakers approved the clean water law, they took the major step of establishing a fund to pay for the cleanup and a board to administer it. Since 2016, Vermont has disbursed $928 million — $755 million in state funding and $173 million in local and federal dollars — on water quality projects and programs. That’s nearly as much as what Vermont has spent on paving and resurfacing state highways over the past decade.
As part of the law, the legislature also required the board’s leaders to provide it with a full program audit by January 2021.
But the board received no responses to an initial request for proposals in 2020. Lawmakers extended the deadline to 2023. Yet again, no outside firms bid on the audit.
Farnham said the board received informal feedback from some firms that the audit’s scope was too broad and complex. He reported back to fellow board members that he and Julie Moore, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, had asked legislators what to do next but didn’t receive any clear suggestions.
The board never issued a new request or revisited the matter (until Seven Days and ProPublica recently asked about it), and Vermont’s legislature never followed up to narrow the scope.
Water with particles of cyanobacteria, collected in mid-August from Lake Champlain in St. AlbansLake Champlain Committee monitor Jon Twombly, courtesy of Lake Champlain CommitteeSt. Albans in late August during a high-alert bloom dayVolunteer photo courtesy of Vermont Department of Health
Former state Rep. David Deen, who sponsored the clean water law and retired in 2018, said he was dismayed to learn that the audit never happened.
“Personally, I find it amazing that they haven’t done that audit and that somebody in the legislature did not hold them to account to conduct that audit,” he said.
Rep. Amy Sheldon, the longtime chair of the House Committee on Environment, recalled hearing about the audit challenges but noted that it’s difficult for the legislature to follow up because Vermont’s lawmakers don’t have staff. In the other chamber, former state Sen. Chris Bray, who chaired the natural resources committee until 2025, said he did not recall hearing about the missing audit.
In an interview, Farnham acknowledged that an outside audit would be helpful. But he said the board already has robust tools for assessing progress through a yearly performance report compiled by the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation, which coordinates and tracks most of the state’s clean water spending.
“We’ve got enough eyes coming at it from different angles that I think that mutes the need for that comprehensive audit,” he said.
The annual reporting process has improved greatly since the audit was mandated, and the DEC’s website “provides a lot of transparency,” about how the state is spending clean water money and the results, said Emily Bird, director of the department’s Water Investment Division.
But some current and former state officials say that approach isn’t a substitute for an audit to determine whether Vermont is getting adequate and cost-effective returns on its huge water quality investments.
The last independent assessment of clean water spending was a 2019 report from the state auditor. It found that a disproportionate amount of money was being spent on wastewater treatment plants, which contributed by far the smallest share of phosphorus pollution, instead of targeting bigger sources such as agriculture.
That mismatch persists seven years later. Agriculture is the largest source of phosphorus runoff, yet agricultural water quality programs receive less than a third of the total clean water funding in the current budget.
“I’d like to think they’re getting something done,” said Doug Hoffer, state auditor since 2013, referring to state agencies and legislators. “But the only way to know that is to hire someone who is independent to study that. And it’s really concerning that hasn’t been done. It really raises questions about accountability on both sides.”
Vermont Auditor Doug Hoffer says the lack of an independent audit of Lake Champlain’s cleanup efforts “raises questions about accountability.”Jeb Wallace-Brodeur/Seven Days
An audit would do a few key things that the department’s performance reports do not, Tee Thomas, a former water finance director for the state of Vermont who now runs her own environmental consulting firm, noted via email. The reports rely on models for how effective each type of project is at reducing phosphorus. An audit would analyze water quality monitoring data from rivers and lakes to check those estimates. It would also scrutinize how well Vermont has managed projects and whether it’s gotten results, she said.
The Clean Water Fund gets, on average, $25 million to $30 million each year from the state’s rooms and meals tax, a surcharge applied to some property transfers and deposit money that consumers pay on cans and bottles. That money is paired with between $6 million and $12 million from the state’s annual capital bill, which finances infrastructure projects. The funds have gone to programs and projects to restore wetlands, expand natural buffers around fields, shore up rural roads against erosion, upgrade stormwater drains and improve manure storage on dairy farms.
The state treasurer in 2017 estimated that the cost of Vermont’s 20-year initiative would be $2.3 billion.
But finding that money could be difficult as state government spending outpaces tax revenue and cooling housing and tourism markets squeeze clean water funding sources.
Without the audit, the governor and legislators responsible for coming up with the next billion dollars’ worth of projects may not have a clear understanding of what Vermonters have gotten for the last billion, lawmakers said.
Jane Kitchel, who as longtime chair of the state Senate’s Committee on Appropriations was known for her encyclopedic knowledge of the Vermont budget, noted that a billion dollars is a significant sum for the small state. Had she not retired from the body two years ago, she said, reviving the audit “would be one of the things I’d put on my to-do list.”
The next legislative session starts in January. State Sen. Anne Watson, who chairs the Committee on Natural Resources and Energy and serves on the Committee on Appropriations, told Seven Days and ProPublica that she would likely discuss whether to revive the audit with her colleagues.
“If we value having a clean lake,” she said, “then we need to put our resources toward places that are going to make a difference, and it’s unclear to me right now that what we’re doing is effective.”
Lake Champlain is a vital ecosystem, economic engine and critical resource for Vermonters. Oakledge Park on the lake in Burlington occasionally gets closed because of dangerous algae blooms.Caleb Kenna for ProPublica
Jeff van den Noort collects a sample outside his home in North Hero, Vermont, for the Lake Champlain Committee’s cyanobacteria monitoring program. Caleb Kenna for ProPublica
On the last day of August, Jeff van den Noort spotted thick swirls of neon green film coating the water just steps from his home in Vermont. He waded in up to his ankles and dipped a jar to get a sample of the scum.
It wasn’t the first time he’d seen the slime. Since his parents bought the house on an island in Lake Champlain in 1966, van den Noort has spent part of nearly every summer in this quiet spot. Back then, the lake was clear.
But he began to witness the water’s deterioration as he grew older, especially after he moved into the home full time in 2010 to care for his ailing mother. That day in late August was the worst he’d seen all summer.
Later that week, van den Noort grabbed a bucket, a few Mason jars and a smartphone and got into his rusty Saab. He drove past the boat launches, frozen-in-time general stores and windswept pastures of the lake’s islands in northern Vermont and stopped at four other spots along the shore. Each time, he collected some murky water, gauged how thick the muck was, took a few photos and jotted down the weather conditions. He then uploaded his report to an online database.
Van den Noort was one part of a large volunteer effort to monitor a problem that has plagued Lake Champlain, which supplies drinking water to about 200,000 people. In recent decades, blooms of potentially toxic cyanobacteria, often called blue-green algae, have killed pets, forced beaches to close and hurt business and property values along the shores of this iconic Vermont feature.
“I just don’t feel like enough is being done,” van den Noort said. “And I think the state needs to take this seriously.”
A cyanobacteria bloom mixes with duckweed on the shoreline of Lake Champlain in the town of St. Albans, Vermont, in early August.Courtesy of Lake Champlain Committee
Just over a decade ago, state leaders seemed to be doing just that. In 2015, then-Gov. Peter Shumlin stood a few feet from Lake Champlain by the Burlington waterfront and signed Vermont’s Clean Water Act. It promised to tighten limits on pollution and provide funding to clean up the state’s waterways.
The move was a response to ratcheting pressure from environmentalists and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA had been telling Vermont officials for years that they needed to take much stronger action. In 2016, the agency finalized tougher cleanup targets that the state must meet by 2036.
But after 10 years and nearly a billion dollars spent on water quality projects and programs, Vermont’s cleanup effort is faltering. In a little-noticed letter to the head of Vermont’s Department of Environmental Conservation last year, the EPA’s regional administrator warned that the state was “not on track” to meet its cleanup goal and would need to more than double its annual pace.
Halfway through the two-decade timetable, Vermont has achieved only 35% of the goal, according to the state’s most recent estimates. And the steps that Vermont has taken to get there, such as upgrading sewage treatment plants, represent “low-hanging fruit,” Eric Perkins, a former EPA official involved in setting the target, wrote in an email in response to questions from Seven Days and ProPublica.
The culprit behind these blooms is phosphorus, an element that is an essential building block of life, present in all organic matter. But too much of it has been pouring into the lake from farm fields saturated with fertilizer and manure, dirty stormwater, and raw sewage from treatment plants overwhelmed by heavy rains. That has tipped the lake’s ecosystem out of balance, spurring the growth of microorganisms that turn shallow bays and shorelines into no-go zones.
Ingesting cyanobacteria-laden water can cause vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness and liver damage, while skin contact can lead to rashes. Researchers have also detected possible links between chronic exposure to cyanobacteria and heightened risk of Parkinson’s disease and ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The algae blooms can also deprive fish and other aquatic life of oxygen.
While some areas of Lake Champlain have seen incremental improvements in phosphorus concentrations and cyanobacteria blooms, other parts of the lake are getting worse. Seven of the lake’s 15 sampling stations have exceeded the EPA’s annual phosphorus limits every year since 2015, a Seven Days and ProPublica analysis of lake monitoring data through 2025 shows. Four stations recorded higher average phosphorus levels over the past decade than in the decade before, including in the southern part of the lake and its northeast arm.
People enjoy the water at North Beach on Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vermont, on Labor Day weekend. Algae blooms sometimes force the city to close the beach.Caleb Kenna for ProPublica
In September, the Department of Environmental Conservation reported to the EPA that in two northeastern sections of the lake most chronically plagued by phosphorus runoff, the state is not nearly on track to meet its targets. The department specifically acknowledged that it was not making enough progress in addressing stormwater runoff and that reductions in farm pollution in the Missisquoi River watershed have slowed since 2023.
Vermont shares the 120-mile-long lake with New York and Quebec, but it’s the source of about two-thirds of the phosphorus that flows into the water body. Agriculture is the largest polluting sector, while stormwater runoff from development, like urban parking lots and rural roads, contributes the highest amount of phosphorus per acre.
State agencies have repeatedly delayed taking more difficult and politically fraught action to crack down on pollution from farms, businesses and housing developments. Policies around them have encountered resistance from the dairy industry, property owners and lawmakers sympathetic to their interests.
The challenges in cleaning up Lake Champlain raise a salient question: If a small, conservation-minded state like Vermont can’t tackle this problem, what does that mean for other areas of the United States grappling with algae blooms in the Great Lakes, the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico?
State officials counsel patience as they remind Vermonters it will take more time to solve the problem.
“We are moving apace with the commitments we’ve made, in terms of the projects, but it isn’t manifesting itself nearly as quickly in the lake monitoring data,” said Julie Moore, Agency of Natural Resources secretary. “This is a complex ecosystem, and we need to come at this work with a whole lot of humility.”
Leaders of the Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets said it will take time for investments, such as programs to reduce soil erosion and help farmers upgrade their manure storage equipment, to pay off.
“The first five years, we were really developing an enormous amount of programs,” said Laura DiPietro, the agency’s water quality program director, but implementing them “doesn’t happen overnight.” She said she expects to see greater phosphorus reductions resulting from them in the coming decade.
But for van den Noort, the blooms are increasingly hard to ignore.
“The worst days ever are really, really bad,” he said. “Just as far as you can see, the whole bay is green.”
In September, van den Noort found turquoise and white patches of cyanobacteria in the lake. Scientists say the blooms turn those colors when they break down, potentially releasing toxins in the water.Jeff van den NoortOne of van den Noort’s routine cyanobacteria monitoring sites in North Hero, Vermont.Caleb Kenna for ProPublica
Pushing the Limits
Unlike chemicals and heavy metals that can be removed from lakes and rivers with dredging, phosphorus isn’t technically or economically feasible to extract.
So environmental regulators focus instead on limiting the amount of phosphorus that flows into the water each day. It’s like putting the lake on a diet. The EPA sets what’s known as the total maximum daily load, a target based on the agency’s determination of how much phosphorus the lake can absorb and remain healthy. To meet that goal, the state must cut pollution from agriculture, stormwater drains, roads, forests and wastewater treatment plants.
The EPA had set previous targets for Lake Champlain in 2002, but, concerned that Vermont wasn’t taking strong enough measures, the agency set tougher ones in 2016. For the first few years after those targets were updated, Perkins, who was then the EPA’s Vermont water quality coordinator, felt that the state was generally on the right track.
During his tenure, state agencies and lawmakers set up the Clean Water Fund to finance water quality projects and dedicated tax revenue streams to support it. They put in place stronger rules for fertilizer use and manure storage on farms. They created permit programs to limit stormwater runoff from roads and municipalities. That progress was reflected in a 2020 report card the EPA issued, acknowledging that Vermont had checked off all the milestones up to that point.
“Overall, I was very impressed with the level of commitment demonstrated by the state,” Perkins wrote to Seven Days and ProPublica.
By the time Perkins retired in 2021, he and colleagues at the EPA had become concerned about signs of lagging commitment by Vermont’s agencies to water quality enforcement on farms.
North Beach on Lake Champlain in Burlington in September. Seven of the lake’s 15 sampling stations have exceeded the EPA’s annual phosphorus limits every year since 2015.Caleb Kenna for ProPublica
One clear opportunity to speed up phosphorus reductions, according to Perkins, is to ensure farms comply with required agricultural practices and avoid spreading manure before anticipated rainstorms, which has caused “major phosphorus runoff events.”
If the state and farm operators were to make that a priority, “it could likely make a big difference,” Perkins wrote. And the state could encourage that practice by overhauling its permitting system to tighten water quality requirements and enforcement for farms that keep animals confined in barns for long periods of time. Those farms are called concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. In recent years, many small family dairies in Vermont have closed or consolidated into larger operations that would be considered CAFOs under federal law.
Yet Vermont has delayed action on an EPA directive to strengthen its approach to regulating CAFOs. Just across the lake, New York has used such permits for decades to ensure better environmental practices on larger farms. In Vermont, a recent state task force report recommended working to develop this program for another five years.
A second, related reform the EPA has recommended is to change who leads regulation of those farms.
Vermont has two different agencies that oversee farm pollution. The Agency of Agriculture regulates how farms handle waste on site, while the Agency of Natural Resources is responsible if runoff from that waste leaves the farm. This split responsibility has caused oversight problems, including lapses in following up on reported water quality violations with inspections and enforcement actions. Environmental advocates have long maintained that the agriculture agency has a conflict because it also has a mandate to promote the state’s farm sector.
A turtle washes up on a high-alert day in St. Albans in August.Lake Champlain Committee monitor Jon Twombly, courtesy of Lake Champlain Committee
This arrangement frustrates farmers, too. In a letter to Gov. Phil Scott earlier this year, owners of one Vermont dairy farm wrote that “the lack of alignment and clear communication between these agencies” places farmers in an uncertain position. “Many in the farming community feel caught in the middle of interagency disagreements, unsure which standards will ultimately govern their operations or how enforcement will proceed,” they wrote.
In interviews, officials at the two agencies acknowledged those communication problems but said that they have taken steps to improve how they share information on potential violations and coordinate more closely on inspections.
In 2024, the EPA ordered Vermont to consolidate the regulation of agricultural pollution under the Agency of Natural Resources, Vermont’s main environmental agency, which the EPA says has sole authority to administer federal Clean Water Act rules.
In a letter that year to Moore, the agency’s secretary, EPA Region 1 administrator David Cash noted that the EPA had monitored the situation in Vermont for well over a decade. “And despite having had ample time and opportunity to cure longstanding program deficiencies,” he wrote, “ANR has failed to do so.” Cash noted that the state has failed to give ANR “sufficient resources or operational authority” to regulate runoff from farms.
Hovering over this back-and-forth is the threat that the federal government could take over enforcement of water pollution rules from Vermont.
Seven Days and ProPublica have teamed up to investigate the cleanup of Lake Champlain. Have you been affected by this issue? We’d like to hear from you.
Following the letter to Moore, the divisions between the two agencies were on display as they discussed their regulatory approach in internal emails obtained under Vermont’s Public Records Act by Seven Days and ProPublica. In a 2025 email, Agency of Natural Resources general counsel Catherine Gjessing reminded her counterpart at the agriculture agency and legislative counsel staff that “there are a significant number of farms that are in fact discharging without a permit” in violation of the federal Clean Water Act. She added that the two agencies had been working under this split responsibility arrangement, with the agriculture agency taking the lead, “for decades now and we are still not in compliance.”
In an interview, the agriculture agency’s general counsel, Steve Collier, said there was never “a Wild West situation where farms were not being regulated” and that his agency’s rules protected the environment. “Whether or not the Clean Water Act was being administered exactly as it should be is a different issue,” he said.
Outside of agriculture, Vermont has yet to fully implement a third EPA demand as well as the directives of its own Clean Water Act. That 2015 law mandated the Department of Environmental Conservation to require properties with 3 or more acres of paved surface, such as parking lots, to install systems to slow and capture stormwater runoff.
Five years later, when the department still hadn’t finalized this “3-acre rule” permit system, the EPA warned Vermont that it would have to give the state “a failing grade” if it didn’t do so by Sept. 4, 2020. Vermont met the EPA’s deadline but in 2025 passed a law pushing the date for getting permits to 2028 for properties in the Champlain basin.
And those property owners don’t need to make the stormwater upgrades until 2033.
Treading Water
Algae blooms in St. Albans in AugustCaleb Kenna for ProPublica
For a quarter century, Steve Cushing has been advocating to clean up St. Albans Bay in the northeast part of Lake Champlain near the epicenter of Vermont’s dairy industry. Throughout that time, he listened as federal and state environmental officials came through town and pledged to act. “Expect a lot of progress 10 years from now in many segments of the lake,” one EPA official told him and his neighbors in 2015.
A decade later, this summer’s cyanobacteria blooms in the shallow bay were some of the worst he’s seen in several years, he said. Since June, the public beach in the St. Albans Bay Park has mostly been closed to swimming.
“Overall, you can’t really see a big improvement in water quality in the bay,” Cushing said.
Public data supports that notion. Every three years the federally funded Lake Champlain Basin Program, which coordinates research and grantmaking across the lake’s watershed, issues a report summarizing its water quality monitoring.
Its most recent edition, from 2024, revealed “deteriorating” trends in the northeast arm of the lake for both phosphorus and cyanobacteria and no progress in Missisquoi Bay, a shallow stretch spanning the U.S.-Canada border that frequently suffers intense blooms.
That’s troubling, scientists and advocates say, because the failure to address new pollution is exacerbated by both historical pollution and the effects of climate change.
What scientists call “legacy phosphorus” has accumulated in soils and lake sediments after many decades of fertilizer use, manure spreading, deforestation and unregulated septic and wastewater systems.
“We are working on a system that’s been impacted by human activities for the past 150-plus years,” said Matthew Vaughan, the chief scientist of the basin program.
Climate change poses another headwind for the lake cleanup. Since 2003, cyanobacteria blooms have appeared earlier in the spring and later in the fall as temperatures rise, and even at lower phosphorus levels. The drought that hit Vermont in 2025 led to a spike in blooms, thanks to the combination of heat and low water levels. Meanwhile, downpours are turning Vermont’s streams and rivers into fire hoses of phosphorus-laden sediment: In just one week in July 2023, record-shattering floods pumped six months worth of phosphorus into the lake.
“All of this just makes it more urgent to do our part to address these water quality challenges,” Vaughan said.
Some state officials and researchers contend that phosphorus deposited in the lake bed and soil decades ago might play as significant a role in fueling algae blooms as today’s runoff.
Caleb Kenna for ProPublicaCaleb Kenna for ProPublica
University of Vermont researcher Audrey Manning, first image, collects water samples on Lake Champlain in Swanton, Vermont, while fellow researcher Katelynn Warner, second image, gathers cyanobacteria to study their genetic makeup.
But while legacy phosphorus remains a challenge, “I think it’d be wrong to just rely on that as the excuse,” said Eric Smeltzer, who worked for the Department of Environmental Conservation for 35 years, including as the state limnologist who monitors the health of Vermont’s lakes and ponds.
“The most important technical question about the Lake Champlain phosphorus cleanup is: Are these practices working? And if not, why not?” Smeltzer said. “How can it be done better? I think you can’t just explain it away based on time lags and legacy phosphorus forever.”
In reviewing the state’s data recently, one detail in particular jumped out to him, he said. Wastewater treatment still garners an outsize share of Vermont’s clean water spending, even though it has been clear for years that it’s not a major contributor of phosphorus, while agriculture and stormwater are.
Cushing traces the algae blooms back to the dairy farms that dominate the watershed and to regulators’ failure to “put any teeth behind” restrictions on manure spreading and other water quality rules.
Cushing, a former dairy farmer, has pushed for policy changes as a volunteer with the St. Albans Area Watershed Association and has led an effort to mechanically remove vegetation that contributes to the phosphorus problem in his overburdened bay.
At 78, he is now searching for someone to take over the weed removal effort. “I’m getting a little burned out,” he admitted.
Seven miles to the west, on the island of North Hero, van den Noort questioned this summer whether all the data he gathers is making any difference.
“If we really wanted to solve the problem, I think we’d have to make some tough choices,” he said. “I don’t think anybody wants to do that. It’s a head-in-the-sand thing.”
Every week, van den Noort drives up the western edge of Isle La Motte on his monitoring circuit, looking out over a stretch of water that is supposed to be one of the cleanest parts of Lake Champlain. On the worst days, a pea green broth of blooms stubbornly hugs its entire shoreline.
A bloom at Lake Champlain at Graveyard Point in North HeroJeff van den Noort
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Democrats captured both chambers of Congress Tuesday in a sweeping midterm victory that extended deep into traditionally Republican territory and sharply curtailed President Donald Trump’s power for the final two years of his presidency.
The Associated Press called Democratic control of both the House and Senate early Wednesday. Democrats won all 20 closely watched House races decided by election night while capturing Senate seats in states including Texas, Kansas, North Carolina, Michigan and South Carolina. Reuters described the result as a “sweeping midterm repudiation” of Trump.
The scale of the defeat was remarkable. Democrats won statewide races in states Trump carried comfortably in 2024, including Texas, Kansas and Iowa. AP noted that only three previous post-World War II midterms, 1946, 1994 and 2006, saw both congressional chambers flip simultaneously.
The election also produced several historic firsts. Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed became the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate, while New Hampshire Democrat Chris Pappas became the first openly gay man elected to the Senate. In Georgia, Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms became the first Black woman elected governor of any U.S. state.
Exit polling showed broad dissatisfaction with Trump and the country’s direction, with roughly 70% saying they wanted Congress to provide stronger checks on presidential power.
Beginning in January, Democrats will control congressional investigations, legislation and Senate confirmation votes — fundamentally changing the balance of power in Washington.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump spent much of Wednesday morning explaining why Republicans suffered a sweeping midterm defeat. His list of culprits included Republican candidates, insufficient MAGA loyalty, Fox News and voters who failed to show up.
Notably absent from that list was Trump himself.
That omission is striking because Trump repeatedly tried to make the 2026 midterms a referendum on his presidency. Axios reported in September that Trump was explicitly pushing Republicans to campaign around him, while he later urged supporters to “pretend I’m on the ballot.”
After Democrats captured both the House and Senate, Trump posted that Republicans would have won “IN A LANDSLIDE” had he personally been running.
Fox News anchor Bret Baier confronted Trump with the contradiction Tuesday night, reminding him that he had specifically asked voters to behave as though his name were on the ballot. Trump acknowledged that but blamed Republican nominees instead, saying some “weren’t for” him and failed to inspire the MAGA base.
Trump then turned on Fox News, declaring that the network “bears responsibility for these losses” because it allowed Democratic voices on its programs.
He also attacked longtime ally Greg Abbott after the Texas governor lost reelection, accusing Abbott of becoming a “RINO.”
The broader evidence makes Trump’s effort to distance himself difficult to square with the campaign he ran. Axios reported that Republicans privately viewed Trump as their biggest electoral liability even before Election Day, while national polling showed his approval sinking into the mid-30s and majorities expressing dissatisfaction with his handling of the economy and cost of living.
Democrats ultimately seized both chambers, winning races across battlegrounds and traditionally Republican territory.
Trump wanted voters to treat the midterms as if he were on the ballot. They did. His response afterward was to blame nearly everyone except himself.
MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA — Alabama voters approved a constitutional amendment Tuesday requiring public schools to conduct the Pledge of Allegiance each morning and to allow student-initiated, student-led prayer.
Statewide Amendment 3 passed with roughly 63% support in unofficial results. The measure requires local school boards to adopt policies implementing both provisions, while explicitly allowing students to opt out based on their beliefs.
The practical change is narrower than the ballot language may suggest. Alabama law already requires public schools to conduct the Pledge of Allegiance, and students already possess constitutional protections allowing voluntary prayer and religious expression at school. The amendment places those requirements into the state constitution, making them harder to repeal through ordinary legislation.
The prayer provision specifies that any prayer must be initiated and led by students and that no student may be forced to participate. That distinction is important because the U.S. Supreme Court has long prohibited public schools from sponsoring or requiring religious exercises. Student prayer itself remains protected when it is genuinely voluntary and not school-directed.
The Republican-sponsored amendment passed the Alabama House 94-3 and the Senate 30-0 before being sent to voters.
Supporters described the measure as protecting religious expression and patriotic traditions. Critics questioned whether detailed school policies belong in the state constitution and warned that implementation must remain within federal church-state limits.
Midterm to long-term analysis of US election. What’s next?News releasesfarrell.drupa…
As voting was under way, Chatham House analysts on Tuesday looked ahead to how the US midterm elections could reshape the US political system, and the next two years of President Donald Trump’s administration.
On US midterm election day Chatham House convened a panel of experts to discuss what they were seeing, and what lies ahead for US domestic and foreign policy.
The in-person and online event – one of many convened by the Royal Institute of International Affairs – was part of its ongoing coverage of the US and its relationships with Europe, China and the rest of the world.
Dr Andrew Payne, Research Director of Chatham House’s Europe, Russia and the Americas Programmes, and author of ‘War on the Ballot: How the Election Cycle Shapes Presidential Decision-Making in War’.
‘This is actually a foreign policy election, a foreign policy election of the likes that we haven’t really seen since 2006, when you had another very unpopular war in the Middle East that led to a significant backlash against George W. Bush,’ he said.
‘The top issue is inflation and the cost of living. The Chicago Council [on Global Affairs] had a poll out that said that that was 37 per cent, by far and away the top issue.
‘And on the surface that supports this conventional wisdom that voters know little and they care even less about international affairs. These are events which are geographically and metaphorically very distant from the daily lives of voters. So when they go to the polls, they think about things like the price of gas, like the price of groceries.
‘To put it another way, James Carville, the political strategist, in 1992 famously said that elections in the US are about “the economy, stupid.”
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Experts discuss the US midterms at Chatham House.
‘So on the surface, I think that is that is all true, but the key exception, when voters really do start to sit up and pay attention to foreign policy, is when the costs of the administration’s foreign policy choices come to bite. And I think whether it’s tariffs, whether it’s the war in Iran, voters really are feeling the effects of some of the choices that this administration has made.
‘A couple of data points: that same survey I mentioned says 86 per cent of Americans say that the war – the war in Iran that is – has increased the cost of living, 81 per cent say the same about tariffs. When YouGov asked survey respondents why gas prices were going up in their area, 41 per cent said the war in Iran was to blame. That was more than twice as many as the next most popular answer, which was President Trump.
‘So I would make the case that it still is kind of “the economy, stupid”. But in this cycle, more than we have seen for 20 years, the economy really is a foreign policy issue in a very real sense.’
The lame duck era, and succession
Ludovic Hood, Senior Fellow with the Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East and a former US foreign service officer for 20 years.
‘We’re very much going into lame duck era for Donald Trump. And that’s going to be painful for him. I’m sure you’ve all tracked him enough, and the kinds of things he’s sensitive to and about,’ he said.
‘I think the likely results of this election will be a clear repudiation of how Trump has governed in the past two years versus his first term. In some ways some of his economic policies – for example investing in US companies – are more, if you will, Democratic than they are Republican.
‘I think a lot of long-standing Republicans are a little bit uncomfortable or aghast at a lot of the policies of the last two years, notably tariffs and notably some of the quasi, I’ll say, the socialist investments that the Trump administration has made in US firms.
‘I think a lot of American long-standing Republicans would like to see a return to more of a free markets economic freedom approach. And then there’s just the governing style. And we can talk about that for a long time. But I think there’s been a lot of drama. And I think a lot of people are fatigued.’
He added:
‘We throw the term civil war around, but in DC parlance, both parties are going to go through some intense soul searching and public arguing about about the direction.
‘The end of the Trump era is largely the end of the MAGA era. Trump is the magic ingredient. JD Vance will try and pick up strands of the MAGA tent, but it’s going to be a fairly small sub-tent, if you will. He just doesn’t have the appeal. And he’s also been quite ideologically flexible over the years if you go back in time.
‘He is the self-appointed standard bearer for some MAGA values. But don’t forget, Trump is in many ways, as I said, not only a realist when it comes to foreign policy and international affairs, but he’s more of a pragmatist, and he does go with his gut quite a lot. And he’s a bit of a contrarian, a disruptor. It’s very hard to pin an ideology on that.
‘Vance is trying to sort of be a standard-bearer for an ideology that almost quite isn’t there, if you will… I personally don’t think that JD Vance will get the nod, and that someone else – Rubio, Cruz, or someone else – there’s a fairly long list of senators and governors who have publicly said they are interested, or have used the usual vague language to pretend they’re not when they clearly are.
‘And I think you’ll see the Republican Party, for lack of a better term, become conservative again.’
Affordability
Laurel Rapp, Director of the US and North America Programme at Chatham House:
‘The polling over these past months has aligned very much with what Ludo is suggesting here. There is high levels of concern about cost of living, affordability. And that is across the Republican and Democratic voters. That is not a partisan issue. Questions about housing costs, access to health care, rising costs of food tied to inflation. So these are sort of across the partisan spectrum. That is a shared view.
‘When you start to break it down on the right and the left, you’re seeing different priorities. On the left, you see greater access to health care as something that they would like candidates to pursue. Climate change, questions about the US role in the world as it relates to the Iran war, stopping the Iran war.
‘When you look to the right and you’ll see a lot of Republican candidates in these final days reflecting some of these Republican voter attitudes focused on crime, on immigration, on social stability issues, and warnings. And that’s something we’ve seen the president also weave into his message a little bit. But to Ludo’s point, the president in these final days has not really hammered on these messages of affordability, has called that a hoax over the past couple of months.
So when you pull voters across the political spectrum, they will say affordability is really important to me. And then when asked, ‘Who do you trust? Which party do you trust to help get the economy back on track?’ a majority will say that the Democratic Party is more trusted on this. So I think we’re seeing a lot of those headwinds surging to the Democrats in these final days.’
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA — Virginia voters approved a constitutional amendment Tuesday removing the state’s dormant ban on same-sex marriage and replacing it with explicit protections for lawful marriages between two adults.
The measure passed with about 57% support, according to unofficial results, and will take effect Jan. 1, 2027.
Virginia voters originally approved the Marshall-Newman Amendment in 2006, defining marriage as exclusively between one man and one woman. That provision became unenforceable after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision established nationwide marriage equality, but the language remained in Virginia’s constitution.
The new amendment states that Virginia may not deny a marriage license to two adults based on sex, gender or race and must recognize and treat lawful marriages equally under state law. It also reinforces protections for interracial marriage.
Supporters argued that removing the old language was important because constitutional protections could matter if the U.S. Supreme Court ever revisited Obergefell. Opponents included religious conservative groups that campaigned against the change.
The marriage amendment was one of three constitutional changes Virginia voters approved Tuesday, alongside measures protecting reproductive rights and automatically restoring voting rights after incarceration.
MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA — Minnesota voters transformed their Election Day stickers into memorials Tuesday, placing “I Voted” decals at sites honoring Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two U.S. citizens killed by federal agents during the Trump administration’s Operation Metro Surge.
Photos from Minneapolis showed dozens of stickers covering signs, poles and other objects at the memorial sites. The gesture tied Election Day directly to an immigration crackdown that became one of Minnesota’s most contentious political issues this year.
Good, a 37-year-old writer and mother, and Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive-care nurse at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center, were killed in January during federal immigration operations. Their deaths triggered protests and continuing demands from their families for greater transparency and accountability.
Some voters explicitly connected their ballots to the shootings. A retired physician who had worked with Pretti left his sticker at the memorial, while another voter said visiting Good’s memorial made his vote feel connected to what Minneapolis experienced during the federal operation.
Immigration enforcement remained a major issue for Minnesota voters throughout the campaign. The Star Tribune reported that several voters cited Operation Metro Surge and ICE activity as important reasons for supporting Democratic candidates.
The memorials ultimately became more than places of mourning on Election Day, serving as visible expressions of how deeply the federal immigration crackdown shaped political engagement across Minneapolis.
ATLANTA, GEORGIA — A North Carolina man pardoned by President Donald Trump for offenses connected to Jan. 6 is facing new federal charges after prosecutors say he threatened to execute judges who handled Capitol riot cases.
Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr. was arrested Monday over an April Facebook post allegedly declaring that “ALL J6 Federal JUDGES will be EXECUTED!” Prosecutors say he later posted additional messages warning that “firing squads will commence 11/04/26” following the midterm elections.
Meredith previously traveled to Washington around Jan. 6, 2021, but arrived after the Capitol attack because of vehicle problems. He was later arrested after threatening to shoot then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. FBI agents found firearms, high-capacity magazines and roughly 2,500 rounds of ammunition in his trailer.
He pleaded guilty and received a 28-month sentence. Trump included Meredith in his sweeping January 2025 clemency order covering offenses connected to Jan. 6.
Prosecutors now argue Meredith’s recent posts constitute genuine threats rather than political rhetoric, citing what they describe as a continuing pattern of violent online statements.
The new charges underscore that Trump’s pardon erased federal consequences for Meredith’s earlier offenses but provides no protection for alleged crimes committed afterward. Meredith is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
It’s easy to run out of words to describe Rabindranath Tagore. The first non-European to win the Nobel prize in literature, Tagore was a Bengali poet, musician, novelist, philosopher, songwriter, painter, humanist and educator.
Born in 1861, Tagore left an indelible mark on the subcontinent’s literature, music, education and art. Among his enduring legacies are the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the United States will stop providing roughly $4 billion in annual aid to Israel beginning in 2027, while continuing to sell military equipment to the longtime U.S. ally.
Trump told Fox News that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had approached him about ending the assistance and that the two had discussed the idea for several years. Trump said Israel no longer needs the money and argued that continued aid had become a political issue in the United States.
The current U.S.-Israel security agreement provides about $3.8 billion annually in military aid through 2028. Because Congress appropriates the money each year, ending the assistance would still require changes to that funding process.
Trump said the policy shift would not end the defense relationship. Israel would instead be expected to purchase more U.S.-made weapons directly rather than receiving them through American military assistance.
The announcement comes amid growing political debate over U.S. support for Israel. Trump specifically cited criticism from Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, while public polling has shown declining support for unrestricted U.S. aid among Democrats and some Republicans.
Netanyahu’s office did not immediately comment. Israel has received tens of billions of dollars in additional U.S. military assistance since the Gaza war began in 2023.
China and its trading partners are moving towards an economic peace. But it is a fragile oneExpert commentthilton.drupal
Beijing appears to have embraced economic stability in its relations with the US and the EU. But serious challenges over its currency and export model remain.
In a world full of geopolitical tension and war, it is worth pausing to consider the few signs of hope that have emerged these last few months in China’s relations with the US and the EU.
Last month’s deal between Beijing and the EU to limit Europe’s imports of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) is the most recent notable example. It represents an easing of trade tension and could help to defuse the threat of some very hostile trade tools that the French and German governments are now willing to deploy.
This EU-China agreement also comes in the context of President Xi and President Trump agreeing to a period of ‘constructive strategic stability’ during Trump’s visit to China in May. While this apparent embrace of stability is welcome, China’s economic relations with its global trading partners remain contentious.
Self-serving stabilization
China has some very good reasons of its own to seek a period of stabilization. Just about the one thing that the US, the EU and many parts of the Global South can all agree on, these days, is their shared view that China should import more and export less. Beijing is immensely lucky that its trading partners can’t turn that common view into a common policy, and so they remain entirely uncoordinated in their response to China’s rapidly increasing share of the global market for manufactured goods. Beijing should worry that this luck may run out, and so it makes sense for the authorities there to offer some help.
China’s reaction to the Hormuz crisis is another example of the ‘strategic reasonableness’ that Beijing seems to have adopted. China reduced its oil imports very sharply after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in March and threatened the world with the loss of some 12 million barrels per day of oil that couldn’t find alternative routes out of the region. In June this year, China’s oil imports were down by about 5 million barrels a day. This reduced stress in the world’s oil market, which both supported economic activity and helped minimize global inflationary pressures.
It should go without saying that self-interest was at work here. China’s intensely export-oriented growth model requires Beijing to make sure that the chokepoint leverage that it is amassing through its manufacturing dominance doesn’t lead to a catastrophic loss of trust on the part of its trading partners. And at a more basic level, China’s economic model requires its customers to stay afloat. Whatever Beijing can do to stabilize global demand conditions, it should do. And that’s not to mention the chance that rising populism in the West might take on a more explicitly anti-China hue in the future.
Fragility
It has to be said, though, that this stabilization is very fragile. For example, China’s agreement to limit its exports of PHEVs to Europe, albeit through a WTO-compliant ‘safeguard measure,’ runs several risks. One is that China’s other trading partners might wonder why Beijing offered export restraint to the EU but not them, potentially leading them to push for their own arrangements.
And within the EU, there seems to be a strong sense that now Beijing has agreed to restrain vehicles exports, the same kind of pressure could be applied to sectors like pharmaceuticals, chemicals and machinery. China’s tolerance for this might be very limited.
Moreover, Europe and China’s other trading partners have ‘whack-a-mole’ problem when it comes to Chinese manufactured exports. The main reason that a rise in PHEV exports became so visible is thanks to the tariffs that the EU imposed on battery electric vehicles two years ago: China simply boosted its exports of PHEVs which weren’t subject to the tariffs. Now that these will be constrained, it probably won’t be long before another kind of manufactured exports surge next.
Currency concerns
Another reason to curb one’s enthusiasm is the way in which the debate about global trade imbalances is likely to evolve.
Beijing’s commitment to its manufacturing-led growth model seems, for the time being, unshakeable. What’s more likely is that China will agree to let its currency strengthen.
Last month, France and Germany made it clear in their unofficial ‘non-paper’ on trade that an appreciation of the renminbi would be a tolerable substitute in the short term for a more meaningful economic rebalancing of the economy that would boost China’s spending on imports. More pressure on China might grow when the US Treasury publishes its next report on potential ‘currency manipulators’ early next year.
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Watch: David Lubin on what the 2026 Bund Summit in Shanghai tells us about China’s economic engagement with the rest of the world.
It is difficult to argue against the idea that the renminbi remains highly undervalued. CF40, a distinguished Chinese economics think-tank, recently suggested that the underlying equilibrium exchange rate of the renminbi against the US dollar – adjusting for the fact that the cost of living in China is much lower – is around 2.5 CNY per USD. The current market exchange rate is just below 6.7.
In this respect, though, China’s trading partners should be careful what they wish for. A more expensive renminbi will inevitably boost inflationary pressures among China’s trading partners. The European Central Bank has shown how cheap imports from China have kept goods inflation more moderate than it would otherwise be. At a time when anxiety about inflation is especially acute, given the surge in prices seen since the Iran war started in February, a renminbi-induced inflation shock in Europe and the US may not be very welcome.
‘Safe’ FDI
Economic relations between China and its trading partners in the EU and the US suffer from a familiar security dilemma: my pursuit of security leaves you feeling less secure, and vice versa.
The most hopeful way out of this might be for everyone to agree that China should increase its flow of ‘safe’ foreign direct investment (FDI) to the rest of the world.
This issue is now at the centre of talks in Europe about the European Commission’s proposed Industrial Accelerator Act. Bigger FDI flows would help to lower China’s trade surplus by generating production in host countries, along with all the benefits of local job creation, technology transfer and tax revenues.
China has a long-term incentive to park industrial assets offshore, not least because they will generate a flow of cross-border investment income in the future.
Finding a way to increase China’s FDI flow to Europe without causing conniptions about national security risks is a worthy task. Set against the $350 billion trade deficit the EU will run with China this year, China’s FDI annual inflows of around $10 billion are tiny.
But boosting Chinese FDI will require tolerance of some minimal level of insecurity on Europe’s part. Otherwise, the pursuit of absolute security will come at an economic price that is just too high, and will, in the end, be self-defeating. FDI may well be the best way to build on the economic peace that is trying to break out.
A flash flood along the Rio Ruidoso on July 30, 2025
Three summers ago, over Father’s Day weekend, my family and I went camping in the Lincoln National Forest, just a few hours drive north of our home in El Paso, Texas. It’s a beautiful area that’s long served as a getaway for the region, with skiing in the winter, and golf and hiking in the summer. My daughter played under the trees, and I rode my bike down mountain trails that, I noticed, seemed concerningly dry.
The next evening, after we left to drive home, two fires started in forests surrounding the town of Ruidoso, New Mexico, around 25 miles away from where we’d been. I watched horrifying videos online of fire lapping the mountains behind the village’s strip malls and parking lots. The fires were eventually suppressed by a combination of human effort and the late summer monsoon season. But when the downpour of rain hit the burnt landscape around Ruidoso, it created another problem: Recurring floods then ripped through town, damaging homes and infrastructure, and leading to emergency rescues.
The following summer, the scene repeated. On July 8, 2025, monsoon rain hit a burn scar and quickly swelled the Rio Ruidoso and its tributaries. Three people — two of them children — lost their lives.
Reporter Abe Streep, a member of ProPublica’s Southwest office, and I met in Ruidoso to report on what happened. Ruidoso is a place built on tourism, with a paid (rather than volunteer) fire department staff and its own disaster manager. How could two children and a man be swept to their deaths in a place that appeared equipped to handle such disasters?
In two stories ProPublica recently published, Abe answered those questions. He found that, after the 2024 fires, experts warned the town of increased flash flooding risks. Initially, local and state leaders considered a relocation plan for some homes and businesses that would get people out of harm’s way, but the project faltered. Instead, village leaders continued promoting tourism to the town, and the mayor even chastised residents for warning of floods on social media. Abe also reported that, while local and state officials insisted the emergency response to the flood was admirable, first responders say the three deaths could have been avoided. The responders told Abe that village leadership left them understaffed and inadequately equipped to contend with the flooding.
The Village of Ruidoso did not respond to detailed written questions about its emergency response, and it has not publicly released a report on rescue efforts during the flood. Reached by phone, the fire chief, Cade Hall, disputed our reporting but declined to provide specifics. Mayor Lynn Crawford has said protecting the village includes balancing public safety with tourism, the lifeblood of its economy. But in an interview last year, Crawford said to Abe and me: “Who’s to blame? I didn’t start the fire.”
My role as a photographer was to document Ruidoso as the story unfolded — to visualize the people and place at the center of it. It’s a role I’ve had countless times in my career, but this story hit unexpectedly close to home. I could imagine my own family caught unaware in a similar situation, trying to escape the El Paso summer heat but instead navigating an unfathomable disaster.
A crumbled trailer and debris from flash flooding in Ruidoso on Aug. 1, 2025The crumbling house at the Riverview RV Park on Sept. 10, 2026
When Abe and I started reporting, we met people from the community and out of town who tried to help. I watched as New Mexico National Guard service members loaded sand bags into families’ cars, people prepared hot meals for those who had been displaced and volunteers handed out donated supplies from collection centers.
Supplies inside a Salvation Army makeshift distribution center and a sandbag distribution point facilitated by the New Mexico National Guard last summer
While we were reporting one afternoon, it started raining. Fear swept through me. Our phones lit up with flood warnings from the National Weather Service. We knew we should take them seriously.
Abe and I sought refuge in a local brewery perched high above the river basin. Before we knew it, the water from that thin little creek of Rio Ruidoso became a torrent. The rushing water rose quickly. It swept through the river valley right under the brewery, carrying what looked like trees and debris with it.
A woman watches the Rio Ruidoso rise from inside a brewery in downtown Ruidoso last summer.Two people venture close to the river as a flash flood began to subside last summer.
Still, I wanted to photograph the river up close. I left the safety of the brewery and let the heavy rain cover me as I moved closer to the river. As I made photos that afternoon and throughout the rest of the trip, questions about my own safety ran through my mind: Would the water keep rising? If it did, could I get to high ground? And, notably, would I have enough warning?
In hindsight, I realize these questions were largely about whether I could trust the systems in place to keep me and others safe. And as Abe kept reporting over the next year, the more those questions felt valid.
Last month, Abe and I traveled again to Ruidoso. The town felt lighter and less ominous. Much of the ruin had been removed or rebuilt. Grass and sagebrush sprouted on a burn scar. Tourists wandered around a lively downtown on a Friday afternoon. People seemed to be moving on from the terror of the previous year.
Downtown Ruidoso on a Friday afternoon this summerA mule deer and an elk wander behind downtown Ruidoso.New growth on a burn scar above Ruidoso
But Stephanie and Sebastian Trotter still carry the scars of the day. They lost their two children, Sebastian Rowan, 7, and Charlotte, 4, in the Ruidoso flooding.
There is now a memorial for them and Benjamin “Tim” Feagin, the third person who died, at the RV park where they had been camped. But I wanted to see for myself the places where each of them was found. I felt that making photos of those places could help people connect with the reality of their deaths as well as their lives. So, early one morning, I walked along the floodplain trying to find the locations Abe had shared with me.
I got to the bridge where a firefighter found Sebastian Rowan. There was no marker, no indication that anyone’s body had been found there.
Then I went looking for the area where Charlotte was found. I wandered under pine and cottonwood, through knee-deep grasses and wild sunflowers. Crows cawed overhead, and the early morning sun broke through the trees. I stood there for a while, admiring the beauty, awed by the sadness of the river’s trickle.
Rio Ruidoso, near where the body of Sebastian Rowan was found
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from sending states lists of voters it suspects may be noncitizens or pressuring election officials to segregate or reject their ballots.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled Monday that the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security must stop distributing the lists while litigation continues. She said the government’s data may be unreliable, creating a risk that eligible U.S. citizens could be improperly flagged and disenfranchised.
The administration recently sent such lists to California and Washington, asking officials to isolate ballots from thousands of voters until their citizenship could be verified. Voting-rights and privacy groups sued, arguing the effort violated the federal Privacy Act and improperly intruded on state authority over elections.
The Justice Department maintains that its actions are intended to enforce the federal prohibition on noncitizen voting. Noncitizen voting is illegal, but documented cases remain rare.
Chutkan’s order does not prevent states from independently verifying individual citizenship through existing federal systems. It instead bars the administration from distributing its own lists or directing states to act on them.
The ruling follows several other court setbacks to the administration’s election-related efforts, including challenges involving California ballots and alleged noncitizen voters.
MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE — Newly released video shows Tennessee National Guard members pointing their handguns at 20-year-old Tyrin Johnson as he lay mortally wounded on a Memphis sidewalk after being shot during a July encounter, adding new scrutiny to a case already complicated by conflicting accounts of what happened.
The Shelby County District Attorney’s Office released police body-camera footage, surveillance video and a bystander recording Monday as the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation continues reviewing the July 5 shooting. Johnson died at the scene from a single gunshot wound.
The released footage does not show the moment Johnson was shot. It does show Guard members shouting commands and aiming their weapons at Johnson after he was already on the ground. A Memphis police officer can be heard calling for an ambulance and asking whether the troops had medical supplies.
That missing footage is important because official accounts and Johnson’s autopsy appear to conflict.
A Tennessee National Guard report said Johnson “rounded on” two Guard members and pointed a handgun at them before both troops fired their M17 pistols. However, an autopsy provided to Johnson’s family found that he had been shot in the back, raising questions about whether the official description accurately reflects Johnson’s position when the fatal round was fired.
Authorities have said Johnson was armed and had fled after officers responded to reports of gunfire. Earlier surveillance footage shows a person firing shots across a parking lot before police began pursuing an armed man. The available video, however, does not establish what Johnson was doing at the precise moment the Guard members opened fire.
Attorney André C. Wharton, representing Johnson’s family, said the investigation should remain focused on whether the fatal shot was legally justified.
The Guard members were deployed as part of a federal crime task force created under President Donald Trump and supported by Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee. The task force was involved in four fatal shootings between May and July.
Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy has not yet decided whether criminal charges will be filed.
ST. CLOUD, MINNESOTA — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spent last Friday promoting the Trump administration’s aggressive campaign against fraud in Minnesota. But when asked whether that same scrutiny should apply to an ICE prison purchase that cost the federal government hundreds of millions more than an earlier offer to the state, Bessent dismissed the question as a “waste of our time.”
The exchange highlighted a notable contradiction in the administration’s message: federal officials say they intend to follow suspicious money wherever it leads, while rejecting calls to examine a costly transaction involving their own government.
The controversy involves the Prairie Correctional Facility in Appleton, Minnesota. ICE purchased the vacant 1,600-bed prison from private prison company CoreCivic for about $496 million in August. However, records obtained by KARE 11 showed CoreCivic had offered the same facility to Minnesota for $75 million in 2025.
CoreCivic also has substantial financial ties to Trump-era Republican politics: the company donated $500,000 to Trump’s 2025 inaugural committee, while its PAC and employees gave nearly $785,000 during the 2024 election cycle, with about $660,000 going to Republican candidates and committees.
Asked about the roughly $420 million difference during the administration’s fraud task force event, Bessent said he knew nothing about the transaction and added that questions diverting attention from criminal fraud were “a waste of our time.”
That response came shortly after Bessent declared that President Trump had made fighting fraud “a mandate” across the entire administration. Treasury’s own release said that “wherever the money leads, the full weight of government will follow.”
No evidence has established that the ICE purchase itself involved criminal fraud. But the enormous difference between the earlier $75 million offer and the federal government’s $496 million purchase has raised legitimate questions about how taxpayers’ money was spent.
DHS and CoreCivic dispute the suggestion that the figures are directly comparable. CoreCivic says the $75 million figure was not a formal appraisal and that the federal price reflected replacement costs, renovations, security upgrades and current construction expenses. The company said independent federal appraisers determined the property’s fair market value.
The timing nevertheless makes the contrast difficult to ignore. At the same Minnesota event, Bessent, FBI Director Kash Patel and other officials repeatedly emphasized protecting taxpayers and pursuing fraud aggressively. Treasury said its anti-fraud campaign would use “every tool” available to hold wrongdoers accountable.
That standard may now invite an obvious question: if federal officials believe questionable spending deserves aggressive scrutiny, should transactions involving their own agencies receive the same examination?
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS — A federal judge has dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit seeking to force Harvard University to turn over extensive admissions records as part of an investigation into whether the school continued considering race after the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions in 2023.
U.S. District Judge Myong J. Joun dismissed the case without prejudice, meaning the Justice Department may be able to file it again after correcting procedural deficiencies. Joun emphasized that his ruling did not decide whether Harvard discriminated in admissions or whether the government may ultimately obtain the requested records.
The Justice Department sued Harvard in February, seeking applicant-level information including grades, test scores, admissions decisions, race and ethnicity data, extracurricular activities and personal essays. The department said the records were necessary to determine whether Harvard was complying with the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
Harvard maintained that it had already provided substantial information while challenging the scope and relevance of some federal demands.
Joun found that the government had not adequately demonstrated that it followed required procedures before going to court, including formally identifying a compliance violation and establishing that voluntary compliance could not be achieved.
“The Government may be able to identify a qualifying determination or cure the procedural deficiency,” Joun wrote, but he concluded that it had not yet established a sufficient basis for judicial intervention.
The ruling therefore represents a procedural setback for the administration rather than a substantive victory for Harvard on its admissions practices. The Justice Department could renew the case after completing the required administrative steps.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected the Trump administration’s emergency request to force California to set aside roughly 20,000 mail ballots associated with voters federal officials suspect may be noncitizens, handing the Justice Department another defeat in its Election Day challenge.
The court issued a brief order declining to intervene, with no justices publicly dissenting. The ruling allows California to continue processing and counting the disputed ballots under its existing election procedures.
The Justice Department had argued that ballots connected to people on its federal list should be segregated until their citizenship could be verified. Solicitor General D. John Sauer warned that once ballots were removed from identifying envelopes and mixed with other votes, any ballot later determined to have been cast illegally could no longer be identified.
California opposed the request, arguing that the federal list contained significant errors and that imposing a new ballot-segregation procedure at the last minute could disenfranchise lawful voters and disrupt an election already underway.
Those concerns were reinforced by an analysis from the UCLA Voting Rights Project, which found that 8,880 of the 20,930 names on the Justice Department list, about 42%, could not be matched to California’s voter rolls. Researchers also identified confirmed U.S. citizens and thousands of people who appeared likely to be naturalized citizens. The Justice Department disputes that analysis.
The administration had already lost before a federal district judge and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Lower courts questioned both the reliability of the federal data and the Justice Department’s authority to require California to alter its election procedures immediately before voting concluded.
The Supreme Court’s action does not resolve the broader legal dispute over the administration’s noncitizen-voter initiative. Separate litigation over federal voter lists, subpoenas and Justice Department demands remains active. But for the Nov. 3 election, California will not be required to isolate the approximately 20,000 ballots identified by the federal government.
Its vision, “Establishing Equity Through Literacy,” centers on helping everyone gain the knowledge needed to make informed health decisions. Its work includes advocating for education and policy changes, strengthening partnerships and encouraging clearer communication throughout the healthcare system.
