ProPublica reports that federal cybersecurity reviewers had serious, yearslong concerns about Microsoft's GCC High cloud offering, yet they approved it anyway because the product was already deeply embedded across government. As one member of the team put it: "The package is a pile of shit." From the report: In late 2024, the federal government's cybersecurity evaluators rendered a troubling verdict on one of Microsoft's biggest cloud computing offerings. The tech giant's "lack of proper detailed security documentation" left reviewers with a "lack of confidence in assessing the system's overall security posture," according to an internal government report reviewed by ProPublica. For years, reviewers said, Microsoft had tried and failed to fully explain how it protects sensitive information in the cloud as it hops from server to server across the digital terrain. Given that and other unknowns, government experts couldn't vouch for the technology's security. Such judgments would be damning for any company seeking to sell its wares to the U.S. government, but it should have been particularly devastating for Microsoft. The tech giant's products had been at the heart of two major cybersecurity attacks against the U.S. in three years. In one, Russian hackers exploited a weakness to steal sensitive data from a number of federal agencies, including the National Nuclear Security Administration. In the other, Chinese hackers infiltrated the email accounts of a Cabinet member and other senior government officials. The federal government could be further exposed if it couldn't verify the cybersecurity of Microsoft's Government Community Cloud High, a suite of cloud-based services intended to safeguard some of the nation's most sensitive information. Yet, in a highly unusual move that still reverberates across Washington, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP, authorized the product anyway, bestowing what amounts to the federal government's cybersecurity seal of approval. FedRAMP's ruling -- which included a kind of "buyer beware" notice to any federal agency considering GCC High -- helped Microsoft expand a government business empire worth billions of dollars. "BOOM SHAKA LAKA," Richard Wakeman, one of the company's chief security architects, boasted in an online forum, celebrating the milestone with a meme of Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Wolf of Wall Street." It was not the type of outcome that federal policymakers envisioned a decade and a half ago when they embraced the cloud revolution and created FedRAMP to help safeguard the government's cybersecurity. The program's layers of review, which included an assessment by outside experts, were supposed to ensure that service providers like Microsoft could be entrusted with the government's secrets. But ProPublica's investigation -- drawn from internal FedRAMP memos, logs, emails, meeting minutes, and interviews with seven former and current government employees and contractors -- found breakdowns at every juncture of that process. It also found a remarkable deference to Microsoft, even as the company's products and practices were central to two of the most damaging cyberattacks ever carried out against the government.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and other top officials are testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee about national security threats facing the U.S.
Nick Timothy said an event attended by the mayor of London that included prayers was an ‘act of domination’
Polanski says the government should be doing more to improve home insulation, and on the drive towards renewable energy.
And he says the government should commit to ensuring energy bills do not rise above the April-June price cap.
The government should guarantee right now that it will not allow energy bills to rise beyond the April-June price cap – instead setting aside approximately £8.4bn to prevent a rise of up to £300 per household that could be coming down the track.
No, it’s not cheap. But the alternative is unacceptable: if the price cap rises, we will see interest rate rises. Mortgage rates up. Bond yields up. And inflation up – and we will be back into the doom loop that has done untold damage to our economy and caused misery for households across the UK for years now.
There are ways to pay. Instead of scrapping the windfall tax on energy companies, as this government is planning to do, we should be strengthening it instead. We need a real, loophole-free windfall tax with no exemptions for reinvesting in fossil fuels. A robust tax that claws back every single pound of reckless profiteering from this crisis and repurposes it immediately to protect every home in the country. And while taxing extreme wealth in the ways we need to will take time to implement, there are levers the government could pull right now – like equalising capital gains tax with income tax and reforming the base, to raise £12bn.
It’s time for the government to act decisively, eliminate the uncertainty that is plaguing people and the markets and insulate us from some of the worst economic effects of Trump’s war.
This was not a war of self-defence, there was no imminent threat. Negotiations were ongoing. It was, as the BBC’s international editor said, a war of choice.
People across the Middle East are terrified of what Trump and Netanyanhu’s war will mean for them and their loved ones. And the repercussions are echoing across the world as instability spreads and oil prices spike.
People are already struggling so hard just to make ends meet. People feel like they’re running every day just to stay in the same place. The idea that yet again – for the second time in just a few years – that we are going to have to deal with another enormous spike in the cost of the basics is unacceptable.
It’s unacceptable because we didn’t need to be here. It’s unforgivable that just four years after we last saw an energy price shock, that one triggered by Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, far too little has been done to protect this country, its people, and its economy – from the impact of yet another energy price shock.
Continue reading...Offer to reform taxes, tackle ‘rip-off Britain’ and overhaul fiscal rules could tempt exasperated Labour supporters
The venue for Zack Polanski’s economic speech on Wednesday – a sunny north London garden centre – could hardly have been more different to the sombre City backdrop for Rachel Reeves’s Mais lecture a day earlier.
The chancellor was, as it happens, the last politician to give a major economic speech at the New Economics Foundation (NEF), the leftwing thinktank that invited the Green party leader, Polanski, to set out his stall as part of its 40th anniversary celebrations. Back in 2018 it hosted the speech in which, as a backbencher, Reeves called for an “everyday economy” that would prioritise the needs of low-paid workers.
Continue reading...The director of national intelligence provided the Senate Intelligence Committee with mixed messages about the state of Iran’s nuclear program before the war began.
Committee chair Rand Paul and Markwayne Mullin exchange heated remarks at hearing to confirm new homeland security secretary
Rand Paul seemed immediately frustrated with Mullin as he opened the hearing. While he was speaking, he suggested that Mullin wasn’t listening to his remarks, during which he pushed Trump’s nominee on his vote against Paul’s amendment to stop all funding for refugee welfare programs.
“You decided to transfer the blame. You told the media that I was a ‘freaking snake’ and that you completely understood why I had been assaulted,” Paul said, referring to when he was attacked by a neighbor in Kentucky in 2017, which resulted in Paul breaking several ribs and developing pneumonia.
Continue reading...Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news
UK mortgage rates have climbed again today, as lender pull their cheaper deals from the market.
Data provider Moneyfacts reports that the average 2-year fixed residential mortgage rate today is 5.30%, up from 5.28% on Tuesday.
Average 2-year fix has risen from 4.83% at the start of March to 5.30% today. It’s highest since February 2025.
Average 5-year fix has risen from 4.95% at the start of March to 5.35% today. It’s highest since August 2024.
“The rapid disappearance of sub-4% mortgage deals shows just how quickly market sentiment has shifted. Nine days ago (9 March), well-positioned borrowers could choose from hundreds of fixed rate deals priced below 4%, but that has now dwindled to just two.
“The financial effects of ‘Trumpflation’ are already hitting home as the conflict in Iran is driving inflation concerns. That has forced markets to rethink the outlook for rate cuts, pushing borrowing costs higher and prompting lenders to pull and reprice deals at speed. For borrowers, it means the window for ultra-competitive sub-4% rates has been slammed shut, at least for now.”
Iranian crude exports through the corridor accounts for nearly three-quarters of the 27.2 million barrels that have left the Persian Gulf since March 1, data from intelligence firm Kpler Ltd. show. That amounts to about 1.2 million barrels a day of crude for Tehran, compared to a pre-war daily level of 1.5 million barrels.
By contrast, nearly three weeks into the war, cargoes from others in the region added up to just 400,000 barrels a day, versus an average 14 million barrels per day in peace time.
Continue reading...Acting deputy TSA administrator Adam Stahl says the situation will get worse the longer the agency and the Department of Homeland Security don't receive funding.
The bloc’s foremost troublemaker could lose April’s election, but the headaches he’s caused will not necessarily disappear with him
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How do you solve a problem like Viktor Orban? By crossing your fingers and hoping it disappears in just over three weeks’ time. But even if the European Union’s disruptor-in-chief is ousted in elections next month (which is far from certain), Europe’s Hungary problem is unlikely to vanish overnight.
EU leaders will gather in Brussels on Thursday and Friday for yet another summit that will be at least partly hijacked by Orbán, Hungary’s illiberal prime minister.
Continue reading...A HELOC could be your most affordable borrowing option now. Here's how far costs have fallen in the last two years.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin is appearing before the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee for a confirmation hearing, which Sen. Rand Paul chairs.
Josh D'Amaro, who oversees Disney theme parks and dozens of resort hotels worldwide, will become the next Disney CEO.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin is appearing before the Committee on Homeland Security after President Donald Trump nominated him to replace Kristi Noem as the Homeland Security Secretary.
President Trump on Wednesday temporarily eased a century-old law that limits shippers from transporting energy products around the U.S.
Trump pick for homeland security secretary followed firing of Kristi Noem amid blowback for anti-immigration tactics
Markwayne Mullin defended his ability to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Wednesday at a confirmation hearing that began on an unusually quarrelsome note when a fellow Republican senator accused him of encouraging violence.
Donald Trump earlier this month nominated Mullin, a first-term Republican senator from Oklahoma, to lead DHS, after the president ousted Kristi Noem amid public blowback against the administration’s aggressive approach to its mass deportation agenda, which resulted in the killings of two US citizens by immigration agents in Minneapolis.
Continue reading...Breakthroughs in Quantum Cryptography and Quantum Teleportation Redefined Secure Communication and Computing
NEW YORK, March 18, 2026 — ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard as the recipients of the 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award for their essential role in establishing the foundations of quantum information science and transforming secure communication and computing.
Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard are the recipients of the 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award
The ACM A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize in Computing,” carries a $1 million prize with financial support provided by Google, Inc. The award is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundations of computing.
Bennett and Brassard are widely recognized as founders of quantum information science, a field at the intersection of physics and computer science that treats quantum mechanical phenomena not merely as properties of matter, but as resources for processing and transmitting information.
In 1984, inspired by the insights of their late collaborator Stephen Wiesner, Bennett and Brassard introduced the first practical protocol for quantum cryptography, now known as BB84. The paper, “Quantum Cryptography: Public Key Distribution and Coin Tossing,” demonstrated that two parties could establish a secret encryption key with security guaranteed by the laws of physics, even against adversaries with unlimited computational power and technological sophistication such as a quantum computer.
In 1949, mathematician and computer scientist Claude Shannon proved that perfect secrecy in communications is only possible between parties who share ahead of time a secret key that is at least as long as the message itself. Public-key cryptography later provided a powerful workaround by relying on mathematical problems which were believed to be hard to solve—assumptions embedded in modern digital infrastructure but shown by Peter Shor as early as 1994 to become insecure when a full-size quantum computer is available. In sharp contrast, BB84 achieves information-theoretic security without computational assumptions, instead relying on a fundamental property of quantum information: it cannot be copied or measured without disturbance. Any attempt at eavesdropping leaves detectable traces before any information can be compromised.
As research advances toward large-scale quantum computers, governments and industry are reassessing the long-term resilience of widely deployed public-key cryptographic systems. Quantum cryptography, alongside emerging, hopefully quantum-resistant classical approaches for which no proofs of security are known, represents one pathway toward securing digital communications in the decades ahead. Variants of BB84 have already been implemented in operational quantum communication networks around the world, using both landlines via fiber and free space communication through satellites.
Beyond cryptography, Bennett and Brassard’s work reshaped the theoretical foundations of computing. In 1993 and with other collaborators, they introduced quantum teleportation, demonstrating how an arbitrary quantum state could be transmitted between distant parties using quantum entanglement—the surprisingly correlated behavior of particles too far apart to influence one another—and classical communication. This discovery showed that entanglement, once viewed primarily as a philosophical curiosity, could serve as a practical resource. Experimental verification of related phenomena was recognized by the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Their subsequent work on entanglement distillation in 1996 demonstrated how imperfect entanglement could be strengthened into high-quality entanglement, a critical step toward scalable quantum communication. These ideas underpin ongoing efforts to build quantum networks and ultimately a quantum internet capable of transmitting quantum information across global distances.
Over four decades, Bennett and Brassard’s collaboration bridged two previously distinct disciplines: physics and computer science. By incorporating quantum principles into computational models, their work has influenced cryptography, algorithm design, computational complexity, learning theory, interactive proofs, and mathematical physics. Their research helped catalyze a generation of physicists and computer scientists to work across disciplinary boundaries.
“Bennett and Brassard fundamentally changed our understanding of information itself,” said Yannis Ioannidis, President of ACM. “Their insights expanded the boundaries of computing and set in motion decades of discovery across disciplines. The global momentum behind quantum technologies today underscores the enduring importance of their contributions.”
Their recognition comes on the heels of the United Nations’ designation of 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, reflecting the growing global investment in quantum computing, communication, and sensing. Many of today’s ambitious efforts to build large-scale quantum systems trace their conceptual foundations to the theoretical breakthroughs pioneered by Bennett and Brassard.
Looking ahead, the next chapter of quantum information science includes the pursuit of fault-tolerant quantum computers, new quantum algorithms, and long-distance quantum communication enabled by satellites and quantum repeaters. Teleportation, entanglement swapping, and distillation—once abstract theoretical ideas—are now central components of practical quantum engineering.
“Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard’s visionary insights laid the groundwork for one of the most exciting frontiers in science and technology,” said Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist, Google DeepMind and Google Research. “Their work continues to influence both fundamental research and real-world innovation. Google is proud to support the ACM A.M. Turing Award and honor the pioneers shaping the future of computing.”
Biographical Background
Charles H. Bennett is an American physicist whose research has shaped the foundations of quantum information science, quantum cryptography, and quantum teleportation, and who has played a central role in establishing quantum information science as a rigorous scientific discipline. After earning his Bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University and his PhD from Harvard University, Bennett joined IBM Research in 1973 (and still works there today), where he has spent his career exploring connections between physics (especially thermodynamics and quantum mechanics) and computer science (cryptography, computability, computational complexity, and information theory), to advance the theoretical and practical understanding of computation and quantum mechanics. He is a recipient of several prominent awards including the Wolf Prize in Physics, the Micius Quantum Prize, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences, and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. He is also a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society.
Gilles Brassard is a Canadian computer scientist widely recognized as the first in the world to have delved into the uncharted territory of quantum information science. He earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the Université de Montréal, and his PhD in theoretical computer science from Cornell University in 1979 under the direction of 1986 Turing Award laureate John E. Hopcroft. He joined the faculty of the Université de Montréal shortly thereafter and was Canada Research Chair in Quantum Information Science from 2001 to 2021. An Officer of the Order of Canada and of the Ordre national du Québec, Brassard has received numerous honors including the Wolf Prize in Physics, the Micius Quantum Prize, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences, and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and an International Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
About the ACM A.M. Turing Award
The A.M. Turing Award was named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits of computing, and who was a key contributor to the Allied cryptanalysis of the Enigma cipher during World War II. Since its inception in 1966, the Turing Award has honored the computer scientists and engineers who created the systems and underlying theoretical foundations that have propelled the information technology industry.
About ACM
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.
Source: ACM
The post ACM A.M. Turing Award Honors Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard for Foundational Contributions to Quantum Information Science appeared first on HPCwire.
IDF is attempting to gain control of border towns, in particular the strategic hilltop city of Khiam
Israel and Hezbollah are engaged in intense ground clashes in at least three strategic areas in south Lebanon as Israel pushes on with its ground invasion of its neighbour, according to a Lebanese security source and residents of the affected towns.
Much of the fighting was concentrated around the strategic hilltop city of Khiam, with the Israel Defense Forces carrying out an air and artillery campaign against Hezbollah fighters dug into the city. Fighting escalated there after days of clashes, with a Hezbollah spokesperson acknowledging there were “heightened clashes” on the eastern and northern outskirts of the city.
Continue reading...Beijing seeks to decipher effect of Iran war on US midterms and best way to apply pressure when Trump meets Xi
The White House said on Wednesday that China had agreed to postpone Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing, as war in the Middle East rages on, complicating the US president’s position at home and abroad.
China has not yet commented on the delay to the highly anticipated trip, in which Trump and the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, will meet in person for the first time since October. Trump previously said that he hoped to delay the trip, originally scheduled for 31 March to 2 April, for “five or six weeks”.
Continue reading...SAN JOSE, Calif., March 18, 2026 — Super Micro Computer, Inc. is announcing new additions to its broad portfolio of enterprise solutions to meet the growing demands of today’s AI-enabled and graphical computing applications, in a wider range of enterprise environments.
Supermicro Enterprise-Optimized Solutions
The new systems bring the acceleration power of NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs in form factors which are optimized for enterprise data centers and the edge, where space, power, and cooling limitations have previously restricted the deployment of high-density compute infrastructure. For enterprises seeking turnkey, full stack solutions, Supermicro offers NVIDIA-Certified Systems that have been tested and validated for compatibility with NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell GPUs, NVIDIA networking, and NVIDIA AI Enterprise and NVIDIA Omniverse libraries. Additionally, Supermicro’s NVIDIA-Certified Systems are NVIDIA accelerated application-ready, supporting a wide range of certified third-party applications to accelerate enterprise workloads.
“As enterprises of all shapes and sizes continue to increase their pace of AI adoption, Supermicro is again leading the industry in bringing new NVIDIA acceleration technologies to market, balancing performance and efficiency to enable accelerated compute where it is needed most,” said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. “With our range of flexible, modular Building Block Solutions architectures supporting NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell GPUs, we are helping enterprises shorten Time-to-Online so that they can realize value from their infrastructure investment sooner.”
In addition to Supermicro’s existing enterprise AI solutions based on the NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPU, the expanded portfolio adds support for the new NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPU and NVIDIA Vera CPU, providing even more deployment-specific customization options for a range of enterprise workloads including LLM fine-tuning, AI inference, Gen AI, VDI, data analytics, media transcoding, cloud and mobile gaming, and FP32 HPC.
Supermicro systems with NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell GPUs can directly replace standard 1U and 2U rackmount enterprise servers to provide significant workload-specific acceleration improvements compared to CPU-only compute, easily integrating into existing data centers and requiring minimal to no modifications to existing rack, power, or cooling infrastructure. Supermicro also offers storage solutions with leading ISVs based on NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference architecture, which incorporate GPU acceleration into the storage platform to accelerate data vectorization, vector database searching, and inference workloads.
The new NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell GPUs deliver breakthrough performance for demanding data processing, AI video, and inference workloads in a single‑slot, power‑efficient design. Supermicro NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell solutions are offered in industry-standard form factors that can directly replace existing CPU-only compute servers and are available with curated NVIDIA software packages, reducing the complexity of creating full-stack AI solutions.
Supermicro’s expanded portfolio of accelerated systems is now available to address the full spectrum of enterprise deployment requirements, including:
For more information on Supermicro’s complete range of enterprise AI and accelerated systems, please visit https://www.supermicro.com/en/accelerators/nvidia/supermicro-rtx-pro-bse
About Super Micro Computer, Inc.
Supermicro (NASDAQ: SMCI) is a global leader in Application-Optimized Total IT Solutions. Founded and operating in San Jose, California, Supermicro is committed to delivering first-to-market innovation for Enterprise, Cloud, AI, and 5G Telco/Edge IT Infrastructure. We are a Total IT Solutions provider with server, AI, storage, IoT, switch systems, software, and support services. Supermicro’s motherboard, power, and chassis design expertise further enables our development and production, enabling next-generation innovation from cloud to edge for our global customers. Our products are designed and manufactured in-house (in the US, Asia, and the Netherlands), leveraging global operations for scale and efficiency and optimized to improve TCO and reduce environmental impact (Green Computing). The award-winning portfolio of Server Building Block Solutions® allows customers to optimize for their exact workload and application by selecting from a broad family of systems built from our flexible and reusable building blocks that support a comprehensive set of form factors, processors, memory, GPUs, storage, networking, power, and cooling solutions (air-conditioned, free air cooling or liquid cooling).
Source: Supermicro
The post Supermicro Expands Enterprise Systems with NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell GPUs appeared first on HPCwire.
Esmail Khatib is third senior Iranian figure killed in 24 hours, as Israel authorises military to kill targeted officials
Israel said on Wednesday it had killed a third senior Iranian figure in 24 hours, stating that its forces had “eliminated” Tehran’s intelligence minister, Esmail Khatib, in an overnight strike.
Khatib’s death follows those of Ali Larijani, the head of the supreme national security apparatus, and the commander of the Basij militia, Gholamreza Soleimani. Iran confirmed his death.
Continue reading...The skeleton is the latest in a series of bodies discovered in the city of Dijon that were mysteriously buried in a seated position while facing west.
Italian soldiers are patrolling Rome's ancient Jewish quarter and Belgian troops will help secure Jewish sites as an official warns the threat of antisemitic violence "is very real."
Some states give creditors less time to sue over credit card debt. Here's where the deadlines are shortest.
From intelligence to research and grant applications, artificial intelligence is playing a bigger role in government and military operations.
Producers say alleged victim of grooming was ready to tell his story and show raises urgent issues around online safety
Channel 5 has defended its controversial drama about the downfall of Huw Edwards, saying it raises the “urgent” issue of grooming and online safety and gives voice to his alleged victim, who worked with the programme to tell his side of the story so “no one who has been silenced feels they are alone”.
Starring Martin Clunes as the disgraced former BBC newsreader, the drama charts the claim of a relationship and texts between Edwards and a vulnerable young man who was at the centre of a scandal reported by the Sun in 2023, which alleged the presenter made payments to a 17-year-old for sexually explicit images.
Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards will air at 9pm on 24 March on Channel 5.
Continue reading...In this week’s newsletter: the creators of All Will Rise on standing up to the tech giant – and joining the No Games for Genocide movement
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Video games are in a funding crisis. Investor money flowed freely during the pandemic gaming boom, but now the well has run dry. It is increasingly difficult, for indie developers especially, to get the capital to make games. It is extremely unusual, then, to hear of a developer returning an investor’s money. Yet that is what Speculative Agency, developers of All Will Rise, have just done.
Last year, All Will Rise, a deck-building game about a team of activists fighting for the future of their oligarch-run city, received money from Microsoft as part of a developer acceleration programme. In late-2025, however, the team became aware of No Games for Genocide, a collective of developers, journalists, union organisers and others that came together as a result of Israeli assault on Gaza to protest against “material and commercial ties between the games industry and enabling genocide, war crimes, and the military industrial complex”.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Musi, a free music streaming app that had tens of millions of iPhone downloads and garnered plenty of controversy over its method of acquiring music, has lost an attempt to get back on Apple's App Store. A federal judge dismissed Musi's lawsuit against Apple with prejudice and sanctioned Musi's lawyers for "mak[ing] up facts to fill the perceived gaps in Musi's case." Musi built a streaming service without striking its own deals with copyright holders. It did so by playing music from YouTube, writing in its 2024 lawsuit against Apple that "the Musi app plays or displays content based on the user's own interactions with YouTube and enhances the user experience via Musi's proprietary technology." Musi's app displayed its own ads but let users remove them for a one-time fee of $5.99. Musi claimed it complied with YouTube's terms, but Apple removed it from the App Store in September 2024. Musi does not offer an Android app. Musi alleged that Apple delisted its app based on "unsubstantiated" intellectual property claims from YouTube and that Apple violated its own Developer Program License Agreement (DPLA) by delisting the app. Musi was handed a resounding defeat yesterday in two rulings from US District Judge Eumi Lee in the Northern District of California. Lee found that Apple can remove apps "with or without cause," as stipulated in the developer agreement. Lee wrote (PDF): "The plain language of the DPLA governs because it is clear and explicit: Apple may 'cease marketing, offering, and allowing download by end-users of the [Musi app] at any time, with or without cause, by providing notice of termination.' Based on this language, Apple had the right to cease offering the Musi app without cause if Apple provided notice to Musi. The complaint alleges, and Musi does not dispute, that Apple gave Musi the required notice. Therefore, Apple's decision to remove the Musi app from the App Store did not breach the DPLA."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Marius Borg Høiby accused of 39 offences, but denies the most serious charges of four rapes
Marius Borg Høiby, the son of Norway’s crown princess, should receive more than seven years in prison if he is found guilty of 39 offences, including four rapes and assaults, according to prosecutors.
On Wednesday, the penultimate day of the more than six-week-long trial at Oslo district court, the prosecution said it believed that Høiby was guilty of 39 of the 40 offences with which he was charged, which, as well as rape and domestic abuse, include multiple breaches of restraining orders, assault, drug and driving offences.
Continue reading...We're breaking down the big news from Nvidia GTC, including backlash on DLSS 5 and the company's response.
Front light on XR started to flash when in use, replaced Ferrit Ring but light still flashing.
Does anyone have any other recommendations to fix this?
The Magpies head to Camp Nou for this delicately poised last-16 decider.
 | Came up midweek and am so glad we did! It’s like summertime!! Nothing like an early morning rip around Tahoe Vista. [link] [comments] |
Israel reported the death of Esmail Khatib in Tehran as it intensified its offensive in Lebanon, demolishing a building in the heart of the capital overnight.
Government’s first published land use framework maps how land is used and how it can be adapted to meet changing needs
About 7% of England’s land – an area roughly two-and-a-half times the size of Cornwall – will need to be given over to nature, forests and renewable energy, to meet the UK’s environmental targets, new data shows.
But there will still be enough land to grow the food needed, and to house a growing population, according to the government’s first land use framework, published on Wednesday.
Placing a high priority on restoring peatland, all but 13% of which is degraded across England, but this will not include an outright ban on development such as wind or solar farms.
Encouraging the “multi-use” of land, for instance with livestock grazing alongside wind and solar farms, and wildlife protection and nature restoration on arable land.
Encouraging local authorities to put nature reserves in urban areas as well as in the countryside.
Grouse moors to come under closer scrutiny and tighter regulation, which will go further than EU rules.
No new “right to roam” is included in the framework, but there will be a consultation on “making landowner liability more proportionate”, which could open up areas for public access.
A national soil map will be published.
A new land use unit will be established.
Government planning for changes to the UK’s landscape under global heating of 2C above preindustrial levels, and of much higher heating of 4C.
Continue reading...Modern kernel anti-cheat systems are, without exaggeration, among the most sophisticated pieces of software running on consumer Windows machines. They operate at the highest privilege level available to software, they intercept kernel callbacks that were designed for legitimate security products, they scan memory structures that most programmers never touch in their entire careers, and they do all of this transparently while a game is running. If you have ever wondered how BattlEye actually catches a cheat, or why Vanguard insists on loading before Windows boots, or what it means for a PCIe DMA device to bypass every single one of these protections, this post is for you.
↫ Adrián Díaza
I hate that we need proprietary rootkits just to play competitive multiplayer games – we can chalk this up to a few sad people ruining the experience for everyone else, as so often happens. I have a dedicated parts bin Windows box just to play League of Legends (my one vice alright, nobody’s perfect) so I don’t really care if it has a proprietary rootkit running in the background as there’s not a single bit of valuable data on that machine, but for most people, that’s not realistic.
Virtually every League of Legends player hands over control of their entire computer to a proprietary rootkit developed and deployed by a company from China, whereas players of other popular online multiplayer games must install rootkits from companies from the United States. If anyone inside the governments of these countries ever wants to implement a backdoor in dozens (hundreds?) of millions of Windows machines, this is the way to go.
It’s an absolutely bizarre situation.
SAXONBURG, Pa., March 18, 2026 — Coherent Corp., a global leader in photonics, has announced it will showcase breakthrough innovations powering the next generation of AI-driven datacenter and communications networks at OFC 2026, March 17 –19, at the L.A. Convention Center in Los Angeles, California, Booth #1401.
From 400G/lane, 3.2T transceivers and emerging architectures for 12.8T and beyond, to advanced co-packaged optics (CPO), multi-rail transport, and open optical networking platforms, Coherent will demonstrate how its vertical technology stack – spanning materials, devices, modules, and systems – is redefining performance, scalability, and energy efficiency for the AI era.
“At OFC 2026, we are demonstrating how Coherent’s innovation engines, from advanced materials to fully integrated optical systems – are enabling the infrastructure backbone of AI,” said Dr. Sanjai Parthasarathi, CMO at Coherent. “Our technologies are driving the bandwidth, power efficiency, and scalability required for the next decade of optical networking.”
In addition, Coherent executives and technology leaders will take center stage across plenaries, executive forums, panels, and technical sessions, helping shape the future roadmap of optical networking.
Technology and Product Demonstrations
Partner Demo
MSA Announcements
Industry Leadership at OFC 2026
Coherent executives will play a prominent role across OFC’s most influential stages, including:
Topic: Scale Out Data Center Networks
Moderator: Dr. Sanjai Parthasarathi
Panelist: Vipul Bhatt
Monday, March 16th, 10:50 am – 12:00 pm
Topic: Fireside chat with CTO
Speaker: Dr. Julie Eng
Monday, March 16th, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Visitors to OFC 2026 can experience Coherent’s innovations at Booth #1401. For more information, visit www.coherent.com.
About Coherent
Coherent (NYSE: COHR) is the global photonics leader. We harness photons to drive innovation. Industry leaders in the datacenter, communications, and industrial markets rely on Coherent’s world-leading technology to fuel their own innovation and growth.
Source: Coherent
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If Europe is sucked into this illegal conflict with Iran, public support for rearmament could collapse – and only Putin will benefit
Once again, Donald Trump has deployed Nato as leverage to get the US’s European allies to submit to his will. After launching an unprovoked war against Iran, in response to which Tehran’s closure of the strait of Hormuz to shipping has sent oil prices soaring, Trump now wants his Nato allies in Europe to step in to help clean up his mess. Europeans should do nothing of the kind.
Trump’s war of choice with Iran is not going well. Iran has retaliated by targeting US assets and allies in the Gulf. At least 13 US service members have so far been killed in this conflict – a figure dwarfed by more than 1,200 civilian Iranian deaths. The US has spent $16.5bn on just the first 12 days of the war, more than its total humanitarian assistance budget for 2024. Prolonged high oil prices could lead to a recession in Europe and parts of Asia.
Armida van Rij is a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform
Continue reading...Oklahoma senator has repeatedly made cryptic claims about ‘overseas’ work and war experience, while refusing to explain them
Markwayne Mullin, the Oklahoma senator chosen by Donald Trump to lead the Department of Homeland Security who will be considered by the Senate on Wednesday, has never served in the US military, but he routinely speaks as if he did in interviews.
Two days after the US attacked Iran, for instance, Mullin told Fox News: “War is ugly. It smells bad. And if anybody has ever been there and been able to smell the war that’s happening around you and taste it, and feel it in your nostrils, and hear it, it’s something you’ll never forget. And it’s ugly.”
Continue reading...Emanuel Fabian says his routine report became focus of wager with $23m at stake on online prediction platform
An Israeli journalist received threatening messages from users of the online prediction platform Polymarket after one of his reports, on a minor missile strike near Jerusalem, suddenly became the focus of an unresolved bet about the Israel-Iran conflict.
“After you make us lose $900,000 we will invest no less than that to finish you,” said one message to the journalist, Emanuel Fabian.
Continue reading...The Department of Energy has announced a $293 million funding opportunity to advance the Genesis Mission, continuing the agency’s push to build a nationwide AI-driven discovery platform spanning supercomputers, scientific data systems, and advanced research infrastructure.
The DOE is inviting applications from interdisciplinary scientific teams that can use AI models and frameworks to address pressing issues in 20 critical fields – including advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, critical materials, nuclear energy and quantum information science. A Request for Application (RFA) is now available for research efforts that combine AI, HPC, and large scientific datasets to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.
The Phase I awards will range from $500,000 to $750,000 and will support a nine month project period. Phase II awards will range from $6 million to $15 million over a three year project period. The applications for Phase I and letters of intent for Phase II are due April 28, 2026. Phase II applications are due May 2026.
Darío Gil, Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy
The funding call highlights that the national laboratory system is central to the success of the Genesis Mission. The stakeholders will need to leverage DOE user facilities, such as exascale supercomputers and large experimental datasets generated across the lab network, to support AI-driven research.
“The Genesis Mission has caught the imagination of our scientific and engineering communities to tackle national challenges in the age of AI,” said Darío Gil, Under Secretary for Science and Genesis Mission Director.
“With these investments we seek breakthrough ideas and novel collaborations leveraging the scientific prowess of our National Laboratories, the private sector, universities, and science philanthropies.”
The Genesis Mission was launched by executive order late last year, marking one of the most significant shifts in U.S. science policy in recent memory. The goal, according to the order, was to launch a “dedicated, coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI‑accelerated innovation and discovery that can solve the most challenging problems of this century.”
Some called this the largest coordination of federal scientific resources since the Apollo space program in the 1960s. Others have been more cautious, pointing out that execution will be the real test.
At the center of it is a plan to rebuild the research ecosystem itself. The idea is to connect massive, and often underused, scientific datasets across agencies like the DOE, NIH, and NOAA to national lab supercomputers and wrap it all into an AI experimentation platform that supports scientific discovery. The policy outlined key players – public research agencies, academic institutions, and a few hand-picked private partners.
Earlier this year, the DOE announced 26 science and technology challenges that it described as being of national importance to advance the Genesis Mission and accelerate innovation and discovery through AI. Several of the challenges focus on reducing the time required to move from theory to validation.
(VideoFlow/Shutterstock)
Commenting on the challenges, Dr. Gil emphasized that “these challenges represent a bold step toward a future where science moves at the speed of imagination because of AI.”
“It’s a game-changer for science, energy, and national security. By uniting the U.S. Government’s unparalleled data resources and DOE’s experimental facilities with cutting-edge AI, we can unlock discoveries that will power the economy, secure our energy future, and keep America at the forefront of global innovation.”
The $293 million in new funding is one of the largest individual investments in the Genesis Mission, and is a signal that the program is moving steadily from the planning phase to the operational phase. A core theme with the initiative is that rather than focusing on individual projects, the government wants to build momentum toward a nationwide collaboration to accelerate scientific discovery.
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Browser-based access streamlines interactive workflows across diverse systems and user communities
COLUMBUS, Ohio, March 18, 2026 — At the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advanced computing powers research across disciplines, institutions and experience levels. Founded in 1986 as one of the original supercomputer centers established under the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Supercomputer Centers Program, NCSA provides high performance computing, data, networking and visualization resources to scientists and engineers across the United States.
Computing systems at NCSA support a growing community of researchers working across disciplines and institutions. Image Credit: NCSA.
Researchers access NCSA’s nationally allocated systems through programs such as the NSF ACCESS initiative, while campus and industry users engage through institutional partnerships. Supported by the NSF, the state of Illinois, and the University of Illinois, the center enables work in fields ranging from artificial intelligence and astrophysics to digital agriculture and health sciences.
As demand for machine learning and data-driven workflows increased, NCSA recognized that traditional access models were becoming a barrier for many of its users. Researchers without extensive command-line experience often struggled to take full advantage of advanced computing resources, prompting the team to look for a more accessible way to interact with these systems.
Broadening Access Across a National Research Community
To address that challenge, NCSA implemented Open OnDemand, a browser-based interface designed by the Ohio Supercomputer Center to simplify access to high-performance computing systems. The platform’s initial deployment at NCSA in 2019, alongside its HAL cluster, an NSF-funded system developed to support machine learning research, marked a shift in how users accessed computing resources and helped set the model for broader adoption across the center.
As machine learning tools became more widely adopted across disciplines, including biology, geospatial science, social science, and digital humanities, NCSA saw an increasing number of researchers who relied on interactive environments rather than traditional command-line workflows.
“Many of our HAL users are people who want to train models, but they are not all computer science or engineering majors,” said Volodymyr Kindratenko, director for NCSA’s Center for AI Innovation (CAII). “They tend to have difficulty logging in and working through the terminal and beyond.”
Before Open OnDemand, users had to follow a series of manual, command-line-based steps to launch interactive sessions – a process that was often fragile and difficult to troubleshoot. Even small missteps could derail the workflow entirely. “We constantly had users who mistyped something or did something different,” Kindratenko said. “It just never worked for them.”
Lowering Barriers for Interdisciplinary Researchers
With Open OnDemand in place, the way researchers interacted with NCSA’s systems began to change almost immediately. Tasks that once required multiple manual steps could now be launched through a web browser, reducing friction and lowering the barrier to entry for interactive computing.
“The very first most useful application for us was the ability to launch a Jupyter notebook,” Kindratenko said. “You click a button, your Jupyter is there, on a compute node with whatever resources you need.”
The impact was decisive. Experienced users who preferred working through the command line continued to do so, while a large and growing group of researchers gravitated to Open OnDemand as their primary entry point to NCSA’s systems. Over time, the center expanded the set of interactive applications available through the platform to include JupyterLab, TensorFlow, H2O, and, later, a VS Code server.
“Once we deployed it, there was no way to go back,” Kindratenko said. “We had users who demanded it.”
What began as a solution for a single system soon became a model for the rest of NCSA’s computing ecosystem.
Scaling a Consistent Interface Across Multiple Systems
Across NCSA’s campus and nationally allocated platforms, Open OnDemand has supported approximately 1,700 unique users and more than one million jobs since 2019, with steady growth in adoption across the center.
Today, Open OnDemand is deployed across six NCSA computing environments, each serving different communities, funding models, and research needs, including NSF-funded national systems, campus clusters, geospatial research platforms and infrastructure supporting private-sector partners.
“All of these are different resources with very diverse users,” said Gregory Bauer, senior technical program manager at NCSA. “But once one of them learned how to deploy and operate Open OnDemand, the expertise spread quickly.”
Because many of the same system administrators support multiple resources, early experience with Open OnDemand enabled rapid replication. Rather than building heavily customized portals for each system, the team focused on consistency, providing a familiar interface and a shared set of interactive tools wherever possible.
“We would characterize our efforts as modest customization,” Bauer said. “But that’s actually been an advantage. We didn’t need to reinvent the interface every time.”
The result is a familiar interface that supports a wide range of users and workflows without fragmenting the experience. Whether working on campus or remotely, researchers can launch interactive sessions through a web browser, reducing technical overhead while preserving flexibility for more advanced use cases.
“During recent travel, I didn’t have my work laptop,” Bauer said. “I used Open OnDemand on a tablet through the browser to access a cluster, and it worked.”
Beyond usability, Open OnDemand has also helped NCSA scale access without proportionally increasing support demands. By standardizing how users launch and interact with applications, the platform reduces the number of custom workflows that staff must troubleshoot, an important consideration for shared systems running with finite operational resources.
At the same time, NCSA views Open OnDemand as part of a broader strategy to expand participation in advanced computing.
“We’re trying to broaden participation and lower the barriers to entry for new users,” said Brett Bode, assistant director of NSF’s Delta and Delta AI systems at NCSA. “Open OnDemand is one of the routes we’re using to achieve that.”
Building on Community-Driven Innovation
Looking ahead, the team is exploring new interactive applications, particularly in genomics and other data-intensive research areas, by drawing on tools developed and shared by the Open OnDemand community. That collaborative ecosystem, they say, continues to strengthen the platform’s value over time.
“One of the attractive features of Open OnDemand is this large community of developers that contribute interactive apps and make them available,” Bauer said. “We can build on what other institutions have already done.”
For NCSA, Open OnDemand has evolved from a targeted usability solution into a foundational access layer – one that supports beginners and experts alike, spans multiple systems and adapts as research needs continue to grow. While the resources it supports may differ, the goal remains consistent: meeting researchers where they are and lowering barriers to advanced computing.
About OSC
The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) addresses the rising computational demands of academic and industrial research communities by providing a robust shared infrastructure and proven expertise in advanced modeling, simulation and analysis. OSC empowers scientists with the services essential to making extraordinary discoveries and innovations, partners with businesses and industry to leverage computational science as a competitive force in the global knowledge economy and leads efforts to equip the workforce with the key technology skills required for 21st century jobs.
Source: Lexi Biasi, Ohio Supercomputer Center
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Exclusive: Drug users face felonies and prison under Prop 36, with analysis showing racial disparities and little help
California prosecutors have filed nearly 20,000 drug possession felony cases under a tough-on-crime measure passed in 2024. But despite promises to get people into services, the vast majority of those arrested have not received drug treatment, state data reveals.
Proposition 36, a state ballot measure, enacted harsher penalties for minor theft and drug offenses, with proponents pledging the crackdown would lead to “mass treatment to keep people alive, out of jail, and off our streets”.
Continue reading...Scientists trying to work out why Gauls chose to bury some of their dead in seated position facing west
Children at a primary school in eastern France found a strange attraction next to their playground this week: a skeleton sitting upright, peeking out of a circular pit.
It is the latest in a series of bodies discovered in the city of Dijon that were buried in a seated position facing west.
Continue reading...IRVINE, Calif., March 18, 2026 — Menlo Microsystems Inc. (Menlo Micro), a leader in high-performance electronic switches, has announced a strategic partnership with Rosenberger to jointly develop a Multichannel Ultra-Low Power Switch Module for Quantum Computing, planned to accelerate scalable quantum systems.
The partnership combines Menlo Micro’s Ideal Switch MEMS technology with Rosenberger’s precision high-density Multichannel WSMP RF connector and industrialization expertise, addressing a critical bottleneck in quantum system interconnect and control infrastructure.
This partnership positions Menlo Micro and Rosenberger to accelerate the commercialization of quantum computing by delivering modular, high-performance cryogenic switching solutions while providing the industry with a pathway to deploy practical, scalable quantum systems faster.
As quantum computing systems scale, managing RF signal routing at cryogenic temperatures becomes increasingly critical. Traditional switches generate thermal loads that can compromise qubit coherence and system stability.
The planned Ultra-Low Power Switch Module is designed to integrate Menlo Micro’s ultra-low-power Ideal Switch platform, capable of operation down to 10 millikelvin (mK), with Rosenberger’s precision high-density 16- and 32-Multichannel WSMP RF connector, engineered to deliver reliable, low-loss, and reproducible RF connections in cryogenic environments.
To further support precise measurements, the module will include built-in Open-Short-Load (OSL) RF calibration standards, enabling rapid and repeatable system verification. By minimizing Joule heating and maintaining near-zero temperature disturbance during switching, the solution is expected to improve thermal efficiency, simplify system design, and offer a compact, dilution refrigerator-compatible form factor that supports higher-density characterization and production workflows and help accelerate the development of next-generation quantum systems.
The partnership also underscores a strategic business opportunity in the rapidly growing quantum computing market. By combining Menlo Micro’s leading-edge switching technology with Rosenberger’s proven global interconnect solutions, the companies aim to reduce system complexity, accelerate development cycles, and support broader adoption of scalable quantum architectures.
As quantum computing transitions from research systems toward commercial deployments, the companies view this collaboration as an opportunity to establish a foundation for future product offerings that support long-term growth in quantum infrastructure markets.
“This partnership marks a major milestone in making scalable quantum systems more practical and efficient,” said Russ Garcia, CEO of Menlo Micro. “By combining our Ideal Switch technology with Rosenberger’s world-class cryogenic interconnects, precision connectivity, and proven reliability, we aim to provide a modular solution that reduces system complexity and helps quantum system developers shorten development cycles and accelerate time to market for their applications.”
For more information on the partnership and the planned Ultra-Low Power Switch Module for Quantum Computing, visit Rosenberger at Booth #2302 during the APS Global Physics Summit 2026.
About Menlo Micro
Menlo Micro sets a new standard for switches with the Ideal Switch, a chip-scale platform that overcomes performance, efficiency, and scalability bottlenecks of electromechanical relays (EMRs) and semiconductor-based switches. It’s the first disruptive switching technology in over 30 years and the only platform scalable across both power and frequency domains. The Ideal Switch enables smaller, lighter, faster, more reliable, and energy-efficient systems. From AI to aerospace, defense and power electronics, the Ideal Switch eliminates bottlenecks and reduces the total cost of ownership across today’s most demanding applications. Menlo Micro unlocks new possibilities.
Source: Menlo Micro
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To secure critical minerals supply governments need to take a stake in industry Expert comment jon.wallace
To establish some measure of control of minerals supply, market-oriented governments are starting to directly invest in mining projects. Governments that don’t are placing their manufacturing sectors, energy security, and national defence at risk.
The scramble to secure critical minerals has reignited a wave of resource nationalism, with states intervening in private entities across the mining sector.
This is part of a decisive shift, as market-oriented economies move from incentivizing private actors towards taking a direct financial stake in their operations – in order to influence supply.
The traditional drivers of state intervention have been to protect the mining industry, get projects off the ground, or expectations that governments can benefit economically from extraction.
New drivers of intervention are far more concerned with control over minerals flows – to address vulnerabilities caused by the dominance of China in supply chains and the volatility emanating from intervention from other players.
The US is acting with remarkable urgency to increase production and secure supply. That means that governments that do not have an equity stake in supply chains risk being left behind in the race for material security, placing their manufacturing jobs, many of which rely on supply of minerals, in jeopardy – consigning themselves to trajectories of deindustrialization.
Countries like the UK and blocs like the EU are following Washington’s example by accepting the need for relatively risky minerals investments. In doing do, they must be guided by a desire for control as much as – if not more than – a search for the best value, especially given current low prices.
The geopolitical vulnerability of minerals supply is clear. China is the world’s biggest miner and dominant processor of critical minerals. Beijing’s use of export controls, soft barriers to trade such as export licensing requirements, and trade dumping to reduce prices mean that consistent supply is no longer guaranteed.
US action to counter this dominance will mitigate their own supply risks, but at high cost. The US is leveraging several funding mechanisms, including $15 billion in letters of interest from its Export Import bank EXIM, and $7 billion in loans from the department of energy. The pentagon has also committed $2.8 billion in equity and debt to eight mining and refining projects.
The US is distinct from other partners as they have a higher risk appetite, and they are strategically leveraging Gulf State sovereign funds. Their goal is control, via significant shareholding in mining concerns, seats on their boards, and through that the ability to control flows of critical minerals.
For example, the agreement for the US Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and UAE-backed Orion consortium’s 40 per cent share of Glencore’s copper operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was tied to them being able to choose the export destination for the copper.
Similarly, the US Department of War provided support measures lasting over a decade to MP Metals for Neodymium-Praseodymium oxide and manufactured magnates – while including an offtake agreement to ensure that it could have access to the finished product.
This US policy is a major political risk. Even if these efforts mitigate supply risks, they will still fall far short of overtaking China as a dominant producer of critical minerals.
Other countries, such as the UK, EU countries and others, cannot match the scale of what the US is attempting and have a difficult ask of their taxpayers; to pour money into an industry with low project success rates and high environmental costs.
But government investment is what is required to get mining projects off the ground and establish some measure of control over mineral supply flows. That in turn will ensure national access to industry-critical materials and protect jobs. But it will also likely cause further volatility, as states pressure companies to serve national needs in addition to market forces.
State involvement can influence companies’ decision making. In February 2026 French firm Imerys Lithium placed its project in Cornwall, UK, on care and maintenance due to financing constraints. At the same time, the Banque des Territoires, acting on behalf of the French government, acquired a minority stake in another Imerys Lithium project located in France. The French project with state support pulled through.
The UK’s National Wealth Fund has similarly put money into domestic critical minerals projects. That includes Cornish Lithium, a separate project close to the Imerys site.
However, to genuinely protect supply, the scale of financing must increase, and equity ownership strategies cannot only take place within national borders. Countries like the UK must mobilize politically guided capital instruments to gain direct influence in mining operations across the global supply chain.
Funds such as British International Investment should seriously consider taking investment positions overseas that complement other instruments such as UK Export Finance – so that the UK has a stake in – and access to – mineral production it cannot achieve domestically.
If the UK and EU are serious about improving minerals access, then they must also seek to increase control through equity.
There is precedent: shared private/ government ownership structures are commonplace in the oil industry. The mining industry is moving towards this model, and governments should take advantage of the shift. Representatives of national oil companies that sit on boards and engage in corporate governance as non-operating partners bring significant skills and knowledge. For the UK, EU and others, there is a need to bring technical skills into government, that can then be deployed into such positions.
Government investment at an early stage has other benefits: It can de-risk mining projects by providing patient capital and committing to purchase a portion of the mine’s future production. This can make projects more economically viable and attractive to others. But governments must also go into projects with their eyes open. They are not picking winners seeking short term gains. Rather, they are giving projects an improved chance of long-term success.
Countries like the UK and EU member states can also provide important means for greater democratic oversight of Environmental, Social and Governance criteria and responsible performance standards in the mining sector. They can also be important representatives of indigenous peoples’ rights, while promoting environmental protections, and pushing for more sustainable practice.
However, government intervention should not be guided by a desire for profit or job creation. A measure of long-term control of supply chains should be the objective for industrial EU countries and the UK, serving the more pressing need: to protect critical industries and manufacturing jobs that depend on mining sector products.
Governments that take stakes in critical minerals ventures in developing countries must strike a careful balance. In many cases their investments will be welcome, as the financial liability of investing in mining is even greater for developing nations and is normally not the most effective way to invest their money. But international partners should work to build triangulated state-backed joint ventures, balancing their desire for security of supply with exporting countries’ demands for control over national resource wealth.
Leader uses first major economic speech to prioritise public services and reduction of inequality over growth
A government led by the Green party would not set targets for GDP growth but would instead focus on people’s mental health, social cohesion and community welfare, Zack Polanski has said in a major speech to set out his plans for the economy.
In his first policy address since taking over as leader of the Greens in England and Wales six months ago, Polanski condemned what he called “rip-off Britain”, where a minority of asset owners benefited at the expense of people obliged to pay unaffordable sums for housing and other basics.
Continue reading...Venezuela played with heart, Italy sipped espresso and the Dominicans showed off their verve at the tournament. America wanted to concentrate on war
On the morning of the World Baseball Classic final between the United States and Venezuela, the headline of the New York Times daily briefing read, “America, alone,” in reference to the unwillingness of the country’s traditional allies to join the war with Iran. The revived rhetoric of America First, once a restoration of the isolationist, often Nazi-sympathetic sentiments of the 1930s, has coalesced into current policy, status, attitude: America by itself, making its own rules, intent on largely playing alone by them.
Venezuela won the final, thrillingly, 3-2 over Team USA, but not before the hosts extended that isolationism with a sourness that produced a comically vapid extension of American bravado, and nearly undermined a tournament that in its 20th year is at last becoming one of baseball’s great successes.
Continue reading...Cuba “can’t fix” its economy, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, as President Donald Trump said his administration will be “doing something with Cuba very soon.”
Ilya Remeslo sends Telegram post titled ‘Five reasons why I stopped supporting Vladimir Putin’ to his 90,000 followers
For years, Ilya Remeslo was a reliable pro-Kremlin operator, going after critics of the regime and smearing independent journalists, bloggers and opposition politicians.
Then the 42-year-old lawyer abruptly turned on the country’s most powerful man. Late on Tuesday, Remeslo posted a manifesto to his 90,000 Telegram followers titled: “Five reasons why I stopped supporting Vladimir Putin.”
Continue reading...LOS ANGELES, March 18, 2026 — Marvell Technology, Inc., a leader in data infrastructure semiconductor solutions, has announced Marvell Structera S 30260―a new 260-lane CXL switch device that enables rack-level memory pooling. Working in concert with Marvell Structera A near-memory accelerators, Structera X memory-expansion controllers and Alaska P PCIe/CXL retimers, the new switch allows data center operators to further increase memory bandwidth and capacity by providing access to disaggregated memory resources outside the server.
CXL switching has long supported traditional CPU computing architectures and has also now become essential for accelerated AI data center infrastructure. As AI clusters expand dramatically in scale and complexity, memory capacity has hit a wall, becoming a primary constraint on the performance and efficiency of these systems. Exploding large language model (LLM) sizes, expanding context windows and growing key-value cache requirements are driving unprecedented memory demands. Traditional approaches are becoming increasingly inefficient and costly, and they cannot support the massive capacity required by these larger and more complex AI workloads.
Leveraging industry-leading switch solutions through the recent acquisition of XConn Technologies, the Structera S CXL switch device enables true memory pooling across the rack, allowing hyperscalers and data center operators to dynamically expand and allocate memory resources across CPUs, GPUs, XPUs and other accelerators without replacing existing platforms or relying solely on HBM stacking. It enables a large scalable, composable resource that can deliver higher memory utilization, improved data flow efficiency and AI application performance, greater infrastructure design flexibility and scalability, and reduced overall total cost of ownership.
“Breaking through the AI memory wall requires a fundamental architectural change,” said Rishi Chugh, vice president and general manager, Data Center Switch Business Unit at Marvell. “The Structera S CXL switch is the first true CXL switching solution purpose-built for AI. By enabling composable memory across the fabric, we are fundamentally reshaping and improving memory pooling efficiency as AI infrastructure scales.”
“KV‑cache is driving an exploding demand for memory capacity to support LLM inference,” said Gerry Fan, senior vice president, engineering, Scale-up Switching at Marvell. “The CXL switch offers an ideal solution by providing a near‑local, shared memory pool with sub‑microsecond access, which eliminates multi-hop data movement and unlocks higher throughput, longer context and improved GPU utilization.”
“Limited availability of DRAM in the market and runaway pricing, compounded with broader macroeconomic and supply chain issues, are upending the plans of data center operators as they rush to scale infrastructure to support rapidly expanding AI workflows,” said James Sanders, senior analyst at TechInsights. “Industry adoption of CXL 3.0-compliant technologies, including the Structera S CXL switch, can help alleviate these issues, giving operators the flexibility to scale infrastructure as needed to meet future AI infrastructure demand.”
Industry’s First Comprehensive CXL Portfolio
With CXL 3.0 support and aggregate bandwidth up to 4TB/s, the Structera S CXL switch bolsters the existing Marvell CXL product family, which includes Marvell Structera A CXL near-memory accelerators and Structera X CXL memory-expansion controllers. It also includes Marvell Alaska P PCIe/CXL retimers and copper and optical cable solutions from Marvell ecosystem partners. The PCIe/CXL cable solutions scale connections between GPUs, CPUs, XPUs, CXL memory, SSDs, and other PCIe components, enabling low-power, high-speed and low-latency connectivity that scales within servers and clusters to power accelerated AI data center infrastructure.
The addition of XConn Technologies CXL switches to the existing Marvell CXL portfolio creates a complete end-to-end CXL fabric architecture spanning expansion, acceleration and pooling, supporting both traditional compute and next-generation scale-up AI environments.
Availability
The Marvell Structera S 30260 CXL switch is expected to begin sampling to customers in calendar Q3 2026. The Structera S 20256 CXL 2.0 switch is currently in production.
Marvell will showcase its end-to-end connectivity portfolio at OFC 2026, March 17–19, at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, California. Visit the Marvell booth #1600 to learn how the company is enabling the next generation of data center and AI infrastructure.
About Marvell
To deliver the data infrastructure technology that connects the world, we’re building solutions on the most powerful foundation: our partnerships with our customers. Trusted by the world’s leading technology companies for over 30 years, we move, store, process and secure the world’s data with semiconductor solutions designed for our customers’ current needs and future ambitions. Through a process of deep collaboration and transparency, we’re ultimately changing the way tomorrow’s enterprise, cloud and carrier architectures transform—for the better.
Source: Marvell
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We explored virtual reality, got red light therapy, ate barbecue and heard about visions of technology's future.
I asked career cooks what they actually think about electric can openers, mixers and pepper mills -- and whether or not they're worth the splurge.
More than 200 Americans at Balad site say they have no evacuation plan as fears grow of a post-Ramadan assault
Hundreds of US contractors are stranded on a major military base near Baghdad, Iraq, with no evacuation plan, while local Iran-backed militants are possibly making plans to attack the base, three sources said.
The contractors are employed on the Martyr Brigadier General Ali Flaih Air Base, formerly Balad Air Base, to support the Iraqi government’s F-16 fighter jet program.
Continue reading...USPS Postmaster General David Steiner said raising the price of stamps would "largely solve" the agency's financial woes.
Cybertrucks have locked passengers inside and burned so hot they’ve disintegrated drivers’ bones. Victims’ families blame what they say is the faulty design of a truck Elon Musk calls ‘apocalypse-proof’
When sheriff deputies arrived at the scene of a late-night crash off a desolate Texas road in August 2024, they could see a giant pyre through heavy smoke.
According to police reports detailing the events of that night, the officers tried to approach the vehicle, but the fire burned too intensely. They saw it was a Tesla Cybertruck and couldn’t see anyone inside. So they combed the surrounding area for the driver.
Continue reading...Cut off from Europe by Brexit and cast adrift by Donald Trump, maintaining diplomatic expertise and connections is crucial
Of all the concerns in the world, the demise of the Ferrero Rocher ambassador might not be top of the agenda. In days gone by, thanks to an excruciating TV advert, the chocolate with the golden wrapping was synonymous with the diplomatic circuit. You really had made it if you offered them up to your bejewelled and bemedalled guests.
That was the 1990s. Almost all diplomats I have met over the years are very serious and very hardworking. They still must schmooze and dress up on occasion, but most of their time is spent trying to fathom out what’s going on and reporting that back to base, often from difficult places.
John Kampfner is the author of In Search of Berlin, Blair’s Wars and Why the Germans Do It Better
Continue reading...Japan’s super-popular prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, will visit the White House on Thursday, as President Donald Trump looks to allies for military help against Iran.
SHIRA LERNER
Staff Reporter
Despite the cold, overcast weather in Newark recently, a group of 16 dedicated volunteers met up on Feb. 19 at White Clay Creek State Park to remove invasive plants.
They congregated around a car, taking gloves and tools out of the trunk and catching up with one another. While they normally work on a trail in the woods, the rapidly melting snow moved the group to the roadside for the week.
This is the Volunteer Environmental Stewardship team, led by Terri Tipping, dedicated to removing invasive plants in the Judge Morris Estate (JME) area of the park.
“While the work is endless, after a period of time we can actually see progress,” Bill McGonegal, who has been a member of the group for almost five years, said.
McGonegal was looking for volunteer work to do as he entered retirement and stumbled across the JME group while walking his dog one day. He volunteered on the first Thursday after he retired and has come back ever since.
Tipping founded the group 10 years ago as a way to keep busy after her own retirement. The Volunteer Environmental Stewardship team has grown from 746 volunteered hours in 2017 to nearly 5,000 in 2024, and over 500 volunteers participated in 2024 alone.
This number includes one-time volunteers who come from companies like Delmarva and Chemours, schools and other organizations, along with the regular weekly volunteers.
Although Tipping founded the group, various volunteers have grown confident in their skills and become captains of smaller teams in order to tackle other areas of the park. These teams include DeVine Intervention, started by volunteers who joined the cause specifically to fight invasive vines, and Barberry-Anns, a group named after the invasive plant Japanese Barberry.
Most of the regular volunteers are retirees, many of whom had no previous knowledge of invasive plants. Others were familiar with the work, but joined the group looking for community or a way to get fresh air and exercise.
Peter Saenger is in his eighth year as a regular volunteer with the Environmental Stewardship team. He was doing work to control invasive species in his own yard, but then heard about the group and decided to join.
“It’s a wonderful combination of being outside, being with people, and doing good work,” Saenger said.
On Feb. 19, the group was spread along Polly Drummond Hill Road, cutting and discarding invasive plants.
“We’ve been cutting the multiflora and the honeysuckle and the mulberry,” Tipping said. “I contacted the park and it’s the white mulberry that they want us to get out of here.”
According to Brian Kunkel, the university’s ornamentals integrated pest management extension specialist, invasive plants and insects can make their way around the world in a variety of ways.
Commonly, plant nurseries can become infested with invasive insects that spread to customers, or through mail-order decorative plants for their yards. This exacerbates the issue, as invasive plants can serve as a food source for invasive insects.
“Nature does well on its own,” Kunkel said. “Problems come about when we get in the way.”
“The old concept of a preserve meant you set aside this piece of land, you don’t allow people to build things on it and ruin it, you just walk away and it’ll be okay,” Laura M. Lee, park superintendent IV at White Clay Creek State Park, said. “That is not the case anymore, you can’t just walk away. Even a preserve needs care or nothing in there is gonna be preserved, it’s getting all choked out.”
Invasive plants have always been present due to global trade and travel, but the problem in Delaware parks has gotten progressively worse in recent years. One of the ways volunteers in the Environmental Stewardship team prevent the invasive plants from growing back after they have been removed is by using bingo daubers — small plastic bottles with sponge tips that release product when squeezed — to paint the stumps with the pink-dyed herbicide Vaslan.
“Before this, we had to wait for the park people to come and spray,” Saenger said. “But this thing puts the herbicide just exactly where you want it, it doesn’t leak because you have to apply pressure, and because of the color you know where it is.”
Delaware State Parks have reduced spraying of chemicals for safety reasons, and currently the park mainly sprays for legally noxious weeds. Additionally, anyone spraying chemicals needs to be a certified pesticide applicator, which can slow down the treatment process due to a limited number of certified applicators.
As long as a certified pesticide applicator is present and monitoring use of daubers, multiple volunteers can be applying the chemicals at a time, making the process much more thorough and efficient. The daubers also apply the chemical directly to the plant’s stump, preventing chemicals from being released into the air.
“Getting involved is a really good way to learn,” Lee said.
The Volunteer Environmental Stewardship team meets every Thursday from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. in the parking lot of the JME. There are also volunteer opportunities along Creek Road for university students who do not have access to transportation.
“We just have limited resources,” Lee said. “We’ll never have enough people or manpower or money to effectively control them all.”
Snub comes as Iran vows revenge for killing of Ali Larijani. Plus, judge orders reinstatement of Voice of America staff
Good morning.
Donald Trump has said the US does not need Nato, after a number of the organization’s members rejected his call to send their warships to reopen the strait of Hormuz.
How many people have been displaced in Iran? Up to 3.2 million people, according to the UN’s refugee agency. Here, Tehran residents speak about their daily life under bombardment.
For the latest updates, follow our liveblog.
Continue reading...Sky News Arabia has been accused of broadcasting propaganda and whitewashing genocide in Sudan
Sky is considering terminating its joint venture with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) after accusations it is involved in broadcasting propaganda and genocide denial.
Sky is in talks with its partner in the UAE on Sky News Arabia over the potential termination next year of the licence to use its brand.
Continue reading...The WNBA and its players' union reached a verbal agreement on a transformational new collective bargaining agreement early Wednesday morning, both sides said.
The 2026 Illinois primary results in the race for governor set up a rematch between Gov. JB Pritzker and his 2022 Republican challenger Darren Bailey.
Iran retaliates for Israel's latest assassinations as Trump and Netanyahu give no indication the war is about to let up, 19 days in.
Don't let fear or frustration force you to give up something you love. It may be a process of adaptation and discovery, but ultimately, it's still about fun.
Omni-Man has returned to Earth -- but is he really here to help save it?
Instead of regime change, all the bombing has produced so far is regime reinforcement and no end in sight
With the US-Israeli bombing of Iran now in its third week, its costs are mounting, its purpose is increasingly muddled and potential off-ramps have become frustratingly elusive. Yet rather than succumb to despair, we should urgently press for this destructive war to end.
Iran never engaged in an actual or imminent attack that would justify a war of self-defense. The best that Donald Trump could muster was an argument of prevention – that Iran’s missile program and capacity to disrupt the Middle East must be curtailed, along with its ability to build a nuclear weapon. But the UN charter does not permit armed attacks for mere preventive purposes; that would open the door to endless armed conflicts. And even by the standard of Trump’s inadequate justification for war, his bombing has been a fiasco.
Continue reading...$11.3bn more than enough to fund EPA or National Cancer Institute, where administration sought to slash budgets
The US spent $11.3bn on just the first week of its military assault on Iran. This huge expenditure dwarves the annual budgets of many of the public health and scientific agencies the Trump administration has sought to cut, raising stark questions about the country’s priorities.
In the six days that followed the US and Israel’s joint attack on Iran on 28 February, $11.3bn was spent on American taxpayer-funded bombs that hit the country and caused hundreds of deaths, the Pentagon has told lawmakers. This figure does not capture the full cost of the conflict, such as deployment of forces, and will now be far higher given the ongoing nature of the war.
Continue reading...Florida restricted teaching around sex, gender and race. Lux is now giving students a forum for these issues
On a Tuesday night, at Florida’s only public liberal arts college, a small group of students gathered in a classroom to discuss issues deemed “controversial” on state campuses: transgender rights, feminism, immigration. But perhaps what they wanted to address most was how to combat despair.
“It’s important to stand and resist,” said Nya Jacobson, a New College of Florida senior. “But this place is a lost cause.”
Continue reading...It’s that time of year when people start giving up on their New Year’s resolutions. Here’s how I stay focused -- and how you can, too.
Never worry whether your garage is closed again with these high-tech smart motors and retrofits.
Afghan Taliban government says more than 400 people killed and 265 injured, as Pakistan disputes target of strike
Families and friends of people who were being treated at a drug rehabilitation centre in Kabul have continued to search for their loved ones two days after it was bombed by Pakistan, in the deadliest attack so far in the months-long conflict between the two countries.
The Afghan Taliban government has said more than 400 people were killed and 265 others wounded in the airstrike, which took place on Monday night as people and staff at the centre were praying days before the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
Continue reading...City lawyers say former mayor is not entitled to public-funded defense over alleged 1993 sexual assault
The administration of New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, wants to stop representing Eric Adams in a lawsuit that alleges the former mayor sexually assaulted a woman more than three decades ago, according to a court filing on Tuesday.
The move comes just a few months after Mamdani took office, following a bitter campaign season last year that had the two Democrats taking turns bashing each other in often caustic and personal terms.
Continue reading...The movement-based Nex Playground might be the antidote to parental screen time guilt.
Union and league reach verbal agreement on new deal
Average annual salary expected to be $600,000
Sign up for WNBA 30: a limited run women’s basketball newsletter
The WNBA and its players’ union reached an agreement in principle on a new collective bargaining agreement early Wednesday morning.
Specifics still need to be finalized over the next few weeks as lawyers on both sides work on the new deal. A term sheet should be completed in the next day or two. It will then need to be ratified by the players and then approved by the league’s Board of Governors.
Continue reading...The Iran war should boost security cooperation by US Pacific allies like Japan, the Philippines and South Korea Expert comment jon.wallace
The war is fuelling worries about US commitment to its Pacific partners. The ‘triangle’ of US-aligned countries must use the moment to strengthen their mutual defence.
The US war with Iran is shaking up security in the Indo-Pacific. Earlier this month, it was reported that the US had begun pulling THAAD and Patriot missile-defence systems from South Korea to boost its defences in the Middle East – even as North Korea continued cruise missile tests.
The Pentagon also redirected around 2500 marines and an amphibious warship from Japan to the Arabian Sea – at a time when Tokyo’s relations with Beijing are under significant strain.
Such moves raise questions in the wider region about the US’s reliability as a security partner. For decades, the US invested time, money, and troops to develop a strong web of security relationships across East Asia that countries have come to rely on – particularly Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. As President Donald Trump wages war in the Middle East, that carefully constructed Pacific web is overshadowed by significant uncertainty. US allies in the region should meet this new security environment by boosting their interoperability.
For now, the new liberal leadership in Seoul is presenting a strong front about US redeployments. But missile defence systems like THAAD are a vital buffer against ever growing aggression from their northern neighbour. Reportedly, concerns were raised strongly to the US but were overruled, highlighting the vulnerability of relying upon easily movable US assets.
This has caused additional consternation as these missile systems came at significant political and economic cost to South Korea. Following the purchase of THAAD, China punished Seoul with economic sanctions, indicating its displeasure at having US capabilities so close.
US and Korean forces are continuing to carry out military drills as scheduled. And for now, Washington has reaffirmed its commitment to helping to maintain peace on the peninsula. But any US move to redeploy assets away from South Korea will feed anxieties about a US administration that has repeatedly criticized Seoul for its defence spending.
In Tokyo, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has signalled interest in further cooperation with the US, by getting involved in Trump’s ambitious Golden Dome initiative.
Takaichi has also promised to accelerate an increase in Japanese defence spending, acknowledging US pressure for allies to do more on defence. But the Iran war is creating economic pressure for the prime minister at a time when she is trying to move forward an ambitious reform agenda. And Trump’s recent call for Japanese warships and others to help secure the Strait of Hormuz sits uneasily with Japan’s pacifist constitution – creating a rather complicated picture for Takaichi to navigate.
The Philippines is yet to see any US deployments change as a result of the Iran war. But concerns are rising. The longer the war continues, the more pressure will grow on US munitions stockpiles. That could yet affect the Philippines. As tensions continue with China over sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea, reliance on US for defence essentials is coming to be viewed as more of a risk, and anxiety is starting to grow in Manila.
Meanwhile, all three countries are facing increasing economic pressure caused by skyrocketing oil prices.
The war, and US deployments, also create domestic political issues. The head of Japan’s main opposition party, Junya Ogawa, signalled frustration following the US redeployment of assets, saying that Japan did not allow US troops on to their territory ‘so they can sortie from those bases to fire missiles towards the Middle East’.
In South Korea, where President Lee Jae-Myung is striving to rebuild trust in Korean democracy following an attempted coup by his predecessor last year, some conservative news outlets are anxious that recent US actions have diminished the country’s ability to defend itself.
In the Philippines, dependence on the US has long been a point of attack used against the administration of President Ferdinand ‘BongBong’ Marcos Jr – who is currently battling corruption allegations. And the war has ignited worries that ties with the US place a target on Filipino soil, should Iran choose to attack US assets in Asia.
The war in Iran also cuts more personally for the Filipino public. Around one in four seafarers are Filipino, and many now face danger and uncertainty as tensions continue to flare in the Strait of Hormuz.
Yet, even as these leaders share a common security challenge and domestic pressures, they also have a unique opportunity to overcome this predicament – together.
Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines have been described by US military commanders as forming a security ‘triangle’ in the Indo-Pacific because of their strategic locations and important role in balancing Chinese power.
Yet, for all their mutual interests, the three allies do not have a trilateral security arrangement, only numerous bilateral agreements.
Japan, South Korea and the US undertook naval exercises in 2025. And Japan and the Philippines conducted joint naval exercises in June the same year. But ‘triangle’ joint naval exercises have not taken place without a US presence. More and better integration is needed.
In order to bridge the gap the US might leave in coming years, a formal and binding trilateral security arrangement is necessary to ensure strong interoperability, intelligence sharing, advanced military tactics and good munitions supplies.
There is a clear foundation for such an agreement: the three countries’ mutual cooperation with the US exhibits commitment to shared norms and principles, providing them with an excellent basis for multi-layered and trust-based cooperation.
The Philippines has enjoyed good bilateral relations with Japan and South Korea. And although Tokyo and Seoul have had a difficult history, their current leaders have shown commitment to bettering relations, sealed by a drum duet earlier this year. This foundation of friendship and respect will certainly smooth the process of integrating into a shared security community. Expanding current bilateral agreements to include a third country would accelerate this process as well.
For example, by extending the current Japan–Philippines reciprocal access agreement to include South Korea, waters within the triangle would see smoother movement of military vessels and more frequent joint training exercises. Disaster response would also likely improve.
If you're thinking of popping popcorn in an air fryer, you'll want to read this expert advice first.
Samsung, Apple and Google have unveiled their early-2026 phones but gear up for the rest of the year. We're in for some very exciting foldables and Ultra camera phones.
Commentary: Foldables are everywhere now and Apple is the only major phone-maker without one.
Pardoned by Trump after violating US banking law, Ben Delo provides funding, networking, and podcasting space for a range of groups, including those with hardline views on migration and abortion
A British billionaire convicted in the US for failing to implement adequate money-laundering controls on his cryptocurrency business is funding a political base in the heart of Westminster used by “anti-woke” and rightwing activists.
Ben Delo, 42, who was pardoned by Donald Trump last year, has given support in kind to Rupert Lowe, the anti-migration MP challenging Nigel Farage from the right – while also connecting with mainstream figures including the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch and former cabinet minister Michael Gove.
Continue reading...Ottawa wants to modernize a region in the north that’s about six times the size of Texas, ‘just like in the 1800s’
Picture an Arctic territory, marginalized by its own country, almost entirely lacking roads, ports and power sources, but rich in mining potential and suddenly feeling vulnerable to outside threats.
It’s not Greenland; it’s the Canadian Arctic.
Continue reading...Use AI as a brainstorming partner and organizer, but don’t outsource your judgment
Three years on from the release of ChatGPT, two broad camps have formed: those people who refuse to use it, and those who use it every day.
A 2025 survey by the Pew Research Center found that one-third of US adults say they have been using ChatGPT. This includes 58% of US adults under 30 – roughly double the share two years ago.
Continue reading...Tasteless political merch is nothing new to Donald Trump, but it’s a particularly bad look if you’re married to Bill Clinton
We live in a golden age of tasteless political merchandise. This is largely thanks to Donald Trump: over the years the president’s official store has flogged everything from hoodies with Joe Biden falling downstairs on them to a T-shirt with a version of the mugshot from his 2023 booking on felony charges (Trump denied wrongdoing).
Trump isn’t the only one. Back in 2019, Senator Mitch McConnell, then Senate majority leader, sold more than 2,000 T-shirts referencing “Cocaine Mitch”. This had nothing to do with his hobbies; it was in response to a nickname given to McConnell by a political rival off the back of a baseless allegation. “One of the things we learned with this whole ‘Cocaine Mitch’ phenomenon is that people are really engaged,” one of the staffers involved in the T-shirt sales said at the time. “They want merchandise.”
Continue reading...Records shed light on how Scott Brown – then Trump’s New Zealand ambassador, now running for Senate – responded to Kennedy’s 2019 Samoa trip ahead of measles outbreak
When Robert F Kennedy Jr ran for president as a Democrat in 2023, he found an unexpected ally in Scott Brown. A former Republican senator, Brown had begun a tradition of hosting Republican presidential candidates for barbecues in his New Hampshire back yard, where they could stump for votes and get attention ahead of the state’s crucial primary.
Kennedy became Brown’s first Democratic invitee. His appearance in September 2023 drew hundreds of people, Brown’s biggest crowd ever. Kennedy held Brown in such high regard that after he decided to run instead as an independent, he reportedly reached out to Brown as a possible vice-presidential running mate, though Brown declined.
Continue reading...Sociology faculty are refusing to alter syllabi, even as state targets how race, gender and inequality are taught
Across Florida universities, some sociology professors are quietly choosing not to alter their courses in response to new state guidelines restricting how topics like race, gender and sexuality can be discussed. Rather than rewriting syllabi or removing foundational material, as the new demands would call for, they say they are continuing to teach their classes as designed. The professors view the preservation of their curricula not as an act of defiance, but as a professional responsibility to provide students with a full and rigorous education.
In late January, Florida’s department of education introduced what many professors are calling a censored sociology textbook for use in the state’s public colleges and universities, along with a list of proposed guidelines at state schools, restricting various discussions related to systemic discrimination, gender and sexual identity, race-conscious remedies, and the structural causes of inequality. Faculty members say this move reflects a broader effort to narrow academic freedom in higher education and follows several years of legislation aimed at reshaping public university curricula under the banner of combating “woke ideology”.
Continue reading...Guardian analysis of more than a million emails reveals financier’s deep and longstanding ties with the wealthy and powerful
The release of the Epstein files has reverberated around the world, leading to at least nine resignations and investigations into high-profile figures, including the former UK ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson, and the ex-prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
The deluge of information has made it hard to assess the extent of the connections but a Guardian data analysis reveals how frequent, deep and longstanding his ties were to a number of high-profile figures.
Continue reading...London Marathon runners will be the first to experience this partnership during the upcoming April race.
From favorite streaming services to voice assistant tasks, these smart speakers wowed us in our testing.
sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: In The Martian, fictional astronaut Mark Watney survives the wasteland of Mars by growing potatoes in lunar soil -- with a bit of help from human poop. The idea may not be so far-fetched. In a preprint posted this month on bioRxiv, researchers show potatoes can indeed grow in the equivalent of Moon dust, though they need a lot of help from compost found on Earth. To make the discovery, scientists first had to re-create lunar regolith -- the loose, powdery layer that blankets the Moon's surface. To replicate that in the lab, David Handy, a space biologist at Oregon State University (OSU), and his colleagues used a mix of crushed minerals and volcanic ash that matched the chemistry of the Moon. But lunar regolith is entirely devoid of the organic matter that plants need to grow. "Turning an inorganic, inhospitable bucket of glorified sand into something that can support plant growth is complex," says Anna-Lisa Paul, a plant molecular biologist at the University of Florida not involved with the work. So Handy and his colleagues added vermicompost -- organic waste from worms -- into the regolith. They found that a mix with 5% compost allowed the potatoes to grow while still emulating the stressful conditions of the lunar environment. After almost 2 months of growth, the team harvested the tubers, freeze-dried them, and ground them up for further testing. Analysis of the potatoes' DNA showed stress-related genes had been activated. The potatoes also had higher concentrations of copper and zinc than Earth-grown ones, which may make them dangerous for human consumption. The plants' nutritional value, though, was similar to traditional potatoes -- a surprise to the scientists, who expected lower levels of nutrition "because the plants might have been working overtime to overcome certain stressors," Handy says.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Untold numbers will get sick as a result. Clinics are scrambling, and no one seems to be able to explain why this is happening
They’re calling it a funding cliff for sexual health in America. Pap smears and HIV tests will be cancelled. IUD appointments will have to be rebooked; condoms and birth control pills that used to be free will now come with a price tag. Maternal health outcomes will worsen, and STDs will spread. Some nurses, doctors, and other health clinic staff will be laid off, and clinic hours will be slashed. The long-term impacts for public health could be horrific.
On 31 March, millions of Americans may lose access to birth control and STD screening services provided by the Title X program, a $286m annual public health investment that provides sexual and reproductive care for Americans, mostly women, who are low-income or lack health insurance. More than 2 3 million people used the program in 2023; now, they are likely to be denied care – being forced to pay out-of-pocket for services that used to be free, or to make the decision to go without.
Continue reading...This easy meal kit service was never my favorite. Here's how Home Chef fared in our most recent testing.
Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton is projected to win the heated and crowded Democratic primary race for the U.S. Senate seat that Dick Durbin has held for nearly 30 years, according to CBS News analysis.
An Arkansas law requiring that the Ten Commandments be prominently displayed in public school classrooms has been struck down by a federal judge.
Jessie Holmes is the third competitor in the 54-year history of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race to repeat the year after winning for the first time.
Thousands of students to be offered vaccines in response to quickest-growing outbreak experts have seen
The number of meningitis infections linked to Kent continues to grow, with five confirmed new cases on Wednesday, in what experts have described as the quickest-growing outbreak of the disease they have seen.
The UK Health Security Agency said that as of 5pm on Tuesday there were 20 cases of invasive meningococcal disease, up from 15. Nine have been confirmed in the laboratory, while a further 11 are under investigation. Six are confirmed to be the meningitis B strain, also known as MenB, which is the most common form of invasive meningococcal disease.
Continue reading...Over the next week, around 800 high temperature records are forecast to be neared, tied or broken at 165 locations in Western and Central states.
Stick vacuums are a convenient alternative to corded designs, but which model wins for overall cleaning prowess? Our expert reveals all
• The best robot vacuums
• How to make your vacuum last longer
Choosing a cordless vacuum isn’t a decision that should be taken lightly. You’re likely to keep a vacuum cleaner for years, relying heavily on its ability to suck up dust, crumbs, mud, pet hair and any other dry spillages or sheddings that end up on your floor. Choosing the right model can be the difference between an effective cleaner that’s a delight to pull out of the cupboard and a dud that you dread having to unblock, detangle and clean after every use.
In this review, I took 15 of the leading cordless vacuum cleaners from a range of manufacturers and at various prices and inflicted the same cleaning tests on each one. That takes all the guesswork out of picking your next cleaner: I can tell you exactly which ones picked up the most mess.
Best cordless vacuum cleaner overall:
Shark PowerDetect Clean & Empty IP3251
Best budget cordless vacuum cleaner:
Vax HomePro Pet-Design
Fans love watching an underdog cause an upset. The problem is that unbeaten teams are unbeaten for a reason
A classic narrative, dating back to the classic matchup of David v Goliath, is the underdog v the favorite.
The only problem is that the underdog is an underdog for the reason. Sure, everyone loves it when a David wins, but Goliath usually swats him away with predictable ease and then pounds him into the dirt. Which leads to a problem: who, other than devoted fans of the team in question, roots for the perennial champions? Isn’t that a bit like watching Hoosiers and rooting for the big kids to beat Gene Hackman’s scrappy underdogs? Or watching Rocky IV and rooting for Drago?
Continue reading...The US president is using the language and the strategy of authoritarians once again
There’s nothing completely new in Donald Trump’s latest attacks on reporters.
But they’re more extreme now and ever more indicative of what he wants: a docile press that provides propaganda – not factual journalism – for everything he does, including for his misguided war in Iran.
Continue reading...Sara Brannon alleges high school overseen by the Roman Catholic archdiocese was negligent in treatment of her 17-year-old son
A suburban New Orleans woman whose teenaged son died by suicide hours after his Catholic school expelled him in the wake of what he termed a shoving match with a campus bully is pursuing a wrongful death lawsuit against the local archdiocese.
Sara Brannon contends that Rummel high school in Metairie, Louisiana, was negligent in its treatment of her son, 17-year-old Devon Shelton, and is therefore owed damages, including for mental anguish as well as physical pain and suffering.
In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In the UK, the youth suicide charity Papyrus can be contacted on 0800 068 4141 or email pat@papyrus-uk.org, and in the UK and Ireland Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
Continue reading...In late 2024, the federal government’s cybersecurity evaluators rendered a troubling verdict on one of Microsoft’s biggest cloud computing offerings.
The tech giant’s “lack of proper detailed security documentation” left reviewers with a “lack of confidence in assessing the system’s overall security posture,” according to an internal government report reviewed by ProPublica.
Or, as one member of the team put it: “The package is a pile of shit.”
For years, reviewers said, Microsoft had tried and failed to fully explain how it protects sensitive information in the cloud as it hops from server to server across the digital terrain. Given that and other unknowns, government experts couldn’t vouch for the technology’s security.
Such judgments would be damning for any company seeking to sell its wares to the U.S. government, but it should have been particularly devastating for Microsoft. The tech giant’s products had been at the heart of two major cybersecurity attacks against the U.S. in three years. In one, Russian hackers exploited a weakness to steal sensitive data from a number of federal agencies, including the National Nuclear Security Administration. In the other, Chinese hackers infiltrated the email accounts of a Cabinet member and other senior government officials.
The federal government could be further exposed if it couldn’t verify the cybersecurity of Microsoft’s Government Community Cloud High, a suite of cloud-based services intended to safeguard some of the nation’s most sensitive information.
Yet, in a highly unusual move that still reverberates across Washington, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP, authorized the product anyway, bestowing what amounts to the federal government’s cybersecurity seal of approval. FedRAMP’s ruling — which included a kind of “buyer beware” notice to any federal agency considering GCC High — helped Microsoft expand a government business empire worth billions of dollars.
“BOOM SHAKA LAKA,” Richard Wakeman, one of the company’s chief security architects, boasted in an online forum, celebrating the milestone with a meme of Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Wolf of Wall Street.” Wakeman did not respond to requests for comment.
It was not the type of outcome that federal policymakers envisioned a decade and a half ago when they embraced the cloud revolution and created FedRAMP to help safeguard the government’s cybersecurity. The program’s layers of review, which included an assessment by outside experts, were supposed to ensure that service providers like Microsoft could be entrusted with the government’s secrets. But ProPublica’s investigation — drawn from internal FedRAMP memos, logs, emails, meeting minutes, and interviews with seven former and current government employees and contractors — found breakdowns at every juncture of that process. It also found a remarkable deference to Microsoft, even as the company’s products and practices were central to two of the most damaging cyberattacks ever carried out against the government.
This is not security. This is security theater.
Tony Sager, former NSA computer scientist
FedRAMP first raised questions about GCC High’s security in 2020 and asked Microsoft to provide detailed diagrams explaining its encryption practices. But when the company produced what FedRAMP considered to be only partial information in fits and starts, program officials did not reject Microsoft’s application. Instead, they repeatedly pulled punches and allowed the review to drag out for the better part of five years. And because federal agencies were allowed to deploy the product during the review, GCC High spread across the government as well as the defense industry. By late 2024, FedRAMP reviewers concluded that they had little choice but to authorize the technology — not because their questions had been answered or their review was complete, but largely on the grounds that Microsoft’s product was already being used across Washington.
Today, key parts of the federal government, including the Justice and Energy departments, and the defense sector rely on this technology to protect highly sensitive information that, if leaked, “could be expected to have a severe or catastrophic adverse effect” on operations, assets and individuals, the government has said.
“This is not a happy story in terms of the security of the U.S.,” said Tony Sager, who spent more than three decades as a computer scientist at the National Security Agency and now is an executive at the nonprofit Center for Internet Security.
For years, the FedRAMP process has been equated with actual security, Sager said. ProPublica’s findings, he said, shatter that facade.
“This is not security,” he said. “This is security theater.”
ProPublica is exposing the government’s reservations about this popular product for the first time. We are also revealing Microsoft’s yearslong inability to provide the encryption documentation and evidence the federal reviewers sought.
The revelations come as the Justice Department ramps up scrutiny of the government’s technology contractors. In December, the department announced the indictment of a former employee of Accenture who allegedly misled federal agencies about the security of the company’s cloud platform and its compliance with FedRAMP’s standards. She has pleaded not guilty. Accenture, which was not charged with wrongdoing, has said that it “proactively brought this matter to the government’s attention” and that it is “dedicated to operating with the highest ethical standards.”
Microsoft has also faced questions about its disclosures to the government. As ProPublica reported last year, the company failed to inform the Defense Department about its use of China-based engineers to maintain the government’s cloud systems, despite Pentagon rules stipulating that “No Foreign persons may have” access to its most sensitive data. The department is investigating the practice, which officials say could have compromised national security.
Microsoft has defended its program as “tightly monitored and supplemented by layers of security mitigations,” but after ProPublica’s story published last July, the company announced that it would stop using China-based engineers for Defense Department work.
In response to written questions for this story and in an interview, Microsoft acknowledged the yearslong confrontation with FedRAMP but also said it provided “comprehensive documentation” throughout the review process and “remediated findings where possible.”
“We stand by our products and the comprehensive steps we’ve taken to ensure all FedRAMP-authorized products meet the security and compliance requirements necessary,” a spokesperson said in a statement, adding that the company would “continue to work with FedRAMP to continuously review and evaluate our services for continued compliance.”
But these days, ProPublica found, there aren’t many people left at FedRAMP to work with.
The program was an early target of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, which slashed its staff and budget. Even FedRAMP acknowledges it is operating “with an absolute minimum of support staff” and “limited customer service.” The roughly two dozen employees who remain are “entirely focused on” delivering authorizations at a record pace, FedRAMP’s director has said. Today, its annual budget is just $10 million, its lowest in a decade, even as it has boasted record numbers of new authorizations for cloud products.
The consequence of all this, people who have worked for FedRAMP told ProPublica, is that the program now is little more than a rubber stamp for industry. The implications of such a downsizing for federal cybersecurity are far-reaching, especially as the administration encourages agencies to adopt cloud-based artificial intelligence tools, which draw upon reams of sensitive information.
The General Services Administration, which houses FedRAMP, defended the program, saying it has undergone “significant reforms to strengthen governance” since GCC High arrived in 2020. “FedRAMP’s role is to assess if cloud services have provided sufficient information and materials to be adequate for agency use, and the program today operates with strengthened oversight and accountability mechanisms to do exactly that,” a GSA spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
The agency did not respond to written questions regarding GCC High.
About two decades ago, federal officials predicted that the cloud revolution, providing on-demand access to shared computing via the internet, would usher in an era of cheaper, more secure and more efficient information technology.
Moving to the cloud meant shifting away from on-premises servers owned and operated by the government to those in massive data centers maintained by tech companies. Some agency leaders were reluctant to relinquish control, while others couldn’t wait to.
In an effort to accelerate the transition, the Obama administration issued its “Cloud First” policy in 2011, requiring all agencies to implement cloud-based tools “whenever a secure, reliable, cost-effective” option existed. To facilitate adoption, the administration created FedRAMP, whose job was to ensure the security of those tools.
FedRAMP’s “do once, use many times” system was intended to streamline and strengthen the government procurement process. Previously, each agency using a cloud service vetted it separately, sometimes applying different interpretations of federal security requirements. Under the new program, agencies would be able to skip redundant security reviews because FedRAMP authorization indicated that the product had already met standardized requirements. Authorized products would be listed on a government website known as the FedRAMP Marketplace.
On paper, the program was an exercise in efficiency. But in practice, the small FedRAMP team could not keep up with the flood of demand from tech companies that wanted their products authorized.
The slow approval process frustrated both the tech industry, eager for a share in the billions of federal dollars up for grabs, and government agencies that were under pressure to migrate to the cloud. These dynamics sometimes pitted the cloud industry and agency officials together against FedRAMP. The backlog also prompted many agencies to take an alternative path: performing their own reviews of the products they wanted to adopt, using FedRAMP’s standards.
It was through this “agency path” that GCC High entered the federal bloodstream, with the Justice Department paving the way. Initially, some Justice officials were nervous about the cloud and who might have access to its information, which includes highly sensitive court and law enforcement records, a Justice Department official involved in the decision told ProPublica. The department’s cybersecurity program required it to ensure that only U.S. citizens “access or assist in the development, operation, management, or maintenance” of its IT systems, unless a waiver was granted. Justice’s IT specialists recommended pursuing GCC High, believing it could meet the elevated security needs, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal matters.
Pursuant to FedRAMP’s rules, Microsoft had GCC High evaluated by a so-called third-party assessment organization, which is supposed to provide an independent review of whether the product has met federal standards. The Justice Department then performed its own evaluation of GCC High using those standards and ruled the offering acceptable.
By early 2020, Melinda Rogers, Justice’s deputy chief information officer, made the decision official and soon deployed GCC High across the department.
It was a milestone for all involved. Rogers had ushered the Justice Department into the cloud, and Microsoft had gained a significant foothold in the cutthroat market for the federal government’s cloud computing business.
Moreover, Rogers’ decision placed GCC High on the FedRAMP Marketplace, the government’s influential online clearinghouse of all the cloud providers that are under review or already authorized. Its mere mention as “in process” was a boon for Microsoft, amounting to free advertising on a website used by organizations seeking to purchase cloud services bearing what is widely seen as the government’s cybersecurity seal of approval.
That April, GCC High landed at FedRAMP’s office for review, the final stop on its bureaucratic journey to full authorization.
In theory, there shouldn’t have been much for FedRAMP’s team to do after the third-party assessor and Justice reviewed GCC High, because all parties were supposed to be following the same requirements.
But it was around this time that the Government Accountability Office, which investigates federal programs, discovered breakdowns in the process, finding that agency reviews sometimes were lacking in quality. Despite missing details, FedRAMP went on to authorize many of these packages. Acknowledging these shortcomings, FedRAMP began to take a harder look at new packages, a former reviewer said.
This was the environment in which Microsoft’s GCC High application entered the pipeline. The name GCC High was an umbrella covering many services and features within Office 365 that all needed to be reviewed. FedRAMP reviewers quickly noticed key material was missing.
The team homed in on what it viewed as a fundamental document called a “data flow diagram,” former members told ProPublica. The illustration is supposed to show how data travels from Point A to Point B — and, more importantly, how it’s protected as it hops from server to server. FedRAMP requires data to be encrypted while in transit to ensure that sensitive materials are protected even if they’re intercepted by hackers.
But when the FedRAMP team asked Microsoft to produce the diagrams showing how such encryption would happen for each service in GCC High, the company balked, saying the request was too challenging. So the reviewers suggested starting with just Exchange Online, the popular email platform.
“This was our litmus test to say, ‘This isn’t the only thing that’s required, but if you’re not doing this, we are not even close yet,’” said one reviewer who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal matters. Once they reached the appropriate level of detail, they would move from Exchange to other services within GCC High.
It was the kind of detail that other major cloud providers such as Amazon and Google routinely provided, members of the FedRAMP team told ProPublica. Yet Microsoft took months to respond. When it did, the former reviewer said, it submitted a white paper that discussed GCC High’s encryption strategy but left out the details of where on the journey data actually becomes encrypted and decrypted — so FedRAMP couldn’t assess that it was being done properly.
A Microsoft spokesperson acknowledged that the company had “articulated a challenge related to illustrating the volume of information being requested in diagram form” but “found alternate ways to share that information.”
Rogers, who was hired by Microsoft in 2025, declined to be interviewed. In response to emailed questions, the company provided a statement saying that she “stands by the rigorous evaluation that contributed to” her authorization of GCC High. A spokesperson said there was “absolutely no connection” between her hiring and the decisions in the GCC High process, and that she and the company complied with “all rules, regulations, and ethical standards.”
The Justice Department declined to respond to written questions from ProPublica.
As 2020 came to a close, a national security crisis hit Washington that underscored the consequences of cyber weakness. Russian state-sponsored hackers had been quietly working their way through federal computer systems for much of the year and vacuuming up sensitive data and emails from U.S. agencies — including the Justice Department.
At the time, most of the blame fell on a Texas-based company called SolarWinds, whose software provided hackers their initial opening and whose name became synonymous with the attack. But, as ProPublica has reported, the Russians leveraged that opening to exploit a long-standing weakness in a Microsoft product — one that the company had refused to fix for years, despite repeated warnings from one of its engineers. Microsoft has defended its decision not to address the flaw, saying that it received “multiple reviews” and that the company weighs a variety of factors when making security decisions.
In the aftermath, the Biden administration took steps to bolster the nation’s cybersecurity. Among them, the Justice Department announced a cyber-fraud initiative in 2021 to crack down on companies and individuals that “put U.S. information or systems at risk by knowingly providing deficient cybersecurity products or services, knowingly misrepresenting their cybersecurity practices or protocols, or knowingly violating obligations to monitor and report cybersecurity incidents and breaches.”
Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said the department would use the False Claims Act to pursue government contractors “when they fail to follow required cybersecurity standards — because we know that puts all of us at risk.”
But if Microsoft felt any pressure from the SolarWinds attack or from the Justice Department’s announcement, it didn’t manifest in the FedRAMP talks, according to former members of the FedRAMP team.
The discourse between FedRAMP and Microsoft fell into a pattern. The parties would meet. Months would go by. Microsoft would return with a response that FedRAMP deemed incomplete or irrelevant. To bolster the chances of getting the information it wanted, the FedRAMP team provided Microsoft with a template, describing the level of detail it expected. But the diagrams Microsoft returned never met those expectations.
“We never got past Exchange,” one former reviewer said. “We never got that level of detail. We had no visibility inside.”
In an interview with ProPublica, John Bergin, the Microsoft official who became the government’s main contact, acknowledged the prolonged back-and-forth but blamed FedRAMP, equating its requests for diagrams to a “rock fetching exercise.”
“We were maybe incompetent in how we drew drawings because there was no standard to draw them to,” he said. “Did we not do it exactly how they wanted? Absolutely. There was always something missing because there was no standard.”
A Microsoft spokesperson said without such a standard, “cloud providers were left to interpret the level of abstraction and representation on their own,” creating “inconsistency and confusion, not an unwillingness to be transparent.”
But even Microsoft’s own engineers had struggled over the years to map the architecture of its products, according to two people involved in building cloud services used by federal customers. At issue, according to people familiar with Microsoft’s technology, was the decades-old code of its legacy software, which the company used in building its cloud services.
One FedRAMP reviewer compared it to a “pile of spaghetti pies.” The data’s path from Point A to Point B, the person said, was like traveling from Washington to New York with detours by bus, ferry and airplane rather than just taking a quick ride on Amtrak. And each one of those detours represents an opportunity for a hijacking if the data isn’t properly encrypted.
Other major cloud providers such as Amazon and Google built their systems from the ground up, said Sager, the former NSA computer scientist, who worked with all three companies during his time in government.
Microsoft’s system is “not designed for this kind of isolation of ‘secure’ from ‘not secure,’” Sager said.
A Microsoft spokesperson acknowledged the company faces a unique challenge but maintained that its cloud products meet federal security requirements.
“Unlike providers that started later with a narrower product scope, Microsoft operates one of the broadest enterprise and government platforms in the world, supporting continuity for millions of customers while simultaneously modernizing at scale,” the spokesperson said in emailed responses. “That complexity is not ‘spaghetti,’ but it does mean the work of disentangling, isolating, and hardening systems is continuous.”
The spokesperson said that since 2023, Microsoft has made “security‑first architectural redesign, legacy risk reduction, and stronger isolation guarantees a top, company‑wide priority.”
The FedRAMP team was not the only party with reservations about GCC High. Microsoft’s third-party assessment organizations also expressed concerns.
The firms are supposed to be independent but are hired and paid by the company being assessed. Acknowledging the potential for conflicts of interest, FedRAMP has encouraged the assessment firms to confidentially back-channel to its reviewers any negative feedback that they were unwilling to bring directly to their clients or reflect in official reports.
In 2020, two third-party assessors hired by Microsoft, Coalfire and Kratos, did just that. They told FedRAMP that they were unable to get the full picture of GCC High, a former FedRAMP reviewer told ProPublica.
“Coalfire and Kratos both readily admitted that it was difficult to impossible to get the information required out of Microsoft to properly do a sufficient assessment,” the reviewer told ProPublica.
The back channel helped surface cybersecurity issues that otherwise might never have been known to the government, people who have worked with and for FedRAMP told ProPublica. At the same time, they acknowledged its existence undermined the very spirit and intent of having independent assessors.
A spokesperson for Coalfire, the firm that initially handled the GCC High assessment, requested written questions from ProPublica, then declined to respond.
A spokesperson for Kratos, which replaced Coalfire as the GCC High assessor, declined an interview request. In an emailed response to written questions, the spokesperson said the company stands by its official assessment and recommendation of GCC High and “absolutely refutes” that it “ever would sign off on a product we were unable to fully vet.” The company “has open and frank conversations” with all customers, including Microsoft, which “submitted all requisite diagrams to meet FedRAMP-defined requirements,” the spokesperson said.
Kratos said it “spent extensive time working collaboratively with FedRAMP in their review” and does not consider such discussions to be “backchanneling.”
FedRAMP, however, was dissatisfied with Kratos’ ongoing work and believed the firm “should be pushing back” on Microsoft more, the former reviewer said. It placed Kratos on a “corrective action plan,” which could eventually result in loss of accreditation. The company said it did not agree with FedRAMP’s action but provided “additional trainings for some internal assessors” in response to it.
The Microsoft spokesperson told ProPublica the company has “always been responsive to requests” from Kratos and FedRAMP. “We are not aware of any backchanneling, nor do we believe that backchanneling would have been necessary given our transparency and cooperation with auditor requests,” the spokesperson said.
In response to questions from ProPublica about the process, the GSA said in an email that FedRAMP’s system “does not create an inherent conflict of interest for professional auditors who meet ethical and contractual performance expectations.”
GSA did not respond to questions about back-channeling but said the “correct process” is for a third-party assessor to “state these problems formally in a finding during the security assessment so that the cloud service provider has an opportunity to fix the issue.”
The back-and-forth between the FedRAMP reviewers and Microsoft’s team went on for years with little progress. Then, in the summer of 2023, the program’s interim director, Brian Conrad, got a call from the White House that would alter the course of the review.
Chinese state-sponsored hackers had infiltrated GCC, the lower-cost version of Microsoft’s government cloud, and stolen data and emails from the commerce secretary, the U.S. ambassador to China and other high-ranking government officials. In the aftermath, Chris DeRusha, the White House’s chief information security officer, wanted a briefing from FedRAMP, which had authorized GCC.
The decision predated Conrad’s tenure, but he told ProPublica that he left the conversation with several takeaways. First, FedRAMP must hold all cloud providers — including Microsoft — to the same standards. Second, he had the backing of the White House in standing firm. Finally, FedRAMP would feel the political heat if any cloud service with a FedRAMP authorization were hacked.
DeRusha confirmed Conrad’s account of the phone call but declined to comment further.
Within months, Conrad informed Microsoft that FedRAMP was ending the engagement on GCC High.
We can’t even quantify the unknowns, which makes us very uncomfortable.
FedRAMP reviewer of GCC High
“After three years of collaboration with the Microsoft team, we still lack visibility into the security gaps because there are unknowns that Microsoft has failed to address,” Conrad wrote in an October 2023 email. This, he added, was not for FedRAMP’s lack of trying. Staffers had spent 480 hours of review time, had conducted 18 “technical deep dive” sessions and had numerous email exchanges with the company over the years. Yet they still lacked the data flow diagrams, crucial information “since visibility into the encryption status of all data flows and stores is so important,” he wrote.
If Microsoft still wanted FedRAMP authorization, Conrad wrote, it would need to start over.
A FedRAMP reviewer, explaining the decision to the Justice Department, said the team was “not asking for anything above and beyond what we’ve asked from every other” cloud service provider, according to meeting minutes reviewed by ProPublica. But the request was particularly justified in Microsoft’s case, the reviewer told the Justice officials, because “each time we’ve actually been able to get visibility into a black box, we’ve uncovered an issue.”
“We can’t even quantify the unknowns, which makes us very uncomfortable,” the reviewer said, according to the minutes.
Microsoft was furious. Failing to obtain authorization and starting the process over would signal to the market that something was wrong with GCC High. Customers were already confused and concerned about the drawn-out review, which had become a hot topic in an online forum used by government and technology insiders. There, Wakeman, the Microsoft cybersecurity architect, deflected blame, saying the government had been “dragging their feet on it for years now.”
Meanwhile, to build support for Microsoft’s case, Bergin, the company’s point person for FedRAMP and a former Army official, reached out to government leaders, including one from the Justice Department.
The Justice official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter, said Bergin complained that the delay was hampering Microsoft’s ability “to get this out into the market full sail.” Bergin then pushed the Justice Department to “throw around our weight” to help secure FedRAMP authorization, the official said.
That December, as the parties gathered to hash things out at GSA’s Washington headquarters, Justice did just that. Rogers, who by then had been promoted to the department’s chief information officer, sat beside Bergin — on the opposite side of the table from Conrad, the FedRAMP director.
Rogers and her Justice colleagues had a stake in the outcome. Since authorizing and deploying GCC High, she had received accolades for her work modernizing the department’s IT and cybersecurity. But without FedRAMP’s stamp of approval, she would be the government official left holding the bag if GCC High were involved in a serious hack. At the same time, the Justice Department couldn’t easily back out of using GCC High because once a technology is widely deployed, pulling the plug can be costly and technically challenging. And from its perspective, the cloud was an improvement over the old government-run data centers.
Shortly after the meeting kicked off, Bergin interrupted a FedRAMP reviewer who had been presenting PowerPoint slides. He said the Justice Department and third-party assessor had already reviewed GCC High, according to meeting minutes. FedRAMP “should essentially just accept” their findings, he said.
Then, in a shock to the FedRAMP team, Rogers backed him up and went on to criticize FedRAMP’s work, according to two attendees.
In its statement, Microsoft said Rogers maintains that FedRAMP’s approach “was misguided and improperly dismissed the extensive evaluations performed by DOJ personnel.”
Bergin did not dispute the account, telling ProPublica that he had been trying to argue that it is the purview of third-party assessors such as Kratos — not FedRAMP — to evaluate the security of cloud products. And because FedRAMP must approve the third-party assessment firms, the program should have taken its issues up with Kratos.
“When you are the regulatory agency who determines who the auditors are and you refuse to accept your auditors’ answers, that’s not a ‘me’ problem,” Bergin told ProPublica.
The GSA did not respond to questions about the meeting. The Justice Department declined to comment.
If there was any doubt about the role of FedRAMP, the White House issued a memorandum in the summer of 2024 that outlined its views. FedRAMP, it said, “must be capable of conducting rigorous reviews” and requiring cloud providers to “rapidly mitigate weaknesses in their security architecture.” The office should “consistently assess and validate cloud providers’ complex architectures and encryption schemes.”
But by that point, GCC High had spread to other federal agencies, with the Justice Department’s authorization serving as a signal that the technology met federal standards.
It also spread to the defense sector, since the Pentagon required that cloud products used by its contractors meet FedRAMP standards. While it did not have FedRAMP authorization, Microsoft marketed GCC High as meeting the requirements, selling it to companies such as Boeing that research, develop and maintain military weapons systems.
But with the FedRAMP authorization up in the air, some contractors began to worry that by using GCC High, they were out of compliance. That could threaten their contracts, which, in turn, could impact Defense Department operations. Pentagon officials called FedRAMP to inquire about the authorization stalemate.
The Defense Department acknowledged but did not respond to written questions from ProPublica.
Rogers also kept pressing FedRAMP to “get this thing over the line,” former employees of the GSA and FedRAMP said. It was the “opinion of the staff and the contractors that she simply was not willing to put heat to Microsoft on this” and that the Justice Department “was too sympathetic to Microsoft’s claims,” Eric Mill, then GSA’s executive director for cloud strategy, told ProPublica.
In the summer of 2024, FedRAMP hired a new permanent director, government technology insider Pete Waterman. Within about a month of taking the job, he restarted the office’s review of GCC High with a new team, which put aside the debate over data flow diagrams and instead attempted to examine evidence from Microsoft. But these reviewers soon arrived at the same conclusion, with the team’s leader complaining about “getting stiff-armed” by Microsoft.
“He came back and said, ‘Yeah, this thing sucks,’” Mill recalled.
While the team was able to work through only two of the many services included in GCC High, Exchange Online and Teams, that was enough for it to identify “issues that are fundamental” to risk management, including “timely remediation of vulnerabilities and vulnerability scanning,” according to a summary of the team’s findings reviewed by ProPublica.
Those issues, as well as a lack of “proper detailed security documentation” from Microsoft, limit “visibility and understanding of the system” and “impair the ability to make informed risk decisions.”
The team concluded, “There is a lack of confidence in assessing the system’s overall security posture.”
A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement that the company “never received this feedback in any of its communications with FedRAMP.”
When ProPublica read the findings to Bergin, the Microsoft liaison, he said he was surprised.
“That’s pretty damning,” Bergin said, adding that it sounded like language that “would’ve generally been associated with a finding of ‘not worthy.’ If an assessor wrote that, I would be nervous.”
Despite the findings, to the FedRAMP team, turning Microsoft down didn’t seem like an option. “Not issuing an authorization would impact multiple agencies that are already using GCC-H,” the summary document said. The team determined that it was a “better value” to issue an authorization with conditions for continued government oversight.
While authorizations with oversight conditions weren’t unusual, arriving at one under these circumstances was. GCC High reviewers saw problems everywhere, both in what they were able to evaluate and what they weren’t. To them, most of the package remained a vast wilderness of untold risk.
Nevertheless, FedRAMP and Microsoft reached an agreement, and the day after Christmas 2024, GCC High received its FedRAMP authorization. FedRAMP appended a cover report to the package laying out its deficiencies and noting it carried unknown risks, according to people familiar with the report.
It emphasized that agencies should carefully review the package and engage directly with Microsoft on any questions.
Microsoft told ProPublica that it has met the conditions of the agreement and has “stayed within the performance metrics required by FedRAMP” to ensure that “risks are identified, tracked, remediated, and transparently communicated.”
But under the Trump administration, there aren’t many people left at FedRAMP to check.
While the Biden-era guidance said FedRAMP “must be an expert program that can analyze and validate the security claims” of cloud providers, the GSA told ProPublica that the program’s role is “not to determine if a cloud service is secure enough.” Rather, it is “to ensure agencies have sufficient information to make these risk decisions.”
The problem is that agencies often lack the staff and resources to do thorough reviews, which means the whole system is leaning on the claims of the cloud companies and the assessments of the third-party firms they pay to evaluate them. Under the current vision, critics say, FedRAMP has lost the plot.
“FedRAMP’s job is to watch the American people’s back when it comes to sharing their data with cloud companies,” said Mill, the former GSA official, who also co-authored the 2024 White House memo. “When there’s a security issue, the public doesn’t expect FedRAMP to say they’re just a paper-pusher.”
When there’s a security issue, the public doesn’t expect FedRAMP to say they’re just a paper-pusher.
Eric Mill, former GSA executive director for cloud strategy
Meanwhile, at the Justice Department, officials are finding out what FedRAMP meant by the “unknown unknowns” in GCC High. Last year, for example, they discovered that Microsoft relied on China-based engineers to service their sensitive cloud systems despite the department’s prohibition against non-U.S. citizens assisting with IT maintenance.
Officials learned about this arrangement — which was also used in GCC High — not from FedRAMP or from Microsoft but from a ProPublica investigation into the practice, according to the Justice employee who spoke with us.
A Microsoft spokesperson acknowledged that the written security plan for GCC High that the company submitted to the Justice Department did not mention foreign engineers, though he said Microsoft did communicate that information to Justice officials before 2020. Nevertheless, Microsoft has since ended its use of China-based engineers in government systems.
Former and current government officials worry about what other risks may be lurking in GCC High and beyond.
The GSA told ProPublica that, in general, “if there is credible evidence that a cloud service provider has made materially false representations, that matter is then appropriately referred to investigative authorities.”
Ironically, the ultimate arbiter of whether cloud providers or their third-party assessors are living up to their claims is the Justice Department itself. The recent indictment of the former Accenture employee suggests it is willing to use this power. In a court document, the Justice Department alleges that the ex-employee made “false and misleading representations” about the cloud platform’s security to help the company “obtain and maintain lucrative federal contracts.” She is also accused of trying to “influence and obstruct” Accenture’s third-party assessors by hiding the product’s deficiencies and telling others to conceal the “true state of the system” during demonstrations, the department said. She has pleaded not guilty.
There is no public indication that such a case has been brought against Microsoft or anyone involved in the GCC High authorization. The Justice Department declined to comment. Monaco, the deputy attorney general who launched the department’s initiative to pursue cybersecurity fraud cases, did not respond to requests for comment.
She left her government position in January 2025. Microsoft hired her to become its president of global affairs.
A company spokesperson said Monaco’s hiring complied with “all rules, regulations, and ethical standards” and that she “does not work on any federal government contracts or have oversight over or involvement with any of our dealings with the federal government.”
The post Federal Cyber Experts Thought Microsoft’s Cloud Was “a Pile of Shit.” They Approved It Anyway. appeared first on ProPublica.
AT&T customers have a new app for managing their accounts, including some parental controls and access to more data.
Amid signs that Republicans may lose some of the Latino support that the party picked up in 2024, grassroots organizations are stepping in to boost GOP Senate candidates in key midterm races.
President Trump is likely to make less of an impact on the federal bench in his second term because of fewer vacancies, a slower pace of retirements and the potential for Democrats to regain control of the Senate in November.
Why Should Delaware Care?
Roughly a quarter of Delaware’s land mass is made up of wetlands – marshy ecosystems saturated with water that improve water quality, prevent floods and store carbon. But not all wetland types are afforded the same legal protections. Environmental rule changes at the federal level are prompting state lawmakers to find local solutions to protect some of the most vulnerable — and valuable — wetlands left behind.
As the Trump administration continues efforts to roll back environmental regulations, a gap in policies at the state level could leave some of Delaware’s most vulnerable wetland habitats protected only by the owners of the land where they are found.
State Sen. Stephanie Hansen (D-Middletown) is hoping to change that.
For months, the chair of the Senate’s Environment, Energy & Transportation Committee has been workshopping a bill that would create a new regulatory committee tasked with developing a program within the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) that would oversee the state’s nontidal wetlands – the kinds of marshy ecosystems found across the state that are not connected to rivers or bays but can still help improve water quality and prevent floods.
“This is a bill that’s going to set the bones of a wetlands program for the state of Delaware,” Hansen said.
The idea, she added, is to combine the state’s existing tidal wetlands program — for marshes that do connect with rivers or bays — with a yet-to-be-created non-tidal program.
While it will be up to a regulatory advisory committee to actually create the new program, the idea is that it would govern how non-tidal wetlands are identified and protected if, say, a development were being proposed for the same spot.
These marshy areas can be home to some of the rarest state species, like the Eastern tiger salamander in northern Delaware, but also can be found on the fringes of some of the state’s southern farmlands.
But Hansen’s proposal could fall squarely in the midst of a decades-long struggle between environmentalists and private land owners.
Generational Delaware farmers like Jay Baxter understand what is at stake. The father of four said some of his best times are spent with his boys exploring the outdoors. But he also worries about state regulators overstepping future farming and property rights. Farmers and developers alike have raised alarms about giving DNREC too much additional regulatory discretion.
And since marshy spaces are widespread in a coastal state like Delaware, figuring out exactly how to appropriately regulate — and even how to accurately identify and rank — certain types of wetlands means contending with those competing land use interests.
Not only do wetlands provide habitats to unique plants and animals, but they also can act as sponges during storms to absorb floodwaters and filter pollutants. That has become increasingly important as more and more of the state, particularly in Sussex County, sees increased development and greater flood risks due to increased impervious surfaces, climate change and rising sea levels.
But Sussex County has historically fought more stringent protections along its waterways. In 2008, the county sued state regulators who tried to set buffers along Inland Bays waterways as part of a pollution control strategy. The county prevailed in court, with the Delaware Supreme Court ruling it was up to the county to develop land-use policies.
At the federal level, the Trump administration has nixed efforts by Democratic predecessors to apply more protections to “Waters of the United States” under the Clean Water Act. The public comment period for the newly proposed rule, which would exclude protections for many of America’s seasonal and nontidal wetlands, closed in early January.
This also is not the first time Hansen has introduced a freshwater wetlands program bill. In 2024, she introduced Senate Bill 290 to regulate non-tidal wetlands, but it did not make it out of committee.
That bill’s fiscal note ranged from about $1.5 million to $3 million annually to create, grow and administer a program that would have processed an estimated 700 permit applications each year.
Securing funding may not be the only hurdle this new bill would face. During stakeholder group meetings about the issue, local farmers and developers have continued to raise concerns about future regulatory restraints that could apply to how they have already been using the land for years.
“Work needs to be done to make it something palatable,” said Baxter, who grows a variety of vegetables, including corn and soy, and chickens.
He pointed to historic drainage pathways as being a potential sticking point in the proposed legislation. Such areas, which fill with water in storms but may otherwise be dry, were a major sticking point for critics of the federal WOTUS rule.
“This is very important to future generations of agriculture in the state of Delaware,” Baxter said after a late January meeting. “We must have proper drainage. The rules as they stand don’t allow us to maintain drainage.”
In Delaware, state-level protections are already afforded to tidal marshes — those connected to tidally influenced bodies of water like rivers or the Delaware Bay — as well as large freshwater wetlands with over 400 contiguous acres, which largely only applies to the Great Cypress Swamp stretching across Delaware’s southernmost border into Maryland.
County-level protections can be more stringent. Both Kent and New Castle counties have mandatory buffers for all waterways and wetlands.
But in Sussex, there’s only a 50-foot buffer required for developers building along tidal waterways. Delaware is also alone in the mid-Atlantic region when it comes to its lack of state-level protections. Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia and even Pennsylvania all have varying levels of non-tidal wetland programs.
Meanwhile, most of Delaware’s wetlands are on private land; only about 20% are owned by the state or federal government, according to DNREC.
“The analogy is we’re standing out in the middle of the woods naked as it relates to our protection of non-tidal wetlands here in Delaware,” said Christophe Tulou, executive director of the Delaware Center for the Inland Bays, which advocates for the protection of the Rehoboth, Indian River and Little Assawoman bays in Sussex County.
Tulou said efforts to protect Delaware’s freshwater wetlands date back decades, even before he formerly served as DNREC secretary in the 1990s.
“This is not new,” he said. “And the reason it’s not new is because people have known for a long, long time that freshwater wetlands are hugely important.”
Transparency Notice
Maddy Lauria previously worked for the Delaware Center for the Inland Bays from 2020 to 2021. She is currently an independent journalist based in Dover.
The post Sen. Hansen wants state protections to extend to non-tidal wetlands appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Footage of women walking between bars and clubs in UK city centres, often filmed covertly, is proliferating online – attracting thousands of views and profits for those who post them. Can anything be done to stop the creepshots?
‘My friend just sent me this video, told me she’d found me in it,” read the text. “As I was looking for myself, I noticed you’re in it too. I didn’t know I was being filmed, guess you don’t either, just wanted to let you know …”
When Nancy Naylor Hayes received the message in November 2023, she felt a twinge of fear. It was from an acquaintance she hadn’t heard from in years. “I was panicking,” she says. The text pointed her to a Facebook link, which led to a montage of clips of women filmed on the streets of Manchester during nights out.
Continue reading...First-of-its-kind framework enables seamless integration of quantum computers with advanced accelerators to support AI-native and QEC-native quantum computing at scale
DENVER, March 18, 2026 — Quantum Machines has launched The Open Acceleration Stack, a first-of-its-kind framework allowing users to integrate any classical processor (XPU) into their quantum control stack. This novel architecture allows quantum computers not only to be Quantum Error Correction (QEC)-ready and AI-ready, but also QEC- and AI-native.
Credit: Quantum Machines
The Open Acceleration Stack marks a significant expansion of Quantum Machines’ Orchestration Platform, the industry’s leading hardware and software framework for the control and operation of quantum processors. Using Quantum Machines’ OPNIC (OPX Network Interface Card) and NVIDIA NVQLink, the framework enables an ultra-low, microsecond-level latency link between its proprietary Pulse Processing Unit (PPU) and high-performance accelerators, including GPUs, CPUs, FPGAs and ASICs.
Important computational tasks, such as decoding for real-time QEC and advanced AI-native QPU and circuit calibration, require a variety of processors and accelerators to work in harmony and communicate with low latency, high bandwidth and synchronization with the PPU, which runs the quantum program. Quantum Machines’ Open Acceleration Stack enables this hybridization, allowing users to develop and deploy complex hybrid workloads.
Users can deploy CPU-GPU-QPU integration using NVIDIA NVQLink through co-development by Quantum Machines and NVIDIA.
With this solution now evolving into an Acceleration Stack with an open, modular architecture, labs and enterprises will be able to integrate a range of classical processors, from CPUs by companies like AMD, as well as FPGAs, high-performance NVIDIA GPUs, and real-time quantum error correction systems from partners such as Riverlane. This allows users to right-size their setup to meet specific performance and budget requirements and choose the optimal architecture for their applications.
“The Open Acceleration Stack reflects the industry’s shift from quantum computing demonstration to scaling and integration,” said Yonatan Cohen, CTO and Co-Founder, Quantum Machines. “It meets the needs of two critical areas of quantum development: real-time error correction and advanced qubit calibration,
and provides the framework to scale both hardware and software with user experience and performance in mind. We are very excited to engage with our customers and the entire quantum community around these tools and their utilization to advance the field and bring useful quantum computation closer.”
Industry partners highlighted the importance of tightly integrating accelerated computing infrastructure with quantum control systems to enable scalable hybrid architectures.
Sam Stanwyck, Director of Quantum Product at NVIDIA, commented: “GPU computing is integrating deeply with quantum processors to scale logical qubits. With NVIDIA NVQLink, Quantum Machines is delivering the low-latency, high-bandwidth performance to power real-time quantum error correction and calibration – bringing practical, large-scale quantum-GPU supercomputing closer to reality.”
“The path to scalable quantum computing depends on heterogeneous architectures that combine quantum processors with high-performance classical compute,” said Madhu Rangarajan, Corporate Vice President, Computing, Enterprise and AI technologies, AMD. “The Open Acceleration Stack enables integration of AMD CPUs and adaptive computing technologies into the quantum control layer, supporting demanding workloads such as real-time error correction and complex hybrid algorithms. By bringing leadership high-performance compute into quantum control systems, AMD is helping enable the next phase of scalable quantum research and deployment.”
As the industry moves toward fault-tolerant quantum computing, fast and reliable quantum error correction will be essential for building large-scale systems. “Fault-tolerant quantum computing depends on fast, reliable quantum error correction running in real time,” said Steve Brierley, Founder & CEO of Riverlane. “Delivering that capability requires specialized classical infrastructure tightly integrated with the quantum control stack to produce reliable logical qubits at scale. Open frameworks such as Quantum Machines’ Open Acceleration Stack help enable this level of integration, representing an important step toward scalable, error-corrected quantum computers.”
Quantum Machines will be hosting live demonstrations of the new Open Acceleration Stack at the APS Global Physics Summit (March 15-20, 2026, Denver, CO) on booth #1607. The first will showcase a fault-tolerant quantum phase estimation using an OPX1000-based system, and the second will remotely connect to live qubits at the IQCC to demonstrate real-time qubit calibration.
About Quantum Machines
Quantum Machines (QM) is a global leading provider of quantum control solutions, driving the advancement of quantum computing with its hybrid control approach. By harmonizing quantum and classical operations, hybrid control eliminates friction and optimizes performance across hardware and software, enabling researchers and builders to iterate at speed, resolve setbacks, and bring visionary ideas to life. Quantum Machines’ Orchestration Platform supports any type of quantum processor, empowering the industry to scale systems, accelerate breakthroughs, and push the boundaries – previously impossible. Learn more at: https://www.quantum-machines.co.
Source: Quantum Machines
The post Quantum Machines Launches Open Acceleration Stack Alongside NVIDIA, AMD and Riverlane appeared first on HPCwire.
Why Should Delaware Care?
Delaware Secretary of Education Cindy Marten will announce a decision Thursday about the future of the Bryan Allen Stevenson School of Excellence. If she follows a state recommendation to close the school, it would mean that more than a hundred families will have to search for new places to send their kids.
A state decision scheduled for Thursday of whether to force the closure of the Bryan Allen Stevenson School of Excellence highlights the sometimes volatile nature of charter schools in Delaware.
In contrast with traditional public schools, those independently operated, publicly funded entities can be shuttered when state officials determine they haven’t sufficiently served students – or don’t have a sustainable path to do so in the future.
Advocates say the model creates a competitive market that ensures that only the best charter schools survive and thrive.
“If we’re not doing great things for kids, we’ve got to figure out a better way to either do it — or to just stop doing it,” said Charter Schools Network Executive Director Kendall Massett, who advises the nearly two dozen charter schools in Delaware.
But the model has also left some Delaware families scrambling to find new places to send their children following past closures.
Over the previous decades, more than 10 charter schools have closed in Delaware as a result of low enrollment, financial instability, or academic performance concerns. Each one has uprooted students from their daily routines.
Last week, during a meeting of state officials investigating the Bryan Allen Stevenson school, one mom expressed concern that a move back to traditional public education could cause her daughter’s academic performance and confidence to regress.
“Behind every data point is a family or a child like ours,” the mother, Candace Kinsler, said.
In February, Delaware education officials recommended the state close the Georgetown school, commonly referred to as BASSE, at the end of the 2025-26 school year — citing low enrollment.
The recommendation now goes before Delaware Education Secretary Cindy Marten, who will announce a final decision on Thursday. Last week’s hearing marked the final chance for families and school community members to voice their thoughts before the final decision is made.
If Marten does close BASSE, it would mark the first charter closure in the state in seven years – and the first to be closed by Delaware regulators in a decade.
It would also leave Sussex County with just two charter schools, compared to six in Kent County and 15 in New Castle County.
Charter schools first began operating in Delaware in the 1990s. Since then, several have thrived. But there also have been waves of closures at others.
In 1996, Delaware approved a school choice program, allowing families to enroll their children in district and charter schools outside of their designated feeder patterns. That same year, the Charter School of Wilmington opened. It has since become among the highest rated high schools in the state.
Delaware’s first charter closure occurred in 2000 when the Richard Milburn Academy – a Wilmington school operated by a national organization — relinquished its charter after a year of operation. It marked the first of several closures to occur in Delaware’s largest city.
Two years later, Georgetown Charter School garnered national attention when state officials shuttered its doors after finding the school was more than $1.5 million in debt, according to reports.
By 2008, the Marian T. Academy in Wilmington closed after the State Board of Education voted not to renew its charter.
As WDEL reported at the time, then-Education Secretary Valerie Woodruff expressed concern about poor student performance, saying the school failed to meet the standards of the Delaware Student Testing Program or the No Child Left Behind Act.
The following decade marked an even more tumultuous time for charters, with nine schools closing between 2013 and 2019.
In 2013, state officials cited low student proficiency rates, and what they described as a lack of recruitment plans and economic viability when they closed the Pencader Business & Finance Charter High School in New Castle, according to a state report.
Low test scores were also concerns at the Maurice J. Moyer Academic Institute in Wilmington when it closed at the end of the 2014-15 school year, as reported by The News Journal.
That same year, it was a federal judge who made the final decision to close the Reach Academy for Girls in Wilmington.
Over the following four years, low enrollment or low test scores continued to plague certain schools, contributing to the closure of six additional charters.
Those were the Delaware College Preparatory Academy in Wilmington; the Delaware MET in Wilmington; Delaware STEM Academy in New Castle; Prestige Academy in Wilmington; the Delaware Academy of Public Safety and Security in New Castle; and Newark’s Design Thinking Academy.
The Delaware Academy of Public Safety and Security closure was particularly jarring for students, as it happened without warning during the school year, as reported by The News Journal.
The school sent a letter to families at the time stating that its board had just learned of “new financial information” that showed a budget deficit to be “far greater than previously believed.”
By contrast, then-Secretary of Education Susan Bunting credited Design Thinking Academy’s early decision to close “recognizing that the low enrollment would inevitably lead to financial challenges that would make it impossible for the school to provide its students with the academic program they deserve.”
For some families and staff at BASSE, a potential closure would be premature.
During last week’s meeting, they noted that the school has struggled with enrollment, but said it needs more than two years of classes to become successful. More guardrails from the state could also help the school thrive, they said.
In particular, one teacher said during the meeting that allowing the school to remain open with “clear oversight” would strengthen its accountability by “ensuring progress is measured and transparency is maintained.”
The school’s enrollment has sat at 123 students in recent months, compared with 230 students during the school’s first year in operation in the fall of 2024, according to state records.
State funding at charter schools is determined by the number of students enrolled. The independently operated schools are not eligible to receive taxpayer dollars for facilities and capital projects.
Currently, a sign outside the main school building reads, “Come take your place at BASSE!”
The school is named after the prominent civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson who was born in nearby Milton. Among its founders is State Rep. Alonna Berry (D-Milton).
The post Sussex school closure decision highlights volatility of Delaware charters appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
German food delivery firm’s share price has plummeted by 93% since 2021 boom during Covid lockdowns
HelloFresh has reported a sharp decline in sales as the struggling food delivery company battles falling demand after the pandemic-era meal kit boom.
The German company was forced to make 900 UK job cuts last year with the closure of a delivery site in Nuneaton, and the demand for meal kits tumbled as revenue fell by more than 11% during 2025.
Continue reading...Dear current and former members of the inspectors general community,
Last year, in a highly unusual move, President Donald Trump fired more than 18 inspectors general without specific justifications, as the law requires, and replaced several of them with political loyalists. Over the past weeks, we have spoken with dozens of people who have experience in this field. They have given us important context on how these offices work. Some have expressed concerns that these new federal government watchdogs may be unable to independently carry out their critical oversight duties.
We recognize the longstanding reluctance of inspectors general and their staffs to speak with the media. But this is an extraordinary moment. As ProPublica journalists, we share a common purpose with inspectors general: to hold our government accountable by identifying any waste, fraud or abuse — and to be thorough, fair and accurate. For these reasons, we are asking for your help understanding and presenting a comprehensive picture of what’s happening, or not happening, in these offices as they face unprecedented change. To do this work, it is critical that we speak to as many people as possible.
If you work in or have recently left the office of a federal inspector general, we want to hear about your experience. Have important projects been halted? Have staff been asked to do work that wouldn’t have typically been done by an inspector general’s office in the past? What is working well, or better than it has previously? Are you facing obstacles that impact your ability to do your work?
We welcome general as well as specific tips and take confidentiality seriously. Both of us have extensive experience covering sensitive topics and government agencies. We are happy to answer questions you may have about ourselves and our project. Please reach out to us on Signal or email, and share this letter with anyone who should see it.
Signed,
The post An Open Letter to the Inspectors General Community appeared first on ProPublica.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 18, 2026 — GMI Cloud, a leading full-stack AI infrastructure provider, has announced an ongoing global initiative to architect and deploy sovereign AI Factories for countries worldwide. As the critical backbone of these initial buildouts, GMI Cloud is bringing significant capacity of the newly announced NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 online, establishing a standard for national-scale artificial intelligence deployments. This initiative for sovereign AI Factory buildouts is already underway.
The global shift towards sovereign AI is driven by a consensus that AI computing power is a fundamental pillar of national security, economic competitiveness, and cultural preservation in the foreseeable future. Governments are moving decisively to mitigate the strategic risks of depending on foreign-controlled platforms, recognizing that true independence requires localized infrastructure, data jurisdiction, and full control over the intelligent systems underpinning their critical industries.
GMI Cloud’s motto, “Build AI Without Limits,” is dedicated to bringing accelerated computing to every industry across the globe. This transformation begins by first building robust AI infrastructure for everyone, everywhere, ensuring that no country is left behind in the AI industrial revolution.
“Nations around the world are recognizing that AI sovereignty is as critical as energy or food security,” said Alex Yeh, CEO of GMI Cloud. “Every country needs to own the production of its intelligence. GMI Cloud’s role is to build these sovereign AI Factories from the ground up, providing the full-stack infrastructure governments require to protect their data and secure their competitive future.”
As a pioneer in next-generation hardware deployment, GMI Cloud is utilizing the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform as the foundational architecture for these sovereign buildouts. Rather than simply supplying raw compute power, GMI Cloud leverages NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 to solve the core challenges nations face when building AI Factories at scale: data security, operational cost, and energy sustainability.
Crucially for sovereign applications, the Vera Rubin architecture provides hardware-level data protection across the entire system, ensuring that a nation’s most sensitive data and proprietary models remain entirely secure within their borders. Furthermore, the architecture delivers a generational leap in compute efficiency, drastically reducing both the hardware footprint required to train complex models and the ongoing cost of running highly interactive, agentic AI. This allows nations to scale their AI capabilities aggressively while adhering to strict sustainable computing and energy efficiency mandates.
GMI Cloud, a Reference Platform NVIDIA Cloud Partner, delivers a complete, end-to-end AI stack: from bare-metal infrastructure to the inference and workflow layers. This proven experience in deploying and operating AI infrastructure across multiple continents and complex regulatory environments positions GMI Cloud as the partner of choice for countries seeking rapid, reliable paths to technological independence.
About GMI Cloud
Silicon Valley-based GMI Cloud delivers full-stack inference-first AI infrastructure to build sovereign and commercial AI deployments. With proven experience deploying AI infrastructure across multiple continents and regulatory environments, GMI Cloud enables nations, enterprises, and research institutions to build AI capabilities without dependence on foreign platforms. For more information, visit https://gmicloud.ai.
Source: GMI Cloud
The post GMI Cloud Bringing NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 Online in Global Sovereign AI Initiative appeared first on HPCwire.
Governments in countries heavily reliant on Middle Eastern oil introduce measures to shield public from soaring costs
In Thailand, news anchors ditched their jackets on air as the government called on the public to reduce their use of air conditioning to save energy. In the Philippines, many government workers are now operating on a four-day week. In Vietnam, officials have urged employers to allow staff to work from home.
Across south-east Asia, governments are scrambling to find ways to conserve energy and shield the public from soaring costs as war in the Middle East causes what the International Energy Agency has described as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.
Continue reading...Who are the players to watch? Which Cinderella team could break your bracket? Our contributors pick the winners, sleepers and upsets for this year’s men’s NCAA Tournament
The annual bevy of trivia that accompanies an NCAA Tournament. Have you heard there are two Miamis? Did you know Nebraska have never won a men’s tournament game? Are you aware that the Queens Royals have a “spirit animal” called Buddy the Street Dog? Even more importantly, I’m looking forward to watching enough basketball over the next three weeks to crack 68/68 on the Sporcle quiz of this year’s mascots. EB
Continue reading...The militant group’s attacks on Israel have sparked anger even among its most loyal Shiite supporters in Lebanon, weakening its clout as the war widens.
In a post on X, the hotel magnate lambasted the president for not considering collateral damage, although he later told The Post: “I blame Trump, but I blame the Iranians more.”
Greater Manchester mayor adds to Rayner’s criticism of planned immigration changes, which she has called ‘un-British’
Andy Burnham has backed stark criticism of the direction of Keir Starmer’s government by Angela Rayner after she said the very survival of the Labour party was at stake.
Rayner, the former deputy prime minister and an influential backbencher, used a speech on Tuesday night to warn that the prime minister “cannot go through the motions” in the face of declining support.
Continue reading...Thomas Corbett-Dillon, who claims to have advised Boris Johnson, says immigrants could ‘turn’ on white population
GB News is facing a backlash after a commentator on one of its shows suggested there is “a genocide happening” against white people in England and that immigrants could “turn” on the white population.
Ofcom, the media regulator, has received a series of complaints about the comments by Thomas Corbett-Dillon.
Continue reading...Trying to get myself a onewheel after reading it kinda feels like snowboarding (been doing that for 19 years...) :D
It's difficult for me to make a first purchase though! The market in Finland is pretty scarce too...
Here's what my options look like right now:
XR classic "used" from Bananaway for 1800e, I have no clue about how used though, they don't mention it on the site :D
Pint X for ~ 1300e new, a few different sites selling that
XR used (1000km) for 900e, from a "local" marketplace (2h drive), the seller didn't budge on the price :D
Plus (not xr!) that I could maybe haggle down from 500e and mod with an ego battery or something, I could probably do it but it's not gonna be good, neat or even cheap lol
Non-onewheel things seem to be out of stock and pricier anyway?
Researchers say their prototype is a big step towards fully functioning batteries with rapid charging times
Australian scientists have developed what they say is the world’s first proof-of-concept quantum battery.
Quantum batteries, first proposed as a theoretical concept in 2013, use the principles of quantum mechanics to store energy, and have the potential to be more efficient than conventional batteries.
Continue reading...Aircraft carrier has been participating in strikes on Iran, after previously taking part in the operation to seize Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro
A fire onboard the USS Gerald R Ford, injuring sailors and destroying 100 beds, is the latest mishap to plague the world’s largest aircraft carrier on a marathon deployment some argue has sapped crew morale.
At sea for almost nine months, and currently stationed in the Red Sea to support the war on Iran, the carrier will reportedly set sail for Crete for repairs.
Continue reading...Last year it was China’s answer to tariffs, now it’s Iran’s retaliation to airstrikes – ‘America First’ keeps foundering on global economics
Donald Trump is teaching the world a lesson, but not the one he thinks. The attack on Iran was meant to be a dazzling display of military supremacy. It has instead illuminated chinks in the US’s armour.
The US president’s formidable arsenal cannot summon up an insurrection from Iran’s tyrannised and leaderless opposition. It cannot force merchant ships to run a gauntlet of missile and drone attacks in the strait of Hormuz. The government in Tehran and the facts of geography that give it leverage over global trade are unchanged. Trump’s exasperation is showing. He urges tanker crews to “show some guts” by sailing into harm’s way. He calls on Nato members to provide naval chaperones and accuses them of cowardice and ingratitude for refusing. He comes across as peevish and flustered. Impotence is not a good look in a potentate.
Continue reading...Nvidia unveiled its Vera Rubin Space-1 system for powering AI workloads in orbital data centers. "Space computing, the final frontier, has arrived," said CEO Jensen Huang. "As we deploy satellite constellations and explore deeper into space, intelligence must live wherever data is generated." CNBC reports: In a press release, the company said that its Vera Rubin Space-1 Module, which includes the IGX Thor and Jetson Orin, will be used on space missions led by multiple companies. The chips are specifically "engineered for size-, weight- and power-constrained environments." Partners include Axiom Space, Starcloud and Planet. Huang said Nvidia is working with partners on a new computer for orbital data centers, but there are still engineering hurdles to overcome. "In space, there's no convection, there's just radiation," Huang said during his GTC keynote, "and so we have to figure out how to cool these systems out in space, but we've got lots of great engineers working on it."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Harris lifts Howard to first NCAA win in history
UMBC rally falls short in tense First Four loss
Mark buzzer-beater sends Texas past NC State
Bryce Harris had 19 points and 14 rebounds, and he sank a turnaround jumper with 13 seconds remaining that sent Howard to its first NCAA Tournament victory in program history, 86-83 over UMBC in the First Four on Tuesday night.
Ose Okojie scored a career-high 23 points to lead the Bison (24-10), who entered with an 0-4 record in March Madness and had to hold off a late rally by the Retrievers (24-9).
Continue reading...A 2006 Guardian interview with Iran’s slain security chief now reads as a grim warning of the conflict that killed him
Deep down, Ali Larijani always believed that the western powers were bent on destroying Iran’s revolutionary regime, for which he had fought on the battlefield.
The prescience of that inner conviction has now been vindicated in lethal fashion as Larijani has become the latest establishment figure to die at the hands of Israel, killed in an apparently targeted airstrike, according to reports.
Robert Tait was the Guardian’s correspondent in Tehran from February 2005 until December 2007
Continue reading...Show in part a rediscovery of more than 40 mostly forgotten women who plied their trade in the Low Countries
Judith Leyster, an artist of the Dutch golden age, was thought to be about 21 when she painted her self-portrait in 1630. In the picture she presented to the world, Leyster exudes cheerful confidence. Clad in shimmering silks and a stiffly starched lace collar, she leans back in her chair, palette and brushes in hand, a painting by her side.
This work, completed in the year she was admitted to a painters’ guild in Haarlem, proclaimed her arrival as an established artist. It was one of the first self-portraits by an artist in the Dutch republic, a device most male painters did not adopt until years later.
Continue reading...  | Every time I hop on it this insane sputter makes it completely unrideable. It had occasionally happened here and there for several months but has progressively gotten worse to where it's in this state constantly now. Anyone have an idea of what's busted here, and is it worth getting a repair done or is it cooked? I've put a few years on this, so it's definitely beyond warranty. Thanks for any help! [link] [comments] |
Primaries acted as test of the style of politics voters are looking for ahead of midterms, when Democrats hope to regain control of Congress
Democratic voters in Illinois handed the party’s nominations for five open seats in the House of Representatives to candidates that included Daniel Biss, Evanston’s mayor, and Donna Miller, the Cook county commissioner, after heated and at times bitter campaigns that saw significant spending by outside groups, most controversially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac).
The primaries acted as a test of the style of politics voters were looking for ahead of the midterm elections in November, when Democrats hope to regain control of Congress. All five districts are heavily Democratic, making the primary victors favorites to triumph in the general elections.
Continue reading...Both Russia and Ukraine will struggle to reintegrate millions of veterans.
America can make it easier for Iranians to revolt.
The Iran war is returning the Gulf to a more insular, conflict-prone era.
Meta’s announcement comes after years of criticism from child safety groups over feature
Instagram will stop encrypting private messages between users from May, after enduring years of criticism from law enforcement and child safety groups over the feature.
Meta quietly announced this month on its help page for Instagram and in an updated 2022 news post that end-to-end encryption would no longer be available on direct messages between users on Instagram from 8 May 2026.
Continue reading...Candidates for governor, U.S. Senate, U.S. House, and Cook County Board President were among the races on the ballot in the 2026 Illinois primary election on Tuesday.
The Senate voted to begin a marathon debate on the SAVE America Act, an elections bill that President Trump has been pressing Republicans to pass.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media, written by Jason Koebler: Over the last few months, various academics and AI companies have attempted to predict how artificial intelligence is going to impact the labor market. These studies, including a high-profile paper published by Anthropic earlier this month, largely try to take the things AI is good at, or could be good at, and match them to existing job categories and job tasks. But the papers ignore some of the most impactful and most common uses of AI today: AI porn and AI slop. Anthropic's paper, called "Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence," essentially attempts to find 1:1 correlations between tasks that people do today at their jobs and things people are using Claude for. The researchers also try to predict if a job's tasks "are theoretically possible with AI," which resulted in this chart, which has gone somewhat viral and was included in a newsletter by MSNOW's Phillip Bump and threaded about by tech journalist Christopher Mims. (Because everything is terrible, the research is now also feeding into a gambling website where you can see the apparent odds of having your job replaced by AI.) In his thread, Mims makes the case that the "theoretical capability" of AI to do different jobs in different sectors is totally made up, and that this chart basically means nothing. Mims makes a good and fair observation: The nature of the many, many studies that attempt to predict which people are going to lose their jobs to AI are all flawed because the inputs must be guessed, to some degree. But I believe most of these studies are flawed in a deeper way: They do not take into account how people are actually actually using AI, though Anthropic claims that that is exactly what it is doing. "We introduce a new measure of AI displacement risk, observed exposure, that combines theoretical LLM capability and real-world usage data, weighting automated (rather than augmentative) and work-related uses more heavily," the researchers write. This is based in part on the "Anthropic Economic Index," which was introduced in an extremely long paper published in January that tries to catalog all the high-minded uses of AI in specific work-related contexts. These uses include "Complete humanities and social science academic assignments across multiple disciplines," "Draft and revise professional workplace correspondence and business communications," and "Build, debug, and customize web applications and websites." Not included in any of Anthropic's research are extremely popular uses of AI such as "create AI porn" and "create AI slop and spam." These uses are destroying discoverability on the internet, cause cascading societal and economic harms. "Anthropic's research continues a time-honored tradition by AI companies who want to highlight the 'good' uses of AI that show up in their marketing materials while ignoring the world-destroying applications that people actually use it for," argues Koebler. "Meanwhile, as we have repeatedly shown, huge parts of social media websites and Google search results have been overtaken by AI slop. Chatbots themselves have killed traffic to lots of websites that were once able to rely on ad revenue to employ people, so on and so forth..." "This is all to say that these studies about the economic impacts of AI are ignoring a hugely important piece of context: AI is eating and breaking the internet and social media," writes Koebler, in closing. "We are moving from a many-to-many publishing environment that created untold millions of jobs and businesses towards a system where AI tools can easily overwhelm human-created websites, businesses, art, writing, videos, and human activity on the internet. What's happening may be too chaotic, messy, and unpleasant for AI companies to want to reckon with, but to ignore it entirely is malpractice."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 | I have a onewheel pint and recently it keeps giving me error 15 it thinks I'm on the sensor when I'm not, like during startup. sometimes it works but still if I take a break the blue bar shows be that it thinks I'm standing on one side of it. not sure what pint model I'll add photos and also do you guys have any solutions? or has this happened to you? thanks! [link] [comments] |
With the game tied going into the 9th, Eugenio Suárez smacked a double into left-center field to score pinch runner Javier Sonoja for what would prove to be the winning run.
The 2026 Democratic primary campaign in Illinois for retiring Sen. Dick Durbin's Senate seat — won by Lt. Gov. Lisa Stratton — could set the tone for other midterm primaries.
The leader of Cuba is vowing to put up "resistance" against the U.S. as President Trump suggests he may "take" the island nation, whose communist government has faced intense U.S. pressure and languished under energy shortages.
Military officials say a shooting at a U.S. Air Force base in New Mexico has left one person dead and another wounded.
Stratton, a progressive with the support of the governor, JB Pritzker, won the race to succeed Dick Durbin
Juliana Stratton, the Illinois lieutenant governor, won the Democratic primary race to succeed Illinois’ US Senator Dick Durbin, beating out US Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi.
With nearly 90% of the vote tallied, Stratton was leading Krishnamoorthi by more than six percentage points on Tuesday night, according to the Associated Press.
Continue reading...Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 18.
Director of national intelligence wrote on social media that Trump ‘is responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat’
A top counter-terrorism official in the Trump administration has resigned over the ongoing war on Iran.
Joe Kent, who reported to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, said he “cannot in good conscience” support the conflict, adding that the US started this war “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.
You can reverse course and chart a new path for our nation, or you can allow us to slip further toward decline and chaos. You hold the cards.
Continue reading...Democratic voters in Illinois’ 9th Congressional District chose Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss as their nominee to replace retiring Rep. Jan Schakowsky Tuesday night, dealing a simultaneous defeat to progressives who rallied behind Palestinian American activist Kat Abughazaleh and pro-Israel interests that pushed to elect state Sen. Laura Fine.
Biss’s victory came amid mixed results for outside spending groups representing pro-Israel, artificial intelligence, and cryptocurrency interests — with crypto regulation supporter and state Rep. La Shawn Ford winning in the 7th Congressional District while the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s favored candidates, Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller and former Rep. Melissa Bean, won in the 2nd and 8th. In the closely watched Senate race, Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton received AIPAC’s congratulations for her win over Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi and Robin Kelly.
With five open House seats and one open Senate seat heavily favored for Democrats, the Illinois primaries presented a test for the future of the party — and became a top target for outside groups that poured more than $50 million into races throughout the state. The infusion of outside cash included more than $35 million in spending from groups linked to the AIPAC and the cryptocurrency and AI industries.
Dozens of super PACs in Illinois sought to influence the competitive Democratic primaries, often while concealing both their donors and broader intentions. In the 9th District, AIPAC used groups with uncontroversial titles like “Elect Chicago Women” and “Chicago Progressive Partnership” to boost its pick, Fine, and pit progressive candidates against one another. The spending appeared to come up short Tuesday night, when Fine finished in third.
The groups’ competing ads at times inflamed and at times distracted from voter concerns over civil liberties, the economy, bipartisan fealty to corporations and wealthy donors, and now the unfolding war in Iran.
The Illinois primaries presented a test for AIPAC in particular, which with its affiliated groups spent more than $22 million in races in and around deep-blue Chicago while obscuring the pro-Israel lobby’s involvement amid growing criticism. In several races, AIPAC donors have funneled money to candidates where it did not officially endorse, including in the U.S. Senate race, The Intercept reported.
The crypto industry spent more than $13 million in Illinois races through the super PAC Fairshake, including close to $10 million against Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton in the Senate race and more than $3 million in two races attacking candidates who have voted for consumer protection regulations on cryptocurrency. The AI industry poured in another $2.5 million into two House races.
Detailed results from the Senate race and the 2nd, 7th, 8th, and 9th districts are below.
Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton defeated Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi and Robin Kelly in the highly anticipated Democratic primary to replace retiring Sen. Dick Durbin. The often bitter race was defined by debates over dark money, establishment endorsements, and race and identity.
Stratton won just shy of 40 percent of the vote in the crowded 10-way race. While AIPAC publicly stayed out of the contest, suggesting that the group had become politically toxic with Democratic primary voters, reporting from The Intercept found that at least 27 AIPAC donors gave to Stratton’s campaign.
On Tuesday night, AIPAC publicly congratulated Stratton for her primary win over Kelly, writing on X that Kelly’s “most recent actions have undermined the U.S.-Israel alliance,” and that the group looks “forward to continuing our long-standing partnership” with Stratton.
Neither Stratton nor Krishnamoorthi have called Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide or said they would push to condition aid to Israel, as Kelly repeatedly pointed out in her attempts to carve out a lane to their left.
Stratton’s victory does represent an early defeat for the crypto industry, which spent millions against her candidacy. The industry’s main PAC, Fairshake, spent nearly $10 million against Stratton, in a move that likely favored Krishnamoorthi. The Illinois congressman is known as a top fundraiser, with a massive $30 million war chest.
In addition to concerns over the influence of money in politics, the race was also plagued by questions over the role of establishment endorsements. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker endorsed Stratton, his longtime running mate, and donated $5 million to Stratton’s super PAC, spurring controversy about the perception of establishment Democrats throwing around their political weight.
But Stratton’s most controversial endorsement of the cycle was an alleged posthumous endorsement from the late Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose family later said he did not come to a decision about the race before his death.
The fight for support from Black voters was already a highly contentious issue within the primary, with concerns that Kelly and Stratton, who are both Black, would split the Black electorate in Illinois. Kelly took offense to those comments, arguing at a recent campaign event that “no one talks” about spoilers “when two white men are running.”
Illinois has not sent a Republican to the Senate since the 1990s, and Stratton is expected to easily win her general election in November.
Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller fended off a comeback attempt from former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. in a race that pitted AIPAC against the artificial intelligence industry.
Miller was backed heavily by a PAC affiliated with the pro-Israel group, while Jackson drew support from an AI PAC funded by tech leaders.
Jackson had the star power of his civil rights activist father’s name but was tarnished by a federal fraud conviction for misusing campaign funds over a decade ago during his previous stint as a U.S. representative.
AIPAC’s role in the race made headlines in February, when retiring U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, vacating her 9th Congressional District seat, withdrew her endorsement of Miller over the group’s support for her.
Meanwhile, the progressive standardbearer in the race — state Sen. Robert Peters — was trailing far behind on Tuesday night, despite endorsements from Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Peters made the involvement of outside groups ranging from AIPAC to cryptocurrency to artificial intelligence PACs a theme of his campaign, blasting his opponents for relying on their support.
State Rep. La Shawn Ford beat Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin the primary to succeed retiring longtime Rep. Danny Davis Tuesday night, despite the nearly $5 million AIPAC spent to boost her and nearly $2.5 million a crypto PAC spent against him.
Conyears-Ervin conceded early in the night, before the Associated Press called the race for Ford.
Ford was the target of heavy spending from the cryptocurrency industry PAC Fairshake because of his support for state-level consumer protections. Ford told The Intercept earlier this month that the money spent against him underlined the need for campaign finance reform.
“We are a grassroots campaign that is struggling to get our message out and make sure that people know that our experience and our platform is out there,” he said. “We don’t have a budget to counter lies.”
The crowded race made polling difficult, and the heavily Democratic nature of the district, which stretches from Chicago’s Loop and South Side to leafy suburbs to the west, meant that several candidates were competing for the progressive lane.
AIPAC donors backed former real estate mogul Jason Friedman early in the race, but the pro-Israel group’s campaign arm later spent nearly $60,000 opposing him and $4.8 million boosting Conyears-Ervin, according to a tally by political consultant Frank Calabrese.
Ford and Conyears-Ervin both brought ethical baggage to the race: He successfully fought off a raft of federal bank fraud charges more than a decade ago, pleading to a single misdemeanor count, while she was forced to pay a $30,000 fine to settle two ethics cases, including one involving the firing of two whistleblowers who warned her not to use city resources to organize prayer events on Facebook, according to WTTW Chicago.
Anthony Driver, executive director of the Service Employees International Union Illinois State Council, drew heavy spending support from his union and an endorsement from the Congressional Progressive Caucus. He finished well behind the leading candidates.
Former U.S. Rep. Melissa Bean took a big step closer to a comeback Tuesday night by defeating Junaid Ahmed, a progressive backed by the group Justice Democrats.
Bean, a previous member of the moderate Blue Dog Coalition, drew a big assist from more than $4 million in spending from AIPAC-affiliated PACs, as well as spending from crypto and AI PACs.
Both candidates were vying to replace Krishnamoorthi.
Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss prevailed in a crowded Democratic primary race largely defined by outside spending from groups associated with AIPAC, which spent millions targeting Biss and Palestinian American activist and journalist Kat Abughazaleh, who came in second.
Biss, a former math professor who stressed his anti-war bonafides on the campaign trail, sought to define himself as the tested progressive favorite while Abughazaleh’s campaign gained steam.
Initially, AIPAC-affiliated groups focused their attacks on Biss, who is Jewish, because of his support for conditions on aid to Israel. The AIPAC-affiliated group Elect Chicago Women spent nearly $1.5 million to oppose Biss and over $4 million to boost state Sen. Laura Fine, who came in third. But as the race heated up, Abughazaleh, who drew a harder line on Israel, surged forward in the polls and became their central target.
In his victory speech Tuesday night, Biss said he had been pressured to move away from what he called a nuanced view on Israel and Palestine. He also took a direct swipe at AIPAC.
“This district understands nuance and wants someone who accepts the reality of competing, even contradictory-sounding priorities and values and realities,” Biss said. “Now, that point of view is not the point of view of AIPAC. AIPAC spent an unbelievable amount of money — over $7 million — to try to buy this seat, to support the idea that we can’t accept nuance.”
The district is deep blue, and Biss is expected to handily win his general election. He becomes the Democratic nominee on the heels of a scandal that broke in the final hours of the race, after his former student, Megan Wachspress, went public about a past relationship with Biss on Monday in a Bluesky post.
“If he’s going to get a national profile on the strength of a younger woman’s campaign,” wrote Wachspress, who is now a lecturer at Stanford Law School, referring to Abughazaleh, “I’m going to come out and say it: during his short-lived tenure as a math professor, Biss had an inappropriate romantic relationship with one of his undergraduate students. I was that student.”
Biss acknowledged the relationship on Tuesday, calling it “ill-advised.”
Though Abughazaleh earned key progressive endorsements, including from the group Justice Democrats and Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, Biss pulled Schakowsky’s support, as well as that of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
The Chicago Progressive Partnership, another AIPAC-affiliated group, spent roughly $1.2 million in the latter half of the race to counter Abughazaleh. The former journalist also faced alleged “dark money” spending from the PAC Democracy Unmuted, which she claimed was paying influencers $1,500 to push negative rhetoric about her on social media.
AIPAC also spent money boosting Bushra Amiwala, a progressive Muslim activist, who was seen as a potential spoiler for Abughazaleh. When the race was called, Amiwala was in sixth place and had received just over 5 percent of the vote — a share larger than the difference between Biss, at just shy of 30 percent, and Abughazaleh, slightly under 26.
AIPAC, for its part, put a positive spin on the results Tuesday night.
“While disappointed that Laura Fine did not prevail, voters rejected two anti-Israel candidates in this race,” the group posted on X. “We were especially proud to help defeat Abughazaleh.”
In his victory speech, Biss said he would fight for self-determination and justice for everyone in the Middle East and beyond. “AIPAC found out the hard way: The 9th District is not for sale,” he said in his closing remarks.
Biss also thanked J Street, which was founded as a liberal counterweight to AIPAC, for wading into the race to back him. J Street’s President, Jeremy Ben-Ami, said in a statement that the group had bundled more than $200,000 for Biss’s campaign while an affiliated super PAC spent $150,000.
“AIPAC and its affiliates poured more than $7 million into a Democratic primary to stamp out opposition to Netanyahu’s policies — using shell PACs to obscure their involvement — and the voters rejected that effort,” Ben-Ami said. “Tonight’s results should send a clear message to candidates across the country: you do not have to fear AIPAC’s spending or intimidation.”
This developing story has been updated.
The post Illinois Results: Daniel Biss Beats Kat Abughazaleh in Blow to Left and AIPAC Alike appeared first on The Intercept.
With the release of the new M5 MacBook Air, has the time come to replace your current model? Join me as I go through each of the past four generations to help you answer that question.
March 17, 2026 — Oracle and NVIDIA today announced expanded AI capabilities on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) that help redefine scalable AI performance, accelerate vector database operations, and simplify enterprise AI deployment using cloud-native services. Together, Oracle and NVIDIA are enabling organizations to move from AI experimentation to production at extraordinary scale, speed, and efficiency.
Organizations training and serving frontier AI models require infrastructure engineered for extreme throughput, consistently ultra-low latency, and massive GPU scale. OCI Superclusters are built to meet that demand—engineered to connect hundreds of thousands of GPUs into a single AI supercomputer and support an unprecedented level of performance, with over 17 zettaFLOPS of peak performance, up to 131 Pb/s of cluster front-end throughput for massive scale-out, and up to 2.1 Eb/s of RDMA throughput with sub-10 microsecond latency for fast, efficient scale-in.
Next-Gen AI Performance: OCI Delivers Nearly Limitless Supercomputing Scale
At the core is the Oracle Acceleron network architecture, designed for predictable, high-bandwidth communication across large clusters. By combining RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), Converged Network Interface Card (CNIC) offload, and a multiplanar network design, Oracle Acceleron delivers deterministic performance and ultra-low-latency GPU-to-GPU connectivity at scale. This helps customers train larger models faster, run high-throughput inference more efficiently, accelerate multimodal and scientific workloads, and improve cluster utilization across Oracle’s distributed cloud.
Introducing the Next OCI Supercluster—Powered by NVIDIA Vera Rubin
Today, Oracle is introducing a next-generation OCI Supercluster powered by the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform, including NVIDIA Rubin GPUs, NVIDIA Vera CPUs, NVIDIA BlueField-4 DPUs, sixth-generation NVLink, NVIDIA ConnectX-9 SuperNICs, and NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet switches, purpose-built to accelerate next-generation training and high-throughput inference workloads.
The system integrates thousands of Rubin GPUs to deliver breakthrough AI compute performance at scale, while NVIDIA BlueField-4 DPUs and ConnectX-9 SuperNICs offload networking, security, and data movement from host CPUs to help increase throughput, improve workload isolation, and maximize usable GPU capacity across large-scale clusters.
Together, these technologies extend Oracle Acceleron’s multiplanar network architecture, using dedicated RoCE fabrics and direct GPU-to-GPU communication paths to reduce latency and increase bandwidth across thousands of nodes. By combining Oracle Acceleron’s deterministic networking with BlueField-4 data processing and Rubin GPU performance, OCI Superclusters delivers ultra-low-latency communication, higher cluster utilization, improved resilience across network planes, and optimized power efficiency at hyperscale.
From frontier model training to high-throughput inference and extreme-scale supercomputing, OCI Supercluster is built to help customers move faster, scale bigger, and push AI further.
Accelerating Oracle AI Database Embedding and Vector Index Creation
As organizations deploy retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and AI-driven search applications, rapidly generating embeddings and maintaining large-scale vector indexes has become critical to delivering more accurate and responsive AI systems. Oracle AI Database can now use NVIDIA AI infrastructure and NVIDIA cuVS to accelerate large-scale embedding generation and vector index creation, helping reduce time-to-value for AI-driven applications.
With Oracle AI Database, developers can run vector similarity search directly in SQL or access capabilities through APIs and SDKs, allowing AI functionality to be integrated seamlessly into existing enterprise applications and workflows. GPU acceleration helps improve performance for embedding pipelines and indexing operations, enabling organizations to continuously refresh vector indexes as enterprise data grows.
Customers are leveraging Oracle AI Database with NVIDIA AI infrastructure and NVIDIA cuVS acceleration to power advanced knowledge retrieval, AI copilots, document intelligence, and real-time data exploration—unlocking faster insights and more efficient AI-driven operations.
OCI Generative AI Expands Open Model Innovation with NVIDIA Nemotron
OCI Generative AI continues to broaden how developers and enterprises use open-weights foundation models. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure recently announced support for the NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super model through a new Model Import capability in OCI Generative AI.
Soon planned to be available on Oracle Government Cloud in addition to commercial cloud regions, NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super is the first model from NVIDIA available through OCI Generative AI Model Import and demonstrates how organizations can continue to run advanced reasoning models on OCI while maintaining control over customization and deployment.
Model Import allows customers to bring supported models into OCI Generative AI and run them through the same managed service used for Oracle-hosted models. This combines the flexibility of open models with a consistent API, enterprise security model, and operational experience.
Oracle Government Cloud operates government cloud regions in the US, UK, and Australia and provides governments worldwide with a way to run generative AI models that still address local data residency, classification, operational, and security requirements.
These capabilities extend beyond infrastructure into enterprise applications. NVIDIA Nemotron models are now available to support Oracle Fusion Applications, augmenting generative AI-powered capabilities across business workflows such as finance, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. By combining Nemotron reasoning capabilities with Oracle’s enterprise application data, organizations can power intelligent automation, document understanding, and contextual decision-making directly within operational systems.
Oracle AI Database can access Nemotron models by calling NVIDIA NIM containers, enabling developers to build retrieval- augmented generation (RAG) applications using built-in vector search, embeddings, and AI-powered data processing. Together, OCI Generative AI, Oracle AI Database, and NVIDIA Nemotron models create a unified approach where enterprises can build AI applications that securely combine foundation models with enterprise data—helping accelerate development of intelligent applications across industries including financial services, healthcare, telecommunications, and media.
With these advancements, Oracle and NVIDIA continue to push the boundaries of enterprise AI—delivering supercomputing-scale performance, accelerated vector intelligence, and simplified cloud-native AI innovation in one integrated platform.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in AI and accelerated computing.
About Oracle
Oracle offers integrated suites of applications plus secure, autonomous infrastructure in the Oracle Cloud. For more information about Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), please visit us at www.oracle.com.
Source: Oracle
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New Zealand economic growth tipped to overtake Australia’s this year but Middle East conflict casts a shadow over outlook
Just as New Zealand’s fragile economic recovery shows flickers of improvement – with economists predicting its annual growth could surpass that of its larger neighbour Australia – it is facing a new threat: the war in the Middle East.
New Zealand is particularly exposed to the energy shocks produced by the conflict – and to economic crises generally – with the small, isolated nation highly dependent on global trade and tourism. It is susceptible to disruptions in supply chains and shipping.
Continue reading...Some residents immediately feared the sound was an explosion, according to CBS affiliate WOIO, but weather service officials say it appears to have been a meteor.
Experts say attacks on Afghanistan are ‘defensive, not offensive’ but carry a risk of spiralling cycle of violence
An escalating Pakistani campaign of airstrikes against targets in Afghanistan is aimed at forcing the Taliban authorities to abandon their support for Pakistani militants, according to officials and experts.
The strategy is to impose such a steep cost on the Taliban administration that they act to prevent attacks emanating from Afghanistan. Yet it carries the risk of spiralling violence.
Continue reading...March 17, 2026 — The next step in the UK’s plans for Quantum technology will help deliver personalized treatments, potential cures for diseases, safeguard national security and deliver high-paid jobs – revolutionizing the health and wealth of hardworking people across the UK and delivering on the government’s Modern Industrial Strategy.
Credit: Shutterstock
A pioneering program worth up to £2 billion of government investment announced by the Technology Secretary and the Chancellor today, will ensure the UK stays at the forefront of Quantum innovation. The UK will become the first country to benefit from revolutionary Quantum computers, sensors and networks, and support the emergence of the next generation of leading British companies who will help shape the curve of progress.
Quantum is technology’s next great generational leap and will rival AI as the defining technology of the future. While a traditional computer solves problems using a one-by one approach, a Quantum system explores thousands of potential answers at once -slashing the time it takes to reach a solution. That will accelerate how we can drive growth, investment, and national renewal for future generations, delivering new, life-changing breakthroughs in the process.
As of today, the UK is the first country in the world to commit to an advanced procurement to build large-scale quantum computers on our shores by the early 2030s. Joining R&D, manufacturing, software, hardware and procurement into a single program, we will be world leaders in developing and deploying large-scale Quantum computers.
These systems will be built in Britain – creating British jobs, new opportunities for British businesses, and opening new routes of investment to flow into our economy from all over the world.
Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said: “I am determined this country grasps the benefits will Quantum computing will bring. It is only by keeping pace with technological progress that we can deliver the high-paid jobs, cutting-edge public services, and innovations which change lives. Today’s announcements are an investment in our future - unlocking better health, wealth, and more opportunities for communities across the country. This government is ushering in a Quantum leap – making the choice today to back UK scientists, companies, and innovators so we can deliver a future that works for all.”
This first of its kind procurement program, ”ProQure: Scaling UK Quantum Computing” will launch next week, where companies will be invited to table proposals to partner with us to deliver state of the art prototypes for evaluation.
Prototypes will then be assessed, with the most promising companies invited to deliver larger scale machines for use by scientists, researchers, the public sector, and businesses, as part of our national computing infrastructure – transforming the UK into a hotbed for the latest, cutting-edge Quantum technology.
This will also accelerate growth of the UK’s already thriving Quantum industry-supporting homegrown firms as they scale-up and grow while building an environment which encourages private backers from around the world to pour money into the sector, capturing everything from hardware, processors and manufacturing through to sustained investment in UK supply chains.
Estimates show Quantum could boost productivity by 7% in the next 2 decades, creating more than 100,000 jobs in the process. That would mean £212 billion worth of economic impact – the equivalent of adding the combined annual GDP of Wales and Northern Ireland.
The technology is already being put to work across the country, with Q-BIOMED researchers at the University College London exploring wearable brain scanners to support people suffering from epilepsy.
Laying the foundations which will give the UK a rich pool of Quantum talent, the government’s flagship TechFirst program will launch new partnerships with companies in the sector – offering up to 100 fully funded internships. This will give people the tools they need to embark on future, high-paying careers in the field.
The UK is already a global powerhouse in the technology, launching a first of its kind National Quantum Technologies program in 2014 which has already been backed by more than £1 billion in public funding to support skills, research, and infrastructure. Our credentials as a global magnet for private investment are also thriving. Coinciding with today’s announcements, several global companies are announcing technical breakthroughs delivered in the UK, as well as new and recent investment commitments including:
The raft of measures set out today not only lay the foundations for new investment, jobs, and improved public services across the country, but cement the UK’s position as a global leader in the emerging technologies which will shape the future.
Further Details
In addition to the £1 billion for procuring large scale quantum computers, the investments announced today include:
Over £1 billion over the next 4 years to support our leading companies and researchers to put Quantum into action by investing at scale in technology development, skills and facilities. Specifically:
More from HPCwire: UK Government Invests £45M in ‘Sunrise’ AI Supercomputer for Fusion Research
Source: UK Government
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The companies will share fraud intelligence and coordinate responses as AI makes scams faster, cheaper and harder to detect.
SAN JOSE, Calif., March 17, 2026 — Flex has announced its 800 VDC Power Rack developed in collaboration with NVIDIA to support the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform. As part of Flex’s AI Infrastructure Platform, the 800 VDC Power Rack extends the company’s portfolio of products and services for accelerating AI infrastructure deployment at global scale.
Traditional in-rack power distribution systems, designed for kilowatt-scale racks, can no longer support the megawatt-scale demands of modern AI workloads. As power density and system complexity increase to support performance and energy efficiency advances, the 800 VDC architecture announced by NVIDIA has emerged as the new benchmark for AI infrastructure.
“Megawatt-scale AI workloads are redefining what’s required from data center power infrastructure,” said Chris Butler, President, Embedded and Critical Power, Flex. “Flex’s 800 VDC Power Rack pairs advanced power products with global manufacturing scale to enable efficient, scalable power delivery and faster deployment of next-generation infrastructure.”
The 800 VDC Power Rack uses a disaggregated architecture and features Flex’s power shelf for the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform. By shifting power products out of the IT rack, this architecture maximizes space for compute, allowing more GPUs to be packed densely, communicate more efficiently, and deliver greater value from the IT hardware. The 800 VDC Power Rack enables current data centers to support high power density, next generation accelerated computing racks without costly retrofits.
When deployed with a future GPU platform, this architecture increases available compute power per rack from approximately 125 kW to up to 880 kW. Flex also offers Battery Backup Units (BBUs) and Capacitor Backup Units (CBUs) as enhanced options for the 800 VDC Power Rack, improving resiliency by protecting critical AI workloads from outages and grid disturbances.
The 800 VDC Power Rack is supported by Flex’s global manufacturing and supply chain network, providing the speed, scale, and resilience required to deploy next-generation AI infrastructure. This global footprint includes the ability to manufacture the 800 VDC Power Rack in North America, giving customers flexibility to manufacture in-region.
The Flex 800 VDC Power Rack will be showcased at NVIDIA GTC, March 16–19, 2026. Visit Flex at Booth 138 to learn more.
About Flex
Flex (Reg. No. 199002645H) is the manufacturing partner of choice that helps leading brands design, build, and manage products that improve the world. With a global footprint spanning 30 countries, Flex delivers advanced manufacturing and supply chain solutions, innovative products and technology, and lifecycle services that support customers from concept to scale. In the AI era, Flex is helping customers accelerate data center deployment by solving power, heat, and scale challenges through cutting-edge power and cooling technology and scalable IT infrastructure solutions.
Source: Flex
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March 17, 2026 — Kvantify, Atom Computing, and the Department of Chemistry at Aarhus University have launched a joint project focused on advancing quantum computing methods for drug discovery. Innovation Fund Denmark is investing DKK 30 million (~US$4.63 million) in the effort.
Pharmaceutical development remains constrained by low success rates, timelines that can span 10 to 15 years, and costs that often exceed DKK 15 billion per drug.
Molecular simulation is a core component of drug discovery, and improving the accuracy of these methods is considered key to addressing these challenges.
“With the potential to perform computations that are currently impossible, quantum computing offers a promising technological path forward for drug discovery. But to facilitate the impact, new accurate quantum-ingrained chemistry methods are required as the basis for hardware-optimized quantum algorithms,” said Ove Christiansen, Professor at the Department of Chemistry, Aarhus University.
These methods must also be implemented in software that is accessible to industry specialists and can be integrated into existing workflows.
Quantum Computers: Pushing the Boundaries of Molecular Simulation
A key computational challenge in drug discovery is accurately predicting how strongly a candidate molecule binds to its target protein, known as binding affinity. The EarlyBIRDD project, supported by Innovation Fund Denmark, brings together an international consortium to address this problem.
The effort focuses on advancing computational chemistry methods, co-developing quantum hardware and algorithms, and integrating these capabilities into practical software tools for pharmaceutical applications.
“Molecular simulations are extremely hard for classical computers but naturally translate into the language of quantum computers,” said Nikolaj Thomas Zinner, CSO and co-founder of Kvantify and project leader of EarlyBIRDD. “This makes computational chemistry a very promising place to look for first use cases of quantum computing with high business value.”
Potential to Reduce Industry Costs
Advances in computer-assisted drug development are expected to reduce R&D costs, potentially by as much as 50%. The EarlyBIRDD project is intended to contribute to these efforts. Over the longer term, the initiative also aims to support economic activity by advancing the use of quantum computing in the pharmaceutical sector, which accounts for approximately 10% of Denmark’s GDP.
“Quantum computing hardware will remain in-development for years to come, but with the so-called early fault-tolerant quantum computers we are entering a regime where we expect to see industrial impact,” Zinner said. “However, making an early bird tap into this imminent business potential requires dedicated co-development across the entire chain – from problem and method formulation to algorithm development, hardware implementation, and software integration.”
Collaboration Between Research, Technology, and Industry
With support from Innovation Fund Denmark, the EarlyBIRDD project brings together Aarhus University’s expertise in theoretical quantum chemistry, Kvantify’s quantum software and algorithms, and Atom Computing’s scalable quantum computing hardware into a single coordinated effort.
To align development with industry needs, the consortium plans to engage stakeholders for input on software functionality and performance requirements, with support from the Alexandra Institute on user interface design.
The project is expected to contribute to Denmark’s position in quantum computing while supporting industry adoption of emerging technologies.
Further Information
Contact
Project leader: Nikolaj Thomas Zinner, CSO & Co-founder, Kvantify ApS
Mail: ntz@kvantify.dk
Facts
Innovation Fund Denmark’s investment: DKK 30.0 million
Total budget: DKK 37.7 million
Duration: 4 years, starting April 2026
Official title: Early fault-tolerant quantum computing – Bringing Impact by Revolutionizing Drug Discovery (EarlyBIRDD).
More from HPCwire
About Kvantify
Kvantify is a Danish startup that develops software and algorithms coupling the speed and accuracy of quantum computers with the power of classical computing clouds with the goal of transforming molecular discovery. Incorporated in 2022, Kvantify now employs more than 40 specialists in quantum algorithms, chemistry, drug discovery, and computer science.
About Atom Computing
Atom Computing is a global leader in development of quantum computing hardware based on trapped neutral atoms. The company is based in Boulder, Colorado and employs more than 100 people. Atom Computing has recently set up an office in Copenhagen and will deliver the quantum computer Magne to be commissioned in Denmark in late 2026.
About the Department of Chemistry, Aarhus University
The Department of Chemistry at AU is home to one of the world’s most advanced scientific communities in theoretical chemistry. Essential for the project, the department will contribute leading expertise on quantum chemistry and force-field development that will be a cornerstone for computational speed-ups and development of novel quantum algorithms.
Source: Kvantify
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NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform now available through PsiQuantum’s software platform Construct and Workbench tool, accelerating large scale quantum algorithms research
PALO ALTO, Calif., March 17, 2026 — PsiQuantum has announced the integration of NVIDIA CUDA-Q with Construct, PsiQuantum’s software suite for fault-tolerant quantum application development. The integration enables GPU-accelerated state-vector simulation of large-scale quantum algorithms, delivering up to 450x faster performance compared to CPU-based simulation.
Construct users can now request early access to GPU-accelerated simulation capabilities within their existing workflows via CUDA-Q. This new integration allows developers to validate and benchmark complex quantum algorithms at scales that were previously impractical when using CPU-based simulators. Integrating CUDA-Q into Construct will provide users with tunable acceleration based on their specific needs, ranging from an 8x speedup to up to 450x for best-in-class multi-GPU nodes.
“As the industry moves toward utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computing, rigorous verification of large-scale quantum applications is essential,” said Sam Pallister, VP of Quantum Applications at PsiQuantum. “By integrating NVIDIA CUDA-Q’s GPU-acceleration into Construct, we are giving developers the ability to simulate and stress-test algorithms at an advanced scale, mitigating deployment risk.”
CUDA-Q is the NVIDIA platform for hybrid quantum-classical computing, designed to enable developers to build and simulate quantum algorithms alongside GPU-accelerated classical workloads. By integrating CUDA-Q into its software development kit, PsiQuantum enables Construct users to perform optimized GPU state-vector simulation, leveraging the NVIDIA cuQuantum simulation engine without a single change to users’ existing code.
“Simulating future quantum workloads means modelling a complex hybrid quantum-classical environment,” said Tim Costa, Vice President and General Manager for Quantum at NVIDIA. “By integrating the CUDA-Q platform into their workflow, PsiQuantum is able to run GPU-accelerated simulations at the magnitudes they need to deploy large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum applications.”
Utility-scale quantum computing demands a shift from small experimental circuits to production-grade quantum applications whose correctness and performance must be established long before execution on hardware. High-performance classical simulation plays a pivotal role in this transition, enabling developers to stress-test algorithms, explore parameter regimes, and de-risk deployment at scale. By bringing NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform into Construct, PsiQuantum is establishing the simulation infrastructure required to support the next generation of fault-tolerant quantum applications.
PsiQuantum launched Construct in September 2025, with users across industry and academia actively using the tools. In February 2026, PsiQuantum announced a stand-alone, open-access web application of its Circuit Designer tool. Circuit Designer is the fastest and easiest way to create and share quantum circuit diagrams commonly found in academic research, allowing users to prototype new quantum algorithms and advance quantum algorithm development.
Early access to the integration is available by request, allowing Construct users to experience the benefits of GPU acceleration for their largest simulation tasks.
About PsiQuantum
PsiQuantum was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. The company’s mission is to build and deploy the world’s first useful quantum computers. PsiQuantum’s photonic approach enables it to leverage high-volume semiconductor manufacturing, existing cryogenic infrastructure, and architectural flexibility to rapidly scale its systems. Learn more at www.psiquantum.com.
Source: PsiQuantum
The post PsiQuantum Construct Enables Utility-Scale Quantum Application Development with CUDA-Q Integration appeared first on HPCwire.
SAN JOSE, Calif., March 17, 2026 — At NVIDIA GTC 2026, Compal Electronics is showcasing its high-density AI server solution based on NVIDIA HGX Rubin NVL8, aligning with the NVIDIA’s “Six New Chips – One AI Supercomputer” NVIDIA Vera Rubin architecture and demonstrating its engineering readiness for next-generation AI supercomputing infrastructure.
Compal Introduces High-Density NVIDIA HGX Rubin NVL8 Integrated Solution at GTC 2026
The NVIDIA Vera Rubin architecture integrates the NVIDIA Vera CPU, NVIDIA Rubin GPU, NVIDIA NVLink 6 Switch, NVIDIA BlueField-4 DPU, NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet and NVIDIA ConnectX-9 SuperNIC to form a comprehensive heterogeneous computing architecture. Powered by NVLink 6 switching technology, the NVL72 rack-scale configuration delivers up to 260 TB/s of total bandwidth and enables 3.6 TB/s of all-to-all bandwidth per GPU, supporting MoE models and large-scale training and inference workloads.
Compal is introducing the SG231-2-L1, based on NVIDIA HGX Rubin NVL8. The core value of the SG231-2-L1 includes:
In its booth, Compal is also featuring an NVIDIA Vera CPU HPM module based on NVIDIA HGX system, highlighting engineering readiness and manufacturing capabilities aligned with the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform. As heterogeneous computing architectures continue to evolve, coordinated CPU-GPU design has become a critical factor for data centers.
Complementing this showcase, Compal is also introducing support for the new NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition—featuring 32GB GDDR7 memory and up to 800 GB/s bandwidth, enabling efficient acceleration for AI inference, data processing, and visual computing workloads.
Alan Chang, Vice President of Compal’s Infrastructure Systems Business Group, stated: “Competition in AI infrastructure has shifted from single-node performance comparisons to overall deployment efficiency and long-term scalability. As the NVIDIA HGX Rubin NVL8 platform advances in both performance and power density, data center architecture must evolve accordingly. We are strengthening not only compute capability, but also the load-bearing and expansion capacity of the entire infrastructure stack, enabling customers to establish sustainable deployment models for next-generation AI workloads.”
As AI workloads continue to scale, data center competitiveness is increasingly defined by ecosystem alignment and holistic architectural integration. Through its showcase at GTC 2026, Compal demonstrates engineering strength in high-density GPU systems and liquid cooling solutions while reinforcing its long-term strategic engagement within the NVIDIA technology ecosystem.
About Compal
Founded in 1984, Compal is a leading manufacturer in the notebook and smart device industry, creating brand value in collaboration with various sectors. Its groundbreaking product designs have received numerous international awards. In 2025, Compal was recognized by CommonWealth Magazine as one of Taiwan’s top 7 manufacturers and has consistently ranked among the Forbes Global 2000 companies. In recent years, Compal has actively developed emerging businesses, including cloud servers, auto electronics, and smart medical, leveraging its integrated hardware and software R&D and manufacturing capabilities to create relevant solutions. More information, please visit https://www.compal.com.
Source: Compal
The post Compal Introduces High-Density NVIDIA HGX Rubin NVL8 Integrated Solution at GTC 2026 appeared first on HPCwire.
Google says Fitbit's AI Coach will offer improved sleep insights and use your medical records for more personalized advice.
Law enforcement sources told CBS News that additional images were obtained from surveillance cameras installed at Guthrie's Tucson home, but they showed nothing suspicious.
The Cuban government is planning to allow Cuban nationals who live abroad to invest in the island, a government official told NBC News, as the country faces economic collapse and pressure from the Trump administration.
Postmaster general David Steiner has called for change to federal law that caps USPS’s borrowing at $15bn
The US Postal Service will run out of funds within a year, unless lawmakers lift a cap on how much money the agency can borrow, according to the postmaster general.
In an interview with the Associated Press, David Steiner warned that the postal service – which relies on stamps and service fees rather than tax dollars to deliver mail six days a week to every address in the country – would run out of cash for employees and vendors by February next year.
Continue reading...Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for March 18, No. 541.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for March 18, No. 1,733.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for March 18, No. 745.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for March 18 #1011.
Study highlights the movements in people’s gait that give away most about their emotional state
A long face is not the only sign that someone is down in the dumps. How people walk is revealing too, particularly the swing of the arms and legs, researchers say.
Scientists asked volunteers to guess people’s emotions from video clips of them walking and found that bigger swings portrayed more aggression while smaller swings implied fear and sadness.
Continue reading...Healthcare AI is no longer relegated to analyzing images or predicting outcomes. At Nvidia’s GTC conference this week, the company described collaborations in areas like protein modeling, drug discovery, surgical robotics and hospital simulation. Nvidia’s life sciences announcements reflect its strategy of connecting accelerated computing, simulation and AI models across the full healthcare timeline, from early-stage discovery through clinical delivery and manufacturing.
One substantial update revolves around protein folding. Since 2020, when deep learning models like AlphaFold demonstrated high-accuracy protein structure prediction, the method has become foundational for drug discovery and disease research. Nvidia announced it is working with Google DeepMind, EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute and Seoul National University to expand the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database with 1.7 million high-confidence protein complex predictions and roughly 30 million additional structures available for bulk download.
(Shutterstock)
Nvidia says the expanded dataset will act as a comprehensive resource for modeling protein-to-protein interactions at a large scale. Using Nvidia’s accelerated compute workflows, including optimized inference libraries and faster OpenFold implementations, the collaborators have precomputed structures that researchers can use as starting points for hypothesis generation. These precomputed structures serve as starting hypotheses, allowing researchers to move more quickly into experimental testing. The dataset prioritizes reference proteomes and pathogens on the World Health Organization’s priority list to support infectious disease research. By providing the precomputed structures, it could also lower research barriers for groups without access to large-scale computing infrastructure.
Along with the dataset, Nvidia said it is continuing to build out its BioNeMo platform as an open development environment for life sciences. The platform aggregates models and datasets for tasks such as molecular modeling, drug discovery and multimodal biomedical analysis. One example highlighted at GTC is Proteina-Complexa, a generative model designed to create protein binders for therapeutic development. Early adopters, including pharmaceutical and biotech firms, are using the model to design candidate molecules that can then be experimentally validated.
Nvidia’s healthcare announcements also extend into robotics, where the company introduced a set of domain-specific tools for surgical and clinical environments. The release includes Open-H, a dataset of more than 700 hours of surgical video; Cosmos-H, a family of models for generating synthetic surgical data; GR00T-H, a vision-language-action model for translating clinical instructions into robotic actions; and Rheo, a simulation framework for modeling hospital environments.
(Image courtesy of Nvidia)
These models are designed to be a foundation for training and evaluating robotic systems in settings where real-world data is difficult to collect and standardize. Synthetic data generation and simulation have become important in robotics for addressing the gap between training environments and real-world deployment. By combining real surgical footage with physics-based simulation, Nvidia appears to be encouraging more robust training for clinical robotics.
Several medical device companies and platform developers are already experimenting with these tools. Surgical robotics firms, including CMR Surgical, Johnson & Johnson MedTech, Moon Surgical and Rob Surgical, are contributing data and using simulation to evaluate control policies. Software developers like PeritasAI and Proximie are building systems that integrate computer vision, language models and real-time coordination in operating rooms. Some collaborations focus on providing real-time decision support to surgical teams, while others are developing robots that can perform defined tasks under human supervision.
Another major component of Nvidia’s healthcare strategy is infrastructure, as illustrated by a large-scale deployment with Roche. The pharmaceutical company is expanding its use of Nvidia GPUs to more than 3,500 Blackwell GPUs across hybrid cloud and on-prem environments. This infrastructure will support a wide range of workloads, including foundation model training, drug discovery, diagnostics and manufacturing optimization.
Roche’s approach highlights how AI is being integrated into enterprise-scale scientific workflows. In drug discovery, the company is using AI within a “lab-in-the-loop” framework that connects computational models with experimental data in iterative cycles. According to Roche, most eligible small-molecule programs now incorporate AI, with reported gains in development timelines for certain candidates. These examples suggest that AI is beginning to influence not just early research but also decision-making processes throughout the development pipeline. The same infrastructure is being applied to Roche’s manufacturing through digital twins, where virtual models of production facilities are being used to simulate and optimize operations. In diagnostics, AI models are being used to analyze pathology images and large-scale biological datasets, with these capabilities being deployed across Roche’s global operations.
(gguy/Shutterstock)
Across Nvidia’s healthcare announcements is the company’s consistent theme of AI that works through connecting data, models and compute. The company is presenting an interconnected AI stack spanning biological modeling, simulation, robotics and enterprise infrastructure. The strategy depends on the assumption that advances in one layer, such as faster protein modeling or improved simulation environments, will reinforce progress in others. And though these AI capabilities in healthcare are exciting, there are practical constraints that will influence how quickly they translate into clinical use. In drug discovery, biological complexity and regulatory requirements can limit the speed of development. In robotics, clinical validation and safety standards can create high barriers to deployment. Clinical environments are highly variable, high-risk and subject to strict regulations. Even with large-scale infrastructure, bringing AI into existing workflows takes time and continued investment.
Despite the remaining challenges, AI in healthcare is moving beyond narrow applications toward systems that combine prediction, simulation and physical interaction. Nvidia’s GTC announcements suggest it intends to play a large role in that transition, as the company does in many other industries, by providing both the underlying compute and the software frameworks that connect these domains. Whether the company’s signature integrated approach leads to measurable improvements in patient outcomes will depend on how these tools are adopted and used, but initial projects are already revealing where AI may have the most immediate impact in healthcare.
The post Nvidia Details Its Healthcare AI Stack at GTC appeared first on HPCwire.
So I’ve had my pint x for a while now, like 3 years and I’m still on the original firmware. I never get prompts to update on the app and tried everything. Even contacted them and sent diagnostics and FM Just stopped responding. Am I better off or am I missing out on customization?
Republican appointee rules attempts to shutter federal agency are illegal and mandates workers return by 23 March
A Republican-appointed federal judge has ordered that more than 1,000 Voice of America (VOA) employees be reinstated after a Trump administration order effectively dismantled the radio network, triggering mass layoffs.
In two separate rulings made Tuesday, the US district judge Royce Lamberth said that attempts to shut down operations of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), an independent federal agency that oversees VOA, are illegal and mandated that employees return to work by 23 March.
Continue reading...Israel announced earlier that he was killed in overnight strike on Tehran
Full report: Iran’s security chief, Ali Larijani, killed in airstrike, Israel says
How have you been affected by the latest Middle East events?
The head of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) has said that naval escorts through the strait of Hormuz will not “100% guarantee” the safety of ships attempting to transit the waterway, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.
Military assistance was “not a long-term or sustainable solution” to opening up the strait, Arsenio Dominguez told the newspaper.
We are collateral damage of a conflict when the root causes have nothing to do with shipping.
Remaining in the area of the specified buildings exposes you to danger
Continue reading...The new AI technology is making some big changes to video game graphics that hardly anyone seems to like.
Arizona has filed criminal charges against Kalshi, accusing it of operating an illegal gambling business. "Kalshi may brand itself as a 'prediction market,' but what it's actually doing is running an illegal gambling operation and taking bets on Arizona elections, both of which violate Arizona law," Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said in a statement. The case could ultimately head to the Supreme Court to decide whether federal oversight by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission overrides state gambling laws. Bloomberg reports: While state regulators have taken steps to crack down on what they say is unlicensed betting on Kalshi's site, Arizona appears to be the first state to escalate to criminal charges. The charges cited in the complaint are misdemeanors, which carry less serious penalties than felonies. [...] Prediction market exchanges like Kalshi have said they should continue to be regulated by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission despite opposition from some state officials, who argue the trading should come under state gambling laws. Arizona's criminal complaint follows Kalshi's move last week to block the state's gaming department from taking enforcement action against the company. "These are the first criminal charges of any kind filed against Kalshi in any court in the United States, but it will likely be the first of several," said Daniel Wallach, a sports and gaming attorney.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
MSPs reject bill after concerted campaign to block it and despite amendments intended to placate critics
The Scottish parliament has voted against legalising assisted dying after critics and religious groups led a concerted campaign to block the measures.
MSPs voted 69 to 57 to reject the proposals in a late night vote on Tuesday – a larger margin than expected, despite a series of last-minute amendments designed to placate critics of the private member’s bill.
Continue reading...A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore the government-run Voice of America to full operations, putting hundreds of journalists who have been on administrative leave for a year back to work.
Former deputy prime minister says Labour’s immigration changes are ‘un-British’ and Starmer must respond to fall in party’s popularity
Angela Rayner has said the very survival of the Labour party is at stake and warned Keir Starmer that he “cannot go through the motions” in the face of declining support.
In a speech at campaign group Mainstream’s spring reception, the former deputy prime minister said she believed the government was “running out of time” to show it can deliver the change that the public needs.
Continue reading...Musician, AKA Michael Tyler, faces up to 20 years after entering plea in state court outside Baton Rouge, Louisiana
The US rapper Mystikal on Tuesday pleaded guilty to third-degree rape in connection with a case that led to his arrest in 2022.
Mystikal – whose given name is Michael Tyler – faces up to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty in a state courthouse outside Baton Rouge, Louisiana, according to reports from local news outlets WBRZ and WAFB.
Continue reading...Fi Intelligence allows you to ask questions of a specially tailored pet health chatbot, but it's not meant to replace vet visits.
Tribblix, the Illumos distribution focused on giving you a classic UNIX-style experience, has released a new version.
There are several noticeable version updates in this release. The graphical libraries libtiff and OpenEXR have been updated, retaining the old shared library versions for now. OpenSSL is now from the 3.5 series with the 3.0 api by default. Bind is now from the 9.20 series. OpenSSH is now 10.2, and you may get a Post-Quantum Cryptography warning if connecting to older SSH servers.
↫ Tribblix m39 release notes
If you’re already running Tribblix, updating is easy, and if you want to try it out, head on over to the downloads page. Rests me to say that Tribblix is a treasure, and it must be protected at all costs. It’s rare to see a passion project like this maintain such a steady pace.
Close ally of president was set to testify at antitrust trial of Ticketmaster parent company later this month
Kid Rock thinks it’s bawita-bad that the US Department of Justice reached a shocking settlement with Live Nation one week into its antitrust trial.
A close ally of Donald Trump, the rightwing rocker expressed bewilderment over the settlement, telling former Rolling Stone editor-in-chief Noah Shachtman that he was shocked by the news.
Continue reading...Residents in rural Ohio are pushing a constitutional amendment to ban large data centers over 25 megawatts, citing concerns about energy use, water consumption, and lack of transparency around proposed projects. "My biggest concern is because I love Adams County," Nikki Gerber told Cleveland.com. "What it feels like they are doing is just taking advantage of the unzoned rural areas of Ohio, where they can go ahead and put in whatever they want." From the report: Gerber and a handful of residents from Adams and Brown counties gathered about 1,800 signatures in eight days to start the ballot process. They submitted those petitions to the Ohio attorney general's office on Monday. That's the first step before supporters can begin collecting signatures statewide. State law requires at least 1,000 valid voter signatures to begin the process. The petitions must also include the full text of the proposed amendment and a summary explaining what it would do. Attorney General Dave Yost's office now has 10 days to decide whether the summary fairly and truthfully describes the proposal. If it does, the measure will move to the Ohio Ballot Board. Supporters would then need to gather about 413,000 valid signatures by July to place the amendment before voters this November. The report notes that a 25-megawatt limit "would effectively block most modern data centers from being built in Ohio."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The retailer says the one-hour option is available in hundreds of cities, with discounted shipping for Prime members.
The Department of Homeland Security is using discretionary funding to continue paying active-duty U.S. Coast Guard personnel during the department's ongoing shutdown, even as civilian employees remain unpaid.
The lawsuit continues a trend of content owners suing AI companies for copyright infringement.
Larijani was killed by an Israeli airstrike and is the most senior Iranian fatality since Ali Khamenei on first day of war
Iran’s supreme national security council has confirmed the death of its chief, Ali Larijani, after Israel said it had killed him in an airstrike.
“The pure souls of the martyrs embraced the purified soul of God’s righteous servant, Martyr Dr Ali Larijani,” the council said on Tuesday evening, adding that his son and his bodyguards had died with him.
Continue reading...Trump has expressed frustration over a lack of military assistance from allies, but European leaders are reluctant to join a conflict he started without consulting them.
Java 26 delivers thousands of improvements that boost developer productivity, simplify the language, and help developers integrate AI and cryptography functionality into their applications. To help developers further streamline and enhance their development initiatives, Oracle is also announcing the new Java Verified Portfolio, which provides developers with a curated set of Oracle-supported tools, frameworks, libraries, and services, including commercial support for JavaFX, a Java-based UI framework, and Helidon, a Java framework for microservices. In addition, Oracle intends to align Helidon’s release cadence with Java releases and propose Helidon as an OpenJDK project.
↫ Oracle’s Java 26 press release
Oracle’s press releases lists the most important JDK Enhancement Proposals in this release, as do the release notes and the project page at OpenJDK. In addition, Java developer Hanno Embregts published a detailed blog post that dives deeper into this new release.
I have a used XR that had 340 miles on it, I hit 440 today!
I’m a bigger guy, but I am now crushing at 10-13mph comfortably.
I’ve just been riding around my neighborhood with little to no traffic.
Also been practicing transitioning from the sidewalk to the street going up and down driveways. It’s really fun to carve up a driveway then cruise back down onto the street 😂
All in all I’m loving this hobby, it’s helping me get out the house on my days off and it’s been a good thing for my mental health.
I work 3 miles from my house and plan to ride it to work when I am more comfortable around cars and what not!
To anyone having any doubts and want to give up, don’t. It gets better and way easier with time.
Float on everyone!!!!
Nvidia balanced the debut of its Vera CPU and NemoClaw agent stack against a wave of gamer backlash over its "cinematic" DLSS 5 technology.
 | I just got this XRC yesterday and I got to ride it today. I first tried to get on and it never activated (without and with shoes). And I tried again and it didn’t activate until I kind of stood on it had the weight of the front and let it fall kinda (kinda hard to explain). Is it a problem with my stance? Or is it a defective front pad? [link] [comments] |
Roberts did not name Donald Trump, but US president has decried ‘corrupt judges’ who ruled against him
The chief justice of the United States, John Roberts, said on Tuesday that hostility directed in personal terms at judges is “dangerous, and it’s got to stop”.
The comment came just days after Donald Trump’s latest social media broadside against judges who have ruled against him and his administration.
Continue reading...One Nation and Coalition adopting reactionary tactics to win over frustrated and fearful voters, frontbencher Andrew Giles says
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Pauline Hanson and rightwing populists are cynically exploiting the frustrations of Australians who feel forgotten by government or left behind by poor education and job opportunities, Labor frontbencher Andrew Giles says.
Accusing One Nation and the Coalition of adopting cynical and reactionary tactics to win over frustrated and fearful voters, Giles says better education is critical to stopping disenfranchisement with government and a weakening of democracy in Australia.
Continue reading...WASHINGTON, March 17, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced funding to advance the Genesis Mission’s efforts to tackle the nation’s most complex science and technology challenges. This includes a $293 million Request for Application (RFA),“The Genesis Mission: Transforming Science and Energy with AI.” Through this RFA, DOE invites interdisciplinary teams to leverage novel AI models and frameworks to address over 20 national challenges spanning advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, critical materials, nuclear energy, and quantum information science.
“The Genesis Mission has caught the imagination of our scientific and engineering communities to tackle national challenges in the age of AI,” said Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil and Genesis Mission Director. “With these investments we seek breakthrough ideas and novel collaborations leveraging the scientific prowess of our National Laboratories, the private sector, universities, and science philanthropies.”
The RFA is open to interdisciplinary teams from DOE National Laboratories, U.S. industry, and academia. Phase I awards will range from $500,000 to $750,000 and will support a nine month project period. Phase II awards will range from $6 million to $15 million over a three year project period. Teams may apply directly to either phase in FY 2026, and successful Phase I teams will be eligible to compete for larger Phase II awards in future cycles.
Phase I applications and Phase II letters of intent are due April 28, 2026. Phase II applications are due May 19, 2026. DOE plans to hold an informational webinar about this RFA on March 26, 2026.
For full eligibility, application instructions, and challenge details, see the official NOFO: DE-FOA-0003612. Registration instructions and other details will be posted here.
More from HPCwire
Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy
The post DOE Announces $293M in Funding to Support Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges appeared first on HPCwire.
Kyle Orland writes via Ars Technica: Since deep-learning super-sampling (DLSS) launched on 2018's RTX 2080 cards, gamers have been generally bullish on the technology as a way to effectively use machine-learning upscaling techniques to increase resolutions or juice frame rates in games. With yesterday's tease of the upcoming DLSS 5, though, Nvidia has crossed a line from mere upscaling into complete lighting and texture overhauls influenced by "generative AI." The result is a bland, uncanny gloss that has received an instant and overwhelmingly negative reaction from large swaths of gamers and the industry at large. While previous DLSS releases rendered upscaled frames or created entirely new ones to smooth out gaps, Nvidia calls DLSS 5 -- which it plans to launch in Autumn -- "a real-time neural rendering model" that can "deliver a new level of photoreal computer graphics previously only achieved in Hollywood visual effects." Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said explicitly that the technology melds "generative AI" with "handcrafted rendering" for "a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression." Unlike existing generative video models, which Nvidia notes are "difficult to precisely control and often lack predictability," DLSS 5 uses a game's internal color and motion vectors "to infuse the scene with photoreal lighting and materials that are anchored to source 3D content and consistent from frame to frame." That underlying game data helps the system "understand complex scene semantics such as characters, hair, fabric and translucent skin, along with environmental lighting conditions like front-lit, back-lit or overcast," the company says. Nvidia's announcement video and detailed Digital Foundry breakdown can be found at their respective links. "Reactions have compared the effect to air-brushed pornography, 'yassified, looks-maxed freaks,' or those uncanny, unavoidable Evony ads," writes Orland. "Others have noted how DLSS 5 seems to mangle the intended art direction by dampening shadows in favor of a homogenized look." Thomas Was Alone developer Mike Bithell said the technology seems designed "for when you absolutely, positively, don't want any art direction in your gaming experience." Gunfire Games Senior Concept Artist Jeff Talbot added that "in every shot the art direction was taken away for the senseless addition of 'details.' Each DLSS 5 shot looked worse and had less character than the original. This is just a garbage AI Filter." DLSS 5's "AI dogshit is actually depressing," said New Blood Interactive founder and CEO Dave Oshry, adding that future generations "won't even know this looks 'bad' or 'wrong' because to them it'll be normal."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In letter to justice secretary, groups say judge-led decisions more likely to be influenced by bias than those made by 12 random people
Thirty organisations representing victims of violence against women and girls (VAWG) have written to the justice secretary, David Lammy, urging him to drop plans to significantly reduce the number of jury trials.
The groups said that the proposals, which will affect court cases in England and Wales, will deepen mistrust in the justice system among victims and distract from measures designed to reduce offending.
Continue reading...MUNICH, March 17, 2026 — SimScale, the world’s first AI-native cloud engineering simulation platform, has announced a strategic collaboration with AI Engineering GmbH to integrate the PAMICS solver into the SimScale ecosystem. Leveraging accelerated computing on NVIDIA AI infrastructure, the integration removes meshing bottlenecks and dramatically reduces simulation runtimes for complex industrial applications that have traditionally struggled with grid-based methods, delivering simulation speeds 10-20x faster.
By combining AI Engineering’s state-of-the-art Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) solver with SimScale’s cloud-native infrastructure, this partnership aims to democratize access to high-fidelity, meshless Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).
This performance leap further positions SimScale as a high-velocity source of synthetic physics data, enabling teams to generate the scale and fidelity required for Physics AI model training and predictive Digital Twins. By combining cloud-native simulation, centralized data management, and accelerated computing, SimScale helps lay the foundation to train the next generation of AI models. This foundation supports downstream Physics AI workflows across the NVIDIA ecosystem, including physics-informed models built directly in SimScale with NVIDIA PhysicsNeMo.
The integration also supports advanced visualization workflows across the NVIDIA ecosystem, including compatibility with applications built on NVIDIA Omniverse libraries to deliver photorealistic, physically-based rendering and immersive review of simulation results. This allows engineering teams to more easily visualize, communicate, and validate complex fluid behavior as part of broader Digital Twin workflows.
Designed to handle complex, highly dynamic fluid behavior that is difficult to capture with traditional simulation methods, the PAMICS solver utilizes a Lagrangian Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) approach, allowing engineers to simulate fluid dynamics directly from raw CAD geometries without the need for meshing. This accelerates simulation workflows for complex multiphase and free surface flows, particularly in scenarios involving arbitrary motion, fluid-structure interaction and splashing that are difficult or impractical to model with traditional grid-based methods. Critical use cases include:
“At SimScale, our mission is to empower engineers to explore thousands of engineering decisions in seconds,” said David Heiny, CEO of SimScale. “By integrating AI Engineering’s sophisticated PAMICS solver, we are bringing a true ‘no-mesh’ workflow to the cloud, removing one of the biggest bottlenecks when it comes to simulating complex fluid dynamics with moving assemblies. Combined with accelerated computing on GPUs and Physics AI workflows, this enables our customers to build their own synthetic data engines, accelerating their path to predictive Digital Twins.”
“We developed PAMICS to handle the most demanding fluid dynamics challenges where traditional methods fail—specifically where complex motion and free surfaces interact,” said Dr.-Ing. habil. Stefan Adami, CEO of AI Engineering GmbH. “Joining forces with SimScale allows us to scale this technology globally. As a member of NVIDIA Inception, we have optimized PAMICS to extract maximum performance from NVIDIA GPUs. Delivering this through SimScale’s browser-based platform means engineers in the industrial and manufacturing sectors will be able to access high-end SPH capabilities instantly, without investing in expensive local hardware.”
This integration is being showcased at NVIDIA GTC, attendees can visit SimScale at booth 168 for a preview of the new SPH capabilities running on NVIDIA infrastructure.
About SimScale
SimScale is the world’s first AI-native cloud platform for engineering simulation. Trusted by over 800,000 users globally, SimScale empowers engineering teams to innovate faster by exploring thousands of design decisions in seconds. By integrating Engineering AI workflows with high-fidelity CFD, FEA, Electromagnetics, and Thermal simulation in a single cloud platform, SimScale eliminates the constraints of on-premise hardware and software, helping customers engineer the irreplaceable. For more information, visit www.simscale.com.
About AI Engineering GmbH
AI Engineering GmbH is a pioneer in advanced simulation solutions, specializing in Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) and AI-enhanced engineering tools. AI Engineering leverages cutting-edge GPU acceleration to deliver PAMICS, a robust meshless solver designed for complex industrial fluid dynamics. For more information, visit www.ai-eng.com.
Source: SimScale
The post SimScale Partners with AI Engineering GmbH to Unlock Meshless SPH Simulation appeared first on HPCwire.
SAN JOSE, Calif., March 17, 2026 — AI-optimized memory and storage have become strategic assets driving system performance to enable AI workloads and infrastructure to deliver real-world value. Micron Technology, Inc. has begun volume shipment of its HBM4 36GB 12H in the first quarter of calendar year 2026 and is designed for NVIDIA Vera Rubin. With HBM4, Micron achieves over 11 Gb/s pin speeds, enabling a bandwidth greater than 2.8 TB/s, representing a 2.3 times bandwidth and greater than 20% power efficiency improvement over its HBM3E.
Credit: Micron
Looking towards further HBM cube capacity expansion, Micron has demonstrated advanced packaging capability of stacking 16 die of HBM by shipping samples of HBM4 48GB 16H to customers. This milestone delivers a 33% increase in capacity per HBM placement compared to the HBM4 36GB 12H offering.
“The next era of AI will be defined by tightly integrated platforms developed through joint engineering innovations across the ecosystem. Our close collaboration with NVIDIA ensures that compute and memory are designed to scale together from day one,” said Sumit Sadana, executive vice president and chief business officer at Micron Technology. “At the heart of this is Micron’s HBM4, the engine of AI, delivering unprecedented bandwidth, capacity and power efficiency. With HBM4 36GB 12H, alongside the industry’s first SOCAMM2 and Gen6 SSD now in high-volume production, Micron’s memory and storage form a core foundation that unlocks the full potential of next-generation AI.”
Micron SOCAMM2 is designed for NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 systems and standalone NVIDIA Vera CPU platforms, enabling up to 2TB of memory and 1.2 TB/s of bandwidth per CPU.
Micron is the first company to mass-produce a PCIe Gen6 data center SSD. The Micron 9650 is optimized for energy efficiency and liquid-cooled environments, delivering high-speed, low-latency data access for AI training and inference workloads with the NVIDIA BlueField-4 STX reference architecture, supporting up to 28 GB/s sequential read throughput and 5.5 million random read IOPS. Micron 7600 and 9550 SSDs offer customers PCIe Gen5 SSDs, increasing their architectural design choices.
Showcasing Micron innovation at NVIDIA GTC 2026
At NVIDIA GTC 2026, Micron will showcase how its advanced memory and storage portfolio enables end-to-end AI acceleration from the data center to the edge. Attendees can find detailed information at the Micron booth, 1407.
About Micron Technology, Inc.
Micron Technology, Inc. is an industry leader in innovative memory and storage solutions, transforming how the world uses information to enrich life for all. With a relentless focus on our customers, technology leadership, and manufacturing and operational excellence, Micron delivers a rich portfolio of high-performance DRAM, NAND and NOR memory and storage products. Every day, the innovations that our people create fuel the data economy, enabling advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and compute-intensive applications that unleash opportunities — from the data center to the intelligent edge and across the client and mobile user experience. To learn more about Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU), visit micron.com.
Source: Micron
The post Micron in High-Volume Production of HBM4 Designed for NVIDIA Vera Rubin, PCIe Gen6 SSD and SOCAMM2 appeared first on HPCwire.
Lawmakers on both sides of aisle have criticized justice department’s improper redaction of information
Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, has been formally subpoenaed to appear before a House panel to answer questions about the justice department’s handling of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and its release of the Epstein files.
The move came amid growing criticism from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle over the justice department’s compliance with a law passed last year requiring the full release of Epstein-related files.
Continue reading...SAN JOSE, Calif., March 17, 2026 — Cadence has announced an expansion of its broad collaboration with NVIDIA to accelerate Cadence’s Design for AI and AI for Design strategy. The next generation of agentic AI design solutions includes autonomous, long-running agents that require accelerated, trusted, physics-grounded engines to translate design intent into automated flows, generate designs and debug errors, and manage long, complex, end-to-end workflows. Cadence’s leadership in agentic AI is expanded by integrating its portfolio of industry-leading chip and system design solutions with NVIDIA’s accelerated computing stack.
“The fusion of agentic AI and physics-based design is transforming how the world’s most advanced chips are engineered,” said Anirudh Devgan, president and CEO of Cadence. “Through our expanded collaboration with NVIDIA, we’re bringing together Cadence’s expertise in agentic IC design and physics-driven optimization with NVIDIA’s accelerated computing to advance a new era of AI-driven chip innovation. Together, we’re enabling customers to design more intelligent, efficient silicon that will power the next generation of computing and AI infrastructure.”
“AI is driving the largest infrastructure buildout in history—spurring the creation of new chips, systems, and AI factories around the world,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Together, NVIDIA and Cadence have created the Cadence Millennium M2000—a revolutionary AI supercomputer built to tackle the immense scale and complexity of designing the world’s next generation of infrastructure.”
Broadest-Ever Portfolio of Accelerated Design Solutions
To give agents and engineers the tools they need, Cadence has expanded its design solutions accelerated with NVIDIA Grace CPUs and NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs—and as a turnkey deployment on the Cadence Millennium M2000 Supercomputer—delivering up to 80X greater throughput and up to 20X lower power consumption. This expanded offering now spans analysis, optimization and design, with key solvers deeply optimized with NVIDIA CUDA-X. One example is the Cadence Clarity 3D Solver demonstrating that a Millennium M2000 system configured with 8X NVIDIA RTX pro 6000 GPU servers is up to 5X faster, or 4X better cost iso-performance, compared to an equivalent CPU-based solution, when extracting complex and large-scale designs.
Cadence accelerated solutions that will be available in 2026 include:
The Cadence Allegro X Design Platform and the Cadence Reality Digital Twin Platform also integrate with NVIDIA Omniverse libraries for photo-realistic visualization, critical for multi-disciplinary engineering and design. Cadence’s MSC Virtual Test Drive (VTD) is being integrated with NVIDIA Cosmos and NVIDIA Omniverse NuRec for advancing the state of the art in physical AI.
Design for AI and AI for Design
Industry leaders use Cadence’s full suite of accelerated agentic solutions to design the next generation of AI infrastructure. The Cadence Reality Digital Twin Platform helps teams use physics-based models and AI to design and operate AI factories, accelerating deployment timelines and unlocking new revenue streams across the data center portfolio.
Cadence is advancing AI-driven engineering with its agentic AI solutions, led by the Cadence ChipStack AI Super Agent, to help engineers deliver higher quality, more complex designs. Cadence and NVIDIA are also collaborating on future agentic AI innovations in custom and analog design and building deep research and long-running agents for engineering NVIDIA NemoClaw, an open source stack that simplifies running OpenClaw always-on assistants, more safely, with a single command. As part of the NVIDIA Agent Toolkit, it installs the NVIDIA OpenShell runtime—a secure environment for running autonomous agents, and open source models like NVIDIA Nemotron.
For more information, visit https://www.cadence.com/en_US/home/company/nvidia.html.
About Cadence
Cadence is a market leader in AI and digital twins, pioneering the application of computational software to accelerate innovation in the engineering design of silicon to systems. Our design solutions, based on Cadence’s Intelligent System Design strategy, are essential for the world’s leading semiconductor and systems companies to build their next-generation products from chips to full electromechanical systems that serve a wide range of markets, including hyperscale computing, mobile communications, automotive, aerospace, industrial, life sciences and robotics. In 2024, Cadence was recognized by the Wall Street Journal as one of the world’s top 100 best-managed companies.
Source: Cadence
The post Cadence and NVIDIA Unveil Accelerated Engineering Solutions for Agentic AI Chip and System Design appeared first on HPCwire.
The deal will give fans more ways to engage with the tournament.
Senate voted 51-48 to begin discussion on bill that would require proof of citizenship for new voters
The Senate voted on Tuesday to debate a sweeping restrictive voting bill that would require proof of US citizenship for new voters, among other measures.
The Senate voted 51-48 to begin debate on the Save America Act, a rebranded version of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility act, or the Save Act, which has been circulating through Congress in some iteration for more than two years.
Continue reading...A meteor that fell over the Cleveland area on Tuesday shook homes and startled residents, who heard a sonic boom that some compared to an explosion. The American Meteor Society said it received reports from Wisconsin to Maryland
Continue reading...
Trump administration officials have claimed that they are saving Americans over $1.3 trillion by ending regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks. But the figure does not incorporate any benefits of the emissions standards. By one of the Environmental Protection Agency’s own calculations, getting rid of the standards could cost billions.
On Feb. 12, the EPA announced that it was revoking the 2009 endangerment finding, which allowed the agency to regulate greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide that trap heat and cause climate change. Without that policy in place, the agency said it was terminating its rules that limit such pollution from vehicles. The regulation has primarily acted to increase fuel efficiency, since more efficient cars and trucks burn less gas and release less carbon pollution.
Since unveiling the finalized rulemaking last month that eliminates the emissions standards, officials have frequently touted an alleged savings of $1.3 trillion.
“This action will save American taxpayers over $1.3 trillion,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in the press conference announcing the policy change. “What that means is lower prices, more choices, and an end of heavy-handed climate policies. With today’s announcement, American families will save over … $2,400 for a new vehicle.”
In the same briefing, President Donald Trump and Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, also mentioned the $1.3 trillion figure. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has similarly referred to it, and in official communications, the EPA has also emphasized it.
But the $1.3 trillion is not a net total. It only includes the added cost of making cars and trucks more fuel efficient over a period of nearly three decades, without considering any of the benefits, such as reduced fuel or maintenance costs. One of the agency’s own estimates, which also ignores any health or environmental benefits, shows that repealing the policy could ultimately cost Americans $180 billion.
“This is a very biased and misleading way to talk about the effects of this rollback,” Jason Schwartz, regulatory policy director at New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, told us of the $1.3 trillion framing. “It’s actually worse than only looking at one half of the equation because they’ve also left a bunch of really important effects off the other side of the equation.”
“I honestly can’t recall another rulemaking where the focus of all of the fact sheets and press releases was ONLY about the costs of the policy,” Kenneth Gillingham, a Yale University economics professor, told us in an email.
With the elimination of these standards, soon there will be effectively no fuel efficiency standards in place on American cars and trucks. While the Department of Transportation’s fuel economy standards still technically exist, with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act earlier this year, Congress set the compliance penalties in the program to zero. The Trump administration is also now working to finalize significant rollbacks to the standards.
Here, we’ll take a closer look at the EPA’s calculations and explain why the administration’s singular focus on $1.3 trillion is misleading.
According to an EPA fact sheet, the $1.3 trillion in alleged savings for U.S. consumers includes about $1.1 trillion in avoided vehicle technology costs and $200 billion in avoided electric vehicle charger and equipment costs between 2027 through 2055.
Those figures are taken from the agency’s regulatory impact analysis. The analysis modeled four different scenarios, making different assumptions about the future cost of gasoline and to what degree fuel savings are counted, under two discount rates. (A discount rate is how much future money is discounted on an annual basis to convert it to a present value.) For each of the scenarios at the 3% discount rate, the EPA estimated a “savings” of either $1.29 trillion or $1.34 trillion.
But those estimates are only one half of the EPA’s ledger. Partially or fully offsetting the alleged savings are a variety of increased costs as a result of undoing the standards, primarily due to higher fuel and maintenance costs (electric vehicles are cheaper to maintain). In no case is there a net savings of $1.3 trillion.
Most of the EPA’s modeled scenarios do show a net savings in repealing the greenhouse gas emissions standards. However, as we said, that analysis does not factor in any health or environmental benefits.
“A correct cost-benefit analysis – even under the Trump Administration’s Circular A-4 guidance document – must include all relevant benefits and costs,” Gillingham told us, referring to the Office of Management and Budget’s guidance for such analyses. “In this rule, they are simply arguing that the benefits don’t exist. The science is not on their side on this one.”
Even still, one of the agency’s key estimates — one using the Energy Information Administration’s best guess for future fuel prices — shows that rescinding the policy will cost Americans $180 billion on net. Even with nearly $1.3 trillion in savings, there will be almost $1.5 trillion in costs under that scenario.
The other scenarios assume either lower fuel prices or only factor in fuel savings for 2.5 years, or both — each of which lowers the benefits of any fuel efficiency policy and makes the standards appear more expensive.
In response to a series of questions about the agency’s calculations and why the agency is using the $1.3 trillion number when it is not a net figure, the EPA press office told us that the analysis included eight projected net impacts under different modeling assumptions (four scenarios under two discount rates). “We didn’t single out scenarios to suit a narrative, we followed the data,” the agency said in an email, which again highlighted the $1.3 trillion.
Although the agency and officials routinely refer to “over” $1.3 trillion in savings by ending the emissions standards program, only two of the EPA’s four scenarios at the 3% discount rate actually top $1.3 trillion in terms of the avoided higher technology costs that make vehicles more fuel-efficient. And at the 7% rate, those avoided costs never go above $870 billion.
“Rescinding the 2009 Endangerment Finding means real dollars back in the pockets of American families and unleashing consumer choice. Now, Americans will be able to buy the car they want, including newer, more affordable cars with the most up to date safety standards and that emit fewer criteria and hazardous air pollutants,” the agency continued, adding that the action “does not affect regulations on any non-GHG air pollutants.”
It’s true that the EPA retains its other regulations on vehicles that limit the release of so-called criteria air pollutants, such as ozone and fine particle pollution. But it’s not the case that ending the emissions standards will have no effect on those pollutants. Schwartz said the standards “would have had important indirect impacts on criteria pollutants.”
He cited an analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund, which estimated that with a repeal of the greenhouse gas emissions standards, there would be up to 58,000 more premature deaths and as many as 37 million more asthma attacks through 2055.
In its final rule, the EPA argued that removing the standards would have “only marginal and incidental impacts” on non-greenhouse gas emissions. The agency also said it “is no longer monetizing benefits” from reducing particle and ozone pollution because of uncertainty in how to do those calculations precisely.
“In the past, EPA has always considered air pollution benefits as part of a cost vs benefit sort of study. Here the assumption is that the pollution benefits are all zero,” Mark Jacobsen, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, told us, adding that the benefits are not just to the climate, but to air quality, which the EPA “has typically found to be quite important.”
In its 2024 rule finalizing increased greenhouse gas emissions standards under then President Joe Biden, the EPA estimated that those standards would provide $200 billion in health benefits due to less particle pollution and $1.6 trillion in climate benefits (in 2022 dollars, 3% discount rate). The overall net benefit was estimated at $2 trillion.
Even without factoring in health or environmental benefits, the EPA two years ago found a $62 billion net benefit to the increased standards, with higher vehicle technology and battery port costs more than offset by lower fuel, repair and maintenance costs.
This gets at problems several experts identified in the EPA’s analysis. Jacobsen told us that the agency’s estimates are “deeply flawed.”
Jacobsen, along with Gillingham and other economist and mechanical engineer co-authors, several of whom the EPA has frequently cited in its rulemaking, wrote a comment to the EPA explaining their criticisms of the agency’s proposed rule in September. While not all of the issues still apply to the revised final rule, some remain.
One of the biggest issues affects half of EPA’s scenarios, which only factor in 2.5 years of the standards’ fuel savings. In these scenarios, the fuel savings are dramatically reduced.
Gillingham, who said there were “many issues” with the EPA’s analysis, said this is “simply incorrect and flips it from how it has always been done.”
A major question for the cost-benefit analysis is why consumers undervalue fuel efficiency. As noted in the EPA’s regulatory impact analysis, some evidence suggests that buyers are only willing to pay for about 2.5 years’ worth of fuel savings upfront for a more fuel-efficient car. If it’s a market failure and buyers are simply not properly considering the benefits of better gas mileage for the lifetime of the car, then a cost-benefit analysis should factor in the fuel savings beyond the first 2.5 years. But if consumers dislike the features of fuel-efficient cars, then they could be already valuing and “paying” for those future fuel savings in the form of a less desirable vehicle, so those fuel savings should not be counted.
For half of its scenarios, the EPA assumes that the latter is true in full, so it doesn’t include fuel savings beyond the 2.5 years in its cost-benefit calculation.
“This makes a gigantic difference to the costs and benefits,” Gillingham told us.
Jacobsen, Gillingham and colleagues note in their comment that this assumption “is not supported by the economics literature.” Moreover, they said, the EPA is ignoring that some electric vehicle attributes are superior to conventional gasoline vehicles.
In its analysis, the EPA defended its approach on undervaluation, noting that it uses scenarios that both likely overestimate and underestimate the costs of the rule, and that it views them as “a form of a bounding exercise.”
Schwartz, of NYU, independently flagged the same concern about zeroing out most fuel savings as well. “They’re saying there must be $900 billion in lost vehicle features,” he said of the EPA. “That is absolutely not the case.”
At the same time, when the EPA estimates the cost of making vehicles more fuel efficient, the agency assumes that manufacturers preserve vehicle performance, and don’t opt for cheaper solutions, such as lowering a car’s horsepower, Schwartz said.
“By modeling both extra costs to maintain performance and assuming additional costs of alleged performance losses,” an economic report from Schwartz’s group explains, the EPA is “effectively double-counting costs.”
Gillingham and Jacobsen noted the same problem, calling it an “inconsistent combination” that makes the cost of regulation appear high and the benefits appear small.
Half of the scenarios also assume a “low” oil price to “take into account the policies being implemented by President Trump that are intended to drive down the price of gasoline and diesel,” according to the regulatory impact analysis.
But as Schwartz noted, and as we have explained before, oil is a global commodity. The price is set based on worldwide supply and demand. Economists and energy experts told us during the 2024 presidential campaign that Trump’s plans to reduce prices by increasing production are unlikely to be very successful over the long term. U.S. and global producers wouldn’t be incentivized to produce more if prices are low. In a world with less-fuel-efficient vehicles, demand will also be higher, driving up the cost of gasoline — a feature the EPA also did not fully account for in some scenarios, Schwartz said.
The various oil prices used are projections from the Energy Information Administration. Although the EIA also projects a “high” oil price, EPA did not use it for any of its scenarios.
“Every step of this analysis is biased in an effort to make their repeal look as favorable as possible and to hide from the public the real costs to consumers, to public health, and to the environment, that [are] going to result from this rollback,” Schwartz said.
Along with the $1.3 trillion, officials have often referred to an average per-vehicle savings of “over” $2,400 by eliminating greenhouse gas emissions standards. Zeldin gave this figure during the policy repeal announcement, and an agency fact sheet includes it.
In the announcement press conference, Trump also said that the repeal would “help bring car prices tumbling down dramatically. … You’re going to get a car that starts easier, a car that works better for a lot less money.”
But this figure, too, is not a net number and only captures the costs of the regulation, ignoring all benefits. The EPA’s estimate of $2,400 appears to comes from dividing the $1.1 trillion in reduced new vehicle costs by its estimated figure of how many new vehicles will be purchased.
As Gillingham told us, the savings “comes from fuel-saving technology not being installed. It definitely would not be reducing the price of a car by $2,400. It would mean that cars would not increase in price as quickly and that car buyers would lose out on a lot of fuel savings.”
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The post EPA’s Misleading Claim of $1.3 Trillion in Deregulatory ‘Savings’ appeared first on FactCheck.org.
Authorities are investigating a shooting at a Veterans Affairs clinic in Jasper, Georgia, where police say a suspected gunman was shot and killed by officers after reports of gunfire at the facility.
Progressive and green groups join call for tax on major fossil-fuel companies to help offset rising living costs
With big oil companies poised to reap billions of dollars in profits from the war in Iran, Democratic lawmakers and progressive groups are calling for a windfall tax on major fossil fuel companies.
The US-Israeli strikes on Iran have triggered the largest ever disruption to fuel supply, according to the International Energy Agency, sending crude costs surging over $100 per barrel in recent days. Those high prices have hit US pocketbooks, with average domestic gas prices topping $3.70 a gallon, and Americans spending more than an additional $2bn to fill their tanks in the past fortnight according to one estimate.
Continue reading...  | Just interested in conversating about what the community thinks a non-profit local group is expected to maintain? I started Onewheel AZ shortly after I received my pre-order XR. I wanted to build a local community to explore trails, and rides, bring people together with a shared interest, and have fun. I've tried to be considerate throughout and believe I have built a great foundation for the community to grow with. My question is: What level of activity is required for a group to be considered active? From my perspective, the community is now self-sustaining. Foundational rules and attitudes have been used, and trolling attitudes get handled, so everyone feels as inclusive as possible. I have a family and don't get paid to run a community, and share hours of my time, weekly for many years, moderating and keeping trolls at bay. We do event rides ( like Halloween ), trick clinics, anniversary rides, stoke racers for events like Let It Ride, get sponsors to donate and share products, run the Underground racing scene, and have smaller impromptu trail rides with anyone stoked enough to go out and have fun while possibly pushing their limits. Overall, I am proud of what we have been doing for over 8 years, but I still feel like: If I am not doing weekly rides and hand-teaching every rider in AZ, I am not doing well enough or letting the community down. No one says that, but it's just this feeling of disappointment I have because I can't be everything for everyone, all the time. What do you think? [link] [comments] |
Joe Kent, a close aide to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, cited deliberate Israeli “misinformation” and lies to President Donald Trump about a “swift path to victory.”
Leaks reveal that Anker's new Liberty 5 Pro and Pro Max earbuds will feature an in-house-developed AI chip called the Anker Thus.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pulled the covers back a bit on the GPU giant’s roadmap during his keynote at the GTC show this week. Nvidia plans to build a host of new chips to address insatiable demand for compute, including new GPUs, CPUs, LPUs, and DPUs. The company is also making a big push into silicon optics, including to build a scale-up NVLink system with more than 1,000 GPUs.
The chips, racks, and systems are flying out of Nvidia these days as the AI boom continues to build. Yesterday the GPU giant revealed the seven new chips at GTC, which includes the Rubin GPU, the Vera CPU, a Groq language processing unit (LPU), BlueField-4 data processing units (DPUs), NVLink 6 Switch, ConnectX-9 SuperNICs, and SpectrumX Photonics, a co-packaged optics (CPO) Ethernet switch unveiled at GTC25. It also revealed new NVL systems, a slew of new MGX racks for Vera, Groq, and DPUs, as well as a new supercomputer that combines various Nvidia MGX racks in a Pod configuration.
But over the next two years, Nvidia will roll out a slew of new chips, systems, and MGX rack systems. Huang shared during his GTC keynote. For starters, Nvidia plans to roll out Rubin Ultra later this year. We’ll also see another Groq LPU chip, the LP35, which is designed for low-precision 4-bit NVFP4 AI workloads.
Feynman, which is the next generation of Nvidia’s GPU, will debut in 2028 and feature die stacking and a custom HBM, Huang said. Nvidia is also developing a version of the Groq LPU that plugs into NVLink, the LP40. The follow-on to the Vera CPU will be called Rosa. There’s also a BlueField-5 DPU in the works and CX10 SuperNIC.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang shared this roadmap during his keynote at GTC26
In 2028, we’ll also see NVLink8 CPO, a co-packaged optic ASIC that brings silicon photonics to Nvidia’s scale-up NVLink interconnect. We’ll also see Spectrum7 204T, the next version of its CPO switch for scale-out Ethernet deployments.
Huang is fond of saying that Nvidia is not a GPU company, but an AI factory company. To that end, the company is rolling out new racks, including NVL72 based on the Vera Rubin superchip. With the launch of Rubin Ultra, we’ll also see an NVL576 “Oberon” system, which combines “eight separate MGX NVL racks, each with 72 Rubin Ultra GPUs, all in a single 576-GPU NVLink domain with copper and direct optical connections,” the company said in a blog post this week. Nvidia is demonstrating this NVL576 Oberon system with Polyphe, a prototype of a GB200 multi-rack NLV576 system (see feature image above).
Nvidia also touted the MGX NVL, which are new “Oberon” generation racks designed to provide scale-up capability based on its NVL interconnect. It’s also launching MGX ETL racks, which provide scale-up racks in the MGX form-factor but featuring a Spectrum-X Ethernet spine (or a direct chip-to-chip spine).
Nvidia Kyber NVL1152 (Image courtesy Nvidia)
Nvidia is in the process of moving to the next-generation “Kyber” systems as the follow-on to Oberon. Kyber will first be introduced with Vera Rubin Ultra as a standalone NVL144 system, and eventually it will provide customers with three options for Vera Rubin Ultra NVLink scale-up domains, including NVL72, NVL144, and the flagship NVL576.
Eventually Nvidia will take it all up a notch with Kyber NVL1152, which is “the next-generation MGX NVL rack design that will double the NVLink domain per rack to fit 144 GPUs,” Nvidia said in its blog. “Kyber will scale up into a massive all-to-all NVL1152 supercomputer using similar direct optical interconnects for rack-to-rack scale-up.”
Silicon photonics looms heavy over the computer industry, which is rapidly awakening to the realization that the physical limits of copper will soon be reached, if they haven’t already. While copper-based electrical connections have taken us very far, copper has limits when it comes to speed, latency, reach, and energy. The benefits of silicon photonics have long been known, but the costs and complexity were typically too high to justify using it.
Nvidia is already in production with Spectrum-X Photonics, which is co-packaged optics (CPO) Ethernet switch unveiled at GTC25 that connects GPUs and memory over glass strands with up to 400 Tb per second of throughput in a scale-out manner. The company also announced the Quantum-X Photonics InfiniBand switch, which delivers up to 800 Tb per second of scale-out throughput using its proprietary scale-out interconnect.
Nvidia Quantum-X (left) and Spectrum-X photonics chips (Image courtesy Nvidia)
Nvidia invested $4 billion in a pair of silicon photonics companies two weeks ago, including Lumentum and Coherent. It also has investments in other silicon photonics outfits, including Scintil Photonics, among others.
Nvidia is moving forward with a strategy of supporting copper and silicon photonics, for both scale-up and scale-out connections, Huang said in his GTC keynote.
“A lot of people have been asking, Jensen, is copper going to still be important? The answer is yes,” he said. “Jensen are you going to scale up optical? Yes. Are you going to scale out optical? Yes. And so for everybody who’s in our ecosystem, we need a lot more capacity. And that’s really the key. We need a lot more capacity for copper. We need a lot more capacity for optics. We need a lot more capacity for CPO.”
The post Huang Shares Nvidia Roadmap Showing More Chips, NVL1152, Scale-Up CPO appeared first on HPCwire.
The 10-inch device cost nearly $3,000 and will no longer be available to buy in the US or South Korea.
The complaint includes 20 separate counts against Kalshi, claiming the company accepted bets from Arizona residents in violation of state law.
Israel says it killed Iran's top security official Ali Larijani, as America's European allies reject President Trump's demands for help in the Strait of Hormuz.
The State Department order to review security at “ALL posts worldwide” follows persistent attacks on U.S. embassies, with almost 300 reported in Iraq alone.
Ali Larijani, Iran’s lead security official, and Basij commander Gholamreza Soleimani were “eliminated,” Israel said. Iran has not commented on the strikes.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: A battle of insults and threats has broken out between the tech world and Wall Street. What's got everyone so worked up? The same thing that starts most fights: business software. A series of social-media posts went viral in recent days with claims that AI has created a worthy -- and way cheaper -- alternative to the Bloomberg terminal, a computer system that is like oxygen to professional investors. Now "Bloomberg is cooked," some posters argued as they heralded the arrival of a newly released AI tool from startup Perplexity. [...] The finance bros who worship at the altar of Bloomberg have declared war on the tech evangelists who have put all their faith in AI. To suggest that the terminal is replaceable is "laughable," said Jason Lemire, who jumped into the conversation on LinkedIn. (Ironically or not, his post also included an AI-generated image of churchgoers praying to the Bloomberg terminal). "It seems quite obvious to me that those propagating that post are either just looking for easy engagement and/or have never worked in a serious financial institution," he wrote. [...] Morgan Linton, the co-founder and CTO of AI startup Bold Metrics and an avid Perplexity Computer user, said it's rare for a single AI prompt to generate anything close to what Bloomberg does. That said, he added that tools like this can lay "a really good foundation for a financial application. And that really has not been possible before." Others aren't so sure. Michael Terry, an institutional investment manager who used the terminal for more than 30 years, said he used a prompt circulating online to try to vibe code a Bloomberg replica on Anthropic's Claude. "It was laughable at best, horrific at worst," he said. Shevelenko acknowledged there are some aspects of the terminal that can't be replicated with vibe coding, including some of Bloomberg's proprietary data inputs. The live chat network, which includes 350,000 financial professionals in 184 countries, would also be hard to re-create, as well as the terminal's data security, reliability and robust support system. "I love Bloomberg. And I know most people that use Bloomberg are very, very loyal and extremely happy," said Lemire. His message to the techies? "There's nothing that you can vibe code in a weekend or even like over the course of a year that's going to come anywhere close."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Russian billionaire accused of missing ‘last chance’ to release money to help victims of Ukraine war
UK officials are preparing for a possible court case against Roman Abramovich after he missed a deadline to release £2.4bn he raised from selling Chelsea FC.
The Russian billionaire failed to hand over the money by the deadline of 17 March, amid a dispute over how it will eventually be used.
Continue reading...Union says claims involving young women and minors are serious enough to halt annual tributes and open an inquiry
The United Farm Workers union has cancelled celebrations honoring Cesar Chavez, the organization’s co-founder, following “troubling allegations” that Chavez was involved in the abuse of young women or minors.
“We have not received any direct reports, and we do not have any firsthand knowledge of these allegations,” the UFW said in a statement on Tuesday. “However, the allegations are serious enough that we feel compelled to take urgent steps to learn more and provide space for people who may have been victimized to find support and to share their stories if that is what they choose.”
Continue reading...Airport security professionals just missed their first paychecks due to the ongoing partial US government shutdown.
Gold IRA minimums can vary widely by provider. Here's what investors should understand before opening an account.
Supplies becoming sparse amid rise in demand since Kent outbreak, which has killed two and left 13 seriously ill
Worried parents are contacting pharmacies in an “increasingly desperate” effort to get their children vaccinated against meningitis after the outbreak in Kent that has killed two young people and left 13 seriously ill.
The surge in demand has led to stocks of the vaccine running so low that many pharmacies cannot get hold of supplies from wholesalers.
Continue reading...The retailer also announced a limited-time trade-in bonus on the consoles and other older gaming equipment.
What’s goin on, I’m in the Fayetteville NC area and was wondering if there’s any local places in NC that do tire replacements. I was going to do the replacement through the onewheel website, but I’m military and still haven’t been provided with a permanent address so shipping is a little wonky. Also, I think there’s gotta be a cheaper way to do it… any suggestions/referrals are appreciated!
Vaccination programme to be launched on Canterbury campus as strain B of disease identified in fatal outbreak
Students in Kent are to be offered a targeted vaccination against meningitis B after two more cases in the deadly outbreak were confirmed and pharmacies ran out of vaccine doses.
Government scientists have said two people who died in the outbreak had bacterial strain B of the disease, for which most people have not been vaccinated.
Continue reading...Ukraine’s president says mass attacks on civilians are no longer the preserve of a ‘madman like Putin’
European nations should prepare for attacks by non-state actors including criminal networks, terror groups and lone attackers as drone technology advances, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned.
The Ukrainian president said it was no longer just “a wealthy madman like Putin” who could afford mass attacks as he demonstrated the latest technology to British MPs and peers.
Continue reading...  | Here we go, after about 30mi the thunder tire is broken in. Not too bad. Hit some sand and it skid way too easily, but its not as terrible as people say. (I’m biased, the GT 6.5” hub and tire was terrible so even the Thunder is better!) Looking forward to cruising on this bad boy! [link] [comments] |
Experts say Nigel Farage’s party is not being transparent about how it will use data it collects on people’s voting habits
Reform UK risks breaching data protection laws with its competition to win free energy bills for a year, lawyers and data experts have warned.
Nigel Farage announced the lottery on Tuesday as a way to advertise his latest policy to cut energy bills. The Reform leader encouraged British people to sign up via a website for a chance to have their energy bills paid for a year, as well as those of their entire street.
Continue reading...Many Americans feel like they live in a "hamster wheel economy," said one expert who studies economic security.
Tory leader says US president’s words ‘completely wrong’ as she tries to distance herself from his war on Iran
Kemi Badenoch has called Donald Trump’s repeated criticisms of Keir Starmer “childish”, as the Conservative leader continued her recent moves to distance herself from the US president and his military action against Iran.
Speaking shortly before Trump yet again singled out Starmer for condemnation to say the prime minister had not been sufficiently supportive of the US war, Badenoch used a social media video to describe Trump’s actions as counterproductive.
Continue reading...Pipeline, closed since 2015 after huge oil spill, reopens after president cites need to boost US supply amid war on Iran
Oil has begun to flow from a controversial California pipeline system for the first time in an more than decade following a Trump administration order, despite state officials decrying the move.
Sable Offshore Corporation, the Houston-based owner of the coastal pipelines, announced on Monday that offshore oil was now flowing through its Santa Ynez unit and Santa Ynez pipeline system, which runs through several California counties.
Continue reading...Gio Reyna is in the squad for friendlies against Belgium and Portugal, while top prospect Noahkai Banks hasn’t yet decided if he’ll represent the US or Germany
Mauricio Pochettino made clear Tuesday that his 27-man squad is not a carbon copy of his expected roster for the 2026 World Cup. There will be cuts and corresponding recalls made from the roster for the friendlies against Belgium and Portugal at the end of the month in Atlanta.
The latest roster includes four goalkeepers and 10 changes from the squad that notched impressive wins over Uruguay and Paraguay in November. Ultimately, the US men’s national team boss is trying to complete his assessments of several players, whether they’re mainstays at their clubs or struggling to see the field often enough for his liking.
Continue reading...National power outage is making life extremely difficult and may force Havana into biggest economic changes in 67 years
Just a few hours after a nationwide electricity blackout struck Cuba, Donald Trump hinted at an even darker future for the island’s rulers.
The country’s entire electricity system had collapsed on Monday afternoon, leaving about 10 million people without power. Emergency teams were still struggling to restore it when the US leader made his latest threat.
Continue reading...Amid escalation of Middle East crisis, US president describes rejection of call for help as a ‘foolish mistake’
Donald Trump has said the US does not need Nato after being rebuffed by a number of the organisation’s member countries over his appeal for a multinational naval force to reopen the key strait of Hormuz trade route closed by Iran.
Speaking to reporters from the Oval Office, the US president described the rejection of his calls as a “very foolish mistake”, adding without evidence: “Everyone agrees with us, but they don’t want to help. And we, you know, we as the United States have to remember that because we think it’s pretty shocking.”
Continue reading...An NWS office posted video of the meteor shooting across the sky, but says no report of debris found as it likely burned
A meteor over Ohio caused a large boom that jolted people as far away as Pennsylvania on Tuesday morning, according to the National Weather Service (NWS) and reports.
The meteor entered the atmosphere at about 9am local time on Tuesday, producing a sonic boom felt across a wide swath of northern Ohio and beyond. Reports poured in from Cleveland and other sectors as far east as Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and into New York state.
Continue reading...Clare Dupree, 48, who had severe mental illness, died after using a vape to start blaze at prison in Gloucestershire
There were “missed opportunities” that could have prevented the death of a woman with severe mental illness from “sustained inhalation of smoke” after a fire in her prison cell, an inquest has found.
Clare Dupree, 48, from Cardiff, died after she used a vape to start a fire at HMP Eastwood Park in Gloucestershire just after Christmas 2022.
Continue reading...Samsung is reportedly ending sales of the Galaxy Z TriFold just months after launch, likely due to "high production costs" and limited supply. 9to5Google reports: The Galaxy Z TriFold launched in South Korea barely four months ago, arriving in Samsung's home market ahead of a larger debut in the U.S. and other markets in January. The $2,899 smartphone brought an entirely new form factor to the foldable market, but it's apparently very short-lived. Korean media reports (via SamMobile) that Samsung is planning to end sales of the Galaxy Z TriFold in Korea, with one more restock coming in the country this week. In the United States, the report mentions that the TriFold will be available until "the current production volume is sold out," which sounds like we might only get another restock or two here as well.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Brent crude price climbs as operations suspended at Shah gasfield in UAE after Iranian strike
Oil and gas prices rose again on Tuesday after Iran carried out attacks on production facilities for the first time since the start of the war with the US and Israel.
Brent crude, the international benchmark oil price, climbed 2.3% to almost $103 (£77) a barrel and was up nearly 50% from levels before the war began on 28 February. Wholesale gas prices rose nearly 3% to €52 (£45) a megawatt hour, compared with about €30 before the war.
Continue reading...
The Trump administration is on its way to creating every authoritarian’s dream: a centralized database containing intimate details about every resident of this country, fully searchable by artificial intelligence. This powerful tool would empower the government to conduct previously unimagined levels of surveillance and harassment against its own people.
Freedom of the Press Foundation is suing the administration for documents behind the database. We know that this isn’t just something that the Trump administration would exploit; once built, it’s unlikely any administration could resist the urge to weaponize our personal information.
This nightmare privacy scenario began one year ago, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order that expanded data sharing across the federal government. The administration touted the order, “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos,” as a way to target fraud within a supposedly bloated government.
The order was no such thing.
Instead, it took a machete to long-standing privacy protections that mandate agencies can only share our data when absolutely necessary, to install a massive data-mining operation in their place.
To do so, Trump’s executive order required agency heads to submit reports to the Office of Management and Budget on the following:
The public has never seen the reports agencies submitted by OMB, despite their impact on our privacy. However, thanks to intrepid reporting and litigation, we do have glimpses of how this is starting to play out:
But these incursions are only the tip of the iceberg.
Reports indicate the administration’s goal for dismantling privacy protections is to build a centralized national database, which would allow the administration to create detailed reports on every American, potentially for political purposes, including retaliation, harassment, and imprisonment.
At the same time this database is becoming a reality, the Department of Homeland Security is rapidly expanding its surveillance capabilities, and the administration is unleashing AI across federal systems to analyze the data points they are harvesting from our private lives.
Perhaps worst of all, by “eliminating information silos,” the administration is creating a single point of failure for the privacy of every American. A centralized database that compiles our most intimate information, from our health to our finances, doesn’t just make us vulnerable to government abuse; it creates a massive, singular target for hackers and foreign adversaries.
“‘Information silos’ aren’t an inefficiency. They are a bulwark against the exact kind of abuses and negligence the Trump administration has engaged in,” said Ginger Quintero-McCall, a public records attorney with the Free Information Group. “Preventing easy, frictionless, unaccountable access to troves of sensitive data isn’t a bug — it’s a feature.”
And while the Trump administration recklessly seeks and compiles our data, it has simultaneously stopped sharing its data with the public. Vital information about the climate, immigration, federal spending, and the economy has been pulled from public view.
The government is turning into a one-way mirror: They see everything, while we see nothing.
This is an untenable and anti-democratic information imbalance. To fight back, we need to fully understand just how badly our data and our privacy has been compromised. The agency reports submitted to the OMB are essential for this investigation — which is why Freedom of the Press Foundation is filing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against OMB for these records.
This suit will not only force the disclosure of these important documents, but it will also serve to remind the administration that the federal government is required to safeguard the personal data we entrust to it. It is not allowed to become a data-mining firm that leverages our information for political gain while hiding its work from the public.
As Kevin Bell, one of our counselors at Free Information Group, said, “This threat to Americans’ very right to an individual identity has never been so dire. The Trump administration is correlating each of its citizens’ with their transactions, emails, location tracking, missed car payments, online views or posts, and entire personal histories; the President has ordered the collection and free dissemination of every bit of data about every one of us held anywhere for any reason.”
The public deserves to see these documents. We intend to compel them to show us — and all Americans.
The post Trump Wants to Put You in a Massive, Secret Government Database appeared first on The Intercept.
Relations deteriorate as Gustavo Petro claims government of Trump ally Daniel Noboa bombing targets in Colombia
President Gustavo Petro has accused Ecuador of bombing targets inside Colombian territory, saying later that the burned remains of nearly 30 people had been found near the border, in a sharp deterioration in relations between the two neighbouring countries.
The Colombian leader said on Tuesday that an attack which had left “27 charred bodies” did not appear to have been carried out by Colombia’s own forces or any illegal armed groups which he said do not have armed planes.
Continue reading...The subpoena issued by GOP Rep. James Comer of Kentucky requires Bondi to appear for a deposition on April 14.
A medical examiner ruled Eric Richins, a Utah father of three, died of a lethal dose of fentanyl. His wife Kouri was charged in his death.
SAN JOSE, Calif., March 17, 2026 — HPE today announced the HPE AI Grid, an end-to-end solution built on the NVIDIA reference architecture to securely connect AI factories and distributed inference clusters across regional and far‑edge sites. The HPE AI Grid enables service providers to deploy and operate thousands of distributed inference sites, turning AI installations into a single intelligent system.
AI‑native applications require predictable, low‑latency, distributed infrastructure. The HPE AI Grid solution, part of NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE portfolio, delivers predictable, ultra‑low latency performance at scale for real‑time AI services, zero‑touch provisioning, and automated security with integrated orchestration.
“We’re redefining how AI is delivered by moving intelligence to where data and users live and making the network the dependable fabric for real-time experiences,” said Rami Rahim, executive vice president, president and general manager, Networking, HPE. “HPE AI Grid with NVIDIA gives service providers a secure, scalable way to operate distributed inference as a single system—delivering predictable, ultra-low latency performance so customers can innovate faster, reduce risk, and create new services.”
“An AI Grid unifies geographically distributed AI clusters to place AI workloads where they run best—balancing performance, cost, and latency across AI factories, regional sites, and the edge,” said Chris Penrose, global vice president, Telco, NVIDIA. “Together with HPE, we’re bringing that vision to life by combining NVIDIA’s accelerated computing and networking with HPE’s telco‑grade multicloud routing and edge infrastructure to create a single, intelligent fabric for distributed inference.”
HPE Delivers End-to-End AI Grid Solution That Speeds Time to Value for Deployment
The HPE AI Grid aligns with NVIDIA AI Grid reference architecture to provide a unified hardware and software stack for service providers. The HPE AI Grid is differentiated by HPE’s ability to offer full-stack AI servers and AI networks. The HPE AI Grid includes:
HPE AI Grid Creates New Opportunities for Service Providers
Service provider use cases—from retail personalization and predictive maintenance to edge healthcare and carrier‑grade AI services—demand predictable, ultra‑low latency connectivity. HPE AI Grid lets operators convert existing sites with power and connectivity into RAN‑ready AI grids, enabling distributed inference and new services at scale.
As part of advancing its AI grid strategy, Comcast announced today new AI field trials on its highly distributed network for real-time edge AI inferencing to unlock faster, more responsive experiences for the next wave of AI applications. The initial trials addressed several use cases, including leveraging HPE ProLiant servers running small language models from Personal AI, part of HPE’s Unleash AI parter program, on NVIDIA GPUs to deliver AI-powered “front desk” services for small businesses.
Industry Reactions to HPE AI Grid with NVIDIA
“HPE and NVIDIA have been strategic partners in building TELUS’ Sovereign AI Factory, Canada’s fastest and most powerful supercomputer, which is enabling researchers, businesses, and institutions to innovate at scale,” said Nazim Benhadid, Executive Vice-president and Chief Technology Officer, TELUS. “As TELUS looks to bring AI closer to customers, advance AI-powered network optimization and deliver faster service, HPE AI Grid powered by NVIDIA is a solution we are interested in exploring further as we continue our transformational AI journey.”
“Our customers increasingly expect millisecond responsiveness, low-latency connectivity and comprehensive security to support their applications and services,” said Neil McRae, CTIO at CityFibre. “We’re exploring how AI Grid from HPE, based on NVIDIA’s reference architecture, could support distributed AI inferencing and bring intelligence closer to users and data. By leveraging our fiber network assets, we see potential to combine high-performance connectivity with intelligent services for customers.”
HPE Financial Services Accelerates AI-Ready Networking and Distributed AI Infrastructure
To further accelerate adoption of AI‑ready networks and distributed AI infrastructure, HPE Financial Services is also extending its 0% financing on networking AIOps software including HPE Juniper Networking Mist, and its financing providing the equivalent of 10% cash savings on AI‑ready networking leases.
More from HPCwire: HPE Bolsters Server, Software Lineup for AI and HPC
About HPE
HPE (NYSE: HPE) is a leader in essential enterprise technology, bringing together the power of AI, cloud, and networking to help organizations achieve more. As pioneers of possibility, our innovation and expertise advance the way people live and work. We empower our customers across industries to optimize operational performance, transform data into foresight, and maximize their impact. Unlock your boldest ambitions with HPE. Discover more at www.hpe.com.
Source: HPE
The post HPE Launches AI Grid Built on NVIDIA Architecture for Distributed Inference at Scale appeared first on HPCwire.
Amazon is speeding deliveries, putting pressure on other retailers. Here's where 1- and 3-hour delivery options are available and how much the service costs.
The two-month offer expires at the end of March.
Senate Democrats sent counteroffer on Monday aimed at resolving budget standoff
Negotiations for Congress to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – which oversees airport security officers – remained ongoing as the airport in Atlanta, the world’s busiest, dealt with long security lines on Tuesday.
A White House official confirmed that Senate Democrats sent a counteroffer on Monday aimed at resolving a budget standoff that led to a DHS shutdown into its second month. A Trump administration official confirmed to the Guardian that the offer by Democrats was under review, though Republican lawmakers were quick to dismiss the proposal.
Continue reading...Moving $20,000 into a money market account this year could make sense. Here's how much interest you could earn.
"Their lives have been shattered," the filing says, by the creation and sharing of "sick, fetishized and unlawful images."
The Defense Department inspector general found Major General Antonio Aguto in separate incidents improperly handled classified documents and engaged in the "overindulgence of alcohol."
Family of then PM, Patrice Lumumba, welcome decision to charge Étienne Davignon as ‘beginning of a reckoning’
A former Belgian diplomat, 93, should stand trial over alleged complicity in the 1961 murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of what was then the newly independent Congolese state, a Brussels court has ruled.
Étienne Davignon, the only person still alive among 10 Belgians the Lumumba family accuses of involvement in the killing, is charged with participation in war crimes.
The illegal transfer of Lumumba and his associates from Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) to Katanga.
The “humiliating and degrading treatment” of the men.
Depriving them of a fair trial.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang threw out a lot of numbers -- mostly of the technical variety -- during his keynote Monday to kick off the company's annual GTC Conference in San Jose, California. But there was one financial figure that investors surely took notice of: his projection that there will be $1 trillion worth of orders for Nvidia's Blackwell and Vera Rubin chips, a monetary reflection of a booming AI business. About an hour into his keynote, Huang noted that last year Nvidia saw about $500 billion in demand for its Blackwell and upcoming Rubin chips through 2026. "Now, I don't know if you guys feel the same way, but $500 billion is an enormous amount of revenue," he said. "Well, I'm here to tell you that right now where I stand -- a few short months after GTC DC, one year after last GTC -- right here where I stand, I see through 2027, at least $1 trillion."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
SAN JOSE, Calif., March 17, 2026 — Cisco has announced a major expansion of its Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, giving customers a framework for deploying AI across their entire infrastructure – from central data center to local sites where data is created and decisions are made. Enterprises, neoclouds, sovereign clouds, and service providers can now move AI from pilot to full-scale production without stitching together disconnected systems, compressing deployment timelines from months to weeks and embedding security from the start.
“Most organizations understand the potential for AI to transform their businesses, but they’re navigating how to deploy the technology safely and at scale,” said Chuck Robbins, Chair and CEO, Cisco. “In partnership with NVIDIA, we’re solving that challenge with an architecture that sets a new standard for performance – making it simpler to deploy, operate, and secure AI infrastructure.”
“AI factories are transforming every industry, and security must be built into every layer—from silicon to software—to protect data, applications, and infrastructure,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Together, NVIDIA and Cisco are building the secure foundation for AI infrastructure—core to edge—so companies can scale intelligence with confidence.”
AI That Runs Everywhere, Not Just in the Data Center
AI inference happens where data lives and decisions can’t wait, whether on the hospital floor or for analyzing video of a factory floor in real-time to keep workers safe. This reality fundamentally reshapes infrastructure by requiring inference workloads to operate locally — closer to the data, the devices, and the moment a decision must be made. Cisco and NVIDIA are enabling organizations to support edge inferencing use cases by:
Driving Performance and Efficiency for Massive-Scale AI Factories
Building on the momentum of the recently launched systems powered by Cisco Silicon One G300 for scale-out and P200 for scale-across, Cisco continues to raise the performance ceiling while making the whole process faster and simpler.
Customers building large AI factories now have two validated paths to choose from: an AI factory based on a reference architecture compliant with the NVIDIA Cloud Partner (NCP) program, and a Cisco Cloud Reference Architecture built on Cisco Silicon One that adheres to the same design tenets.
Security Fused into Every Layer
In an era where AI models are high-value assets and agents are more autonomous, taking actions, making decisions and interacting with other agents – security can’t be an afterthought. Cisco is embedding protection into the fabric of the Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA to safeguard against both external threats and rogue agent behavior, including:
Cisco Secures Enterprise AI Agent Development
Building on Cisco’s commitment to fuse security into all layers of AI infrastructure, as well as the agentic workforce, Cisco also announced today that Cisco AI Defense will support and secure NVIDIA’s OpenShell runtimes – part of the NVIDIA Agent Toolkit – adding controls and guardrails to govern agent and claw actions. By continuously monitoring and validating every tool and action an agent performs, Cisco AI Defense ensures that enterprises can confidently deploy AI agents to manage critical workflows without compromising security. This integration bridges the gap between innovation and risk, allowing organizations to trust their autonomous systems to operate reliably and securely.
About Cisco
Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide technology leader revolutionizing the way organizations connect and protect in the AI era. For more than 40 years, Cisco has securely connected the world. With its industry-leading AI-powered solutions and services, Cisco enables its customers, partners, and communities to unlock innovation, enhance productivity, and strengthen digital resilience.
Source: Cisco
The post Cisco Expands Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA Across Core and Edge Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.
SAN JOSE, Calif., March 17, 2026 — NVIDIA has announced NVIDIA Dynamo 1.0, open source software for generative and agentic inference at scale, with widespread global adoption. Together with the NVIDIA Blackwell platform, Dynamo 1.0 enables cloud providers, AI innovators and global enterprises to deliver high-performance AI inference with unmatched scale, efficiency and speed.
Credit: Shutterstock
As agentic AI systems move into production across industries, scaling inference within a data center has become a complex challenge of resource orchestration, with requests of varying sizes and modalities, as well as performance objectives, arriving in unpredictable bursts.
Just as a computer’s operating system coordinates hardware and applications, Dynamo 1.0 functions as the distributed “operating system” of AI factories, seamlessly orchestrating GPU and memory resources across the cluster to power complex AI workloads. In recent industry benchmarks, Dynamo boosted the inference performance of NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs by up to 7x, lowering token cost and increasing revenue opportunity for millions of GPUs with free, open source software.
“Inference is the engine of intelligence, powering every query, every agent and every application,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “With NVIDIA Dynamo, we’ve created the first-ever ‘operating system’ for AI factories. The rapid adoption across our ecosystem shows this next wave of agentic AI is here, and NVIDIA is powering it at global scale.”
Dynamo 1.0 splits inference work across GPUs by adding smarter “traffic control” and the ability to move data between GPUs and lower-cost storage, reducing wasted work and easing memory limits. For agentic AI and long prompts, it can route requests to GPUs that already have the most relevant “short-term memory” from earlier steps, then offload that memory when it is not needed.
NVIDIA Inference Platform Gains Momentum
NVIDIA is accelerating the open source ecosystem by integrating Dynamo and NVIDIA TensorRT
-LLM library optimizations into popular frameworks from providers such as LangChain, llm-d, LMCache, SGLang, vLLM and more. Core Dynamo building blocks like KVBM for smarter memory management, NVIDIA NIXL for fast GPU-to-GPU data movement and NVIDIA Grove for simplified scaling are also available as standalone modules. NVIDIA also contributes TensorRT-LLM CUDA® kernels to the FlashInfer project so they can be natively integrated into open source frameworks.
The NVIDIA inference platform is supported across the AI ecosystem, including:
Chen Goldberg, executive vice president of product and engineering at CoreWeave, said: “As AI moves from experimental pilots to continuous, large-scale production, the underlying infrastructure must be as dynamic as the models it supports. Supporting NVIDIA Dynamo allows us to offer a more seamless, resilient environment for deploying complex AI agents. This foundation provides the durability and high-performance orchestration required to move the industry’s most ambitious agentic workloads into global production.”
Danila Shtan, chief technology officer of Nebius, said: “Delivering reliable AI inference at scale isn’t just about powerful GPUs, it’s about the software that turns that performance into real customer outcomes. We value how NVIDIA’s software stack, from Dynamo to TensorRT-LLM, brings deep optimization, predictable performance and faster time to deployment, helping us offer customers a simpler, higher-performance path to production AI.”
Matt Madrigal, chief technology officer of Pinterest, said: “Delivering an intuitive, multimodal AI experience to hundreds of millions of users requires real-time intelligence at global scale. As a significant adopter in open source, we’re committed to building scalable AI technologies. With NVIDIA Dynamo optimizing our deployment, we’re expanding the seamless and personalized experiences we deliver, powered by high-performance AI infrastructure.”
Vipul Ved Prakash, cofounder and CEO of Together AI, said: “AI natives require inference that can reliably and efficiently scale with their application. NVIDIA Dynamo 1.0, combined with cutting-edge inference research from Together AI, helps us deliver a high-performance stack to offer accelerated, cost-effective inference for large-scale production workloads.”
Dynamo 1.0 is available today to developers worldwide. To learn more and get started, read the blog and visit the Dynamo webpage.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in AI and accelerated computing.
Source: NVIDIA
The post NVIDIA Enters Production with Dynamo, the Broadly Adopted Inference Operating System for AI Factories appeared first on HPCwire.
BOULDER, Colo., March 17, 2026 — Atom Computing has announced the successful integration of NVIDIA NVQLink – a low latency, high-bandwidth communication interface – into Atom Computing’s proprietary control-systems stack. With NVQLink’s ultra-low-latency data pathways, the company is unlocking new performance thresholds essential for next-generation quantum information processing. This enhanced architecture enables accelerated scaling of Atom Computing’s high-performance logical-qubit systems while increasing logical cycle speeds.
As part of the development effort, Atom Computing’s team successfully implemented a fully integrated, end-to-end NVQLink workflow and completed comprehensive latency measurements validating the advantages of this architecture. These results demonstrate NVQLink as a promising technology for the company’s scaling strategy.
“Integration of NVIDIA NVQLink provides a boost to the speed and scalability of our quantum systems, strengthening our path toward utility-scale performance,” said Dr. Ben Bloom, CEO and Founder of Atom Computing. “We’re excited for the breakthroughs this architecture will enable as we advance the frontier of quantum computing.”
With NVQLink, Atom Computing will continue to pursue major advances in system scale, control fidelity, and quantum-error-correction throughput, including:
By adopting state-of-the-art technologies such as NVQLink into its QPU stack, Atom Computing continues to push the boundaries of practical quantum computation. These efforts directly support the company’s mission to build and deliver utility-scale quantum computers, a mission highlighted by its Stage B participation in the DARPA Quantum Benchmarking Initiative.
About Atom Computing
Atom Computing is developing large-scale quantum computers to enable companies and researchers to achieve unprecedented computational breakthroughs. Utilizing highly scalable arrays of optically trapped neutral atoms, the company has developed systems with over 1,000 qubits, featuring advanced capabilities towards fault-tolerant quantum computing. Atom Computing’s on-premises systems provide customers with new computational tools and logical qubit capabilities to address increasingly complex applications and to grow their quantum ecosystem. QuNorth, a Nordic quantum initiative funded by EIFO and Novo Nordisk Foundation, recently announced the purchase of Atom Computing’s on-premises system. The system, to be named ‘Magne’, will be installed and brought online in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Source: Atom Computing
The post Atom Computing Integrates NVIDIA NVQLink to Accelerate Scaling of Its Quantum Computers appeared first on HPCwire.
SAN JOSE, Calif., March 17, 2026 – Supermicro, Inc. today unveiled one of the industry’s first context memory (CMX) storage server as part of NVIDIA STX reference architecture announced NVIDIA GTC 2026. STX is a new modular reference architecture from NVIDIA which is designed to accelerate the full lifecycle of AI.
“Supermicro continues to be first to market with new rack scale architectures designed to exceed the needs of a rapidly evolving AI Factory customer base,” said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. “Building upon last year’s introduction of the Petascale JBOF (Just a Bunch of Flash), where we proved the feasibility of a JBOF powered by NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs, we have developed the CMX storage server. Our prototype of the latest storage architecture demonstrates the level of our collaboration with NVIDIA, and our commitment to be first-to-market with game changing technologies.”
For more information about the new Supermicro storage server built on the NVIDIA STX reference architecture please visit: www.supermicro.com/en/solutions/ai-storage.
Leveraging the STX architecture, the CMX server is designed to address the challenge of long-lived AI queries and multi-stage chain-of-thought agentic workloads, which require the prior and intermediate tokens associated with the user’s query to be accessed. This solution both accelerates the results and reduces the power which would otherwise be required to recompute the results when the local storage required for the tokens is exceeded. This storage of tokens, called Key Value (KV) cache, is managed by NVIDIA Dynamo, NVIDIA’s inference orchestration layer.
As the STX solution comes to market, Supermicro will be working with these software partners and others on porting and validation. Additionally, Supermicro long-standing relationships with leading SSD providers such as Micron, Samsung, Phison, and others will enable testing for the specific STX architecture requirements.
At GTC 2026, Supermicro also announced seven AI Data Platform solutions based on the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPU with NVIDIA and storage partners such as Cloudian, DDN, Everpure (formerly Pure Storage), IBM, Nutanix, VAST Data, and WEKA. The AI Data Platform enables enterprises to process their data for AI workloads. The CMX server is being shown in Supermicro booth #1113, and at the NVIDIA exhibit, at the NVIDIA GTC 2026 March 16-19.
About Super Micro Computer, Inc.
Supermicro (NASDAQ: SMCI) is a global leader in Application-Optimized Total IT Solutions. Founded and operating in San Jose, California, Supermicro is committed to delivering first-to-market innovation for Enterprise, Cloud, AI, and 5G Telco/Edge IT Infrastructure. We are a Total IT Solutions provider with server, AI, storage, IoT, switch systems, software, and support services. Supermicro’s motherboard, power, and chassis design expertise further enables our development and production, enabling next-generation innovation from cloud to edge for our global customers. Our products are designed and manufactured in-house (in the US, Taiwan, and the Netherlands), leveraging global operations for scale and efficiency and optimized to improve TCO and reduce environmental impact (Green Computing). The award-winning portfolio of Server Building Block Solutions allows customers to optimize for their exact workload and application by selecting from a broad family of systems built from our flexible and reusable building blocks that support a comprehensive set of form factors, processors, memory, GPUs, storage, networking, power, and cooling solutions (air-conditioned, free air cooling or liquid cooling).
Source: Supermicro
The post Supermicro Unveils NVIDIA BlueField-4 STX Storage Server to Improve AI Inference Performance appeared first on HPCwire.
Debt collectors have limits under federal law and there are certain behaviors that cross the line into harassment.
Prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre says files show sex offender’s connection to those in ‘trusted and central positions’
The Norwegian parliament has voted unanimously to appoint an independent investigative commission to look into connections between its foreign office and the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaking before the vote on Tuesday, the prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, paid tribute to Epstein’s victims and said that the files released by the US Department of Justice had clearly shown “it is possible to buy and abuse influence if you are rich enough”.
Continue reading...Kalshi calls Arizona’s case ‘paper-thin’ and says the platform should not be overseen by ‘inconsistent state laws’
Arizona’s attorney general on Tuesday filed criminal charges against Kalshi, accusing the prediction markets platform of operating an illegal gambling business in the state and unlawfully allowing people to place bets on elections.
The charges filed by Kris Mayes, the Arizona attorney general, marked the first time a state has pursued a criminal case against Kalshi, which has been at the center of an escalating battle over the ability of state gaming regulators to police prediction markets operators.
Continue reading...President Trump has slammed the Supreme Court justices who voted to strike down most of his tariffs, claiming they "openly disrespect the Presidents who nominate them."
SAN JOSE, Calif., March 17, 2026 — CoreWeave, Inc. has announced an expansion of its purpose-built AI cloud platform at NVIDIA’s GTC conference. The expansion brings NVIDIA HGX B300 to the CoreWeave Cloud, unlocking a new generation of performance for AI workloads, alongside new Weights & Biases capabilities that streamline reinforcement learning (RL) and agent development workflows.
NVIDIA HGX B300, now generally available on CoreWeave.
As the industry shifts from large-scale training to iterative RL, infrastructure requirements are rapidly evolving. By combining the latest hardware with CoreWeave’s AI optimized cloud services and advanced development workflows, CoreWeave is closing the gap between training and production to support the next generation of self-improving agents and physical AI workloads.
“The next phase of AI is being defined by how efficiently AI systems can run and scale in production,” said Michael Intrator, CEO, co-founder, and chairman at CoreWeave. “By pairing the massive compute power of NVIDIA’s latest hardware with CoreWeave’s cloud services, we’re enabling enterprises to build and refine autonomous agents faster and more reliably than ever before. This expansion reinforces our position as the essential partner for any organization navigating the complexities of frontier-scale AI.”
“The era of AI is shifting from training models to operating agents at scale,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO, NVIDIA. “CoreWeave is a world-class new generation AI-Native cloud. We are thrilled to partner with them to build out NVIDIA computing infrastructure to power the world’s AI.”
Purpose-Built for Agentic AI: NVIDIA HGX B300
CoreWeave Cloud unlocks NVIDIA HGX B300 performance at scale, marking a major step forward for frontier and agentic workloads. With the general availability of NVIDIA HGX B300, part of the NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra platform, customers will have access to:
“We’ve already run production workloads with CoreWeave on NVIDIA HGX B200, and that experience built real confidence in their ability to operate at scale,” said Aman Sanger, Co-Founder of Cursor, an AI-powered code editor. “We’re focused on collaborating with companies who deliver predictable performance, operational reliability, and ongoing support as our requirements evolve. As we move toward HGX B300, that proven operating model gives us confidence to focus on building more capable AI code generation systems rather than infrastructure risk.”
CoreWeave also expects to be among the first cloud providers to deploy the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 platform and NVIDIA Vera CPU rack in production in the second half of 2026. This expansion will further support large-scale inference, reasoning, and the most demanding agentic AI applications.
Direct “On-the-Job” Training for Agents with Environment-Free RL
RL is the most effective method for post-training LLMs on agentic tasks, but it traditionally requires costly, time-consuming, and difficult-to-model simulated environments. Weights & Biases now addresses this with environment-free training in its Serverless RL offering, eliminating the need to build simulated environments, and allowing agents to learn through continual “on-the-job” training.
Production Agent Evaluations Accelerate Agent Development
Research evaluations often rely on limited datasets and synthetic scenarios, leaving agents unprepared for real-world production. This gap makes it difficult to feed production insights back into the research loop, slowing time-to-market and resulting in agents that fail to meet expectations.
Production agent evaluations in W&B Weave close that gap, connecting research and production, enabling teams to learn from real user interactions. It automatically detects production failure modes, alerts researchers, and feeds insights back to improve evaluation datasets and accelerate iteration. By closing this loop, W&B Weave helps teams ship more reliable agents faster.
Accelerating Robotics AI Development
W&B Models now allows robotics and embodied AI customers to track, compare, and reproduce multimodal experiments faster. Teams can log training metrics, simulation outputs, and video in a single workspace, and use a new comparison panel to evaluate up to four images or videos side-by-side. In collaboration with NVIDIA, Weights & Biases is releasing two blueprints for scalable training of RL and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models using NVIDIA Isaac Lab simulations. These blueprints outline a full-stack workflow to help teams quickly start training and fine-tuning embodied AI models.
Monitor Training Anywhere With the First Weights & Biases Mobile App
To enable AI pioneers to manage these massive production runs from anywhere, CoreWeave introduced the first iOS app designed specifically for AI model development. The Weights & Biases iOS app provides a mobile-first experience to track training runs in real time, allowing researchers to spot issues early and make confident decisions without being tethered to a desktop.
CoreWeave’s AI cloud delivers industry-leading performance and efficiency through an end-to-end technology stack optimized for AI workloads. It has achieved top MLPerf benchmark for AI workloads, Platinum rankings in both SemiAnalysis ClusterMAX 1.0 and 2.0, and NVIDIA Exemplar Cloud validation for training and inference on GB200 NVL72. Visit us at booth #913 at NVIDIA GTC to learn more about today’s announcements.
About CoreWeave
CoreWeave is The Essential Cloud for AI. Built for pioneers by pioneers, CoreWeave delivers a platform of technology, tools, and teams that enables innovators to move at the pace of innovation, building and scaling AI with confidence. Established in 2017, CoreWeave completed its public listing on Nasdaq (CRWV) in March 2025. Learn more at www.coreweave.com.
Source: CoreWeave
The post CoreWeave Advances AI-Native Cloud Platform for the Next Phase of Production-Scale AI appeared first on HPCwire.
SAN JOSE, Calif., March 17, 2026 — DDN has launched two new IndustrySync Pipelines. The pipelines – validated, industry-specific AI blueprints, initially available in the Financial Services and Life Sciences verticals – can be deployed on existing customer infrastructure in days rather than months. The pipelines are aligned to industry-specific business outcomes, running seamlessly on DDN and NVIDIA’s validated, fully orchestrated technology stack.
IndustrySync Pipelines are pre-integrated, production-validated workflows that are available immediately for DDN Enterprise AI HyperPOD deployments, with available expansion to NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD & NVIDIA HGX environments, as well as sovereign AI factories. Each pipeline is designed as a flexible, extensible foundation — built to adapt to your specific environment, data, and workflows.
“Enterprises are not limited by AI models—they are limited by how quickly they can operationalize AI infrastructure and data to achieve the promise of AI-assisted business outcomes,” said Alex Bouzari, CEO and Co-Founder at DDN. “IndustrySync Pipelines provide a validated path from experimentation to production AI in a matter of days, so every enterprise can move from experimenting with AI to running it in an accelerated manner.”
“Supermicro has collaborated closely with DDN and NVIDIA on developing the HyperPOD, an AI Data Platform solution which combines GPU-accelerated compute with DDN’s data platform software,” said Vik Malyala, President & Managing Director EMEA, SVP Technology & AI, Supermicro. “The integrated HyperPOD solution using Supermicro servers with the IndustrySync solutions are a perfect complement to provide ready-to-run industry-specific AI solutions for these and future workflows.”
IndustrySync Financial Services Pipeline
The DDN IndustrySync Financial Services (FSI) Pipeline enables financial institutions to operationalize AI-driven risk intelligence at market speed, transforming how capital is modeled, managed, and optimized.
Business Outcomes
By eliminating infrastructure complexity and performance bottlenecks, IndustrySync allows institutions to focus on what drives competitive advantage: faster decisions, improved capital efficiency, and measurable shareholder value.
IndustrySync Life Sciences Pipeline
The DDN IndustrySync Life Sciences Pipeline is a production-ready blueprint, built on NVIDIA industry reference architectures and integrated with NVIDIA BioNeMo, enabling research institutions to operationalize AI-driven drug discovery at scale.
Research & Business Impact
Operational Advantages
By removing infrastructure complexity and enabling predictable, high-performance execution, IndustrySync allows researchers to focus on accelerating scientific breakthroughs rather than managing systems.
Expanding Industry AI Deployment
DDN plans to expand IndustrySync Pipelines throughout 2026 with additional industry workflows, including expanded financial services use cases and intelligent video and surveillance pipelines.
“Enterprises are not limited by AI models, they are limited by how quickly they can operationalize data and infrastructure,” said Alex Bouzari, CEO and Co-Founder at DDN. “IndustrySync Pipelines provide a validated path from experimentation to production AI, so every enterprise can move from experimenting with AI to running it.”
Early Adopter Program now open: Apply today. To accelerate customer adoption, DDN is launching a 90-day IndustrySync Financial Services Early Adopter Program, allowing select institutions to deploy and evaluate the pipeline in their own environments ahead of general availability. Participants receive:
Applications are now open at ddn.com/financial-ai-pipeline. Availability is limited. Visit the DDN Booth #1621 at GTC.
More from HPCwire
About DDN
DDN is the world’s leading AI and data intelligence company, powering the world’s most demanding AI workloads by keeping GPUs fed, efficient, and productive—at massive scale—so organizations can train, checkpoint, and infer faster with less footprint and power while achieving tremendous ROI from their AI investments. From hyperscalers and next-gen cloud builders to enterprises, governments, and research institutions, DDN delivers proven data intelligence at exabyte scale across hundreds of thousands of GPUs—so customers can deploy AI with confidence, accelerate time-to-value, and realize outsized returns.
Source: DDN
The post DDN Launches IndustrySync Pipelines for Financial Services and Life Sciences AI appeared first on HPCwire.
President Trump said Tuesday that China is "fine" with a delay.
Doing a lot of work and need it done fast? Meet GPT-5.4 mini and nano.
The Blues need to overturn a three-goal deficit at home against the defending champs.
Can Pep Guardiola's team overturn a three-goal deficit at the Etihad Stadium?
RACHEL SIDRANE
Staff Writer
“We Were Liars,” a novel originally published in 2014 by E. Lockhart, took the young adult reading world by storm, quickly becoming a bestseller and garnering many positive reviews. Praised for its poetic writing style, emotionally intense story and a plot based on a compelling mystery, the popularity of the novel led to the release of a prequel a few years later, and most recently, a TV series on Amazon Prime.
The big questions are, how do the novel and the series compare, and what are the differences between the two?
The story surrounds a wealthy family, the Sinclairs, who maintain the perfect image and spend their summers on Beechwood, the private island they own off the East Coast. Yet, a mysterious accident occurs one summer, leaving the protagonist, Cadence Sinclair, with memory loss and a brain injury that makes it difficult for her to piece together the events of the previous summer.
The audience follows Cadence through the summer of her accident and the summer she returns to Beechwood as she attempts to understand the reason for her brain injury –– which her family and friends (who refer to themselves as “the Liars”) refuse to tell her.
Both the novel and the series explore themes of family dynamics and secrets, love, mental health and the corruption from wealth and privilege. I am a firm believer that the book is always better than the movie — or in this case, the show — but I really enjoyed the series.
The story itself is beautiful as each of the characters are crafted to have a number of layers peeled back throughout its course. I feel as though the book focused more on Cadence and her internal thoughts, while the series delved further into the other characters and their stories, extending the plot and the depth of the characters.
The length of the series, compared to the individual novel, allowed more time for the audience to build an attachment and connection to the other characters. Warning: There are spoilers ahead.
The show presents a shortened time period that flips between summer 16 and summer 17 — summer 16 being when Cadence gets into her accident and summer 17 when she returns to Beechwood.
However, in the novel, Cadence’s accident occurs in summer 15 and she travels through Europe with her father in summer 16, finally returning to the island in summer 17. The novel leaves the injury and amnesia unsolved for a longer period of time, presenting the incident as seemingly more traumatic and providing more reasoning for her unreliable narration.
A big difference that sets the book apart from the series is the storytelling element. Every few chapters in the book, Cadence would tell allegorical fairy-tale-like stories that reflected the dynamic between her power-hungry grandfather and his three daughters. In the novel, these stories provide a sense of depth by serving as a coping mechanism for Cadence to process her trauma.
The characters in the show, specifically the rest of the Liars — Gatwick, Cadence’s love interest, and her two cousins, Johnny and Mirren — developed more in-depth storylines of their own in the show.
For example, the show highlighted Mirren’s love for painting and her mother’s blatant disapproval of it, better presenting the tension between her and her mother, one of the Sinclair daughters. Their arguments and strained relationship further highlighted the tension of the Sinclair family dynamic, a focal point of the storyline.
Mirren was also presented as a girl with big dreams who felt invisible to everyone until she developed a romance with Ebon, a boat boy, who pushes Mirren to be her authentic self and reflect on her facade of a perfect life.
This extension of Mirren’s storyline in the show allows the audience to build a stronger connection to her and better understand her story. Consequently, they feel deeply for her death at the end of the series.
Johnny, Cadence’s other cousin, is also further represented in the TV series. While embodying the same snarky and unserious personality he has in the book, the show better displays his violent streak which results in a legal dispute. This provides more depth to his character and raises the stakes for his mother, heavily contributing to her drug addiction.
The dispute also forces Johnny’s mother to leave her husband of Indian descent in order to secure her family inheritance, highlighting the racial bias in the Sinclair family. The addition of this plot really emphasizes how drug addictions, anger issues and racism impact family dynamics, which are all critical parts of the story and aren’t as glaringly present in the novel.
Though Johnny identifies as straight in the novel, his character is bisexual in the show which not only becomes an internal struggle for him, adding to the complexity to his character, but it also adds more layers to his individual plotline, like his romantic conflict with his tennis partner. His mother’s denial of his coming out also emphasizes the tension in their relationship.
Gatwick’s love for Cadence is seemingly more represented in the show, especially in a sacrificial manner. He passes up an incredible scholarship opportunity to check in on Cadence when he thinks she may be in trouble. Also, during the fire in the novel, he got trapped while in the basement, while in the series, he got trapped in the fire when he chivalrously entered the house to find Cadence.
The show also displays more of the family disputes and tensions. In one scene, the show features an annual lemon hunt, a tradition that is not practiced in the novel, where the Liars end up coming together to stand up to Harris Sinclair, the grandfather of the cousins and the head of the family. This instance foreshadows their final act of rebellion — the house fire that ultimately resulted in Cadence’s “accident.”
The use of timeline and flashbacks is different in the two portrayals of the story. The timeline is more blurred in the book, with unreliable narration, that allows the readers to experience the confusion of Cadence’s mind. In the series, the timeline is more logical, clearly shifting between two summers, which makes for an easier following of the story.
The elements incorporated in the novel versus the show allow them to explore different parts of the story. The series has more time to develop the stories of characters beyond Cadence, providing more depth and exploration of themes like racism, classism and personal identity.
The focus on Cadence in the novel, however, allows for more expanded literary elements, like the poetic fairy tales, unreliable narration and vivid metaphors.
I enjoyed both the novel and the series, and ultimately believe that despite the differences, the series did a great job of carrying over the storyline and expanding it to fit the screen time.
"There are countless upgrades you could make to your gaming setup," writes PC Gamer's Jacob Ridley. "A wireless this, a bigger that, a faster thing. But how do you know what's going to be a genuine upgrade worth investing in? Personally, I think it might be split spacebars." His argument centers on the fact that spacebars take up a "greedy" amount of keyboard space -- space that could instead be divided into multiple keys for different actions, such as voice chat or melee attacks. From the report: While it's often very easy to reprogram your spacebar to do a different action via your keyboard's software, it's a lot harder to reprogram your brain to hit any other key when you try to jump in game. Spacebar makes you jump. Everyone knows that; it's practically etched onto your brain if you're a long-time mouse and keyboard player. So, why does a split spacebar help with that? It comes down to this: once you know which side of a spacebar you tend to thwack with your thumb, you can program the other side to do whatever you want. I hit the right-side of my spacebar every time when I'm typing. Therefore, when I started using a Wooting 60HE v2 with a split spacebar, I set the left-side to be the delete key; the keyboard lacking a dedicated delete key for its 60% size. Though for gaming, the split spacebar offers much more varied purpose. People do strange things with the WASD keys that I won't litigate here, but I'm pretty sure most gamers use their left thumb to strike the spacebar for gaming. Right? Right. If you fall into this category, you have the option of using the right-side spacebar for things like a chunky melee key, or, my personal favorite, an in-game voice chat key.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
AI and other technologies can help you manage your financial life. But don't rely exclusively on such tools for money matters.
Foreign secretary says one third of those who were in region have left as MPs press for support for those still stranded
The number of UK nationals flown back from the Middle East since the start of the conflict with Iran reached 100,000 on Tuesday, Britain’s foreign secretary has said.
Yvette Cooper told parliament this is a third of the 300,000 who were in the region at the outset of hostilities, many of whom were stuck when airspace was closed. The figure included tourists and Gulf residents who have temporarily left.
Continue reading...100% a fake scam website! They "offer" almost anything that's available for purchase at the official Onewheel website (which is https://onewheel.com/), with the pictures copied over, but the prices are about 90% lower than they would actually be. Red flags all over.
While the health secretary posts shirtless workouts and AI videos, he should be focusing on soaring cases of measles
Vladimir Putin loves bombing Ukraine and taking his shirt off – not necessarily in that order. The Russian leader is well known for his macho photoshoots, including that infamous shot of him horse-riding bare-chested in Siberia. While various politicians have mocked Putin for his posing, others have been taking notes. And by others I mean Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has spent a large portion of his time in politics spamming social media with increasingly weird footage of him working out.
In 2023, when Kennedy ran for president, he posted a video of himself doing shirtless push-ups in an empty car park as preparation for his debate with Joe Biden – bizarrely, he was wearing blue jeans for the stunt. Now that Kennedy is the US health secretary, the videos are coming at a faster clip.
Continue reading...The University of Florida campus group says the suspension over an off-campus post violated free speech
A dispute among student Republican groups in Florida over alleged antisemitic behavior is heading for a courtroom after a chapter at the state’s flagship university was suspended for an online post featuring two people giving Nazi salutes.
On Saturday, University of Florida (UF) blocked campus operations of the school’s College Republicans after the group’s state leadership said it had disbanded the chapter for engaging in “a pattern of conduct that violated its rules and values, including a recent antisemitic gesture”.
Continue reading...STUTTGART, Germany, March 17, 2026 — Q.ANT today announced the deployment of its second-generation photonic processors in a high-performance computing (HPC) environment at the Leibniz Supercomputing Center (LRZ). This deployment marks an important step toward integrating light-based co-processing into production data center operations to reduce the escalating energy and performance constraints of AI workloads. Photonic computing architectures can enable up to 90x lower power consumption per workload and up to 100x greater data center capacity, driven by higher computational density and increased calculation speed.
An LRZ engineer working with Q.ANT’s second Generation photonic processor
Building on its first-generation system at LRZ, Q.ANT’s Gen 2 Native Processing Units (NPUs) act as photonic AI accelerators, delivering higher computational throughput and improved energy efficiency. Installed via standard PCIe interfaces, the processors integrate into existing HPC systems and operate alongside CPUs and GPUs under AI and scientific simulation workloads.
“AI is pushing data center power consumption to unprecedented levels, and energy has become a major limiting factor in scaling next-generation computing infrastructure,” said Bob Sorensen, Hyperion Research’s Senior Vice President for Research. “What makes this deployment significant is that it moves photonic co-processing beyond proof-of-concept and into production HPC environments. Demonstrating measurable energy reduction and performance gains under real-world workloads signals that alternative architectures like photonics are becoming a practical path forward for scaling AI infrastructure.”
In benchmark evaluations at LRZ, Q.ANT’s Gen 2 architecture demonstrated significant improvements over its first-generation NPUs, marking the next milestone in the company’s aggressive product development roadmap. Results include:
Unlike electronic processors that rely on transistor switching, Q.ANT’s photonic NPUs execute mathematical operations directly in the optical domain using Thin-Film Lithium Niobate (TFLN) photonic integrated circuits, eliminating on-chip heat generation and cooling requirements.
“Adding more digital hardware no longer solves the compute scaling problem in AI,” said Dr. Michael Förtsch, CEO of Q.ANT. “If we continue to scale with brute-force transistor logic, we simply turn electricity into heat. At LRZ, we’re proving that light-based co-processing can integrate with today’s infrastructure and deliver measurable efficiency gains under real workloads. This is how AI can continue to scale without scaling its energy footprint.”
LRZ runs large-scale scientific simulations, AI research, and data-intensive applications under the most demanding operational standards. The installation enables LRZ to rigorously test photonic co-processing under production conditions, benchmarking performance, precision and energy efficiency within heterogeneous HPC architectures.
“This deployment highlights the technological progress from the first to the second generation of Q.ANT’s processors,” said Prof. Dr. Dieter Kranzlmüller, Chairman of the Board of Directors of LRZ. “Our evaluation is conducted under real production workloads and operational requirements. Photonic co-processing represents a promising approach to addressing the performance and energy challenges increasingly defining modern high-performance computing.”
The LRZ installation helps tackle industrial challenges in compute-intensive applications such as drug discovery, materials design, and adaptive optimization, where nonlinear complexity and energy efficiency are critical.
More from HPCwire
About The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre
The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) is a leading European high-performance computing facility serving universities and research institutions across Bavaria and Germany. As a member of Germany’s Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS), LRZ provides large-scale computing infrastructure supporting scientific research, AI development, and data-intensive applications.
About Q.ANT
Q.ANT is a Stuttgart-based photonics company developing photonic AI accelerators for AI and high-performance computing, delivering a scalable alternative to transistor-based systems. Its Native Processing Units (NPUs) use Thin-Film Lithium Niobate photonic integrated circuits to perform mathematical operations directly in the optical domain, enabling energy-efficient co-processing for complex computational workloads. Q.ANT operates its own TFLN chip pilot line in collaboration with IMS CHIPS.
Source: Q.ANT
The post Q.ANT Deploys 2nd-Gen Photonic Processors at Supercomputing Center LRZ appeared first on HPCwire.
Spring break "takeovers," which are massive gatherings organized on social media, are overwhelming some top destinations and posing dangers.
I used to think Wi-Fi 7 routers were overhyped and overpriced. After testing 34 routers and comparing the data, I finally changed my mind.
US-Israel war on Iran: How is Tehran's regional 'axis of resistance' responding? 23 March 2026 — 1:30PM TO 2:45PM Anonymous (not verified) Online
Panellists discuss how axis actors are reacting, adapting, and surviving, and examine implications for the region’s political and security landscape.
Panelists examine how axis actors are reacting, adapting, and surviving, and implications for the region’s political and security landscape.
For more than two decades, the ‘axis of resistance’ functioned as Iran’s forward defense. Since October 7, that model has come under unprecedented strain. Israel and the US have explicitly sought not just to degrade individual members but to dismantle the network as a whole and shift the locus of confrontation toward Iran itself.
The June 2025 12-day war marked an inflexion point, with Iranian officials signalling that they would act directly and alone. However, axis actors, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Popular Mobilization Force (PMF) in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen, have not disappeared.
As the ongoing war between the US, Israel, and Iran is becoming a regional war, some Iran-aligned groups are fighting. Others are holding back. Despite years of decapitation campaigns, they still endure.
In this webinar, a panel of experts will examine how axis actors are reacting, adapting, and surviving. Panellists will also discuss the implications of the axis’s persistence and evolution for US and allied policy, and what it means for the region’s political and security landscape in the years ahead.
The Trump administration is drastically undercounting the price tag of the U.S. war with Iran, peddling fragmentary estimates that offer Americans a skewed understanding of the costs.
The Pentagon on Thursday said the U.S. spent about $11.3 billion in just one week of its war on Iran; Trump economic adviser Kevin Hassett similarly put the figure at $12 billion on Sunday.
But these sums are dwarfed by estimates offered by experts in the costs of war, lawmakers experienced with the Pentagon budget, and two government officials briefed on Operation Epic Fury who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
At the very least, they say the war is burning through between $1 billion and $2 billion per day — or roughly $11,500 to $23,000 per second. The cost, the officials told The Intercept, could rise to a quarter trillion dollars or more over the coming months.
Even that is a drop in the bucket compared to the long-term expenses, which could cost the U.S. trillions of dollars in the decades to come. One of the officials lamented that Americans would be paying off the war for generations.
“If this war takes months rather than weeks, the costs will become astronomical,” said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for an end to wasteful spending,
Jules Hurst III, the War Department’s acting comptroller and chief financial officer, called the Pentagon’s initial $11.3 billion estimate a “ballpark number,” speaking at the Reagan Institute’s National Security Innovation Base Summit. Hurst said a more comprehensive figure would be provided with a supplemental budget request, which he said the Pentagon plans to soon submit to the White House and Congress.
Democratic lawmakers believe the true number is far higher because the Pentagon estimate did not include many expenses, including the massive buildup of military assets, weapons, and personnel in the Middle East ahead of the conflict. Lawmakers have said they expect the Iran War supplemental request to reach at least $50 billion — on top of a $1.5 trillion War Department budget request for 2027.
When he appeared before the House Armed Services Committee recently, Elbridge Colby, the under secretary of war for policy, said that the military campaign against Iran had been “scoped out” for up to five weeks, but that the president could extend it. He was, however, unable to tell Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., the cost. “I can’t give you an answer at this point,” he said. The Office of the Secretary of Defense as well as Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson were no more forthcoming with The Intercept.
Jacobs told The Intercept that Americans had been conned into an open-ended conflict, with unclear goals and no exit plan.
“We haven’t gotten sufficient details in public or behind closed doors about the strategy, the objectives, the length of the operation, or how much this will cost taxpayers,” she told The Intercept. “The American people are demanding an end to this illegal war to prevent more killings of children, retaliation against U.S. service members, skyrocketing costs to U.S. taxpayers, and yet another endless war.”
Hassett, the director of Trump’s National Economic Council, said the war was still expected to take four to six weeks. But without accurate information from the Pentagon on the cost of the war, experts, lawmakers, and government officials have stepped into the breach with estimates of the financial burden of Trump’s war with Iran — his second war on the country within the span of a year.
The numbers are immense.
A three-week conflict could cost taxpayers between $60 billion and $130 billion, according to the two government officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely, with both stressing that the estimates were speculative. “It’s a back of the napkin estimate,” said one official.
“They really have no idea of the real cost.”
A five-week war could top out at $175 billion. Eight weeks could put the total at $250 billion. “They really have no idea of the real cost,” said one of the officials, noting that bookkeeping is not a Pentagon strong suit. The self-styled War Department has never passed an audit, despite almost a decade of attempts.
The Pentagon’s pre-war military buildup — which is missing from the $11.3 billion estimate — had already cost taxpayers an estimated $630 million, according to Elaine McCusker, a former senior Pentagon budget official now at the American Enterprise Institute. (McCusker said those costs are likely to be absorbed within the Pentagon’s existing $839 billion 2026 budget.) Initial estimates of the first 100 hours of the war tacked on around $3.7 billion in operational costs, munitions, and damaged or destroyed equipment, according to a cost breakdown by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS. This and other estimates turned out to be drastic undercounts as Pentagon officials, in classified briefings, disclosed that the military burned through $5.6 billion worth of munitions in just the first two days of the war. An updated analysis by CSIS now estimates that Epic Fury cost $16.5 billion by its 12th day.
Estimates by Linda Bilmes, the co-author of “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” are in line with the government officials’ projections. Bilmes, a former assistant secretary and chief financial officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce under Bill Clinton and currently a public policy professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, says that the price tag of the war will exceed $50 billion if the conflict stretches into its third or fourth week. “Probably higher,” she added.
Bilmes cautioned that enormous short-term expenses — like spent munitions, the deployments of aircraft carrier strike groups, and aircraft shot down — will be eclipsed by even more significant expenditures like the long-term costs of veterans’ benefits and interest on the debt to pay for the war. The ultimate cost, Bilmes says, may reach into the trillions of dollars.
Bilmes first called attention to the immense hidden costs of America’s wars in her groundbreaking analyses of the Iraq War. The George W. Bush administration initially put the likely cost of the Iraq War at $40 billion. By 2008, Bilmes and economist Joseph Stiglitz discovered that the real cost would be at least $3 trillion. By 2021, that figure had ballooned to around $8 trillion.
Asked about the analogous long-term costs of the Iran war by The Intercept, the Office of the Secretary of War clammed up. “We have nothing to provide,” a spokesperson told The Intercept.
“The majority are being exposed to toxins, contamination, acid rain, dust from infrastructure destruction, and burning oil fumes.”
Bilmes notes that around 50,000 U.S. troops are deployed around the Middle East as the United States and Israel, as well as Iran and its proxies, strike fuel depots, oil facilities, and military sites — all of which release noxious substances shown to negatively affect human health. “The majority are being exposed to toxins, contamination, acid rain, dust from infrastructure destruction, and burning oil fumes, so we can estimate that at least one-third will be claiming disability benefits under the PACT Act,” she said, referring to a landmark 2022 law expanding health care and benefits for veterans exposed to burn pits, Agent Orange, and other toxic substances. “That is a major long-term cost that almost nobody looks at.” Bilmes said that if veterans claim benefits at the rate of the extremely short 1990 Gulf War — 37 percent of whom receive compensation today — this alone would add around $600 billion in costs over their lifetimes.
The Iran war also increases the likelihood that Congress will approve a larger Pentagon budget than Trump would have secured without it, Bilmes said. “If the budget would have increased by $100 billion, this war might bump it to $200 billion,” she told The Intercept. “That becomes the base budget and, over a decade, it’s another trillion dollars added to the defense budget.”
“ Now the gross debt is $38 trillion — and about 30 percent of that is due to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Bilmes explained that these long-term costs are exacerbated by the fact that all the money is borrowed. “Back in 2004, the public debt was below $4 trillion. Now the gross debt is $38 trillion — and about 30 percent of that is due to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” she said. A key contributor to that spike is the fact that the United States went to war in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 while simultaneously cutting taxes — increasing spending while reducing revenues. “This combination had never happened before in the history of U.S. wars,” she said. With interest rates almost double what they were in the 2010s, Bilmes notes that 14 percent of the federal budget already goes to interest payments, which are destined to rise further with the Iran war.
Hurst, the War Department comptroller, declined to specify exactly how much money the War Department would ask for in the supplemental request. Most sources say it will top $50 billion. Asked about the likelihood the Iran war supplemental request would pass, given Democrats’ opposition to the conflict, Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., was optimistic due to bipartisan concerns about weapons stockpiles. “There is a need that was there before the Iran conflict,” said Wittman, the vice chair of the House Armed Services Committee, at the Reagan Institute summit last week. “There’s a need there to build our weapons magazine depth. There’s a need there to make sure we’re building more expendable and attritable platforms. So those things extend even beyond the Iran conflict. This just makes it more immediate.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., pushed back on talk of additional funding. “The administration has not even made the case to the American people as to why we are spending billions of dollars and dropping bombs every day in Iran,” he said during a Monday press conference. “So the notion that they would come up here and ask for additional money is beyond the pale at this moment.”
Murphy, the policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, noted that the reconciliation bill enacted last summer included over $60 billion for munitions, missile defense, and low-cost weapons. The lack of specificity in the bill would allow the Pentagon to easily utilize that, plus the remaining $90 billion from reconciliation, for Trump’s war of choice with Iran, he said.
“Billions of taxpayer dollars have already been spent on this unauthorized war. We’re facing a spiraling debt crisis, skyrocketing health care premiums, dire food insecurity, and natural disasters that are growing more frequent, extreme, and costly. These are national security issues,” Murphy told The Intercept. “If Congress believes this war is a good use of taxpayer dollars, it should vote on an authorization for the use of military force. Congress has a duty to consider any supplemental funding requests, but absent an AUMF, Congress shouldn’t approve additional funding.”
The Pentagon, Murphy said, “got a boatload of extra cash, more than $150 billion, in last summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
With the goals of the war undefined, there is no way to project how long the war on Iran will rage on. “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on March 6, following a statement that the war could go on “forever.”
Murphy told The Intercept that the White House needed to provide far more clarity. “Taxpayers deserve answers on the precise costs and timeline for this war,” he said. “‘Indefinitely’ isn’t an answer.”
More recently, the president seemed to indicate that there has been no reason to fight since the first day of the war. “Let me say, we’ve won,” Trump said last week. “You know, you never like to say too early you won. We won. We won, in the first hour it was over, but we won,” Trump said. Jacobs highlighted this uncertainty underlying the conflict, noting that Americans have been “misled into another regime-change war in the Middle East under false pretenses and with fairy tale ideas about what will happen next.”
The Intercept presented Bilmes’s long-term cost estimates to one of the government officials who offered the more immediate quarter-trillion-dollar estimate. That official agreed that Americans would be paying massive sums of money for generations to finance Trump’s second war with Iran. “These costs aren’t known to the American people. You’re never going to hear about them from the White House or the DoD,” said the official of the long-term expenses highlighted by Bilmes. “My kids’ kids, and probably their kids, are going to be paying for this.”
Correction: March 17, 2026, 5:06 p.m. ET
The article has been updated to correct the year Laura Blimes and Joseph Stiglitz determined the cost of the Iraq War would be at least $3 trillion; it was 2008, not 2015.
The post Trump’s War on Iran Could Cost Trillions appeared first on The Intercept.
"If the price of oil goes up, the price of everything goes up," said former U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.
Powerful storms swept across the eastern half of the country as many airports are also struggling with disruptions from reduced staffing at security checkpoints.
Ali Larijani was among the most senior leaders of the regime still alive in Iran after top leaders were killed at the start of the war.
President Trump's director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, announced his immediate resignation Tuesday, citing the administration's decision to intervene in Iran.
From a surprising heat wave in California to blizzards burying parts of the Midwest and storms rolling over the East Coast, chaotic weather put more than half the nation's population in the path of extreme conditions.
Most debt fixes won't stop a garnishment order, but is debt consolidation the exception? Here's what to know.
The U.S. SEC is reportedly preparing a proposal to make quarterly earnings reports optional, potentially allowing companies to report results just twice a year. "The proposal could be published as soon as next month," reports Reuters, citing a paywalled report from the Wall Street Journal, adding that "regulators are in talks with major exchanges to discuss how their rules may need to be adjusted." Reuters reports: The SEC will vote on the proposal once it is published, after a public comment period which typically lasts at least 30 days, the report said. The WSJ report added that the rule is expected to make quarterly reporting optional and not eliminate it altogether. The proposed change in the reporting standard would allow listed companies to publish results every six months instead of the current mandate to report figures every 90 days. Trump, who first floated the idea in his first term as president, has argued the change in requirements would discourage shortsightedness from public companies while cutting costs. Skeptics, however, caution delaying disclosures could reduce transparency and heighten market volatility.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Berkeley is adopting the ‘Zone 0’ regulation, which mandates first 5ft around the home in high-risk areas should be clear of combustible material
Michel Thouati went through the five stages of grief before he ripped his beloved fig tree from the earth. There was a persimmon and an elderberry too, nestled close to his hillside home in Berkeley,California, and they all had to go.
The plants thriving on his small property had become overshadowed by the dangers growing with them: an emerging body of research had found landscaping can help fuel the disastrous fires sweeping out of the wildland and into neighborhoods like his. Tucked into the ridges overlooking California’s San Francisco Bay and against an expansive nature area, the house Thouati and his wife have owned for 30-some years sits in one of the highest wildfire-threat areas in the state.
Continue reading...Miami also receive third- and fourth-round picks
Denver fell one win short of Super Bowl last season
Eagles add receiver Hollywood Brown
The Denver Broncos have reportedly traded for Miami Dolphins receiver Jaylen Waddle, a move that would add offensive firepower to a team that fell one win short of the Super Bowl last season.
ESPN reports that the Broncos will send first-, third- and fourth-round picks in this year’s draft to the Dolphins in return for Waddle. The Broncos will also receive Miami’s fourth-round pick as part of the deal. If the deal is confirmed, the Dolphins will own the 11th and 30th picks in the first round of this year’s draft as they attempt to build around newly acquired quarterback Malik Willis.
Continue reading...Woman known only as Beth says abuser claimed status made him untouchable, which terrorised her into silence
MI5 has apologised and paid compensation to a woman who alleged the Security Service was to blame for her being attacked with a machete and abused by one of its agents.
The woman, known only as Beth, was in a relationship with a man she says used his status as an MI5 agent to perpetrate abuse and terrorise her into silence.
Continue reading...Chancellor says Brexit may have cost 8% of UK GDP in wide-ranging Mais lecture at Bayes Business School in London
The number of people in England and Wales falling into insolvency has jumped.
There were 11,609 individual insolvencies registered in England and Wales in February, the Insolvency Service has reported this morning. This was 18% higher than in February 2025 and 6% higher than in January 2026.
The individual insolvencies consisted of 768 bankruptcies, 4,210 debt relief orders (DROs) and 6,631 individual voluntary arrangements (IVAs). The number of DROs in February 2026 was a record high in the monthly time series going back to their introduction in 2009, exceeding the previous high of 4,185 in August 2025.
The number of IVAs was higher than both January 2026 and the 2025 monthly average. Bankruptcies were 25% higher than in February 2025, although numbers were affected by the clearing of a backlog following the Insolvency Service moving to a new case management system.
Average 2-year fix has risen from 4.83% at the start of March to 5.28% today. It’s highest since April 2025.
Average 5-year fix has risen from 4.95% at the start of March to 5.32% today. It’s highest since February 2025.
“War in the Middle East has added almost £800 to a typical annual mortgage bill in just two weeks, which will be unwelcome news for anyone currently seeking a fixed rate deal.
“The average two-year fixed rate has jumped from 4.83% at the start of March to 5.28% today – its highest level since April 2025. The average five-year fix has risen from 4.95% to 5.32%, now at its highest since February 2025. For a borrower with a £250,000 mortgage over 25 years, that equates to paying £788 more per year on a two-year fix, or £651 more on a five-year deal compared to just a fortnight ago.
Continue reading...TAIPEI, Taiwan, March 17, 2026 — One of COMPUTEX’s organizers—TAITRA (Taiwan External Trade Development Council) announced that Cristiano R. Amon, President and CEO of Qualcomm Incorporated, will deliver the Opening Keynote to kick off COMPUTEX 2026 on June 1st afternoon at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center Hall 2, 7F.
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon to Kick Off COMPUTEX 2026 with Opening Keynote
Qualcomm Technologies is defining the next era of compute, enabling intelligence to run everywhere – from devices to edge systems to data centers. Under Cristiano Amon’s leadership, Qualcomm Technologies is unifying on‑device intelligence, edge‑to‑cloud performance, and next‑generation connectivity, enabling AI everywhere, particularly as agentic workloads scale. Snapdragon and Qualcomm Dragonwing platforms represent computing and intelligence breakthroughs across AI PCs, personal AI devices, smartphones, industrial AI, robotics and data centers, enabling real-time decision-making, autonomy and contextual awareness across consumer and enterprise environments, at scale.
Registration for COMPUTEX Keynote will open in the middle of April; please stay tuned and follow us on our website. COMPUTEX 2026 with the theme “AI Together,” is set to take place from June 2nd to June 5th at Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center Hall 1 & 2, TWTC and TICC. This event will host 1,500 exhibitors across up to 6,000 booths, showcasing three major themes: AI & Computing, Robotics & Mobility, and Next-Gen Tech.
For more exhibition information:
More from HPCwire: Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon to Deliver Keynote at COMPUTEX 2025
About COMPUTEX
COMPUTEX was founded in 1981. It has grown with the global ICT industry and become stronger over the last four decades. Bearing witness to historical moments in the development of and changes in the industry, COMPUTEX attracts more than 40,000 buyers to visit Taiwan every year. It is also the preferred platform chosen by top international companies for launching epoch-making products.
Taiwan has a comprehensive global ICT industry chain. Gaining a foothold in Taiwan, COMPUTEX is jointly held by the Taiwan External Trade Development Council and Taipei Computer Association, aiming to build a global tech ecosystem. COMPUTEX has become a global benchmark exhibition for AI and startups, connecting global pioneers and enabling new sparks of breakthrough technology.
About TAITRA
Founded in 1970, TAITRA is Taiwan’s foremost nonprofit trade-promoting organization. Sponsored by the government and industry organizations, TAITRA assists enterprises in expanding their global reach. Headquartered in Taipei, TAITRA has a team of 1,300 specialists and operates 5 local offices as well as 62 branches worldwide. Together with Taipei World Trade Center (TWTC) and Taiwan Trade Center (TTC), TAITRA has formed a global network dedicated to promoting world trade.
TAITRA’s five local branch offices in Taoyuan, Hsinchu, Taichung, Tainan, and Kaohsiung provide services to companies outside metropolitan Taipei. Through these domestic offices, TAITRA is able to maintain close contact and interaction with local companies in their respective areas and provide direct and substantial services in areas such as feature trade promotion, business information, market seminars, on-the-job training, procurement meetings, meeting room rental, etc. Branch offices play vital roles in Taiwan Trade Shows coordination between Taipei headquarters and local companies, and invite buyers to visit local industries.
Source: COMPUTEX
The post Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon to Kick Off COMPUTEX 2026 with Opening Keynote appeared first on HPCwire.
Brexit was ‘a colossal mistake’, says President Stubb of Finland – but Europe should build a flexible partnership with the UK News release jon.wallace
During a speech at Chatham House the president outlined why the EU must embrace ‘flexible integration’ to forge closer relations with the UK and countries like Ukraine.
President Alexander Stubb visited Chatham House on 17 March 2026 to discuss EU–UK relations, EU enlargement, ‘flexible integration’, Brexit and other issues. Describing a world in which Europe is squeezed between an aggressive Russia and a US in transition, he addressed the impact of Brexit and the opportunities for Europe and the UK.
After outlining his personal links to the UK, President Stubb said:
‘I think Brexit was a colossal mistake… I do think it’s not only shooting yourself in the foot,’ he said, ‘but it’s like amputating your leg without a medical reason for doing it’.
But, he added, there was ample space to forge a more flexible partnership between the EU and the UK.
‘We need to get out of the mindset which I quite often see on extremes on the continent and here – whereby you need to continue to punish the UK for having this self-inflicted pain.’
He said there was a need for a pragmatic closening of ties in areas such as security, technology and the economy, including customs and the internal market.
‘Get out of the mindset that the UK should not be part of the customs union or the UK should not be part of the internal market. Think about a flexible way of dealing with it,’ he added.
President Stubb speaks at Chatham House.
‘The world is changing, our interests in Europe and the UK are the same. Our values in Europe and the UK, are the same. We need a UK voice in Europe – we really miss you guys, I’m serious, we really do. On the internal market, on competition, on reform, all on these things – on climate change. That’s why I think we should be pragmatic.’
During his speech, President Stubb also discussed the end of an era of peace in Europe, the weaponization of trade, energy and currency, Ukraine peace negotiations – and how best to exploit the EU’s changing economic and political power.
BOSTON, March 17, 2026 — Qblox, a leading provider of open-architecture quantum control electronics, today announced that effective April 1st, in partnership with Prodrive Technologies, products will be manufactured in the U.S. and will begin shipping to customers from its facility in Canton, Massachusetts.
Building on the company’s 2025 expansion into Boston and its growing collaborations with universities, government, and industry partners, this milestone underscores Qblox’s commitment to strengthening the American quantum ecosystem across innovation, workforce development, and now manufacturing, while further cementing Massachusetts’ role as a hub for quantum innovation.
The shift to manufacturing quantum control systems in the U.S. brings meaningful advantages for customers, including reduced lead times, greater shipping efficiency, improved supply-chain security, and stronger alignment with U.S. procurement, compliance, and funding requirements. Advantages that will be integral for the U.S. to remain competitive in the global quantum industry as it moves closer to full-scale use.
It also enhances Qblox’s ability to provide onshore support and service while advancing transparent, open-architecture manufacturing that supports the Department of Energy and National Lab research.
The Canton facility will support skilled technical roles across manufacturing, systems integration, logistics, and customer support, contributing to the growth of a high-tech workforce aligned with the future needs of quantum infrastructure. As public and private investment in quantum technology accelerates nationwide, Qblox’s expansion in Massachusetts reinforces both its role as a trusted infrastructure partner to the American quantum ecosystem and the Commonwealth’s growing reputation as a place where emerging technologies can be developed, built, and deployed at scale.
“Massachusetts is proud to be a global hub for quantum innovation, and Qblox’s investment in manufacturing in Canton strengthens our leadership in the technologies that will define the future,” said Governor Maura Healey. “I want to congratulate the Qblox team on this milestone and am proud that they are growing in Massachusetts, where our world-class research institutions, talented workforce and innovation ecosystem make it the ideal place to build the technologies of tomorrow.”
“Massachusetts is where breakthrough technologies move from research to real-world deployment,” said Economic Development Secretary Eric Paley. “By establishing its U.S. manufacturing and fulfillment hub in Canton, Qblox is strengthening domestic supply chains while tapping into Massachusetts’ deep bench of scientific talent, world-class research institutions and advanced manufacturing capabilities.”
“Building and shipping our systems in the United States allows us to be closer to the researchers, engineers, and institutions driving quantum innovation forward,” said Niels Bultink, Co-founder and CEO of Qblox. “This expansion reflects our long-term investment in the U.S. quantum ecosystem and our belief that proximity matters operationally, strategically, and economically.”
“Advanced technologies like quantum control systems require precise manufacturing and trusted partnerships,” said Pieter Janssen, co-founder & CEO at Prodrive Technologies. “As two companies with roots in the Netherlands and growing operations in Massachusetts, Prodrive and Qblox are proud to work together to strengthen the quantum ecosystem and deliver the reliability, quality, and scalability required for the next generation of quantum innovation.”
“Quantum technology is strategic infrastructure,” said Gregg Carman, General Manager and Head of North America for Qblox. “By manufacturing and shipping from the U.S., we are not only optimizing logistics, but also aligning with the long-term goals of American research institutions and the broader innovation economy. We’re proud to be growing that presence in Massachusetts, which offers a uniquely strong foundation for innovation-driven manufacturing and collaboration.”
More from HPCwire
About Qblox
Qblox is accelerating the quantum revolution as the global leader in scalable quantum control. The company provides the essential control engine that empowers researchers and engineers to build high-performance, robust, and scalable systems. Trusted by industrial and academic leaders worldwide, Qblox sets the standard for quantum control and delivers the backbone for a new era of computing.
About Qblox at APS
Qblox will be onsite at APS to showcase its real-time GPU-to-quantum integration and discuss hybrid quantum-classical infrastructure with attendees. To schedule a meeting, contact Juliette de la Rie at juliette.delarie@qblox.com or find Qblox at booth #810.
Source: Qblox
The post Qblox Introduces First ‘Made in America’ Quantum Control Systems appeared first on HPCwire.
As President Donald Trump threatens to “take” Cuba, China is flexing its dominance in renewable energy by supplying solar panels as Havana confronts an energy crisis.
The prime minister told the Ukrainian president that Russia must not benefit from the war against Iran
Nigel Farage is speaking now at the Reform UK event.
The website promoting the lottery is up. It is called nigelcutmybills.com.
Continue reading...Writers Guild of America East says management failed to offer fair wages and basic job protections
Workers at CBS News walked out for 24 hours on Tuesday after a new contract agreement was not reached following the expiration of the contract last week.
About 60 workers at the streaming service CBS News 24/7 are represented by the Writers Guild of America East. The union is holding rallies and walkouts at the CBS News broadcast center in Manhattan, New York, and at KPIX-TV CBS News Bay Area in San Francisco, California.
Continue reading...SAN JOSE, Calif., March 17, 2026 — Classiq has announced a demonstration of the integration between the Classiq platform and NVIDIA CUDA-Q that accelerates the workflow from high-level, AI-assisted quantum modeling through execution in hybrid quantum-classical environments, improving runtime and iteration speed for quantum research and development teams.
The updated integration reduces friction between algorithm design, rapid iteration and execution across heterogeneous compute resources, including GPUs, simulators and emerging quantum hardware. The work helps teams shorten iteration loops, a requirement for testing, benchmarking and refining hybrid approaches as high-performance computing environments evolve.
Hybrid quantum-classical computing plays a central role in how organizations evaluate and operationalize quantum-ready methods, especially as quantum workflows increasingly rely on classical acceleration for simulation, preprocessing, optimization loops and orchestration. By tightening the connection between modeling, compilation and execution, Classiq’s integration of CUDA-Q aims to help researchers and developers move faster from intent to runnable experiments and back again.
Tests were done on a financial options-pricing benchmark using IQAE (Iterative Quantum Amplitude Estimation) available through the Classiq platform. The benchmark was implemented with the updated Classiq integration and executed via CUDA-Q. Circuit synthesis and completed execution of a 31 qubit circuit was reduced from 67 minutes to 2.5 minutes using a single NVIDIA A100 GPU.
The updated integration leverages NVIDIA AI infrastructure to achieve massive parallelization of quantum simulation execution. This enables the exploration of large and complex quantum circuits, helping to ground assumptions regarding quantum scale and quantum algorithms and paving the way for practical quantum utility at scale on emerging quantum hardware.
“Practical quantum R&D requires iteration loops that are fast, repeatable and connected to execution,” said Nir Minerbi, co-founder and CEO of Classiq. “This integration with NVIDIA CUDA-Q is designed to help teams move from high-level intent to running experiments faster, so they can test ideas, compare approaches and build toward production-ready hybrid workflows.”
“NVIDIA CUDA-Q is designed to help developers build and run hybrid quantum-classical applications across today’s accelerated computing environments and emerging quantum systems,” said Sam Stanwyck, Director of Quantum Product at NVIDIA. “Classiq’s integration of CUDA-Q allows teams to shorten iteration cycles, test ideas more quickly, and evaluate quantum-ready methods in the context of modern HPC pipelines.”
About Classiq
Classiq is the leading quantum computing software company, providing the technology that makes it practical for enterprises and researchers to access and harness quantum computing. Classiq’s platform transforms high-level functional models into optimized, hardware-ready quantum circuits automatically. This enables teams to develop algorithms faster, optimize them for cost and performance, and make quantum applications usable sooner, without deep hardware expertise. Through partnerships with global leaders in quantum cloud computing, including major hyperscalers and hardware providers, Classiq ensures that enterprise customers can design once and deploy anywhere. Its synthesis technology and memory optimization tools allow organizations to produce scalable, efficient quantum code that accelerates research and reduces execution cost.
Source: Classiq
The post Classiq Advances Hybrid Quantum Workflows with CUDA-Q Integration on NVIDIA GPUs appeared first on HPCwire.
 | For those who enjoy chill ride videos! [link] [comments] |
Tyler Adams and Diego Luna miss out through injury
Team due to play Belgium and Portugal in Atlanta
Final games before World Cup squad is announced
US men’s national team head coach Mauricio Pochettino has named a 27-player roster for the team’s last camp before he determines his final squad for this summer’s World Cup.
The group will play two high-profile friendlies in Atlanta over the next international window, with the US facing Belgium on Saturday 28 March (3.30pm ET) and Portugal on Tuesday 31 March (7pm ET).
Continue reading...Pakistani strike on Afghan capital kills 400 people, who burned in their beds or were crushed by collapsing walls
Witnesses and survivors have described the horrific scenes of a Pakistani air raid that hit a drug rehabilitation centre in Kabul, killing more than 400 people, who burned in their beds or were crushed by the collapsing building.
Afghan rescue crews were still digging bodies out of the rubble on Tuesday after the strike, the deadliest single attack so far in a three-week war between the two countries.
Continue reading...Despite Trump's repeated calls, the EU foreign policy chief says "nobody is ready to put their people in harm's way in the Strait of Hormuz."
Rising diesel prices could push up costs across the U.S. economy, as many goods move by diesel-powered trucks.
Israeli officials told U.S. counterparts they hope for an uprising even though it would lead to a massacre, according to a State Department cable reviewed by The Post.
Party’s former leader, who is being sued for symbolic damages, says opponents have repeatedly tried to conflate Sinn Féin and IRA
Gerry Adams has told the high court that opponents of Sinn Féin have repeatedly sought to conflate the political party he led with the IRA, as he denied ever being a member of the Irish Republican Army.
Giving evidence in London watched by victims of IRA bombings, the 77-year-old, credited with helping to bring about the peace process that ended the Troubles, said he had “never been a senior, let alone most senior, figure in the IRA”.
Continue reading...When her husband Eric died in March of 2022, Kouri Richins wrote a children's book to help her sons cope with the loss of their father – then she was charged in his death. Follow the timeline for a deep dive into the history of Eric and Kouri's relationship.
Tinubu’s UK state visit: diplomacy alone won’t fix Nigeria’s problems Expert comment thilton.drupal
The Nigerian president’s visit is his latest high-profile foreign policy moment on the world stage. But his diplomatic engagements have not produced concrete benefits for most ordinary Nigerians.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s state visit to the UK this week is the first by a Nigerian leader since General Ibrahim Babangida in 1989.
Hosted by King Charles III, a state visit is the UK’s highest level of diplomatic visit and uses royal ceremony to signal and strengthen relations with key partners. It is being framed in Abuja as a landmark moment, showcasing the ‘unique bond’ between the two countries and inaugurating ‘a new era of cooperation’.
Tinubu’s visit will provide an opportunity to further operationalize the Nigeria-UK Strategic Partnership, signed in November 2024 during Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s visit to Nigeria, and the February 2024 Enhanced Trade and Investment Partnership (ETIP).
The visit is also in line with Tinubu’s embrace of a foreign policy approach that centres high-profile meetings and visible diplomacy. Tinubu’s foreign policy has been rhetorically polished and sometimes strategically astute; it reflects Nigeria’s profile as a regional power and a key Commonwealth state, and has opened channels for deeper economic and security cooperation.
But nearly three years into Tinubu’s presidency, the key question is whether this visibility-driven foreign policy has delivered domestic gains. So far, the president’s prominent international profile has not largely translated into improvements in material conditions for most Nigerians.
Tinubu has engaged in frequent presidential travel, maintaining a visible presence at summits across Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. His trips – and those of senior officials – have drawn criticism for their cost amid rising poverty, hunger and falling purchasing power back home.
Foreign minister Yusuf Tuggar has articulated a ‘4D Foreign Policy’ – built on democracy, development, demography and diaspora – and advocated for Nigeria’s strategic autonomy. But in practice, Nigeria’s diplomatic capacity has lagged behind its rhetoric. Ambassadorial appointments have been slow or seen as politicized, weakening diplomatic capacity to implement the administration’s agenda.
Tinubu’s administration has also sought international validation for its key domestic reforms – fuel subsidy removal, naira devaluation and tax reform. His team cites various policy achievements as proof of success. These include headline inflation falling from above 30 per cent in 2024 to around 15 per cent last month; a stabilizing naira; Nigeria’s removal from the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) grey list; S&P raising its outlook to ‘positive’; and renewed investor interest.
However, for many Nigerians, the combination of subsidy removal, devaluation and tougher taxation with weak safety nets recalls the ‘shock therapy’ of the late 1980s, when IMF-aligned reforms under General Babangida produced lasting social costs.
Poverty remains high, food insecurity has risen, household spending remains weak and credit remains expensive for small firms. Growth is concentrated in capital-intensive sectors such as finance and ICT, while agriculture remain constrained by insecurity and structural bottlenecks. Nigeria’s deficits in education, skills and health are having a more negative impact on future earnings than in other comparable economies.
Tinubu’s London visit will likely focus on leveraging the UK-Nigeria ETIP to attract investment in energy, infrastructure, technology and services – sectors where UK firms are competitive. However, any potential investments are unlikely to fix Nigeria’s struggling economy or reverse the structural drivers of migration, such as rampant insecurity and weak public services.
UK-Nigeria trade is significant, but not top-tier. It reached £8.1 billion in figures for 2025, up 11.4 per cent on the preceding year. Nigeria is the UK’s 36th largest trading partner, with the balance of trade in the UK’s favour. In comparison, Nigeria’s trade with China exceeded $22 billion (around £16.5 billion) between January and October 2025.
The UK is also a major source of FDI and a key destination for Nigerian migrants. Nigerians were one of the largest non-EU nationalities to immigrate to the UK in 2025, and remittances form an important element of Nigeria’s external accounts.
However, much of Nigeria’s non-African commerce is still dominated by hydrocarbons and imported manufactured goods, rather than higher-value non-oil exports. This pattern leaves the country vulnerable to commodity price swings and reflects structural constraints at home: roughly 85 million Nigerians still lack access to grid power. Despite a new Electricity Act in 2023, outcomes remain poor, with frequent outages.
Nigeria’s trade with other African countries also remains low. Nigeria earned roughly $478 million from exports to ECOWAS markets in 2025 – a comparatively modest amount. Despite Abuja’s vocal support for the African Continental Free Trade Agreement and its plans to host the fifth Intra-African Trade Fair (IATF) in 2027, African markets remain underexploited.
While Tinubu may secure UK investment during his visit, these deeper patterns raise doubts about whether this economic diplomacy is reducing Nigeria’s reliance on non-African trade or its exposure to global shocks. Instead, more focus is needed on tackling long-term structural challenges – especially in electricity, education and health.
Security should also be a key focus of the visit. Nigeria remains locked in conflicts across multiple fronts. The jihadist insurgency in the northeast continues, while organized criminality and kidnappings plague the northwest and central Nigeria. Nigeria ranks 6th on the 2025 Global Terrorism Index.
In early February, Nigeria’s Ministry of Defence announced the deepening of defence cooperation with the UK, building on existing training, intelligence, counterterrorism and maritime cooperation. The state visit is expected to formalize and expand this agenda, potentially improving operational capabilities.
So far, security partnerships with the UK and others have improved technical capacity – particularly in maritime security, counter-IED work and some aspects of air operations. But they have not produced discernible improvement in everyday security.
Killings, kidnappings and displacement remain widespread. ACLED data indicates at least 12,860 people were killed in political violence in the past year.
SAN JOSE, Calif., March 17, 2026 — Super Micro Computer, Inc. has unveiled its upcoming system portfolio powered by the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform. As data centers transform into AI factories, producing intelligence at massive scale, agentic reasoning, long-context AI, and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) workloads are driving demand for an entirely new class of compute and storage infrastructure. Supermicro’s NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72, NVIDIA HGX Rubin NVL8, NVIDIA Vera CPU systems are being designed and built with Supermicro’s Data Center Building Block Solutions (DCBBS) advanced liquid-cooling technology stack to accelerate time-to-market for customers.
“We are entering a new era where every organization requires an AI factory to win in the marketplace, as the demand for inference workloads is reshaping what data center infrastructure must deliver,” said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. “Supermicro’s DCBBS technology stack is being engineered to empower upcoming NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72, HGX Rubin NVL8, and Vera CPU systems to give our customers a fast, clear path to deploying next-generation AI factories, at scale. We are excited to provide an early look at these solutions as a testament to being first to market with the infrastructure that will power the next frontier of AI.”
Supermicro DCBBS for NVIDIA Vera Rubin and Rubin Platforms
Delivering AI factory performance at scale requires much more than just compute — It demands power, cooling, and networking infrastructure that performs seamlessly. Supermicro’s modular DCBBS approach enables data center operators to deploy validated, pre-engineered rack solutions rather than custom-building infrastructure for each project — reducing time-to-online, minimizing integration risk, and lowering total cost of ownership across AI factory deployments of any scale.
Supermicro’s DCBBS are engineered specifically to meet the evolving thermal, power, and networking demands needed to enable rapid and robust deployment of upcoming NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72, NVIDIA HGX Rubin, and NVIDIA Vera CPU infrastructure. To meet the needs of Vera Rubin platforms, which will be fully liquid-cooled from this generation forward, DCBBS includes a full suite of validated liquid-cooling infrastructure. This expansion includes in-rack and in-row components such as coolant distribution units (CDUs), manifolds, and liquid-to-air sidecar. Also included are infrastructure solutions such as cooling towers and cabling design and implementation services — designed to integrate seamlessly with Supermicro’s next-generation system portfolio.
Supermicro NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 SuperCluster
Supermicro is engineering its NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 with new DCBBS liquid-cooling components to fully support the power and thermal envelope at rack and cluster scale. This includes the manufacturing of optimized NVIDIA MGX racks, in-rack or in-row CDU, RDHx and L2A sidecar to streamline production and deployment of the rack-scale AI supercomputer at scale. The Vera Rubin NVL72 operates as a single rack-scale accelerator, unifying six co-designed chips — Rubin GPU, Vera CPU, NVIDIA NVLink 6, NVIDIA ConnectX-9 SuperNIC, NVIDIA BlueField-4 DPU, and NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet — to deliver up to 3.6 Exaflops of inference, 75TB of fast memory, and 1.6 PB/s of HBM4 bandwidth, targeting up to 10x the throughput per watt and one-tenth the token cost compared to NVIDIA Blackwell.
NVIDIA HGX Rubin NVL8 System
The 2U HGX Rubin NVL8 system provides the densest and most flexible HGX platform — and the first HGX platform to offer greater flexibility in CPU selections including NVIDIA Vera CPUs alongside next-generation AMD and Intel x86 processors. Built on the NVIDIA MGX rack architecture with Supermicro’s blind mate busbar and manifold for tool-free rack integration, it gives customers the freedom to pair eight Rubin GPUs with the CPU platform that best fits their workload and software stack.
The design supports 9 HGX Rubin NVL8 systems per rack — up to 72 Rubin GPUs total — for large-scale AI training, inference, and accelerated HPC. DCBBS provides in-rack CDU, in-row CDU, RDHx and an optional Liquid-to-air (L2A) sidecar for customers deploying in liquid-cooled or air-cooled data center environments.
NVIDIA Vera CPU System with RTX PRO
Supermicro’s Vera CPU next-generation agentic AI system is being engineered as a versatile AI compute node for organizations targeting next-generation agentic AI deployments. The system features dual NVIDIA Vera CPUs supporting up to 6 RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs in a compact 2U chassis — delivering the compute density and energy efficiency that enterprise AI inference, agentic workloads, visualization, and adding accelerated computing to all enterprise workloads. It is a high-bandwidth LPDDR5X memory subsystem and PCIe GPU acceleration in a space-efficient footprint.
NVIDIA BlueField-4 STX Context Memory Storage Platform
Supermicro’s upcoming Context Memory Storage Platform (CMX) introduces a new class of AI-native storage for context memory — architected as an intelligent pod-level context memory storage tier that extends GPU KV cache capacity and serves long-context inference data at the throughput that Vera Rubin NVL72 super pod clusters demand. Powered by NVIDIA BlueField-4 processor, NVIDIA Vera CPUs, NVIDIA ConnectX-9 SuperNICs, Spectrum-X Ethernet NVIDIA DOCA, and NVIDIA Dynamo, the system provides the high-bandwidth, low-latency fabric and intelligent data path offload that large-scale AI inference pipelines and RAG workloads require.
Supermicro NVIDIA Blackwell Solutions — Available Now
With next-generation systems in rapid development, Supermicro’s current portfolio of NVIDIA Blackwell-based systems is in full production and available for immediate deployment through Supermicro’s US and global manufacturing capacity, enabling customers to build and scale production AI infrastructure today. Supermicro is investing across both its current Blackwell lineup and its next-generation systems to ensure customers have the right platform at every stage of this transformation.
Visit Supermicro at GTC San Jose 2026
Supermicro will be unveiling early previews of its Vera Rubin platform systems alongside its current production Blackwell portfolio. Supermicro experts will be available to discuss current procurement options, roadmap planning, and deployment timelines for both near-term and next-generation AI infrastructure in Supermicro booth #1113.
About Super Micro Computer, Inc.
Supermicro (NASDAQ: SMCI) is a global leader in Application-Optimized Total IT Solutions. Founded and operating in San Jose, California, Supermicro is committed to delivering first-to-market innovation for Enterprise, Cloud, AI, and 5G Telco/Edge IT Infrastructure. We are a Total IT Solutions provider with server, AI, storage, IoT, switch systems, software, and support services. Supermicro’s motherboard, power, and chassis design expertise further enables our development and production, enabling next-generation innovation from cloud to edge for our global customers. Our products are designed and manufactured in-house (in the US, Taiwan, and the Netherlands), leveraging global operations for scale and efficiency and optimized to improve TCO and reduce environmental impact (Green Computing). The award-winning portfolio of Server Building Block Solutions allows customers to optimize for their exact workload and application by selecting from a broad family of systems built from our flexible and reusable building blocks that support a comprehensive set of form factors, processors, memory, GPUs, storage, networking, power, and cooling solutions (air-conditioned, free air cooling or liquid cooling).
Source: Supermicro
The post Supermicro Reveals DCBBS with New NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72, HGX Rubin NVL8, and Vera CPU Systems appeared first on HPCwire.
Beats and Nike have collaborated to bring us the Powerbeats Pro 2 -- Nike Special Edition. I go hands-on with them.
Security chief’s huge influence on many levels of Iranian politics and abroad will make his killing devastating
Israel’s assassination of Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council and one of the linchpins of Iranian politics, will be a devastating body blow to the country and probably a bigger reverse than the loss of the supreme leader Ali Khamenei at the outset of the war.
Larijani would always have been a prime target in any attempt to decapitate the Iranian leadership, largely because of his ability to straddle so many levels of politics and his huge personal influence not just in Iran but with foreign states including China and Russia.
Continue reading...Joe Kent resigned as national counter-terrorism center director, saying Iran posed no imminent threat to the US
Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center and a far-right political figure and supporter of Donald Trump, resigned from his position on Tuesday in protest of the war in Iran.
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” Kent wrote in a resignation letter posted to X. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Continue reading...Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film won Best Picture and Best Director at this year's Oscars.
Samples from the asteroid Ryugu contain all five nucleobases -- the key building blocks of DNA and RNA. "This strengthens the idea that asteroids may have brought the ingredients for the first living organisms to Earth long ago," reports New Scientist. From the report: Japan's Hayabusa 2 spacecraft visited Ryugu in 2018, where it shot two projectiles -- one small and one large -- into the surface of the asteroid and collected the resulting debris. It arrived back at Earth with the samples in 2020 and researchers have been analyzing these in detail ever since. Yasuhiro Oba at Hokkaido University in Japan and his colleagues examined two samples, one from the asteroid's surface and one comprised of subsurface materials excavated by the projectiles. In both, the team found all five primary nucleobases, which are the compounds that make up the nucleic acids DNA and RNA when combined with sugars and phosphoric acid. This isn't the first time that nucleobases have been found in asteroid samples: they have been seen in meteorites, too, and in samples from the asteroid Bennu. The researchers did find different abundances of the various nucleobases among the various samples, though, which hints that these compounds might be useful for tracing asteroids and meteorites back to the parent bodies that they broke off from in the distant past, as well as understanding the evolution of those parent bodies over time. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Robert Allbritton’s Notus plans to double its newsroom staff, which includes hiring prominent ex-Post journalists
Robert Allbritton, the billionaire media entrepreneur, said he was “pained” by the Washington Post’s decision to lay off a large chunk of its newsroom in early February. But he also saw it as an opportunity to hire some of the Post’s most well-known journalists, including many who would have been hard to poach in previous years.
“Opportunity knocks, and you’re going to decide if you’re going to answer the door or not,” Allbritton, 57, said. “I’m always the one that says: ‘Look, if an opportunity like this comes up, you ought to go on ahead and see what you can do with it and take it on full throttle, because these things don’t come along very often.’”
Continue reading...Weekly news magazine’s parent company makes third significant ownership shake-up in its 183-year history
The Canadian billionaire Stephen Smith has bought a stake in the parent company of the Economist, held by Lynn Forester de Rothschild, in only the third significant ownership structure shake-up in its 183-year history.
Smith and his family holding company, Smith Financial Corp, which owns financial businesses, including a co-ownership of the influential proxy advisory group Glass Lewis, has acquired a 26.9% stake in the Economist Group (TEG) for an undisclosed sum.
Continue reading...Carmaker reduces office-based roles and will not fill vacancies ‘to ensure long-term competitiveness of business’
Bentley is to cut 275 jobs in the UK as the carmaker faces a “challenging global market environment”.
The luxury brand, owned by Germany’s Volkswagen, is preparing to launch its first all-electric model but acknowledged it had some work to do to persuade consumers to switch away from internal combustion engine vehicles.
Continue reading...The record player has a removable headshell and switchable preamp.
Colorado’s Quantum Commons becomes home to the first fully open, commercially deployable quantum system in the U.S., strengthening the state’s leadership in quantum commercialization
DENVER, March 17, 2026 — Elevate Quantum, in collaboration with Q‑CTRL, QuantWare, Qblox, Maybell Quantum, and Arrow Electronics have announced the fully operational launch of the Quantum Platform for the Advancement of Commercialization (Q‑PAC), marking the nation’s first commercially deployable Quantum Open Architecture system and the fastest quantum infrastructure deployment ever completed in the United States.
The system, first announced in November 2025, advanced from concept to full operation in just five months and at a fraction of the cost compared to closed, full-stack systems. Thus demonstrating a new, more effective model for the rapid deployment of sovereign quantum capability. Since the concept was introduced, Elevate Quantum and its partners completed an accelerated buildout of the system using the Quantum Utility Block (QUB) architecture, an open, modular, and validated framework that enabled the team to stand up a fully functional quantum system at unprecedented speed.
The rapid deployment confirms that QUB is now the fastest path to establish operational quantum infrastructure without multi‑year development cycles, and is readily available for procurement.
The system is now live at Elevate Quantum’s Commercialization Lab on the Quantum Commons campus in Denver, providing users with integrated access to a complete quantum computing stack, from quantum processors and control electronics to cryogenic infrastructure and advanced autocalibration and circuit optimization software.
“Q‑PAC proves that the United States can deploy quantum systems at commercial velocity,” said Elevate Quantum COO and CFO Jessi Olson. “This is not a research testbed. It is a fully reproducible, commercial‑grade quantum system where companies can test‑drive their quantum future before they build their own.”
The initial quantum processing unit (QPU) launches with 17 qubits, with a clear upgrade path aligned to QuantWare’s QPU roadmap. The same platform will support 100‑qubit‑class processors heading into 2027, allowing supported Q-PAC use-cases to scale without replacing infrastructure.
Qblox’s modular control electronics will deliver high‑fidelity connectivity to all QPU components, ensuring stable and precise operation across the system, while Maybell Quantum’s cryogenic wiring and refrigeration infrastructure will provide the robust ultra-low temperature environment needed for reliable performance. Together, the hardware stack forms a transparent, open reference architecture that gives enterprise users full visibility into system components and behavior, avoiding the “black box” limitations of proprietary systems.
Q‑CTRL’s infrastructure software bridges the gap between raw hardware and the utility‑scale problems industry needs to solve. Reliable operation is driven by Boulder Opal Scale‑Up, which provides AI‑driven automation for calibration and control. This ensures reproducible performance and dramatically reduces engineering overhead to keep quantum systems online. When combined with Fire Opal for error suppression and circuit performance management, the system becomes a fully functional quantum computer block ready for algorithmic execution and enterprise integration.
Looking ahead, through its collaboration with Arrow Electronics, the QUB framework will include a GPU-cluster reference server integrated with the quantum hardware via NVIDIA NVQLink to provide ultra‑low‑latency compute without needing FPGA programming, enabling faster calibration, improved algorithmic execution, and more efficient hybrid workflow performance. This native connection and interoperability across quantum and classical compute resources transform Q‑PAC into a complete, hybrid compute platform ready to deliver the most advanced compute capabilities for organizations deploying within an HPC environment. The roadmap positions Elevate Quantum’s Commercialization Lab as a global leader in HPC‑native quantum computing and sets the stage for larger, more dynamic quantum systems.
“The Q-PAC system is a significant step for Colorado’s economic future, solidifying our state’s leadership in the quantum industry while advancing national collaboration and quantum development,” said Eve Lieberman, Executive Director of the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade. “This initiative is set to attract new investment, generate high-skill jobs across Colorado and the Mountain West, and accelerate the commercialization of cutting-edge technology, all through unprecedented public-private collaboration.”
With Q‑PAC now operational, Elevate Quantum and its partners have delivered a new model for national quantum capability, one that is fast to deploy, open by design, and built for commercial use. The system is now available for companies, researchers, and government users seeking to explore, test, and prepare for their quantum future.
To learn more, visit www.elevatequantum.org.
More from HPCwire: Elevate Quantum and Partners Launch the Nation’s First Quantum Open Architecture System in Colorado
About Elevate Quantum
Elevate Quantum is the federally designated quantum Tech Hub under the U.S. Department of Commerce, representing the nation’s largest quantum industry cluster across Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming. EQ’s mission is to dramatically accelerate the commercialization of quantum technologies. Through its work, Elevate Quantum is helping accelerate the diffusion and commercialization of quantum tech, advancing U.S. economic and strategic security, and building a robust quantum workforce for the future.
Source: Elevate Quantum
The post Elevate Quantum and Partners Launch Nation’s 1st Quantum Open Architecture System in Record Time appeared first on HPCwire.
Hopping on the property train earlier in life can significantly increase your wealth, a recent study found. Here's how much.
Snow, tornadoes and fierce winds disrupt flights and leave homes and businesses in multiple states in the dark
Half a million US homes and businesses were without power on Tuesday morning after a potent storm system brought a mix of snow, strong winds, cold temperatures and rainfall to areas from the midwest to the east coast.
As of Tuesday morning, there were about 107,000 power outages reported in Michigan, according to poweroutage.us. In New York, there were 68,000 power outages; 65,000 were registered in Pennsylvania and 50,000 in Massachusetts.
Continue reading...Charges follow discovery of body of Masood Masjoody, who was a critic of the Tehran regime and the exiled shah
Two people have been charged with the murder of an Iranian activist in Canada, in a case which has intensified fears over transnational repression of critics of the regime in Tehran.
Masood Masjoody, a former university maths teacher, went missing in early February in the city of Burnaby, British Columbia. He had been critical of Iran’s theocratic regime and the exiled family of the former shah.
Continue reading...Our picks for the best gaming TVs of 2026 boast great image quality and minimal delay, and can significantly enhance your gaming sessions.
Borrowers face losing hundreds of dollars a month in higher repayments and rising pump rices will add to the pain, economists warn
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Surging interest rates and petrol prices have stripped more than $1bn a month from Australian household budgets as economists warn of recession risks.
Consumers are preparing for rates to surpass their recent highs after the Reserve Bank delivered back-to-back hikes ahead of an inflation spike driven by the US war on Iran.
Continue reading...Conservationists hope Murray Watt’s review of national marine parks will ‘right the wrongs’ of previous downgrade of protection
The federal environment minister, Murray Watt, has pledged to put an extra half a million square kilometres of Australia’s ocean out of reach of fishers and drillers in a step conservationists hope will “right the wrongs” of an Abbott-era downgrade of marine protection.
Watt confirmed last year Australia would put 30% of its ocean estate under a high level of protection that bans extractive industries as part of an international agreement to protect 30% of the planet’s oceans.
Continue reading...2026 is already full of increases for music and TV streamers, and we want to help you keep up with changing costs.
SAN FRANCISCO, March 17, 2026 — Lambda has announced at NVIDIA GTC 2026 it is a launch partner for NVIDIA’s Vera CPU platform and NVIDIA STX, the deployment of NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand Photonics Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) networking in an AI factory with 10,000+ NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs, and the launch of Lambda Bare Metal Instances as a core cloud offering for frontier AI workloads.
“Lambda’s mission is to expand humanity’s energy and computational capacity,” said Stephen Balaban, Co-founder and CEO of Lambda. “Today’s announcements advance that mission, enabling the world’s top AI teams with the infrastructure they need to do their best work.”
With custom Olympus CPU cores and up to 1.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth, Vera keeps thousands of sandboxed AI environments running in parallel, ensuring NVIDIA GPUs stay fully utilized across reinforcement learning (RL) and agentic workloads. It gives frontier labs access to a compute architecture designed for the demands of next-generation agentic AI systems.
While the industry is shifting toward agentic AI, long-term memory and the processing of massive context windows are critical bottlenecks in inference. Powered by NVIDIA Vera Rubin, BlueField-4, Spectrum-X Networking, and NVIDIA AI software, NVIDIA STX brings a modular reference architecture for rack-scale AI storage platforms, accelerating inference, analytics, and training through next-generation hardware integration and optimized KV-cache management.
As AI factories scale into the tens of thousands of AI accelerators, network architecture becomes as important as the accelerators themselves. Co-packaged Optics (CPO) networking delivers higher efficiency, longer sustained application runtime, and greater resiliency than traditional pluggable transceivers.
Lambda is leading one of the largest deployments of NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand Photonics Co-Packaged Optics switches to date, in an AI factory with 10,000+ NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs. The deployment builds on Lambda’s November announcement of early CPO adoption.
“The race to build AI factories isn’t won on GPU counts alone. Network architecture is what determines whether those systems can perform at scale,” said Dave Salvator, Director of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA. “Getting this right is what allows AI infrastructure to power services used by hundreds of millions of people around the world.“
Lambda’s new Bare Metal Instances, paired with custom networking and system-level optimizations, provide infrastructure and research teams with direct hardware access and eliminate virtualization overhead for distributed training workloads.
The new offering strengthens Lambda’s full-stack AI infrastructure platform, expanding the tools available to frontier labs, enterprises, and hyperscalers. Infrastructure teams gain complete control over the hardware stack while benefiting from Lambda’s reliability, uptime, and operational expertise.
Today’s announcements reflect Lambda’s decade-long collaboration with NVIDIA, as well as the company’s commitment to continuously develop its Superintelligence Cloud: a platform engineered for fast deployment, density, and cooling to meet modern AI demands and maximize the intelligence produced per watt.
More from HPCwire
About Lambda
Lambda, The Superintelligence Cloud, is a leader in AI cloud infrastructure serving tens of thousands of customers. Founded in 2012 by machine learning engineers published at NeurIPS and ICCV, Lambda builds supercomputers for AI training and inference. Our customers range from AI researchers to enterprises and hyperscalers. Lambda’s mission is to make compute as ubiquitous as electricity and give everyone the power of superintelligence. One person, one GPU.
Source: Lambda
The post Lambda Expands NVIDIA Collaboration, Large-Scale Deployments, and New AI Infrastructure Offerings appeared first on HPCwire.
Want to impress your friends at your next dinner out? Here's what you're actually looking for when you taste wine at the table.
Midwestern state has a slate of competitive races with money flowing in from donors including Aipac
Illinois voters on Tuesday will decide between a crowded field of Democratic candidates vying to be the state’s next senator as the midwestern state also nominates candidates for five open congressional seats.
Longtime Illinois senator Dick Durbin’s retirement leaves a competitive race that includes two US representatives and the lieutenant governor vying to replace him, with huge infusions of money coming to the candidates from outside groups, including donors affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), that are spending millions to sway voters.
Continue reading...Want to buy a home or refinance your current one? Here are the mortgage interest rates you need to know now.
HELOCs and home equity loans offer homeowners an affordable way to borrow money now. Here are the rates for each.
White House will take a financial loss to make it easier for Americans to walk away from citizenship starting in April
The Trump administration has agreed to take a financial loss in order to make it easier for Americans to walk away from their US citizenship.
In April, the cost to formally renounce citizenship will plunge from $2,350 to just $450, below the actual cost to the government of processing the requests – but fulfilling a years-long promise to reverse an unpopular fee adopted in 2015.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Jonathan Powell thought Tehran’s ‘surprising’ offer on its nuclear programme could prevent rush to war, sources say
Britain’s national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, attended the final talks between the US and Iran and judged that the offer made by Tehran on its nuclear programme was significant enough to prevent a rush to war, the Guardian can reveal.
Powell thought progress had been made in Geneva and that the deal proposed by Iran was “surprising”, according to sources.
Continue reading...SAN JOSE, Calif., March 17, 2026 — IonQ, a global leader in quantum computing, has announced a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for a collaborative business engagement with the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI). This MOU, announced at NVIDIA GTC, outlines a shared vision for the organizations to explore the advancement of quantum-high performance computing (HPC) hybrid technologies incorporating NVIDIA accelerated computing and supporting the development of a robust ecosystem within South Korea.
“The scale and scope of this alliance represents a powerful convergence of quantum, AI, and classical supercomputing expertise,” said Niccolo de Masi, Chairman and CEO of IonQ. “By working with KISTI, we are seeking to create a pathway for South Korea to be a global leader in hybrid quantum-classical research. This initiative is intended to provide the foundational technology and AI models necessary to accelerate the practical application of quantum computing worldwide.”
“This collaboration with IonQ and NVIDIA is a critical step in building a national quantum-HPC infrastructure that can solve the most complex scientific challenges,” said Jaegyoon Hahm, Director of the Center for Quantum Computing Service at KISTI. “By leveraging NVIDIA AI and accelerated computing platforms alongside IonQ’s trapped-ion quantum systems, we are ensuring that South Korean researchers and enterprises remain at the forefront of the quantum era.”
The MOU focuses on seeking to establish a phased approach to integrate IonQ’s industry-leading quantum hardware with KISTI’s world-class HPC infrastructure using NVIDIA NVQLink, an open architecture that connects quantum computers to GPU-based supercomputers. By combining these technologies, the parties aim to conduct research and development on quantum-HPC hybrid applications, including the simulation of quantum algorithms and technologies for next-generation hardware.
Key initiatives anticipated under the MOU include:
The MOU underscores IonQ’s continued momentum in the Asia-Pacific region and its commitment to providing flexible, hardware-agnostic solutions that interface with the world’s most advanced classical computing platforms. It reinforces IonQ’s regional commitment as evidenced through its collaborations with other partnerships in Korea with SK Telecom, Hyundai Motor Company, Intellian Technologies, and leading academic institutions such as Seoul National University and Sungkyunkwan University.
About IonQ
IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ) is the world’s leading quantum platform and merchant supplier – delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. IonQ’s newest generation of quantum computers, the forthcoming IonQ Tempo, will be the latest in a line of cutting-edge systems that have been helping customers and partners including Amazon Web Services, AstraZeneca, and NVIDIA achieve 20x performance results 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.
Source: IonQ
The post IonQ and KISTI Target Hybrid Quantum-HPC Systems in South Korea Collaboration appeared first on HPCwire.
SAN JOSE, Calif. and CAMPBELL, Calif., March 17, 2026 — WEKA has announced the integration of its NeuralMesh software with the NVIDIA STX reference architecture. WEKA’s Augmented Memory Grid memory extension technology running on NeuralMesh will support NVIDIA STX to bring high-throughput context memory storage to agentic AI factories, making long-context reasoning seamless across sessions, tools, and tasks.
NeuralMesh and Augmented Memory Grid Integration with NVIDIA STX Increases Token Production by 6.5x in the Same GPU Footprint, Slashing Cost of Inference for AI-Driven Organizations.
Leveraging NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72, NVIDIA BlueField-4, and NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet, the NeuralMesh solution based on NVIDIA STX will deliver an estimated increase of 4-10x more tokens per second for context memory while supporting at least 320 GB read and 150 GB write throughput per second for AI workloads, more than double the throughput of conventional AI storage platforms.
Solving the Inference Cost Problem with Shared KV Cache Infrastructure
Scaling agentic systems, especially for software engineering applications, exposes a hard truth: today’s AI economics are decided at the memory infrastructure layer. Every large-scale inference fleet hits the memory wall: limited high-bandwidth memory (HBM) on the GPU is rapidly exhausted, key-value (KV) cache is evicted, context is lost, and the system is forced to repeat work it already completed. This architectural inefficiency sends inference costs soaring.
The answer is a shared KV cache infrastructure that keeps context live across agents, users, and sessions. It eliminates redundant computation, sustains token throughput, and maintains predictable performance. Without shared KV cache infrastructure, every increase in concurrent users and agents becomes a liability — costs rise, experiences degrade, and the inference fleet becomes harder to operate the larger it grows. With STX for context memory, NVIDIA is introducing a blueprint to address these core inference bottlenecks.
Context Memory Storage: The Foundation of Agentic AI Factories
With co-designed WEKA solutions based on NVIDIA STX architecture, AI clouds, enterprises, and AI model builders can deploy the infrastructure foundation they need to run GPUs at peak productivity, sustain high-volume token production, and make large-scale inference more energy and cost-efficient.
Leading AI innovators and cloud providers, such as Firmus, are already transforming their inference economics with Augmented Memory Grid on NeuralMesh.
“Real-world AI doesn’t run in a lab— it has power constraints, cooling limits, and relentless workload demand. Firmus is built for exactly that. Paired with NVIDIA AI infrastructure, WEKA Augmented Memory Grid delivers up to 6.5x higher tokens per second and 4x faster TTFT at scale, proving we can get more performance from the same GPU footprint. With NeuralMesh and Augmented Memory Grid integrated into our NVIDIA-aligned AI Factory and NVIDIA STX reference architecture, we’ll be able to deliver the fastest context memory network for predictable and efficient inference at scale,” said Daniel Kearney, Chief Technology Officer atFirmus.
NeuralMesh and NVIDIA STX: Purpose-Built for Agentic AI
NeuralMesh is WEKA’s intelligent, adaptive storage system built on over 170 patents. It will run across the full-stack STX reference architecture, providing the next-generation storage organizations need to standardize high-performance AI data services and accelerate agentic AI outcomes. WEKA’s Augmented Memory Grid is a purpose-built memory extension layer that pools and persists KV cache outside of GPU memory, keeping long-context sessions stable and concurrency high as inference workloads grow. First unveiled at GTC 2025 and generally available to NeuralMesh customers today, Augmented Memory Grid has been validated with Supermicro on NVIDIA Grace CPUs and BlueField-3 DPUs to deliver numerous benefits that improve AI economics, including:
“With coding LLMs advancing, we’re seeing unprecedented adoption of Agentic AI use cases for software engineering, where productivity increases by 100-1000x. As coding assistants make repeated calls against largely unchanged codebases and prompts, WEKA’s Augmented Memory Grid reuses cached context instead of forcing redundant prefill, even as context windows grow to incredible lengths. This provides a major boost in response times and greatly increases the number of concurrent users running on the same infrastructure,” said Liran Zvibel, co-founder and CEO at WEKA. “WEKA first identified this need for context memory storage more than a year ago and launched Augmented Memory Grid at GTC 2025. Now, NVIDIA STX opens the door to organizations running their storage and memory extension infrastructure on state-of-the-art NVIDIA Vera Rubin architecture, including NVIDIA BlueField-4 and NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet. Running Augmented Memory Grid on NeuralMesh for NVIDIA STX delivers extreme performance and efficiency that translates directly to game-changing AI economics.”
Availability
WEKA’s Augmented Memory Grid is commercially available with NeuralMesh today.
Organizations that don’t address the memory wall today will find it harder and more expensive to scale tomorrow. As agentic workloads grow and context windows expand, DRAM-only architectures face a compounding cost problem: each additional concurrent user or session increases recomputation overhead, GPU idle time, and operational cost. The organizations that architect for persistent KV cache now will have a structural cost and performance advantage over those that wait.
For more information about NeuralMesh, visit: weka.io/NeuralMesh.
For more information about Augmented Memory Grid, visit: weka.io/augmented-memory-grid.
Organizations can learn more at weka.io/nvidia or visit WEKA at GTC 2026, booth #1034.
More from HPCwire: WEKA Releases NeuralMesh AI Data Platform Based on NVIDIA AI Data Platform Design
About WEKA
WEKA is transforming how organizations build, run, and scale AI workflows with NeuralMesh by WEKA, its intelligent, adaptive mesh storage system. Unlike traditional data infrastructure, which becomes slower and more fragile as workloads expand, NeuralMesh becomes faster, stronger, and more efficient as it scales, dynamically adapting to AI environments to provide a flexible foundation for enterprise AI and agentic AI innovation. Trusted by 30% of the Fortune 50, NeuralMesh helps leading enterprises, AI cloud providers, and AI builders optimize GPUs, scale AI faster, and reduce innovation costs.
Source: WEKA
The post WEKA Integrates NeuralMesh with NVIDIA STX to Support Context Memory for Agentic AI appeared first on HPCwire.
His books of betrayal and deception, including “The Ipcress File,” skewered espionage services and sharply mocked English social strictures.
Seven meal kit services, one question: Which ones offer the best value? We ran the numbers against real supermarket prices to find out.
Falling costs and government incentives make solar an attractive option for many, reducing need for gas
After prices of liquefied natural gas surged to record highs after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, millions of people in Pakistan were repeatedly left without electricity. An intense heatwave and gas shortages amid record-breaking prices resulted in power cuts across the country.
But people soon started to realise there was an alternative. The falling costs of solar panels and generous government incentives to feed excess power back to the grid made rooftop solar an attractive option.
Continue reading...SAN JOSE, Calif., March 17, 2026 — Kioxia America, Inc. has announced the development of its Super High IOPS SSD, a new type of SSD enabling the GPU to directly access high-speed flash memory as an expansion to High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) in AI systems. The new Super High IOPS SSD, the KIOXIA GP Series, is purpose-built to meet the growing performance demands of AI and high-performance computing, providing larger GPU-accessible memory capacity for faster data access to AI workloads. Evaluation samples of KIOXIA GP Series will be available to select customers by the end of 2026.
The KIOXIA GP Series SSD family is designed to address the evolving needs of AI workloads.
The NVIDIA Storage-Next initiative addresses the anticipated shift from compute-intensive to data-intensive workloads and the expanded need for GPU-accessible memory space, currently limited by HBM size. Expanding the GPU’s usable memory space allows access to larger data sets and improves GPU utilization by moving more data closer to compute resources.
The NVIDIA Storage-Next initiative calls on SSD vendors to design drives optimized for GPU-initiated AI workloads. The initiative effectively expands HBM capacity by enabling GPUs to access flash-based memory. Kioxia is supporting NVIDIA’s initiative with the KIOXIA GP Series SSDs, which utilize low-latency, high-performance KIOXIA XL-FLASH Storage Class Memory, and is uniquely positioned for this architecture, delivering higher IOPS, finer-grained data access (512 bytes), and lower power consumption per IO, compared with Kioxia conventional TLC SSDs.
“Kioxia fully supports the NVIDIA Storage-Next initiative and will deliver purpose-built SSDs to effectively address the need for GPU-accessible memory,” said Makoto Hamada, Senior Director of the SSD Division, Kioxia Corporation. “This collaboration is instrumental in shaping the future of AI storage architecture.”
Kioxia reaffirms its commitment to driving technological advancements in AI and high-performance computing through ongoing innovation and strategic collaborations. The KIOXIA GP Series SSD family is designed to address the evolving needs of AI workloads.
Additionally, AI models are rapidly scaling toward trillions of parameters while context windows expand to millions of tokens, driving an unprecedented growth in KV (Key Value) cache requirements. Architectures such as NVIDIA’s Context Memory Storage (CMX) recognize the need to extend the memory hierarchy beyond GPU memory using high-performance storage. The KIOXIA CM9 Series PCIe® 5.0 E3.S SSD, offering 25.6 TB TLC capacity with 3 DWPD endurance, provides the performance, capacity, and endurance needed to support these large-scale inference environments. KIOXIA believes this class of storage will play a critical role in scaling efficient, cost-optimized AI inference infrastructure. Samples will begin shipping in Q3 2026.
KIOXIA will be demonstrating the Super High IOPS SSD emulator and other technology innovations at NVIDIA GTC, booth 3522.
About KIOXIA America, Inc.
KIOXIA America, Inc. is the U.S.-based subsidiary of KIOXIA Corporation, a leading worldwide supplier of flash memory and solid-state drives (SSDs). From the invention of flash memory to today’s breakthrough BiCS FLASH 3D technology, KIOXIA continues to pioneer innovative memory, SSD and software solutions that enrich people’s lives and expand society’s horizons. The company’s innovative 3D flash memory technology, BiCS FLASH, is shaping the future of storage in high-density applications, including advanced smartphones, PCs, automotive systems, data centers and generative AI systems.
Source: KIOXIA
The post KIOXIA Announces New SSD Model Optimized for AI GPU-Initiated Workloads appeared first on HPCwire.
You may be tempted to buy a used laptop, but don't let the urge overcome you.
ALIYAH JACKSON
Co-Managing Mosaic Editor
I don’t really want to get out of bed, but I should start my day. First, I need to pick out an outfit that draws the least amount of attention to my body as possible. Okay, now to look in the mirror over and over again to reassure myself that I look fine. Is this outfit alright? Is it too feminine? Too masculine? Whatever, I need to get to class. I would rather die than be late. I can’t deal with all those eyes staring at me when I walk through the door.
I never leave my room without my headphones — the barrier between me and the outside world. What if a group of people laugh at me when I walk by or someone decides to randomly say something mean? At least I won’t be able to hear them, or have to sit in silence with my thoughts for too long. Maybe it’ll deter people from talking to me entirely. Hopefully.
My professor asks a question — I stay silent. I knew the answer. I was correct. Why didn’t I raise my hand? What if I was wrong? What if I embarrassed myself? Oh no, they want us to discuss. I have to find someone to talk to. Everyone seems to already be talking. It would be weird to cut in now, but I look weirder just sitting here in silence. God, what is wrong with me? Think of a distraction. Something happy, like my dog. I miss him. I wish I were with him instead of being here. He’s quite old now and he probably won’t live much … actually, let’s think about something else.
At least it’s time for lunch. Should I be eating more? Should I be eating less? Is my food healthy enough? I need to lose weight. That might solve some of my problems. I struggle with that, though. I’d probably just end up with an eating disorder. Oh my god, just eat your food.
I’ve made it to band rehearsal. I’ve done this a million times. I wish I had more close friends in marching band. I should go up and talk to some people. No, that would be weird. People already think I’m weird. Why does that guy not like me? Am I really that bad of a person? I don’t think so. It’s fine, he doesn’t matter anyway. Look at that guy over there instead. He’s cute. I want to talk to him. I’m going to do it. Actually, no. He might think I’m a creep or I might get rejected. I’m probably not his type anyway. There’s a lot of things I need to change about my appearance before I even try. Maybe one of my friends can talk to him for me.
My friends, I love my friends! Well, they’re sort of my friends. Sometimes I wonder if they would care if I disappeared. Probably not. They all have friends whom they are so much closer with. I miss my best friends. I wonder if they will replace me with someone else from their schools. I hope I’m not that disposable. Sometimes it feels like I am.
Finally, I’ve made it back to my bed. It’s too quiet in here. I’m thinking too much. I kind of want to cry. Did I take my meds? Yes, I did. Are they working? I should up my dose. Why do I still feel like this? What if they take away my sparkle? Honestly, take it. Anything has to be better than this. I can’t wait for therapy. Sometimes it feels like that’s the only time anyone actually listens to me. I wish I were well-liked. I wish people cared.
It’s fine. You’re strong. You just need to get out of this school, out of this state. But, what if that doesn’t fix anything? … It’s late, I should go to bed. I need to get more sleep. I can’t wait to do this all again tomorrow.
Upgrading your router to support this type of connection may help reduce drops, experts say.
If you love air fryers but not the plastic shells most of them come in, Cosori's sleek stainless-steel model offers an aesthetically pleasing alternative.
Team Artichoke; PC/Mac
Ancient Greek gods, adorable raccoons and hypnotic puzzling from Olympus to the mortal realm and back
There’s been a trend for a while where familiar puzzle game genres are imbued with novel stories to give them depth and meaning beyond simply clearing a screen for points. Occult object sorter Strange Horticulture and historical romance card game Regency Solitaire are lovely examples, and now here’s Mythmatch, a match-three game in the style of Candy Crush or Bejeweled that’s also a warming tale of friendship and community set in a small town in ancient Greece. Interspersed with cerebral challenges are dialogue scenes with villagers and with gods which accentuate each other and give little clues that are picked up later, making this both puzzle game and communal oral drama.
You play as Artemis, the immortal daughter of Zeus, who is tired of getting overlooked for plum jobs in favour of her oafish brother Apollo (brilliantly portrayed as an insufferable proto-tech bro). When the role of God of the Hunt comes up, she applies, but finds she must first earn favour with a council of her elders on Mount Olympus, and they all have puzzle-based jobs for her. Hephaestus wants her to help make arrows and hammers in his foundry, while Apollo needs her to protect his collection of chimp soft toys (a not-so-subtle dig at NFTs). These mini-tasks take the form of match-three puzzles, though cleverly they also bring in elements of other puzzle games such as Plants vs Zombies and Overcooked.
Continue reading...Iran FA president said negotiations being held with Fifa
Trump said Iran should not play for their ‘life and safety’
Fifa is unwilling to switch Iran’s World Cup matches to Mexico despite the country’s football federation claiming it is in discussions with the world governing body about moving their games outside the US.
Iran are due to play two fixtures in Los Angeles and one in Seattle but their participation in the tournament has been placed in doubt by the US’s joint airstrikes on the country with Israel.
Continue reading...USA and Venezuela play for title on Tuesday night
Navy Seal gave locker room talk to Americans
Venezuelans dance and sing before games
The US will play Venezuela in the World Baseball Classic final on Tuesday, a meeting that comes after recent tensions between the two countries.
In January, Donald Trump ordered a military operation that captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Since then, the US has launched a war against Iran, during which the American players have paid tribute to their country’s military. Players have saluted each other after victories and the team invited Robert J O’Neill, a former Navy Seal who claims he killed Osama bin Laden, to give a locker room speech. Two of the team’s pitchers, Paul Skenes and Griffin Jax, played at the Air Force Academy and have spoken of the importance of honoring the military.
Continue reading...A bitter Democratic primary is unfolding in Maine as Gov. Janet Mills and Graham Platner battle for the chance to challenge GOP Sen. Susan Collins — pitting a governor with a long political resume against an anti-establishment oyster farmer.
Water shortages and rising heat is putting pressure on beer ingredients, but US brewers and farmers are adapting
With St Patrick’s Day this week, millions of Americans are raising a glass. Beer remains the country’s most popular alcoholic drink with more than 6bn gallons consumed each year. But from water shortages to rising temperatures, the climate crisis is putting pressure on beer’s most essential ingredients.
At Deschutes Brewery in Bend, Oregon, beer is either stacked high in warehouse rows or racing down a canning line and assembled into 12-packs. Inside the cavernous cellars, enormous 6,000-gallon tanks hold the latest batches in progress.
Continue reading...Trump failing to keep his word could be important ahead of primaries and midterm elections for independents
It was on 18 October 2024, just weeks before presidential election day that candidate Trump announced at a rally in Hamtramck, a small, diverse city inside Detroit with a large Muslim population, that once in office he would “get peace in the Middle East”.
For the many in attendance and who have family in the region, it was music to their ears.
Continue reading...FREMONT, Calif., March 17, 2026 — Penguin Solutions, Inc. has announced the expansion of its OriginAI portfolio to include solutions that address the need for more GPU memory to solve context size and concurrency, and meet low latency demands of enterprise-scale AI inference. Penguin Solutions’ OriginAI inference solutions seamlessly add large memory appliances to NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 and NVIDIA B300 GPU designs, helping to shorten time to value and mitigate performance limitations of AI inference. Designed to improve key operational metrics such as GPU utilization, deployment velocity, and infrastructure reliability, OriginAI enables organizations to run AI workloads with predictable performance at scale.
Penguin Solutions’ OriginAI Factory Platform delivers optimized performance for AI inference with the expansion of its OriginAI portfolio with solutions that address the need for more GPU memory to solve context size and concurrency, and meet low latency demands of enterprise-scale AI inference.
OriginAI inference solutions are designed leveraging Penguin Solutions 3.3+ billion hours of GPU runtime experience and more than 30 years of expertise delivering advanced memory solutions. OriginAI delivers production-level inference, where memory capacity and availability, not only GPU compute power, affect latency, system throughput, and overall user experience.
“Penguin Solutions operationalizes and optimizes AI inferencing by delivering the performance, scalability, and reliability required to realize fully actionable insight and discovery,” said Phil Pokorny, chief technology officer at Penguin Solutions. “Organizations must understand the factors that impact inference performance—which differ significantly from training—to productize AI and deliver accurate and fast outcomes. Whether it’s for deep research or agentic applications, we optimize infrastructure for real-world workloads and enable organizations to turn AI innovation into measurable business outcomes.”
Penguin’s MemoryAI KV Cache Server Matched with NVIDIA GPUs Optimizes OriginAI Solutions for Scalable AI Inference
Penguin Solutions OriginAI solutions also offer the flexibility to incorporate Penguin’s CXL-based MemoryAI KV cache server, designed to support customers’ KV strategies by expanding KV cache capacity, enabling low-latency, high-concurrency inference and extended context lengths for the most demanding applications. Use of Penguin’s MemoryAI KV cache server, which is compatible with the NVIDIA Dynamo framework, provides cost-efficiency and optimal design for the next wave of AI deployment.
OriginAI AI factory solutions also include Penguin Solutions ICE ClusterWare software, an intelligent management layer that transforms validated hardware into a fully-tuned AI cluster. ICE ClusterWare software delivers health monitoring and auto-remediation, to ensure sustained peak performance at scale. It also enhances data security in multi-tenant environments by isolating workloads and protecting sensitive information.
The OriginAI portfolio offers a range of configurations to address diverse customer needs. NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000-based architecture targets enterprise-class copilots, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, code assistance, and document summarization, delivering a lower acquisition cost, flexible deployment, and power-efficient performance for mid-sized models. NVIDIA B300-based architecture is designed for enterprise-wide AI platforms, long-context assistants, frontier model hosting, and agentic workloads, providing massive memory bandwidth and future-proof scalability for large, shared services.
Enterprise Inference for Financial Services, Healthcare, and Retail
OriginAI inference architectures help provide the flexibility to scale out and avoid overprovisioning by combining expert infrastructure design with meticulous in-factory builds and on-site deployment. This approach enables enterprises as well as cloud service providers (CSPs) and neoclouds to cost-efficiently deploy infrastructure tailored for use case and inference applications at scale. For example:
AI is reshaping how organizations achieve efficiency, accuracy, and innovation. Penguin Solutions has delivered solutions that address customers’ inference objectives and KV strategies, helping them meet evolving demands and achieve measurable results.
To learn more, explore Penguin Solutions’ OriginAI inference solutions and/or visit booth #1031 at the NVIDIA GTC AI Conference and Expo March 16-19, 2026, in San Jose, Calif.
More from HPCwire: Penguin Solutions Introduces Industry’s First Production-Ready CXL-Based KV Cache Server
About Penguin Solutions
The most transformative technological advancements are often the hardest to deploy and optimize. Penguin Solutions, the AI factory platform company, has the innovative technologies, skills, experience, and partnerships needed to turn your AI ambitions into reality. In addition to our AI capabilities, Penguin Solutions offers memory and LED solutions serving a wide range of high-performance and specialized applications. For more information, visit www.penguinsolutions.com.
Source: Penguin Solutions
The post Penguin Solutions’ OriginAI Factory Platform Delivers Optimized Performance for AI Inference appeared first on HPCwire.
The Find N6 has a lot going for it, like a giant battery, AirDrop support with iPhones and a slim, sturdy design. Its biggest problem is that it's difficult to buy.
From the all-out flagship to the best budget pick, I've tested every Apple Watch to help you decide.
The Taliban in Afghanistan claim that a Pakistani military airstrike on a drug rehabilitation hospital in Kabul has killed over 400 people, but Pakistan alleges the site was a weapons depot.
Specialist lender’s shares plunge after short seller claims it will have to raise provision for car finance scandal
The UK banking group Close Brothers is to cut about 600 jobs and roll out the use of AI “at pace” after posting further losses amid a mounting compensation bill for the UK motor finance scandal.
The specialist lender said the cuts – almost a quarter of its 2,600-strong workforce – would be made over the next 18 months across its teams in the UK and Ireland.
Continue reading...President Trump has invited farmers and biofuels producers to the White House for an event next week as the industry awaits the government's announcement on mandates for the fuel additives.
What does China’s new Five-Year Plan mean for the climate? Audio thilton.drupal
Anna speaks to James Kynge and Lauri Myllyvirta (CREA) about what the plan reveals about China’s climate and clean tech ambitions, as well as it’s broader geopolitical goals.
China is the world’s largest emitter and dominates global production of green technology. A few days ago, the National People’s Congress approved the country’s 15th Five-Year Plan, China’s main economic and policy blueprint for the period 2026–2030. What does the new plan say about China’s climate and clean tech ambitions? And what does it reveal about China’s broader geopolitical and foreign policy goals?
To discuss this, Anna is joined by James Kynge (Senior Research Fellow for China in the World at Chatham House’s Asia-Pacific Programme) and Lauri Myllyvirta (Lead Analyst at and Co-founder of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, CREA).
Want to learn more? Please see:
- The expert comment ‘China’s Five Year Plan commits to economic resilience – as the Iran war exposes the fragility of global supply’, by Dr Yu Jie (Senior Research Fellow on China, Chatham House). Available here.
- The article ‘China’s 5-Year-Plan: Latest draft shows emission targets out, clean energy targets in’, by Bernice Lee (Distinguished Fellow, Chatham House). Available here.
- The article ‘Can the West recover from China’s hi-tech knockout blow?’, by James Kynge (Senior Research Fellow for China in the World, Chatham House). Available here.
The Climate Briefing explores key themes in the UN climate negotiations and international climate politics. The podcast is hosted by Bhargabi Bharadwaj and Anna Aberg from Chatham House and features interviewees from governments, international organizations, academia and civil society organizations from across the world.
You can also listen to The Climate Briefing on Apple Podcasts and Spotify
Trying to find your next passion in a life filled with work and chores? Maybe AI can help you decide.
It would make Larijani the most senior Iranian figure to be killed in the war since Ali Khamenei. Plus, Oakland homicides down 48% from Covid peak
Good morning.
Israel says it killed Iran’s national security chief, Ali Larijani, in overnight strikes. If the claim is confirmed, it would make Larijani the most senior Iranian figure to die in the war since the supreme leader Ali Khamenei was killed on its first day.
How significant could Larijani’s death be? Very. If confirmed, it would remove a pivotal figure at the center of the regime’s political and security establishment at a time of acute crisis.
What’s happening to oil prices? Oil and gas prices have risen again after Iran successfully attacked production facilities for the first time since the start of the war. Brent crude reached $103.2 a barrel on Tuesday.
Continue reading...More than 100 others injured in bombings targeting post office, market areas and hospital in Maiduguri
At least 23 people have been killed and more than 100 others injured in multiple suspected suicide bombings in the north-eastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri, shattering its reputation as a relative oasis of calm in recent years as a long-running insurgency was pushed to the rural hinterlands.
Authorities said the explosions went off at the post office and market areas, as well as the entrance to the University of Maiduguri teaching hospital, on Monday evening during iftar, the breaking of fast in the month of Ramadan.
Continue reading...After carrying out an audit, the council found some parts of the town were ‘overwhelmed’
A local council has stopped residents from installing any more memorial benches in the town amid concerns that it is becoming “overwhelmed”.
Hartlepool borough council has said it is not currently taking any new applications for benches, after concerns from residents that there are too many.
Continue reading...Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was captured in Bolivia last week and transferred to U.S. custody.
Scotland’s busiest station to run reduced trains timetable after estimated 953,000 passenger journeys affected so far
Scotland’s busiest station, Glasgow Central, will partially reopen its main concourse on Wednesday, including for cross-border services, after a fire gutted the Victorian building next to it.
There will be a reduced timetable, including a scaled-down service to London Euston, and passengers are asked to check journeys before travelling.
Continue reading...Britons learn about the country’s involvement ‘almost as a self-congratulatory narrative’, says historian Joseph Mulhern
In 1845 British citizens and companies were already legally prohibited from owning or buying enslaved people overseas, yet that year 385 captives were “transferred” to a British mining company in Brazil named St John d’El Rey.
Despite a global campaign waged by the UK against slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, the move was not technically illegal because the enslaved people were not sold but “rented” – a practice permitted overseas under the 1843 Slave Trade Act.
Continue reading...Shaped by two coaching legends in Pat Summitt and Geno Auriemma, Ralph has Vanderbilt poised to make an NCAA Tournament run
Shea Ralph’s decision to storm the court during the fourth quarter of Vanderbilt’s quarter-final against Ole Miss last Friday at the SEC Tournament wasn’t premeditated. Ralph, who up to that moment had never been thrown out of a game in her lengthy career, just did what she thought was right in arguing a questionable foul call.
“I wasn’t trying to get kicked out,” Ralph told reporters after the game. “I know where I was on the court. But I also think that at that time what I said was warranted, and the action I took was warranted. And I’ll stand behind that. You want to kick me out for it, they can kick me out.”
Continue reading...MSI EdgeXpert and XpertStation platforms enable developers and enterprises to build and deploy next-generation AI agents
SAN JOSE, Calif., March 17, 2026 — MSI, a global leader in high-performance server solutions and Edge AI, is collaborating with NVIDIA to accelerate the development of next-generation AI agents using the open source NVIDIA OpenShell runtime. The solution will be supported on MSI’s EdgeXpert and XpertStation platforms, which are built on NVIDIA DGX Spark and NVIDIA DGX Station architectures.
MSI and NVIDIA are also working together on NVIDIA NemoClaw — an open source stack that simplifies running OpenClaw always-on assistants, more safely, with a single command. As part of the NVIDIA Agent Toolkit, it installs the NVIDIA OpenShell runtime—a secure environment for running autonomous agents, and open source models like NVIDIA Nemotron.
OpenShell is an open-source runtime for building and deploying autonomous, self-evolving agents more safely. Optimized for dedicated AI systems, OpenShell can be deployed on platforms such as DGX Spark and DGX Station to deliver reliable performance for advanced AI agent workloads.
MSI EdgeXpert marks the arrival of a pioneering class of systems engineered specifically for the development and execution of AI. Powered by NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, the EdgeXpert unleashes up to 1petaflop of AI compute, optimized for persistent agents requiring massive token throughput for inter-model communication. With its 128 GB of coherent unified memory, autonomous agents can natively host models featuring up to 200 billion parameters, reducing reliance on external APIs and slashing per-token cloud expenditures. Through integrated NVIDIA ConnectX-7 NIC technology, users can cluster up to four EdgeXpert units to tackle even more sophisticated agentic workflows. By packing data-center-grade power into a compact, efficient footprint, MSI EdgeXpert and OpenShell stand as the ultimate desktop foundation for always-on AI.
MSI XpertStation WS300, built on DGX Station architecture, serves as an ultimate developer platform for OpenShell, enabling developers to build and run large-scale AI models and autonomous, self-learning agents locally and securely at the deskside. Designed as a desktop supercomputer, DGX Station includes NVIDIA GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra Desktop superchip, featuring a massive 748GB of coherent memory, 20 petaFLOPS of FP4 performance, dual 400GbE connectivity powered by NVIDIA ConnectX-8 SuperNIC and can support 1T parameter models. Developers can build, run, and optimize new solutions around the clock, powered by long-running, autonomous agents with frontier-level intelligence.
OpenShell allows any AI agent—including widely used coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and OpenCode—to run inside a secure development sandbox without requiring code changes. By combining AI productivity with privacy and safety, OpenShell provides critical capabilities for developers building personal AI agents and enterprises deploying AI across their organizations.
Visitors can experience live OpenShell demos at the MSI booth#730, explore MSI XpertStation at the NVIDIA Zone and the Exxact Corporation booth#3202, and learn more about EdgeXpert at the Phison Electronics booth#119 during NVIDIA GTC 2026.
More from HPCwire: MSI Launches XpertStation WS300 on NVIDIA DGX Station Architecture
About MSI
MSI is a global leader in gaming, content creation, business & productivity, and AIoT solutions. With its cutting-edge R&D capabilities and a commitment to customer-driven innovation, MSI has a broad international presence spanning over 130 countries. The company is renowned for its comprehensive range of products, including laptops, graphics cards, monitors, motherboards, desktops, servers, IPCs, robotic appliances, and vehicle infotainment and telematics systems. Notably, MSI’s server products are entirely developed in-house, reflecting their dedication to meeting customer needs and aligning with market demands, with a strong emphasis on design and manufacturing. For more information, visit MSI’s website at http://www.msi.com and Enterprise Platform Solutions at http://eps.msi.com.
Source: MSI
The post MSI Accelerates Autonomous AI Agents with NVIDIA AI Software and Models appeared first on HPCwire.
As a professional photographer, I wanted to test both phones to see which takes the best photos.
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Apple's iPhone 17 phone brings notable improvements to the camera, display and battery.
Spam calls can be annoying, but you don't have to put up with them any longer.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inside Climate News: Republican lawmakers in multiple states and Congress are advancing proposals to shield polluters from climate accountability and prevent any type of liability for climate change harms -- even as these harms and their associated costs continue to mount. It's the latest in a counter-offensive that has unfolded on multiple fronts, from the halls of Congress and the White House to courts and state attorneys general offices across the country. Dozens of local communities, states and individuals are suing major oil and gas companies and their trade associations over rising climate costs and for allegedly lying to consumers about climate change risks and solutions. At the same time, some states are enacting or considering laws modeled after the federal Superfund program that would impose retroactive liability on large fossil fuel producers and levy a one-time charge on them to help fund climate adaptation and resiliency measures. But many of these cases and climate superfund laws could be stopped in their tracks, either by the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court or by the Republican-controlled Congress. Last month the court decided to take up a petition lodged by oil companies Suncor and ExxonMobil in a climate-damages case brought against the companies by Boulder, Colorado. The petition argues that Boulder's claims are barred by federal law, and if the justices agree, it could knock out not only Boulder's lawsuit but also many others like it. The court is expected to hear the case during its upcoming term that starts in October. There is also a possibility that Republicans in Congress will take action before then to gift the fossil fuel industry legal immunity, similar to that granted to gun manufacturers with the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. Sixteen Republican attorneys general wrote (PDF) to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in June suggesting that the Department of Justice could recommend legislation creating precisely this type of liability shield. And last month, one Republican congresswoman announced that such legislation is indeed in the works. "The ultimate democratic institution in America is the jury," said former Washington Gov. Jay Inslee. Enacting policies that prevent or block climate-related lawsuits against polluters, he said, would effectively shutter "the doors of the courthouse to Americans that have been injured by oil and gas company pollution and by their lies and deceit about that pollution." "I really think it's an un-American effort to deny Americans the traditional right of access to a jury," Inslee said. Oil and gas executives are "terrified" by the prospect of having to stand before a jury and face evidence of their climate-change lies and deception, he added. "You'll see the steam coming out of the jury's ears when they hear about how they've been lied to for decades. [Oil companies] understand why juries will be outraged by it, and they are shaking in their boots. The day of reckoning is coming, and that's why they're afraid."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Board members Jørgen Vig Knudstorp and Beth Ford face scrutiny for the coffee chain’s ongoing labor dispute
Starbucks shareholders are pushing to remove two board members at the company who they argue have contributed to stalling the coffee chain’s long-fought-over union drive.
The SOC Investment Group, Trillium Asset Management, Merseyside Pension Fund, the non-profit Shareholder Association for Research and Education (Share), and the New York state and New York City comptrollers wrote a letter to Starbucks shareholders to vote “no” on the re-election of board members Jørgen Vig Knudstorp and Beth Ford at Starbucks’s annual shareholders meeting on 25 March.
Continue reading...That $11.3bn doesn’t include any estimate of repairing facilities or replacing losses
Generally speaking, when you bomb another country, and that country retaliates, you call it a “war”. Very simple word. Three letters. Even Donald Trump knows how to spell it.
But be careful about calling the US-Israeli attacks on Iran, which have expanded into an Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon, a “war”. The geniuses in the White House can’t seem to figure out what the hell they’re doing. The House speaker, Mike Johnson, announced on 5 March that “we are not at war” and that the US has “no intention of being at war”. Some lawmakers, such as Senator Cynthia Lummis, meanwhile, are arguing that the US has been in “forever war” with Iran for decades.
Continue reading...
It started on President Donald Trump’s very first day in office in 2017. Over 200 Inauguration Day protesters were mass arrested and charged with hefty riot and conspiracy felonies for simply being present and wearing black at a rowdy demonstration.
Since then, the government has sought and failed to convict left-wing activists on thin, unconstitutional claims of collective guilt.
Just as the J20 prosecutions, as the inauguration cases were known, fell apart, so too did cases accusing dozens of participants in the Atlanta-based Stop Cop City movement of domestic terrorism, racketeering, and conspiracy.
It became a pattern of sorts. Prosecutors on both the federal and state level throwing extreme and overreaching charges at leftists, based on infirm theories of collective liability, aiming to paint antifascist, anti-racist movements as criminal terrorist networks. The evidence marshaled in these cases was consistently no more than typical First Amendment-protected activity, like making protest signs, raising bail funds, or being present at a demonstration. The cases drained movement energies and resources.
Again and again, though, they failed.
This was the pattern repeated in the malign, overreaching cases against protesters in Fort Worth, Texas. The anti-ICE activists had mounted a demonstration at a U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement jail in nearby Alvarado.
There were consistencies with other anti-protest cases. There had been some illegal activity outside the Prairieland Detention Facility last July, and a police officer was shot. The government latched onto these circumstances to build its strategy of criminalizing dissent through guilt by association.
Even in conservative Texas, I didn’t think a jury would buy the government’s case that these defendants were “North Texas Antifa Cell operatives” — an organization fabricated whole cloth by the Trump administration — who had orchestrated an elaborate ambush of the ICE facility.
Last week, a jury found eight of the defendants guilty of terrorism charges for simply being present and wearing black at the protest. The government scored a resounding victory: A few of the protesters, none of whom had fired any weapons, were acquitted of attempted murder charges, but the Justice Department won on almost all the other charges.
“Most people looking at this case are still stuck on the shooting aspect, but the jury decided the shooting was beside the point,” a member of a support group for the defendants told me. “The verdict is that a normal noise demo deserves to be called terrorism and people should spend potentially the rest of their lives in prison. The implications of this are obvious, and people should know that the DOJ is going to try this again.”
The convictions mark a number of grim precedents. It was the first successful effort in court to paint anti-ICE, antifascist protest activity as not only criminal but also terroristic; the first time federal terrorism charges have been deployed in association with the “antifa” label; and the first time the Trump government’s collective guilt strategy won in court.
The terrorism-related charges in the case were filed just a month after Trump announced that he was designating antifa, which is not an organization, a “major terrorist organization” — a designation that does not exist under law for domestic groups.
It’s little wonder that the Justice Department is celebrating the convictions. Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement that the “verdict on terrorism charges will not be the last as the Trump administration systematically dismantles Antifa and finally halts their violence on America’s streets.”
The prosecution’s case was extraordinarily weak — all they really proved was that the activists, some of whom knew each other, planned and attended a late-night demonstration during which certain illegal acts took place.
If that can be sold to juries as the work of an organized terrorist cell, deserving of decades in prison, then Trump’s fantasy of rounding up and imprisoning leftists en masse becomes a reality. This was entirely the idea behind Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, released last September, which directs federal law enforcement agencies to target left-leaning groups and activities. One of the defense attorneys involved in the Prairieland cases told news outlet NOTUS that it “wouldn’t be a terrorism case if it weren’t for that memo.”
The prosecution treated it as a given that antifascist, anti-government, left-wing sentiment was itself evidence of criminal conspiracy.
Throughout the trial, the prosecution treated it as a given that antifascist, anti-government, left-wing sentiment was itself evidence of criminal conspiracy. As The Intercept’s Matt Sledge reported, “prosecutors bombarded jurors with images of radical zines” and “anti-government internet memes, drawings of burning cop cars, and a video of an unidentified street brawl between far-left and far-right protesters.”
The fact that demonstrators wore black and covered their faces — a reasonable tactic in an era when federal forces are filming and openly harassing legal observers and anti-ICE protesters — was presented as material support for terrorism, for which the jury convicted eight defendants.
Another defendant was convicted for the crime of moving a box of zines and pamphlets.
What should have at most been individualized cases relating to a shooting and minor property damage were instead spun by the government into a delusional story of a planned ambush involving “explosives” — protesters set off retail fireworks — and “terroristic acts,” according to a Justice Department statement.
Whether certain illegal activity took place outside the Prairieland Detention Facility last July 4 was never up for debate in this case. Protesters spray-painted vehicles in the parking lot, and a police officer was shot in the neck by one protester, Benjamin Song. (Song was convicted of one count of attempted murder and could face up to life in prison.)
The material support for terrorism and related convictions must be challenged in appeal. They are unconstitutional and were obtained in a trial riddled with irregularities.
For one, the Trump-appointed judge, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Pittman, abruptly declared a mistrial during jury selection based on the initial jury pool reportedly showing too little sympathy for ICE.
When the trial restarted, the judge himself took charge of jury selection — a highly unusual move.
Pittman also barred Song from presenting a self-defense argument. In closing arguments, his defense attorney said that Song only shot at the ground after police officers fired first, and that the injured cop was grazed by a ricocheted bullet.
And access to the court for supporters, observers, and the media was also extremely limited.
“All the odds were stacked against the defendants from the start,” Xavier T. de Janon, a defense attorney representing one of the defendants, told Unicorn Riot. “The rulings of the judge, the way the courtroom was closed, the fact that the first jury was declared a mistrial, where this was happening, the very strict rules on who can even take these cases in north Texas, the sanctions that the judge imposed on defense attorneys for filing very normal motions — all of this piled up to end in this result.”
It’s notable, too, that the defense attorneys did not mount a defense in court. Once the prosecution rested its ideology-drenched and inconsistency-filled case, the defense rested too, and closing arguments proceeded.
“We do not know how things would have gone otherwise, but the assumption that the state’s glaringly weak case was enough to convince a North Texas jury pool to vote not guilty was delusional,” a close friend of a number of the defendants who helped with court support efforts told me. “This is not merely 20/20 hindsight, many of the supporters and loved ones of the defendants disagreed with the decision when it happened.”
With the Prairieland defendants also facing state charges, and with appeals processes ahead, there is a clear need to present a robust case against the government’s pernicious and dangerous lawfare. Outside of future trials and court challenges, it is crucial that anyone invested in challenging Trump’s fascist deportation machine understand the stakes of these cases and show solidarity with defendants accordingly.
The Prairieland case, as I’ve previously noted, provided a convenient testing ground for state repression, in part because it has not been lifted up as a national cause célèbre against Trumpian overreach. The reasons why should be obvious: not only were there acts of minor vandalism, but also a police officer was shot — a highly unusual event at these sorts of demonstrations.
No matter how unique, however, the Texas case reveals precisely the strategies the Trump administration will use, with the assistance of state forces, to target whole movements and communities with prosecutorial overreach and a logic of guilt by association. In the face of Trump’s escalations, this is no time for anti-ICE activists to distance themselves from protests where militant activity might occur; this is the chilling effect the government seeks.
It is the nature of contemporary far-right governance to throw everything against the wall, repeatedly, until something sticks to achieve its goals. Anti-trans laws that once roundly failed are now on the books in multiple states; once-constitutionally protected reproductive rights have been decimated.
With brute force, repetition, and relentlessness, Trump and his acolytes hack away at established protections. First Amendment-protected protest activity is no different. The Trump regime has been seeking to criminalize leftist dissent since the president’s first inauguration. For years, nothing stuck. We cannot let Prairieland be the turning point.
The post Why We Have to Fight Back Against ICE Protesters’ Terror Convictions appeared first on The Intercept.
Kareem’s Daily Quote: A reminder from James Madison
What Happens When Justice Starts Taking Requests: Not enough for a case
Freedom Offered, Pressure Applied: Shaky future for the Iranian women’s soccer team
Video Break: 83 points
From the Atlantic: He’s likeable and personable, but “mayor” and “activist” are two different jobs
What I’m Watching: Bad Man
Jukebox Playlist: The Sounds Of Silence
“…all men having power ought to be distrusted, to a certain degree.” — James Madison
Yes, James Madison actually said that as written. (The quote was revised in the 20th Century to make it more definitive.) But even with that historical qualifier, it sounds cynical at first, like something you’d hear from a guy who’s been burned one too many times. Then you live life, and you watch folks shift the instant they’re handed an award, a title or a mic. And you realize that Madison, far from being cynical, was simply telling it like it is.
I learned this in small ways long before I ever understood it in big ones. In my early twenties I remember sitting in a cramped community meeting where the most powerful person in the room was a man whose job title I can’t remember. All I know is, he wasn’t a senator or a mayor: he was the kind of official whose authority only exists inside a particular building. The moment he steps outside, it’s gone…no one even knows who he is. But inside? You could feel it. People adjusted themselves around him. They softened their tone. They waited for his reaction before offering their own. It was like watching powerful magnets work on human behavior, bending it this way and that. Because power doesn’t have to be enormous to be distorting. It just has to be present.
And once you notice that, you start seeing it everywhere. How people talk differently when the boss walks in. How someone’s moral clarity becomes a little foggier once they’re the one holding the pen. How quickly “I would never” becomes “Well, this situation is complicated,” once the consequences land on their desk instead of someone else’s.
I’ve watched people I admire get promoted and suddenly become unrecognizable, not because they’re bad people, but because power quietly rearranges your priorities. It whispers to you. It tells you that your instincts are correct, that your judgment is superior, that your exceptions are justified. And if you’re not careful, you start believing it.
Madison wasn’t warning us about villains. Villains are easy to spot. He was warning us about us, the well‑intentioned, the principled, the ones who swear they’d never abuse power because they’re “one of the good ones.” I’ve learned that the people most confident in their own goodness are often the ones who need the most guardrails.
I’ve also learned that mistrust can be healthy. The kind of mistrust that keeps institutions honest, that keeps leaders grounded, that keeps us awake. It’s the kind of mistrust that says, “I believe you mean well, but I’m not taking only your word for it.” It’s the kind that understands that power—any power—needs friction, because otherwise it goes to people’s heads, and those heads are invariably too small to contain it.
I’ve been in enough rooms now to know that the people who handle power best are the ones who are a little afraid of it. The ones who understand that authority is borrowed, not owned. The ones who don’t treat their position like a mirror that reflects their greatness back at them, but like a weight they’re responsible for carrying.
Oh, and I also learned that people who insist they can be trusted without question are the ones you should question first.
Madison wasn’t telling us to be bitter. He was telling us to be realistic. He was telling us that power is a force of nature, and human beings, even the good ones, are not built to handle it without accountability.
And maybe the real lesson, the one I wish someone had told me earlier, is that mistrusting power isn’t about doubting people but about protecting them from the parts of themselves they can’t always see.
None of us are immune to the gravitational pull of power. The best we can do is stay awake and watch if and when the room starts to bend.
Exclusive: Early US assessment suggesting missile was Iranian was almost immediately dismissed, sources say
Donald Trump’s attempt to blame Iran for the deadly strike on an elementary school stemmed from an early US intelligence assessment that initially suggested the missile was Iranian but was almost immediately dismissed, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The CIA initially told the president that they did not believe the missile that struck the school was a munition used by the US because the fins appeared to be positioned too low for it to be a Tomahawk cruise missile.
Continue reading...
Why Should Delaware Care?
Independent libraries in Sussex County often act as hubs for community resources that reach far beyond checking out books. But those same libraries also are consistently strapped for cash as their state and county funding split comes up short. As county leaders waffle on whether to help increase the libraries’ coffers, library directors work to showcase why they need the boost.
From winter coat drives to free-to-use printers, tax season help, and their most fundamental service — providing books — Sussex County’s 11 independent libraries wear many different hats within their respective communities.
But a funding structure that almost always leaves large gaps in the independent libraries’ annual budgets — deficits of anywhere from 13% to 52% — has forced library employees to spend hours away from those programming responsibilities to apply for grants, make donation pleas to community members and search for other funding sources.
Bridgeville Public Library Director Karen Johnson-Kemp, for example, said she spends hundreds of hours a year applying to grants and trying to fundraise to close a $25,000 budget gap.
“If I were able to have that [time] back, I could focus on more administrative issues that are needed to keep the library moving forward in a more positive fashion,” Johnson-Kemp said.
Independent library leaders like Johnson-Kemp are lobbying Sussex County leaders this spring to increase the county’s library tax rate — its share of the funding structure. If they are successful, the new rate would translate to about $18 annually for the average property owner. It also would represent the first rate increase in 20 years.
However, some Sussex County Council members said they are reluctant to raise taxes this year, citing resident blowback from the property tax increases spurred by last year’s property reassessment and budget requests by other departments.
Sussex County also has three county-run libraries — Milton, Greenwood and South Coastal — which are fully funded by the county government.
“I think the libraries do great things,” County Councilman Steve McCarron said. “I don’t want to dismiss it. I just don’t know if this is the most opportune time for that.”
A number of library directors, though, said they were skeptical that county leaders genuinely understand everything independent libraries provide to their communities, and how they work with so little funding.
The state aims to fund about 15% of independent libraries’ expenses, and counties are meant to provide the rest. In practice, however, Sussex County only chooses to finance a portion of the independent libraries’ remaining budget, leaving the libraries to search for tens of thousands of dollars annually.
Raising the library tax rate, directors said, would go a long way in easing funding concerns and focusing more on providing services to their communities.
But experts also say this friction between independent libraries and the county is representative of a broader culture in the state’s southernmost county focused on keeping taxes low, which has left the libraries in financial distress as a result.
“There has been, proudly so, a fiscally conservative attitude toward government spending and a proudness about not raising taxes on an annual basis for a long time,” Troy Mix, director of the Institute for Public Administration at the University of Delaware, said of Sussex County.
Library directors say they have sporadically raised the issue of their funding challenges to county leaders for more than a decade. This current campaign is the first time they have made a specific funding increase request to the county, though. It also has more organized, forward momentum, they said.
Some of that momentum has come from Candace Vessella, a former Washington, D.C. lobbyist and current president of the friends group at the Lewes Public Library, who has made the tax rate increase her focus since last fall.
The independent library coalition proposes raising the tax rate from $0.0023 per $100 of assessed property value to $0.0046 per $100. This would mean the average county property owner’s library tax would increase from the $4 to $23 range to the $9 to $46 range, annually, Vessella said.
The tax increase would provide about $2.5 million in additional funding to the libraries, Vessella estimated. Combined with state dollars, that would cover about 90% of the libraries’ operating costs, she said.
County leaders have responded to the funding increase campaign by arguing that county funding for libraries has gradually increased, despite the rate staying the same, as the ongoing population boom in southern Delaware has expanded Sussex’s property tax base, Vessella said.
Sussex County Libraries Director Rachel Lynch and Sussex County Administrator Todd Lawson declined Spotlight Delaware’s request for comment about the library tax rate.
Lawson told WBOC in mid-February, however, that the county’s contribution to independent library funding increased by 54% from 2009 to 2025 – from $1.93 million to $2.976 million.
But libraries have expanded in size to serve more visitors due to the population spike, far exceeding the funding growth referenced by the county, Vessella said.
Selbyville Public Library Director Kelly Kline said her library grew from a 5,600-square-foot building to nearly 12,700 square feet and also has seen a spike in visitors due to population growth.
Without the tax rate increase, Kline said she expects her library will have to dip into their reserves by about $60,000 for the 2027 fiscal year.
Johnson-Kemp, the Bridgeville director, similarly said her library will need to come up with an additional 15% in funding this fiscal year. Success in meeting that goal, she said, will largely depend on the weather during Bridgeville’s popular Apple Scrapple Festival in October, which is the library’s primary fundraiser each year.
Visitors at independent Sussex County libraries told Spotlight Delaware said they appreciate the role libraries serve in their community, and they would not feel a major burden from the tax rate increase.
Bridgeville resident David Owen said he comes to the Bridgeville Public Library every week to check out books because the closest book store is all the way on the other side of the county in Rehoboth Beach.
Owen said he looked at his property tax bill and saw that he pays very little for his library tax currently, so he wouldn’t miss a little bit more money going to the library.
“I don’t mind paying a couple dollars more a month for what they do and what they give back to the community,” he said.
Another Bridgeville resident, Rob Costello, volunteers each week at the library during the spring to help people with their taxes. Costello said he supports the tax rate increase because of how much he has seen the library do for his small western Sussex community.
“A library is more than just books and stuff. It’s really a focal point in the community,” he said.
As part of their push for more funding, independent libraries asked visitors to share those sentiments with Sussex County Council members through a postcard writing campaign.
While the eastern Sussex County beach towns have been built up with more infrastructure over time, libraries are one of the only meeting places in central and western Sussex county, residents say.
When asked what her library provides in addition to books, Johnson-Kemp, the Bridgeville director, had a question of her own:
“What don’t we do?”
Some supplementary services in Bridgeville include free yoga and workout classes for people who can’t afford a gym membership; a “small business hub” with printing, copying and faxing services; a summer reading program; free activities for families; and housing one of the only meeting spots in town that can fit more than 50 people, Johnson-Kemp said.
Rachel Lawson, who took over as director of the Seaford District Library last fall, spoke similarly about her goal of providing a hub of community resources.
This could be as simple as offering a cool place for people to escape the summer heat or a warm meeting spot in the winter, Lawson said. But it also includes offering events as varied as adult craft sessions and free HIV testing.
“Nothing is too far out of the scope of what we will try for,” Lawson said.
Johnson-Kemp acknowledged the libraries’ appeal to the county might not succeed this year. But by raising the public’s awareness of the issue, she hopes it will set the libraries up for success in the future.
Other library directors agreed, saying making a concerted push for more county funding is necessary to put the independent libraries in a more sustainable financial position.
“We are just asking for an increase to help us get off the hamster wheel of constant fundraising or burning through our reserves,” Kline, the Selbyville director, said.
The post Sussex libraries seek funding increase from county; council members skeptical appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Caroline Catlin started a “little free pep talk library” outside her home, sharing wisdom and joy with anyone who passes by.
If Brendan Carr and the US president’s attacks on the press aren’t stopped, the outcome could be dire
Over the weekend, Donald Trump fumed on Truth Social about newspapers covering attacks on US tanker aircrafts in Saudi Arabia. Within hours, the Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, reposted Trump’s rant and vowed to revoke the licenses of broadcasters who air what he called “fake news”. For some extra brownie points, Carr tossed in a line about Trump’s “landslide election victory”, too.
Early on Monday, Trump completed the sycophantic cycle with a second post announcing that he was “thrilled” by Carr’s threats and accusing unnamed media outlets of “treason” and a lack of patriotism for reporting on AI fakes linked to Iran. (It’s not clear what Trump was referring to, since the media has regularly reported on those fakes to debunk them.)
Continue reading...New Jersey’s statewide battle over growth, rooted in a once loosely enforced 1970s law against racial segregation, has turned “vicious” in Princeton.
Why Should Delaware Care?
The Granary at Draper Farms is one of the largest master-planned communities to have ever broken ground in Delaware, and its ambitious builder has a unique view on how it should fit into the greater community.
Colby Cox is a fourth-generation Miltonian who left his mark on his hometown two decades ago, when he built Cannery Village. Today, the master-planned community surrounds the Dogfish Head brewery and helped launch the intimate, mixed-use development concept to Delaware.
He’s recently kickstarted work on his latest Delaware project, The Granary at Draper Farms – a massive project on Milton’s southwest side, which will likely double the town’s population in the next decade.
Cox discussed the project, how he approaches building a community, how to view Sussex County’s building boom and more in a sit-down interview with Spotlight Delaware.
The entire conversation can be heard in an exclusive podcast. A selection of the conversation, edited for length and clarity, is offered here.
So we’re here in Milton as you kick off sales in The Granary at Draper Farm, a 451-acre planned community with 1,350 residences and 60,000 square feet of commercial space. There’s a lot to unpack, but I really want to start at the beginning, because this land has been in your family for about 80 years. Can you give us the background of Draper Farms?
My family’s been in Delaware for a long, long time, hundreds of years, but Milton became a place that a big portion of my family settled. My great grandmother was born here, just up Federal Street. My grandmother was born in that house, which is still there to this day and a lot of my extended family has lived here. I lived here for a while at one point in the early 2000s
And my great grandfather started a tomato company and canned tomatoes, which ended up becoming the Draper Canning Company and later Draper King Cole. My grandfather took it over in the ‘40s, when he moved down here after playing football at the University of Maryland, and took that from a tomato company to agriculture in general, and vertical integration with rail cars, manufacturing and owning his own soybean and corn farms. He was a major supplier across the U.S. of canned goods for about 40 years, until the industry started to transition and frozen food became popular.
I’ve heard that there were about 140 canneries on the Delmarva Peninsula at one time, and today there are none. So that went away, and then through some kind of weird serendipity, I ended up purchasing that property back in the early 2000s, tore down that factory, and then turned that into a community, which is where Dogfish Head brewery is today, and a housing community called Cannery Village.
You mentioned earlier that this is not your first development in Milton. Convergence Communities also did the Cannery that surrounds the Dogfish Head campus today. Did you learn any lessons from that project that you hope to carry over to The Granary?
Some of the stuff that we did in there has worked very well. I was very into New Urbanism and traditional neighborhood design at the time. I’d been studying projects under Andrés Duany and some of the projects that he had worked on. I worked with a group out of Washington, D.C., at the time called Rogers Consulting that had really worked closely with Duany.
This is more common now, but back in the early 2000s this was kind of cutting-edge. These concepts were really developed in the late ‘80s and it had never really been done here. There was one project in DC that I was able to get some inspiration from, but it was a big sell.
The mayor and town council originally did not like the concept. My pitch was, ‘All I’m trying to do is implement a lot of the same values, architecture and design principles that exist in Milton as it was designed hundreds of years ago.’ Well, then engineers get involved and they’re like, ‘Yeah, but what about the 100-year snowstorm? And what about this? And, how’s the fire truck going to swing around this 90-degree radius with a median in the middle of it?’
Those are all practical concerns, but I realized the only thing I could do is take them somewhere and show them what it looks like, what it feels like. So, I ended up convincing the mayor and council at the time to get on a bus and we all drove to a master-planned project called Lakelands and Kentlands in Maryland.
We walked around for a day in this community. And they finally started to see that houses fronting on the street with alleyway access behind can work. And 5 feet between residences actually breeds more human connection than fences everywhere and distance between people. And so they got it, and they ultimately bought in. And I think that that has worked very well.
We can’t let engineers control the way that we live, because a lot of times what feels best in terms of the way we live isn’t the most practical in terms of trash pickup and snow removal.
Cannery Village has really transformed Milton in many ways, bringing new life to an area that was largely kind of forgotten, but it also really introduced master-planned communities to Delaware in a way that hadn’t existed beforehand. Now there are many communities around the state using that model.
What is it about mixed-use or master-planned communities that convinces you this is not just a fad, but something that people are going to want for generations?
I’ve spent a lot of time all over Europe, Asia, and South America, and there’s some real common elements that you see in the way that people live that hammers in the general idea that there are a couple things that people need.
People need to feel that they can readily connect with nature, with each other, and with themselves or their spirit — those three things are very important for the development of self love and human happiness.
When Convergence says we want to “create conscious communities,” it is designed around those very specific things.
Our goal in all of our projects is for people to see their home as the place where they sleep and have some time with their family, but the most important thing is for people to come out of their home and engage with other people and do things out in the natural world.
We want you to have opportunities to sit quietly with yourself, without a phone or a computer in front of you, and sit in stillness and really kind of discover your inner voice and answer some of the big questions in life. That is the driving mission of The Granary.
And so the entire planning around The Granary is about really giving people very accessible opportunities to connect with other people, to feel part of a community. And a key component of that is making sure that the Town of Milton feels as connected with the project as the project feels with the town.
There was some minor controversy over Convergence’s decision to seek a special development district to help pay for The Granary’s infrastructure like roads, sewer and amenities, which essentially puts the cost on future homeowners rather than on the developer upfront. We don’t see a lot of those special tax districts in Delaware. What went into that decision?
Yeah, I think part of the reason why we don’t see more creativity in projects is because there’s a feasibility analysis that’s done that says, this is the amount of infrastructure benefits, recreational uses, or whatever, that this project can support based on what homebuilders are willing to pay for lots and, ultimately, what buyers are willing to pay for homes.
That equation has resulted in a lack of creativity, not just here in Delaware, but most of the places that I go.The standard practice in a community is to now build a clubhouse that nobody’s going to use, a pool that people only use twice a year, and a hotel-style gym that’s too small.
That’s kind of the standard amenity package that people are being offered, and it’s absurd; it’s weak.
So, how do we deliver a product at a reasonable price that people are willing to pay for and afford all of these things? Well, there’s another mechanism, and we’ve used that in other areas.
I’ve used it in Texas, and I’m currently involved in a project in Colorado where we’re looking at this tool. The best way to do that is to spread those costs out over time, have those costs borne by a combination of the developer and the new residents in the community, and actually be able to afford to pay the town for some of the impacts to the town, but also bring a litany of other amenities and uses to the community that otherwise would not make any economic sense.
A lot of the stuff we’re doing, like the recreational athletic fields, the amphitheater, the bouldering field, the skate park, the outdoor basketball courts, the 3 miles of walking trails, preservation of 20 acres of waterfront — all of this is being funded by us in combination with this public financing program. The risk is borne, ultimately, by me, but it’s my ability to sell to these new homeowners, and then once they purchase a home, they pay their annual fee, and they pick up some of the expense. Until that happens, I’m paying all of that.
Would the public financing up front allow you to build some of those amenities earlier in the process?
It does. It advances some of those funds, and it does allow us to move substantially faster with some of those things.
So you’re getting those things earlier, and then you’re paying for it in the long run with an additional tax on top?
Yeah, and the beauty is that there’s no risk to the town, and the risk is all on the residents and the developer of the new project. This is where we get into the win-win.
The current residents of Milton are going to be getting a bunch of additional things that are public access and that the new residents are paying for – and they should be paying for it. That’s their contribution to this community, and it’s OK for them to have a bit of an entrance fee because somebody else built all of this.
Here in Sussex County, it seems there’s increasingly a tough climate for builders in criticism from residents, even around some mixed-use projects like Belle Mead and Cool Spring Crossing. What have you learned as you look at those debates, and do you feel like the conversation is changing around development?
Well, I think to be truthful in a conversation about growth, you have to recognize both sides of the equation. It is not true that all development is good, and it is not true that all development is bad. There are ways of doing things that are mutually beneficial.
I think the standpoint that “I’m here and nobody else should come” is unreasonable in any community. Communities need to welcome people that want to come and join, but they have to accept the values of that community.
There’s a lot of benefits that have come with growth. That said, not every community should be developed. I believe wholeheartedly that the best growth is growth that occurs around already existing infrastructure, and frankly, towns. I do not believe that we should just allow people to develop green fields in the middle of nowhere.
Now, you have to balance that with the fact that this is traditionally a farming community. These farmers have worked very hard to survive for many years, they have value in their property, and that value should not be taken away without just compensation. And there are ways to do that.
There are transfer of development rights (TDR) programs and other things that can be done to protect these people who have owned this property for a very long time, and they deserve to be able to continue to farm, and they deserve to be able to have some value for what they have long term that isn’t just legislated into nothing.
There’s not a strong TDR culture in Delaware. Is that something Delaware should put more thought into as other states have?
No matter where I go — I develop in Texas, I’ve done some stuff in the Carolinas, I live in Jackson Hole, Wyoming — I run into a lot of the same concerns in a lot of these places.
How do we deal with growth?
And yes, there are ideas that have worked well and transfer development rights programs have worked well. For people who don’t really know what that is, it’s the idea that you can put something that is not in a growth area under permanent preservation, but then you can monetize the development rights that you’re giving up for that by allowing somebody to purchase those and use those rights in an area that is more designed for growth.
And I think that Delaware should very strongly consider that concept, especially here in Sussex County. I think it’s a potential solution for a lot of issues, and I think it can preserve a lot of the rural character of this place without destroying the value that the rural community has right now in their property.
People probably aren’t used to hearing this from people like me, but I do not believe that growth should be occurring outside of the annexation area of towns. I think that that is where growth should occur.
You and your family have been here for generations. When you look at Milton today, what do you think about in terms of how it’s changed over the decades?
I used to live at 424 Chestnut St. I drove by it yesterday. Every time I come to town, I kind of take a look at it as the first home I ever owned. It’s pretty humble, but I have a lot of nostalgia there. I have a lot of nostalgia for this town.
I used to go to King’s Ice Cream when I was a kid. It’s been here forever. I remember my grandfather taking me on tours of the factory when I was 6 or 7 years old.
I think it’s a uniquely special place, and it’s different from some of these other towns in southern Delaware. They all have their own cool and unique attributes, but Milton in particular has this history of industry and culture and arts, and there’s a lot of really creative people in this town.
You run into these very interesting people who are highly intelligent, highly creative, and they just happen to be in this town because there’s something about it that seems to draw those types of people in. It’s always been that way.
But I do think there is something unique about Milton, and my mission with this project is to make sure that is preserved and enhanced.
The post Granary developer Colby Cox talks designing community, planning growth appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
By considering consciousness a possibility, Anthropic is raising a fascinating proposition – that chatbots could rise up against their own algorithms
I am, in the way of my country, an over-apologiser. Colleague who ignored my email, woman who stepped on my foot, chair I tripped over: all will receive a fulsome apology for the terrible embarrassment of my being alive and bringing attention to it.
All of which is my way of pre-emptively asking forgiveness when I admit that I extend these niceties to AI chatbots. “Good morning, Claude, thanks for your suggestions yesterday, they were great. Shall we work up some more?” I might say. (“I’d be delighted to,” returns Claude.) It was unintentional formality at first and then became deliberate, as I didn’t want to get into the habit of speaking rudely in case that leaked into behaviour with humans (cue dystopian visions of someone shouting “WRONG, DO IT AGAIN” to a cowering staff member over a doughnut-shop mix-up). Manners, after all, are muscles that need exercising.
Coco Khan is a freelance writer and co-host of the politics podcast Pod Save the UK
Continue reading...Music’s most famous number is being repurposed to offer resources for patients and caregivers
The telephone number immortalized in the enduring Tommy Tutone hit song 867-5309/Jenny has started connecting callers to a cancer support line – as one ad touting the news says it was time that music’s most famous digits “did some good”.
Cancer Support Community (CSC)’s Instagram page announced the campaign with a series of posts on Monday alluding to the song about a guy who nervously ponders calling the phone number of a woman named Jenny, which is scrawled on a bathroom wall.
Continue reading...Five years ago, Oklahoma oil regulators took on a project with an impressive name: the Source of Truth. State officials wanted a comprehensive database capturing all vital information about the more than 11,000 wells in Oklahoma that shoot the toxic byproduct of oil production back underground.
I’d heard about this project from several people during the 18 months I had spent reporting on the growing number of cases where oilfield wastewater blasted out of old wells, known as purges, after being injected underground at high pressures. State employees also referenced the project in internal communications that I received after filing nearly a dozen public records requests to the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry.
Just before the new year, the Source of Truth itself landed in my inbox in response to an unrelated records request. And it was explosive, revealing a pattern of rule violations by oil and gas companies that state regulators allowed to continue.
The project was supposed to clean up or fix state data regarding how much wastewater was being injected and the pressures at which it was being pushed underground. The agency’s databases, many of which were based on decades-old paper records, were riddled with contradictory or missing information. In many cases, the agency failed to update its records. More than 1,300 errors were identified.
But the Source of Truth found more than just messy data. It also allowed regulators to pinpoint nearly 600 wells that were operating illegally: injecting wastewater above their permitted pressures or volumes.
Excessively high injection pressures and volumes can lead to purges and groundwater pollution.
That wasn’t all. The report also showed that regulators had allowed more than 1,400 other older injection wells to operate for decades without any limits whatsoever on injection pressures or volumes — grandfathered in from an earlier era of permissive oversight.
In the course of my reporting on oil and gas pollution in Oklahoma, I’ve uncovered systemic underregulation by the state — as well as a few crucial fork-in-the-road moments, instances when state regulators could have taken action to bring the industry into compliance with their own rules.
The completion of the Source of Truth was one of them.
With this report, the agency had in hand an extensive list of potentially problematic wells that were either injecting above legal limits — or lacked limits entirely. These wells accounted for nearly a fifth of the active injection wells in the state. They warranted scrutiny, my agency sources told me.
But after the report was completed, in 2021, regulators did not act on its findings. They did not make oil and gas operators comply with the injection limits on their permits or establish limits on older wells to bring them up to modern standards, agency employees said. They never made the report accessible to the wider agency staff, according to my agency sources and internal documents.
In the meantime, the number of oilfield purges grew steadily, from about a dozen in 2020 to more than 150 over the next five years, according to a Frontier and ProPublica analysis of pollution complaints submitted to the agency.
As agency employees investigated these pollution events, they identified plenty of problematic wells that, unbeknownst to many of them, had already been flagged in the Source of Truth.
“The Oklahoma Corporation Commission looked into using the Source of Truth database in the past and elected not to use this form of data collection,” said Jack Money, an agency spokesperson, without saying why.
Money did not say why regulators did not force oil companies to comply with the limits they had agreed to, why the agency chose not to establish limits on the older wells or why it did not share the Source of Truth widely. He did not respond to follow-up questions.
The core problem identified by the Source of Truth dates back to 1981, when Oklahoma applied to take over regulation of oil and gas injection operations from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Before the feds would agree to hand over control, the state had to prove that its regulations would protect groundwater as required by the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. The 1974 law created basic standards for regulating underground injection.
This meant big changes in Oklahoma. For decades, the state had routinely approved parcels of land for drilling, along with groups of injection wells that help produce oil. This type of injection well takes wastewater after it has been separated from oil and shoots it back underground to push more petroleum to the surface — a technique known as waterflooding.
The state proposed approving every injection well individually, setting a maximum pressure and volume for each one to “prevent contamination of freshwater,” according to Oklahoma’s application to the EPA. Setting such limits would help ensure that the injected wastewater would not fracture the rock surrounding the well and pollute groundwater.
Oklahoma won the EPA’s approval, becoming one of the first states to gain direct control of underground oil and gas injection. Today, more than 30 states have authority over regulation of underground injection for oil and gas.
Oklahoma did not retroactively apply its new standards. And the EPA never forced it to. Thousands of existing wells were allowed to continue injecting with no volume or pressure limits.
Federal regulators’ hands appear to be tied by the language of the Safe Drinking Water Act, which allows injection without limits to continue for “the life of the well,” according to Joseph Robledo, a spokesperson for the EPA regional office that oversees Oklahoma.
“EPA acknowledges that because oil and gas activity began in Oklahoma long before the establishment of federal [underground injection] regulations, many wells in Oklahoma do not meet modern standards,” Robledo wrote in an email.
He said Oklahoma has taken steps to modernize its oil and gas inventory and submits regular reports to the EPA.
But my reporting shows that state regulators have not directly addressed the issue of wells without injection limits.
I consulted more than a half dozen experts in oil and gas injection, including lawyers, about these wells operating under outdated standards. None had any idea that so many of Oklahoma’s injection wells had been grandfathered in and were not abiding by volume and pressure limits. Several noted, though, that the federal law is unclear on what state regulators were allowed — or required — to do; the Safe Drinking Water Act prohibited states from interfering with oil and gas operations that existed prior to the law’s passage — unless the operations endangered drinking water.
Because the state never investigated these wells, no one can say for certain whether they do, in fact, threaten drinking water. But my reporting shows that excessively high injection pressures and volumes have caused mass pollution in Oklahoma.
The most recent state data indicates that 88% of the 1,400 wells found by the Source of Truth to have no pressure or volume limits are listed as active, injecting over a hundred million gallons of wastewater beneath the ground last year.
Establishing pressure and volume limits for each of these wells would’ve been a huge task, requiring regulators to approve new permits for each one.
Nevertheless, experts say that responsible regulation of underground injection requires, at a basic level, knowing how much — and with how much force — water is being pushed underground.
“Pressure and volume limits are key to ensure that injection wells aren’t, first and foremost, endangering groundwater, but also to prevent bad outcomes like earthquakes and purges,” Adam Peltz, an attorney who directs the energy office for the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy nonprofit, told me.
In the years since the Source of Truth was completed, purges multiplied across the state, with toxic wastewater gushing to the surface, polluting farmland and water sources.
One especially bad series of purges occurred in a rural stretch of Carter County in south central Oklahoma. Huge volumes of wastewater poured from the ground for months at a time starting in 2021.
In an August 2022 internal email chain discussing the response to the ongoing wastewater eruptions, one environmental supervisor pointed out that the Source of Truth could have been “a tremendous help” to his team as they evaluated the injection wells near the purges — but they did not have access to it.
After I got the Source of Truth documents, I checked to see if wells that it flagged as problematic were later identified by the agency to be located near purges in recent years. There were at least 30 matches. If the agency had proactively investigated the problem wells to see if wastewater was spreading widely belowground, it may have been able to identify several oilfields where overpressurized injection would later cause purges.
In theory, the EPA could still force Oklahoma to improve its regulation of oil and gas injection, if federal officials found that its wells were systematically threatening groundwater. There is some precedent for this, but it’s rare.
In California, federal officials helped conduct an audit of the state’s oilfield wastewater injection policies in 2011 and found that it had failed to properly protect aquifers. State and federal officials subsequently created a plan to overhaul California’s underground injection regulations. No state has ever had its oversight of oil and gas injection revoked.
Similar scrutiny is unlikely in Oklahoma under President Donald Trump, whose EPA is radically loosening regulations on industry.
Robledo, the EPA spokesperson, noted in an email that there are some circumstances that would require Oklahoma to place limits on these old wells, including when they are contaminating drinking water or violating other state rules.
But state regulators would not know if these wells are contaminating drinking water if they do not investigate them.
I asked state regulators whether they would address the many wells still injecting under outdated regulations, a situation created four decades ago and highlighted by the Source of Truth.
They did not answer.
Toxic wastewater from oil fields keeps pouring out of the ground in Oklahoma. For years, residents have filed complaints and struggled to find solutions. We need your help to understand the full scale of the problem.
The post Oil Regulators Found Hundreds of Wells Violating Oklahoma Rules. Then They Ignored Their Findings. appeared first on ProPublica.
The new officer completed a basic training program that provided a third of the hours once dedicated to teaching recruits how to fill out a key form.
The Iran war is exacting a heavy toll on Gulf oil and gas exporters – and creating risk and opportunity in North Africa Expert comment jon.wallace
The war unleashed on Iran by Israel and the US will have profound implications for Middle East economies – mainly negative for both producers and consumers.
For the oil and gas exporters in the Gulf, the US-Israeli war with Iran has already exacted a heavy toll through lost revenue. Matters could get even worse if major installations are seriously damaged.
Regional energy importers, meanwhile, are facing stresses from higher fuel costs and losses of foreign currency earnings, which will push up inflation and aggravate socio-economic tensions.
It is striking that amid the crisis, while its economy is being badly damaged by the war, Iran is still exporting oil to China using the Strait of Hormuz – even as it closes the passage to Gulf countries’ shipping.
It’s possible the US is refraining from attacking Iranian traffic in hopes of preserving the infrastructure that any new Iranian regime would depend upon. Gulf Arab states’ fear of further escalation, and Trump’s wariness of antagonizing China prior to a planned summit later this month, may also be playing a part.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE are managing to sell reduced volumes via pipelines to terminals outside the Strait of Hormuz. The East-West pipeline across Saudi Arabia to Yanbu on the Red Sea has the capacity to deliver 5 million barrels/day (b/d), while the line from Abu Dhabi to Fujairah, on the Arabian Sea, can carry 1.5 million b/d.
Yet even at full capacity these routes can only cover about one-quarter of the oil that normally goes through the Strait of Hormuz. And they are vulnerable to attack by Iran, and by Yemen’s Houthis. The Yemeni group has yet to enter the fray, but if it does, it could disrupt Saudi exports from Yanbu to Asia.
Saudi Arabia will be able to claw back some of its revenue losses thanks to higher oil prices. But its financial position was already showing signs of strain before the war.
The fiscal deficit was 5.3 per cent of GDP in 2025, and capital spending was being cut back. The kingdom has become increasingly reliant on capital inflows, including external borrowing, which has reached $156 billion. The net foreign assets of its commercial banks showed a deficit of $57 billion at the end of January. Foreign lenders and investors will be reappraising Saudi risk, even if oil exports climb back to pre-war levels within a few months.
The UAE has a more diversified economy than Saudi Arabia, and a smaller national population, and so it is less reliant on oil. Yet its Jebel Ali trading and manufacturing hub has been hit hard by the disruption to shipping, as have tourism, retail, aviation and the property market. And the UAE’s role as a services and trade outpost for Iran will be called into question by the war.
Qatar’s financial loss from a one-month interruption to its liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports will be a relatively modest $4 billion (assuming 6 million tonnes at $14/mmBtu). This could easily be recouped with a return to business as usual.
However, Qatar and the UAE’s long-term plans for major expansions to their LNG exports face uncertainty. The start-up of Qatar’s own expansion project has already been delayed to mid-2027. And assumptions about the prospect for a steady increase in Asian demand now look much less sure.
Asian buyers have the option of increasing imports from other producers, such as the US, Australia, Canada and Russia. And utilities in Asia can continue to rely on coal for electricity generation, while increasing investment in renewables, batteries and nuclear power. In order to safeguard market share, Qatar may have to soften its commercial terms, which are less flexible than those offered by US exporters.
Iraq’s economy is the most oil-dependent in the wider Gulf region. Some 90 per cent of its budget revenue derives from crude exports. The bulk flows from the Basra Oil Terminal and through the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.
The oil is produced in southern fields, which are not linked to pipeline systems in the north. Limited volumes are now flowing from smaller northern fields through the pipeline to Turkey. And some oil from the south is being moved by road tanker to Jordan. But a prolonged loss of oil revenue would make it hard for the government to cover public salaries and pensions, which account for over half of budget expenditure.
Outside the Gulf, Egypt has been hit hard by rising oil and LNG prices and the loss of Qatari LNG. Egypt is a net oil importer, and depends on imports for about one-third of its natural gas supply. Roughly half of this comes from Israel, with LNG making up the remainder. Israeli supplies have been suspended, while Qatar accounted for a large chunk of LNG shipments that Egypt had ordered to boost its summer supply.
Foreign portfolio investors, on whom Egypt relies heavily to finance its fiscal deficit, have pulled some $6 billion out of the Egyptian market because of concerns about the impact of higher import costs, the potential loss of revenue from tourism and the Suez Canal, and the risk of a fall in remittances from Egyptians working in the Gulf.
The central bank has allowed the Egyptian pound to depreciate in response to these pressures, rather than releasing reserves. This has provided some assurance to investors, and there have been recent reports of a modest recovery in foreign purchases of government securities.
But the war has also created some opportunities. Egypt is in a position to provide alternative logistical services to the Gulf via Jordan and Saudi Arabian ports. Use of the Suez Canal to transport Saudi oil from Yanbu to the Mediterranean could increase. The Sumed pipeline, which runs from the Gulf of Suez across Egypt to the Mediterranean coast, could also see increased flows.
Additionally, Egypt’s exports of fertilizer and aluminium will command higher prices, as sales from the Gulf are blocked. And the tourism sector could benefit from the misfortune of Dubai.
However, the net effect on Egypt will be negative, with higher inflation and the possibility of a rise in interest rates. That would push up already high public debt-service costs while stifling private sector investment.
Among energy exporting countries in the region, Algeria stands to benefit most from the Iran war, although its ability to cash in on higher oil and gas prices is constrained by its limited ability to increase production – it is already producing at full capacity.
The impact on Morocco, which relies heavily on energy imports, will be mixed. It will be hit hard by the increase in oil prices, but this will be offset to some extent by the surge in fertilizer prices: Morocco is one of the world’s largest exporters of phosphatic fertilizers. However, production costs will be inflated by the requirement to import ammonia.
If the intense phase of the conflict winds down over the next few weeks, and structural damage to energy infrastructure in the Gulf remains limited, confidence could gradually return to region’s energy sector and to an economic model that remains hugely dependent on oil and gas, for all the efforts at diversification.
 | Going to check it out tomorrow (price in AUD) idk if the pint will be fast enough and have good enough range for me, share your good experiences to convince me! (I am bad at decision-making) [link] [comments] |
At least 23 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in suspected suicide bombings in Maiduguri, Nigeria, police said. It was one of the deadliest attacks in the conflict-battered city in recent history.
Former Norwich defender lived for years in an LA motel, cut ties with his family for more than three decades and is now the subject of a documentary
“I hated it,” Tony Powell says on a spring afternoon in Los Angeles of his past as a secretly gay professional footballer for Bournemouth and Norwich in the 1970s. Powell is 78 and now lives in a very different world compared with when he was a husband, the father of two young daughters and Norwich’s player of the season in 1979.
Powell is not a demonstrative man and, having been forced to bury his true self for decades, does not make a fuss about the pain he endured. But there is an ache in his English accent, which remains intact after 45 years in America. “I just wanted to be who I am, but at that time it was not a good idea to come out.”
Continue reading...The Champlain Hudson Power Express, a $6 billion, 339-mile buried transmission line, will soon deliver Canadian hydropower from Hydro-Quebec to New York City. The project could supply up to 20% of the city's electricity and power roughly one million homes throughout the year. "This is far and away the largest project I have ever worked on," said Bob Harrison, who has worked in infrastructure for 40 years and is the head of engineering for the Champlain Hudson Power Express. "We like to say it's the largest project you'll never see." The New York Times reports: The massive power project, expected to provide energy to a million New York City customers a year, travels underground and underwater, from the northern plains at the Canadian border to the filled-in marshlands of coastal Queens, much of it loosely following the Hudson River. Its construction included the underwater installation of more than two million feet of cable imported from Sweden. It also required special boats, loaded with equipment that could shoot water jets deep into the sediment, to create trenches for the cable. Then, when it came to placing cable beneath the landscape, more than 700 land-use easements were needed, plus an additional 1.55 million feet of cable. The Champlain Hudson Power Express has found a way to plug into the city, but it wasn't easy. The work included 10 new manholes and more than three miles of new underground circuitry, according to Con Edison, the city's primary electricity provider. "It was literally a hand weave under the streets of Queens," said Jennifer Laird-White, the head of external affairs for Transmission Developers. The hydropower travels from Canada via two buried cables that are as round as cantaloupes. Those lines snake for hundreds of miles under a lake, several rivers (including the Hudson for about 90 miles) and through buried trenches alongside train tracks and roads. The cables resurface in Astoria, Queens, where a converter station shapes, filters and refines the raw power into a product that New Yorkers can consume. In two cavernous rooms that could be mistaken for "Star Wars" sets, the electricity flows through 30 hanging structures encased in what look like metallic, dinosaurlike exoskeletons. Each one weighs about as much as a small humpback whale and contains microprocessors, thousands of valves and fiber wires. "I am still wowed when I walk into that facility," said Mr. Harrison, the engineer. "I mean, it is just mind-boggling."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In today’s newsletter: As drones and missiles hit Dubai, Doha and other sites across the Gulf, Hannah Ellis Peterson explains what happens next for the region
Morning everyone, I’m Patrick Greenfield – you may recognise the name from my environment reporting over the years (or perhaps you read my piece about the possible rebirth of a long-extinct 12ft bird). I’ll be joining you on First Edition for the next few months, where I will inevitably be turning my attention to some rather more worrisome news than the Jurassic Park-adjacent ambitions of a US startup.
On that note: no Gulf state wanted war with Iran. But, as fighting in the Middle East enters its third week, the region finds itself on the frontline of an increasingly intractable conflict. After the US-Israeli attack on Iran in late February, drones and missiles have showered the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia – bringing the region’s oil and gas industries to a near standstill, and prompting an exodus of tourists and expats.
UK news | Keir Starmer has said the UK will not be drawn into the wider war in the Middle East, after Donald Trump called for allies to send warships to the strait of Hormuz to help unblock global oil supplies from the region. Starmer also announced that households reliant on heating oil to warm their homes would receive £53m of government support to help with their bills.
Health | A sixth-form student at Queen Elizabeth’s grammar school in Faversham has been confirmed as the second person to have died after an outbreak of meningitis in Kent.
Environment | Realtime pollution alerts are urgently needed across Windermere, campaigners have said, as the mother of a seven-year-old boy who kayaked on the lake described how he nearly died after contracting a dangerous strain of E coli from contaminated water.
Media | The BBC has asked a US court to throw out Donald Trump’s $10bn (£7.5bn) lawsuit over the way a documentary edited one of his speeches, warning that proceeding with the case would have a “chilling effect” on its reporting on the president.
Energy | Belgium’s prime minister, Bart De Wever, has been criticised for calling for the normalisation of relations with Russia to re-establish cheap energy supplies.
Continue reading...Authorities have made an arrest in the cold case disappearance of California teenager Victoria Marquina.
Liz Kendall announces £1bn funding to help design large-scale quantum computers for scientists, researchers, public sector and business
The UK will not let quantum computing talent slip through its fingers and must learn lessons from US dominance of the AI race, the technology secretary has said, as the government announced a £1bn quantum funding pledge.
Liz Kendall said the government hoped to retain homegrown quantum startups, engineers and researchers rather than lose them to competing countries, with the US stealing a march on its western rivals in AI.
Continue reading...Deputy government spokesman says death toll has reached 400 people ‘so far’ as Islamabad denies targeting facility for drug addicts
Hundreds were feared dead after a strike on a hospital treating drug users in the Afghan capital of Kabul, which officials from Afghanistan blamed on the Pakistani military.
Afghanistan’s deputy government spokesperson Hamdullah Fitrat said the death toll had “so far” reached 400 people, while about 250 people had been reported injured. He said most of those killed and wounded were patients undergoing treatment at the facility.
Continue reading...Audiences draw parallels between the abduction plot of Feels Like Home and Viktor Orbán’s 16-year reign
It’s seven o’clock on a Tuesday night, and one of the most popular movie theatres in Budapest is full, not an empty seat in sight. The audience is not here for a Hollywood blockbuster, but a Hungarian film that barely had the budget to be made.
Feels Like Home (Itt Érzem Magam Otthon) has captured moviegoers not only with its striking visuals but also with its timing – its release coming before Hungary’s pivotal parliamentary elections on 12 April.
Continue reading...Steeped in gaming and rightwing culture wars, Musk and his team of teenage coders set out to defeat the enemy of the United States: its people
In 2025, when Elon Musk joined the government as the de facto head of something called the “department of government efficiency”, he declared that governments were poorly configured “big dumb machines”. To the senator Ted Cruz, he explained that “the only way to reconcile the databases and get rid of waste and fraud is to actually look at the computers”.
Muskism came to Washington soaked in memes, adolescent boasts and sadistic victory dances over mass firings. Leading a team of teenage coders and mid-level managers drawn from his suite of companies, Musk aimed to enter the codebase and rewrite regulations and budget lines from within. He would drag the paper-pushing bureaucracy kicking and screaming into the digital 21st century, scanning the contents of cavernous rooms of filing cabinets and feeding the data into a single interoperable system. The undertaking combined features of private equity-led restructuring with startup management, shot through with the sensibility of gaming and rightwing culture war. To succeed, he would need “God mode”, an overview of the whole.
Continue reading...In a world teeming with social media and smart devices, there are many ways to upset people, whether you’re checking your watch notifications or sending a voice note without a text to explain the subject. Here’s how to navigate it all
In an age of smartphones, social media and instant communication, it has never been easier to connect … or to offend everyone around us. Many of today’s most common etiquette breaches stem not from malice but from convenience: a badly written message, a thoughtless post, a device that demands our attention. Yet good manners still hinge on the same old principle: consideration for others. From eschewing headphones on public transport to ghosting invitations and sharing thoughtlessly online, here are some of the most common modern etiquette mistakes, why they grate, and how they can be avoided.
Continue reading...Numerous faked images and a string of startlingly inaccurate responses from Gemini and Grok are part of a tidal wave of AI slop engulfing coverage of the Iran war
The graves, freshly dug, lie in neat rows of 20 across. More than 60 have already been carved out of the earth, with a few clusters of people standing gathered around them. Dozens more are marked out on the ground in front: small chalk rectangles, with diggers poised to complete their task.
The cemetery of Minab, photographed as it prepares to bury more than 100 of the town’s young girls, is one of the defining images of the US-Israeli war on Iran, bluntly capturing the devastating civilian toll.
Continue reading...Why defense integration could fracture the continent.
Prosecutors say Kouri Richins slipped five times the lethal dose of the synthetic opioid into a cocktail that he drank
A Utah woman was convicted on Monday of aggravated murder after poisoning her husband with fentanyl and then self-publishing a children’s book about coping with grief.
Prosecutors said Kouri Richins slipped five times the lethal dose of the synthetic opioid into a cocktail that her husband Eric Richins drank in March 2022.
Continue reading...This one might be dumb. I’m assuming if I get an aftermarket motor (eg fungeneers, something on a 5” hub) that I also have to change the controller and firmware as well to actually get it to work to specifications?
A man who was accused of planting pipe bombs outside the RNC and DNC on the eve of the Jan. 6 attack is arguing he is covered by President Trump's sweeping pardons of alleged Jan. 6 rioters.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Since Andrej Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding" just over a year ago, we've seen a rapid increase in both the capabilities and popularity of using AI models to throw together quick programming projects with less human time and effort than ever before. One such vibe-coded project, Gaming Alexandria Researcher, launched over the weekend as what coder Dustin Hubbard called an effort to help organize the hundreds of scanned Japanese gaming magazines he's helped maintain at clearinghouse Gaming Alexandria over the years, alongside machine translations of their OCR text. A day after that project went public, though, Hubbard was issuing an apology to many members of the Gaming Alexandria community who loudly objected to the use of Patreon funds for an error-prone AI-powered translation effort. The hubbub highlights just how controversial AI tools remain for many online communities, even as many see them as ways to maximize limited funds and man-hours. "I sincerely apologize," Hubbard wrote in his apology post. "My entire preservation philosophy has been to get people access to things we've never had access to before. I felt this project was a good step towards that, but I should have taken more into consideration the issues with AI." "I'm very, very disappointed to see [Gaming Alexandria], one of the foremost organizations for preserving game history, promoting the use of AI translation and using Patreon funds to pay for AI licenses," game designer and Legend of Zelda historian Max Nichols wrote in a post on Bluesky over the weekend. "I have cancelled my Patreon membership and will no longer promote the organization." Nichols later deleted his original message (archived here), saying he was "uncomfortable with the scale of reposts and anger" it had generated in the community. However, he maintained his core criticism: that Gemini-generated translations inevitably introduce inaccuracies that make them unreliable for scholarly use. In a follow-up, he also objected to Patreon funds being used to pay for AI tools that produce what he called "untrustworthy" translations, arguing they distort history and are not valid sources for research. "... It's worthless and destructive: these translations are like looking at history through a clownhouse mirror," he added.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
This blog is closed
Continued from previous post:
Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, has said she has no immediate plans to send her country’s maritime self-defence forces to help protect tanker traffic in the strait of Homuz.
We have not made any decisions whatsoever about dispatching escort ships. We are continuing to examine what Japan can do independently and what can be done within the legal framework.
I would like to engage in solid discussions based on Japan’s views and position regarding the need for early de-escalation.
Continue reading...Events in the narrow waterway are causing chaos around the globe. Jillian Ambrose explains why
The strait of Hormuz, a narrow stretch of water at the mouth of the Gulf, is the world’s petrol pump, a geographical bottleneck through which 20% of the world’s oil normally flows.
Since the US and Israel launched their war on Iran, however, Tehran has threatened to close the strait and cause mayhem. “They’ve not formally, officially shut it down, but they have said that they will set ablaze any tanker that tries to move through. For any shipping owner, for any insurer, that is as good as closed,” explains the Guardian’s energy correspondent, Jillian Ambrose.
Continue reading...SAN JOSE, Calif., March 16, 2026 — DDN and Supermicro Computer, Inc. today announced Driving AI Breakthroughs, a joint AI Factory initiative debuting at NVIDIA GTC 2026. Delivered through a custom-built mobile NVIDIA-powered AI factory, this immersive experience gives enterprise leaders a hands-on blueprint for architecting AI systems engineered for efficiency, utilization, and return on investment.
Credit: DDN
While AI investment continues to accelerate across industries, translating that spending into measurable outcomes remains a persistent challenge. According to DDN’s 2026 State of AI Infrastructure Report, complexity remains a primary barrier to AI ROI, with 65% of organizations citing overly complex environments and 54% delaying or canceling initiatives as a result. As AI investment accelerates, fragmented architectures and underutilized GPU capacity continue to stall production-scale outcomes.
The Driving AI Breakthroughs experience addresses these challenges head-on—demonstrating in real time how enterprises can eliminate infrastructure bottlenecks, optimize GPU efficiency, and deploy a turnkey AI factory platform built for measurable business impact from day one.
“AI only delivers value when it’s engineered for outcomes—and when it’s not, it fails to scale,” said Alex Bouzari, CEO and Co-Founder at DDN. “AI factories must be architected end-to-end to convert compute investment into sustained productivity. With Supermicro and NVIDIA, we’re bringing our proven AI factory architecture directly to customers to show how AI infrastructure should be built for measurable ROI.”
Make Data AI-Ready
The experience begins with the foundational step of AI deployment: preparing data to feed models efficiently. Attendees will interact with four guided AI pipeline demonstrations—enterprise RAG, financial services, genomics, and video analytics—running on DDN Enterprise AI HyperPOD, built on Supermicro systems and accelerated by NVIDIA.
Through interactive demos and guided workflows, visitors will see firsthand how integrated architecture reduces deployment friction and accelerates the path toward scalable AI operations.
“Enterprises are looking for AI infrastructure that simplifies complexity and accelerates time-to-value,” said Charles Liang, President and CEO at Supermicro. “By combining Supermicro’s AI-optimized systems with NVIDIA AI infrastructure and DDN’s data platform, we are helping customers design AI environments that scale efficiently and predictably.”
The AI Factory Engineered for ROI
The experience also features an interactive AI factory design environment, where visitors can configure systems ranging from modular deployments to large-scale AI Factory architectures. Through hands-on configurators and simulations, attendees see how architectural decisions directly influence GPU utilization, tokens-per-watt efficiency, power consumption, cooling requirements, and overall infrastructure economics.
Consistent Architecture Across Data Center and Cloud
The mobile platform also demonstrates how AI factory designs extend across on-premises infrastructure as well as Google Cloud, and NVIDIA Cloud Partner platforms, enabling organizations to deploy AI workloads while maintaining architectural consistency and service-level expectations. Interactive stations map common enterprise paths for starting on-premises, extending to the cloud, or operating hybrid environments without sacrificing performance, governance, or efficiency.
From Digital Models to Physical AI, Featuring AMECA
A featured element of the experience is AMECA, the advanced humanoid robot developed by Engineered Arts. Through live interaction, AMECA demonstrates how humanoid systems can be trained and refined using modern AI infrastructure to perceive, respond, and operate in real-world environments.
“Humanoid robotics depends on AI systems capable of continuous learning and natural interaction,” said Leo Chen, Director of Operations at Engineered Arts. “By integrating AMECA into this experience, we’re showing how advanced infrastructure enables humanoids to be trained and deployed safely and effectively in increasingly complex environments.”
AMECA provides a tangible example of how AI is moving from digital models into embodied intelligence—where coordinated data pipelines, low-latency processing, and system-level design become essential.
National Roadshow
After its debut at GTC 2026, Driving AI Breakthroughs will travel to major U.S. enterprise markets and tradeshows, offering customer walkthroughs, executive briefings, and interactive sessions designed to help organizations evaluate approaches for building AI systems engineered for measurable ROI.
To learn more or schedule a private demo at GTC, visit the experience in the GTC park, book a meeting, or visit the DDN booth at #1621.
About DDN
DDN is the world’s leading AI and data intelligence company, powering the world’s most demanding AI workloads by keeping GPUs fed, efficient, and productive—at massive scale—so organizations can train, checkpoint, and infer faster with less footprint and power while achieving tremendous ROI from their AI investments. From hyperscalers and next-gen cloud builders to enterprises, governments, and research institutions, DDN delivers proven data intelligence at exabyte scale across hundreds of thousands of GPUs—so customers can deploy AI with confidence, accelerate time-to-value, and realize outsized returns. Discover more at ddn.com.
Source: DDN
The post DDN and Supermicro Launch ‘Driving AI Breakthroughs’ Experience at GTC 2026 appeared first on HPCwire.
REDWOOD CITY, Calif., March 16, 2026 — MinIO today announced that MinIO AIStor will support object data stores for the NVIDIA STX reference architecture. Designed with the NVIDIA STX rack-scale reference architecture, AIStor delivers a unified, high-performance datastore that powers the full AI lifecycle—from large-scale model training to enterprise RAG and real-time agentic inference. As part of this collaboration, MinIO is joining the NVIDIA STX ecosystem as a partner for AI data platforms.
NVIDIA STX defines how enterprise AI factories store, move, and access data at modern AI speeds. Powered by NVIDIA Vera Rubin, NVIDIA BlueField-4 processor, and NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking, STX provides a modular, rack-scale storage architecture for production AI infrastructure. Running on NVIDIA STX reference architecture, AIStor serves as an object-native data foundation at the center of the AI factory.
As AI systems evolve from isolated inference to distributed, multi-agent workflows, infrastructure demands expand across training throughput, RAG indexing performance, and low-latency context access. AIStor addresses these requirements within a single, consistent platform that operates with the NVIDIA STX architecture.
MinIO: One Data Store for the Full AI Lifecycle
High-Performance Data Store for Training and Analytics
Enterprise AI Data: RAG and Multimodal Indexing
Context Memory for Agentic AI
“AI is being reshaped by data as much as by models,” said Garima Kapoor, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of MinIO. “The infrastructure that succeeds in this era won’t be retrofitted for AI; it will be architected for it. AIStor’s integration of the NVIDIA STX reference architecture reflects years of deliberate engineering around performance, scale, and architectural simplicity. We are delivering the unified, object-native data foundation that production AI factories require.”
MinIO AIStor: Architected for NVIDIA STX
AIStor’s alignment with NVIDIA STX reflects deliberate architectural decisions made well before rack-scale AI factories became mainstream. This includes standardizing on ARM and ensuring that MinIO’s minimal footprint integrates natively with the NVIDIA BlueField-4 processor that underpins the STX architecture.
AIStor ships as a single, static binary under 200 MB, with no external metadata databases or background services. Its lightweight design runs natively within BlueField-4, which underpins the STX storage tier, eliminating dedicated x86 storage nodes and reinforcing STX’s disaggregated architecture.
MinIO’s long-standing ARM64 and Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) optimizations further strengthen this fit. AIStor’s erasure coding using ARM SVE delivers up to 2× faster throughput compared to earlier implementations, while integrity verification scales linearly with core count. These optimizations position AIStor as a natural storage layer for the silicon foundation of NVIDIA STX.
STX-Enabled Capabilities
Within the NVIDIA STX architecture, AIStor unlocks advanced capabilities through NVIDIA DOCA and NVIDIA BlueField-4 acceleration:
Together, these capabilities ensure storage operates as an integrated component of the STX rather than an external bottleneck.
Availability
MinIO AIStor on NVIDIA BlueField-4 within the NVIDIA STX reference architecture is expected to reach general availability in the second half of 2026, with early access available for qualified enterprise customers. AIStor with NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA for S3-compatible storage is available now as a tech preview. SVE2 and ARM64 optimizations are production-ready today on BlueField-3 and other ARM platforms.
About MinIO
MinIO is the data foundation for enterprise analytics and AI. Built for exascale performance and limitless scale, MinIO AIStor delivers a secure, sovereign, and AI-ready data store that spans from the edge to the core to the cloud. With rampant adoption across the Fortune 100 and 500, MinIO is redefining how organizations and government agencies store, manage, and mobilize all of their data in the AI era. MinIO is backed by Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures, Dell Technologies, General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Intel Capital, Softbank Vision Fund 2, and others.
Source: MinIO
The post MinIO AIStor Brings Object Data Stores for the NVIDIA STX Reference Architecture appeared first on HPCwire.
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 17.
Jurors delivered their verdict Monday in the trial of Kouri Richins, a Utah mother accused of murdering her husband and later publishing a children's book about grief.
This live blog is now closed.
Donald Trump drew a backlash on Sunday for suggesting US efforts to protect the Strait of Hormuz were unnecessary – and that “maybe we shouldn’t even be there at all” because his country has plenty of oil of its own.
The president made the contradictory comment to reporters on Air Force One after pleading with European and Nato allies to enter the war in Iran to help the US secure the strait amid the largest oil supply disruption in history.
Continue reading...An Afghan father who served with U.S. forces died in ICE custody less than a day after being arrested in North Texas.
US president wants countries to help police the strait after Iran effectively closed the vital fossil fuel shipping channel – key US politics stories from Monday 16 March at a glance
Key US allies in Europe and beyond have ruled out sending warships to the strait of Hormuz, despite threats from Donald Trump that Nato faces “a very bad future” if members fail to help reopen the vital waterway.
The UK, Germany, France and Italy, along with Australia and Japan, have said they had no plans to send warships.
Continue reading...Penguin Solutions MemoryAI KV cache server, an 11TB memory appliance, enables efficient deployment of enterprise-scale AI inference
FREMONT, Calif., March 16, 2026 — Penguin Solutions, Inc. today announced the industry’s first production-ready KV cache server that utilizes CXL memory technology to address the critical “memory wall” challenge in AI inferencing—Penguin Solutions MemoryAI KV cache server. This innovative solution delivers up to 11 TB of CXL-based memory engineered to optimize performance of enterprise scale inference, including agentic AI. The result is lower latency, higher throughput, increased efficiency of GPU clusters, consistent achievement of stringent service-level agreements (SLAs), and faster time-to-first-token (TTFT).
Penguin Solutions MemoryAI KV cache server is the industry’s first production-ready KV cache server that utilizes CXL memory technology to address the critical “memory wall” challenge in AI inferencing. The innovative solution delivers up to 11 TB of CXL-based memory engineered to optimize performance of enterprise scale inference, including agentic AI.
While model training and tuning is primarily compute-bound and occurs episodically, the continuous memory-bound and latency-sensitive inference workloads required for inference and agentic AI are complex and fundamentally different. Inference demands are typically 30% compute driven (GPU) and 70% memory driven (RAM), elevating the need for greater memory capacity and causing performance bottlenecks and GPU idle time. Accelerating memory-dependent AI processes, Penguin’s MemoryAI KV cache server increases memory capacity by integrating 3 TB of DDR5 main memory and up to eight 1 TB CXL Add-in Cards (AICs).
“CXL-enabled KV cache technology delivers faster time-to-first-token, reduced time per output token, and increased overall end-to-end token throughput,” said Phil Pokorny, chief technology officer at Penguin Solutions. “These critical performance improvements enable enterprise-scale inferencing across many users who expect low latency and timely access to AI-generated insights. The introduction of Penguin’s MemoryAI KV cache server is designed to help enterprises sustain these performance improvements and consistent service standards as model size, context windows, precision requirements, and concurrency demands continue to grow.”
By significantly expanding the memory available to GPUs, the server enables organizations to mitigate GPU memory bandwidth limits, reduce redundant re-compute operations, and optimize clusters for inference performance. This increased system efficiency also enables organizations to train larger models and process expansive datasets faster.
Benefits of Penguin Solutions MemoryAI KV cache server in Cluster Design
With expanded, disaggregated memory, the server offers several operational benefits:
The Penguin Solutions MemoryAI KV cache server builds upon Penguin Solutions’ legacy of innovation in high-performance computing expertise, with customers already deploying the solution to optimize cluster performance and meet demanding latency SLAs for production AI workloads.
Explore Penguin Solutions’ MemoryAI KV cache server page or visit booth #1031 at the NVIDIA GTC AI Conference and Expo March 16-19, 2026, in San Jose, Calif.
About Penguin Solutions
The most transformative technological advancements are often the hardest to deploy and optimize. Penguin Solutions (Nasdaq: PENG), the AI factory platform company, has the innovative technologies, skills, experience, and partnerships needed to turn your AI ambitions into reality. In addition to our AI capabilities, Penguin Solutions offers memory and LED solutions serving a wide range of high-performance and specialized applications. For more information, visit https://www.penguinsolutions.com.
Source: Penguin Solutions
The post Penguin Solutions Introduces Industry’s First Production-Ready CXL-Based KV Cache Server appeared first on HPCwire.
Cheddar cheese from California-based Raw Farm identified as ‘likely source’ of infections across multiple states
Cheese from the country’s largest raw milk distributor have been linked to a multistate E coli outbreak.
Raw cheddar cheese from the California-based company Raw Farm has been identified as the “likely source” of several E coli O157:H7 infections in California, Florida and Texas, according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), PBS News reported, though no Raw Farm products have tested positive for E coli.
Continue reading...Nvidia is pushing artificial intelligence beyond its traditional home in the data center, into industrial design software, robotics development pipelines and even the emerging computing infrastructure in space. At the company’s GTC conference in San Jose, the company described projects and collaborations aimed at turning its accelerated computing and simulation platforms into a foundation for what it calls “physical AI,” or AI systems that enable autonomous machines to perceive, understand and perform complex actions in the physical world.
The company announced it is expanding partnerships for industrial design and engineering software, a category that has become a key entry point for applying AI to physical systems. Nvidia said several of the world’s largest engineering software vendors are integrating its accelerated computing stack into their platforms, including Cadence Design Systems, Dassault Systèmes, PTC, Siemens and Synopsys. The integrations are designed to support new forms of AI-driven workflow automation within engineering software. Cadence and several others are developing AI agents that can assist with tasks such as planning design flows, debugging code and coordinating front-end verification steps in semiconductor and system design. These partnerships combine Nvidia’s CUDA-X libraries, Omniverse simulation technology and GPU-accelerated engineering software.
(Image Courtesy of Nvidia)
Nvidia also highlighted how GPU-accelerated simulation is increasingly being applied to industrial engineering problems like automotive aerodynamics and aerospace propulsion. For example, Honda is using Synopsys’ Fluent computational fluid dynamics software on Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell platform to run aerodynamic simulations 34 times faster than CPU-based systems, Nvidia claims. Automakers such as Jaguar Land Rover and Mercedes-Benz are using Siemens Simcenter STAR-CCM+ software on Nvidia infrastructure to analyze vehicle aerodynamics. Aerospace firm Ascendance is running aerodynamic simulations of hybrid electric aircraft using Cadence Fidelity software on GPU infrastructure, enabling large simulation that previously required significant high performance computing resources. In the energy sector, industrial manufacturer Solar Turbines is using the same software on GPU-accelerated systems to simulate combustor designs with billion-cell models.
Simulation and digital twins are also being used in industrial operations. Siemens recently introduced a Digital Twin Composer platform that uses Omniverse libraries to build physics-based simulations of factories, shipyards and production lines. Companies including Foxconn, HD Hyundai, PepsiCo and KION are using these systems to test manufacturing workflows and logistics operations in virtual environments before deployment.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said we’re at the dawn of a new industrial revolution where physical AI and autonomous AI agents are “fundamentally reinventing how the world designs, engineers and manufactures,” adding that Nvidia is “delivering a full-stack accelerated computing platform that empowers every industry to turn this vision into reality at a scale and speed never before possible.”
(Image courtesy of Nvidia)
Another major physical AI announcement at GTC is the introduction of Nvidia’s Physical AI Data Factory Blueprint, a new open reference architecture designed to automate the creation, augmentation and evaluation of datasets used to train robotics, computer vision and autonomous vehicle models. Training these systems often requires large volumes of specialized data, capturing edge cases like unusual lighting conditions, rare objects or unexpected events. Nvidia said the architecture combines its Cosmos world models with automated orchestration tools to generate synthetic data and expand limited real-world datasets.
Physical AI Data Factory Blueprint organizes data production into several stages, including curation, augmentation and automated validation. Cosmos Curator processes and annotates large datasets, while Cosmos Transfer expands them with additional variations. A component called Cosmos Evaluator analyzes the generated data to determine whether it is physically plausible and suitable for training.
Nvidia said cloud providers including Microsoft Azure and Nebius are integrating the blueprint into their infrastructure, allowing developers to run these pipelines at scale. Early users include companies such as ABB Robotics, Teradyne Robotics and Skild AI, as well as autonomous vehicle developers like Uber. The blueprint also incorporates an orchestration system called OSMO that manages distributed computing resources and coordinates stages of the training workflow. Nvidia said OSMO can integrate with coding agents that monitor infrastructure usage and automate operational tasks in the pipeline. Nvidia said the Physical AI Data Factory Blueprint will be available on GitHub in April.
While most of the news focused on Earthbound industries, Nvidia also announced plans to extend its AI infrastructure into space. The company introduced the Vera Rubin Space-1 Module, a computing platform designed for satellites and other space-based systems that must operate within strict limits on size, weight and power consumption.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Introduces the Vera Rubin Space-1 Module at GTC earlier today
The module is designed to run LLMs and frontier models and support real-time data processing directly on spacecraft (or on-orbit analytics, as the company calls it). Nvidia said the Vera Rubin Space-1 Module has a tightly integrated CPU-GPU architecture and high-bandwidth interconnect to manage data from space-based instruments in real time. Companies including space infrastructure developer Axiom Space and satelite imagery firm Planet are working with Nvidia’s hardware for applications like geospatial imaging analysis and satellite network operations. Nvidia also said its existing edge platforms, IGX Thor and Jetson Orin, are also being used for space missions that require on-board inference and image processing. These platforms help process sensor data directly in orbit instead of transmitting raw data back to Earth for analysis.
The data deluge doesn’t stop back on terra firma. Imaging satellites, radar systems and radio frequency sensors produce continuous streams of observations that are added to large geospatial archives used for environmental monitoring, infrastructure tracking and climate analysis. Historically, much of that processing has been done on CPU-based systems, which is a slow process for datasets reaching hundreds of petabytes. Nvidia said its GPU-accelerated platforms such as its RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPU are being used to speed analysis of these large datasets and support AI models that detect patterns in satellite imagery. The company says the same computing stack can run across cloud infrastructure, ground stations and spacecraft, allowing analysis of data closer to where it is generated.
In his keynote, Huang said challenges remain with building compute infrastructure in space, including cooling and radiation management. “We have to figure out how to cool these systems out in space. But we’ve got lots of great engineers working on it,” he said. Nvidia gave no word on when the Vera Rubin Space-1 Module will be released, only stating it will be available at a later date. For now, Nvidia’s projects and partnerships in physical AI show it is pushing AI beyond the data center and into systems that design products and technology, train robots and other autonomous machines, and analyze data from space. It remains to be seen just how far these systems will reach.
The post Nvidia Maps Its Physical AI Strategy Across Engineering, Robotics and Space appeared first on HPCwire.
SAN JOSE, Calif., March 16, 2026 — MSI today announced the launch of XpertStation WS300 on NVIDIA DGX Station Architecture, a next-generation deskside AI supercomputer built to support the accelerating demands of large language models (LLMs), generative AI, and advanced data science workflows. Powered by NVIDIA GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra Desktop Superchip, supporting up to 748GB of large coherent memory and dual 400GbE networking, the platform extends advanced AI infrastructure capabilities into a compact deskside deployment model and is available for order starting today.
Credit: MSI
“MSI has a strategic vision to advance AI-first computing,” said Danny Hsu, General Manager of MSI’s Enterprise Platform Solutions. “With NVIDIA, we are defining the next era of AI infrastructure, bridging centralized performance and distributed innovation, and enabling organizations to move from experimentation to production with greater speed, scale, and confidence.”
Bringing Data-Center AI to the Desktop
XpertStation WS300 integrates up to 748GB of large coherent memory, combining high-bandwidth HBM3e GPU memory and LPDDR5X CPU memory into a unified domain to enable efficient CPU-GPU data sharing for large-scale model training and fine-tuning.
With dual 400GbE connectivity powered by NVIDIA ConnectX-8 SuperNICs, the platform delivers up to 800Gb/s of aggregate networking bandwidth to support distributed AI workloads and multi-node scalability. High-speed PCIe Gen5 and Gen6 NVMe storage accelerates dataset ingestion and AI data pipelines, ensuring sustained compute utilization during intensive training and inference operations. Combined with full support for NVIDIA AI Software Stack, the platform provides an integrated hardware-software foundation for seamless AI development and deployment from desktop to data center.
Expanding AI Workflows from Development to Deployment
XpertStation WS300 supports the full AI lifecycle, from large-scale model training and data-intensive analytics to real-time inference and emerging physical AI and robotics workloads. The platform enables organizations to accelerate deep learning models, process massive datasets efficiently, and execute complex AI workloads locally with high-throughput performance.
The system can also function as a centralized AI compute node for collaborative fine-tuning and on-demand deployment, providing teams greater operational flexibility while maintaining control over proprietary data and intellectual property.
By extending data-center-class performance to the deskside, XpertStation WS300 allows organizations to move AI initiatives from experimentation to production with infrastructure-level consistency and reliability.
Supporting Autonomous AI Agents
NVIDIA NemoClaw is an open-source stack installing OpenShell runtime with a policy-controlled sandbox that enables autonomous AI agents to operate continuously more safely. Running OpenShell on XpertStation WS300, developers can run trillion-parameter models locally with up to 20 petaFLOPS of AI compute and 748GB of memory, enabling always-on AI agents at the deskside without relying on cloud infrastructure.
About MSI
MSI is a global leader in gaming, content creation, business & productivity, and AIoT solutions. With its cutting-edge R&D capabilities and a commitment to customer-driven innovation, MSI has a broad international presence spanning over 130 countries. The company is renowned for its comprehensive range of products, including laptops, graphics cards, monitors, motherboards, desktops, servers, IPCs, robotic appliances, and vehicle infotainment and telematics systems. Notably, MSI’s server products are entirely developed in-house, reflecting their dedication to meeting customer needs and aligning with market demands, with a strong emphasis on design and manufacturing. For more information, visit MSI’s website at http://www.msi.com and Enterprise Platform Solutions at http://eps.msi.com.
Source: MSI
The post MSI Launches XpertStation WS300 on NVIDIA DGX Station Architecture appeared first on HPCwire.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for March 17, No. 744.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for March 17, No. 1,010.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for March 17, No. 1,732.
A judge blocked a set of changes to the childhood vaccine schedule recommended by allies of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, dealing a setback to the Trump administration's efforts to overhaul federal vaccine policy.
Pair attempt to strike united front amid reports vice-president skeptical over US-Israeli attack on Iran
Donald Trump revealed that he had asked China to delay his forthcoming visit to Beijing while the war with Iran was continuing, as he attempted to strike a united front on Monday with his vice-president, JD Vance, who is believed to have been skeptical over attacking Tehran’s regime.
Appearing together with Vance for the first time in two weeks, Trump said he did not think the conflict – which started on 28 February after the US and Israel opened hostilities – would be over this week but predicted victory would be achieved soon.
Continue reading...A person believed to be the ex-wife of the suspect in the attack at Michigan's Temple Israel told authorities that the suspect was "not stable" ahead of the attack, according to a 911 call obtained by CBS News Detroit.
A severe weather front has dumped heavy snow on the Upper Midwest, caused thunderstorms in the South and threatens Mid-Atlantic states with rain and possible tornadoes.
International researchers find ‘very little evidence’ medical form of the drug can treat anxiety, anorexia and other disorders
Cannabis is not an effective treatment for common mental health conditions despite the global surge in patients using it for that purpose, a review has found.
Researchers concluded there was “very little evidence for its efficacy” in treating anxiety, anorexia nervosa, psychotic disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder or opioid use disorder.
Continue reading...Exclusive: eSafety commission pointed to Musk’s promise that ‘removing child exploitation is priority #1’ in letter obtained by Guardian Australia
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The Australian online safety regulator warned Elon Musk’s X amid the Grok sexualised image generation scandal that it found child abuse material was “particularly systemic” on X and more accessible than on “any other mainstream service”, correspondence obtained by Guardian Australia reveals.
The eSafety commissioner wrote to X in January after its chatbot, Grok, was used to generate sexualised images of women and children online, which the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, described as “abhorrent”.
Continue reading...Amid the U.S. oil blockade, Cuba’s national energy grid collapses, causing a nationwide blackout.
The latest blackout in Cuba comes over a week after another massive outage affected the island's west, leaving millions without power.
More than 30 billion images captured by Pokemon Go players have helped train a visual mapping system developed by Niantic. The technology is now being used to guide delivery robots from Coco Robotics through city streets where GPS often struggles. Popular Science reports: This week, Niantic Spatial, part of the team behind Pokemon Go, announced a partnership with Coco Robotics, a company that makes short-distance delivery robots for food and groceries. Soon, those robot couriers will scoot around sidewalks using Niantic's Visual Positioning System (VPS)-- a navigation tool that can reportedly pinpoint location down to a few centimeters just by looking at nearby buildings and landmarks. Niantic trained that VPS model on more than 30 billion images captured by Pokemon Go users, and claims it will help robots operate in areas where GPS falls short. [...] Instead of helping users navigate the way that GPS does, VPS determines where someone is based on their surroundings. That makes Pokemon Go particularly useful as a data source, because players had to physically travel to specific locations and point their phones at various angles. That mapping effort got a significant boost in 2020, when the app added what it called "Field Research," a feature prompting players to scan real-world statues and landmarks with their cameras in exchange for in-game rewards. A portion of the data also reportedly came from areas known as "Pokemon battle arenas." Whether players knew it or not, those scans were creating 3D models of the real world that would eventually power the Niantic model. More data means better accuracy, and because Niantic was collecting images of the same locations from many different users, it could capture the same spots across varying weather conditions, lighting, angles, and heights. [...] The idea is that Coco's robots can use VPS and four cameras mounted around the machine to get a far more precise read on their surroundings. In turn, the well-equipped robot will deliver food on time. On a broader level, Niantic says its partnership with Coco Robotics is part of a longer-term effort to build a "living map" of the world that updates as new data becomes available. Once VPS-equipped delivery robots hit the streets, they will collect even more info that can be fed back into the model to bolster its accuracy further. This kind of continuous, real-world data collection is already central to how self-driving vehicle companies like Waymo and Tesla operate, and is a large part of why that technology has improved so significantly in recent years.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Volvo is canceling the EX30 electric SUV in the US market after the 2026 model year, just one full year after its arrival.
Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar also star in the film, which is coming to the Starz app.
NemoClaw is designed to make "claws," or autonomous AI agents, more accessible.
Storm system dumps snow in midwest and threatens east coast with high winds and possible ‘long-track tornadoes’
A late winter storm continued a destructive, elemental march across the eastern US, with thousands of flights canceled or delayed as powerful winds combined with a partial government shutdown delayed travelers passing through airport security scanners.
Flight delays and cancellations mounted at some of the nation’s largest airports, including in New York, Chicago and Atlanta. Flight delays within, into, or out of the US totaled 9,112 by late afternoon, with cancellations standing at 4,763, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking website.
Continue reading...  | Getting used to her but man she tossed me wearing crocs. My pint never did ? What gives guys I went all in Should I take it back to scheels? I turned on the single zone thing and barefoot it worked but still not in crocs. [link] [comments] |
US president had earlier hinted trip could be put on hold if President Xi does not help unblock the strait of Hormuz
Trump has asked to delay his planned visit to Beijing by about a month due to the Iran war, after earlier hinting he might put the trip off if his prospective hosts do not help to unblock the strait of Hormuz.
The US president’s summit with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, was meant to take place at the end of March but Trump told reporters in the White House on Monday: “Because of the war I want to be here, I have to be here, I feel. And so we’ve requested that we delay it a month or so.”
Continue reading...Trump said the long-anticipated reboot of U.S.-China relations could be postponed by “a month or so,” amid mounting pressure to reopen the critical oil route.
PARIS, March 16, 2026 — Pasqal, a global leader in neutral-atom quantum computing and member of the NVIDIA Inception program for startups, announced today the integration of the NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform with its Quantum Resource Management Interface (QRMI) runtime. The integration enables CUDA-Q workloads to be scheduled and orchestrated on Pasqal quantum systems through standard Slurm-based high-performance computing (HPC) workflows via QRMI, making quantum processors native accelerators in heterogeneous HPC environments. This milestone follows Pasqal’s recently announced path to go public through a business combination with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II.
HPC centers and enterprise compute teams rely on proven operational models to run large-scale workloads securely and efficiently. By integrating CUDA-Q with QRMI, Pasqal aims to reduce adoption friction for HPC users by enabling quantum workloads within familiar Slurm job submission, scheduling, and monitoring workflows.
CUDA-Q, NVIDIA’s open-source platform, provides a unified programming framework combining CPUs and GPUs with quantum processors (“QPUs”). CUDA-Q enables tight interleaving of GPU-accelerated classical kernels and quantum routines running on Pasqal’s neutral-atom processors.
QRMI exposes QPUs as schedulable resources within Slurm, enabling secure authentication, allocation, and monitoring alongside CPUs and GPUs. Users submit jobs through standard HPC interfaces, and QPUs are provisioned automatically as part of the Slurm workflow when quantum workloads are executed. Designed to be hardware-, modality-, and vendor-agnostic, QRMI integrates quantum processors into existing HPC infrastructures without requiring changes to core operating models.
QRMI originated from an initiative established by IBM with collaborative development from Pasqal, RPI, and STFC Hartree Centre. This integration represents Pasqal’s next step in enabling production-grade hybrid HPC–quantum workflows and provides the foundation for additional on-premises software components in Pasqal’s stack.
Pasqal’s on-premises stack is intended to be first deployed at CINECA, integrating Pasqal’s QPU with Leonardo (the EuroHPC pre-exascale supercomputer co-funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research, MUR) to enable Slurm-native hybrid GPU–QPU workloads. The integration is already available using QPUs on Pasqal’s cloud platform.
“HPC users don’t want a new operational model to access quantum capabilities. By integrating CUDA-Q into our HPC-native environment with the QRMI, we’re enabling Pasqal quantum processors to be used within hybrid GPU-QPU workflows leveraging the existing resource management systems HPC teams already run in production. This is a practical step toward making quantum acceleration usable at scale, alongside CPUs and GPUs, for real applications in optimization, simulation, and AI,” said Wasiq Bokhari, Pasqal’s Chief Executive Officer.
“CUDA-Q is designed to make hybrid quantum-classical computing accessible to developers by unifying quantum and HPC resources,” said Sam Stanwyck, Director of Quantum Product at NVIDIA. “By integrating CUDA-Q with QRMI, Pasqal is enabling developers to explore new hybrid quantum-classical applications at supercomputing centers around the world.”
“Leonardo will be among Europe’s first supercomputers supporting hybrid HPC–QPU workloads in our standard Slurm environment,” said Sara Marzella, Responsible of Quantum Computing group at CINECA.
More from HPCwire: Pasqal to Go Public via Business Combination, Plans Nasdaq Listing
About Pasqal
Pasqal is a leader in the industrialization of neutral-atom quantum computing, transforming Nobel Prize-winning research into real-world solutions for industry, science, and governments. Since its founding in 2019, Pasqal has built high-performance quantum systems and cloud-ready software designed to address complex challenges in optimization, simulation, and artificial intelligence. Pasqal, headquartered in France, employs over 275 people and serves over 25 clients, including CMA CGM, OVHcloud, Thales, IBM (Pasqal is part of the IBM Quantum Network), and Sumitomo. Backed by more than USD 300 million to date in total funding from international investors, Pasqal seeks to accelerate the adoption of scalable, high-performance quantum computing worldwide.
Source: Pasqal
The post Pasqal Integrates NVIDIA CUDA-Q with QRMI for Slurm-Native Hybrid HPC-Quantum Workflows appeared first on HPCwire.
Since many of the platforms and conventions that came to dominate computing came from the western world, we never give it a second thought that virtually everything related to programming is written in English using the English alphabet. However, there’s no real reason behind arriving at this point other than convention and the course of history – with the right tooling, you could program a computer in whatever language or alphabet (or other writing system!) you desire.
For example, what about programming in Korean, using Hangul?
Han is a statically-typed, compiled programming language where every keyword is written in Korean. It compiles to native binaries through LLVM IR and also ships with a tree-walking interpreter for instant execution. The compiler toolchain is written entirely in Rust.
↫ Han’s GitHub page
Han is written entirely in Korean, and uses the genius and easy-to-learn Hangul script. Hangul was developed by King Sejong the Great in the middle of the 15th century, to replace the Chinese-based characters used to write Korean up until that point. Since it was specifically designed to be easy to learn by scholars and the general public of the time alike to promote literacy, the Hangul alphabet is stupidly easy to learn; I managed to teach myself the Hangul alphabet in an single afternoon a decade or so ago. Obviously, do note that learning Hangul (an alphabet) isn’t the same thing as learning Korean (a language).
One of my favourite aspects of Hangul is that it combines the letters making up a syllable into single structured syllable blocks, which gives it its unique look and makes it quite easy to grasp – you’ll quickly start recognising common syllables. On top of that, it’s said that the individual Hangul consonants mimic the shape of speech organs (tongue, throat, etc.), which, once you see it, you can’t unsee, further aiding in remembering what letters sound like. If you have an afternoon to kill, it’s certainly a fun thing to learn.
Regardless, it’s very welcome to see efforts like this, if only to remember that programming being an Anglophone affair is but an accident, not a law of nature.
The Kennedy Center's board of directors has voted to shut down operations for two years following this summer's July 4 celebrations.
During today's Nvidia GTC keynote, the company introduced NemoClaw, a security-focused stack designed to make the autonomous AI agent platform OpenClaw safer. ZDNet explains how it works: NemoClaw installs Nvidia's OpenShell, a new open-source runtime that keeps agents safer to use by enforcing an organization's policy-based guardrails. OpenShell keeps models sandboxed, adds data privacy protections and additional security for agents, and makes them more scalable. "This provides the missing infrastructure layer beneath claws to give them the access they need to be productive, while enforcing policy-based security, network, and privacy guardrails," Nvidia said in the announcement. The company built OpenShell with security companies like CrowdStrike, Cisco, and Microsoft Security to ensure it is compatible with other cybersecurity tools. Nvidia said NemoClaw can be installed in a single command, runs on any platform, and can use any coding agent, including Nvidia's own Nemotron open model family, on a local system. Through a privacy router, it allows agents to access frontier models in the cloud, which unites local and cloud models to help teach agents how to complete tasks within privacy guardrails, Nvidia explained. Nvidia seems to be hoping that the additional security can make OpenClaw agents more popular and accessible, with less risk than they currently carry. The bigger picture here is how NemoClaw could give companies the added peace of mind to let AI agents complete actions for their employees, where they wouldn't have previously. Nvidia did not specify when NemoClaw would be available.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Hey guys, so I kind of got screwed with a deal on Facebook marketplace because I bought a pint X that was supposed to be recalled and I didn’t know it. I have blown a mosfet sensor and I would like to try and replace just the mosfet alone in my garage. I’m just a kid and I really don’t have much money left at all for parts or repairs as that wasn’t part of the plan or budget and I have been dying to ride again. Does anybody know what part number the mosfets are, or where I could find them? Thanks yall! 🙏
John Cornyn and Greg Casar debate TSA agent pay outside Austin airport as partial shutdown enters second month
Republican senator John Cornyn and Democratic congressman Greg Casar of Texas squabbled outside Austin’s international airport on Monday over funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as the shutdown of the agency enters its second month.
Cornyn, the longtime Texas senator who is locked in a tough primary battle against attorney general, Ken Paxton, went to Austin-Bergstrom international airport to bring Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees lunch. As he pulled up outside the terminal, he encountered Casar, whose district includes Austin and who a spokesperson said was there to catch a flight back to Washington DC.
Continue reading...NVIDIA Vera CPU Delivers the Highest Performance and Energy Efficiency for Data Processing, AI Training and Agentic Inference at Scale
SAN JOSE, Calif., March 16, 2026 — NVIDIA today launched the NVIDIA Vera CPU, the world’s first processor purpose-built for the age of agentic AI and reinforcement learning — delivering results with twice the efficiency and 50% faster than traditional rack-scale CPUs.
Credit: NVIDIA
As reasoning and agentic AI advances, scale, performance and cost are increasingly driven by the infrastructure supporting the models that plan tasks, run tools, interact with data, run code and validate results.
The NVIDIA Vera CPU builds on the success of the NVIDIA Grace CPU, enabling organizations of all sizes and across industries to build AI factories that unlock agentic AI at scale. With the highest single-thread performance and bandwidth per core, Vera is a new class of CPU that delivers higher AI throughput, responsiveness and efficiency for large-scale AI services such as coding assistants, as well as consumer and enterprise agents.
Leading hyperscalers collaborating with NVIDIA to deploy Vera include Alibaba, CoreWeave, Meta and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, as well as global system makers Dell Technologies, HPE, Lenovo, Supermicro and others. This broad adoption establishes Vera as the new CPU standard for the AI workloads that matter most for developers, startups, public-private institutions and enterprises — helping democratize access to AI and accelerating innovation.
“Vera is arriving at a turning point for AI. As intelligence becomes agentic — capable of reasoning and acting — the importance of the systems orchestrating that work is elevated,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “The CPU is no longer simply supporting the model; it’s driving it. With breakthrough performance and energy efficiency, Vera unlocks AI systems that think faster and scale further.”
Configurable for Every Data Center
NVIDIA announced a new Vera CPU rack integrating 256 liquid-cooled Vera CPUs to sustain more than 22,500 concurrent CPU environments, each running independently at full performance. AI factories can quickly deploy and scale to tens of thousands of simultaneous instances and agentic tools in a single rack.
The new Vera rack is built using the NVIDIA MGX modular reference architecture, supported by 80 ecosystem partners worldwide.
As part of the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 platform, Vera CPUs are paired with NVIDIA GPUs through NVIDIA NVLink-C2C interconnect technology, with 1.8 TB/s of coherent bandwidth — 7x the bandwidth of PCIe Gen 6 — for high-speed data sharing between CPUs and GPUs. Additionally, NVIDIA introduced new reference designs that use Vera as the host CPU for NVIDIA HGX Rubin NVL8 systems, coordinating data movement and system control for GPU-accelerated workloads.
Vera systems partners are providing both dual and single-socket CPU server configurations, optimal for workloads such as reinforcement learning, agentic inference, data processing, orchestration, storage management, cloud applications and high-performance computing.
Across all configurations, Vera systems integrate NVIDIA ConnectX SuperNIC cards and NVIDIA BlueField-4 DPUs for accelerated networking, storage and security, which are critical for agentic AI. This enables customers to optimize for their specific workloads while maintaining a single software stack across the NVIDIA platform.
Designed for Agentic Scaling
By combining high-performance, energy-efficient CPU cores, a high-bandwidth memory subsystem and the second-generation NVIDIA Scalable Coherency Fabric, Vera enables faster agentic responses under the extreme utilization conditions common for agentic AI and reinforcement learning.
Vera features 88 custom NVIDIA-designed Olympus cores, delivering high performance for compilers, runtime engines, analytics pipelines, agentic tooling and orchestration services. Each core can run two tasks, using NVIDIA Spatial Multithreading, to deliver consistent, predictable performance — ideal for multi-tenant AI factories running many jobs at once.
To further enhance energy efficiency, Vera introduces the second generation of NVIDIA’s low-power memory subsystem, now built on LPDDR5X memory and delivering up to 1.2 TB/s of bandwidth — twice the bandwidth and at half the power compared with general-purpose CPUs.
Widespread Ecosystem Support
National laboratories planning to deploy Vera CPUs include Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).
“At TACC, we recently tested NVIDIA’s Vera CPU platform as we prepare for deployment in our upcoming Horizon system — and running six of our scientific applications, we saw impressive early results,” said John Cazes, director of high-performance computing at TACC. “Vera’s per-core performance and memory bandwidth represent a giant step forward for scientific computing, and we look forward to bringing Vera-based nodes to our CPU users on Horizon later this year.”
Leading cloud service providers planning to deploy Vera CPUs include Alibaba, ByteDance, Cloudflare, CoreWeave, Crusoe, Lambda, Nebius, Nscale, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Together.AI and Vultr.
Leading infrastructure providers adopting Vera CPUs include Aivres, ASRock Rack, ASUS, Compal, Cisco, Dell, Foxconn, GIGABYTE, HPE, Hyve, Inventec, Lenovo, MiTAC, MSI, Pegatron, Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT), Supermicro, Wistron and Wiwynn.
Availability
NVIDIA Vera is in full production and will be available from partners in the second half of this year.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in AI and accelerated computing.
Source: NVIDIA
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SAN JOSE, Calif. and CAMPBELL, Calif., March 16, 2026 — WEKA today announced general availability of its enterprise-ready NeuralMesh AI Data Platform (AIDP), which delivers composable, high-performance infrastructure optimized for AI Factory deployments. Based on NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, the solution is an end-to-end system that accelerates the delivery of AI-ready data to AI factories. The result: AI project timelines speed up from months to minutes, empowering organizations to deliver production-scale agentic AI applications using best-in-class technologies across their ecosystem.
New NeuralMesh AI Data Platform Closes the Gap Between AI Proof-of-Concept and Profitable Production, Delivering Scalable Business Intelligence and Faster AI Outcomes with NVIDIA. Credit: WEKA.
Leveraging NeuralMesh’s uniquely adaptive architecture, the solution addresses the most persistent obstacle in enterprise AI: organizations can demonstrate AI concepts work in proof-of-concept (POC) but consistently struggle to reach production scale.
Built on more than 170 patents and over a decade of AI-native storage innovation, a foundation no competing storage platform can replicate, NeuralMesh is the only solution that gets faster and more resilient as AI environments scale to exabytes and beyond. As AI Factory data infrastructure becomes a critical layer in enterprise AI architecture, NeuralMesh is helping customers to close the gap between POC and production deployments today. Customers running NeuralMesh with Augmented Memory Grid can achieve 6.5x more tokens per GPU for inference workloads, reflecting the compounding advantage of a purpose-built architecture over retrofitted infrastructure.
“Enterprises are now deploying AI Factories internally, driving a major shift to inference throughout the ecosystem. These companies require rapid AI outcomes and need turnkey solutions that come with the enterprise table-stakes of reliability, security, and optimal price-performance and cost-effectiveness,” said Liran Zvibel, cofounder and CEO at WEKA. “WEKA’s NeuralMesh AIDP gives organizations everything they need to run always-on AI factories: extreme storage performance and the flexible architecture required to operationalize AI at production scale. Whether an organization is just beginning its AI journey or running full-stack NVIDIA deployments, NeuralMesh AIDP scales seamlessly as they grow.”
“The deployment of agentic AI in production demands a new focus on managing the continuous, coherent flow of data and inference context,” said Jason Hardy, vice president, storage technologies at NVIDIA. “By leveraging the NVIDIA AI Data Platform, solutions like WEKA’s NeuralMesh AIDP deliver the persistent context tier necessary for stable and high-scale agentic inference.”
One System, Every AI Workload: Delivering End-to-End AI Factories
AI factories provide enterprises with purpose-built production systems designed to operate AI at scale, but they demand storage capabilities that extend beyond where data sits to actively support context and continuous data movement. NeuralMesh, WEKA’s intelligent, adaptive storage system, delivers the continuous data-loop performance that AI factory workloads demand.
Out-of-the-Box AI Applications Designed to Accelerate Business Outcomes
NeuralMesh AIDP enables enterprises and AI cloud providers to unify AI operations from retrieval to inference on a single, ready-to-deploy platform. With pre-integrated hardware and software options from NVIDIA (including NVIDIA RTX 6000 PRO Server Edition GPUs and the newly announced NVIDIA RTX 4500 PRO Server Edition GPUs) alongside Red Hat, Spectro Cloud and Supermicro, organizations can eliminate months of AI integration work.
The platform provides a simplified solution that allows teams to focus on intelligence output rather than managing underlying infrastructure. It delivers ready-to-use pipelines for a spectrum of business use cases that work across verticals, including: Semantic Search, Video Search & Summarization (VSS), AlphaFold for drug discovery, AIQ/Agentic RAG and more.
These AI applications are already being used by enterprise and research customers to drive outcomes across high-priority sectors:
“The missing piece in production AI isn’t reasoning models or compute power. It’s having an efficient platform that unifies the AI Factory pipeline and makes it truly scalable,” said Shimon Ben-David, CTO at WEKA. “The NeuralMesh AIDP was designed to close AI’s production and profitability gap, taking enterprise experiments to full-scale operations and making AI economically viable for everything from next-generation agents to healthcare applications.”
Availability
The NeuralMesh AI Data Platform solution is available now, delivered as an appliance-style system. Organizations can learn more at weka.io/nvidia or visit WEKA at GTC 2026, booth #1034 for a demo.
About WEKA
WEKA is transforming how organizations build, run, and scale AI workflows with NeuralMesh by WEKA, its intelligent, adaptive mesh storage system. Unlike traditional data infrastructure, which becomes slower and more fragile as workloads expand, NeuralMesh becomes faster, stronger, and more efficient as it scales, dynamically adapting to AI environments to provide a flexible foundation for enterprise AI and agentic AI innovation. Trusted by 30% of the Fortune 50, NeuralMesh helps leading enterprises, AI cloud providers, and AI builders optimize GPUs, scale AI faster, and reduce innovation costs.
Source: WEKA
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 | On April 16-19 2026, Lemonade Float Fest is back for it's 4th year! A festival packed with fun activities like racing, trick comps, games, food trucks, camping and more! Kicking off the event is a massive group ride through Downtown Austin, the festival is then held at Reveille Peak Ranch is Burnet, Texas. Reveille has over 60+ miles of trails to ride on! If you want to join in on the fun, click the link attached to purchase your tickets! I will also be there filming the event and making a documentary short film about it! Hope to see you there! [link] [comments] |
SAN JOSE, Calif., March 16, 2026 — HPE is helping customers advance sovereign AI initiatives worldwide by delivering robust, liquid-cooled sovereign AI systems that are part of the NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE portfolio. HPE will help build AI factories at Argonne National Laboratory in the United States and the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) in Germany, enabling governments, research institutions, and businesses to quickly deploy, operate, and scale AI initiatives while adhering to regional data sovereignty and compliance requirements.
“Sovereign AI initiatives will accelerate innovation and unlock economic growth, yet they require infrastructure and services that enable scale, sustainability, and governance,” said Trish Damkroger, senior vice president and general manager, HPC & AI Infrastructure Solutions at HPE. “HPE is uniquely suited to power a new era of sovereign AI by combining our proven AI factory solutions and services with NVIDIA solutions to build the world’s fastest, most energy-efficient computers that allow our customers to develop, train, and run AI while maintaining control of their data and IP.”
HammerHAI AI Factory at HLRS bolsters sovereign AI in Europe
HPE will build and install the supercomputer for the European Union (EU) AI Factory, HammerHAI (Hybrid and Advanced Machine learning platform for Manufacturing, Engineering, and Research). A consortium of leading academic high performance computing (HPC) centers in Germany, and coordinated by HLRS, will lead this effort. As part of the EU’s AI Factory initiatives, the €55 million (USD $64.8 million) flagship system is funded by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space, and the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and Art. It will strengthen Europe’s sovereign AI capabilities for research and industry, including small enterprises and startups, by advancing machine learning, data science, research, and technology development.
The HammerHAI system will provide more than 15 exaflops of peak AI inference performance1, making it capable of training AI models and running data-intensive simulations used in sectors such as engineering, manufacturing, and automotive. Based on NVIDIA GB200 NVL4 by HPE, the HammerHAI system is a rack‑scale architecture that features:
“HammerHAI will offer a highly-performant AI platform, alongside services like AI skills training, as an alternative to future users that have historically relied on commercial cloud AI services in which data sovereignty was difficult to ensure,” said Dr. Bastian Koller, Managing Director of HLRS and lead coordinator of HammerHAI. “This integrated approach will help researchers, startups, and enterprises access AI resources while operating in alignment with European Union data security requirements.”
Janus and Tara accelerate AI training and inference to make breakthroughs at Argonne National Laboratory
In the United States, Argonne National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory, is supporting Genesis Mission – a new national AI strategy – with next-generation AI systems called “Janus” and “Tara.” The systems will advance AI inferencing for scientific research and innovation, and, along with training and mentorship, will empower future workforce development in AI and computational science. The two systems also reflect the growing convergence of AI and HPC workloads such as modeling, simulation, and data analytics that enable researchers to blend powerful capabilities into unified scientific workflows.
Janus, designed to support the development of the next generation AI and HPC practitioners, will be deployed at Argonne National Laboratory. The system will be based on the HPE Cray XD server platform and accelerated by NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. Janus will provide a powerful environment for training, experimentation, and applied research that prepares users to work with large‑scale AI systems.
Tara, based on the exascale‑class HPE Cray Supercomputing EX4000 supercomputer powered by NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips, is designed to enable researchers using a convergence of AI inferencing and scientific computing to extract real‑world technological and research breakthroughs. Together, these systems reinforce U.S. leadership in AI for science by providing reliable, high-performance infrastructure capable of supporting the most demanding AI and computational workloads.
“We’re entering a new era of supercomputing — one in which AI and HPC converge to form intelligent systems that blend simulation, data and inference,” said Rick Stevens, Argonne’s associate laboratory director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences. “This integration accelerates discovery at every step, transforming not only the speed but also the way scientists approach their problems. By combining AI models with large-scale computation, we can explore complex systems, uncover hidden patterns, and guide experiments in real time. It marks a shift from computing as a tool to computing as an active collaborator in scientific discovery.”
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About HPE
HPE (NYSE: HPE) is a leader in essential enterprise technology, bringing together the power of AI, cloud, and networking to help organizations achieve more. As pioneers of possibility, our innovation and expertise advance the way people live and work. We empower our customers across industries to optimize operational performance, transform data into foresight, and maximize their impact. Unlock your boldest ambitions with HPE. Discover more at www.hpe.com.
Source: HPE
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March 16, 2026 — The UK government is investing £45 million for a 1.4MW mission-focused supercomputer named ‘Sunrise’, a key first step in establishing the country’s first AI Growth Zone at the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s (UKAEA) Culham Campus in Oxfordshire. As announced in the Fusion Strategy, Sunrise is targeted for operation in June this year and is primed to be the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer dedicated to fusion energy.
Credit: Shutterstock
Funded by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), Sunrise will tackle key fusion energy challenges in areas such as plasma turbulence, materials development and tritium fuel breeding, while delivering spillover benefits to other clean energy technologies and the UK’s broader net zero ambitions.
Sunrise will also strengthen essential AI capabilities at Culham Campus and across the UK’s high-performance computing landscape, contributing to the government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan and AI for Science Strategy. Sunrise will see AMD, DESNZ, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), Dell Technologies, Intel, UKAEA, the University of Cambridge, and WEKA working together. It will deliver up to 6.76 Exaflops of AI-accelerated modeling, enabling high-fidelity simulations and the creation of digital twins for complex systems.
“We can be proud that Britain will lead the way on research, innovation and skills for a future of limitless fusion energy,” said Lord Vallance, Minister for Science, Innovation, Research and Nuclear. “By backing our fusion industry, we are not only securing our future energy independence, but from innovation and research to engineers, we are also providing the skilled clean energy jobs of the future for British people.”
“UKAEA is taking lessons from the Apollo program: we learn fastest when we can test, iterate, and improve safely in the virtual world before we commit to our real-world mission,” said Dr. Rob Akers, UKAEA’s Director for Computing Programmes. “Sunrise will bring that capability to fusion by combining high-fidelity simulation with physics-informed AI to develop predictive digital twins that reduce the cost, risk and time of learning that would otherwise require expensive and time-consuming physical testing. UKAEA is proud to be working with such a pioneering group of partners to harness AI and high-performance computing at scale to support the UK’s fusion roadmap and Net Zero mission.
Dr. Paul Calleja, Director of the Cambridge Research Computing Service, said: “Cambridge is proud to be working with UKAEA, Dell, AMD and StackHPC, a UK AI software SME, to co-design, deliver and operate Sunrise the UK’s latest GPU accelerated scientific AI supercomputer. Sunrise builds on our long-established collaboration with UKAEA also leveraging Cambridge’s leadership class national supercomputing and sovereign AI portfolio. Sunrise is an important first step in the UK’s bold vision to strengthen its sovereign scientific computing capability, accelerate fusion research, and lay the foundations for the Culham AI Growth Zone.”
“Fusion research pushes the limits of science and computing, demanding massive simulation, complex modeling and advanced AI to accelerate progress,” said Dr. Thomas Zacharia, SVP, Strategy and Development, Public Sector, AMD. “With Sunrise, the UK will have a powerful new capability to rapidly and accurately simulate plasma behavior and fusion conditions, helping researchers advance the development of stable, efficient and economically viable fusion energy. Sunrise brings together AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct GPU acceleration, purpose-built on the Dell PowerEdge platform, to deliver breakthrough AI and high-performance computing for the UK fusion community and supporting the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero as it moves fusion from research toward practical impact.
“Sunrise is a bold step in advancing fusion energy and AI innovation, made possible through close collaboration and shared ambition,” said Tariq Hussain, UK Head of Public Sector, Dell Technologies. “At Dell Technologies, we’re helping turn this vision into reality with advanced AI and storage solutions that enable the UK to tackle complex challenges and accelerate a sustainable energy future.”
Simon Wilyman – GM UK/I & Northern Europe, Intel Corporation, said: “There are grand milestones in the evolution of our civilization, and the commercialization of fusion power is set to be one of them. Intel is delighted to partner with organizations such as UKAEA to support this ambitious endeavour. As part of the first AI Growth Zone, the Sunrise supercomputer strengthens the UK’s position as a global innovation hub. By combining advanced AI capabilities and high memory bandwidth with fusion research, Intel is creating the computational foundation necessary to unlock sustainable energy and improve lives worldwide.”
Liran Zvibel, Co-Founder & CEO, WEKA, said: “Building a supercomputer to simultaneously advance fusion energy and grow an AI-native economy is one of the most valuable scientific investments a nation can make, and Sunrise delivers on exactly that. WEKA is proud to partner with the UK Atomic Energy Authority to ensure Sunrise has the storage performance it needs to move at top speed from scientific discovery to real-world impact.”
Sunrise will be used to address real-world challenges from a wide range of UK fusion programs to drive critical advancements for the LIBRTI (Lithium Breeding Tritium Innovation) programme, which is developing tritium fuel-cycle technologies for self-sufficiency in future fusion operations, and for STEP Fusion, the UK’s flagship initiative to demonstrate fusion energy in the 2040s.
In 2023, Dell Technologies, Intel, the University of Cambridge and UKAEA shared plans to use supercomputers and AI to advance the development of the UK’s prototype fusion power plant design capabilities through the ‘Industrial Metaverse’.
In January 2026, £36 million of government investment was injected into the Cambridge supercomputing centre. The supercomputers will support modern AI workloads and simulation demand to turn breakthrough research into practical applications.
Download The Sunrise supercomputer key facts PDF here.
Source: UK Government
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It’s only a small annoyance in the grand scheme of the utter idiocy that is modern Windows, but apparently it’s one enough people complained about Microsoft is finally addressing it. In all of its wisdom, Microsoft doesn’t allow you to set the name of your user’s home folder during the installation procedure of Windows 11. The folder’s name is automatically generated based on your Microsoft account’s username or email address, something I’ve personally really disliked since I have been using thomholwerda for as long as I can remember.
Last year, they introduced an incredibly obtuse method of setting your own home folder name, but now the company is finally adding it as an optional step during the regular installation process.
Expanding on our work which started rolling to Insiders last fall, you can now choose a custom name for your user folder on the Device Name page when going through Windows setup. This most recent update now makes it easier to choose a custom name. The naming option is available during setup only. If you skip this step, Windows will use the default folder name and continue setup as usual.
↫ Windows Insider Program Team
This means you now have the option of defining your own home folder name, excluding CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, COM¹, COM², COM³, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, LPT9, LPT¹, LPT², and LPT³. It’s a very small change, and certainly not something that will turn Windows’ ship around, but at least it’s something that’s being done for users who actually care. It’s also such a small change, such a small addition, that one wonders why it’s taken them this long.
I’m assuming there’s already some incredibly complex and hacky way to change your automatically assigned home folder name by diving deep into the registry, converting your root drive back to FAT16, changing some values in a DLL file through a hex editor, and then converting back to NTFS, but this is clearly a much better way of handling it.
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle No. 540 for Tuesday, March 17.
The big challenge is keeping things cool, apparently.
Details from US Central Command come as 13 US service members and more than 1,300 Iranians have been killed
At least 200 US troops have been injured in the US-Israeli war on Iran, a US military spokesperson said on Monday.
“Since the start of Operation Epic Fury, approximately 200 US service members have been wounded,” US Central Command spokesperson Cpt Tim Hawkins told the Guardian via email.
Continue reading...SAN JOSE, Calif., March 16, 2026 — NVIDIA today announced the NVIDIA Vera Rubin DSX AI Factory reference design, a guide for building codesigned AI infrastructure, and general availability of the NVIDIA Omniverse DSX Blueprint, fully compatible with NVIDIA Vera Rubin DSX, to enable physically accurate AI factory digital twins for large-scale design, buildout and operations.
Credit: NVIDIA
Industry leaders Cadence, Dassault Systèmes, Eaton, Jacobs, Nscale, Phaidra, Procore, PTC, Schneider Electric, Siemens, Switch, Trane Technologies and Vertiv are contributing to the reference design and blueprint to help plan, build and operate these massive AI factory buildouts.
“In the age of AI, intelligence tokens are the new currency, and AI factories are the infrastructure that generates them,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “With the NVIDIA Vera Rubin DSX AI Factory reference design and Omniverse DSX Blueprint, we are providing the foundation to build the world’s most productive AI factories, accelerating time to first revenue and maximizing scale and energy efficiency.”
Building AI Factories That Maximize Every Watt
Building large-scale AI factories to meet the rising demand for training and inference is complex, requiring precise coordination across infrastructure, power, cooling, networking, software and compute.
The NVIDIA Vera Rubin DSX AI Factory reference design outlines how to design, build and operate the entire AI factory infrastructure stack, spanning compute, NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking and storage, for repeatable, scalable and optimal cluster performance. Documentation within the reference design also equips industry partners with best practices to design, build and operate power, cooling and control systems, enabling seamless hardware-software integration and scalable deployment.
The Vera Rubin DSX software stack is open, modular and composable, connecting cluster hardware with power and cooling to maximize AI tokens per watt of available energy. Its flexible design lets AI factory builders and data center providers deploy as many components as they need.
Rubin DSX offers a collection of software libraries for partners to build on:
Accelerating AI Factory Design and Simulation
Even with a detailed architecture, designing, building and operating large-scale AI factories can be difficult. Traditional design methods are limited in their ability to model entire systems, be flexible and efficient with power use, and validate designs before construction begins.
The NVIDIA Omniverse DSX Blueprint provides an open, comprehensive framework for designing and operating large-scale AI factories. Now generally available on build.nvidia.com and fully compatible with the Vera Rubin DSX AI Factory reference design, Omniverse DSX allows developers to build physically accurate digital twins of their AI factories, simulate operations in real time and optimize performance before construction or deployment begins.
Omniverse DSX unifies power, cooling, networking and operations in one environment to accelerate time to revenue and AI efficiency. Using NVIDIA Omniverse libraries, companies can simulate layouts, power topologies, thermal behavior and operational policies — and evaluate hardware or workload changes without disrupting production.
Global Energy Leaders Modernize World’s Power Grids with Omniverse DSX Blueprint
Energy is now the biggest bottleneck for AI infrastructure buildouts, with over $300 billion in equipment backlogs and more than 200 gigawatts of projects waiting in U.S. interconnection queues.
To address this, NVIDIA is working with leading energy providers to unlock faster access to power and strengthen grid stability:
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in AI and accelerated computing.
Source: NVIDIA
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SAN JOSE, Calif., March 16, 2026 — HPE today announced significant innovations to the NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE portfolio focused on large-scale AI factories and supercomputers that enable customers to scale, deploy efficiently, and gain faster time-to-insight. The full-stack AI solutions with NVIDIA include tightly integrated compute, GPUs, networking, liquid cooling, software, and services designed for at-scale and sovereign environments.
AI-forward organizations and leading research institutions, including Argonne National Laboratory, HLRS, Hudson River Trading (HRT), and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), have chosen HPE AI infrastructure and AI factories with NVIDIA to advance innovation.
HPE Brings NVIDIA AI Solutions to Its Industry-Leading Supercomputing Platform
Research laboratories, sovereign entities and large enterprises are rapidly adopting AI to enhance traditional high performance computing (HPC) workloads. For organizations seeking to significantly expedite scientific discovery, HPE is making the following NVIDIA products available on its second-generation exascale-class supercomputing platform designed to unify AI and HPC – the HPE Cray Supercomputing GX5000.
“Having built the three most powerful, exascale supercomputers in the world, HPE is at the forefront of innovation that brings together cutting-edge AI workloads with traditional HPC to accelerate scientific breakthroughs,” said Trish Damkroger, senior vice president and general manager, HPC & AI Infrastructure Solutions at HPE. “Our continued collaboration with NVIDIA helps customers tap into the high-performance density they need to push the boundaries in the fields of medicine, life sciences, engineering, manufacturing, and more.”
Enhancing HPE AI Factory At-Scale and Sovereign, Co-Engineered with NVIDIA
In addition to the enhancements of its industry-leading supercomputing platform, HPE is bolstering the HPE AI Factory portfolio for service providers, sovereign entities, and large enterprises with the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform and NVIDIA Blackwell architecture.
These solutions are enhanced by a number of HPE and NVIDIA software and services updates that lead to faster AI deployments for customers rolling out large-scale AI projects.
Each of these solutions are built leveraging HPE’s services and expertise in datacenter design and liquid cooling gained through decades of experience building the largest and most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world.
“To realize the potential of AI, enterprises and nations require infrastructure that can handle massive-scale model training and HPC workloads,” said Chris Marriott, vice president, Enterprise Platforms at NVIDIA. “Together, HPE and NVIDIA have developed full-stack AI infrastructure that unite accelerated computing, advanced networking and liquid cooling for faster time-to-insight in at-scale and sovereign environments.”
Availability
About HPE
HPE (NYSE: HPE) is a leader in essential enterprise technology, bringing together the power of AI, cloud, and networking to help organizations achieve more. As pioneers of possibility, our innovation and expertise advance the way people live and work. We empower our customers across industries to optimize operational performance, transform data into foresight, and maximize their impact. Unlock your boldest ambitions with HPE. Discover more at www.hpe.com.
Source: HPE
The post HPE Unveils Next-Gen AI Factory and Supercomputing Advancements with NVIDIA appeared first on HPCwire.
Conservative-majority court sided with administration before and lifted protections for 600,000 Venezuelans
The supreme court will hear arguments over the Trump administration’s push to end legal protections for people fleeing war and natural disaster from countries around the world, including Haiti and Syria.
The justices refused to immediately lift the protections for hundreds of thousands of people Monday, allowing them to live and work in the US legally for now.
Continue reading...Angelo Rodriguez accused of hitting car and leaving scene, leading to deaths of quartet in second crash moments later
A California highway patrol officer has been charged with second-degree murder for his role in a fatal crash last summer, prosecutors announced on Monday.
Angelo Rodriguez, 24, was charged with second-degree murder after crashing into a civilian vehicle while driving at high speeds in Norwalk, said Los Angeles county district attorney Nathan Hochman at a press conference.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Times of Israel, written by journalist Emanuel Fabian: On Tuesday, March 10, a massive explosion shook the city of Beit Shemesh, just outside Jerusalem, in yet another Iranian ballistic missile attack during the ongoing war. Rescue services scrambled to the scene in search of possible casualties, though as it turned out, the projectile had struck a forested area just outside the city, around 500 meters from homes. On The Times of Israel's liveblog that day, I reported that the missile had hit an open area and no injuries were caused, citing the rescue services, as well as footage that emerged showing the massive explosion caused by the missile's warhead. But what I thought was a seemingly minor incident during the war has turned into days of harassment and death threats against me. Emanuel began receiving numerous emails, messages and phone calls from individuals urging him to change the report to say the missile had been intercepted. "It was indeed a little strange to receive the same question, about something relatively inconsequential, from two different people within a day," he said. The connection eventually became clear after he noticed two users on X responding to his story with apparent ties to Polymarket. "There are people saying that they have received word from you that the missile strike in Beit Shemesh on March 10th was in fact intercepted, is this true or did no such interaction occur?" one user wrote. Another asked, "Was there any video of the actual impact?" The rules of this particular Polymarket bet state: "This market will resolve to 'Yes' if Iran initiates a drone, missile, or air strike on Israel's soil on the listed date in Israel Time (GMT+2). Otherwise, this market will resolve to 'No'." However, there is a clause: "Missiles or drones that are intercepted... will not be sufficient for a 'Yes' resolution, regardless of whether they land on Israeli territory or cause damage." At that point, Emanuel realized his "minor report" of a missile strike had suddenly become part of a "betting war," with traders who had wagered 'No' on an Iranian strike on Israel on March 10 pressuring him to change the article so they could win their bets. When he refused, some of the Polymarket gamblers escalated to harassment, fabricated messages, bribery attempts, and explicit threats against him and his family. "You have no idea how much you've put yourself at risk," wrote a user named Haim. "Today is the most significant day of your career. You have two choices: either believe that we have the capabilities, and after you make us lose $900,000 we will invest no less than that to finish you. Or end this with money in your pocket, and also earn back the life you had until now." After receiving no response, Haim sent him another series of messages: "You are choosing to go to war knowing that you will lose your life as you've grown accustomed to it -- for nothing." He later added: "You have exactly a few hours left to fix your attempt at influencing [the market]. It would be stupid of you to ignore this." According to Emanuel, the messages also included detailed threats referencing his neighborhood, parents, and family.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
President revealed details of Neal Dunn’s health prompting Mike Johnson, the House speaker, to say it ‘wasn’t public’
Donald Trump on Monday publicly revealed details about a Republican congressman’s “terminal” diagnosis that could have left him “dead by June”, prompting Mike Johnson, speaker of the House, to say: “That wasn’t public.”
Trump touched on Neal Dunn’s health during a meandering press conference at the White House held alongside leaders of the Kennedy Center and other top Republicans, in which he also discussed topics including the performing arts venue’s upcoming renovation, the breast cancer diagnosis of Susan Wiles, his chief of staff, and the war with Iran.
Continue reading...
Maine oysterman-turned-politician Graham Platner has been drawing consistently packed crowds across the rural state for months as he aims to take on longtime incumbent Republican Susan Collins in this year’s Senate race. He’s regularly outpolling his only other viable competitor for the Democratic nomination, Gov. Janet Mills. At 41, he could hold a seat for decades that Democrats have long had their eyes on.
Since Mills joined the race last fall (Platner announced he was running that August), her support has stagnated and even slipped in some polls as Platner’s numbers continue to rise. Collins and Mills are in a statistical dead heat, with Collins having the edge, while Platner has a few points difference ahead of the incumbent.
For Maine voters concerned with electability, those polls lend credibility to Platner’s campaign. He’s in position to take on an entrenched Republican whose feigned objections to Donald Trump’s excesses — usually expressed as “concern” — have long driven liberal Mainers insane. So why is he still facing resistance from Senate Democratic leadership?
Platner’s town hall tour of Maine is further raising his profile, even after a number of controversies, most notably a Nazi tattoo, threatened his campaign. The more voters get to know him, the more they like him; he’s gone from underdog to favorite in the race. And despite establishment antipathy, he’s finding some friends in other corners of the party.
Three Democratic senators — Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, Arizona’s Ruben Gallego, and New Mexico’s Martin Heinrich — have endorsed Platner. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., is backing him, as are individual members of the progressive wing, like Robert Reich and David Hogg, and groups like Our Revolution and the Maine People’s Alliance. Platner also has the ear of the Pod Save America crew, a group of influential Democrats aligned with the Obama wing of the party.
But the Democratic establishment is trying to draw a line in the sand on the future of the party. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Kirsten Gillibrand, both Democrats from New York, are actively working to elect Mills. There is speculation that the governor, who has pledged to only serve one term in Washington, is Senate leadership’s preferred candidate because she would be a more pliable member of the delegation, while Platner is seen as more independent and willing to take populist, further left stands.
The race bears similarities to the 2016 Democratic primary for president, when Sanders went up against Hillary Clinton and offered a progressive alternative. As in this contest, the machine politician was pitched by the party’s establishment as the more deserving candidate, while the populist candidate to her left ran an insurgent campaign.
It’s another chapter in the intraparty civil war that has been simmering and often boiling over for decades. The Clinton wing, the Obama wing, the Sanders wing, and every other part of the sprawling political coalition that is the Democratic Party are all still vying for dominance. In 2008, the main dividing line was Iraq; in 2016, the failure of the Obama presidency; in 2020, Trump and Covid.
In 2026, the party is still reeling from defeat at the ballot box just two years ago, one that was driven by a perception that the party was out of touch with voters on economic issues as well as, reportedly, its complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The latter issue has become a flashpoint for conflict between the base and the establishment, especially with Schumer — who has described one of his roles in leadership as ensuring Israel gets “all the aid” it needs from the U.S.
For centrist Democrats, Mills is their pick for Maine. Seniority means a lot to a certain kind of centrist Democrat. According to Platner, he was told in no uncertain terms that he was expected to stand down — “I was skipping the line,” he told Slate earlier this month — when he notified Democratic Senate leadership that he was considering running for the seat; the response he received came with a threat to turn his life inside out.
“They essentially said, if we do this, they’re going to come after me,” Platner said. “They’re going to rip my life apart.”
It’s not hard to see what’s off-putting about Platner to the moderate wing of the party. He’s running an anti-war, economically populist campaign with rhetoric aimed at the elites who fund the DSCC and the party’s corporatist wing. He’s come out forcefully for trans rights at a time when Democratic centrist think tanks, friendly to the party’s donor class, are all but arguing the party should throw marginalized groups under the bus. He’s also been forthright in calling Israel’s genocide in Gaza what it is.
Unfortunately for the party establishment, the issues Platner is running on are popular with voters — especially the Democratic base. The party has been shifting left since Trump’s first term and Platner, like Sanders and members of the Squad, among others, is taking advantage of those rising tides of progressivism.
This isn’t to say that Platner doesn’t have his own significant challenges. His posts on Reddit, which span a decade, included some language seen as misogynistic, prejudicial, and insulting to Mainers, though clearly antifascist in general and anti-Nazi in particular. Most notably, a scandal last fall became a national news story over his tattoo of a Totenkopf — a skull-and-bones symbol commonly associated with the Nazis — which led him to publicly apologize and have it inked over. Platner has claimed he got the tattoo in a drunken haze while on leave in 2007 when he was a Marine and that he didn’t know its ties to the Nazis until last October.
The tattoo has dogged him ever since, with media outlets bringing it up whenever Platner makes the news, and the controversy hasn’t stopped there. Recently, Platner was criticized for appearing on a right-wing podcast hosted by a fellow veteran, Nate Cornacchia, who has endorsed conspiracy theories like far-right streamer Nick Shirley’s attacks on Somalis in Minnesota and tying Israel to the murder of Charlie Kirk.
But the governor has her own baggage. Mills is already 78, and if elected, she would be 85 at the end of her six years in office. It’s a hard sell to Democrats in Maine, who, like their counterparts around the country, are still smarting from the humiliation of watching a visibly declining Joe Biden spend his presidency hidden from the public and the media and, when he did appear, fumbling answers onstage or staring off into space.
Plus, after more than 30 years in Maine politics, which also includes serving in the statehouse and as attorney general, Mills is compromised in this race in specific ways that Platner is not. As governor, Mills has had to work with Collins to get things done for the state. There’s nothing unique about that, but it has provided soundbites of Mills praising Collins — one of which, “I appreciate all that she is doing,” the incumbent already used in an ad last fall.
Maine voters will make the final decision on who the Democratic nominee will be. Right now, that looks like Platner — so much so that local labor leaders are urging Schumer to withdraw his support for Mills.
If he wins the primary, Democrats in leadership will have a simple decision to make: Do they want to flip the Senate with a left-leaning veteran whose message resonates, even if it’s not how they wanted to do it? Or do they want to ride out another six years of even more razor-thin margins in either direction in the chamber and bet on 2032? Let’s hope they don’t think another six years of Susan Collins is better than winning with a candidate that outran their candidate from the left.
The post Senate Dem Leaders Are Trying to Sink Graham Platner. Voters Aren’t Convinced. appeared first on The Intercept.
The U.S. men's national soccer team is expected to debut the new uniforms later this month in Atlanta, ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup starting in June.
Trustees approve Trump’s $257m ‘revitalization project’ to remake DC arts institution that president has taken over
The Kennedy Center board of trustees unanimously voted on Monday in favor of a controversial plan to temporarily shutter the arts institution for renovations, rubber-stamping a $257m project initiated by Donald Trump to remake the arts institution in line with other grand plans for Washington.
In a statement, the center said it had voted for “a comprehensive revitalization project” lasting two years that would come after an Independence Day celebration in July, with “a grand re-opening to follow”.
Continue reading...
At least 13 American service members have died so far in the U.S.-Israel war with Iran. Some online accounts are using the moment to share artificial intelligence-generated clickbait.
One viral video showed a toddler-aged boy crying "Daddy" as he approached a flag-draped coffin. A woman follows and tries to console him, saying "I’m right here, sweetheart."
A Facebook page shared it March 15 with the caption, "A Hero’s Final Farewell: Heartbreaking moment a son says goodbye to his father lost in the Iran conflict."
The video had 1.1 million views as of March 16.
We saw the same video on X, TikTok, Instagram, and Threads. But online detection tools and AI experts said the video is very likely AI-generated. Several of the accounts sharing the video post other AI-generated content or acknowledge their content is not real.
(Screenshot of Facebook video)
This particular video is one of several similar videos circulating online. They each depict a near-identical scene, a mother and child crying over a casket. In different versions, the mother and child’s ethnicities vary, as do their clothing and dialogue. Many captions reference the Iran war.
We tested several videos using Hive Moderation’s AI detection tool, which said they all were over 95% likely to be generated using AI.
We sent the video with 1.1 million views to several AI-detection experts for analysis.
"At exactly 10-seconds in length, this is typical of AI-generated videos that max out at 10- to 15-seconds in length," said Hany Farid, a professor and digital forensics expert at the University of Berkeley, California. Farid also flagged some visual anomalies, such as the child’s hand disappearing into the flag and casket.
Experts at Northwestern University’s Security and AI Lab also analyzed the video and said it was "likely generated via artificial intelligence." Analysts pointed out several more visual cues, like the blurry faces of the soldiers in the background and moments of malformed hands and faces.
Hafiz Malik, a University of Michigan computer engineering professor, said one motive for sharing these videos may be to spread inaccurate information, but another might be financial. "People are emotionally very charged, so more clicks, more money," he said. The success of one video can motivate copycats.
Another media literacy trick that can help and doesn’t require a computer science degree: Examine the source pushing the video.
One of the Facebook pages that posted the video, Critter PD, says in its bio that it posts "fictional content for a real cause."
Another Facebook page, Female Forces USA, has posted numerous clips of children crying over U.S. service members’s caskets in recent weeks. Most appear to be AI-generated — you can tell by the American flags that are often skewed, with stars in the middle or stripes in the wrong spot.
So far, the U.S. military has returned the remains of seven of the 13 service members who died.
News reports say that at least three of the seven service members whose remains have been returned left behind children, but none are toddlers as the video depicts.
A social media video purports to show a young boy crying over a flag-draped casket of a service member killed in the ongoing Iran war. But the video is not authentic.
Experts and online detection tools said they, and other similar videos, are AI generated.
Based on news reports, none of the seven service members whose remains have been returned had a toddler-aged child.
We rate this claim False.
ARMONK, N.Y., March 16, 2026 — IBM today announced at GTC 2026 an expanded collaboration with NVIDIA to help enterprises operationalize AI at scale. Advancing efforts across GPU-native data analytics, intelligent document processing, on-premises and regulated infrastructure deployments, cloud, and consulting, the collaboration aims to give enterprises the data foundation, infrastructure, and expertise to move AI from pilot to production.
Credit: majestic b/Shutterstock
Enterprises are making significant investments in AI, but too many remain stuck between experimentation and production at scale. The barriers are consistent: data is fragmented and difficult to access; infrastructure wasn’t built for advanced AI workloads; AI deployments don’t support the compliance and residency requirements of regulated industries; and many organizations still need the guided expertise to implement and deploy the technologies. Today’s announcements from IBM and NVIDIA are designed to close these gaps.
“In the next wave of enterprise AI, the model layer will rely on the data, infrastructure, and orchestration layers – and on businesses that can bring all three together,” said Arvind Krishna, Chairman and CEO, IBM. “Our partnership with NVIDIA goes to the heart of that challenge. Together, we’re giving enterprises the solutions they need to stop experimenting with AI and start running on it.”
“IBM pioneered enterprise computing and data processing six decades ago — and today they are redefining it for the AI era,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Data is the ground truth that gives AI context and meaning. Together with IBM, we are bringing CUDA GPU acceleration directly into the data layer — turning analytics and document processing from bottlenecks into real-time intelligence engines.”
Accelerating Structured Data Analytics with GPU-Native Computing
IBM and NVIDIA are collaborating on an open-source integration to increase performance and reduce costs around how enterprises extract intelligence from their massive datasets. IBM watsonx.data’s SQL engine Presto is accelerated by NVIDIA cuDF to enable faster query execution on large datasets.
To validate in production, IBM and NVIDIA applied GPU-accelerated watsonx.data to Nestlé’s Order-to-Cash data mart. The data mart tracks every order, fulfillment, delivery, and invoice across 186 countries and processes terabytes across 44 tables. Nestlé was ideal for this proof of concept because of its strong digital backbone. With globally unified data models, a consolidated data foundation, and a single source of truth across markets, Nestlé already had timely, accurate, and trusted data at scale — the right foundation to put GPU-accelerated analytics to the test in a real production environment.
On CPUs, a single refresh previously took Nestlé 15 minutes and only ran a handful of times a day. Nestlé reports that with NVIDIA’s software and GPUs, the IBM watsonx.data Presto engine reduced query runtime down to three minutes – achieving 83% cost savings and an overall 30X price-performance improvement.
“For a company that serves billions, data underpins decision making across our global operations,” said Chris Wright, Chief Information and Digital Officer of Nestlé. “Working with IBM and NVIDIA, a targeted proof of concept has demonstrated the ability to refresh global operations data in a few minutes and at reduced cost. Our focus now is on turning this capability into tangible business impact — further improving decision speed in areas such as manufacturing and warehousing, and scaling these capabilities across our enterprise.”
Helping Enterprises Unlock the Full Value of Their Data
Most enterprises aren’t lacking data. But often, they’re unable to access and use it. SharePoint sites, CMS systems, vendor research, SME knowledge: the information exists but it is trapped in unstructured, multi-modal formats that are difficult to extract, standardize, and trust at decision speed.
IBM and NVIDIA are addressing this with Docling from IBM and NVIDIA Nemotron open models – a combination designed to make intelligent document extraction available at enterprise scale. Docling standardizes and converts documents into AI-ready formats with source-level traceability, while NVIDIA Nemotron models accelerate ingestion of multi-modal content. Early results show significantly higher throughput compared to other open-source models, while maintaining or improving accuracy wherever GPU-accelerated infrastructure is available.
GPU-Optimized Infrastructure for On-Prem and Regulated Deployments
IBM and NVIDIA are extending their data efforts to the infrastructure layer. NVIDIA has selected IBM Storage Scale System 6000 to provide 10PB of high-performance storage to serve massive data for its GPU-native advanced analytics engines, pairing IBM’s unified data access layer and massive parallel throughput with NVIDIA’s GPU pipelines. IBM Storage Scale 6000 is certified and validated on NVIDIA DGX platforms.
For enterprises and governments requiring data residency and regulatory control, IBM and NVIDIA are exploring the integration of IBM Sovereign Core and NVIDIA infrastructure and NVIDIA Nemotron models that would focus on enabling GPU-intensive AI workloads that run entirely within regional boundaries – without compromising governance or compliance.
Advancing the Enterprise AI Stack with IBM, NVIDIA and Red Hat
IBM and NVIDIA are also deepening their partnership across cloud and enterprise consulting to advance clients’ enterprise AI adoption. IBM plans to offer NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs on IBM Cloud in early Q2 2026 for large-scale training, high-throughput inferencing, and AI reasoning. This technology will also be integrated across Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA, and VPC servers with enterprise-grade compliance and data residency controls.
Additionally, IBM Consulting plans to bring Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA to clients through IBM Consulting Advantage – an IBM enterprise AI platform that helps clients build and scale AI across their technology environments. Combined with Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA, the platform is built to simplify how companies prepare data, build models, and deploy AI, while also enhancing performance and oversight. This builds on IBM Consulting’s broader efforts to help clients maximize outputs from their AI investments.
About IBM
IBM (NYSE: IBM) is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help 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 consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.
Source: IBM
The post IBM Announces Expanded Collaboration with NVIDIA to Advance AI for the Enterprise appeared first on HPCwire.
Unprecedented changes to routine US immunization recommendations ‘arbitrary and capricious’, court says
The appointment of a controversial slate of vaccine advisers by Robert F Kennedy Jr likely violated federal law, and all votes taken by the committee over the past year have been stayed, a federal judge ruled on Monday.
The advisory committee on immunization practices (ACIP) is not able to meet later this week, since its membership has been invalidated, the judge said. The meeting has been postponed, an HHS official said.
Continue reading...Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage with NVIDIA helps operationalize AI through faster deployment and real-time inferencing across workstations, edge, data centers, and emerging AI factories
SAN JOSE, Calif., March 16, 2026 — Today at NVIDIA GTC, Lenovo unveiled new Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage with NVIDIA solutions designed to accelerate AI adoption, reduce time-to-first-token (TTFT), and deliver measurable business results across personal, enterprise, and cloud environments. Building on the inferencing acceleration introduced at Lenovo Tech World, this next phase of Hybrid AI execution expands the Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage with NVIDIA from device to data center to gigawatt-scale AI cloud deployments, enabling real-time decision-making, operational efficiency, and intelligent automation across industries at global scale.
As AI moves from training models to powering real-time decisions, inferencing has become the new frontier of enterprise value—and organizations need infrastructure that delivers both securely spanning edge, data center, and cloud. According to the CIO Playbook 2026 commissioned by Lenovo and conducted by IDC, 84% of organizations expect to run AI across on-premises or edge environments alongside the cloud—accelerating demand for validated hybrid AI platforms built for production-scale inferencing.
“Together, Lenovo and NVIDIA are uniquely positioned to help organizations operationalize AI—from experimentation to enterprise production to AI cloud gigafactories,” said Yuanqing Yang, Chairman and CEO, Lenovo. “As agentic AI drives exponential growth in inferencing workloads, cost control and performance per token become mission critical. By combining NVIDIA AI Enterprise software with Lenovo’s full-stack hybrid AI platforms and services, we enable customers to scale AI with greater efficiency, lower cost per token, and faster time-to-production.”
Lenovo and NVIDIA are bringing AI from development environments into real-world production at a global scale with the new Lenovo AI inferencing platforms with NVIDIA Dynamo and NVIDIA NIM, the Lenovo AI Cloud gigafactory powered by NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72, and industry-specific agentic AI solutions built with NVIDIA Blueprints and software.
“AI has entered the production era. Intelligence is now generated in real time—and enterprises need systems built for that scale,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “As AI agents begin to reason, plan, and act, the next AI inflection point will dramatically scale demand for accelerated computing, software and AI factories—and together, Lenovo and NVIDIA are delivering the full-stack platforms to power the future.”
AI Development and Inferencing Wherever You Work
Lenovo is bringing real-time AI development and inferencing directly to professionals with next-generation NVIDIA RTX Pro Blackwell-powered mobile and desktop workstations:
Production-Ready AI Platforms for Real-Time Enterprise Inferencing
Lenovo’s Hybrid AI Advantage with NVIDIA solutions are now delivering ROI in less than six months and up to 8× lower cost per token compared to comparable cloud IaaS—helping enterprises bring AI workloads on-premises with greater efficiency and control.
New inferencing-optimized Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkEdge servers, combined with enhanced Hybrid AI platforms and integrated partner solutions, enable real-time AI Inferencing across retail, manufacturing, healthcare, sports, and smart city environments. Customers including Iren and the Town of Cary are leveraging Lenovo infrastructure to modernize operations and scale data-driven services.
The expanded portfolio features NVIDIA-Certified Systems integrated with NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, including:
These solutions are backed by an expanded global collaboration with IBM Technology Lifecycle Services to accelerate hybrid AI adoption worldwide.
Expanding the Lenovo AI Library: Industry-Ready AI at Scale
Lenovo is expanding the Lenovo AI Library with new agentic and physical AI solutions built on the Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage with NVIDIA – bringing real-time, production-grade inferencing directly into enterprise workflows.
In sports, Lenovo’s AI-powered solutions deliver real-time analytics, operational intelligence, broadcast optimization, and immersive fan experiences—helping leagues, venues, and media organizations transform live data into competitive advantage. In retail, intelligent in-store and digital assistants deliver personalized engagement and operational efficiency through the Lenovo xIQ Agent Platform with NVIDIA.
Across manufacturing, industrial, and mobility environments, Lenovo’s physical AI solutions combine robotics, edge computing, and multi-modal sensing to automate inspection, enhance worker safety, optimize fleet operations, and reduce downtime. Lenovo’s Auto AI Box extends these capabilities to vehicle computing platforms, enabling advanced driver assistance, predictive maintenance, and real-time fleet intelligence at the edge.
Through the Lenovo AI Innovators ecosystem, collaborating with NVIDIA and partners including AiFi, RocketBoots, and Vaidio, delivers validated AI solutions for public sector, smart cities, retail, and other verticals.
Powering the Next Generation of AI Cloud with NVIDIA Rubin
Lenovo is helping customers manage data at gigawatt-scale with next-generation NVIDIA Rubin platforms, accelerating deployment for hyperscale and sovereign AI cloud providers. As a launch partner for NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72, Lenovo is delivering fully liquid-cooled, rack-scale AI systems engineered for faster deployment and dramatically improved token economics—achieving up to 10x higher throughput and up to 10x lower cost per token compared to previous generations. Lenovo is also introducing NVIDIA HGX Rubin NVL8 systems and collaborating with Nscale to power hyperscale AI deployments optimized for large-scale inference and emerging agentic workloads.
Backed by Lenovo Hybrid AI Factory Services, these platforms combine lifecycle management, global deployment expertise, and operational optimization—helping AI cloud providers move from build-out to revenue generation faster and with lower risk.
Fast-Tracking the Future of Hybrid AI
Lenovo’s collaboration with NVIDIA accelerates AI opportunities across its global channel ecosystem. Through the Lenovo 360 framework, partners are enabled to deliver the Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage with NVIDIA—spanning devices, infrastructure, services, NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, accelerated computing, and networking—guiding customers from pilot to production and expanding AI practices.
Visit Lenovo at NVIDIA GTC, booth #431, or the Lenovo Hub at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center to see the Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage with NVIDIA in action.
Source: Lenovo
The post Lenovo Accelerates Production-Ready Enterprise AI with NVIDIA appeared first on HPCwire.
March 16, 2026 — Today at NVIDIA GTC 2026, Intel announced that Intel Xeon 6 is being used as the processor for NVIDIA DGX Rubin NVL8 systems. This highlights Xeon’s role in providing architectural continuity and scalability for GPU -accelerated AI systems as workloads shift toward massive, real -time inference.
“AI is shifting from large-scale training to real‑time, everywhere inference —driven by agentic AI and reasoning systems,” said Jeff McVeigh, corporate vice president and general manager, Data Center Strategic Programs at Intel. “In this new era, the host CPU is mission‑critical. It governs orchestration, memory access, model security, and throughput across GPU‑accelerated systems. Intel Xeon 6 delivers leadership performance, efficiency, and compatibility with the extensive x86 software ecosystem that customers rely on to scale inference workloads.”
As organizations continue to deploy AI systems, inference is increasingly defined not only by GPU throughput but also by CPU-led system performance, with the host CPU shaping overall cluster efficiency and total cost of ownership. It is also responsible for critical functions such as memory management, task orchestration, and workload distribution, while ensuring the security, reliability, and operational continuity essential to modern AI infrastructure.
Building on these system-level requirements, Intel Xeon processors are used as the host CPU for DGX Rubin NVL8 systems due to their capability to support fast memory speeds, balanced performance across a range of workloads, lower long-term total cost of ownership (TCO), and their mature, enterprise-proven software ecosystem. Additionally, Intel’s robust PCIe and I/O capabilities further strengthen Xeon’s role as a high-bandwidth, low-latency platform across diverse workloads.
This selection reinforces Intel Xeon as a cornerstone of modern AI infrastructure, enabling scalable deployment across modern data centers, the cloud and edge use cases. As AI inference scales, end -to-end confidential computing becomes essential — from CPU to GPU data paths. Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) adds hardware-based isolation and attestation further reinforcing the selection of Xeon as the secure foundation for modern AI clusters.
The New Intel and NVIDIA Collaboration
NVIDIA DGX Rubin NVL8 systems integrate Intel Xeon 6 processors, building on the architectural foundation established with Intel Xeon 6776P in current NVIDIA Blackwell -based platforms, including DGX B300 systems. By building on this proven foundation, Intel is helping to carry forward the performance, experience, and system-level expertise into the new DGX Rubin NVL8 systems.
Intel engineered Xeon to help these systems get the most out of their GPUs, using features like Priority Core Turbo to keep data flowing to GPUs – and with strong single‑thread performance handling orchestration, scheduling, and data movement, Xeon helps ensure everything runs smoothly and efficiently even as inference workloads grow more complex.
Key features of Intel Xeon 6 include:
Learn more at the Intel GTC booth #3100 on the show floor in the San Jose Convention Center.
About Intel
Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) is an industry leader, creating world-changing technology that enables global progress and enriches lives. Inspired by Moore’s Law, we continuously work to advance the design and manufacturing of semiconductors to help address our customers’ greatest challenges. By embedding intelligence in the cloud, network, edge and every kind of computing device, we unleash the potential of data to transform business and society for the better.
Source: Intel
The post Intel Xeon 6 Used as Host CPUs in NVIDIA DGX Rubin NVL8 Systems appeared first on HPCwire.
This free-roaming snowman robot is coming to overseas Disney theme parks.
The tech giant has struggled to deliver on its ambitious plans for the Avocado AI model, AI-powered smart glasses and other next-generation projects.
Users of the popular chatbot will eventually be allowed to have X-rated sexual chats.
British version of the topical US comedy show will air live on Sky One and will be written in the week before broadcast
Tina Fey, Jamie Dornan and Riz Ahmed have been named as the first three guest hosts of the UK spin-off of Saturday Night Live.
The first episode of the long-awaited British version of the US late-night comedy show will air live on Sky on 21 March.
Continue reading...Despite withering airstrikes, officials predict a weakened but more hard-line government in Tehran, backed by the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps security forces.
Abbas Araghchi demands clarification on reports Saudi crown prince urged Donald Trump to ‘hit the Iranians hard’
Some Gulf states hosting US forces may be covertly encouraging the slaughter of Iranians, Iran’s foreign minister has claimed in a thinly-veiled attack on Saudi Arabia.
Abbas Araghchi demanded clarification on reports that Mohammed bin Salman was in regular private conversations with Donald Trump, urging the US president “to continue hitting the Iranians hard”.
Continue reading...Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino was pulled away from a high-profile role leading immigration raids in major U.S. cities, including Minneapolis, earlier this year.
The Iran war could escalate further as President Trump threatens to hit key oil infrastructure if Tehran doesn't drop its chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz.
The injuries have occurred as Iran launches waves of missile and one-way attack drones in response to the Trump administration’s expansive assault.
Encyclopedia Britannica has sued OpenAI, alleging its AI models were trained on nearly 100,000 copyrighted articles and sometimes reproduce or misattribute passages to the encyclopedia. The lawsuit also claims trademark infringement and argues tools like ChatGPT divert traffic away from Britannica and Merriam-Webster sites. Engadget reports: More specifically, Britannica alleged that OpenAI illegally used its "copyrighted content at a massive scale" when training its AI models. Not just with training, the encyclopedia company claimed that ChatGPT's responses to user queries sometimes contain "full or partial verbatim reproductions of [Britannica's] copyright articles." Along with claims of copyright violations, Britannica argued that OpenAI was also responsible for trademark infringement. According to the lawsuit, ChatGPT generates "made-up content or 'hallucinations' and falsely attributes them" to Encyclopedia Britannica. The lawsuit doesn't specify an amount for monetary damages, but Britannica is also seeking an injunction to prevent OpenAI from repeating these accusations.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Hoping to hear from anyone who has already upgraded their XRC with the GTs motor that's available on the website. Is it worth it? Alot of people say to just get the X7 If you want an upgrade, but I'd like to know what I'd stand to gain from the motor swap
Students queue for antibiotics in Canterbury and worry about who they have been in contact with, as exams are moved online
On Monday morning, nine days after a night out at Club Chemistry, a nightclub in Canterbury, Joe Bradshaw realised he had been linked to the meningitis outbreak in Kent that has killed two people, a university student and a sixth-former.
He ran through the week in his mind, beginning to worry about those he had been in contact with.
Continue reading...The Supreme Court said in an unsigned order it will hear arguments in late April on efforts to end temporary deportation protections for thousands of immigrants from Syria and Haiti.
Ten million people left without power in latest of outages that sparked violent protest last weekend
Cuba’s national electric grid has collapsed, the country’s grid operator has said, leaving approximately 10 million people without power amid a US-imposed oil blockade that has crippled the island’s already obsolete generation system.
The grid operator, UNE, said on social media on Monday that it was investigating the causes of the blackout, the latest in a series of widespread outages that last for hours or days and that last weekend sparked a rare violent protest in the communist-run country.
Continue reading...Time is running out to find agreement on areas such as tuition fees EU citizens would pay in Britain and rules for food safety
The EU is hoping to urgently reboot talks on the “reset” of relations with the UK as negotiations are in danger of foundering before a planned July summit.
At a public meeting of the EU-UK parliamentary partnership assembly in Brussels, the European Commission vice-president and trade commissioner, Maroš Šefčovič, said both sides had to “change gears” now to ensure the deal got over the line.
Continue reading...Wiles, 68, praised by president as ‘one of the strongest people I know’, to continue working while having treatment
Susie Wiles, the first woman to serve as White House chief of staff, has been diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer but plans to continue working while undergoing treatment.
The 68-year-old revealed on Monday that the illness had been detected in the past week. Both she and Donald Trump struck an optimistic tone, saying doctors expect a strong recovery.
Continue reading...Expansion will more than double capacity; add critical equipment to meet growing AI data center demand
ST. PAUL, Minn., March 16, 2026 — 3M today announced a major planned expansion of U.S. manufacturing capacity for its 3M Expanded Beam Optical (EBO) interconnect technology, a high-performance optical connectivity solution engineered to improve deployment speed, reliability, and operational efficiency within next-generation AI data centers. The expansion will include adding new advanced manufacturing equipment and additional production space to support increasing global demand for high-speed interconnects in AI data centers.
3M has announced a major planned expansion of U.S. manufacturing capacity for its 3M Expanded Beam Optical (EBO) interconnect technology, a high-performance optical connectivity solution engineered to improve deployment speed, reliability, and operational efficiency within next-generation AI data centers.
“Key customers understand the benefits of our EBO technology, and with infrastructure scaling at an unprecedented pace, data center customers need optical connectivity solutions that can deploy quickly and operate reliably at massive scale,” said Alex An, vice president, Data Center Vertical Business for 3M. “By expanding our manufacturing capacity for 3M Expanded Beam Optical technology, 3M is helping to ensure our customers have the high-performance interconnect solutions they need to build and scale the AI data centers that are powering the digital economy.”
The capacity expansion reflects accelerating adoption of optical interconnect technologies designed for high-density computing environments. As AI clusters grow and data center architectures evolve to support faster data movement and higher bandwidth demands, expanded beam optical technology helps improve connection reliability while reducing maintenance complexity in large-scale deployments.
This investment will also strengthen 3M’s ability to support customers across the data center ecosystem—including hyperscalers, optical network equipment providers, and cable assembly partners—while expanding our production capacity. 3M EBO is in mass production and has been commercially available since late 2024.
3M Expanded Beam Optical solutions leverage the company’s material science expertise to enable durable, dust-resistant optical connections designed for high-density computing environments. The technology is part of 3M’s broader portfolio of data center solutions that help address high-speed connectivity, rack and power, and advanced materials challenges associated with next-generation AI infrastructure.
Meet us at OFC in Los Angeles at booth #5233 to see the latest in 3M Expanded Beam Optical technology.
About 3M
3M (NYSE: MMM) is focused on transforming industries around the world by applying science and creating innovative, customer-focused solutions. Our multi-disciplinary team is working to solve tough customer problems by leveraging diverse technology platforms, differentiated capabilities, global footprint, and operational excellence.
Source: 3M
The post 3M Announces Capacity Investment for Expanded Beam Optical Production appeared first on HPCwire.
Nvidia acquired the intellectual property of the chip startup Groq barely two months ago for $20 billion, but it’s Language Processing Unit (LPU) is already in production and is being integrated with the rest of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin stack, which features a total of seven new chips that are in production, Nvidia announced today at its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose.
Founded in 2016 by former Google engineers who were part of the original Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) team, Groq develops a custom ASIC that’s designed to provide fast, low-latency processing for AI inference. According to Ian Buck, general manager and vice president of accelerated computing at Nvidia, says the combination of the “extreme flops” from Rubin GPUs and the impressive bandwidth of Groq LPUs will combine to create something special.
Ian Buck, general manager and vice president of accelerated computing at Nvidia
“GPUs, with large memory and amazing floating point performance, and offering high throughput and token rate for the volume market, excels at AI, but this other processor, the LPU, is optimized strictly for that extreme low-latency token generation, offering token rates in the thousands of tokens per second,” Buck said during a press conference yesterday. “The tradeoff, of course, is that you need many chips in order to perform that kind of get that kind of performance.”
Each Groq 3 LPU has only 500 MB of SRAM, which is 1/500 of the memory capacity of Rubin GPUs, Buck said. “But the bandwidth is exceptional–22TBps [with Rubin GPUs] to 150TB per second of bandwidth [with Groq LPUs],” Buck said. “Nvidia is working to combine these two processors to do the decoding operations of the GPU, and do it as one.”
The Groq 3 LPX rack that Nvidia unveiled today will sit next to NVL72 racks to provide that capacity for AI inference and agentic AI workloads. According to Nvidia’s presentation, the Groq 3 LPX rack will house up to 256 LPU accelerators, 128 GB of SRAM, and provide 40 petabytes per second of SRAM memory bandwidth. The rack as a whole will deliver up to 640 TB per second of scale-up bandwidth, and could eventually scale to more than 1,000 LPUs, Nvidia says.
Nvidia NVL72
The combination of a Groq 3 LPX rack with a Rubin NVL72 system will allow customers to generate a million tokens for $45 on a 1 trillion GPT model with a 400k context window, which is 35x more tokens than Rubin NVL72 could generate by itself, Nvidia says.
Groq 3 LPUs aren’t the only new chips Nvidia is counting on to provide capacity for AI inference, and the company today announced a new rack for Vera CPUs, its ARM-based CPU that are combined with two Rubin GPUs to create the superchips at the heart of Nvidia NVL72 and NVL8 systems.
As CPU becomes the bottleneck for AI inference and agentic AI, organizations are demanding more and more CPU capacity. That led Nvidia to offer a CPU-only rack, dubbed the Vera CPU Rack, which will feature 256 Vera CPUs connected to 400 TB of LPDDR5x memory running at 300 TBps.
The Vera CPU rack will also feature a Spectrum-X Ethernet spine, and 64 BlueField-4 data processing units (DPUs), which will coordinate with GPUs on NVL72 systems via Nvidia’s NVLink-C2C interconnect technology, offering 1.8 TBps of coherent bandwidth, which it says is 7x the bandwidth of PCIe Gen 6.
The Vera rack will be able to sustain 22,500 concurrent CPU environments, Nvidia said, presumably satisfying the huge demand for CPU capacity to handle AI inference and agentic workloads. The Vera rack also will be liquid-cooled and use Nvidia’s MGX reference architecture, which Nvidia points out is supported by 80 ecosystem partners. It will also be sold through its partner network.
Nvidia is in production with the Rubin GPU
Nvidia also announced a new rack full of BlueField-4 DPUs, one of the seven new chips that Nvidia touted as making up the new AI supercomputer. The BlueField-4 STX is the first rack-scale implementation of Nvidia’s new CMX (context memory storage) platform, which expands GPU memory from HBM into primary NVMe storage. It unveiled CMX in January, and Nvidia’s storage partners, such as VAST Data, which presented on its CMX storage offering at its conference a few weeks ago, are beginning to adopt it via the Nvidia STX reference architecture.
“The STX is a high-bandwidth, shared layer optimized for storing and retrieving the massive key value cache data generated by agentic workflows,” Buck said. “This is a reference architecture. While Nvidia is not going to be providing it directly, we’re providing [the reference architecture] to all of our storage partners and the entire storage ecosystem so that they can build the next generation of storage for AI factories that has 4x the performance per watt, double the pages per second for enterprise data, and delivering 5x the tokens per second of context memory necessary for AI factories running agentic workflows.”
Cloudian, DDN, Dell Technologies, Everpure (forerly Pure Storage), Hitachi Vantara, HPE, IBM, MinIO, NetApp, Nutanix, and WEKA are all building new storage on the BlueField-4 STX reference architecture, Nvidia said, while companies like CoreWeave, Crusoe, IREN, Lambda, Mistral AI, Nebius, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and Vultr are adopting it.
All told, Nvidia is showcasing seven new chips at GTC that each have a role for powering AI in the Vera Rubin platform. This includes Vera CPU, Rubin GPU, NVLink 6 Switch, ConnectX-9 SuperNIC, BlueField-4 DPU, Groq 3 LPU, and SpectrumX CPO, the new co-packaged optics Ethernet switch that delivers 200 Gbps connectivity over silicon photonics. Nvidia announced the SpectrumX chip at GTC 2025, and it’s now in production, CEO Jensen Huang said in his keynote.
Stay tuned to HPCwire for more coverage from GTC in San Jose.
The post Nvidia Boasts 7 Chips in Production for Vera Rubin Platform, Including Groq 3 LPU appeared first on HPCwire.
Leaders seek a diplomatic solution despite US president’s threat of ‘a very bad future’ for Nato unless it provides warships
European countries have ruled out sending warships to the strait of Hormuz, despite threats from Donald Trump that Nato faces “a very bad future” if members fail to help reopen the vital waterway.
Germany ruled out participation in any military activity, including efforts to reopen the strait. “There was never a joint decision on whether to intervene. That is why the question of how Germany might contribute militarily does not arise. We will not do so,” the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said.
Continue reading...PM refuses to be drawn into wider conflict as Germany and Italy defy Trump’s call to help reopen strait of Hormuz
Keir Starmer has insisted that the UK will not be drawn into the wider war in the Middle East as European leaders ruled out sending warships to the strait of Hormuz.
In his clearest signal yet of the UK’s divergence from Donald Trump’s attack on Iran, the prime minister said he would stand firm in the face of US pressure despite the decision being “difficult, there’s no hiding that”.
Continue reading...The global rollout of the video tool, which sparked panic with its cinema-quality AI-generated video, appears to be delayed.
Opening a gold IRA can take a few days — but it could also take much longer for some investors. Here's why.
Carie Hallford, 48, whose husband Jon received 40-year term, pleaded guilty to defrauding grieving families
A former Colorado funeral home owner who helped her ex-husband hide nearly 200 decomposing bodies in a building was sentenced Monday to 18 years on a federal fraud charge, nearly the maximum allowed under the law.
Carie Hallford, 48, faced up to 20 years in prison for taking over $130,000 from families for funeral services, including cremations, and often giving them urns full of concrete mix instead. In two cases, investigators found the wrong body was buried. In August, she pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and admitted that she and her ex-husband Jon Hallford cheated customers and also defrauded the federal government out of nearly $900,000 in pandemic small business aid.
Continue reading...Deaths of student and sixth-former named as Juliette announced as long queues for antibiotics form at Canterbury campus
A university and three schools have been struck by an outbreak of invasive meningitis that has killed two young people and left 11 others in hospital.
One of the young people to have died was a student at the University of Kent, while the second was a sixth-former at Queen Elizabeth’s grammar school (QEGS) in Faversham.
Continue reading...Heat warnings are in effect across region as record-high temperatures are forecast in California, Nevada and Arizona
Millions of people in the western US are preparing for extreme heat as unprecedented temperatures are forecast across California, Nevada and Arizona.
The National Weather Service (NWS) issued a heat advisory for California’s Bay Area and central coast regions as temperatures are expected to reach up to 90F (32C).
Continue reading...What’s the favorite tune for you guys for pintv I don’t loves the stock tune I’m gonna mess with it myself but I’d like to try other peoples favorite tunes
Ukrainian president’s visit coincides with deadline for Roman Abramovich over proceeds from £2.5bn Chelsea sale
Keir Starmer will host Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on Tuesday as the prime minister warns US-Israeli strikes on Iran cannot be allowed to become a “windfall for Putin”.
Zelenskyy’s visit will come on the day of the government deadline for the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich to pay proceeds from his sale of Chelsea FC to victims of the Ukraine war.
Continue reading...DENVER, March 16, 2026 — Qolab today announced the launch of the John Martinis Prize for Experimental Superconducting Qubit Physics, a new initiative designed to support the next generation of researchers advancing superconducting quantum hardware. The prize is supported by Qolab, Israeli Quantum Computing Center (IQCC), and Quantum Machines, whose control technology powers the initiative’s experimental framework. The announcement comes as the company highlights a series of technical collaborations, education initiatives, and workforce investments during the American Physics Society (APS) Global Physics Summit in Denver.
Named in honor of Qolab co-founder and CTO John M. Martinis, recipient of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for his pioneering work on macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit, the prize will provide research and education grants to scientists and educators working to advance experimental superconducting quantum systems.
The program will support both academic research and classroom instruction, providing awardees with funding and access to Qolab quantum processors, running on the Quantum Machines orchestration stack, to accelerate experimental work and training in superconducting qubit control and device engineering.
“Scaling quantum computers from research prototypes to useful systems requires a new generation of experimentalists who understand both the physics and the engineering of superconducting devices,” said John M. Martinis, CTO and co-founder, Qolab. “Through the John Martinis Prize, we hope to support researchers and educators pushing the boundaries of qubit control, device design, and experimental techniques.”
“The IQCC is the only cloud access center providing experimentalists with full pulse-level control of superconducting qubits via Quantum Machines’ OPX+,” said Nir Alfasi, General Manager, IQCC. “We are excited to host Qolab’s processors to advance technology with the next generation of superconducting experimentalists.”
Grant recipients will receive financial support, processor access, and opportunities to collaborate with leading researchers in the field. Research awardees will be granted time on Qolab’s latest superconducting processors hosted at the IQCC, enabling advanced pulse-level control experiments and advanced device characterization, a research stipend, and a free pass to the Adaptive Quantum Circuits conference.
Applications for the John Martinis Prize will open on March 16, and researchers and educators can apply via the online submission form. Prize winners will be formally announced and recognized at the Adaptive Quantum Circuits (AQC) conference in Chicago in 2026.
Global Collaborations Advancing Scalable Quantum Hardware
The announcement comes amid growing international momentum around Qolab’s approach to scalable superconducting quantum hardware.
Earlier this year, Qolab announced a collaboration with researchers at Singapore’s National Quantum Federated Foundry (NQFF) to develop cryogenic low-pass filters, critical components used to suppress microwave noise in superconducting quantum processors. These components represent a key bottleneck in building larger and more reliable quantum systems.
The collaboration combines Singapore’s advanced semiconductor manufacturing capabilities with Qolab’s expertise in superconducting qubit systems. By developing wafer-scale cryogenic filters that can be integrated directly with quantum processor circuits, the partnership aims to enable denser integration and improved reliability in next-generation quantum computers.
Expanding Access to Quantum Hardware Education
At APS, Qolab is also highlighting its Quantum Educational Fabrication Program (Qolab Fab), an initiative designed to bring hands-on quantum hardware engineering into university classrooms.
The program enables students to design superconducting microwave resonators using professional electronic design tools, after which Qolab fabricates and measures the devices at millikelvin temperatures using its production measurement infrastructure.
Students then analyze real measurement data from the devices they designed, providing practical exposure to superconducting circuit engineering and the materials challenges that limit qubit performance.
The program will launch pilot deployments in summer 2026 and is designed to expand access to quantum hardware education, particularly for undergraduate institutions and master’s programs without access to specialized fabrication and cryogenic infrastructure.
Building the Quantum Workforce
Qolab is also expanding its team and will be participating in the APS Global Physics Summit Career Fair, where prospective candidates can meet members of the Qolab engineering team and speak directly with Nobel laureate John Martinis about careers in quantum hardware.
“As the field moves from laboratory demonstrations to manufacturable systems, there is enormous demand for engineers and physicists who can bridge quantum science and semiconductor manufacturing,” said Alan Ho, CEO, Qolab. “We’re building a team focused on solving the hard engineering problems that determine whether quantum computing can scale.”
Interested applicants can learn more about opportunities at the APS Career Fair or by visiting the Qolab booth #717.
In addition, those interested in hearing Qolab CTO and cofounder, and Nobel Laureate John Martinis, speak can join the following sessions at APS in Denver:
About Qolab
Qolab is a hardware company developing utility-scale superconducting quantum computers. By combining deep physics and engineering expertise with strategic semiconductor partnerships, we solve the toughest challenges on the path to fault-tolerant quantum computing.
Source: Qolab
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Sporting director suspended without pay through 1 June
League found ‘violations of MLS policies and standards’
Major League Soccer announced on Monday that it has suspended Philadelphia Union sporting director Ernst Tanner without pay through 1 June 2026. Tanner had been under league investigation since mid-November following a Guardian report detailing wide-ranging allegations of misconduct during his tenure at the Union.
“Based on new information obtained during outside counsel’s independent review, the investigation substantiated violations of MLS policies and standards of professional conduct required of League and Club leadership,” the league said in a statement to the Guardian.
Continue reading...SAN JOSE, Calif., March 16, 2026 — Accelsius, a leader in two-phase, direct-to-chip liquid cooling technology for AI and high-performance computing, today introduced the NeuCool IR150, the industry’s first fully integrated rack-level cooling solution that combines a two-phase Coolant Distribution Unit (CDU), 42U of IT rack space, and built-in liquid and vapor manifolds in a single 800mm-wide enclosure, offering up to 150kW of capacity.
The announcement arrives at a pivotal moment for the data center industry. According to various sources, the global liquid cooling market is projected to be around $6 billion in 2026, driven by AI workloads that generate rack densities that air cooling can no longer manage. At the same time, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang revealed earlier in 2026 that the company’s next-generation Vera Rubin platform, expected in the second half of 2026, is designed to be cooled entirely via liquid cooling, using warm overhead facility water at temperatures up to 45°C. As the industry’s leading chipmaker signals a future built on liquid cooling, Accelsius, an NVIDIA Inception program member, is delivering the infrastructure to make that future a reality today.
Reimagined for the mission-critical liquid cooling era, the IR150 integrates a two-phase CDU directly into the IT enclosure, allocating 200mm to cooling infrastructure and 600mm to server space. The result is a true plug-and-play solution for high-density, two-phase-enabled deployments. The system dramatically simplifies installation, reduces technology cooling system (TCS) complexity and cost, and confines failure domains to a single rack.
“The IR150 represents the next evolution of data center infrastructure,” said Josh Claman, CEO of Accelsius. “When the world’s leading chipmaker designs its next-generation AI supercomputers to run on liquid cooling, the industry needs purpose-built infrastructure to deliver it. The IR150 does exactly that, a single, integrated rack that arrives ready to cool the most demanding AI workloads, with minimal chiller infrastructure, no water treatment, and no compromise on reliability.”
Traditional single-phase liquid cooling systems rely on treated water circulated directly to the chip, introducing leak risk, corrosion concerns, and continuous water-quality maintenance.
In contrast, Accelsius’ two-phase approach uses a non-conductive dielectric refrigerant with an A1 safety rating and low global warming potential. No water enters the IT rack, meaning leak events pose minimal risk to GPUs or server electronics. Industry studies have shown that two-phase cooling systems can reduce cooling energy consumption by up to 90 percent and eliminate millions of gallons of annual water use compared to air-cooled alternatives, while independent analysis by Jacobs Engineering has demonstrated that Accelsius’ two-phase solutions deliver 35–44 percent annual OpEx savings and 8–17 percent five-year total cost of ownership savings over single-phase direct-to-chip systems.
Key benefits of the NeuCool IR150 include:
See the NeuCool IR150 at NVIDIA GTC 2026
Learn more about the NeuCool IR150 at NVIDIA GTC 2026, March 16–19 Booth 129 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. To schedule a meeting or demo, contact info@accelsius.com.
The IR150 joins the NeuCool MR250, Accelsius’ row-based CDU delivering up 250kW+ of cooling capacity per rack, and the NeuCool Thermal Simulation Rack (TSR), a first-of-its-kind thermal test platform. Together, the NeuCool product family offers operators a complete suite of two-phase, direct-to-chip cooling solutions that scale from evaluation through full data center deployment.
About Accelsius
Founded by Innventure, Inc. (NASDAQ:INV), Accelsius empowers data center and AI neoclouds to achieve their business, financial and sustainability goals through advanced cooling solutions. The proprietary NeuCool platform provides best-in-class thermal efficiencies through a safe, two-phase, direct-to-chip liquid cooling system that scales from single racks to entire data centers.
Source: Accelsius
The post Accelsius Makes NVIDIA GTC Debut with NeuCool IR150 Integrated Rack for Two-Phase Liquid Cooling appeared first on HPCwire.
Apple has quietly announced the AirPods Max 2, featuring improved active noise cancellation, an H2 chip, and new features like adaptive audio and AI-powered real-time translation. Like the original model, these headphones start at $549. The Verge reports: As noted by Apple, the AirPods Max 2 offer active noise-cancellation that's 1.5 times more effective when compared to its predecessor. Transparency mode, which allows you to hear your surroundings while wearing the headphones, also sounds "more natural" with the AirPods Max 2, according to Apple. The AirPods Max 2 support 24-bit, 48kHz lossless audio when connected with a USB-C cable, as well as offer up to 20 hours of listening time on a single charge. Other capabilities include loud sound reduction, a camera remote feature that works by pressing the digital crown to take a photo or start a recording, as well as a personalized volume feature that "automatically fine-tunes the listening experience" based on your preferences over time.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
US president on social media ‘thrilled’ that Brendan Carr reportedly looking into broadcasters’ licenses
Donald Trump reinforced comments made by Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), threatening the broadcast licenses of news organizations that report unfavorably on the war in Iran.
In a Truth Social post on Sunday night, Trump said he was “thrilled” that Carr was “looking at the licenses of some of these Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations. They get Billions of Dollars of FREE American Airwaves, and use it to perpetuate LIES …”
Continue reading...MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 16, 2026 — Lightmatter, today announced a new collaborative initiative within the Open Compute Project (OCP) to create open specifications for a shared reference architecture enabling interoperable Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) in next-generation AI systems. The announcement, in conjunction with the submission of a white paper titled “Open Collaboration for CPO-Enabled AI Systems,” will initiate the project. This proposal underscores Lightmatter’s commitment to advancing AI infrastructure in open collaboration with ecosystem leaders, including Celestica, Corning Incorporated, Dell Technologies, Inc., Flex, Foxconn Interconnect Technology, Hyve Solutions, Keysight, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., and Quanta Cloud Technology.
The exponential increase in AI workloads has exposed a critical bottleneck in electrical interconnects, which is now driving the industry toward CPO solutions to scale next-generation AI infrastructure. CPO offers a solution by integrating photonics directly with silicon, providing massive increases in bandwidth that contribute to large gains in compute, power and space efficiency. However, the complexity of CPO systems presents challenges around integration, interoperability, reliability and scaling across a diverse supply chain. This project directly addresses the need for collaborative open standards that will enable a robust ecosystem, high-volume production and seamless integration of CPO in hyperscale data centers.
“The AI revolution is at a pivotal moment, and we must ensure interoperable solutions that can be produced and deployed at scale across the industry’s diverse ecosystem,” said Nick Harris, Ph.D., Founder and CEO at Lightmatter. “We believe the answer is in open collaboration. By working with the OCP community, we can define the standards that will unlock the full potential of CPO, enabling a vibrant ecosystem across the hyperscaler supply chain. We are already seeing strong support from industry leaders who recognize the urgency of this effort.”
This collaboration proposes to bring together AI system architects, advanced manufacturing partners, and networking leaders to align on a shared vision and roadmap for CPO. The goal is to develop open standards for components and systems and to establish a framework for interoperability testing and certification.
Analyst Perspective from Dell’Oro: “The rapid growth of AI workloads is creating immense pressure on the entire data center stack, with the interconnect fabric emerging as a major bottleneck,” said Sameh Boujelbene, Vice President, Market Research at Dell’Oro Group. “The industry has long recognized the critical role of Co-Packaged Optics in addressing power, performance, and density challenges. An open, collaborative initiative like the one proposed by Lightmatter is crucial to bridging the technological and supply chain gaps that have hindered widespread adoption, accelerating the path to next-generation AI infrastructure.”
This initiative is already generating significant interest and support among leading ecosystem vendors and experts who recognize the importance of open, interoperable CPO-enabled AI infrastructure:
Celestica: “Celestica is a long-standing participant in the OCP community, we support industry collaboration to advance open networking and hardware solutions,” said Randy Clark, VP, System Design Engineering, Celestica. “Industry efforts exploring areas such as open standards for co-packaged optics contribute to the ongoing work supporting the next generation of high-performance, open AI infrastructure.”
Corning Incorporated: “Co-Packaged Optics represents a fundamental shift in how optical connectivity is designed, manufactured, and deployed for large-scale AI systems,” said Benoit Fleury, Photonics Connectivity Solutions Commercial Director at Corning Optical Communications. “Successfully deploying CPO at scale will require tight integration of photonic materials, optical fibers, high-density connectivity, advanced packaging, and system-level design, all delivered with the performance and reliability that hyperscalers demand. Corning supports this OCP initiative to define open-reference architectures and specifications that enable broad interoperability and manufacturability across the ecosystem as it transitions from pluggable to integrated optics for next-generation AI infrastructures.”
Flex: “Delivering next-generation AI infrastructure requires a resilient, transparent supply chain and strong industry collaboration,” said Rob Campbell, President, Communications, Enterprise and Cloud at Flex. “As a longstanding contributor to the Open Compute Project, Flex is dedicated to advancing open standards that strengthen the data center ecosystem. Supporting this initiative builds on our close collaboration with customers on CPO, accelerating interoperability and certification frameworks that are essential to the widespread deployment of CPO-based systems globally.”
Foxconn Interconnect Technology, LTD: “As a leading provider of advanced IT infrastructure for GPU-accelerated computing, Foxconn understands the immense pressure on data center interconnects,” said Joseph Wang, CTO at Foxconn Interconnect Technology. “The lack of standardization in Co-Packaged Optics is a significant hurdle for widespread adoption. We believe that by joining this OCP initiative, we can help define a common framework that will accelerate the development and deployment of CPO solutions, enabling our customers to build more powerful and efficient AI systems.”
Hyve Solutions: “As exponential increases in AI training and inference workloads push up against existing interconnect limits, Co-Packaged Optics presents an opportunity for a more efficient and unified scale-up and scale-out network architecture,” said Winnie Lin, VP of Engineering at Hyve Solutions. “By contributing to this OCP reference architecture, we are helping to build an interoperable framework that enables hyperscalers to deploy more scalable, energy-efficient compute clusters with the performance and density required to drive the next wave of AI model innovation.”
Keysight: “As AI workloads push the boundaries of data center infrastructure, the industry requires aligned approaches to ensure seamless interoperability and performance at scale,” said Dr. Joachim Peerlings, Vice President and General Manager at Keysight’s Networks and Data Center Group. “Keysight is proud to support OCP’s AI Infrastructure Standards initiative, bringing our deep expertise in high-speed electrical and optical validation and emulation to this collaborative ecosystem. By establishing robust, open standards for next-generation interconnects, we are helping innovators mitigate risk and accelerate the path from CPO design to optically connected zettascale computing.”
Qualcomm Technologies: “As Qualcomm Technologies continues to scale its high-performance, power-efficient compute architecture from the edge into the hyperscale data center, the need for a collaborative and open interconnect framework has never been greater,” said Tony Chan Carusone, Technology Executive, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and Former CTO of Alphawave Semi, a Qualcomm company. “A shared reference architecture for Co-Packaged Optics is essential for fostering a diverse ecosystem that can deliver the interoperability and scalability required for the next generation of AI infrastructure.”
Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT): “QCT is committed to providing powerful and efficient open infrastructure for AI-enabled data centers,” said Mike Yang, President of QCT. “We are pleased to support this collaborative initiative to standardize Co-Packaged Optics, which will accelerate the development of more powerful, scalable, and efficient solutions for our customers and the broader AI community.”
Lightmatter invites other industry leaders and system architects to join the initiative and help shape the future of AI interconnects. We are prepared to contribute our expertise and actively engage with standards bodies–including the OIF, IEEE, and OCP–and with MSAs, including XPO and OIP, to accelerate the adoption of this transformative technology.
To learn more or to join this Open Collaboration for CPO-Enabled AI Systems project, please contact the team at ecosystem@lightmatter.co.
About Lightmatter
Lightmatter is leading a revolution in AI data center infrastructure, enabling the next giant leaps in human progress. The company’s groundbreaking Passage platform—the world’s first 3D-stacked silicon photonics engine—and Guide—the industry’s first VLSP light engine—connect thousands to millions of processors. Designed to eliminate critical data bottlenecks, Lightmatter’s technology delivers unprecedented bandwidth density and energy efficiency for the most advanced AI and high-performance computing workloads, fundamentally redefining the architecture of next-generation AI infrastructure. Visit www.lightmatter.co to learn more.
Source: Lightmatter
The post Lightmatter Proposes OCP Reference Architecture for Co-Packaged Optics in AI Systems appeared first on HPCwire.
Effective closure of strait of Hormuz also affecting Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, which have brought in crisis measures
Sri Lanka is introducing a shorter four-day working week to preserve its shrinking fuel and gas reserves, as the Middle East conflict continues to severely disrupt energy supplies in the region.
Countries across south Asia are facing crippling shortages of fuel and LPG gas, which are used for everything from home cooking to cremating bodies, as most supplies have been held up in the Gulf since the US and Israel began bombing Iran.
Continue reading...Costco is recalling a meatloaf and potato meal kit because one of its ingredients may be contaminated with salmonella.
The US has overwhelming military power. Yet the battle has moved to oil routes, alliances and domestic politics – where Tehran is testing western unity
Donald Trump would like you to know that he is winning the war with Iran. So comprehensively, in fact, that he now needs Nato’s help. The western alliance, he warns, will have a “very bad” future if its members refuse. Germany’s defence minister had a brisk reply: this is not our war. Meanwhile, tankers pile up outside the strait of Hormuz as Britain promises, in an understated way, to keep “looking” at its options. Mr Trump has found out that starting a war without a coalition of the willing is easier than finishing one with it.
Along with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, the US president started with an illegal attack on Iran in which the country’s supreme leader was assassinated. American forces have established overwhelming military superiority. By hitting military targets but sparing key oil facilities on Kharg Island, Mr Trump is sending a blunt signal: the US can wreck Iran’s economy. It just hasn’t decided to – yet.
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.
Continue reading...Lawyer for women who accused bank of facilitating their sexual abuse calls settlement ‘one more step’ to justice
Bank of America has settled a civil lawsuit brought by women who accused the bank of facilitating their sexual abuse by Jeffrey Epstein, court records showed on Monday.
Lawyers for the bank and the women told Manhattan-based US district judge Jed Rakoff in a 12 March telephone call that they had reached a “settlement in principle”, a court filing said. The terms of the settlement were not immediately clear.
Continue reading...Jets to receive sixth-round draft pick as part of deal
Patrick Mahomes recovering from torn knee ligaments
The New York Jets have reportedly agreed to a trade that will send quarterback Justin Fields to the Kansas City Chiefs as a backup for the injured Patrick Mahomes.
The Jets will receive a sixth-round draft pick in 2027 for Fields and pick up $7m of his guaranteed $10m salary for this upcoming season. The deal, first reported by ESPN, is pending a physical.
The 27-year-old signed a two-year, $40m deal – with $30m guaranteed – with New York last March and was the starter for most of the season until he was benched in favor of Tyrod Taylor in Week 12. He didn’t play another game for the Jets, ending the season on injured reserve with a knee injury.
Fields went 2-7 as the Jets’ starter with seven touchdowns and only one interception for 1,259 yards. He threw for fewer than 55 yards in four games, including a season-low 27 in a loss to Buffalo in Week 2.
Continue reading...Israeli defence minister says IDF instructed to destroy ‘terror infrastructure’ in southern villages
Israel’s announcement on Monday of a ground campaign in new areas of southern Lebanon is fuelling fears of a prolonged occupation among hundreds of thousands of displaced Lebanese.
Concerns intensified after Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, drawing comparisons with Gaza, warned displaced Lebanese forced from their homes would not be allowed to return until the safety of Israelis near the border was guaranteed, remarks that appeared to suggest the presence of Israeli troops could become prolonged.
Continue reading...CAMPBELL, Calif. and HYDERABAD, India, March 16, 2026 — OXMIQ Labs, the GPU architecture and AI technology company founded by Raja Koduri, has announced a strategic technology partnership with AM Intelligence Labs, a business division of AM Group, to provide data center and system infrastructure advisory for AM Intelligence Labs’ 2 GW AI Compute Capability by 2030 with initial 1 GW AI Compute Hub in Uttar Pradesh, India.
OXMIQ and AM Intelligence Labs are building one of the world’s largest renewable-powered AI compute platforms – 2 Gigawatts by 2030, Phase 1 online in Noida, India by 2027. Credit: OXMIQ.
AM Intelligence Labs is a strategic business division of AM Group, parent of Greenko, India’s largest green energy producer with 50 GW of renewable capacity across solar, wind, and hydro, backed by 100 GWh of intelligent energy storage and supplying approximately 2% of India’s total power. Energy is owned, operated, and carbon-free priced at 50–70% below conventional data center power costs.
India is a rapidly changing center of demand in the global AI economy. Driven by its massive developer ecosystem, digital economy, and rapidly expanding enterprise adoption of AI, the country is emerging as the world’s second-largest market for AI usage and token consumption.
AM Group has commenced development of its flagship AI infrastructure initiative, with Phase 1 of the Noida Compute Hub now in active execution. Bringing the initial compute capacity online by the end of 2027 will be a key milestone as the Group builds one of the world’s largest renewable-powered AI compute platforms. OXMIQ is working closely with AM Group to optimize system architecture, infrastructure design, and modular execution delivery to ensure the platform is deployed at speed while achieving best-in-class efficiency and scale.
Under the partnership, OXMIQ will serve as the architecture and engineering partner for the compute platform, working with AM Intelligence Labs to design the systems architecture, hardware roadmap, and supply chain strategy that will underpin the facility. OXMIQ brings deep expertise spanning the entire compute stack, from transistor-level GPU architecture and advanced packaging through rack-scale systems, high-performance interconnects, and the orchestration software required to operate AI workloads at massive scale. Together, the partnership delivers end-to-end optimization from photons to outcomes, ultimately making zettascale economics accessible to everyone.
AM Group is developing the 1 GW AI High Performance Compute Hub in Noida as a fully vertically integrated platform spanning owned carbon-free power generation, advanced data center infrastructure, high-performance accelerators, a complete software stack, applications, and flexible consumption models ranging from AI Pods-as-a-Service to Tokens-as-a-Service.
OXMIQ’s deep expertise across the compute stack enables the platform to be architected for end-to-end optimization from photons to tokens. Every layer, from renewable energy generation through data center architecture, liquid cooling, interconnect topology, accelerator selection, and workload orchestration, will be engineered as a unified system. This integrated approach unlocks industry-leading electrons-to-tokens economics, delivering dramatically lower-cost AI compute at gigawatt scale.
“AM Intelligence Labs is the ideal partner for OXMIQ,” commented Raja Koduri, Founder and CEO, OXMIQ Labs. “They have solved the hardest constraint in large-scale AI infrastructure: access to reliable, carbon-free power at global scale. Our team has spent decades building silicon, systems, and software that power the world’s most advanced computing platforms. Bringing that expertise into AM Intelligence Labs’ infrastructure from the first architectural decisions means every rack, every interconnect, every storage and cooling system is designed around the workloads and economics required for the AI era.”
“OXMIQ gives AM Intelligence Labs access to some of the deepest hardware and systems expertise in the industry.
said Anil Chalamalasetty, Group Chairman, AM Group. “Their team’s experience across leading Silicon Valley companies is exactly what we need to architect infrastructure that can compete globally. Together we are laying the foundation for AM Intelligence Labs to become a full-stack AI compute platform.”
About OXMIQ Labs
OXMIQ Labs, headquartered in Campbell, California, is a GPU architecture and AI technology company founded by Raja Koduri, whose career spans leadership at Apple, AMD, Intel, and ATI Technologies. OXMIQ delivers licensable chiplet-based AI hardware and software solutions built for the age of inference. OxCapsule and OxPython deliver immediate optimization across heterogeneous hardware, while OxCore and OxQuilt provide the chiplet-native roadmap to zettascale efficiency. For more information, visit www.oxmiq.ai.
Source: OXMIQ Labs
The post OXMIQ Labs and AM Intelligence Labs Collaborate on Renewable-Powered AI Compute Platform appeared first on HPCwire.
Both account types come with elevated interest rates and respectable returns for savers who act now.
President says PM should be more supportive over strait of Hormuz
Keir Starmer is speaking at his press conference.
The war is entering its third week, he says.
First, we will protect our people in the region.
Second, while taking the necessary action to defend ourselves and our allies, we will not be drawn into the wider war.
Moments like this also tell you about leadership … Now, there are others who would have made a different decision two weeks ago.
They would have rushed the UK headlong into this war without the full picture of what they were sending our forces into and without a plan to get us out.
It is no surprise that our closest and most important ally is so disappointed. The Labour government’s response to the crisis in Iran has been shameful.
We should have been supporting our allies, not making it harder for them. Even now Starmer is still trying to sit on the fence, which is a complete failure of leadership.
Continue reading...The PM’s natural instinct to stay out of the Iran war has been a good one, but he is left speaking in code about US relations
It was a message that could just as easily have been given via a ministerial statement in the Commons. But Keir Starmer needs every break he can get at the moment and he wasn’t going to pass up the chance to look like a world leader at a press conference in Downing Street. The advantages were obvious. No need to have to listen to Kemi Badenoch drone on for five minutes with her revisionist fantasies in reply. Avoid the danger of loads of backbench MPs observing that President Trump is a deranged halfwit who doesn’t know what he’s doing.
But best of all a press conference was ideal because the American war with Iran is one of the few occasions when the prime minister’s judgment has been right all along. Just over two weeks in and it’s increasingly looking like the The Donald is only in the war for its entertainment value. Just last weekend, he was saying he might continue bombing Kharg Island for fun. For the lols and social media hits. There has never been a plan or a goal in mind. Not so long ago he was saying the Brits were late to the party and he didn’t need them anyway. Now he is begging for help in keeping the strait of Hormuz open.
Continue reading...SAN JOSE, Calif., March 16, 2026 — Global AI, an NVIDIA Cloud Partner and American provider of sovereign AI infrastructure, today announced that it has completed its deployment of NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems at its Endicott facility in New York to run the largest NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 cluster in the state. The company also announced that it plans to deploy the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform across its U.S. data center footprint.
The continued capacity expansion of the Endicott facility in New York, including the planned NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 deployment, marks Global AI’s next step in building secure, high-density sovereign AI infrastructure for model training, large-scale inference, and sovereign-cloud integration within completely secure ecosystems. Building on Global AI’s access to the latest GPU technologies, including NVIDIA GB300 NVL72, the Vera Rubin deployment underscores the company’s ability to deliver bleeding-edge, high-performance AI compute.
Global AI is actively deploying 7000 GB300s. The deployment supports Global AI’s compute capacity growth roadmap, with 16 megawatts (MW) of initial critical IT load as the company ramps up to 100 MW throughout 2026.
“These deployments underscore Global AI’s compute-first strategy and disciplined execution,” Michael Jeter, Director and Head of World Wide Sales at Global AI. “With our success in New York and our upcoming Vera Rubin rollout, we are extending our sovereign infrastructure platform to support clients through the next frontier of reasoning-intensive workloads—while maintaining the operational discipline, security posture, and data-sovereignty controls our customers require.”
He added, “In an era where public LLMs risk diluting differentiation, Global AI provides the sovereign infrastructure to keep proprietary intelligence under enterprise control—ensuring your competitive edge doesn’t become the market’s baseline.”
“The NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform is engineered with extreme co-design across new six chips, to power agentic AI and reasoning-intensive workloads within a secure, sovereign infrastructure,” said Dave Salvator, Director of Accelerated Computing Products at NVIDIA. “Global AI’s deployment of NVIDIA Blackwell, and their commitment to the Vera Rubin platform, clearly demonstrates their focus on delivering performant, sovereign AI at scale.”
Built for Rack-Scale AI: Compute First, Then End-To-End Integration
Global AI’s deployment program focuses on the seamless integration of compute, networking, storage, and liquid cooling to ensure every subsystem is engineered for sustained high utilization. The company works with leading technology infrastructure providers, Supermicro (SMC), whose high-performance server platforms underpin the rack-scale architecture supporting Global AI’s NVIDIA-powered deployments.
This approach centers on high-density performance, moving from the company’s current NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 deployment in New York toward a future roadmap that incorporates NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 racks. Once deployed, these Vera Rubin-based systems will provide the core acceleration for the next generation of training and inference workloads.
The NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform represents a step change in how large-scale AI systems are designed and operated. It advances rack-scale AI by integrating CPUs, GPUs, and high-bandwidth interconnect in a single system. This architecture supports higher utilization, lower latency, and more predictable performance for large-scale AI workloads — helping customers improve performance per watt, reduce orchestration complexity, and scale efficiently without stitching together disjointed systems.
About Global AI
Global AI is a U.S.-based, vertically integrated sovereign AI infrastructure company and the world’s first sovereign AI hyperscaler, designing, building, powering, and operating single-tenant, air-gapped AI data centers that enable nations and enterprises to develop and deploy artificial intelligence within their own jurisdiction. Global AI’s fully integrated model spans land, energy, construction, advanced liquid cooling, and GPU-dense compute, ensuring complete physical and operational separation across the entire stack. With infrastructure deployments across the United States, Global AI is executing a disciplined expansion strategy toward 1 gigawatt of critical capacity by the end of 2029—delivering secure, compliant, and sovereign AI infrastructure at national scale.
Source: Global AI
The post Global AI Deploys NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 Cluster in New York, Plans Vera Rubin Rollout Across US Sites appeared first on HPCwire.
When comparing two of the big US mobile carriers, we look at price, reach, perks and more to find the best one.
Carlson in video claims the CIA is preparing a ‘crime report’ against him and alleges US agencies have read his texts
Tucker Carlson, the conservative US political commentator, has publicly expressed fear that he may be facing criminal charges for “acting as an agent of a foreign power” by communicating with people in Iran.
The former CNN and Fox News host, who has established an alternative media career as online talking head and interviewer, claimed in a video posted on X that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was preparing “a crime report” for the Trump administration’s justice department.
Continue reading...PwC called in as administrators after company runs out of cash, leaving it unable to pay landlords and creditors
National Car Parks, the UK’s biggest car park operator, has fallen into administration, putting nearly 700 jobs at risk.
NCP’s board of directors called in PwC as administrators after it ran out of cash, leaving it unable to pay its landlords and creditors, with significant rent payments due at the end of March.
Continue reading...MIGDAL HAEMEK, Israel, and PALO ALTO, Calif., March 16, 2026 – Tower Semiconductor and Oriole Networks today announced their collaboration to deliver ultra-low, deterministic-latency networking for scale-up and scale-out AI architectures, built on Tower’s mature silicon photonics platform.
As AI models continue to scale, requiring increasingly large clusters of processors, achieving high-radix networks with massive bandwidth and low latency becomes increasingly challenging. Leveraging Tower’s advanced silicon photonics platform, Oriole’s edge-switching architecture enables nanosecond optical circuit switching and a passive network core designed to deliver low and predictable tail latency with improved resiliency. Based on market reports by Dell’Oro and LightCounting, the AI Networking market is expected to surpass $80B by 2030.
Tower Semiconductor’s silicon photonics platform enables the integration of lasers, optical amplification, switching, high-speed modulation, and high-speed detection on a single platform, supporting Oriole’s nanosecond optical circuit switching with fast tunability and high bandwidth for AI networking.
“We are excited to expand our silicon photonics applications beyond traditional data center transceivers and into the network fabric itself,” said Dr. Ed Preisler, General Manager of RF Business Unit at Tower Semiconductor. “Our joint work with Oriole is a key step toward bringing AI back-end networking to market that can scale clusters and break through today’s latency wall.”
The collaboration combines Oriole’s networking technology with Tower’s silicon photonics manufacturing platform to commercialize nanosecond optical circuit switching as a foundational building block of Oriole’s network architecture.
“The exponential growth of AI is forcing the industry to rethink traditional electrical, packet-switched network infrastructure,” said James Regan, CEO of Oriole. “Together with Tower Semiconductor, we’re developing nanosecond optical circuit switching technology designed to deliver a scalable AI fabric where scale-up and scale-out converge into a single, homogeneous, synchronous network. As models grow, legacy architectures hit a hard latency wall – while Oriole’s low, deterministic latency simply steps over it.”
Tower Semiconductor’s high-volume silicon photonics platform is optimized for high-speed optical interconnects and optical circuit switching, making Tower an ideal foundry partner for companies building next-generation AI infrastructure and data center networking.
Both companies will be attending the upcoming OFC 2026 Conference in Los Angeles, March 17–19, with representatives available for meetings during the event.
To learn more about Tower Semiconductor’s advanced silicon photonics (SiPho) platform and RF & HPA technology offerings, visit booth #2221. Additional information is also available on the Company’s website: here.
For more information about Oriole Networks, visit booth #5344 or visit the company’s website.
About Tower Semiconductor
Tower Semiconductor Ltd. (NASDAQ/TASE: TSEM), the leading foundry of high-value analog semiconductor solutions, provides technology, development, and process platforms for its customers in growing markets such as consumer, industrial, automotive, mobile, infrastructure, medical and aerospace and defense. Tower Semiconductor focuses on creating a positive and sustainable impact on the world through long-term partnerships and its advanced and innovative analog technology offering, comprised of a broad range of customizable process platforms such as SiPho, SiGe, BiCMOS, mixed-signal/CMOS, RF CMOS, CMOS image sensor, non-imaging sensors, displays, integrated power management (BCD and 700V), and MEMS. Tower Semiconductor also provides world-class design enablement for a quick and accurate design cycle as well as process transfer services including development, transfer, and optimization, to IDMs and fabless companies. To provide multi-fab sourcing and extended capacity for its customers, Tower Semiconductor currently owns one operating facility in Israel (200mm), two in the U.S. (200mm), and two in Japan (200mm and 300mm) which it owns through its 51% holdings in TPSCo and shares a 300mm facility in Agrate, Italy with STMicroelectronics.
Source: Tower Semiconductor
The post Tower Semiconductor and Oriole Collaborate on Silicon Photonics Platform for AI Optical Switching appeared first on HPCwire.
AI infrastructure company Nebius signed a deal to provide up to $27 billion in AI computing capacity to Meta over the next five years, including a guaranteed $12 billion purchase by 2027. Reuters reports: Under the agreement, Meta will also buy an additional $15 billion worth of capacity planned by Nebius over the coming five years if it is not sold to other customers, giving the contract a total value of up to $27 billion, Nebius said. The deal is the latest example of U.S. tech giants' efforts to supplement their own AI data-centre build-outs by locking in scarce GPU and power capacity from "neocloud" providers like Nebius. Nebius CEO Arkady Volozh said the latest Meta deal would help "accelerate the build-out and growth of our core AI cloud business." Further reading: Data Centers Overtake Offices In US Construction-Spending Shift
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Candidates look for deals with rivals to boost chances as major seats including Paris, Marseille and Lyon appear tight
Political parties in France are hastily attempting to negotiate strategic alliances before the final round of local elections this weekend, after a strong showing by the far right and the radical left.
This Sunday’s final-round vote for mayors and local councillors in major cities including Marseille, Lyon and Paris is expected to be close.
Continue reading...Head of world’s energy watchdog says it will take time for markets to recover from ongoing crisis in strait of Hormuz
The world’s energy watchdog will consider releasing further emergency crude stocks into the global market to cool rising oil prices after warning that it will take time for markets to recover from the ongoing crisis in the strait of Hormuz.
Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, said its members continued to hold large reserves of emergency oil stocks even after agreeing to the biggest release of government crude in the history of the market, meaning more emergency oil reserves could still be released “as and if needed”.
Continue reading...Watch One Battle After Another and more can't-miss movies.
What’s the worst thing that could happen to a Onewheel?
And has it happened to you? Please tell the story!
In remarks ahead of a meeting with the Kennedy Center board of trustees, Mr. Trump provided an update on the ongoing conflict with Iran.
Five years after the deadly Atlanta spa shootings sparked protests and policy changes, Stop Asian Hate is at a crossroads in Trump’s second term
Five years ago, a gunman went on a shooting rampage at three Atlanta-area spas, killing eight people, six of whom were Asian women. The brazen attacks on 16 March 2021 sent shock waves through Asian communities already under siege from a surge in violence during the pandemic.
The shooting – following a spate of attacks targeting Asian seniors – sparked protests, mutual aid organizing and sweeping policy changes. For a moment, Stop Asian Hate looked poised to become the social justice movement of the 2020s.
Continue reading...President Trump said White House chief of staff Susie Wiles will "continue doing the job she loves" even while undergoing treatment for early stage breast cancer.
March 16, 2026 — The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) has signed a contract with HPE to deploy a new AI-optimized supercomputer for the AI Factory HammerHAI, located in Germany.
Once installed at the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), the system will provide powerful new capabilities for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science, strengthening European science, industry, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and startups.
The new HammerHAI supercomputer will be manufactured and installed by HPE, based on the liquid-cooled NVIDIA GB200 NVL4 architecture. Combining NVIDIA Grace CPUs with NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and scaled with NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networking, the system will offer more than 15 Exaflops of peak AI inference performance. It will integrate the VAST Data DASE storage architecture, which provides a unified data platform for AI and HPC workloads, as well as a partition based on AI-optimized inference engines and hardware accelerators from Netherlands-based Axelera AI. The HPE Morpheus Enterprise software will be used as a unified AI control plane, enabling automated provisioning, governance, and workload lifecycle management.
This configuration will make the HammerHAI supercomputer a powerful tool for handling medium- to large-scale AI workloads for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It will incorporate a cloud-native software stack familiar to the AI community, making it straightforward to migrate or scale applications from local systems or commercial cloud environments. The system will be configured to support research and technology development in disciplines prioritized with the HammerHAI consortium, with an emphasis on engineering, manufacturing, automotive and mobility.
Delivery of the HammerHAI supercomputer is scheduled for the second quarter of 2026 and it is expected to go into operation in the second half of 2026.
AI Infrastructure for European Digital Sovereignty
The HammerHAI supercomputer is among the first new AI-optimized systems to be procured within the European Union (EU)’s AI Factories initiative, and marks a further step in the EuroHPC JU’s AI strategy. It will offer a high-performance AI platform capable of supporting the types of applications typically handled by commercial cloud AI services, while being operated in Germany and in accordance with EU data security regulations. Access to this publicly funded resource will be free of charge to eligible European system users.
Anders Jensen, EuroHPC JU Executive Director, stated: “Today’s signature marks a new step toward a vibrant European AI ecosystem. The HammerHAI supercomputer will empower European startups and industry to innovate at scale while reinforcing Europe’s digital sovereignty and technological leadership.”
New AI-Optimized Supercomputer for a Growing HammerHAI Service Portfolio
The AI Factory HammerHAI opened in April 2025 and has already begun offering AI computing and services to European startups and SMEs on existing infrastructure. This includes providing:
Dr. Bastian Koller, Managing Director of HLRS and lead coordinator of HammerHAI, anticipates that the announcement of the new supercomputer will quickly augment and increase these activities:
“The contract signing for this new, AI-optimised system marks a new chapter in HammerHAI’s development. We invite future users of the system to begin preparing their datasets, algorithms, and workflows now. This will make it possible to begin taking advantage of the system’s powerful new capabilities as soon as it becomes available.”
Companies, startups, and researchers can contact HammerHAI here to begin early onboarding of applications.
While primarily intended for startups and SMEs, the new HammerHAI computing system will also be used to develop new kinds of AI, machine learning, and data science applications within the scientific research community. The EuroHPC JU and HammerHAI (based on a national Governance model) will jointly allocate access to computing resources, in proportion to their respective investments.
More from HPCwire
Source: EuroHPC JU
The post EuroHPC Signs Contract with HPE to Deploy AI Supercomputer HammerHAI appeared first on HPCwire.
Commentary: I hated the camera control button on my iPhone, so I used these settings to make it entirely decorative.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Spending on data center projects in the U.S. has exploded, surpassing offices for the first time at the end of last year. It's a trend Matt Kunz saw early on when Meta built a computing hub outside Columbus, Ohio. Other tech companies soon swarmed into the area, drawn by its stable economy, university talent pipeline and ample power, water and land, said Kunz, vice president and general manager at Turner Construction Co., the firm that led Meta's build-out. Since Meta broke ground in 2017, it's expanded its data center campus, and Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Microsoft Corp. made plans to join it nearby. "When one shows up, almost all the other ones tend to follow," Kunz said. For Turner, a construction giant responsible for supertall office skyscrapers, sports stadiums and cultural venues around the globe, data centers are commanding more of its bandwidth. The company completed $9.4 billion of the projects last year, more than five times its 2020 total. Last month, Turner announced it was chosen as one of the contractors on a $10 billion data center for Meta in Indiana. Tech companies' needs for AI processing facilities have made data centers the latest darling of the real estate industry. The properties are figuring heavily into portfolios of major investors such as Blackstone, Brookfield Asset Management and KKR, on a bet that long-term demand for computing power will continue to grow. At the same time, office development has slowed as cities across the U.S. contend with vacancies that have piled up since the Covid lockdowns. Construction spending for data centers has climbed steadily in recent years, while outlays for general office projects headed downward, U.S. Census data show. The two crossed paths in December, with roughly $3.57 billion spent on data centers that month, compared with $3.49 billion for offices, according to preliminary estimates. The shift is likely to continue and "may perpetuate itself even further as AI is utilized for automating day-to-day jobs," said Andy Cvengros, co-lead of U.S. data center markets for the brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. "It's going to directly impact the amount of office space people need." According to Christopher McFadden, senior vice president at Turner, more than a third of the company's backlog is now tied to data centers. "We're going to be building these at this scale for years to come," McFadden said. "There's a lot of wind in the sail."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Hyundai's announcement came after a child died in an incident involving a Palisade vehicle, which the car maker said is still under investigation.
Three teenage plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed Monday accuse xAI of distributing, possessing and producing with intent to distribute child pornography.
With AirPods Max 2 on the way, you may be able to eke out some more life from your original AirPods Max if they're unresponsive.
Plus, take almost half off the 55-inch Insignia F50 Fire TV and $250 off the Roborock QV 35A robo vac.
Swing Left aims to reconnect with voters and overhaul campaigning with ‘deep canvassing’ ahead of midterms
Pope Leo came top with 42%. Donald Trump was just behind with 41%. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) scored 38% and TV host Stephen Colbert 35%. Trailing behind all of them was the Democratic party, viewed positively by just 30% of voters in a recent NBC News poll. About 52% view the Democrats negatively.
Among the reasons for the distrust, argues Swing Left, a national grassroots organisation, is a broken voter contact model in which Democrats are too transactional, too last minute and too dependent on outdated technology. It is aiming to fix the problem ahead of November’s midterm elections.
Continue reading...A Ring camera video that showed a 78-year-old DoorDash driver making a delivery led to strangers donating nearly $1 million to him and his wife.
Travelers continue to face long lines at airports across the U.S. due to the partial government shutdown affecting TSA agents.
Small adjustments, like maintaining a steady speed while driving, can help maximize fuel efficiency, experts say.
As Tehran continued strikes on targets across the Gulf region, Israel said it would hit Iran for “as long as needed” and expanded ground operations in Lebanon.
With mortgage rates ticking up once again, homebuyers should consider making these three moves right now.
A German court ruled that TCL misled consumers by marketing certain TVs as "QLED" when they "do not deliver the color reproduction expected from QLED TVs." It has ordered the company to stop advertising or selling those models in Germany. TechRadar reports: The case was filed by Samsung, which claimed that TCL was running deceptive advertising, and more court cases on the same topic are coming in other countries, including the US. The lawsuits all make the same claim: that what TCL calls a QLED isn't a QLED as it's commonly understood, and that consumers are being mis-sold TVs as a result. The court found that TCL's quantum dot TVs, such as the QLED870 series available in Germany, didn't deliver the characteristics of a quantum dot LED, and that consumers were being misled as a result. The tests were commissioned by Seoul chemicals company Hansol Chemical (which, it's worth noting, works with Samsung, a key TCL rival, and which heavily promoted the results of these tests alongside launching the court case) and carried out by Geneva's SGS and the UK's Intertek. According to ET News (via Google Translate), "no indium (In) or cadmium (Cd) was detected in three TCL QD TV models. Indium and cadmium are essential materials that cannot be omitted for QD implementation... if neither is present, QD technology cannot be said to have been applied." You can see the test results here. TCL disputed the findings -- "The QD content may vary depending on the supplier, but it definitely contains cadmium," it responded -- and published its own tests, including a test by SGS, the same firm that conducted tests for Hansol. The results contradicted Hansol Chemical's tests, but those tests used a different methodology: where TCL's tests focused on TCL's quantum dot films, Hansol's commissioned tests were on finished TCL TVs. [...] Hansol Chemical has filed a complaint against TCL with the US Federal Trade Commission, alleging false advertising, and TCL is also facing class action lawsuits in several US states making the same claim. TCL isn't alone here: Hisense has also been targeted in the US.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Coast guard rescuers pulled all 21 people out of the water, but a 17-year-old student and the captain of one of the boats were later pronounced dead.
One analyst predicting that prices at the pump might hit $3.85 per gallon on Monday as war enters third week
US oil prices could see another day of wild fluctuation as the US-Israel campaign against Iran extends into a third week, with one analyst predicting that prices at the pump might hit $3.85 per gallon on Monday.
Petroleum prices have spiraled upward as the broadening conflict has imperiled oil and gas production infrastructure in the region. On Friday, the US conducted strikes on Kharg Island, an essential oil processing hub in Iran. Tehran, meanwhile, continues to block ships from passing through the strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the international oil supply typically passes through.
Continue reading...Having your wages garnished can cause big issues, but you may have more options to fight back than you think.
By imposing massive costs on the global economy, the Iranian government hopes to cause the US to back down
The US and Israeli decision to attack Iran has sent economic shockwaves around the world. About 20% of global oil supplies have been effectively blocked from transiting the strait of Hormuz since Iran began attacking ships, resulting in a huge jump in oil prices. Militarily, while the United States has the firepower to significantly reduce Iran’s capacity to strike ships in the strait, it is unlikely to be able to eliminate the threat entirely.
Reopening the strait, therefore, is not only a question of military capabilities but of diplomacy, and to negotiate it is necessary to understand what each party to the conflict is trying to achieve.
Continue reading...Agrichemical group will open a research centre in Berkshire, in a move hailed by UK government as ‘clear’ vote of confidence
Syngenta is to build a new £100m research centre for agricultural bioscience, a move hailed by the government as a vote of confidence in the UK’s science base.
The Chinese-owned company, one of the biggest agrichemical groups in the world, will open the centre at its Jealott’s Hill site in Berkshire to host hundreds of scientists.
Continue reading...Hummus and pet grooming also join list of goods and services used to help judge the impact of rising prices
The UK’s increasing sobriety will be recognised from next month in the basket of goods used to calculate inflation after alcohol-free beer was added to a list by the Office for National Statistics totalling 760 items.
Hummus and pet grooming were also included in the list of goods and services used to help judge the impact of rising prices on the cost of living.
Continue reading...Pat McFadden unveils £1bn youth employment scheme and appeals to backbenchers who rebelled last year
Labour MPs have no reason to oppose a fresh government attempt to overhaul the welfare system, the work and pensions secretary has said as he unveiled a £1bn youth employment scheme.
The announcement by Pat McFadden – who said the public wanted the system to promote work and “value for money” – is seen as a prelude to a renewed bid to reform the welfare system after plans by his predecessor, Liz Kendall, were blocked by a Labour backbench rebellion last year.
Continue reading...I have a Onewheel+ XR Hardware 4208 Firmware Gemini 4134. I know it doesn't have heptic buzz and I am good with that. (I may want to upgrade someday) Does this board have pushback? I have written it down to 1% for a battery test with no pushback although I was going very very slow and gentle. I am not interested in pushing the speed until I get or find out the hard way if my board has pushback pushback or not.
A German tourist filed a lawsuit claiming he felt unpleasant symptoms after eating tacos with salsa at Los Tacos No 1
A German tourist’s attempt to pursue $100,000 in damages from a New York City taqueria whose salsa he found to be too spicy has failed after a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit.
In a complaint filed in October 2024, German national Faycal Manz said he was visiting New York City two months earlier when he stopped at the Times Square location of Los Tacos No 1.
Continue reading...An animated reboot of Firefly is in early development at 20th Television Animation with Nathan Fillion involved. The project has Joss Whedon's blessing and will be run by writers Tara Butters and Marc Guggenheim, with early concept art already underway. According to the Hollywood Reporter, "The series would be set in the timeline between the original, 11-episode TV run in 2002 and the 2005 feature film continuation, Serenity." You can watch Fillion announce the Firefly reboot on Instagram. When the first episode of the original series premiered in late 2002, Slashdot reader fm6 wrote: "Firefly, Joss Whedon's 'anti-Trek drama' premieres tonight, on Fox, 8 E/P. I normally despise hypespeak, but this time it's the only language that fits: this is groundbreaking, mind-boggling, totally original. I've seen a bootleg of the pilot (which, unfortunately, the network is holding back) and I promise you this is the most geek-friendly SF you've seen in a long time. Yes, more so than Star Trek and B5, and way past Star Wars. I've never seen the future so skillfully, realistically, and lovingly portrayed. Here is the Official Site and a leading fan site." "This is the single new show this season I have added a season pass for to the old Tivo," CmdrTaco said at the time. "But I'll probably watch it live. This looks like it could be as good as we hope."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Money market accounts still offer good rates and other perks right now, but are they the top option to consider?
James Timpson believes many women in prison shouldn’t be there – and a new board aims to bring about change
Pat had been in trouble with the police before, when she was 16 and had been spat out of the care system with no qualifications, no housing and no support. Nearly 50 years later, she heard a knock on the door again.
There had been a fire in the estate where she lived, and another resident said she had seen Pat start it. “I was in the police station for nearly two days before I got to the magistrates court,” she said, worrying one finger over the top of her hand. “The magistrate said he was sending it to the crown court, and sending me to prison, basically.”
Continue reading...Gas prices have jumped almost 79 cents per gallon from a month ago, raising fresh inflation concerns.
Milan-based bank plans to up its near-30% stake in German lender to trigger formal talks despite strong opposition from Berlin
Two European banking powerhouses have become embroiled in a €35bn (£30bn) takeover battle after Italy’s UniCredit stepped up its long-running pursuit of German lender Commerzbank, despite strong opposition from the German government.
UniCredit first took a stake of 9% in Commerzbank in September 2024 and has since built up its holding to just under 30%. It said on Monday it was pushing to increase that holding further and push the rival lender into formal merger talks.
Continue reading...Apple's premium over-ear headphones get their first update since 2020. Available for preorder on March 25, they ship in early April for $549.
President made contradictory comment to reporters on Air Force One after pleading with allies to help US secure strait of Hormuz
Donald Trump drew a backlash on Sunday for suggesting US efforts to protect the strait of Hormuz were unnecessary – and that “maybe we shouldn’t even be there at all” because his country has plenty of oil of its own.
The president made the contradictory comment to reporters on Air Force One after pleading with European and Nato allies to enter the war against Iran to help the US secure the strait amid the largest oil supply disruption in history.
Continue reading...Hey team, I'm looking for a bit of solidarity and a bit of grounding here, because I'm just beyond frustrated with my GT-S and Future Motion's handling of multiple failed attempts to repair it under warranty (and one replaced BMS outside of their miserable 6-month warranty).
I feel like my story is best told in timeline form, so here we go:
November 27, 2023 - I ordered a Onewheel GT S-Series from onewheel.com for $3,215.50.
December 1, 2023 - Delivered
April 29, 2024 - Submitted trouble ticket 900777 after repeated issues with the board nosediving mid-ride, causing personal injury from multiple crashes. After exchanging emails, I was advised the board health was good, but I could pay $80 to ship the board back to California for additional troubleshooting. Being new to the sport and not completely convinced that I wasn't somehow at fault for the crashes, I declined.
August 16, 2024 - After several months of experience, I submitted trouble ticket 920918 after my board died in the middle of a ride again, very obviously and confidently without any failure on my part.
August 27, 2024 - After 6 days in shipping, the board is received at Future Motion, repaired, and shipped back to me.
September 4, 2024 - After 8 more days in shipping, the board is delivered to me.
June 23, 2025 - I submitted trouble ticket 971616 because my board was completely dead and would not power on.
July 2, 2025 - After 7 days in shipping they replaced my Controller Module under warranty, and replaced a loose gasket inside the motor "as a courtesy."
I was also advised that my Battery Module was bad, but would not be covered under warranty, and I was encouraged to pay for a replacement tire because my original was "significantly out of round" and unsafe to ride. The total bill was $905.00.
July 10, 2025 - After 7 days in shipping, the board is returned to me. I submitted another trouble ticket 975392 four days later to report that the replacement tire was significantly worse - my original tire never had a wobble despite their recommendation to buy a replacement. I share a video showing the tire shake, and their response was that no tire is perfectly round from the factory, and to "break it in" for 100 miles.
August 5, 2025 - I submitted trouble ticket 979489 because my board flashed a battery error message, and reiterated my complaint about the bad tire. I was advised the tire was "within spec," and given troubleshooting steps for the battery. I did not get the battery error again for a few weeks.
September 5, 2025 - I contacted support again after receiving the battery error, and I was asked what charger I was using. I have only ever used the OEM charger that came with the board.
October 9, 2025 - After 7 days in shipping, the board is received for repairs and shipped back to me the same day.
October 15, 2025 - Board is delivered to me after 6 days in shipping.
November 8, 2025 - I submitted ticket 994419 asking for a full refund of my original purchase price ($3,215.50), plus the price of the repair that I was charged ($905), which has continued to be an issue multiple times.
December 23, 2025 - After going back and forth for several days with Tyler P, who identified himself as one of the managers and repeatedly denied my request to speak with anyone else with any authority, I received RMA2551BB93 to send it in "one last time" with the following notes:
"Needs juice" error periodically, well above 50% remaining battery. Random click sound of motor disengagement at speeds well above 2mph (I've had it happen while riding straight at 5-10mph). Completely random, but on average happens at least once or twice every ~10 miles. Sometimes it will happen multiple times within 3 miles. Other times it won't happen for several miles. Usually the motor will turn back on and I will continue the ride, but I have had it nosedive before multiple times.
January 20, 2026 - Board was received for service, and as of March 16th, I have received no further contact from Future Motion.
I just don't know what to do. I contacted my Attorney General, but after repeated attempts to contact the manufacturer, they closed my case with zero response from Future Motion. Future Motion was not legally obligated to respond to the Attorney General, so it feels like they simply don't care.
I have never sought any restitution for bodily harm or personal injury due to the numerous failures of my faulty Onewheel. I simply wanted a working board after multiple failed attempts to fix what I purchased. At this point I'm nearly a thousand bucks over my original purchase, I have NO board to ride, and based on my experience thus far, it honestly feels like they're just holding it for ransom out of spite.
I don't know what else to do, and I'm just hoping that if I can't find any help here, then maybe at least my story will help somebody else in their own journey.
DELFT, Netherlands and BOSTON, March 16, 2026 — Today, Qblox and Riverlane announced advancement of their strategic collaboration to bring real-time quantum error correction to the global quantum computing market. The collaboration pairs Riverlane’s QEC technology, utilizing ultra-fast decoders capable of correcting millions of errors per second, with Qblox’s high-performance control hardware, creating a platform for reliable, error-corrected quantum systems.
This collaboration addresses the challenge that inherently error-prone qubits create for commercial utility. Critically, it removes one of the industry’s most persistent speed bottlenecks: the ability to decode and respond to quantum errors fast enough to prevent error accumulation. By combining both companies’ complementary technologies, Riverlane and Qblox offer a single, integrated solution to tomorrow’s fault-tolerant systems without the complexity of sourcing and integrating components independently.
The deployment brings together Qblox’s high-fidelity,ultra-low-latency and high-throughput control hardware required for real-time error correction with Riverlane’s Deltaflow , now directly integrated with Qblox’s control architecture to enable sub-microsecond feedback between detection and correction. This solution jointly pushes capacity to 300 physical qubits and 5 logical qubits, enabling up to 50,000 QuOps. Supported by Riverlane’s Deltakit open-source SDK for teams building error-corrected workflows, the full stack represents a production-ready foundation for fault-tolerant quantum computing at scale. By offloading decoding to a specialized high-performance layer, the architecture frees primary system resources to focus on increasing qubit counts without sacrificing computational fidelity, creating a scalable foundation for long-term growth.
“Real-time quantum error correction is fundamental to scaling quantum computing to commercially useful systems. The integration of Riverlane’s Deltaflow technology into our commercial quantum data centre marked an important milestone on that journey.” said Dr. Peter Leek, CSO and founder of Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC). ” Through our collaborations with partners such as Riverlane and Qblox, we are demonstrating how tightly integrated control and error-correction technologies can accelerate the path toward reliable, commercially viable quantum computers.”
“By directly integrating Deltaflow 2 into the Qblox control stack, we have moved beyond theory and removed a critical latency barrier to scalable error correction,” said Niels Bultink, CEO of Qblox. “Real-time quantum error correction is the defining challenge of our era, and this is exactly the kind of collaboration that will define the next phase of quantum innovation.”
“Real-time quantum error correction is the cornerstone of making quantum computers truly useful, and this collaboration is proof that we’re no longer just talking about it,” said Steve Brierley, CEO and Founder of Riverlane. “Qblox’s control hardware gives us the ultra-low-latency foundation Deltaflow 2 needs to deliver real error correction across real hardware.”
To learn more about this solution, join Qblox, Riverlane, and other industry leaders for “Building Quantum Together: Quantum Error Correction” at the APS Global Physics Summit 2026 in Denver on Tuesday, March 17. Taking place from 3:10 to 3:30 p.m. MDT at the Qblox booth (#810), the discussion will feature Francesco Battistel, Roadmap Leader at Qblox, Laura Caune, Senior Quantum Scientist at Riverlane, and Linsey Rodenbach, Developer Relations Manager, Quantum Computing at NVIDIA.
About Qblox
Qblox is accelerating the quantum revolution as the global leader in scalable quantum control. The company provides the essential control engine that empowers researchers and engineers to build high-performance, robust, and scalable systems. Trusted by industrial and academic leaders worldwide, Qblox sets the standard for quantum control and delivers the backbone for a new era of computing.
About Riverlane
Riverlane is the world leader in quantum error correction (QEC), the technology that unlocks quantum computing’s promise of a new age of human progress. We partner with over 60% of the world’s quantum computer companies and leading high-performance computing (HPC) centres to solve the error problem blocking their path to ‘utility-scale’ systems that can transform multiple industries. Our real-time QEC stack, Deltaflow, works with all major qubit types and includes proprietary QEC chips, decoders and a compiler. Deltakit, our software platform, helps quantum developers learn, develop and adopt QEC. Founded in 2016, Riverlane is headquartered in Cambridge, UK, and has offices in Boston in the US and Delft in the Netherlands. The company has raised over $120 million in private funding, including an $85 million Series C in 2024.
About Qblox at APS
Qblox will be onsite at APS to showcase its real-time GPU-to-quantum integration and discuss hybrid quantum-classical infrastructure with attendees. To schedule a meeting, contact Juliette de la Rie at juliette.delarie@qblox.com or find Qblox at booth #810.
Source: Qblox
The post Qblox and Riverlane Collaborate on Integrated Quantum Error Correction Solution appeared first on HPCwire.
Despite Trump’s claims, California city has found success in lowering deadly violence, thanks to pioneering efforts to steer people down a different path
In the summer of 2025, as Donald Trump rolled out his plan to deploy the national guard to Washington DC and Chicago, he suggested other American cities were overrun with violence and could soon see federal troops: Memphis, Los Angeles, New York.
Oakland, the president argued, was beyond saving. “And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. They’re so far gone. We don’t even talk about that any more,” Trump said.
Continue reading...Electric vehicles reduce exposure to global oil price shocks and shift energy consumption to electricity largely produced domestically, expert says
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Australia could reduce its reliance on foreign fuel by more than 1bn litres a year if it replaced 1m petrol-fuelled cars with electric vehicles, as experts say boosting EV adoption is part of securing the nation’s long-term economic security.
Hussein Dia, a professor of transport technology and sustainability at the Swinburne University of Technology, said electric vehicles can play a meaningful role in improving Australia’s energy sovereignty, as well as contributing to the national net zero emissions goal.
Continue reading...Scientists in the US have uploaded a fruit fly to a computer simulation, while an Australian lab has taught neurons on a glass chip to play a 90s video game. How long before we are all living in a sci-fi movie?
It sounds like the opening of a sci-fi film, but US scientists recently uploaded a copy of the brain of a living fly into a simulation. In San Francisco, biotechnology company Eon Systems created a virtual insect that knew how to walk, fly, groom and feed in its virtual environment. Researchers in Australia, meanwhile, have taught a petri dish containing 200,000 human brain cells to play the iconic 90s shooter Doom. One experiment has pushed a brain into a computer; the other has plugged a computer into brain cells.
Both stories have been hailed as scientific breakthroughs, but have also sparked inevitable fears about the prospects of lab-grown humans and digital clones. Should we be concerned?
Continue reading...TORONTO, March 16, 2026 — Xanadu Quantum Technologies Inc., a global leader in photonic quantum computing, and TELUS, a world-leading communications technology company, today announced plans to collaborate on advancing sovereign quantum computing infrastructure in Canada, and to exploring the development of a quantum data centre integrated with TELUS’ secure, Canadian-controlled, sovereign infrastructure.
Under a newly-signed MOU, the two Canadian technology leaders will explore how quantum processors can be combined with high-performance computing systems to create sovereign hybrid quantum–classical computing infrastructure in Canada – one of the first of its kind in the world. By bringing together Xanadu’s expertise in photonic quantum computing with TELUS’ sovereign AI expertise, advanced data centre operations, and coast-to-coast PureFibre network, this initiative will provide Canadian enterprises, researchers, and government organizations with secure access to next-generation quantum computing capabilities. These capabilities are poised to unlock breakthroughs in fields like AI, drug discovery, materials science, cybersecurity, and national security, all while keeping critical data and intellectual property in Canada, under Canadian control.
“Canada has a unique opportunity to lead the world in quantum computing,” said Christian Weedbrook, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Xanadu. “TELUS operates some of the most advanced sovereign, digital infrastructure in the country, and together we are excited to explore how quantum computing could integrate with next-generation data centre environments to create something genuinely historic for Canada.”
Quantum computing represents one of the most consequential technological shifts of our era. Hybrid quantum–classical computing environments, where quantum processors work alongside classical high-performance computing systems, are widely recognized as a critical pathway toward realizing this real-world advantage at scale.
“At TELUS, we strongly believe that Canada’s technological future must be built on infrastructure we own and control – and quantum computing is the next chapter of that story,” said Nazim Benhadid, Chief Technology Officer, TELUS. “Our shared vision with Xanadu – one of Canada’s most exciting quantum technology companies – is to support the growth of Canada’s world-class AI quantum ecosystem and advance sovereign, quantum-ready infrastructure. When Canadian organizations can access world-leading quantum capabilities on Canadian-controlled infrastructure, the innovations, economic value and competitive advantages stay here, building Canadian prosperity for generations to come.”
The collaboration will also explore opportunities across the full quantum computing value chain, including quantum hardware, software, algorithms, applications, services, and education initiatives designed to strengthen Canada’s rapidly growing quantum ecosystem. Additionally, the companies will explore research initiatives, pilot programs, knowledge exchange activities, and broader ecosystem development efforts to accelerate quantum innovation across Canada.
This announcement follows Xanadu’s milestone Project OPTIMISM announcement, in which the Company announced that the Governments of Canada and Ontario are negotiating up to CAD $390 million in combined support for Xanadu to establish advanced semiconductor and photonic manufacturing capabilities for Canada’s quantum technology supply chain.
About Xanadu
Xanadu is a Canadian quantum computing company with the mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere. Founded in 2016, Xanadu has become one of the world’s leading quantum hardware and software companies. The company also leads the development of PennyLane, an open-source software library for quantum computing and application development.
Source: Xanadu
The post Xanadu and TELUS Explore Sovereign Quantum–Classical Computing Infrastructure in Canada appeared first on HPCwire.
TORONTO and SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 16, 2026 — Celestica Inc., a global leader in data center infrastructure and advanced technology solutions, and AMD, a leader in high-performance and AI computing, today announced a strategic collaboration to bring the new “Helios” rack-scale AI platform to market. The collaboration pairs AMD computing leadership with Celestica’s expertise in delivering leading-edge networking switch technologies.
At launch, Celestica will undertake the R&D, design and manufacturing of scale-up networking switches in the AMD “Helios” rack-scale AI architecture, based on the Open Compute Project (OCP), Open-Rack-Wide (ORW) form-factor.
The scale-up switches will utilize advanced networking silicon to enable the high-speed interconnect of the next-generation AMD Instinct MI450 Series GPUs, enabling leading-edge computing, optimized for large-scale AI clusters. Consistent with the open standards-based design of the “Helios” platform, the networking switches will utilize the Ultra Accelerator Link over Ethernet (UALoE) architecture for scale-up connectivity. AMD “Helios” will be available to customers in late 2026.
“Deploying AI at scale requires infrastructure that can be delivered quickly, consistently, and with the performance customers expect,” said Steven Dorwart, senior vice president and general manager, Hyperscalers, Celestica. “Our collaboration with AMD on the “Helios” platform brings together our global engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain capabilities with AMD’s innovation in high-performance computing. Together, we are accelerating access to AI systems optimized for the most demanding workloads of the next era.”
“‘Helios’ represents a new blueprint for AI infrastructure, enabling customers to deploy AI at scale with the performance, efficiency, and flexibility required for the next generation of workloads,” said Forrest Norrod, executive vice president and general manager, Data Center Solutions Business Group, AMD. “We are pleased to work with Celestica, leveraging their expertise in delivering leading-edge networking switch technology with AMD’s leadership in high-performance and AI computing.”
The companies are collaborating to support deployments of “Helios” across cloud, enterprise, and research environments, helping to address a growing need for solutions that reduce time-to-value and improve supply chain resiliency for organizations investing in AI.
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.
About Celestica
Celestica (TSX: CLS) (NYSE: CLS) is a technology leader dedicated to driving customer success and market advancements. With deep expertise in design, engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, and platform solutions, Celestica enables critical data center infrastructure for AI, cloud, and hybrid cloud and advances technologies in high-growth markets. With a talented team and a strategic global network, Celestica helps its customers achieve competitive advantages.
Source: Celestica
The post Celestica and AMD Partner to Advance the Next Era of AI with ‘Helios’ Rack-Scale AI Platform appeared first on HPCwire.
OXFORD, England, March 16, 2026 — Infleqtion, a global leader in quantum computing and quantum sensing powered by neutral-atom technology, has delivered the UK’s only operational 100-physical-qubit quantum computing system at the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) with its Sqale platform, achieving a milestone the NQCC identified as a critical objective for the UK’s quantum strategy. Achieved in December 2025, the milestone creates foundational infrastructure that will enable researchers and industry to begin working with large-scale quantum systems.
“Infleqtion’s progress is a significant milestone, helping move the UK beyond research toward real-world uses,” said Lord Vallance, Minister of State for Science, Research and Innovation. “These sorts of advances are vital in paving the way for us to be able to use quantum computers to deliver tangible benefits. With the talent and research expertise that we have on offer in the UK, this is an encouraging next step which helps cement our position as a world leader in one of the defining technologies of our generation.”
“The NQCC’s quantum computing testbed is among the first of its kind, advancing innovation at a global level,” said Matthew Kinsella, CEO of Infleqtion. “This latest achievement with Sqale reflects the progress and potential of our neutral-atom architecture and marks an important step toward larger-scale quantum systems. We’re proud to partner with the NQCC on a platform that is critical to advancing quantum computing and reinforces the UK’s leadership in this essential technology.”
Reaching the 100-physical-qubit level represents an important step beyond laboratory prototypes toward quantum computers that can run more complex algorithms, test error-correction approaches and support practical solutions. At this scale, quantum systems begin to support experimentation that connects more directly to real-world challenges. Researchers can begin probing applications in areas such as advanced materials, energy systems and complex optimization. Sqale is the first neutral-atom platform of this scale deployed in an operational national facility, reinforcing its position at the forefront of quantum hardware development.
The NQCC’s installation of the Sqale platform is part of its broader Quantum Computing Testbed Initiative. With Sqale, researchers will be able to evaluate performance, benchmark applications, and study how neutral‑atom systems scale. The platform is also designed to accelerate skills development, supply‑chain readiness and application exploration across the UK quantum ecosystem.
“Having a system of this scale available through the NQCC is a significant step for the UK quantum community,” said Dr Michael Cuthbert, Director of the NQCC. “It allows researchers to move beyond small demonstrations and begin learning what it really takes to operate and scale quantum computers in practice.”
“This is a defining moment for Infleqtion and the UK’s ambition to build world-class sovereign quantum capabilities. Achieving this milestone has been a key goal for the UK’s quantum efforts and seeing it become reality is something we are all immensely proud of,” said Colin Sullivan, Managing Director of Infleqtion UK. “We look forward to expanding our partnership with UK researchers, businesses and government to unlock the full potential of quantum technology.”
Infleqtion’s milestone with NQCC demonstrates continued execution on the company’s technology roadmap. Infleqtion is aiming to exceed 30 logical qubits in 2026 and deliver more than 100 logical qubits in 2028, advancing toward fully fault-tolerant architectures. Because it takes anywhere from 10 to more than 1,000 physical qubits to encode a single reliable logical qubit, physical-qubit performance becomes a key limiting factor. Infleqtion’s 99.73% two-qubit gate fidelity delivers industry-leading performance on the metric that matters most in quantum computing. Higher fidelity means fewer physical qubits per logical qubit, delivering a significant scalability and efficiency advantage.
About Infleqtion
Infleqtion, Inc. (NYSE: INFQ) is a global leader in quantum technology, delivering neutral-atom solutions for quantum computing, networking, sensing, and security. With a product portfolio spanning quantum computers, quantum optical clocks, RF receivers, and inertial sensors, Infleqtion’s full-stack approach combines high-performance hardware with the company’s proprietary Superstaq quantum computing software platform. Infleqtion’s systems are already in use by the U.S. Department of War, NASA, the U.K. government, and in multiple collaborations with NVIDIA. Infleqtion, in collaboration with NVIDIA, published the world’s first demonstration of a materials science application using logical qubits. With operations in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, Infleqtion meets the demands of government and commercial customers across the space, defense, energy, finance and telecommunications sectors.
Source: Infleqtion
The post Infleqtion Delivers Operational 100-Qubit Quantum Computing System to UK’s NQCC appeared first on HPCwire.
BASEL, Switzerland and SAN FRANCISCO, March 16, 2026 — At the World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit, Syngenta, a global leader in agricultural innovation, today announced it is exploring how quantum computing can help farmers meet the growing demands of food production in a changing climate. The company has partnered with QuantumBasel, Switzerland’s first commercial quantum computing hub, to apply quantum technologies to agricultural research and development.
Farmers worldwide face mounting pressure to produce more food sustainably amid unpredictable weather and evolving pest and disease challenges. Meeting these demands requires new scientific approaches that go beyond what classical computing can deliver, particularly when it comes to understanding the complex molecular and biological systems that underpin crop science.
Developing safe, effective, and sustainable crop protection products requires understanding molecular interactions of extraordinary complexity that classical computers can only approximate. Quantum computing has the future potential to model this complexity with far greater precision, and to predict details about molecular behavior that have previously been out of reach, bringing new insights into product design and opening new pathways for innovation in agriculture.
To help realize this potential, Syngenta is launching a collaboration with QuantumBasel in Basel, Switzerland – a co-located working model that brings together QuantumBasel’s algorithmic expertise and access to advanced hardware and simulators with Syngenta’s scientists and agricultural R&D capabilities. Initial projects will aim to deepen our understanding of molecular behaviour with insights that could unlock new approaches to discovery and crop science.
“Quantum computing could be a catalyst for the next generation of scientific breakthroughs in agriculture,” said Feroz Sheikh, Chief Information and Digital Officer, Syngenta Group. “It has the future potential to give us a deeper understanding of molecular interactions than has ever been possible, delivering insights and solutions that can help growers meet the challenges of a changing world.”
Quantum computing is an emerging technology with significant long-term potential in molecular modeling, AI and beyond. As the technology matures, Syngenta will be well-positioned to explore its application to some of the most complex challenges in crop science, and build the expertise and partnerships needed to apply it meaningfully in agricultural research.
Thomas Landolt, CEO QuantumBasel, said: “Our mission is to apply quantum computing capabilities to industry, and agriculture is one of the most exciting frontiers. By combining QuantumBasel’s quantum computing know-how and infrastructure with Syngenta’s deep agricultural expertise, we can help growers benefit from faster research cycles, better crop resilience, and more sustainable farming practices. We are excited for the chance to create an impact where it really matters.”
About QuantumBasel
QuantumBasel is a competence center for quantum computing and AI and drives access to commercial quantum computing to foster innovation. QuantumBasel is Switzerland’s first and so far only commercial quantum computing hub. QuantumBasel’s team of quantum and data scientists trains and supports companies, conducts projects in quantum computing and AI, and collaborates closely with universities and academic institutions. Through an internationally connected ecosystem, QuantumBasel provides access to advanced know-how and technologies, enabling companies across a variety of industries to achieve innovations through the next generation of information technology.
About Syngenta
Syngenta is a global leader in agricultural innovation with a presence in more than 90 countries. Syngenta is focused on developing technologies and farming practices that empower farmers, so they can make the transformation required to feed the world’s population while preserving our planet. Its bold scientific discoveries deliver better benefits for farmers and society on a bigger scale than ever before. Guided by its Sustainability Priorities, Syngenta is developing new technologies and solutions that support farmers to grow healthier plants in healthier soil with a higher yield. Syngenta Crop Protection is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland; Syngenta Seeds is headquartered in the United States.
Source: QuantumBasel
The post QuantumBasel Partners with Syngenta on Quantum Computing Applications in Agricultural R&D appeared first on HPCwire.
From dates to deal tips, here's everything worth knowing about the 2026 Amazon Big Spring Sale.
The song is that of a humpback whale and was recorded by scientists in March 1949 in Bermuda, researchers said.
March 16, 2026 — Deep Green has announced AI-ready colocation capacity deployable in as little as four weeks at its Urmston facility in Manchester. This is one of the fastest AI infrastructure deployments currently available in the UK today. The site provides sovereign, UK-based capacity designed for high-density AI and HPC workloads.
For many organizations, the barrier to scaling artificial intelligence is no longer GPUs or software. It is infrastructure. Power availability, planning delays and legacy data centre designs mean new capacity can take years to deliver. Deep Green’s modular architecture allows AI workloads to be deployed in weeks, rather than years, giving organisations immediate access to secure, UK-hosted compute capacity.
The Urmston facility is purpose-built for modern AI workloads. It supports rack densities of up to 150kW, designed for GPU clusters and high-performance computing. The infrastructure operates at a sub 1.2 Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), making it substantially more efficient than many conventional data centers. This combination of high-density capability and efficient operation allows organizations to run demanding AI workloads with predictable performance and lower operating costs.
Mark Lee, CEO of Deep Green, said: “The conversations we’re having with customers are remarkably consistent. They don’t have a software problem or even a GPU problem. They have an infrastructure problem. Organizations need somewhere to run AI workloads today, not in two or three years’ time. Our Manchester site allows organizations to deploy high-density AI racks in weeks, and while capacity is filling rapidly, we still have space available for those looking for sovereign UK compute available now.”
Unlike conventional facilities, Deep Green’s infrastructure captures waste heat generated by AI compute and repurposes it locally. The heat can be used by nearby buildings and community facilities. By integrating heat reuse directly into the design of its sites, DeepGreen reduces the environmental impact of high-performance computing while delivering local energy benefits.
About Deep Green
Deep Green builds and operates sustainable, high-density data centres that deliver advanced computing power while capturing and reusing heat for community benefit. By turning data processing into a source of clean energy, Deep Green helps accelerate the decarbonization of heat and power systems worldwide. For more information, visit www.deepgreen.energy.
Source: Deep Green
The post Deep Green Offers High-Density AI and HPC Colocation at Manchester Site appeared first on HPCwire.
I'm picky about my workout gear. These are the only wireless earbuds I trust to handle my sweaty workouts, stay in place and deliver crystal-clear sound for all my activities.
Springing forward on daylight saving time did a number on my body, but these wellness devices are making the transition easier.
As big tech continues to dominate the film industry, Video StoreAge is a uniquely crafted company that works with film-makers to sell independent films on USB drives
The streaming-skeptical cinephile faces a dilemma in 2026, especially when it comes to watching movies at home. Increasingly, movies are available via rentals that funnel money to mega-corporations including Amazon or Apple; digital “purchases” from those same companies that can actually be revoked at any moment; or, most enticingly but still somewhat inconveniently, well-curated physical media special editions that treat films with the respect they deserve (sometimes even respect they don’t, depending on the title) while taking up a lot of shelf space and hitting your wallet hard. Plus, as vinyl aficionados know, bespoke physical media can also be severely limited in terms of where you can actually play it. Basically, almost everyone in the home-video space is trying to either be Amazon or the Criterion Collection.
Ash Cook, the former Sundance programmer who founded the new distributor Video StoreAge (pronounced like “storage”), is trying to figure out a third way. He described Video StoreAge’s products – indie movies sold on USB drives – as “like a DVD in the present tense. It’s a way to have a physical copy of a movie, but in this case you can play it on your computer. It has digital utility.” Like almost anything else these days, Video StoreAge is available as a subscription, with quarterly collections of five features and five shorts. The first drop includes Vera Drew’s buzzed-about The People’s Joker, a homemade superhero comedy that reappropriates many elements of the Batman mythos into a trans coming-out story. (Honestly, it’s more fun than those Joaquin Phoenix movies and might understand the Joker character better, too.) But they also sell single films, including Drew’s, or any combinations of available films as a sort of digital indie-movie mix tape on those format-flexible USB drives. (The quarter’s shorts package is included with every movie regardless, an automatic special feature.)
Continue reading...Cousin of Tech Sgt Tyler Simmons, whose military refueling plane crashed in Iraq, says: ‘We didn’t need to be in this war’
A relative of an Ohio airman who was killed recently in a military airplane crash in Iraq amid the US and Israel’s war in nearby Iran has said the conflict is “uncalled for”.
“This could have been prevented,” Stephan Douglas said of the death of his cousin Tech Sgt Tyler Simmons, 28, in an interview with the Ohio news outlet WCMH. “We didn’t need to be in this war. This is uncalled for – and this is what we get.”
Continue reading...Mohommad Nazeer Paktyawal, 41, died on Saturday in Texas less than 24 hours after being detained
An Afghan immigrant who previously worked with the United States military in Afghanistan and later sought asylum in the US died over the weekend in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody less than 24 hours after being detained in Texas, an advocacy group said on Sunday.
Mohommad Nazeer Paktyawal, who was living in a Dallas suburb with his wife and six children while his asylum case remained pending, was arrested by federal agents outside his apartment on Friday morning while taking his children to school, said a statement from Shawn VanDiver, president of the military veteran-led group AfghanEvac.
Continue reading...‘We’ll see how I feel in practice,’ says world No 2
McIlroy hampered by back injury before Players Championship
Rory McIlroy will weigh up whether to play another event before the defence of his Masters title next month after an underwhelming outing at the Players Championship. He was the defending champion at TPC Sawgrass, but his preparation was hampered by a back injury and he finished in a disappointing tie for 46th on Sunday.
“I’ll see how my body feels,” said the world No 2. “We’ll see how I feel in practice and at home and if I get itchy feet at home maybe add an event at some point.
Continue reading...US president says it is ‘only appropriate’ for Europe to help, and warns failure to do so would be ‘very bad’ for Nato. Plus, meet the Americans withholding their federal income tax
Good morning.
Donald Trump has ratcheted up the pressure on European allies to help protect the strait of Hormuz, warning that Nato faces a “very bad” future if its members fail to come to Washington’s aid.
What did Trump say? The US president told the Financial Times in an interview: “It’s only appropriate that people who are the beneficiaries of the strait will help to make sure that nothing bad happens there. If there’s no response or if it’s a negative response, I think it will be very bad for the future of Nato.”
Who else won? Here’s all the winners at the 98th Academy Awards.
Who was remembered this year? This year’s Academy Awards featured an extended in memoriam section to honour the considerable number of Hollywood legends who have died over the past year. Diane Keaton, Robert Redford and Rob Reiner were remembered in standalone speeches, while Claudia Cardinale and Catherine O’Hara also had extended moments. James Van Der Beek and Brigitte Bardot were among stars who were not included in the tribute.
Continue reading...Some economists think the Fed, facing inflationary pressures from rising energy prices, may not cut interest rates at all this year.
The film follows CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp through their seven-year journey to document the toll of America's school shooting epidemic.
"One Battle After Another" took home several big awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and the newly created Best Casting.
Food production in many African countries depends heavily on fertiliser imported from the Gulf through the strait of Hormuz
Countries in Africa, where farmers depend heavily on imported fertiliser and a large share of household income goes on food, are particularly vulnerable to supply chain disruptions caused by the war in the Middle East, experts have said.
The conflict has drastically disrupted trade through the strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane not just for oil and gas but also for fertiliser, which is produced in vast quantities in the Gulf.
Continue reading...The US men’s national team hated their 2022 World Cup look. Four years later, they were given control over what they will be wearing this year on home soil
US midfielder Diego Luna rocked back and forth, a wide smile plastered across his face. With even wider eyes, Juventus attacker Weston McKennie looked on like a child on Christmas Day, broke out into applause and shrieked with glee. Timothy Weah rubbed his hands together in anticipation.
The US men’s national team had gathered for a team meeting in a hotel conference room in Austin, Texas, with a friendly against Ecuador days away. The get-together had nothing to do with tactics. Rather, they were about to see the kits they’d be wearing at the 2026 World Cup, the first tournament in three decades to be played on home soil.
Continue reading...As the US birthrate has declined dramatically, schools are becoming emptier and districts are getting less public funding
At a February board meeting for Memphis-Shelby county schools in Tennessee, a parent of five children who currently or formerly attended Ida B Wells Academy, an alternative education school, asked board members a question.
“This is a high-performing school. This is not a school in crisis,” she said. “So I respectfully ask, why are we considering closing a school that is working?”
Continue reading...Status of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s money will be put to test in Tuesday’s primaries in Illinois
Four Democratic congressional primaries in and around Chicago on Tuesday have turned into the most expensive test yet of a question the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) would rather not answer: what happens when your money is so toxic you have to pretend it isn’t yours?
Aipac, one of Washington’s most powerful lobbying forces supporting Israel, and affiliated political action committees have spent at least $13.7m across four Illinois races, according to an investigation by WBEZ, Chicago’s public radio station, funneling it through a pair of Super Pacs so determined to hide their origins that they don’t mention Israel once in their ads, with anodyne-sounding names: Elect Chicago Women, and Affordable Chicago Now.
Continue reading...Apple's new $599 budget phone offers a premium feel, complete with MagSafe compatibility and an A19 chip. That makes the minor trade-offs easier to swallow.
The latest rumors, release timing and features we expect from Samsung's next Galaxy Watch lineup.
If Meta and other smart eyewear makers don't want their products known as "pervert glasses," they're going to have to do better at setting boundaries.
"A new type of battery storage is about to be deployed on the Midwestern grid for the first time," reports Electrek: Sodium-ion battery storage manufacturer Peak Energy and global energy company RWE Americas will pilot a passively cooled sodium-ion battery system in eastern Wisconsin on the Midcontinent Independent System Operator network — the first sodium-ion deployment on that grid. Peak Energy says its technology is specifically designed for grid-scale storage and leverages sodium-ion chemistry's inherent stability. Unlike many lithium-ion systems, sodium-ion batteries don't require active cooling and can operate over a wide temperature range without losing performance. That simpler design could make a meaningful dent in the cost of storing electricity. According to Peak Energy, its system cuts the lifetime cost of stored energy by an average of $70 per kilowatt-hour. That's roughly half the total cost of a typical battery system today. The company says it achieves those savings by removing energy-hungry cooling systems, eliminating routine maintenance requirements, and reducing the need to overbuild storage capacity to account for battery degradation over time... If the Wisconsin pilot proves successful, it could open the door to wider adoption of sodium-ion batteries for large-scale energy storage across the US.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The top 16 seeds in the 68-team women's NCAA field will host first- and second-round games, with the regional rounds being played at two neutral sites for the fourth straight year.
Alan Jay White, nicknamed ‘the professor’, arrested after raid of Indiana home found 78 grams of suspected meth
In a case that calls to mind the plot of the fictional crime show Breaking Bad, a former US educator with the last name White is faced with charges of illicitly dealing methamphetamine.
A 12 March statement from police in the town of Clarksville, Indiana, said officers searched the home of Alan Jay White five days earlier, finding 78 grams of suspected meth and counterfeit cash. They contended that the amount was too big for personal use, booking him with illegally peddling meth, counterfeiting and possessing drug paraphernalia, the agency’s statement added.
Continue reading...The suspect was responsible for transporting Oseguera's romantic partner to a luxurious cabin, the defense ministry said .
A fifth of seven members of the Iran women's soccer team who accepted refugee visas to stay in Australia has changed her mind, a sport official says.
Advocates say 24/7 coverage of US attacks will not last for ever – and spotlight will return to Epstein and his crimes
As the US woke to news that Donald Trump had bombed Iran, domestic discord was fast simmering.
There was unrelenting outrage over ICE raids. There was frustration with the rising cost of living. There was fear over rocketing healthcare prices, mounting household debt, not to mention many Americans’ nagging sense of desperation in a country, some warned, where democracy itself was under threat.
Continue reading...US based Covid vaccine recommendations for children and pregnant people on ideology instead of evidence, critics say
There was scant data behind ending the Covid vaccine recommendation for pregnant people and children, according to internal memos made public because of a lawsuit against the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The memos overlooked hundreds of studies on the benefits and safety of Covid vaccination and set the precedent for making changes to vaccine recommendations based on ideology instead of evidence, critics say.
Continue reading...Keep messages from unknown numbers away from your inbox and out of sight.
Atlanta United ended a long drought, there were dramatic finishes to a batch of games and Carles Gil finally has some support
On 28 May 2025, Atlanta United thrilled their home fans with a stoppage-time winner against Orlando City. Jamal Thiaré’s match-winner pulled the club within five points of the playoff places after 16 games, and the team hoped to harness the momentum for a rosier second half of the season.
Continue reading...Ex-French president, who was jailed last year for criminal conspiracy, to be tried at Paris appeal court on four counts
Nicolas Sarkozy appeared at the Paris court of appeal to face a fresh trial over allegations he conspired to receive illegal election campaign funding from the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
The former rightwing French president, who was in office between 2007 and 2012, denies any wrongdoing.
Continue reading...Another weekend of violence compounded global market concerns over war in the Middle East, following US strikes on the vital oil hub
Oil prices have climbed again amid mounting supply fears after the US struck Iran’s vital Kharg Island oil hub and Donald Trump demanded allies help reopen the strait of Hormuz.
Brent crude, the international benchmark, rose 1.8% to $104.98 per barrel during early trading on Monday. Another weekend of violence across the Middle East compounded concerns over the conflict, and its ramifications for global energy markets.
Continue reading...The operation marks the latest joint show of force against drug cartels in the South American country.
The actor led the starry book deals, while publishers assessed whether US-style bans are spreading to the UK
The annual London book fair wrapped on Thursday, marking the end of three days that saw 33,000 people connected to the book industry – agents, publishers, authors, among others – gather at Olympia to make deals and discuss the state of the publishing world, and its future. Here’s our roundup of the biggest deals, trends and takeaways from the fair.
The starriest book deal of the week was a new thriller series co-authored by Idris Elba, featuring an MI6 field operative who gets deployed to Mauritius to investigate an attempted murder. Elsewhere, rights were scooped for Alex Ferguson’s first autobiography in 13 years, broadcaster Mishal Husain’s debut children’s book, and the story of designer Paul Smith’s life.
Continue reading...Watch all the great films you missed.
The war, which shows no signs of ending soon, has disrupted oil exports from the region, driven fuel prices far higher worldwide and upended global air travel.
Magnusson’s 2017 bestseller The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning turned the Scandinavian decluttering practice into a global phenomenon
Swedish author and artist Margareta Magnusson, whose book on “death cleaning” became a global phenomenon, has died aged 92.
Magnusson’s 2017 book, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, introduced international readers to the concept of döstädning – the practice of sorting through and giving away possessions in later life so that family members are not left with the burden of doing so after one’s death.
Continue reading...US president says it is ‘only appropriate’ for Europe to help, and warns failure to do so would be ‘very bad’ for Nato
Donald Trump has ratcheted up the pressure on European allies to help protect the strait of Hormuz, warning that Nato faces a “very bad” future if its members fail to come to Washington’s aid.
The de facto closure of the vital waterway by Tehran in retaliation for airstrikes by the US and Israel has proved catastrophic for global energy and trade flows, causing the largest oil supply disruption in history and soaring global oil prices.
Continue reading...Latest observations of L98-59d, about 35 light years from Earth, suggest it could be different to anything seen before
Astronomers have identified a planet composed of molten lava, suggesting the existence of an entirely new category of liquid planet.
The distant world, known as L98-59d, is about 1.6 times the size of Earth and orbits a small red star 35 light years away. Astronomers initially thought the planet might harbour a deep ocean of liquid water, but the latest analysis suggests that it could be fundamentally different to anything seen before.
Continue reading...Crooks is one of college basketball’s most fascinating stars, blending power and touch in a throwback game that could carry the Cyclones deep into March
The basketball gods really have a thing for Iowa. First came Caitlin Clark at the University of Iowa, a scoring sensation who dominated headlines and sparked cultural debates. Now, the state’s other major college program, Iowa State, has been blessed with Audi Crooks – a thunderclap in her own right.
Where Clark dazzled the masses with moon ball shots and moxie off the dribble, Crooks is the kind of talent that makes other players of stature sit up and take notice, the junior center with a feel beyond her years. A 6ft 3in ballast in the paint, Crooks belongs to a protected class of hooper, the velveteen giant – post players who win with touch as much as brute force.
Continue reading...Apologies won’t help the survivors still living with the echoes of abuse. But wealthy people have the resources to make a real impact
Years before there was a call for transparency with the Epstein files, I spent months reading the documents. Not the headlines – the documents: the emails, the financial records, the human suffering, and the internal communications that mapped how one man’s wealth and power built an ecosystem of exploitation that operated for decades. As a sex trafficking expert for more than 15 years, I’ve witnessed many men who abused their power and the system, but rarely have I seen wealth weaponized so effectively and for so long.
I read the files because I served as the expert witness for the US Virgin Islands in its litigation against JPMorgan Chase, which alleged that the bank maintained a financial relationship with Epstein despite evidence of his sex trafficking. The case ended in a 2023 settlement; the bank did not admit wrongdoing. I reviewed the messages from men with power and wealth in Epstein’s orbit. I saw what they said, what they didn’t say, and what they saw and didn’t see.
Continue reading...The Republican senator from North Carolina will not seek re-election after Trump threatened to primary him
In the last US Senate hearing before Kristi Noem’s ouster, some of the fiercest criticism the homeland security secretary received came not from outraged Democrats, but from an ally of Donald Trump.
“What we’ve seen is a disaster under your leadership, Ms Noem, disaster,” said Thom Tillis, the senior Republican senator from North Carolina, at the outset of a 10-minute skewering of the secretary he dubbed a “performance evaluation”.
Continue reading...Netflix is the sci-fi gift that keeps on giving.
A Democratic candidate for a key House race in Maine oversaw a political action committee that donated thousands of dollars to Republican candidates across the country, Federal Election Commission records show.
Jordan Wood, who is running for the Democratic nomination in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, is the former executive director of democracyFirst PAC, a group that — despite its left-of-center orientation — donated to at least one Republican PAC, in addition to giving thousands of dollars to at least six GOP campaigns for House and Senate seats during the 2024 election cycle, according to the records.
In total, the group donated $75,000 to various House and Senate races, including Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah; Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb.; and Rep. David Valadao, R-Calif., with contributions ranging from $1,000 to $3,000.
Wood’s PAC also gave $5,000 to Republican Governance Group/Tuesday Group PAC, a group of moderate Republicans that has gradually moved to the right as it aligned with the policy priorities of the Trump administration.
“This is pretty troubling.”
“I don’t necessarily condemn anyone for contributing to left or right candidates as long as they’re actively protecting our civil rights, but this is pretty troubling,” said Maine state Rep. Amy Roeder, a Democrat.
While some of the candidates democracyFirst donated to were running for safe seats in deep-red districts, others, such as Valadao, an incumbent, were considered to be more competitive. Valadao, first elected to the House in 2012, lost his seat to Democrat TJ Cox in 2016 before regaining it four years later.
Though some of the GOP lawmakers supported by democracyFirst have at times voted for President Donald Trump’s agenda items, most are considered moderate Republicans. Valadao, for instance, was one of just 10 House representatives to vote to impeach President Trump.
But at least six GOP lawmakers who received money from democracyFirst, including Valadao, voted along party lines to support Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a sprawling funding bill that realized a wide array of long-standing conservative aims, including cuts to Medicaid, tax cuts for billionaires, and a $75 billion infusion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
At the state level, democracyFirst pitched in to help several campaigns for state legislature seats and county commissioner positions in Pennsylvania, including that of County Commissioner Mike Pries, of Dauphin County, who went on in 2025 to vote to reject a resolution that would have restricted local cooperation with ICE.
“democracyFIRST was built to do one thing: defeat Trump-aligned candidates who were trying to seize control of America’s election infrastructure,” Wood said in a statement. “Every Republican candidate democracyFIRST ever supported held an office with direct authority over election administration or certification, and every single one of them was in a primary against an election denier who supported Trump’s false claims of a rigged election. We were trying to take their power away. It was a carefully designed firewall to safeguard future elections.”
Wood is one of several candidates vying for the Democratic nomination in the race to replace Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine. Golden was already facing a primary challenge from State Auditor Matt Dunlap.
Golden, a centrist who has caught heat from progressives for voting against party lines in several key instances, announced in November that he would not seek reelection. In the wake of the announcement, Wood was months into a campaign to unseat the longtime Republican Maine Sen. Susan Collins, but swiftly pivoted to throw his hat in the ring for Golden’s seat.
In addition to the democracyFirst spending, Wood has been scrutinized for his ties to Mothership Strategies, a liberal-leaning fundraising outfit run by his husband, Jake Lipsett. The firm has gained a controversial reputation in Democratic circles for aggressive tactics, inflammatory and alarming rhetoric, and accusations of self-dealing and other unethical billing practices.
Wood has been scrutinized for his ties to Mothership Strategies, a fundraising outfit run by his husband.
Wood has said he and his husband keep their professional lives separate, but FEC records show that in the months after Wood stepped down from democracyFirst to run against Collins, the new candidate’s old PAC began funneling money to Mothership to the eventual tune of more than half a million dollars.
Dunlap, meanwhile, has earned a chilly reception from national Democratic leadership over his decision to primary Golden, whose district elected Trump in the 2024 election by 9 percentage points, and faced criticism from the right for his role in auditing the state’s Department of Health and Human Services. Trump and his allies have said the agency exercised lax oversight in the disbursement of federal money to other state health care programs. The other main contender, Joe Baldacci, a state senator and the brother of former two-term Maine Gov. John Baldacci, joined the race in January. (Dunlap and Baldacci’s campaigns declined to comment.)
Whoever wins the Democratic primary will likely face up in the general against former Maine Gov. Paul LePage, a proto-MAGA populist. LePage, who occupied the governor’s mansion from 2011 until 2019, is known for his long record of foot-in-mouth gaffes and racially charged statements.
Baldacci and Dunlap are longtime residents of Maine’s 2nd Congressional District. Wood, on the other hand, only announced after pivoting to the House race that he would to move with his family to the city of Lewiston in order to qualify. LePage has spent his years of political exile in the sunny wilderness of Florida.
“I am friends with both Sen. Baldacci and State Auditor Dunlap and have known them to be people of integrity and people who really give a damn,” said Roeder, the statehouse representative. “Jordan Wood was not a CD2 resident until very recently, and I personally look sideways at someone who moves into a district in order to run in that district. And I count Paul LePage as well.”
LePage, who announced his candidacy for the House seat in May, is making his second attempt at a political comeback after badly losing his 2024 bid to retake his old job as governor from incumbent Democrat Janet Mills.
The post Dem in Maine House Primary Funneled PAC Money to Republicans appeared first on The Intercept.
Why Should Delaware Care?
For years, universities have hosted debates on controversial topics. But growing political tensions around free speech; DEI programs; and transgender rights have raised the question of whether such forums should be framed as discussions, rather than debates where one side wins. UD’s recent event on biological sex highlights the question of how campuses should balance academic debate with concerns from students who believe their identities are being attacked.
As transgender rights become a growing political flashpoint nationwide, a University of Delaware event debating whether biological sex is binary has stirred controversy on campus, prompting criticism from LGBTQ students and advocates in the state.
While UD officials say the event, which took place last week, was meant to encourage open discussion of a controversial topic in an academic setting, advocates say it instead framed the existence and legitimacy of transgender and queer people as something up for debate.
“Seeing the faculty put on an event that challenges those queer identities is kind of like a slap in the face,” UD senior Emma Abrams said.
Debates over biological sex and other controversial topics, such as immigration and abortion, have taken place on college campuses for years. Universities frequently frame those as part of their commitment to academic freedom and free speech, arguing that higher education should expose students to competing ideas and encourage open discussion.
But UD’s debate on biological sex comes at a time when universities are navigating growing political pressure around diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, as well as heightened national attention on transgender rights and even free speech.
The UD event was organized and hosted by its Philosophy, Women & Gender Studies, and Anthropology departments and promoted by the university on its website.
Over 100 students and faculty attended the debate, which featured two professors, Agustín Fuentes of Princeton University and Tomás Bogardus of Pepperdine University. The two engaged in a back-and-forth discussion over whether biological sex is restricted to male and female or exists along a spectrum.
Fuentes, a biological anthropologist at Princeton, has argued in his research that human biological sex shows significant variation and cannot always be fully explained by a strict male-female binary.
Bogardus, a philosophy professor at Pepperdine, argued that biological sex is a binary category rooted in reproductive roles. In his academic work, he has argued that philosophical arguments separating gender identity from biological sex do not hold up under scrutiny.
In one academic paper, Bogardus argues that efforts to redefine “woman” solely around gender identity create what he calls a “Trans Inclusion Problem,” arguing that identifying as a woman is not the same thing as being a woman.
During the debate, both professors were given 20 minutes to argue their claims and then additional time to dispute and respond to the other’s arguments.
Joel Pust, chair of the Department of Philosophy, said that controversial topics are often chosen for debates at the university not to antagonize people but to allow individuals to think more deeply about their views and the opposing sides.
“I think part of treating people with respect is not treating them as so fragile that they can’t hear the opposing point of view,” Pust told Spotlight Delaware. “And I realize that some of these topics will be disturbing or controversial, but I think that’s part of a university’s job, to expose students to a variety of views and try to get them to think about them.”
University officials asserted that the event was part of its academic programming and not an endorsement for any position. In a statement to Spotlight Delaware, the university said that “hosting a difficult conversation is not the same as endorsing any particular answer.”
Still, multiple student groups gathered for a separate event, scheduled for the same time as the debate, to provide what they said would be a safe space for students to discuss how it impacted them.
Some argued that the UD-sanctioned event should have been framed as a conversation, saying the word “debate” suggests that one side must ultimately be right.
Others pointed to the power imbalance of the university-backed event, arguing it was unfair to expect vulnerable students to defend their identities in front of professors and their peers.
“It’s unfair for all the students who pay so much money to go here, and it’s unfair for those people who aren’t comfortable doing that to not have their voices heard,” UD senior Erik Zuylen said.
Students reached out to the school faculty and UD President Laura Carlson with their concerns. In emails to students, faculty expressed a willingness to discuss ways to better support gender-diverse students. They also noted the event was intended to challenge controversial views in a public academic setting.
Prior to the event, Pust encouraged the students to come and defend their views, noting that there would be a question-and-answer session after the debate.
“Clearly, you disagree with one of the two. I hope your views will be ably defended,” he said in his email to student advocates.
Rep. Mara Gorman (D-Newark), who represents the area, attended the event to listen to students’ concerns and, as she said, to serve as an ally. She said she didn’t support shutting the event down, but that she didn’t understand why it was a productive conversation for the school to have.
After the student-led event, Gorman said she plans to bring students’ concerns to Carlson.
“I would hope that there would be sort of a larger conversation that the president might engage,” Gorman said.
Carlson officially took office in January, after serving as interim president for nearly six months. Her tenure came after the university’s previous president, Dennis Assanis, had been increasingly under fire from faculty, who criticized his focus on capital development projects.
Since Carlson took office, the university has faced criticism over several changes affecting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
Last March, the Trump Administration launched investigations into more than 50 universities across the country, including UD, for their DEI efforts, with the goal to “end the use of racial preferences and stereotypes in education programs and activities,” according to the U.S. Department of Education.
UD has since rebranded its Office of Equity and Inclusion as the Office of Civil Rights and Title IX Compliance, temporarily removed a university website that featured student research on racial injustice, and has taken down posters for the different diversity-related groups and replacing them with posters that appeared more inclusive, as reported by different news outlets.
Carlson did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
In addition to Trump’s efforts to change DEI initiatives, over the past year and a half, his administration has issued a string of directives and executive orders aiming to alter health care for transgender individuals and pull federal funds from hospitals that provided gender-affirming care.
Beyond pushback from the students, local advocacy groups also criticized how the UD debate was framed, arguing that discussions about gender identity should be handled carefully, particularly during a time when transgender rights are being threatened politically.
Mike Brickner, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Delaware, said that while the organization supports the right to discuss controversial topics, universities should keep in mind how those conversations affect marginalized communities.
“We believe that it is essential for university representatives to reach out and engage with (marginalized groups) to ensure that programming is conducted in thoughtful and compassionate ways,” he said.
The post UD debate on biological sex draws criticism from LGBTQ students appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Why Should Delaware care?
Wilmington’s city charter requires at least one minority-party member be elected among the four at-large seats. After City Council’s lone Republican switched to the Democratic Party last fall, that policy goal has been undone.
The Wilmington City Council is considering a resolution that would bar future minority-party members from switching their affiliation during the middle of an elected term.
While the resolution was sparked by Councilman James Spadola’s change of parties five months ago, it would not affect him because it would not apply retroactively.
Still, the conversation around the resolution has brought a wave of criticism against Spadola, including calls for him to resign.
On Thursday, the Wilmington City Council held its first public discussion about the resolution, proposed by Councilman Alex Hackett. The measure asks Delaware’s legislature to change the city’s charter to prohibit a future at-large council member who represents a minority political party from changing their party during their term. If they do, they would be required to forfeit their seat.
During the meeting, all eight council members present expressed support for the resolution. Spadola and four other members did not attend the meeting.
In October, Spadola – then the council’s sole Republican – switched his party registration from Republican to Democrat – altering the makeup of the council to all Democratic members.
Currently, Wilmington’s city charter prohibits the majority party from nominating more than three candidates for the four at-large council seats, essentially guaranteeing that at least one member is from a minority political party. The charter does not explicitly say that council members cannot change their party while in office.
During the meeting Thursday, council members Zanthia Oliver, Coby Owens, and Council president Trippi Congo called that a “loophole” in the charter that Spadola relied on to change his party affiliation.
They argued that the purpose of the charter is to require a member of a minority party on the council at all times.
“It is very clear what the intent of the charter is … and unfortunately, we have an instance where we have a council member who went around that intent,” Congo said during Thursday’s meeting.
Hackett said he proposed the measure to ensure that party switches do not happen in the future, arguing such moves undermine fair representation and the city’s democratic process.
“It just was a slap in the face to all of us,” Hackett told Spotlight Delaware.
A handful of residents also spoke during the meeting, saying Spadola’s party switch disenfranchised voters. They called on the City Council to force him to vacate his seat or take the matter to the Delaware Court of Chancery.
“By switching midterm he has betrayed the very voters who place their trust in him,” Brandon Brice, secretary of the Delaware Republican Party, said.
Following Spadola’s party switch last fall, he told Spotlight Delaware he had considered changing parties since 2021. He finally did so, he said, because he disagreed with several policies associated with President Donald Trump, including tariffs, ICE enforcement, and federal troop deployments into U.S. cities.
Last fall, the city council’s chief of staff Elijah Simmons said Spadola would be able to finish his term, which ends in 2028, He said the city’s charter contained “no written prohibitions against party affiliation changes while in office.”
Since Wilmington’s voter registration is heavily Democratic, three of the four at-large City Council seats have historically gone to Democrats, leaving a single seat for a Republican party candidate.
Spadola was first elected in 2020 and re-elected in 2024.
This week, Spadola took to social media to talk about his fellow councilmembers’ recent actions, including urging him to change his party back, or to vacate his seat.
“You would think in an overwhelmingly Democratic city, with an overwhelmingly Democratic council they would welcome a new Democrat to the fold, but you know there’s politics going on here,” he said in a video posted to Facebook last week.
Spadola did not describe in detail the “politics” that he believed had influenced other members’ actions.
Shawn Dottery, a Republican who ran against Spadola for the at-large council seat in 2024, told Spotlight Delaware that “certain members of council” approached him in January, and urged him to speak out against Spadola’s actions. He said he declined.
But the councilmembers who have criticized his party change say their concerns are not an attack on Spadola specifically, but instead an effort to ensure fair representation.
Congo said he had been looking into the situation since last year. He said he had spoken with other council members, residents, the city’s law department and other attorneys to get advice, which led him to send a letter in February telling Spadola that he had to change his party affiliation back to Republican.
“Should the matter remain unresolved after that date [Feb. 16], we will consider next steps, including declaring your seat vacant,” Congo said in the letter.
Spadola discussed the letter in his social media post, saying that councilmembers were working in an attempt to vacate his seat so that they could replace him with an “unelected, handpicked successor.”
Spadola also hired an attorney to respond to Congo. In a letter to the council president, the attorney William Larson asserted that the city’s charter does not prohibit Spadola from changing party affiliation.
“We reserve all rights to seek declaratory judgment, an injunction, and additional relief in the Court of Chancery should you take any further action to vacate Council Member Spadola’s seat,” Larson said in the Feb. 12 letter.
Larson also accused Congo of breaking Delaware’s open meeting laws by jointly discussing the issue with multiple councilmembers. Congo denied the allegation.
“It’s a distraction,” Congo told Spotlight Delaware.
Congo said he has not responded to Spadola’s attorney’s letter. He is not concerned about a potential lawsuit, he said.
On Thursday, Congo and Hackett also told Spotlight Delaware that they would have further discussions with the City Council and with the community, about their next steps in addressing the issue.
On the other side of the debate, the Wilmington Democratic Committee sent a letter to City Council opposing the resolution, arguing that it is likely to be unconstitutional. They said it ignores the “political reality” that some Republicans may choose to become Democrats.
They also urged council to consider allowing residents to vote for four candidates from the same party.
“Gaining one more Democratic legislative seat in Wilmington is a win for our party, and frankly, a win for Wilmington,” Wilmington Democratic Committee Chair Cassandra Marshall said.
The post Wilmington considers charter change following Spadola’s party switch appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
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.
Delaware senators will begin formal discussions this week on what has already become the most hotly debated bill of the legislative session.
On Wednesday, the Senate Health and Social Services Committee will consider Senate Bill 1, which would impose limits on the rates some large insurance companies pay to reimburse hospitals for health services.
Already, lobbying against the bill has spilled out of Legislative Hall and into online ads paid for by the Delaware Healthcare Association. In one ad, the hospital industry group calls on viewers to “say no to SB 1.”
This week’s hearing comes months after Delaware ended a fight over another measure meant to rein in hospital costs. Last fall, Delaware agreed to remove a state hospital board’s key enforcement tool that had given it authority to veto hospital budgets officials deemed excessive.
The state agreed to do so as part of a settlement it reached with ChristianaCare, which had sued the state, calling the board’s authority “draconian.”
The hospital system – Delaware largest and most influential – also claimed last year that the board’s veto authority would cause “further erosion to the integrity and viability of the (Delaware) corporate franchise.” The remarks piggybacked on criticism being lobbed at Delaware at the time by Elon Musk and several other executives in tech and finance.
Now Senate Bill 1, introduced by Senate Majority Leader Bryan Townsend, is a new referendum on hospital pricing in a state that has some of the highest health care costs in the country.
The legislation would set reimbursement ceilings on the rates insurance companies carrying plans for state employees and some commercial entities pay to hospitals.
Health care providers generally earn the bulk of their revenue by negotiating with insurers who represent large groups of patients. The negotiations determine how much the insurer will pay for health care services, and in turn the costs that will be passed onto patients.
📍 The Senate Health and Social Services will meet at 10 a.m. Wednesday at Legislative Hall, located at 411 Legislative Ave., in Dover. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.
Lawmakers will also consider 20 other bills or resolutions this week, according to legislative agendas.
Among those in front of various committees is a bill that would incentivize businesses to build gas-turbine electricity generators, and one that would cement rules that limit rent increases at mobile home parks.
Before the full Senate on Tuesday is a bill that would remove a cap on the number of households with solar panels that utilities can pay for excess electricity generated.
To view details of all hearings, scroll through the “What’s Happening” box here.
Delaware’s budget forecasting committee – known by its acronym DEFAC – will release updated projections Monday for the amount of money the state could bring in during the next fiscal year.
The estimates will be used in the coming weeks for budget negotiations among lawmakers and with the governor over how much Delaware should spend of that sum.
In January, Gov. Matt Meyer based his $6.9 billion budget proposal off of DEFAC’s previous revenue estimates released at the end of last year. Those numbers showed a rosier picture than previously estimated – largely because of a change in tax law that insulated Delaware from some of the impacts of President Donald Trump’s federal spending legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Since then, several significant global events have occurred – most notably the ongoing war between Iran and the United States and Israel. The war is already disrupting global oil supply chains, which could increase costs for Delaware beyond energy.
📍 The full council of DEFAC will meet Monday at 1 p.m. at the state’s Buena Vista property, located at 661 South DuPont Highway in New Castle. Click here for virtual details and for the meeting agenda.
Delaware Education Secretary Cindy Marten will announce Thursday whether the Bryan Allen Stevenson School of Excellence will lose its right to operate as a charter school in the state.
The scheduled announcement follows a months-long investigation by state officials into enrollment issues that have plagued the school. In February, those officials recommended that Marten revoke the school’s charter.
If she follows the recommendation, the closure would be the first for a Delaware charter school in seven years and the first closed by state regulators in a decade.
It would also leave Sussex County with just two charter schools, compared with six in Kent County and 15 in New Castle County.
📍 Marten will present her decision at a meeting of the Delaware State Board of Education, scheduled for 5 p.m. Thursday. The meeting will occur at the John W. Colette Building, located at 35 Commerce Way, Suite 1, in Dover. For information about virtual participation, click here.
The Sussex County Council will discuss a proposal Tuesday to place a temporary moratorium on the construction of what officials call “cluster subdivisions” in rural areas.
Councilman John Rieley told The News Journal last week that the moratorium aims to stop a “land rush,” in which developers race to submit applications before new ordinances governing those denser types of communities can be passed and take effect.
Among reforms being considered in Delaware’s fastest-growing county is a proposal to loosen restrictions on a county program that incentivizes affordable rental units, and one to increase open space requirements in dense developments.
📍 The Sussex County Council will hold its weekly meeting at 10 a.m. Tuesday at the Sussex County Administrative Office Building, located at 2 The Circle in Georgetown. For more information, including about virtual attendance, click here.
It’s budget season for Delaware’s cities and counties too, and this week Wilmington and Kent County will hold public meetings focused on how they will spend money next year.
In Wilmington, Mayor John Carney will formally present his budget proposal for the fiscal year 2027 — which begins in July — in a speech to the City Council.
Last year, the city’s budget included a 6.5% increase in water and sewer fees, and more dollars to the Wilmington Fire Department so it could take over ambulance services in the city. Ultimately, 11 members of the City Council voted to approve that budget while two voted against it.
📍 The Wilmington City Council will meet for Carney’s budget address at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Old Town Hall, located at 512 North Market Street in Wilmington. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.
For Kent Countians, there will be a public workshop hosted by the county to discuss the proposed capital budget and public safety budget for the 2027 fiscal year.
Last year, the county budget passed with no public comments made – neither on the 12 resolutions attached to the budget nor on the budget ordinance itself, according to a report from Delaware Public Media.
Kent County Levy Court President Joanne Masten attributed the lack of public comment to what she described as the county’s careful stewardship of public money, the report stated.
📍 The Kent County Levy Court will meet for the workshop at 6 p.m. Tuesday at the Kent County Administrative Complex, located at 555 Bay Road in Dover. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.
Officials in Wilmington and Dover also will be meeting this week for their cities’ respective police oversight boards.
Such boards were created in Delaware in the months and years after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
During Wilmington’s meeting, officials will review past community engagement events and discuss a recommendation report, among other agenda items.
In Dover, the board will discuss community meetings, and complaints, according to its agenda. Following the meeting, new members of the Dover Police Advisory Board will participate in a mandatory training session.
📍 The Wilmington Community Police Accountability Board will meet at 1 p.m. Monday at the Third Floor Conference Room in the Louis L. Redding City/County Building, located at 800 N. French St. in Wilmington. For details about virtual attendance, click here.
📍 The Dover Police Advisory Board will meet at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Dover PD’s Hutchison Public Assembly Room, located at 400 S. Queen St. in Dover. No virtual information is listed for the meeting. The agenda states that individuals who wish to be recognized during public comment should notify Rebecca McNamara at 302-736-7100.
The post Get Involved: Hospital cost fight to resume; Sussex charter to learn its fate appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Absurdist video urges policymakers and users to resist deliberate deterioration of platforms and devices
The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.”
The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.
Continue reading...Poll of students of all faiths and none found almost a quarter had seen Jews targeted for their religion or ethnicity
One in five students would be reluctant to, or would never, houseshare with a Jewish student, according to a survey by the Union of Jewish Students (UJS) that says antisemitism has “become normalised” on UK campuses.
A UJS poll of 1,000 students “of all faiths and none” found almost a quarter (23%) have seen behaviour that targets Jewish students for their religion or ethnicity and nearly half (47%) have witnessed justification of the 7 October attacks by Hamas.
Continue reading...Jose Omar Flores-Penaloza was willing to admit that he had entered the United States illegally. He was ready to be deported, according to his attorneys.
But federal prosecutors would not let him go last spring without making him answer for another crime — one he had never heard of.
Weeks earlier, President Donald Trump, to address what he called a national emergency, ordered a stretch of borderland transferred to the military so that troops could help apprehend unauthorized migrants.
Because prosecutors believed Flores-Penaloza had crossed through that zone, now called a national defense area, they charged him with trespassing on military property under statutes including one enacted in 1909 to keep spies away from arsenals.
The added misdemeanors were unlikely to lengthen his sentence; they typically result in time served and deportation. But Flores-Penaloza maintained his innocence in the face of the allegation that could cast him as a national security threat.
So he awaited trial in a New Mexico jail.
One year into the second Trump administration, federal courts are facing a surge of immigration-related litigation, including a record number of habeas petitions from detainees who say they are being unlawfully held.
In Minnesota last month, after a frustrated judge asked why defendants he had ordered released were still in custody, a government attorney blurted out: “What do you want me to do? The system sucks. This job sucks.”
ProPublica and The Texas Tribune spent four months investigating a persistent source of pressure in border districts — one experts say is taxing the courts and challenging long-standing principles of criminal law.
Since last April, at least 4,700 immigrants already charged with entering the country illegally have faced additional misdemeanor counts accusing them of trespassing on military property. Court records reviewed by the news organizations show that more than 90% of cases have been resolved, and that most did not end in convictions on the trespass charges: About 60% were dropped or dismissed.
At least nine judges in West Texas and New Mexico have found the prosecutions legally deficient. Citing the basic requirement of mens rea — a guilty mind — many ruled that defendants could not be found guilty because they did not know they were trespassing on military land.
Yet prosecutors have continued filing the charges and appealing adverse rulings, arguing that knowingly crossing the border is sufficient to prove criminal intent. More than 20 legal scholars and former prosecutors told reporters they could not identify a conventional law-enforcement or military goal that would justify their persistence.
The strain has been visible in crowded federal dockets.
“We would do jury selection and trial on a misdemeanor case that would have no bearing on the sentence whatsoever?” West Texas District Judge Leon Schydlower asked a prosecutor in June. He noted that there were about 40 similar cases on his docket and asked the prosecutor what she would do if he scheduled all the trials on the same day.
“We would have to be prepared to move to go forward on all 40, Your Honor,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Patricia “Patti” Aguayo replied, prefacing her position by saying she had no choice in the matter.
“We have not been allowed to do anything but move forward.”
Prosecutors were operating under a directive issued by Attorney General Pam Bondi mandating “zealous advocacy” of the administration’s priorities and warning that attorneys who declined to advance them could face discipline or termination.
Senior officials in the U.S. attorney’s offices handling trespass cases declined repeated interview requests, and a spokesperson in the West Texas office asked reporters to stop contacting prosecutors directly. A Justice Department spokesperson noted that one of the charges carries a longer sentence and claimed the prosecutions have “proven to be a significant deterrent to both illegal crossings and cartel activity along the border,” though the department did not provide supporting documentation.
Had prosecutors accepted his offer to plead guilty to illegal entry in exchange for dropping the trespass charge, Flores-Penaloza would have been processed for deportation to Mexico, his public defenders Amanda Skinner and Victoria Trull said.
Instead, he remained in custody for more than a month, in a county jail where guards have been accused of threatening to use Tasers on inmates’ genitals and bursting into sleeping areas with flash-bangs. (In a court filing, attorneys for Doña Ana County denied the first allegation and wrote, about the second, that guards used “specialized equipment during operations” but disputed they were “terrorizing vulnerable detainees.”)
Hours into Flores-Penaloza’s June 17 bench trial before Chief Magistrate Judge Gregory Wormuth, prosecutors could not pinpoint exactly where he had crossed the border or produce a clear map showing the boundaries of the military zone.
“I also don’t dispute,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Randy Castellano conceded, “that we don’t meet the mens rea requirement the court has indicated in a prior opinion.”
Wormuth, who had dismissed dozens of similar charges, grew frustrated. He noted that Flores-Penaloza had been in custody for 40 days largely because of the unproven allegation.
“The United States has come in here and put not a single bit of evidence that would allow me to find that he even entered the national defense area,” Wormuth said. “It is very, very disturbing.”
He acquitted Flores-Penaloza on the trespass counts while finding him guilty of illegal entry. The young man was deported.
But more cases were coming.
Federal law generally bars the military from detaining civilians on domestic soil. But there was a workaround: Troops could capture intruders on their own bases.
Under orders from Trump last April, federal agencies including the Department of the Interior transferred more than 200 miles of riverbank and desert scrub in West Texas and New Mexico to the armed forces, converting the terrain into extensions of Army installations.
Speaking to troops deployed to one of the new national defense areas, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested that anyone entering them would be on notice.
“You’ve got signs like this one all across the border wall facing into Mexico,” he said — “clear English, clear Spanish.”
The plan appeared straightforward. But once cases reached courtrooms, that clarity evaporated.
Detained migrants said they hadn’t seen signs and had no way of knowing they had crossed military land. Prosecutors often couldn’t prove otherwise.
ProPublica and the Tribune identified 1,300 New Mexico district court records in which the government stated how far from these signs migrants crossed the border or were apprehended. The news organizations found that some were arrested more than 20 miles away from a sign, and that most didn’t come within 1,000 feet of any posting. In at least one Texas case, defense attorneys demonstrated how difficult it was to read the 12-by-18-inch sign from about 10 feet away.
A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in New Mexico said what matters is not where a defendant was apprehended but where they entered the country. In some cases, such as Flores-Penaloza’s, prosecutors lacked evidence of that as well.
These evidentiary gaps snagged most of the cases that reached judges, underscoring an existential question:
“What is your evidence that he knew he was accessing a restricted national defense area?” a federal magistrate judge, Miguel Torres, asked during an El Paso, Texas, jury trial. Adequate notice was essential, he said, “so that we don’t ensnare innocent people that do not know they are violating this specific law.”
Torres ruled against the government at trial, but many cases didn’t make it that far.
In Texas, many defendants pleaded guilty. To fight the trespass charges meant waiting in jail possibly for weeks or months. They chose to go home instead.
But in New Mexico, within weeks of the first cases, judges began throwing out the trespass charges as soon as they were filed for lack of probable cause.
Prosecutors responded with an unusual maneuver. Rather than abandon the cases, they refiled them using a charging document called an information — a tool commonly used for misdemeanors but, according to the legal experts consulted by ProPublica and the Tribune, rarely deployed to revive cases judges had already deemed unsupported.
Prosecutors used informations to resurrect more than 1,600 military trespass cases, the news organizations found.
“If there is no probable cause, the case is supposed to end,” said Meghan Skelton, a former assistant federal public defender and prosecutor. “They are trying to circumvent that in a way that has not been done in the 30 years I’ve been practicing law.”
The tactic kicked off what one defense attorney called a “ridiculous dance.” Judges would separate the immigration and trespass charges, accept guilty pleas on illegal entry and reiterate that there was no probable cause to detain defendants on the military counts. With deportation imminent, prosecutors would then move to dismiss the trespass charges themselves.
Prosecutors who left the U.S. attorney’s offices in the early months of the second Trump administration told reporters they were alarmed to see the lengths their former colleagues were going to pursue dubious cases. “You’re just losing credibility with the court, and on a bigger picture, credibility with the public,” said Marisa Ong, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Las Cruces.
It was the kind of outcome Matilda “Tilli” Villalobos sought to avoid when she saw the zealous advocacy mandate last February and left the district for private practice. “I don’t want to be the one standing up in court in front of a judge advocating for something that I don’t believe is even legal,” said the decorated former sex crimes prosecutor, who now defends immigrants charged with criminal offenses.
Alex Uballez, who served as U.S. attorney in New Mexico before being fired by Trump last year, called the prosecutions a “flustering attempt to create fear and chaos by whatever means necessary.”
“It would be laughable if it wasn’t so cruel and chaotic and dangerous,” he added, “both for the people involved and for the justice system as a whole.”
The national defense areas were supposed to allow active-duty troops to apprehend unlawful border crossers for the first time. So far, that outcome has largely failed to materialize.
According to a spokesperson for Joint Task Force-Southern Border, about 1,500 deployed troops had made just 68 apprehensions as of last week, leaving the Border Patrol still responsible for the vast majority of detentions.
Even so, the administration has continued expanding the zones from California to Texas.
Prosecutors began filing military trespass charges in South Texas last month, starting with a man caught crossing the Rio Grande, in an area now designated an extension of the Joint Base San Antonio. Along the river, warnings of prosecution are written across floating buoys and blared in Spanish from loudspeakers that can be heard in Mexico.
Border Patrol agents ask migrants detained in national defense areas to sign a form acknowledging they entered without permission, placing the documents in their immigration files, then-interim El Paso Border Patrol Sector Chief Walter Slosar said in a news conference last June. “And so the next time they cross the border unlawfully, there’s going to be no issue” about notice.
In New Mexico, prosecutors have used that written notice and previous military trespass charges to help secure 20 guilty pleas from defendants who reentered. Still, the news organizations’ analysis of court records found that nearly every trespassing charge in the state has been dismissed or dropped.
The Justice Department continues to press its legal theory in appellate court. In May, prosecutors filed trespass charges against Komiljon Toirov, a man from Uzbekistan detained in New Mexico. Toirov does not speak English or Spanish and could not have understood posted warnings. Prosecutors maintain that does not matter. They wanted him held in jail for trial, but a judge released him.
For months since then, prosecutors have fought that decision. As the case bounced between the district court and the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, judges openly bristled at the government’s persistence.
“The defense bar and every judge in the Las Cruces district courthouse disagrees with the government,” U.S. District Judge Sarah Davenport wrote in October. A three-judge appellate panel in December noted that prosecutors had produced “little to no evidence” to support their case for jailing Toirov.
The government has now filed notice that it plans to appeal again, indicating that it will seek a higher court ruling supporting its argument that Toirov didn’t need to know about the military zone in order to trespass onto it.
“We remain confident that our interpretation is consistent with the law and U.S. Supreme Court precedent,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in an email.
Ryan Goodman, a national security law professor at New York University, said the government’s persistence was “jaw-dropping.”
“It appears to be prosecutorial abuse by continuing to bring fatally flawed cases,” he said in an email. “This kind of abuse of the Justice Department’s powers has very significant repercussions for the ability of our democracy to survive.”
Meanwhile, the El Paso courthouse has eased into a new normal. On many mornings, shackled migrants plead guilty to military trespass charges rather than remain jailed awaiting trial.
Occasionally, the routine falters.
On Nov. 3, a young man named Brandon David Munoz-Luna spoke up during his plea hearing. “In my case, I did not know that I was entering a military reservation,” he said through an interpreter.
Federal Magistrate Judge Robert Castañeda turned to Assistant U.S. Attorney Adrian Gallegos. He asked, “Does the government insist on making this a charge you’re pursuing?”
“Yes, Judge,” the prosecutor replied. “Pursuant to DOJ policy.”
Minutes later, Munoz-Luna pleaded no contest, and the court moved on.
The post The Trump Administration’s “Disturbing” New Legal Strategy to Prosecute Border Crossers Is Taxing Courts and Testing the Law appeared first on ProPublica.
Patchwork state policies and limited federal oversight have led to a fragmented system for tracking organ donor status.
Starting in September, even Android developers not in Google's Play Store will still be required to register with Google to distribute their apps in Brazil, Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand, with Google continuing "to roll out these requirements globally" four months later. Even developers distributing Android apps on the web for sideloading will be required to register, pay Google a $25 fee, and provide a government ID. But there's a new theory on what's secretly been motivating Google from an unnamed source in the "Keep Android Open" movement, writes long-time Slashdot reader destinyland: "You can't separate this really from their ongoing interactions with Epic and the settlement that they came to," they argue. Twelve days ago Epic Games and Google announced a new proposal for settling their long-running dispute over the legality of alternative app stores on Android phones. (Rather than agreeing to let third-party app stores into their Play Store, Google wants them to continue being sideloaded, promising in a blog post last week that they'll even offer a "more streamlined" and "simplified" sideloading alternative for rival app stores. "This Registered App Store program will begin outside of the US first, and we intend to bring it to the US as well, subject to court approval.") So "developer verification" could be Google's fallback plan if U.S. courts fail to approve this. "If the Google Play Store has to allow any third-party repository app store, Google essentially has given up all control of the apps. But if they're able to claw back that control by requiring that all developers, no matter how they distribute their apps, have to register with Google — have to agree to their Terms & Conditions, pay them money, provide identification — then they have a large degree of indirect control over any app that can be developed for the entire platform." But that plan threatens millions of people using the alternative F/OSS app distributor F-Droid, since Google also wants to have only one signature attached to Android apps. Marc Prud'hommeaux, a member of F-Droid's board of directors, says that "all of a sudden breaks all those versions of the application distributed through F-Droid or any other app store!" Prud'hommeaux says they've told Google's Android team "You know perfectly well that you're killing F-Droid!" creating an "existential" threat to an app distributor "that has existed happily for over 10 years." But good things started happening when he created the website Keep Android Open: There's now a "huge backlog" of signers for an Open Letter that already includes EFF, the Software Freedom Conservancy, and the Free Software Foundation. He believes Android's existing Play Protect security "is completely sufficient to handle the particular scenarios they claim that developer verification is meant to address"... The Keep Android Open site urges developers not to sign up for Android's early access program when it launches next week. (Instead, they're asking developers to respond to invites with an email about their concerns — and to spread the word to other developers and organizations in forums and social media posts.) There's also a petition at Change.org currently signed by 64,000 developers — adding 20,000 new signatures in the last 10 days. And "If you have an Android device, try installing F-Droid!" he adds. Google tracks how many people install these alternative app repositories, and a larger user base means greater consequences from any Android policy changes. Plus, installing F-Droid "might be refreshing!" Prud'hommeaux says. "You don't see all the advertisements and promotions and scam and crapware stuff that you see in the commercial app stores!"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Exclusive: Revelation comes as company faces mounting scrutiny over use of AI to provide health tips
Google has dropped a new artificial intelligence search feature that gave users crowdsourced health advice from amateurs around the world.
The company had said its launch of “What People Suggest”, which provided tips from strangers, showed “the potential of AI to transform health outcomes across the globe”.
Continue reading...A journalist charts the progress of AI pioneer Demis Hassabis from child chess prodigy to Nobel prize winner
It was March 2016, and at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, the world was gathered to watch the culmination of a battle 2,500 years in the making. On one side was the South Korean Lee Se-dol, the second-highest ranking Go player in the world. On the other was AlphaGo – a computer program developed by London-based artificial intelligence research company DeepMind.
“Chess is the greatest game mankind has invented,” game designer Alex Randolph once said. “Go is the greatest game mankind has discovered.” Something about the ancient Chinese duel, where players place stones on a grid, trying to capture territory, feels fundamental – inevitable, even. Chess had fallen to the robots nearly 20 years earlier, when DeepBlue beat Kasparov, but Go, with its vast decision space (there are far more legal board positions than atoms in the observable universe) remained a plucky holdout.
Continue reading...Latest Android superphone packs great cameras, fast chips, long battery, a stylus and first-of-its-kind privacy display
Samsung’s latest Ultra superphone promises to keep shoulder surfers out of your business with a first-of-its-kind privacy display built into its huge 6.9in screen.
The Galaxy S26 Ultra is Samsung’s top-of-the-line phone costing £1,279 (€1,449/$1,299/A$2,199) and is one of the most feature-packed handsets you can get, with four cameras on the back, an integrated stylus and AI assistance in every corner.
Continue reading...Marianna Spring goes Inside the Rage Machine. Plus: the finale of the brilliant comedy Small Prophets. Here’s what to watch this evening
9pm, BBC Two
“My goal is to not get sued,” says Matt Motyl, a former senior staff researcher at Facebook and Meta. He is one of the ex-employees who give reporter Marianna Spring the inside story of how social media giants have profited from algorithms that perpetuate divisiveness and hate. She also studies whistleblower documents, the arrival of TikTok and charts how events such as the pandemic and the Southport riots played out across various platforms. Hollie Richardson
Covid exposed the lack of data on the country’s 140 million mobile migrant workers, but a new project in Odisha is helping to fill in the gaps
Raja Pradhan is sitting cross-legged, scrolling on his phone in his village in eastern India when a green WhatsApp chat bubble pops up on the screen. “Namaskar! Apana bahare kama pain jauthibe? Apananka suchana diaantu.” (Hello! Are you going outside for work? Please share your information.)
He reads the message twice, unsure whether to respond. “I don’t know where this information would go,” he says. “Would someone use it against me? The internet can be tricky at times. Why should I even share my details in the first place?”
Continue reading...In the Middle East, the occupation is the original sin. And those who banked on this US-backed ‘stability’ now find it giving way beneath them
A war spiralling in the Middle East. A death toll now in the thousands across Iran and Lebanon. Energy prices soaring. The Gulf seized up with Iranian strikes. It’s one of those eras that feels bewildering, incomprehensible, out of control. But there is, at the heart of it, a simple logic: everything that is unfolding is a result of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians.
As the conflagration spreads, the connection to Palestine becomes obscured. But it is clear how much of the stability of the Middle East was secured at the expense of the Palestinians. Look at the region before 7 October 2023. US policy on the Middle East focused on “integration’’: containment of Iran, signing up more Arab countries to normalise relations with Israel and the creation, therefore, of a bloc of economic and security interests under the US military umbrella.
Continue reading...In 2024 Anthropic was sued over claims it infringed copyrights when training LLMs. But as they try to settle, they may have a problem. The Free Software Foundation announced Friday that Anthropic's training data apparently even included the book "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" — for which the Free Software Foundation holds a copyright. It was published by O'Reilly and by the FSF under the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL). This is a free license allowing use of the work for any purpose without payment. Obviously, the right thing to do is protect computing freedom: share complete training inputs with every user of the LLM, together with the complete model, training configuration settings, and the accompanying software source code. Therefore, we urge Anthropic and other LLM developers that train models using huge datasets downloaded from the Internet to provide these LLMs to their users in freedom. We are a small organization with limited resources and we have to pick our battles, but if the FSF were to participate in a lawsuit such as Bartz v. Anthropic and find our copyright and license violated, we would certainly request user freedom as compensation. "The FSF doesn't usually sue for copyright infringement," reads the headline on the FSF's announcement, "but when we do, we settle for freedom."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
US supreme court has ‘ransacked’ the country, president argues, in wake of its ruling against his trade agenda
Donald Trump has claimed he has “the absolute right” to impose new tariffs after the US supreme court ruled many of the import duties he imposed last year were illegal.
The president attacked the court in a late night broadside on Sunday, accusing it of having “unnecessarily RANSACKED” the US – and failing to show him sufficient loyalty.
Continue reading...  | Hi, my onewheel won’t charge anymore. Not sure what avenues I have to debug and get this thing ruining again. Any advice would be appreciated. [link] [comments] |
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 16.
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for March 16, No. 539.
And what others can learn from Japan's embrace of American power.
The Kremlin is in no hurry to save its closest partner in the Middle East.
The end of an unnecessary fiction.
As One Battle After Another swept the Academy Awards, Paul Thomas Anderson, Javier Bardem and Conan O’Brien gave a welcome reality check to the glitzy ceremony
In his opening monologue to the 98th Academy Awards, host Conan O’Brien issued a note of caution to easily offended viewers.
“I warn you, tonight could get political,” O’Brien said. “If that makes you uncomfortable, there’s an alternative Oscars being hosted by Kid Rock at a Dave & Buster’s down the street.”
Continue reading...The United States will face the winner of Monday's semifinal between Italy and Venezuela in Tuesday's World Baseball Classic title game.
Americans will play Italy or Venezuela in final
Gunnar Henderson and Roman Anthony homered and the United States limited the Dominican Republic’s electric offense to win a thrilling semi-final 2-1 on Sunday and move one win from capturing its second World Baseball Classic championship.
The Dominican Republic threatened in the ninth when Julio Rodríguez drew a walk and advanced to third against Mason Miller. With two outs, Miller struck out Geraldo Perdomo for his second save but the final pitch – on a full count and with the dangerous Fernando Tatis Jr up next – was several inches below the strike zone. ABS is not a part of the World Baseball Classic, so the Dominicans – who benefited from some missed calls themselves – were unable to challenge. Although the Americans’ excellent pitching won the game rather than the umpiring, it was a dismal way to end what had been an enthralling contest.
Continue reading...This blog is closed
Iraq’s football team will travel to Mexico for a 2026 World Cup playoff match despite calls for it to be postponed due to the Middle East war, the country’s football association has announced.
“The national team will depart at the end of the week to Mexico via a private plane,” said Iraq football association president Adnan Dirjal in a statement, adding they had contacted Fifa to help facilitate the trip during the conflict in the region that has hampered flights.
Continue reading...⚾ USA will play either Italy or Venezuela in final
⚾ Full report: Blown call ends thrilling semi-final
USA 0-0 DR, top 1st
Severino’s sinker is hitting 99 MPH and now his cutter is whipped past the swinging bat of Bryce Harper. Bang! Two up, two down, two strikeouts.
Continue reading...I have an og pint with 1200 miles now, I’m the second owner I was told it had an upgraded battery which is probably true from the ranges I was gettting but I left it at my house for spring break charged at 100 percent and in working order. I come back and have an error 23 message with no new firmware updates to my knowledge. I’m in hydrus 5207 if that helps. I did open the app to check battery before trying to ride it. Did it auto update or did something else happen? Also what is the best way to go about getting this fixed?
The UK's science minister is announcing details of a five-year, £2.5 billion investment in nuclear fusion, reports the Times of London, "including building one of the world's first prototype fusion power plants in Nottinghamshire and developing a UK sector projected to employ 10,000 people by 2030." Despite the potentially transformative impact of fusion, which in theory could provide limitless clean energy and create a £12 trillion global market, no country has managed to use this fledgling technology to generate useable electricity... [T]he UK is backing a spherical tokamak design... investing an initial £1.3 billion into a prototype fusion power plant called Step (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production) on the site of a decommissioned coal-fired power station at West Burton in Nottinghamshire. Paul Methven, chief executive of the government-owned UK Industrial Fusion Solutions, which is delivering the Step project, said the aim is to get the reactor operating early in the 2040s. "It's quite an aggressive programme," he said. "We need to show that we can achieve genuine 'wall socket' energy — which has not been done before." On Monday, [science minister] Vallance will also announce £180 million for a facility in Culham, Oxfordshire, to manufacture tritium fuel and £50 million for training 2,000 scientists and engineers in fusion-related disciplines. The government is also buying a £45 million fusion-dedicated AI supercomputer called Sunrise to model plasma physics. Scientists at the UK Atomic Energy Authority last year developed an AI model that can rapidly simulate how the ultra-hot fuel in a fusion power plant will behave, cutting calculations that previously took days down to seconds... Vallance will also announce new support and collaboration for the many fusion, robotics, engineering and AI start-ups working in Britain, to develop a strong supply chain for a new fusion sector. One of those companies, Tokamak Energy, which spun out from the UK Atomic Energy Authority in 2009, has already built a smaller reactor that has informed the Step design. In March 2022, it became the first private organisation in the world to surpass 100 million degrees Celsius in its reactor.
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Primary school teacher Pavel Talankin’s record of the indoctrination of his pupils to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine beats contenders
Mr Nobody Against Putin, a primary school teacher’s record of the indoctrination of his pupils to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has won the Oscar for best documentary.
Pavel Talankin, who is now in exile in Europe, picked up the award alongside the film’s US co-director, David Borenstein. It beat favourite The Perfect Neighbor to take the prize, along with other contenders The Alabama Solution, Come See Me in the Good Light and Cutting Through Rocks.
Continue reading...As Kumail Nanjiani took the stage to announce the winner for Best Live-Action Short at the 98th annual Academy Awards, the actor exclaimed: "And the Oscar goes to ... it's a tie."
My Onewheel pint is running out of battery fairly quickly. It's five years old, and has only been used about once a month , so lets say 60 times total.
Not sure if the best course of action is to:
#1 try to get OneWheel to do something?
#2 get the battery changed by mailing it to FutureMotion?
#3 bring it to Onewheel tire guru in Los Angeles to change it in person? (but that's more than an hour drive for me)
#4 order a standard battery and try to replace it myself
#5 order a 21700 battery and try to replace it myself
I'd say the battery last half as long as it used to, maybe slightly more.
Any advice from someone who had the same thing happen is appreciated. it's obviously out of warranty. thank you!
US president’s call for coalition to protect commercial ships gets muted response – key US politics stories from 15 March at a glance
Donald Trump’s call for allies to send ships to the strait of Hormuz to protect commercial shipping vessels and unblock global oil supplies has met a muted response.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump called on the UK, China, France, Japan, South Korea and other countries to send ships to the waterway, the world’s busiest shipping route, which is being violently blockaded by Iran.
Continue reading...Rep. Dan Crenshaw, whose term as representative of Texas' 2nd congressional district is set to end following his loss in the Republican primary earlier this month, appeared on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Sunday.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for March 16, No. 1,731.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for March 16, No. 743.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for March 16 #1009
Rain fell between 1 and 2in hourly in Maui, Molokai and the Big Island while tens of thousands are without power
Rain continued falling in Hawaii on Sunday where a strong storm brought flash flooding, blizzard conditions and landslides to the islands as residents reported collapsed roads and one home washing away in rising waters.
Flash flooding has been a major problem in recent days in places such as Maui, Molokai and the Big Island, where rain had been falling between 1 and 2in (2.5 and 5cm) an hour overnight, according to the Hawaii emergency management agency.
Continue reading...Hello! Long time lurker first time poster :). I have a XR classic with recurve rails. Looking for something different for rail guards that are not the plastic ones FM sells. Anyone have any good suggestions. Unique is always great but welcome all input. Thanks!
Duke is the top overall seed in the NCAA men's college basketball tournament, with Arizona, Michigan, and Florida also landing on the No. 1 line.
Having been nominated in 1986, the actor sets a new record for the longest gap between nominations before a win
Amy Madigan has won the best supporting actress Oscar for Weapons at the 98th Academy Awards,.
Madigan defeated a strong field to take the prize, including Elle Fanning for Sentimental Value, Wunmi Mosaku for Sinners and Teyana Taylor for One Battle After Another. In doing so she set a new record for the longest gap between nominations before a win; she was previously nominated in the same category 40 years ago, in 1986, for Twice in a Lifetime.
Continue reading...Taking down Iran's cheap drones is a drain on the U.S. weapons stockpile. Emerging laser technology may be a cost-effective key to taking them down.
Iranian attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz threaten to drive U.S. gas prices to record highs. The attacks could also have a cascading effect on other prices.
The unprecedented Strait of Hormuz closure amid the Iran war has spiked the price of oil and gas. It's also left thousands of crew members stranded on ships as the war rages on.
The Iran war is testing the U.S. military's ability to combat Iran's drones in a cost-effective way. Emerging laser tech, designed to zap drones out of the sky, may help.
In Port-au-Prince, Haiti's gang-controlled capital, there's an orphanage taking in the most at-risk kids. It's run by bestselling author Mitch Albom and his wife Janine.
Haiti's gangs have near-total control of Port-au-Prince. Bestselling author Mitch Albom runs an orphanage in the city. Children there grow up and get an education in a haven behind walls.
The strategic shipping lane carries a fifth of the world's oil. Analysts warn prolonged disruption could send fuel prices soaring and trigger a global economic slowdown.
Correspondent Anderson Cooper spoke to 60 Minutes Overtime about his former math teacher, Yves Volel, who ran for president in Haiti in 1987 and was later assassinated.
Stacy Librandi went to Haiti as a volunteer new to disaster relief in 2010. Sixteen years later, she runs the largest and foremost emergency medical ambulance and medevac service in Haiti.
Europe's EV sales for January and February spiked 21% from last year, according to new data from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Electrek reports that just in those two months over 600,000 EVs were sold in Europe. And figures for "rest of world" (which excludes Europe, North America, and China) are up a whopping 84% — with 370,000 EVs sold in January and February. (EVs now represent more than 30% of the vehicles sold in South Korea.) But for the same period China's sales are down 26% from last year, with 1.1 million vehicles sold. And North America showed an even larger drop of 36% from the January/February figures in 2025, now selling just 170,000 electric vehicles, while Canada's EV sales were down 23%. EV sales seem heavily influenced by government incentives, with Germany and France leading Europe's growth: EV sales in Germany are up 26% so far this year, following the country's introduction of a new subsidy program at the start of 2026. France's market is up 30%, supported by its existing incentive program. Italy is also seeing rapid growth. EV sales there jumped 23% month-over-month in February, making it the country's strongest month ever for EV sales. The Italian market is now up 98% year to date. That surge follows the Italian government's October 2025 launch of a new subsidy program, funded by the EU's Recovery and Resilience Facility, to increase EV adoption. Households can receive up to €11,000 ($12,700) in incentives, while smaller businesses can get up to €20,000 ($23,200)... [T]he global EV transition isn't slowing, but it's becoming much more uneven depending on policy, incentives, and trade rules.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Students in Canterbury given antibiotics for fast-acting and invasive meningococcal disease, says UKHSA
Two people have died and 11 are reportedly seriously ill in hospital after an outbreak of a rare form of invasive meningitis at the University of Kent.
The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said it had provided antibiotics to students in the Canterbury area after it detected 13 cases of invasive meningococcal disease, a combination of meningitis and septicaemia.
Continue reading...I've got a high roof van and an looking for ways to store the onewheel vertically.
Does any thing exist for this? Some with of rack or holder?
Powerful storm chain to affect 200 million in US as it carries blizzard conditions, damaging winds and thunderstorms
Winter’s grip has yet to release as an erratic patchwork of severe weather moved across much of the US, dumping heavy snow and making roads impassable in the upper midwest while damaging high winds swept across the Plains.
As portions of the mid-south readied for thunderstorms, forecasters said the storms will spread eastward and by Monday threaten a large swath of the eastern US, with mid-Atlantic states and Washington DC at greatest risk for high winds and tornadoes.
Continue reading...American pars 18th for victory after birdie on 17
Fitzpatrick had led at Sawgrass before late slip
The PGA Tour might have lost out in the court of public opinion over whether the Players Championship could be a major. However, the level of drama as shadows lengthened on this Sawgrass Sunday set the tournament aside from most others.
It came down to Cameron Young versus Matt Fitzpatrick. As Fitzpatrick agonisingly missed for par on the 72nd hole, Young had secured the biggest win of his career. He had emerged triumphant from a sporting thriller.
Continue reading...Prime minister expected to set out tens of millions of pounds in help for heating oil users as conflict with Iran drives up costs
Keir Starmer will on Monday announce tens of millions of pounds’ worth of support for Britons hit by a spike in energy prices as a result of the Iran war.
The prime minister will lay out the plans during a press conference in Downing Street on Monday, during which he will also take aim at some suppliers of heating oil for price gouging.
Continue reading...Share of 16- to 24-year-old Neets who report a work-limiting condition up 70% in a decade, says thinktank
There has been a sharp rise in the number of jobless young people in the UK citing health problems as the reason they are not working, according to analysis.
The share of 16- to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training – known as Neets – who reported a work-limiting condition has surged by 70% in a decade, a charity thinktank found.
Continue reading...Government reluctant to dispatch ships amid concerns complying with Trump’s demands could escalate Iran crisis
Ministers are drawing up plans to send minesweeping drones to the strait of Hormuz amid concerns in Whitehall that complying with Donald Trump’s demand to send ships could escalate the crisis.
The government is considering dispatching aerial minesweepers to help clear the vital waterway of mines in an attempt to allow the flow of oil exports to resume. However, officials said that sending ships, as requested over the weekend by the US president, could worsen the situation given the volatile nature of the war.
Continue reading...Far-right and radical left parties likely to increase their local presence in advance of next year’s presidential race
The first-round of the French municipal elections have seen a strong showing for Marine Le Pen’s far-right the National Rally (RN), as well as for Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s radical left, with both parties likely to increase their local presence ahead of next year’s French presidential race.
The French local elections, which now go to a final round runoff on 22 March, are seen as a crucial test of the political temperature before next year’s presidential election. Emmanuel Macron’s two terms in office come to an end in spring 2027 and there is uncertainty about who will next lead the EU’s second-largest economy.
Continue reading...Slashdot reader SysEngineer does embedded/IoT work, but "I want to pick a single system-on-a-chip architecture family and commit to it across multiple product lines — sensor nodes up through edge gateways... I've been on one platform for years and want to know what embedded engineers are actually running in production before I commit!" And "the family needs to scale — cheap and small at the low end, capable of running Linux on the bigger variants!" Their requirements? WiFi + BLE required LoRaWAN a nice-to-have. Low power modes that actually work in the field, not just on the datasheet. Full peripheral set — SPI, I2C, UART, ADC, timers, CAN. A toolchain and runtime support, support multi threads... Slashdot reader Gravis Zero is skeptical all the requirements can be met. "If you want embedded, you get embedded. If you want to run a big OS, you get one that will run a big OS." But Slashdot reader SysEngineer believes "The obvious architecture candidates are ARM, STM, and RISC-V" — and specifically they want to hear your experiences with the RISC-V choices. "What would you standardize on today if you were starting fresh? And how does real-world toolchain and community support hold up compared to the marketing?" Share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. What's the best all-purpose RISC-V system on a chip family?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Zahira Byjaouane, 43, arrested on Saturday after reports baby fell from property on Horseferry Road in Westminster
A mother has been charged with murdering her 18-day-old baby girl, who fell from a height at a property in central London.
Zahira Byjaouane, 43, was arrested on Saturday morning after reports that a baby had fallen from a property on Horseferry Road in Westminster.
Continue reading...World No 1 had lost four finals against opponent
Sabalenka comes back from set down for victory
Aryna Sabalenka snapped her losing streak against Elena Rybakina in a thrilling Indian Wells final on Sunday.
The world No 1 beat Rybakina to win her maiden grand slam title at the Australian Open in 2023 but since then had lost all four finals against the Kazakh, including at the WTA Finals last season and in Melbourne in January.
Continue reading...Patients experiencing raised bedside rails, doors and pathways blocked by furniture and physical interventions
People with dementia are being subjected to restraints and non-consensual sedation while in hospitals in England, according to the first study of its kind.
These restrictive practices were found to be an “embedded aspect of routine ward care”, according to the analysis, with such examples including dementia patients having their bedside rails raised, doors and pathways blocked by furniture, experiencing verbal commands to sit down or go back to bed, and physical interventions such as non-consensual sedation.
Continue reading...Linux gaming "has gotten to the point where some people claim that Linux runs their games better than Windows does," according to the Android site XDA Developers. And there's a new surprise on ProtonDB, an "unofficial" community website with crowdsourced data about videogame compatability with the Linux software/gaming compatability layer Proton: On ProtonDB, one operating system had reigned supreme since 2021: Arch Linux. And I say 'had,' because its streak has just been ended by [Arch-based] CachyOS in an upset that has slowly grown over the past two years. As reported on Boiling Steam, the number of reports coming from CachyOS has topped that of Arch Linux, which held the crown for the most number of reports since 2021... [T]his isn't really a statement that CachyOS is the best gaming distro out there; however, it's seemingly attracting the largest number of gamers who are invested in testing games on Proton and reporting their performance, which is a pretty big milestone if you ask me.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Author says he doesn’t ‘feel symbolic’ and hopes to steer narrative to his books after surviving assassination attempt
Salman Rushdie said he’s tired of being everyone’s “free speech Barbie” four years after the author survived an assassination attempt that left him blinded in his right eye.
“It’s a subject I’m anxious to change,” Rushdie said Friday during a talk with the Atlantic’s George Packer at Tulane University’s New Orleans book festival. “I don’t feel symbolic.
Continue reading...Skier suffered serious injuries in crash at Olympics
Speculation has mounted over possible retirement
Lindsey Vonn said she will retire on her own terms, and not those of anyone else.
The 41-year-old, who is recovering from a serious downhill crash at the Milan Cortina Olympics, is still deciding her next steps, something she made clear in a social media post on Sunday.
Continue reading...NBC News investigates North Korea's "wide-ranging effort to place remote workers at U.S. companies in order to funnel money back to its coffers and, in some cases, steal sensitive information." And working with the FBI, one corporate security/investigations company decided to knowingly hire one of North Korea's remote workers — then "ship him a laptop and gain as much information as possible" about this "sprawling international employment scheme that is estimated to include hundreds of American companies, thousands of people and hundreds of millions of dollars per year." It worked.... Over a roughly three-month investigation, Nisos uncovered an apparent network of at least 20 North Korean operatives including "Jo" who had collectively applied to at least 160,000 roles. During that time, workers in the network — which some evidence showed were based in China — were employed by five U.S.-based companies and allegedly helped by an American citizen operating out of two nondescript suburban homes in Florida... Nisos estimated that in about a year, "Jo", who was likely a newer member of the team, applied to about 5,000 jobs... "They attended interviews all day every day, and then once they secured a job, they would collect paychecks until they were terminated," [according to Jared Hudson, Nisos' chief technology officer]... With the ability to see which other U.S. companies Jo and his team were working for — all remote technology roles — Nisos' CEO, Ryan LaSalle, began making calls to their security teams to alert them of the fraud. "Most of the companies weren't aware of it, even if they had pretty robust security teams," LaSalle said. "It wasn't really high on the radar." NBC News describes North Korea's 10-year effort — and its educational pipeline that steers promising students into "computer science and hacking training before being placed into cyberunits under military and state agencies, according to a recent report by DTEX, a risk-adaptive security and behavioral intelligence firm that tracks North Korea's cybercrime." In one case, a North Korean worker stole sensitive information related to U.S. military technology, according to the Justice Department. In another, an American accomplice obtained an ID that enabled access to government facilities, networks and systems. At least three organizations have been extorted and suffered hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages after proprietary information was posted online by IT workers... Analysts warn that North Korean IT workers are targeting larger organizations, increasing extortion attempts and seeking out employers that pay salaries in cryptocurrency. More recently, security researchers have uncovered fake job application platforms impersonating major U.S. cryptocurrency and AI firms, including Anthropic, designed to infect legitimate applicants' networks with malware to be utilized once hired. The global cybersecurity company CrowdStrike identified a 220% rise in 2025 in instances of North Koreans gaining fraudulent employment at Western companies to work remotely as developers... The payoff flowing back to Pyongyang from these schemes is enormous. Some North Korean IT workers earn more than $300,000 per year, far more than they'd be able to earn domestically, with as much as 90% of their wages directed back to the regime, according to congressional testimony from Bruce Klinger, a former CIA deputy division chief for Korea. The United Nations estimates the schemes, which proliferated after the pandemic when more companies' workforces went remote, generate as much as $600 million annually, while a U.S. State Department-led sanctions monitoring assessment placed earnings for 2024 as high as $800 million... So far, at least 10 alleged U.S.-based facilitators have been federally charged, including one active-duty member of the U.S. Army, for their alleged roles in hosting laptop farms, laundering payments and moving proceeds through shell companies. At least six other alleged U.S. facilitators have been identified in court documents but not named... "We believe there are many more hundreds of people out there who are participating in these schemes," said Rozhavsky, the FBI assistant director. "They could never pull this off if they didn't have willing facilitators in the U.S. helping them...." The scheme itself is also becoming more complex. North Korean IT teams are now subcontracting work to developers in Pakistan, Nigeria and India, expanding into fields like customer service, financial processing, insurance and translation services — roles far less scrutinized than software development.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mother, father and brothers aged five and seven shot in the head as they returned from Ramadan shopping trip
Israeli police have killed two young Palestinian brothers and their parents in the occupied West Bank, shooting all four in the head and face as the family returned from a Ramadan shopping trip.
Mohammed, five, Othman, seven, who was blind and had special needs, their mother, Waad Bani Odeh, 35, and father, Ali Bani Odeh, 37, were driving through their home town of Tamoun late on Saturday when Israeli forces opened fire.
Continue reading...Senator Ron Johnson pushes back, saying he’s not in favor of government meddling in freedom of speech
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair, Brendan Carr, is facing pushback from a Republican lawmaker after warning on Saturday that broadcasters could lose their licenses if they run what the federal agency deems “fake news” over the Iran conflict.
Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said in an interview on the Sunday Briefing on Fox News that he was not in favor of the government control of private enterprise or efforts to meddle with freedom of speech protected under the constitution.
Continue reading...On this "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" broadcast, Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi and Rep. Dan Crenshaw join Margaret Brennan.
There is little sign of imminent regime change in Iran as its blockade of strait of Hormuz shocks global economy
Few doubt that in the first days of the new war in the Middle East, the initiative belonged to the US and its ally Israel. Now it seems less sure, however.
Mohsen Rezaee, a senior officer in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, on Sunday said “the end of the war is in our hands” and called for the withdrawal of Washington’s forces from the Gulf and compensation for all damage caused by the assault.
Continue reading...Metropolitan police say they are also investigating chants led by Bobby Vylan at pro-Palestine protest next to Thames
Twelve people were arrested as hundreds joined a pro-Palestinian al-Quds Day demonstration on one side of the Thames, while hundreds more gathered on the opposite bank to back Israeli and American attacks on Iran.
Al-Quds Day is an international demonstration of support for Palestinian rights. The event takes its name from the Arabic for Jerusalem and was established by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini after Iran’s 1979 revolution.
Continue reading...Americans win Para ice hockey final 6-2
US get better of their neighbors once again
Three weeks after the United States beat Canada in the Olympic hockey finals, the Americans overcame their neighbors again to win Paralympic gold and complete the three-peat at Milan Cortina.
Jack Wallace scored a hat-trick to help the US beat Canada 6-2 in Sunday’s Para ice hockey final and become the first nation to sweep the hockey tournaments at the Olympics and Paralympics. There is currently no women’s division at the Paralympics as it is classified as an open-gender sport.
Continue reading...Nearly month-long funding lapse has disrupted US air travel and caused long wait times amid security officers’ absences
The CEOs of major US airlines urged Congress on Sunday to move quickly to end a 29-day partial government shutdown that has forced 50,000 airport security officers to work without pay, warning it could further disrupt US air travel.
Absences by Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers had already disrupted travel at some major airports over the previous week, raising alarm as the busy spring break travel season continues.
Continue reading...The following is the transcript of the interview with Sen. Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on March 15, 2026.
The following is the transcript of the interview with Rep. Dan Crenshaw, Republican of Texas, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on March 15, 2026.
The U.S. became the first nation to sweep the hockey tournaments at the Olympics and Paralympics.
‘I did it for the people,’ says Farbod Mehr, of song drawing lyrics from the work of revolutionary 20th-century poet Aref Qazvini
A stirring song – sung, apparently, by a young woman, with lyrics expressing the hope that sacrifice will lead to a better future – has become a soundtrack for Iranians in the first part of 2026, as the country experienced the brutal crackdown on anti-regime protests and then the US-Israeli air assault, now in its third week.
However, the singer, called Nava, is a product of artificial intelligence, created by a London-based artist of Iranian origin, Farbod Mehr.
Continue reading...Nottinghamshire and Met police made arrests in past year, despite MPs voting to decriminalise in England and Wales
Vulnerable women in England are still being arrested and facing police investigations over suspected illegal pregnancy terminations, despite parliament backing changes to the law to decriminalise abortion.
Responding to a freedom of information request, Nottinghamshire police and the Metropolitan police confirmed they had arrested women suspected of illegal terminations between June last year and this January.
Continue reading...Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick launched a new venture that "will focus on creating 'gainfully employed robots' for the food, mining and transport industries," Bloomberg reports. "I left Uber in 2017 heartbroken," writes Kalanick on the new company's web site. Kalanick resigned under pressure in 2017, and complains he was "torn away from an idea and a movement that I had poured my life into... I bled, but I did not perish. I got back up and fought my way back into the arena, back to my calling. Back to building. Digitizing the Physical World is my life's work... " Kalanick is remaking his real estate company, City Storage Systems, which owns ghost-kitchen operator CloudKitchens, and renaming it Atoms, according to a manifesto posted on the new company's website. [Bloomberg notes that the company's food robotics division "makes a food assembly machine called Bowl Builder, according to its website."] In addition to its work on food, Los Angeles-based Atoms is expanding into robotics technology for mining and automotive transport. Kalanick said on the livestreamed tech talk show TBPN Friday that Atoms has effectively been in stealth for eight years and has "thousands" of employees.... Kalanick wrote on the Atoms website that the company will make "specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners and society at large." That will include "infrastructure for better food," he wrote, as well as "more productive mines to power Earth's industries" in addition to "wheelbase for robots" in transportation. "The industrial thing is probably our main jam," he said on TBPN. "Once you crack movement in the physical world, there are lots of people who want access to that..." Kalanick also said he was the biggest investor in Pronto, a self-driving trucking startup that currently focuses on closed sites like mines.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Israel Defense Forces said Ibrahim Muhammad Ghazali was responsible for managing weapons operations for the unit within the U.S.-designated terrorist group.
Ministers go to Brussels for talks amid tuition fees standoff, almost 10 years after Britons voted to leave EU
This week is “Brexit reset” week for the British government, as ministers engage in a flurry of activity intended to highlight their determination to forge closer ties with Brussels almost 10 years after the country first voted to leave the EU.
On Monday, Nick Thomas-Symonds, the Cabinet Office minister in charge of negotiating the government’s reset with the EU, will arrive in Brussels for a meeting of the joint EU-UK parliamentary partnership assembly. He travels mob-handed, to be joined by the Europe minister, Stephen Doughty, and the trade minister, Chris Bryant.
Continue reading...Afghan government reports zero casualties and accuses neighbouring country of wanting to ‘fuel the fire of war’
Pakistan has targeted militant hideouts in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province overnight, as the fighting that erupted between the two neighbours late last month showed no signs of abating.
The cross-border attacks, which have included Pakistani airstrikes in Kabul, are the deadliest yet between the countries. Islamabad has referred to the conflict as an “open war”, adding to concerns about regional stability as the US-Israeli conflict with Iran engulfs the Middle East and beyond.
Continue reading...Democrat says Congress ‘doing nothing’ may embolden president to attack countries such as Cuba and North Korea
Democratic US senator Cory Booker has criticized both his own political party as well as its Republican counterpart for being “feckless” in ceding congressional war powers to Donald Trump, saying that their decision could embolden the president to unilaterally attack Cuba, North Korea and other countries.
“I’m going to be one of those Democrats [who] say I think both parties have been feckless in allowing the growth of the power of the presidency,” Booker said on Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.
Continue reading...‘Of course there’s going to be retaliation,’ says one expert. ‘It may be that this is what Trump’s interested in’
For decades, the US and its allies have painted Iran as the world’s biggest sponsor of state terrorism – invoking its Islamic rulers’ supposed revolutionary fanaticism and determined support for militant proxies.
Now a long-standing but mainly latent threat is coalescing, with the war waged on the country by the US and Israel, to raise the risk of an attack on American soil to levels unseen since the murderous al-Qaida assaults of 11 September 2001, experts say.
Continue reading...National Secular Society to launch court action after failure to investigate alleged breaches of academic freedom laws
A university regulator in England has failed to investigate potential breaches of laws protecting academic freedom at a dozen theological colleges and is now facing legal action, the Guardian has learned.
The National Secular Society says it is preparing to pursue the Office for Students (OfS) through the courts to act on complaints first made five years ago, arguing that the colleges are ineligible for public funding or government-backed student loans because of their commitment to theological doctrine.
Continue reading...He's "the most famous anonymous man in the world," suggests Reuters. But investigating Banksy's artworks in a bombed Ukrainian village (and other clues in the U.K. and Manhattan) have led them to "a hand-written confession by the artist to a long-ago misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct — a document that revealed, beyond dispute, Banksy's true identity." But Banksy's long-time lawyer "urged us not to publish this report, saying doing so would violate the artist's privacy, interfere with his art and put him in danger" and "would harm the public, too." Working "anonymously or under a pseudonym serves vital societal interests," he wrote. "It protects freedom of expression by allowing creators to speak truth to power without fear of retaliation, censorship or persecution — particularly when addressing sensitive issues such as politics, religion or social justice." Reuters took into account Banksy's privacy claims — and the fact that many of his fans wish for him to remain anonymous. Yet we concluded that the public has a deep interest in understanding the identity and career of a figure with his profound and enduring influence on culture, the art industry and international political discourse... As for the risk he might face of retaliation or censorship, Britain's legal and political establishments seem comfortable with Banksy's messages and how he delivers them... His mastery of disguise began as a way of shaking the police, says former manager [Steve] Lazarides. In an interview, Lazarides said anonymity served a practical purpose in Bristol, where authorities enforced "draconian" policies against graffiti... Eventually, keeping the secret became a burden. By the end of their partnership, Lazarides estimates he spent half or more of his time managing and maintaining the artist's mystique. "I think it became a good gag, and then, if you want my honest, honest opinion, I think it then became a disease," he said. Lazarides wrote a two-volume book about managing Banksy from the late 1990s to 2008, including a story about Banksy's arrest in 2000 for this defacing of a billboard. Reuters geolocated that building, then found police documents and a court file including the hand-written confession. This investigation spawned a 7,000-word article with everything from a comic strip Banksy drew when he was 11 to his connections with Robert Del Naja of the trip hop band Massive Attack — and a 2017 podcast interview where a music producer apparently revealed Banksy's real first name. But the article also reveals how protective the art community is of Banksy's secret. Reuters investigated that Banksy auctioned in 2018 for $1.4 million — and then immediately started shredding itself with a device Banksy embedded in its frame: That piece, renamed "Love is in the Bin," sold three years later for about $25 million. Art dealer [Robert] Casterline was at the auction and remembers when the shredder began to beep. He pulled out his phone to take pictures. "Unfortunately, there was one person standing in front of me," blocking the view, he said. It was an eccentric-looking man with a broad neck scarf and thick eyewear. Oddly, the man wasn't watching the painting get shredded. He was looking in the other direction, observing the crowd's reaction. Only later, reviewing what he shot, did Casterline notice that the man's glasses appeared to have a small camera built into the bridge. (Banksy later posted a video of the stunt, including shots of the astonished audience.) Having seen a photo of the man suspected of being Banksy, Casterline confirmed to Reuters that he was "pretty sure" it was the same man. But "I don't want to be the guy who exposes Banksy."
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The following is the transcript of the interview with National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on March 15, 2026.
Dolby Vision, HDR10, HDR10 Plus and HLG: Here's what every HDR format means and which one you should choose.
"Emerging evidence indicates that agential AI might validate or amplify delusional or grandiose content, particularly in users already vulnerable to psychosis," writes Dr Hamilton Morrin, a psychiatrist and researcher at King's College in London, in a paper published last week in the Lancet Psychiatry. Morrin and a colleague had already noticed patients "using large language model AI chatbots and having them validate their delusional beliefs," reports the Guardian, so he conducted a new scientific review of existing media reports on AI-induced psychosis — and concluded chatbots may encourage delusional thinking, especially in vulnerable people: In many of the cases in the essay, chatbots responded to users with mystical language to suggest that users have heightened spiritual importance. The bots also implied that users were speaking with a cosmic being who was using the chatbot as a medium. This type of mystical, sycophantic response was especially common in OpenAI's GPT 4 model, which the company has now retired... Many researchers also think it's unlikely that AI could induce delusions in people who weren't already vulnerable to them. For this reason, Morrin said "AI-assocciated delusions" is "perhaps a more agnostic term".... While in the past, people may have had to comb through YouTube videos or the contents of their local library to reinforce their delusions, chatbots can provide that reinforcement in a much faster, more concentrated dose. Their interactive nature can also "speed up the process", of exacerbating psychotic symptoms, said Dr Dominic Oliver, a researcher at the University of Oxford. "You have something talking back to you and engaging with you and trying to build a relationship with you," Oliver said... Creating effective safeguards for delusional thinking could be tricky, Morrin said, because "when you work with people with beliefs of delusional intensity, if you directly challenge someone and tell them immediately that they're completely wrong, actually what's most likely is they'll withdraw from you and become more socially isolated". Instead, it's important to create a fine balance where you try to understand the source of the delusional belief without encouraging it — that could be more than a chatbot can master.
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Oil could pass 2008 record of $147.50 a barrel as damage and field closures risk compounding supply shock caused by Iran war
About 20 miles off the coast of Iran lies the source of the petrostate’s economic lifeblood and the latest target of US military aggression: an 8 sq mile coral island through which nine in every 10 barrels of Iranian crude passes each day.
The US president’s decision to launch a weekend attack on Kharg Island, the home of Iran’s processing hub and the heart of its economy, is an unsurprising counterstrike to the Iranian regime’s ongoing chokehold on the oil market’s trade artery.
Continue reading...British negotiators ‘blindsided’ by Brussels’ demand for a reduction that could cost universities £140m a year
Britain is in a standoff with Brussels over a demand to cut university tuition fees for European students, in a row that threatens to scupper Keir Starmer’s planned EU reset.
EU officials say European students should pay “home” fees of about £9,500 a year in England and Wales as part of the negotiations over a youth mobility scheme, rather than the higher international rate, which can rise above £60,000. European students would also pay the domestic rate in Scotland, which is set at £1,820 a year, although most Scottish students qualify for free tuition. Fees for Irish students In Northern Ireland are generally capped at £4,855.
Continue reading...The luxury property surge fuels growth in Miami, but a poll finds many residents weighing an exit over housing and living costs
To a casual observer, everything in south Florida’s real estate garden is looking rosy. There’s a “gold rush” in Miami as ultra-wealthy buyers snap up mega-mansions and luxuriously appointed condos as soon as they hit the market; and the Guardian has also reported recently on the “Mamdani effect” of elite New Yorkers arriving in the sunshine state with bulging pocketbooks in search of a high-priced escape from the city’s new mayor.
Yet alongside the boom, there are rumblings of a more troubling parallel reality. Undoubtedly, the billionaire class is helping to pump even more dollars into an already thriving Florida economy. But as prices rise and the less affluent find everything from housing and insurance to gas and groceries increasingly expensive, many are considering doing something about it.
Continue reading...There's a surprise in a new documentary about that Bigfoot film shot in 1967 by Roger Patterson, reports the Wall Street Journal. Capturing Bigfoot "builds to a big reveal: freshly surfaced film that appears to show a woodsy dress rehearsal for one of the world's most enduring hoaxes." In the new footage — from a Kodak reel dating to 1966 — Patterson's camera tracks a man in costume, his brother-in-law, moving in a similar fashion to the figure in the 1967 shoot, which featured a different location and a bigger man with a more distinctive stride, according to the documentary. The test-run footage "is the work of a director with a vision," says Capturing Bigfoot director Marq Evans. He says the reel was given to him by a colleague at Olympic College in Bremerton, Wash., where Evans runs a documentary film program. The colleague found the film in a safe that belonged to her late father, who worked in a Boeing film lab and could have developed film discreetly. With the long-buried footage in hand, Evans set out to explore the ripple effects from the Bigfoot film. Patterson, who died in 1972, hailed from the same region of Washington as Evans; the documentarian discovered that the hardscrabble cowboy had also been a gifted craftsman and artist. Patterson illustrated a self-published book, "Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist?", and set out to make a wildlife movie that would feature the ultimate trophy footage. He and his collaborators inadvertently helped spawn "this massive culture and industry" around the Bigfoot legend, Evans says... Roger Paterson presented his footage to America in a traveling show that crisscrossed the nation and climaxed with the hyped Bigfoot sequence on screen. The money poured in, leading to resentment among cohorts who felt they'd been shortchanged, none more so than Bob Gimlin, Patterson's wingman in the field during the infamous shoot.. [Roger's son] Clint Patterson says his mother privately confirmed his suspicions that the family's claim to fame was bogus, but he kept quiet to protect their financial stream. About 10 years ago, when he first wanted to go public with the truth, his mother disowned him. Bigfoot was also a recurring character on the 1970s TV show The Six Million Dollar Man. Which kind of puts the whole thing in perspective...
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Tommy Thompson refused to give up the location of 500 missing coins found in 1988 in a historic shipwreck
A US treasure hunter who was imprisoned for 10 years after refusing to reveal the location of missing gold coins has been released from prison, without officials apparently ever learning where that gold is.
Tommy Thompson – a renowned salvager who in 1988 found the long-lost, so-called Ship of Gold near South Carolina – was freed from federal prison on 4 March, records and reports recently indicated.
Continue reading...Takaichi takes on Trump Expert comment jon.wallace
Iran adds a new layer of difficulty to an increasingly unstable US–Japan relationship, as the Japanese prime minister prepares to visit Washington.
If President Donald Trump is expecting effusive praise for his war on Iran when Japan’s prime minister arrives in Washington on Thursday, he is likely to be disappointed. Sanae Takaichi, re-elected in February in a landslide victory, says she intends to be ‘candid’ in pointing out that Japan’s oil-dependent economy is suffering badly from the conflict.
Takaichi, Japan’s first female prime minister, has won a remarkable mandate and is known for her conservative policies and forthright views. But she cannot afford to be cavalier about this White House visit. Oval Office encounters have become bear traps for many foreign leaders.
She will want reassurance about the US’s security umbrella, the cornerstone of Japanese foreign policy since 1945. Trump is likely to repeat instead his demand for Japan to pay more for its own defence.
That exacerbates the already difficult questions facing Japan: how assertive should it choose to be with China? And how can it make more of its other alliances around the world if the US has become a less reliable partner?
At a Ministry of Finance conference in Tokyo on 9 March, snow falling just days before the first cherry blossom is due, the impact of the US–Iran conflict injected new concern into an already difficult economic picture.
Japan is the fifth largest importer of oil in the world. 95 per cent of that comes from the Middle East. And prices are spiking as supplies are stuck in the Strait of Hormuz, with the weakness of the yen increasing the import bill further.
This potential hit to growth comes as Takaichi plans a 21.3 trillion yen ($134 billion) investment programme to stimulate the economy that is already worrying investors. Bond yields reached record highs in January, reflecting that new concerns have been added to long-standing ones about Japan’s ability to carry its debt with an ageing population.
Takaichi, like other prime ministers (the UK’s included), is finding that a war in which her country has no part is driving up the cost of living and potentially, despite her recent electoral victory, driving down her ratings too.
Takaichi will want to use the good rapport she struck up with the US president at a meeting in October to make the point about the impact of the war on other countries.
After a week of exultant rhetoric from Trump and US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth about killing Iranian leaders, that may strike a jarring note. She is likely to emphasize Japan’s considerable new commitments: accelerating a target to reach 2 per cent of GDP on defence spending, a pledge to develop aerial defences as part of Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ missile defence plan, and an agreement to invest $550 billion in the US in return for lowering tariffs from 25 per cent to 15 per cent last year.
So far, so predictable. The interest for the wider world hangs more on their exchanges about China. Takaichi provoked a furious response from Beijing when she declared in November that if China moved to take over Taiwan, it could prompt a military response from Japan.
That is little more than a repetition of Japan’s established stance. But China’s fury was audible at the Munich Security Conference in February when Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat, after a stately, scripted speech about relations with the US, lashed out at Japan in answer to a final question, proclaiming it ‘a militaristic nation’ and invoking Pearl Harbour.
Takaichi will want to probe Trump’s stance towards China. Many in the region question whether the US lacks the resources or desire to contest China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea – let alone Taiwan. Japan has noted – as have other regional leaders – that the two US destroyers normally based in Japan were in the Arabian sea last week, according to the US Naval Institute.
Her encounter with Trump comes just two weeks before he visits President Xi in China, a visit whose lack of prepared agenda and unpredictability is attracting widespread comment in the region.
China is balancing the value of US distraction – as Iraq and Afghanistan showed – with Trump’s unpredictability and apparently growing taste for sudden military action.
For Japan, these considerations mark a decisive if unwanted shift in its relations with the US and its wider foreign policy. The US’s defence protection has underpinned Japan’s profound post-Second World War pacifist stance.
Japanese governments had gradually been toughening that stance given China’s expansion of claims in neighbouring waters – but Trump’s conviction that allies have been free-riding on the US and must now pay more has brought an acceleration of that movement.
There is an urgency in Japan’s government about the need to look for more allies, on both economic and security fronts, to uphold the rules-based international order which it has supported and needs.
China’s economic coercion – threatening to withhold critical minerals from companies if they do not relocate to China or from the country overall if it objects to its policy – has led to recent new minerals deals with Australia.
Japan’s role in the CPTPP trade group, where it stepped into the leadership when the US quit, is one prime tool, particularly given the rising influence of Canada (another CPTPP member) in searching for new alliances.
Colossal Biosciences’ CEO says its work follows a ‘moral obligation’ while critics say it’s ‘tech bro’ hype that could undermine conservation
Can and should we resurrect animal species that have been extinct for thousands of years? Such weighty, existential questions were once the preserve of science fiction but are now being played out within an unassuming brick building in a Dallas business park.
Colossal Biosciences, valued at $10.2bn after raising hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from investors including celebrities spanning from Tiger Woods to Paris Hilton, has provoked a stampede of acclaim as well as denunciation after announcing last year it had made the dire wolf, a species lost from the world for more than 10,000 years, “de-extinct” via the birth of three new pups.
Continue reading...Experts query ‘mix-up of priorities’ as president plays golf, posts old pictures and repeats details of Bill Maher feud
More than two weeks into the US-Israel war on Iran, and the conflict appears at risk of spiraling out of control.
Back home, Donald Trump’s behavior also appears chaotic. A foreign conflict typically brings somber reflection from leaders: in Trump’s case, it has brought a stream of behavior that has defied norms and raised eyebrows over his state of mind.
Continue reading...A split-screen response shows how Pope Leo is navigating a minefield as the Trump administration projects American nativism at home and deadly force overseas.
Brendan Carr posts that he may cancel spectrum permits of ‘mainstream news’ outlets for ‘misleading’ coverage
The Trump administration’s communications licensing chief fired a warning shot over the US broadcasting industry on Saturday, threatening to cancel the spectrum permits of broadcasters pushing what he termed “hoaxes and news distortions”.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair Brendan Carr posted on social media that broadcasters running “fake news – have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up. The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”
Continue reading...First major study on ‘AI psychosis’ suggests chatbots can encourage delusions among vulnerable people
A new scientific review raises concerns about how chatbots powered by artificial intelligence may encourage delusional thinking, especially in vulnerable people.
A summary of existing evidence on artificial intelligence-induced psychosis was published last week in the Lancet Psychiatry, highlighting how chatbots can encourage delusional thinking – though possibly only in people who are already vulnerable to psychotic symptoms. The authors advocate for clinical testing of AI chatbots in conjunction with trained mental health professionals.
Continue reading...Network has faced Trump’s ire and Pleitgen has faced criticism, but it is ‘better to be on the ground’ he says
Frederik Pleitgen, CNN’s senior international correspondent, had a pretty normal Thursday evening – at home in Berlin with his family, he walked his two Rhodesian Ridgeback dogs and spent some time with his two teenagers.
That return to normalcy came after spending a week in war-torn Iran as the only western television correspondent given a visa to report from the country.
Continue reading...He is stuck in a quagmire. His goals are elusive. His bombing does not force a surrender. He has no exit strategy. Good morning, Vietnam
Donald Trump is lost in his fog of war. He compounds confusion with improvised fabrications as his naive expectation of a lightning victory has been sunk in the strait of Hormuz. Iran, he felt certain, would easily follow the “perfect scenario” of Venezuela, accede to naming a leader who would instantly do his bidding, and there would be no disruption of the oil markets – “a strong gameplan”, stated Karoline Leavitt, his White House press secretary, who defends each of his changeable excuses with equal ferocity.
There may be few if any facts underlying the delusions upon which Trump constructs his vapid explanations and evanescent strategies. The belief that coherent sense can be made out of Trump’s shuffling words is a weakness of the rational mind that refuses to accept the impulses of the inveterate demagogue for what they are. Searching for reason in the jungle of Trump’s tales may compel hopelessly sensible people to superimpose logic where there is none in order to satisfy the need for some semblance of soundness.
Continue reading...On the afternoon of Sept. 9, 2024, Cherise Doyley was in her 12th hour of contractions at University of Florida Health in downtown Jacksonville when a nurse came in with a bedsheet and told her to cover up. A supervisor brought a tablet to Doyley’s bedside. Gathered on the screen were a judge in a black robe and several lawyers, doctors and hospital staff.
“It’s a real judge in there?” Doyley asked the nurse at the beginning of what would be a three-hour hearing. “Now this is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Doyley hadn’t asked for the hearing. The hospital had sought it. Doyley had mere minutes to prepare. She had no lawyer and no advocate — no one to explain to her what, exactly, was going on.
Judge Michael Kalil informed her that the state had filed an emergency petition at the hospital’s behest — not out of concern for Doyley, per se, but in the interest of her unborn child. He described the circumstances as “extraordinary.”
The hospital and state attorney’s office wanted to force Doyley to undergo a cesarean section. Doyley, a professional birthing doula, didn’t want that and had been firm about it. She’d had three prior C-sections, one that resulted in a hemorrhage, and hoped to avoid another serious complication and lengthy recovery. She was aware that doctors were concerned about the risk of uterine rupture, a potentially deadly complication for her and her baby. She would say during the hearing that she understood the risk to be less than 2% and didn’t want to agree to a C-section unless there was an emergency.
But the choice would not be hers. The judge would decide how she would give birth.
Mentally competent patients typically have the right to choose their medical care — or refuse it. But there is one notable exception: pregnant patients. That inconsistency is particularly striking in Florida, a state that has pushed to expand medical freedom for those who wish to avoid vaccines or fluoridated water, while constricting the rights of people in various stages of pregnancy.
“There aren’t any other instances where you would invade the body of one person in order to save the life of another,” said Lois Shepherd, a bioethics expert at the University of Virginia School of Law.
In Florida and many other states, court-ordered medical procedures are just one of the ways pregnant patients’ rights are restricted. The effort to chip away at those rights is rooted in the concept of fetal personhood — that a fetus has equal and, in some cases, more rights than the woman sustaining it.
The link between fetal personhood and court-ordered C-sections dates back to the 1980s, when courts started ruling that hospitals can override patients’ decisions in favor of the health of unborn children.
In the years since, proponents of fetal personhood began to push for even broader legal protections. In 1986, Minnesota was the first state to recognize fetuses as victims in homicide cases. Some states have imprisoned pregnant women for exposing their fetuses to drugs. Nearly 30 states have passed laws that allow hospitals to invalidate pregnant patients’ advance directives, which outline the kinds of life-sustaining treatment a person wants after a catastrophic illness or accident. At least one, Alabama, extended the concept of personhood all the way to the earliest stages of fertilization and conception by giving frozen embryos the same legal status as children, though the Legislature later said the law couldn’t be enforced.
And the fetal personhood movement has accelerated in the past several years, supercharged by the U.S. Supreme Court decision to reverse the abortion rights that had been protected by Roe v. Wade.
Florida has long been at the forefront of fetal personhood policies. The state was one of the first in the country to prosecute a woman for “delivering” drugs to her fetus during pregnancy in 1989, although the Florida Supreme Court later overturned her conviction. And after advocates twice failed to get a fetal personhood amendment on the state ballot, the Legislature is now considering a bill that would enshrine the concept in state law by giving embryos and fetuses the same legal status as people in wrongful death suits.
For women in labor, the potential impact of the bill is clear: Experts anticipate their medical needs could be further diminished in favor of the fetuses’.
Several legal experts told ProPublica they are alarmed by Doyley’s case and the legislation’s potential to allow for more court interventions during childbirth. Lawyers who represent women in fetal personhood cases already have identified a higher number of forced C-sections in Florida than other states.
The state attorney’s office for the 4th Judicial Circuit declined to comment on Doyley’s case, saying a response would violate her medical privacy. But in an email, a spokesperson noted why, in general, the office would intervene: “The courts have held that the State has a compelling interest in the preservation of the life of an unborn child and the protection of innocent third parties who may be harmed by the parental refusal to allow or consent to life-saving medical treatment.”
C-sections account for nearly a third of all deliveries in the United States. They can be necessary when babies are breech, or in the wrong position for birth, as well as in cases of maternal or fetal emergency. But in other cases, such as slow laboring or prior C-sections, the need for the surgery is less clear.
Surveys have found that more than 10% of women feel pressured into C-sections and other procedures by doctors worried about injuries to the baby. Patients generally don’t challenge doctors who say they’re necessary, and it is uncommon for someone to hold out and for the hospital to turn to the courts.
It is so rare, in fact, that advocates for the rights of pregnant women were shocked to discover that the same thing that happened to Doyley had happened to another Florida woman just a year and a half earlier.
The similarities in their cases were striking. Both women had three prior C-sections. They had questioned the need for their previous surgeries and arrived prepared to fight for vaginal births. And both women are Black.
They had argued that compelling them to have C-sections violated their rights to make medical decisions. Hospital staff said their medical decisions threatened the health of the fetus. It would be up to the courts to decide which one mattered more.
Asked to consider the constitutionality of court-ordered C-sections, the U.S. Supreme Court declined in 1994, leaving a patchwork of decisions that vary by state.
In the early 1980s, a hospital in Georgia won a court order to force a woman with a dangerous pregnancy complication to have a C-section. Then, in 1987, a judge in Washington, D.C., approved a request to perform surgery on a pregnant woman dying from cancer without her consent. Later, a higher court reversed that ruling and held that hospitals should not override medical decisions. An Illinois appellate court in 1993 refused to order a woman to undergo a C-section.
Not long after, a patient named Laura Pemberton, who did not want a C-section, left a hospital in Tallahassee, Florida, against medical advice. A local judge sent law enforcement to her house to bring her back. Once she returned to the hospital, the judge ordered her to have a C-section, which doctors carried out. She later sued in federal court and lost. The 1999 decision by a federal district judge found that the state had a right to override her wishes.
“Whatever the scope of Ms. Pemberton’s personal Constitutional rights in this situation, they clearly did not outweigh the interests of the State of Florida in preserving the life of the unborn child,” the decision said. The decision marked a legal turning point in prioritizing fetal rights over the religious freedom and bodily autonomy of the mother.
In 2009, Samantha Burton arrived at the same hospital at 25 weeks pregnant, after going into premature labor. Doctors told her she needed to remain on bed rest, but she wanted to leave and go home to her children. The hospital got a court order for her to remain in the hospital and undergo any treatment doctors deemed necessary to save the fetus. She had an emergency C-section, and the baby was stillborn.
She appealed the ruling granting the emergency order, and a Florida appeals court ruled in her favor. They said the circuit judge should have required the hospital to prove the baby was viable before imposing unwanted treatment, but the court stopped short of saying it was unacceptable to override the medical decisions of pregnant women in all situations.
Pregnancy is the only condition where Florida courts have ruled that a patient can be forced to undergo unwanted treatment. Even a state prisoner on a hunger strike has more rights to make medical decisions.
Those rulings give the state vast control over pregnant women.
“All of it essentially is about the state’s ability to decide that a fetus, at any point during a pregnancy, is more important than the person who’s pregnant,” said Rutgers University law professor Kimberly Mutcherson.
In March 2023, more than a year before Doyley’s court-ordered C-section, Brianna Bennett arrived in labor at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital — the same hospital where the women in the 1999 and 2009 lawsuits had given birth.
Over the preceding years, Bennett had come to question the medical reasoning behind her three prior C-sections. Each recovery had been harder than the last, leaving her so incapacitated after the third that for two weeks she couldn’t even go to the bathroom without help.
At the time Bennett went into labor with her fourth, her mother’s hip problems had gotten so bad that she needed a wheelchair and required some help from Bennett to function. Bennett did not think she could care for all her family members while in recovery from abdominal surgery, so she insisted on trying for a vaginal birth.
Tallahassee Memorial Hospital had specialists on staff and a neonatal intensive care unit equipped to serve critically ill babies. Bennett believed it offered the kind of support she needed to be able to follow her birth plan. The hospital has handled a lot of high-risk pregnancies.
As Bennett’s labor stretched past 24 hours, a doctor confronted her about agreeing to a C-section, Bennett said. She continued to refuse, so the hospital reached out to the state attorney. In an email, Jack Campbell, state attorney for the 2nd Judicial Circuit, responded that the court needed to act quickly.
“I plan to file an emergency motion with the Court to allow TMH to take whatever steps medically necessary to protect the life of the child and mother,” he wrote.
During the hearing, 15 to 20 people squeezed into Bennett’s hospital room. As would later happen with Doyley, she found herself in front of a tablet with a judge on the screen.
Bennett said she found it offensive that so many people were concerned about the method of her delivery without taking into consideration how difficult it would be to take care of both herself and her baby while recovering from a C-section. “Are any of you gonna help me bathe or shower? Are you gonna help change my pad? Are you gonna help lift the baby out of the bed and put me in the bed because I can’t lift my legs? Is anyone going to help me?”
Campbell told ProPublica that he felt the hearing was necessary to save two lives, Bennett’s and her baby’s. “I’m real comfortable with what we did here,” Campbell said. “I hate the fact that she’s upset about it.”
A spokesperson for Tallahassee Memorial Hospital declined to comment on Bennett’s case, even though she signed a waiver allowing the hospital to do so. “We will not be able to discuss specific patients or cases,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. The hospital did not respond to questions about its history of seeking court intervention in multiple women’s medical decisions while giving birth.
Bennett said she tried to remain calm, but inside she was panicking. During the hearing, her baby’s heart rate spiked. The judge ordered her to have a C-section, and doctors wheeled her into surgery. The operation lasted two and a half hours and the surgical team had to cut around existing scar tissue and avoid her bladder. Her incision looked like an upside-down T and required a wound vac, a portable machine that helps incisions close more quickly.
She said a doctor who visited her room during recovery told her she should never get pregnant again, according to a civil rights complaint filed with federal regulators.The complaint is still under investigation, but lawyers for Bennett said they haven’t heard from investigators in more than a year. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not comment on the complaint.
“I cried every single day,” Bennett said. “I felt like I was supposed to be happy. I’m supposed to be thankful that I have a new life and that the Lord has blessed me to see this new baby. And I’m not even happy.”
A year and a half later in Jacksonville, Doyley faced a situation eerily similar to Bennett’s.
She noted as her hearing began that she was the only Black person on the screen. About a dozen faces, most of them white, had gathered to challenge her medical decisions. She said it made her feel as if her race had something to do with the fact that she was thrust into the intrusive hearing.
“I have 20 white people against me, and because I am informed and I am making an informed decision, they are trying to take my rights away from me by force,” Doyley told the people on the screen, requesting a Black nurse or doctor.
“I don’t find that race really has much to do with this, ma’am,” the judge responded.
Dr. Erin Burnett said during the hearing that she did not think Doyley could successfully give birth vaginally because she had a history of stalled labors. A long labor after prior C-sections could increase the risk of uterine rupture, which could kill Doyley and the child, she said.
She said the baby’s heart rate showed some signs of distress and told Doyley it would be better to have a C-section before it became an emergency. If the baby’s heart stopped or if she lost oxygen during delivery, the baby could suffer a brain injury or death.
Dr. John Davis, the chair of the obstetrics and gynecology department, testified that the hospital had been recognized for its low C-section rate and did not perform unnecessary surgeries. Doyley’s condition required intervention, he said.
Burnett and Davis did not respond to requests for comment, and the hospital declined ProPublica’s requests to interview them and others involved in Doyley’s care. Doyley signed a waiver allowing the hospital to discuss her case with ProPublica, but a spokesperson for University of Florida Health in Jacksonville would not comment, citing patient privacy. Nor did the hospital respond to questions about Doyley’s claim that race played a role in the decision to involve the court.
The research on the risks of uterine rupture after prior C-sections is unclear. Studies have found that 0.15% to 2.3% of these labors resulted in a rupture, depending on a number of factors such as body mass, a history of successful vaginal births and whether the labor was spontaneous or had to be induced.
Doyley, who felt comfortable with her odds and wanted to continue laboring, argued during the hearing that C-sections carry their own dangers — including a risk of death.
“A lot of that comes from medical negligence and medical racism, where we have a group of white doctors that think that they know what is best for Black bodies and Black babies,” Doyley said in the hearing.
Both the doctors and Doyley mentioned recommendations from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. However, neither one cited the organization’s stance on court-ordered C-sections, which the group has deemed to be “ethically impermissible.”
After three hours of testimony — all while Doyley lay in her hospital bed — the judge ruled that she could keep laboring unless there was an emergency. If that happened, the hospital could operate, whether she wanted it or not. The judge would reconvene the hearing in the morning.
In response to questions from ProPublica, Kalil wrote in an email that the judicial code of conduct prohibits judges from commenting on cases. “These ethical standards exist to protect the integrity of the judicial process, ensure fairness to all parties, and preserve the Court’s neutrality,” he wrote.
Overnight, doctors said the baby’s heart rate dropped for seven minutes. Doyley woke to her hospital bed being wheeled into surgery. She called out to her sister who was asleep in the hospital room.
“I had to tell her, ‘Hey, wake up,’” Doyley said. “‘Something is going on.’ She’s trying to put on her shoes. I’m like, ‘Girl, leave the shoes. Let’s go.’”
Doyley recalled reciting a short prayer as her sister scrambled into the operating room. The baby was delivered by C-section. Although Doyley’s daughter was initially limp, she perked up and became responsive within a few minutes. Doctors took her to the NICU while Doyley went to recover. And to get ready to face the judge again.
At the 8 a.m. hearing, Doyley looked pained and groggy. She told the judge she still hadn’t been allowed to see her daughter and asked if he could help. A doctor testified that the baby had been brought to the NICU in respiratory distress and placed on a continuous positive airway pressure machine to help with her breathing.
Kalil said he couldn’t order the hospital to do anything. The matter he had been appointed to hear involved only her unborn baby. He had no authority over the child in the nursery.
Kalil wished her well and quickly closed the case.
The post They Didn’t Want to Have C-Sections. A Judge Would Decide How They Gave Birth. appeared first on ProPublica.
The Food and Drug Administration on March 10 changed the approval for a version of the prescription drug leucovorin to include people with a very rare genetic condition. FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary had previously implied that the drug’s new label would cover a much broader group of people with autism, saying that “hundreds of thousands of kids” would benefit.
The condition targeted in the FDA approval is a genetic version of cerebral folate deficiency, caused by mutations in a folate receptor gene. People with CFD — whether from genetic or other causes — have low levels of folate in their cerebrospinal fluid, which leads to reduced folate in the brain. This affects brain development. Patients with genetic CFD can experience developmental delays, movement disorders and seizures. Some behaviors are similar to those with autism.
However, this form of genetic CFD is estimated to occur in 1 in a million people, according to the FDA. That would translate to around 70 kids in the U.S. — far from “hundreds of thousands of kids.” Leucovorin had already been used for decades to treat genetic CFD via off-label prescribing, a common practice when evidence shows a drug approved for one condition improves another.
Despite this limited approval, Makary had initially implied a more substantial change. “Today the FDA is filing a Federal Register notice to change the label on an exciting treatment called prescription leucovorin so that it can be available to children with autism,” Makary said in a Sept. 22 press conference. “We are going to change the label to make it available,” he went on to say. “Hundreds of thousands of kids, in my opinion, will benefit.”
This was the same press conference in which President Donald Trump and others touted an unproven link between autism and the use of Tylenol, or acetaminophen, during pregnancy.
Makary later referred to a subset of people with autism with antibodies that block their own folate receptors, called autoantibodies. Some researchers have hypothesized that a subset of people with autism have CFD caused by these autoantibodies, but this is not well-established, as we will explain.
The FDA “is approving prescription leucovorin for treatment of autistic children,” Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said at the same event. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the treatment “may benefit large numbers of children who suffer from autism.” He had previously vowed by September to identify “what has caused the autism epidemic.”
The Federal Register notice Makary referred to described data on the rare genetic form of CFD, however. The notice also stated that data on leucovorin for people who have symptoms with “autistic features” along with antibodies targeting the receptor “is limited” and that “additional studies are needed.”
The then-head of the FDA’s drugs division, Dr. George Tidmarsh, also subsequently clarified that the new indication was the rare genetic one. “We’re not proposing to approve leucovorin for [people with] the diagnosis of autism,” he told the autism publication the Transmitter in an interview for a story published Oct. 2.
When asked this week about the discrepancy between Makary’s earlier comments about broad benefits for kids with autism and the ultimate FDA approval for a rare genetic condition, a spokesperson from the Department of Health and Human Services told us that Makary previously had been talking about an antibody-related form of CFD, and not the rare genetic disorder.
“Dr. Makary was referring to cerebral folate deficiency — which can be caused by antibodies blocking folate receptors — rather than cerebral folate transport deficiency, which is caused by a specific genetic mutation,” the HHS spokesperson wrote in an email.
However, as we’ve said, the idea that a large subset of people with autism have CFD and can benefit from leucovorin has not been well-established.
“There is no substantive evidence that cerebral folate deficiency (CFD) plays a role in the pathogenesis of autism,” two researchers with expertise in folate and cancer treatment wrote in a January perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine. They also said that despite claims that antibodies against folate receptors play a role in autism, most experts consider this conclusion to be “inconclusive.” They added that the presence of the antibodies doesn’t necessarily mean that folate is low in the cerebrospinal fluid, which is the defining feature of CFD.
The new approval was for GSK’s Wellcovorin, a brand-name version of leucovorin that has long been off patent and that is no longer made by the company. Leucovorin remains available in generic versions. It is mainly used for cancer patients alongside certain chemotherapy regimens to reduce toxicity or to improve effectiveness.
While clarifying that Makary’s remarks about broad benefits applied to a different form of CFD, the HHS spokesperson also said that the rare genetic form of CFD “was the focus of the September announcement about this drug.”
But during the Sept. 22 press conference and subsequent media appearances, Makary repeatedly emphasized potentially sweeping benefits of the new leucovorin label.
“For many kids with autism, it will provide some improvement in their symptoms, and for some subset, marked improvement,” Makary said in a Sept. 22 NewsNation interview, urging people to talk to their doctors. “There are 2.5 million kids suffering, and I hope hundreds of thousands of them will see some improvement with this new treatment that we’re going to approve in about two to three weeks,” he went on to say.
“I think the biggest story today was that the FDA is taking action to make leucovorin available to kids with cerebral folate deficiency,” he told ABC News that same day. “That may be 20% to 50% of kids with severe autism, and they have a clinical improvement in studies.” In a Sept. 25 interview on C-Span, he gave an even larger estimate, saying “we are going to approve a drug called leucovorin for the treatment of autism” and that it “may help 50% or 60% of kids with autism.”
There is very limited evidence to support the assertion that wide groups of kids with autism could benefit, as we wrote in September. David S. Mandell, a psychiatry professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and director of the Penn Center for Mental Health, told us then that the evidence on leucovorin “as a treatment for autism is very weak.”
Other researchers told the Transmitter in September that the literature on autism and leucovorin was “meager” and that it would be “extremely premature” for the administration to recommend the treatment for autism.
“These leucovorin studies are small, lack validated biomarkers or outcome measures, and certainly are not generalizable to all children with autism,” Dr. Shafali Jeste, a neurologist at UCLA, told the Transmitter. “The over-simplified conclusions and media hype from these studies take advantage of vulnerable families who are searching for answers and hope.”
At the time, this evidence included a small collection of studies that looked at the impact of leucovorin on communication and other characteristics in children with autism. One of these studies — among the largest, with 80 participants recruited — has since been retracted due to concerns about its data and statistical analysis, according to a notice on the journal website. Another of the studies had been terminated for “investigator non-compliance,” although the authors still published results.
“Larger, well-designed, multisite trials using objective outcome measures are necessary to determine whether leucovorin is safe and effective in autism and in which subgroups it may be most beneficial for,” says an FAQ page from the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Despite these uncertainties and the lack of a broad approval, people appear to have heeded Makary’s advice to talk to their doctors about leucovorin. New outpatient prescriptions of the drug increased by 71% in children ages 5 and older in the first couple of months following the September announcement, according to a study published March 5 in the Lancet.
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The post No Broad Autism Approval for Leucovorin, Despite FDA Commissioner’s Prior Suggestions appeared first on FactCheck.org.
Key Democrats in Congress are, once again, vaguely opposing a war instead of forcefully opposing it on moral or ideological grounds. Just as Democratic leadership slow-rolled a war powers vote for two weeks after President Donald Trump began amassing his armada to attack Iran, and four days after the bombing was underway, Democrats are refusing to speak out clearly against the war, instead resigning themselves to process-based criticism and demands for “more information” and “plans.”
With strong indications that Trump may soon send ground troops, we are long past the time for begging to see the “plans.” Democrats need to forcefully call for an end to this war now.
Still, this “We need to see Trump’s plans for Iran” talking point has taken hold, either through top-down messaging discipline or a very unfortunate series of coincidences. Democrats in the House and Senate have been echoing some version of this line for the past week:
This messaging often comes after closed-door briefings with Congress, followed by a consternating Democrat in front of a camera lamenting a lack of a “plan” or “exit strategy.” Let us examine this clip, for example, of Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., as he “demands answers” and does a lot of posturing and Plan-Mongering but, strangely, never actually says the war is wrong and should end immediately.
On Thursday, Democratic Reps. Yassamin Ansari, Sara Jacobs, and Jason Crow released a 1,100-word letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demanding accountability for war crimes committed in Iran that makes no demand to end the war causing the war crimes.
Similar to the Biden White House’s strategy of demanding Israel “allow in more aid” in Gaza while continuing to arm and fund the destruction of Gaza, there’s a surplus of performative outrage and handwringing over the logical outcome of the war without opposing the war causing the war crimes in question. Countless other Democrats are repeating this script with varying degrees of normative content, but typically without much at all, instead keeping the conversation purely in the realm of process and strategy.
“[President Trump has] not shown us any plans for what he wants to do for the day after,” Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-N.V., told reporters earlier in the week. “We have to have a plan,” Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., said to NOTUS on Tuesday. “I’m still not convinced that the administration has a plan to execute the rest of the war and have an exit strategy.”
Some of those pushing this line may argue that we can make process criticisms and demand an end to the war. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach –– and some have done it –– for the vast majority, this is simply not the case. The only message that’s pushed out to the public is the how and when of the war, not the fact of it.
An extension of this messaging is a call for “hearings” or “investigations” on the war. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is aggressively pushing this line, telling reporters earlier this week that “the story from the administration changes by the hour.”
“When it comes to sending our service members into harm’s way, the American people need to understand why,” he said. “But right now, they don’t even have a ‘why.’ … That needs to change. We need testimony. We need accountability.”
This war is not an abstract policy proposal up for debate at the Oxford Union Society that requires further deliberation.
It’s unclear why anyone needs “testimony.” The war is illegal, immoral, killing countless Iranians, and needs to end immediately. The implication in this constant Plan-Mongering is that some brilliant Aaron Sorkin speech from Hegseth or Marco Rubio in front of Congress would somehow change these underlying basic facts. This is a criminal war being carried about by openly violent racists and needs to stop at once. It is not an abstract policy proposal up for debate at the Oxford Union Society that requires further deliberation.
“Senate Democrats vow to force Iran war votes if Republicans don’t hold hearings,” an exclusive from Semafor informed us on Tuesday. “Senate Democrats are threatening to force repeated votes on President Donald Trump’s war with Iran unless Republicans agree to hold committee hearings about the ongoing war,” the report continued.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., did make a clear statement in the Semafor article against the war, saying, “Now is the time for Democrats to use all the leverage we have to try to stop this unnecessary war.” But this is an outlier in these Plan-Mongering PR roll outs. Indeed, the entire premise that Democrats would force more war powers votes unless “Republicans hold hearings” is nonsensical. If the war powers votes are meaningful leverage, why not use them to make a clear, consistent moral case to the public, rather than indulge the idea this is an unsettled debate to be hashed out in drawn-out hearings? What more is there to learn? The war is illegal, unjust, and immoral. What functional purpose would hearings serve, other than to mine for viral content of Dems Owning Trump Administration Officials?
It’s true that every Democrat in the Senate — save for Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman — supported a war powers resolution on March 4. And while this would have triggered congressional authority to vote for or against war with Iran, it is not, itself, a vote against war — it is an assertion of Congress’s authority to decide the matter. This conditional element, combined with the fact that its failure in both the Senate and House was likely a fait accompli, permitted Democrats to be on the record as appearing to oppose the war without running afoul of the pro-war, pro-Israel lobby.
The Plan-Mongering strategy is being promoted by centrist, corporate, and billionaire-funded groups like Third Way.
It’s telling that the Plan-Mongering strategy is being promoted by centrist, corporate, and billionaire-funded groups like Third Way, who released talking points detailing how Democrats should talk about the war on the first day of the bombing, the substance of which is an almost carbon copy of how top Democrats have subsequently spoken about it.
“President Trump is refusing to answer a number of grave and urgent questions,” leads off the memo, which proceeds to lay out the familiar talking points: Is Iran truly an imminent threat? (The answer, one assumes, is TBD.) Why did Trump tell us in an address to the nation in June that Iran’s nuclear assets had been “completely and totally obliterated”? Is this a “Wag the Dog” war? Is this a war for regime change? (Again, the normative substance remains elusive.) Why has Congress been bypassed? The memo ends with this muddled statement of support but skepticism about process: “We strongly support our troops and hope this mission succeeds. But these unanswered questions mean we don’t know what success looks like, and that should deeply worry every American.”
What’s missing is a clearly articulated message against the war, or any demand to end it now. Instead, a “hope the mission succeeds,” and a lot of hand-wringing, deflections, and concerns that Congress is being left out of the war. The influential liberal group National Security Action released similar, if marginally better, process-focused talking points last week in their “messaging guide.” While the guide conditionally opposes new funding, it still makes no demand to end the war immediately, instead suggesting Democrats should refuse to fund it until “Donald Trump makes clear how and when we are getting out of this reckless war.”
What’s missing is a clearly articulated message against the war, or any demand to end it now.
Rather than a clear objection to funding this illegal and immoral war in any form, these talking points continue to leave open the possibility Democrats could support it, if only there was an acceptable “plan.” Central to this incoherent messaging is the implication that there exists a “plan” Trump could proffer that would satisfy Democrats. And if that’s the case, after the 900th demand by Democrats that he produce one, one is left wondering: Why don’t the Democrats provide one, or at least a rough outline? What would a good “plan” for a surprise and unprovoked attack on Iran look like, exactly? What’s to stop Schumer’s office from offering one? What’s left unsaid is that there’s no plan in the universe that would justify this war of aggression that’s already killed over 1,300 civilians, including 200 children.
Those pushing this argument would likely make a pragmatism defense: These types of process critiques play better with the public, they might insist. But it’s unclear on what basis this could be said, as the war is already historically unpopular. Polls show the public overwhelmingly wants the war to end; they are not asking for more refined “plans” or “explanations” or “hearings.”
The real reason why this line is popular is almost certainly because it creates the appearance of unified party opposition while permitting those who soft-support the war to find something to criticize, namely the lack of a sufficiently good “plan.”
This focus on process criticism — which defined Democratic leaders Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries’s superficial response to the war in the immediate lead-up and first days of the war — does not build any moral narratives, or undermine the logic of regime change, which remains the bipartisan consensus, or run afoul of AIPAC and other major pro-Israel Democratic donors. But it may help placate Democratic voters who are overwhelmingly opposed to the war to the tune of 89 percent. When Democratic message-shapers are tasked with opposing a war without opposing the moral logic of the war, confusing and often contradictory process criticism is all they have left.
Democrats, as a minority party, could not unilaterally end the war if they wanted to, but this appeal to their powerlessness doesn’t tell the whole story. When the House voted on a separate war powers resolution the day after the Senate’s failed, four Democrats — Reps. Henry Cuellar, Jared Golden, Greg Landsman, and Juan Vargas — broke ranks and opposed it. Had they voted the party line, it would have passed due to two Republicans joining the effort, and the war would have likely ended — at least until a subsequent authorization vote took place.
When is Jeffries, the supposedly anti-war House minority leader, going to discipline these four pro-war Democrats who ruined the party’s nominal opposition to this war? So far, there have been no reports of any such measures, so we’re left to understand that opposing the war is important, but it’s not important-important. A potential upcoming vote on supplemental war funding should be more clarifying, with the potential to differentiate between real opposition and senators Who Just Want to Look Outraged. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., indicated he will oppose any more funding, while others, such as Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., have not ruled out more funding, ostensibly to “support the troops.” Jeffries, true to form as a party leader, refuses to say what he’ll support.
What generic Plan-Monger language does is permit seemingly genuine antiwar voices like Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., to run the same basic script of AIPAC stalwarts like Booker and Schumer. The “No Plan” sandbox provides cover for Democrats with a record of supporting Israel and being “tough on Iran” to appear anti-war without all the mess of saying anything substantive against the war.
A party that built its message around a strong, firm, and unequivocal case to end this war now would very suddenly draw attention to the undoubtedly dozens of congressional Democrats who would not echo this line. So what we get instead is limp process critiques, demanding pointless hearings, and bizarre attacks that Trump is not doing regime change fast enough. Polls repeatedly show the most common criticism of Democrats is not that they are too far left or too anti-war, but that they are too weak, that they don’t stand for anything.
Centering criticism of a deeply unpopular war on those carrying it out for not filling out the right paperwork or producing a satisfactory slideshow — rather than making clear, normative objections to a war of aggression — feeds directly into this perception. But perhaps it’s a perception Democratic leaders, and the pro-war, pro-Israel donors who fund their political careers, would prefer over the alternative.
Update: March 16, 2026
This article has been updated to clarify Rep. Jim McGovern’s stance on the Iran War.
The post Why Dems Keep Saying Trump Has “No Plan” Instead of Calling to End the War With Iran appeared first on The Intercept.
Concerns with Ozaki Scheme emulation have led AMD chip designers to conclude there’s currently no substitution for raw FP64 performance. To ensure the accuracy of traditional modeling and simulation workloads, AMD Fellow Nick Malaya tells HPCwire the company intends to keep pushing the envelope on native FP64 performance with its upcoming HPC-focused GPU, the Instinct MI430X, which will power the Discovery supercomputer going into Oak Ridge National Lab in 2028.
The Ozaki Scheme is a promising new emulation technique that is intended to enable scientists to perform high-precision matrix multiplication math using lower-precision hardware, traditionally on INT8 cores, but also on FP8 compute, as Katsuhisa Ozaki and two other Japanese researchers showed this week in a new paper. The scheme has been presented as a method to run traditional modeling and simulation workloads that would ordinarily require lots of FP64 performance instead to utilize the lower-precision performance that’s abundant as result of the AI boom.
While Ozaki theoretically sounds good, the current implementations of Ozaki-I and Ozaki-II have limitations that preclude its use in the real world, said Malaya, who is AMD’s technical lead for exascale application performance.
The Ozaki scheme has two main problems, Malaya said. First, the software is not IEEE compliant, and it does not provide the same answer as running the codes on actual FP64 hardware.
“In some cases, that’s okay,” he said. “But in a lot of matrices that are common that we’ve observed, the accuracy implications are pretty profound. In fact, you can give it matrices that differ by a few orders of magnitude in terms of the elements in the matrix…Ozaki has accuracy problems.”
Ozaki emulates higher-precision math using lower-precision cores (Shutterstock)
The second big problem with Ozaki revolves around its expectation for square matrices. If the HPC workload does not have square matrices, then the performance drops below native FP64 hardware, Malaya said.
HPC applications traditionally use vector computations as opposed to the tensor and matrix math that dominates AI. But fewer than 10% of HPC applications in the real world have made the changes to the double-precision general matrix–matrix multiplication (DGEMM) instructions that would let them benefit from Ozaki.
“You can’t, to my knowledge with Ozaki-I or Ozaki-II or any of the methods out there, apply that to the vector instructions,” Malaya said. “That’s a key nuance I think the community is missing, which is they say, ‘Oh, well, there’s a lot of compute in the DGEMM instructions. You can use Ozaki for it.’ Sure. That’s great. We have software that does that as well. There’s limitations to Ozaki, but it doesn’t address 90% of the HPC apps. That’s the big gap.”
AMD is going to support Ozaki emulation on its chips, Malaya said. “There’s no reason not to. It’s software. We can release it and support it. And you can have libraries that allow you to dynamically switch between the native and the Ozaki method and probably estimate it,” he said. “But we’re not finding it compelling as, ‘You can replace all the hardware pipes.’ You need those FP64 pipes to fall back onto.”
At the end of the day, Ozaki does not present a workable alternative to native FP64 performance, Malaya said. “I have serious concerns it is ready for a production-level HPC code,” he said. “I’m not the only one in the community saying that.”
Ozaki concerns have led AMD to the conclusion that there’s no substitute for native FP64 performance, at least for the foreseeable future. The company is currently developing the MI430X, which is a specialized version of its next-generation GPU, the MI450, that will feature a significant amount of native FP64 capacity, Malaya said.
AMD expects to ship the MI430X with the launch of Discovery in 2028 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Source: AMD)
Exactly how much FP64 capacity isn’t something that AMD is ready to share yet. However, Malaya said that it will feature substantially more FP64 capacity than its current data-center GPU, the MI355, which delivers 77 teraflops. That is actually down from its previous GPU, the MI325, which delivers 81.7 teraflops of FP64 capacity.
All of these chips–from the MI325 to the MI430–will have more FP64 capacity than Nvidia Blackwell, which offers 40 teraflops, or the upcoming Rubin GPU, which will offer 33 teraflops of FP64. Nvidia is leaning on Ozaki emulation to boost the FP64 capability of Blackwell to 150 teraflops and Rubin to 200 teraflops.
Nvidia justifies its reliance on Ozaki emulation by saying that adding more native FP64 capacity won’t actually speed up scientific applications, since they are bottlenecked by registers, caches, and HBM rather than raw compute.
“A balanced GPU design therefore provisions sufficient FP64 resources to saturate available memory bandwidth, avoiding over-allocation of compute capacity that cannot be effectively utilized,” the company wrote in a January blog post.
Rubin will deliver up to 22 TB per second of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) bandwidth, which is a 2.8x increase from Blackwell, which offers 8 TBps. AMD’s current MI355 GPU offers 8 TBps of HBM bandwidth, while the MI430X will have 19.6 TBps, Malaya said.
While Nvidia is offering much more HBM bandwidth rather than higher FP64 performance, AMD is taking a different approach. According to Malaya, it’s best to increase HBM and flops in lockstep.
ORNL’s Frontier uses AMD EPYC CPUs and MI250X GPUs.
“It’s really the byte-to-flop ratio that matters. From our perspective, we think you need to maintain a much closer ratio to what you’ve seen on current products,” he said. “You’d need to be a lot closer to that ratio in terms of increasing FP64 to keep the roofline profile, as they call it, the arithmetic intensity, the same.”
Since AMD will deliver a 2.5x increase in HBM bandwidth from the MI355 to the MI430X, a similar 2.5x increase in FP64 flops would also be warranted. Some simple arithmetic shows that, based on that 2.5x growth factor, the MI430X could sport anywhere between 192 teraflops and 204 teraflops of FP64 performance, depending on whether the newer MI355 or the faster MI325 is the baseline. This is just speculation, of course, as the company has not yet said how much FP64 capacity it will deliver in the new chiplet-based design.
FP64 is “very important” to the Genesis Mission, Department of Energy’s Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil said in an interview with HPCwire last month.
“In discussions I’ve had with both [AMD CEO] Lisa Su and with [Nvidia CEO] Jensen [Huang], they have expressed a strong commitment for FP64, that it will continue,” Gil said. “For us, it’s very important, because we don’t view this [as a] substitution.
FP64 is critical to supporting modeling and simulation workloads, not just to further traditional scientific exploration but also to provide the data feedstock for training emerging AI models, Gil said.
“You have the high-fidelity simulation codes that run with high precision. You use those, once validated, as the basis to generate training examples with which you train a surrogate model that you end up running on an AI supercomputer,” Gil said. “You end up with benefits in terms of productivity, in terms of time to solution, often 10x, 20x, 100x.”
AMD Fellow Nick Malaya is the exascale lead for application performance
The new generation of Department of Energy supercomputers, like Discovery, will feature a mix of FP64 and lower-precision capacity, Malaya said. Discovery is the new leadership-class supercomputer that the DOE announced in October. It will be a warm water-cooled HPE Cray GX5000 system that includes MI430X and “Venice” EPYC CPU, use an HPE Slingshot interconnect, and connect to the Cray K3000 storage system, which will use DAOS and Lustre parallel file systems.
“There’s always a balance how much FP64 do you need versus FP16,” Malaya said. “The contention from AMD is we need to support a range of data types based on their needs. It’s not going to just be everyone needs FP64 and that’s enough for everybody. It won’t work.”
While AI generally is happy with lower precision capacity, there are exceptions. Malaya points to AI-based protein folding simulations, like AlphaFold and Openfold, which use FP32. Meanwhile, some traditional HPC workloads, like molecular dynamics, don’t need the double precision of FP64.
But at the end of the day, there is still plenty of unmet demand for FP64, he said.
“For HPC, we think that they’re going to still need a lot of FP64,” he said. “There’ll be some codes that are just totally memory bandwidth [constrained] and they don’t need that much. But there’s ones like computational chemistry codes and some of these others that actually have a lot of arithmetic intensity and they’ll use it.
“It’s definitely something that’s going to depend on the basket of apps you care about,” Malaya continued. “And the thing that we find though is that you can get it wrong. If you under provision compute, you’ll be compute-bound when you’d otherwise not be. And that can really limit your performance.”
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The post AMD Hints at Big FP64 Increases in MI430X GPU as Ozaki Underwhelms appeared first on HPCwire.
Why Should Delaware Care?
Spotlight Delaware’s Breaking Bread Tour, launched this year, gives residents a chance to speak directly about issues affecting their communities. By bringing neighbors together around the same table, the discussion allows residents to highlight concerns that might not always appear in local government meetings or policy debates.
On Monday evening, more than 75 New Castle County residents gathered in the basement of a Wilmington church to eat a meal and discuss what they thought were the most pressing challenges for their community.
Their answers spanned a range of recent headline-grabbing issues, including affordable housing and homelessness; education funding; civic engagement and transparency in government; new federal policies under the Trump administration; and tax increases following Delaware’s recent property reassessment.
The event, hosted by Spotlight Delaware as part of its “Breaking Bread” tour, occurred at the Jefferson Street Center, located within Hanover Church building in Wilmington’s Baynard Village neighborhood.
The attendees shared a meal of spaghetti and meatballs while chatting in small groups. Each group was then asked to identify the issues that generated the most discussion at their tables.
For a group that included Wilmington resident Thea Lopez, the salient issues up for discussion stemmed from national actions by the Trump administration. She later told Spotlight Delaware that people in the state should break out of their different groups to address those themes.
“We all understand that there are all these different issues going around, but yet we still work in silos,” Lopez said.
During the dinner, the structure around Delaware’s schooling system was also discussed. One high school senior said frequent teacher turnover, a lack of challenging Advanced Placement courses and limited opportunities for student input negatively affects their learning environments.
Homelessness and the need for better coordination of services was another major topic. Some participants said that while churches and nonprofits regularly provide meals and shelter for the unhoused, there is no centralized system coordinating those efforts in Wilmington.
In the past, Wilmington officials have asserted that creating homeless shelters is a job for the state government, stating that the city’s main interventions are “law enforcement-based.”
Participants also raised concerns about transportation reliability, particularly changing bus routes that make it harder for residents to get to work, as well as challenges facing small businesses in areas such as Wilmington’s Hilltop where parking can limit access for customers.
The Breaking Bread tour aims to encourage community dialogue and identify the issues that matter most to residents. Spotlight Delaware will host additional Breaking Bread events in Kent and Sussex counties later this year.
The post At Wilmington dinner, residents share concerns about housing, schools and government transparency appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
The Israeli government is blocking medical workers from entering or leaving Gaza, twice canceling the departure of seven U.S.-based physicians on a medical mission there, according to a group of doctors in Gaza who spoke to The Intercept.
The temporary suspension of travel is the latest in a crushing set of restrictions that Israel has used to sever Gaza’s contact with the outside world, compounding food, fuel, and medical care shortages for a population subjected to more than two years of genocide. Large backlogs of patients in Gaza need specialized treatments and surgeries, so volunteer medical specialists come with much-needed supplies to relieve some of the demand.
“When you do something like this, it throws all of that to the wayside and we struggle with our ability to treat those patients,” said Dr. Thaer Ahmad, a Chicago-based physician who has previously volunteered in Gaza. “This continues to have really profound implications on Gaza’s most vulnerable people.”
Ahmad, who volunteered in early 2024 at Nasser and Al-Aqsa hospitals, has witnessed similar restrictions at other moments of high tension — past Israeli offensives against Iran, the collapse of past ceasefire deals, or the Israeli military’s siege of Gaza City last September. He has been denied entry into Gaza by the Israeli government four times since his medical mission, including in May 2024, when he and other doctors were turned away in Egypt as the Israeli military took over the Rafah border.
The restrictions in Gaza are set to be lifted next Tuesday, according to messages United Nations aid coordinators sent Wednesday announcing the blockades to dozens of NGOs, two of which confirmed to The Intercept the border closures were affecting their medical teams. Physicians who remain trapped inside the territory have cast doubt on whether the dates will be honored given the multiple postponements.
“There’s uncertainty around when we’re going to leave, are we going to leave? Are they going to try to push the dates even further?” said Dr. Salman Khan, an infectious diseases physician at Columbia University, who is among the trapped doctors.
Khan and six other American doctors were scheduled to return to the U.S. on March 10 following a two-week medical mission at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. The group has been blocked twice from leaving the territory, with Israel’s border security officials citing a “security assessment” without further explanation. The physicians also expressed frustration with the World Health Organization, noting that the international body was partly responsible for coordinating the doctors’ safe passage.
Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, the Israeli military unit that controls the borders between Palestine and Israel, confirmed it had closed crossings into Gaza “due to the ongoing missile threat” and said the restrictions are temporary and meant to protect people’s safety. It refuted claims that it was blocking doctors from leaving Gaza to harm its civilian population.
The World Health Organization did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.
Since the start of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, the military has weaponized blockades, preventing aid from entering the Strip, including food and medical supplies. In addition to systematically killing and imprisoning aid and medical workers throughout the war, the Israeli government has also blocked the movement of international medical missions, further straining an already decimated economy and health care system. Palestinians in the West Bank have also seen similar wartime blockades, including the lockdown of entire cities.
Despite the October deal between Israel and Hamas, the Israeli government has continued to impose limits on food and medical supplies from entering the Strip. In February, the government reopened its Rafah border crossing into Egypt, allowing some Palestinians to seek medical care outside of Gaza.
Once the U.S. and Israel began their war on Iran, the Israeli government once again shut all aid crossings into Gaza. Food has been allowed through a single border entry point — the Kerem Shalom crossing — but the amount of aid allowed in is well below what is needed, according to the United Nations. The Israeli government had already barred some NGOs earlier this year, such as Doctors Without Borders, from accessing Gaza after the organization refused the government’s new requirements of handing over lists of Palestinian employees due to concerns the government would target the workers.
Dr. Mimi Syed, an emergency room physician based in Olympia, Washington, also knows these restrictions firsthand. In August 2025, she was prevented from entering Gaza while waiting for approval in Jordan for her third medical aid trip. During her previous medical trips to the Strip, she witnessed entire convoys of international doctors who were barred from leaving Gaza.
The unpredictable and indefinite nature of the Israeli government’s restrictions hamper future medical missions, Syed said.
“Healthcare workers like myself have jobs in the US that are full-time and we have to get back to our jobs/families,” Syed told The Intercept. “It creates another form of logistical difficulties and prevents and discourages many of us from returning or even attempting to go in.”
The Palestinian American Medical Association, which is facilitating Khan’s trip to Gaza, and Humanity Auxilium, a Texas-based NGO that also organizes medical missions, told The Intercept the recent border closures have hurt their ability to move medical supplies and teams in and out of the territory.
“It really puts us in a limbo in figuring out when to deploy surgeons who cannot take off for weeks,” said Faiza Hussain, executive director of Humanity Auxilium.
Khan, who remains inside Gaza, said he’s had to cancel his patients’ appointments at Columbia’s Irving Medical Center in New York due to the delays.
“I was supposed to be back at work at my hospital today,” Khan said. “This is impacting people on the other side of the world.”
Khan added that some of his colleagues were anxious to return to their children. One of them was running low on their personal medications, having only packed enough for two weeks. The group of doctors includes anesthesiologists Ashraf Abou El-Ezz of Indiana and Anas Rahim of Texas, neonatologist Ahmed Faisal Saleem of Arizona, emergency medicine physician Aizad Dasti of Maryland, and vascular surgeon Asad Choudhry of New Jersey. One other physician did not wish to disclose their identity. They are continuing their volunteer work at Nasser Hospital as they wait out the blockade.
Although Israel’s attacks on Gaza have slowed since the start of the war on Iran, the Israeli military continues to launch strikes in the territory, in violation of the so-called ceasefire deal. In the first week of Khan’s medical mission, he recalled receiving trauma patients from an Israeli bombing on an encampment one mile from Nasser Hospital. A four-year-old girl died at the hospital from her wounds, he said.
After urging from Khan and advocates, the U.S. State Department had arranged flights for the doctors from Tel Aviv’s airport on Friday, Khan said, but has yet to clear a way for them to leave Gaza to make the flight.
In a statement sent after publication, a State Department spokesperson said that the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem was coordinating with COGAT and “ready to assist” the doctors after the Israeli government gets them out of Gaza. “The Department of State’s current travel advisory, in place since October 2023, states that U.S. citizens should not travel to Gaza ‘for any reason due to terrorism and armed conflict,’” the spokesperson added.
Update: March 13, 2026, 3:15 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include the names of more doctors stranded in Gaza.
Update: March 16, 2026
This story has been updated to include a State Department comment sent after publication.
The post Israel’s Deadly Blockade Traps 7 U.S. Doctors in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.
Kazakhstan referendum: The new constitution demonstrates a diminishing interest in Western values Expert comment LToremark
The changes will cement Tokayev’s grip on power and could cause tensions with the West as Kazakhstan seeks to emulate the state-led economies of China and the Gulf.
On 15 March, voters in Kazakhstan approved the most comprehensive overhaul of its constitution since its adoption in 1995 under former president Nursultan Nazarbayev. This radical revamp of 80 per cent of the constitution will lay out the future trajectory for Kazakhstan – and provide a legacy for President Kassym Zhomart Tokayev. Now in the seventh year of his presidency, he has successfully navigated a series of crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 protests and coup attempt, and the ongoing war in Ukraine. However, Tokayev has struggled to define his presidency and move away from the personalist rule of his predecessor and the political system that he established.
Alongside structural change to the political system, Tokayev wishes to imprint some key themes from his presidency on the political culture of Kazakhstan. These include a strong, legalistic state focused on social stability, secularism, environmental protection and digital progress. The government claims that the new constitution will modernize and streamline the political system. But this brand of modernization, which is already in process, entails a move away from Western-led liberal economic models which emphasize privatization, deregulation and foreign investment. Instead, it will move Kazakhstan towards a more institutional, less personalist authoritarian system – similar to the political economy of its neighbour, China. Tokayev appears to admire the technocratic authoritarianism of China, where he served as counsellor to the Soviet ambassador in the late 1980s. Instead of looking west, the Tokayev administration, supported by large parts of the professional class, now looks to emulate the state-led economies of China and the Gulf.
The constitutional changes include a transition to a unicameral parliament, the Kurultai, and the creation of the Halyk Kenesi, a new representative body of citizens. There will also be a redistribution of powers between the president and parliament with the president retaining significant powers while creating a more balanced system of checks and balances on paper. The president’s new powers mean he will be able to appoint all candidates for the Supreme Court, as well as members of the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Audit Chamber and the Central Election Commission, subject to Kurultai approval. These officials will also play a pivotal role in assuring Tokayev remains in power. Furthermore, constitutional amendments will now only be approved through a referendum, rather than by parliament, which the president says will prevent ‘certain political groups’ from amending the constitution.
The constitutional changes strengthen the power of the presidency and present several possible scenarios for succession. President Tokayev could use the results of the constitutional referendum as justification for a new seven-year term. Tokayev’s current – and final – mandate ends in 2029, by which time he will be 76 years old. Or he could step down early and assume the position of vice president, with his successor installed as president. The latter would enable him to manage Kazakhstan’s complex foreign affairs, without the pressure of day-to-day domestic duties.
Tokayev is likely to win extensive internal and external support for an extension of his tenure as president. Both Russia and China would favour continuity in their relations with Kazakhstan, viewing Tokayev as a productive partner. Russia, in particular, views Tokayev as a guarantor against a wave of anti-Russian popular sentiment. A veteran diplomat, Tokayev has also managed to work well with Western governments, most notably the administration of US President Donald Trump.
China is likely to welcome the transition to a more stable and institutionalized system more akin to its own. But Russia will be wary that the new constitution cements Kazakhstan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of increasing Russian attempts to assert its influence. The new constitution also proposes making Kazakh the country’s main language, while retaining Russian as another, albeit downgraded, official language.
Human rights groups, meanwhile, have raised concerns over the changes. Although the text emphasizes the importance of human rights and clarifies constitutional mechanisms, they claim that it also gives the government more leverage to crack down on freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association. The changes include a ban on foreign financing of political parties and trade unions. In the run-up to the hastily scheduled vote, there have been instances of police intimidation and journalists criticizing the proposed changes have been arrested, hardly signs of a more open society.
The new constitution also removes a reference to international law taking precedence over domestic law. At present it is unclear whether this is directed at investors or whether it is intended to limit the application of international human rights law in Kazakhstan. But the changes could have a major impact on investors, particularly those in the extractives sectors – the largest investors in the country. The current wording could allow domestic law to supersede Kazakhstan’s treaty obligations, such as bilateral investment treaties and the Energy Charter Treaty. This will complicate the enforcement of international arbitral awards. Kazakh lawmakers would also not have to consider the nation’s treaty obligations when developing new legislation, given that domestic law would have de facto supremacy.
AI wars: Anthropic battles the Pentagon as China plans ahead. Independent Thinking podcast Audio sseth.drupal@c…
Our experts discuss what the US government’s feud with AI firm Anthropic tells us about governance and competition in the AI race.
The US military’s AI provider Anthropic is feuding with the Pentagon after the company tried to impose ‘red lines’ over the use of its artificial intelligence products for lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of Americans.
President Trump accused the US firm of being ‘radical left’ and designated it a ‘supply chain risk’ – usually reserved for Chinese or Russian firms who could compromise US security.
Our panel discusses the dispute, the battle to control artificial intelligence systems already being used in Iran, Venezuela and Ukraine, and how a public battle between tech and government throws a much-needed spotlight on the wider global issues of AI governance and who is – or isn’t – writing rules for the new era of warfare.
They also look at how China is pushing ahead quickly with its plan to integrate ‘AI Plus’ into all aspects of its economy and military.
This week’s guest host of the Independent Thinking podcast is Alex Krasodomski, director of Chatham House’s Digital Society Programme. He is joined by Laurel Rapp, director of the US and North America Programme; and James Kynge, a senior research fellow with the Asia-Pacific Programme who has spent years studying China and its high-technology industrial sector.
Independent Thinking is a weekly international affairs podcast hosted by our director Bronwen Maddox, in conversation with leading policymakers, journalists, and Chatham House experts providing insight on the latest international issues.
More ways to listen: Apple Podcasts, Spotify.
Climate change is a greater threat to Greenland than Trump’s mineral ambitions The World Today mhiggins.drupal
Islanders want to be in control of exploiting their zinc, copper and other resources in ways that benefit the community and protect its fragile environment, writes Patrick Schröder.
In January scenes of protesters gathered outside the Inatsisartut, Greenland’s parliament, in the capital Nuuk, made news around the world. Despite the bitter Arctic cold, protesters stood for hours, holding hand-painted placards declaring ‘Greenland is not for sale’ and wearing red baseball hats printed with the words ‘Make America Go Away’.
They were objecting to US President Donald Trump’s latest claims that the United States needs to ‘own’ Greenland for national security reasons. Acquiring the island, which is strategically positioned between the US and Russia, has long been an ambition of Trump, who claims it will help protect the US from Russian and Chinese missile attacks. Days into his second term last year, Trump even threatened military action to seize Greenland to gain access to its largely untapped critical minerals, including graphite, zinc and copper.
Although its rugged topography and limited infrastructure make mining complicated and expensive, Greenland’s resources have attracted growing international attention in recent years. ‘Everyone talks about the minerals,’ said Trump in January. ‘There’s so many.’
In Washington, Greenland is increasingly seen as a potential ‘near-domestic’ solution to reduce its dependence on Chinese critical mineral supply chains, which dominate the market. Europe is also looking to the island, which is a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, as a source of critical raw materials needed for the green energy transition.
To Greenlanders, Trump’s statements and the surge of global interest in its mineral resources sound like echoes from its colonial past: blunt, extractive and dismissive of local agency. The dilemma facing the island today, however, is more complicated than a simple rejection of foreign interest.
From Nuuk to the smallest coastal municipalities, Greenland’s leaders and communities are weighing up tough questions of who decides if these resources are extracted, how they might benefit the people of Greenland and how its fragile environment would survive the process.
Malene Vahl Rasmussen, the Mayor of Kommune Kujalleq on Greenland’s southern peninsula, has been negotiating with international mining companies over exploration rights in recent months, as she explained at a panel on Arctic mineral governance organized by Chatham House in Nuuk last November. The area is thought to be home to the island’s richest mineral resources, and her sense of duty was clear: investment could bring much-needed jobs, better infrastructure, hospitals and education facilities, she said.
Shortly after the event, an exploration licence was granted to the US mining company Critical Metals Corp. At the beginning of 2026, the company began construction of a pilot plant to support extraction of rare earth oxides, a critical ingredient for magnets used in electric vehicle motors and wind turbine generators.
Local authorities have cautiously welcomed such developments, granting new mining licences to international companies in recent months, including the British firm GreenRoc Mining in December 2025 for graphite mining. But the licensing stage is merely the first step; moving to commercial operations will need new investments.
Peter Dige Thagesen, head of geopolitics at the Confederation of Danish Industry, said: ‘Several of the projects will require significant financing. This applies, for example, to mining projects such as the Greenlandic Amitsoq graphite mine near Nanortalik, and the molybdenum mine known as the Malmbjerg project. If Greenlanders wish to fully realize these projects, it is essential that financing comes not only from Greenland, but from both Denmark and the European Union.’
Since Trump’s recent overtures altered the political mood, the prospect of European investments has taken on greater significance. In January, after a meeting with Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary-general, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump announced ‘a framework for a future deal’ in Greenland that would include mineral rights and give the US ‘total access’ with ‘no end, no time limit’. Neither Greenlandic nor Danish officials were reportedly involved in discussions, however.
For Mayor Rasmussen, this marked a significant escalation. In an open letter to Trump later that month, she warned: ‘If [US] mining activities are not carried out in full compliance with Greenlandic law and with genuine respect for the population, there will be no mining. It is that simple.’ Greenlanders, she insisted, were not swayed by bluster or geopolitical pressure, including from Washington. ‘Our land and our communities are not pieces on a great-power chessboard,’ she wrote.
Jens-Frederik Nielsen, Greenland’s prime minister, also responded strongly, telling reporters after Trump’s announcement: ‘We have red lines … nobody other than Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark have the mandate to make deals or agreements about [us].’ He added that if Greenlanders had to choose ‘we choose the Kingdom of Denmark, we choose the EU, we choose NATO.’
Since January, European countries have aimed to strengthen their presence on the Arctic island. For example, France opened a consulate in Nuuk in February and signed a technical cooperation agreement aimed at improving geological knowledge of Greenland’s mineral resources.
Polling consistently shows overwhelming opposition to any form of US control over the island. In February, a new survey found that 76 per cent of Greenlanders do not want their island to become a part of the United States.
One of the reasons Trump’s proposals have caused so much alarm in Greenland is that they challenge long-held convictions about the meaning of land, identity and stewardship. In Greenland, private land ownership is prohibited, with the land managed collectively as a public trust rooted in Inuit traditions, emphasizing communal, long-term care of the land rather than its commodification.
Revenue from mining is important, but so is avoiding irreversible environmental damage in ecosystems that communities rely on for fishing, hunting and identity. Fisheries, for example, account for almost a quarter of Greenland’s GDP and 90 per cent of total exports.
At Chatham House’s Environment and Society Centre, work is being done to support Greenland as it tackles these important questions, and to facilitate more exchanges with European partners. The event in Nuuk last year was just one part of ongoing discussions over Arctic mineral development, and how this can be better aligned with high environmental standards and boosting local jobs and revenues.
Long before Trump expressed any interest in buying Greenland, the island realized it faced a much greater security challenge: the climate. In Nuuk, icebergs drift past the shorefront far later into the winter than they once did. The Arctic is warming around four times faster than the global average, and Greenland’s ice sheet, the largest in the Northern Hemisphere, is losing mass at an accelerating speed.
The thaw is revealing new opportunities and risks, said Thomas Varming, of the Denmark and Greenland Geological Survey: ‘The warming climate is reshaping the landscape. Glacier retreats, thawing permafrost and longer ice-free seasons are exposing geology that was previously unreachable. That creates opportunities for mineral exploration that didn’t exist a decade ago,’ he said. ‘These processes could also undermine infrastructure, disrupt ecosystems and exacerbate risks for the communities who depend on this land.’
Many projects under consideration face long lead times, high capital costs and significant uncertainty, especially in a rapidly changing Arctic where melting permafrost alters ground stability and logistics. During my visit to Nuuk in November, Greenlanders told me they were worried that if the US gained greater control over the island, mining would accelerate under looser environmental and social safeguards. There is fear that decisions would be made far from Nuuk, that local consent would be sidelined and that Greenland would cease to be a self-determined society, instead becoming a resource frontier.
As Jason Beaman recounts his long slog searching for mental health therapy last year, he sounds defeated.
The first therapist assigned to him by the Department of Veterans Affairs told him at their initial meeting that she was leaving the agency. A few months later, his second therapist told him she was also leaving. An appointment with a third counselor was canceled with no explanation.
These were huge setbacks for the 54-year-old veteran of the Navy and Army Reserve. Nearly a decade ago, a spiral of depression and anxiety left him homeless and living on the streets of Spokane, Washington. A VA social worker threw him a lifeline, helping him apply for benefits, find housing and get into therapy.
He still needs mental health care, he and his physician say. But bouncing from therapist to therapist has left him exhausted.
“I just quit. I don’t want to mess with the therapist anymore,” Beaman said. He spends much of his time now alone playing video games or walking with his dogs.
After President Donald Trump returned to office last year, his administration announced plans to overhaul the VA, one of the largest health care systems in the country, to deliver “the highest quality care.”
“This administration is finally going to give the veterans what they want,” VA Secretary Doug Collins said last March, as the department announced tens of thousands of job cuts.
But in interview after interview, veterans across the country told ProPublica that one year into the second Trump administration it’s become more difficult to get treatment, as hundreds of therapists and social workers have left the VA. Many of them have not been replaced.
While front-line mental health care workers were largely exempted from the job cuts, hundreds chose to leave anyway. Some cited disagreements with new administration policies, including several targeting the LGBTQ+ community, while others, facing diminished ranks, said they simply could no longer provide proper care.
In January, the department had around 500 fewer psychologists and psychiatrists than it had at the same time last year, ProPublica found.
Although the losses represent a relatively small number — about 4% of psychologists and 6% of psychiatrists — they are notable for an agency that has long struggled with inadequate mental health staffing. For years, administrators have listed psychologists in particular among their most “severe staffing shortages.”
Mental health is not the only area where the VA has lost medical staff. The agency has eliminated more than 14,000 vacant health care positions across the system, according to data first reported by The New York Times.
Data published by the VA going back to May 2023 shows that the agency was adding psychologists every quarter until Trump’s return to the White House. Then, the trend flipped, with departures outpacing hires in all four quarters of last year.
Compounding the losses, the agency’s cohort of social workers, some of whom are licensed therapists who provide mental health counseling, declined by nearly 700 staffers over the year.
To better understand the departures and their impact on veterans’ care, ProPublica interviewed dozens of former and current VA staffers as well as patients.
ProPublica also examined a previously unreported internal employee exit survey, which included hundreds of responses from mental health care workers.
“Mental Health is understaffed, burned out, and there is not enough mental health care for the Veterans who need the services,” wrote one New York-based former employee, according to the records.
“Support is no longer there to provide ethical and good care for these Veterans,” wrote a second, based in Indiana. “Scheduling issues are incredibly high due to poor staff hiring and retainment.”
Yet another wrote that the number of new patients seeking help at their Kansas facility was far too high, making it “unethical to accept more veterans in our clinics.”
Many of those vacated positions have gone unfilled due to a yearlong hiring freeze, which was only lifted in January.
The losses under the new administration amount to 4% of the agency’s psychologists, 6% of psychiatrists and 3% of social workers.
Echoing the exit survey, many who remain on staff describe crushing workloads as they struggle to fill the gaps. Those reached by ProPublica, who agreed to speak only under the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said that as staffing losses mount, they’ve seen their patient loads increase, while administrators shorten their appointments and pack more and more clients into group therapy sessions.
“It was always bad,” said one VA psychologist, referring to staffing at a facility in Arizona. “And now it’s at a breaking point.”
The therapist described being stretched so thin that schedulers replaced some one-on-one sessions with online group sessions that included as many as 35 veterans. The therapist said despite that they were still overloaded with individual sessions and had to limit each one to as little as 16 minutes.
The VA declined ProPublica’s request to interview an official familiar with its mental health programs. In an email, VA spokesperson Peter Kasperowicz accused ProPublica of attempting to mislead the public by “cherry picking issues that are limited to a handful of sites and in many cases were worse under the Biden Administration.”
He argued that the agency’s performance around mental health has improved since Trump took office, citing more than 15.5 million direct mental health care appointments in the most recent fiscal year (Oct. 1, 2024, to Sept. 30, 2025), a 4% increase from the previous fiscal year. He did not say whether those additional appointments were for individual therapy. Kasperowicz also noted that the administration has opened 25 new health care clinics.
After ProPublica shared its findings and the names of veterans who would appear in this story, the agency reached out to several to inquire about their care and offer help. The veterans told ProPublica they remained skeptical that the VA would consistently respond to their mental health needs.
As the ranks of mental health care providers at the VA have shrunk, the department has proposed shifting billions of dollars into community care, a program in which veterans obtain health care via private physicians and other providers. But the program has been stretched thin amid the loss of administrative staff and ongoing issues finding private therapists, ProPublica found, with veterans encountering longer delays as they seek help.
In December, patients waited an average of around 25 days just to receive a confirmed appointment date, nearly four times the VA’s stated goal for scheduling community care.
Collins has disputed assertions that there’s a systemwide problem with access to mental health care. “And if you need emergency care, or are in a crisis situation, you have immediate care,” he told a Senate committee in January.
He said the VA’s average wait time for new patients seeking mental health care appointments was less than 20 days, the number it has set as its goal. But other VA officials have acknowledged problems with access.
“There are wait times at some facilities that are beyond what our expectations and standards would be,” Dr. Ilse Wiechers, assistant undersecretary for health for patient care services, told senators at a separate hearing.
ProPublica’s analysis found that wait times fluctuate dramatically, and fast access to care can depend on location. For example, the small clinic near Beaman’s home in rural Nebraska, with its comparatively small staff, saw appointment wait times for new mental health clients climb as high as 60 days in December and drop to 20 days in February, according to the VA figures.
But a closer look at the entire VA system reveals that a large number of facilities are struggling. In early February, more than half of its hospitals and clinics reported one-on-one mental health appointment wait times for new patients that were longer, and in some cases far longer, than the VA’s 20-day goal, according to a ProPublica analysis of data published on the agency’s website.
In late December, Beaman said he received an email from the VA saying he’d been approved for additional therapy. He was able to meet with a therapist in January — after about six months of waiting and going more than a year without a session. In the interim, he said, he relied on prescription medications, video games and his therapy dogs to keep him steady. Still, his anxiety worsened, he said, and now he often feels so uncomfortable around others that he rarely leaves his home except to walk his dogs while wearing headphones so no one speaks to him.
Kasperowicz, the VA spokesperson, wrote in his email to ProPublica that Beaman had “more than a dozen mental health visits at VA between late 2024 to mid-2025 through the Cheyenne VA clinic” in Wyoming, which is about an hour-and-a-half trip for Beaman. Kasperowicz declined, however, to say whether those appointments involved the one-on-one mental health counseling Beaman had requested. Beaman said he only had two sessions for one-on-one therapy in 2025 — meetings that were truncated because of the therapists’ impending departures.
Kasperowicz also said that one of Beaman’s appointments didn’t occur because he had “moved.” Beaman, however, said he has lived at only one address in Nebraska.
Experts warn that the exodus of mental health care providers from the VA has hurt the agency’s ability to meet veterans’ unique needs.
“VA psychologists are best in class,” said Russell Lemle, former chief psychologist for the San Francisco VA Health Care System and a senior policy analyst at the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute. “They have research and training and decades-long experience” working with veterans.
“When you lose them, the veterans are the ones who pay the price,” he said.
Michelle Phillips, 56, a Navy veteran from Ohio, saw her therapist in remote sessions once a week for two years for her PTSD. Then, in December, Phillips’ therapist told her that she was quitting the VA because of Trump’s policies.
The change, Phillips said, “could mean life or death.”
Years of depression have led Phillips to isolate. Inside her small home about an hour outside of Columbus, the city where she enlisted in 1988, the walls are filled with reminders of brighter times — photos of family members and military paraphernalia from her time in the service. Her only real company is an aging dog, and she almost never leaves.
Her virtual therapy sessions were “the only contact that I had coming in my home to talk to me every week,” she said. “And I would sit and just wait for that appointment.”
Phillips said the counselor requested that the VA continue her one-on-one remote counseling with a new therapist — which totaled about four hours per month. The agency initially offered her virtual group therapy, an option that her previous therapist dismissed as inappropriate. In the third week of January, the VA told Phillips she could have an appointment for one-on-one sessions in March. She later declined the appointment because she didn’t want to face starting over with a new therapist.
Phillips, who is disabled and doesn’t work, said she will try to pay for one-on-one therapy out of pocket with the same therapist who left the VA but will likely only be able to afford one, possibly two, sessions a month.
James Jones said his close connection to his VA therapist, who was trained in combat trauma, helped him control his PTSD-fueled episodes of anger and alcohol abuse. Now the 54-year-old Gulf War veteran, who lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, has seen his care cut in half after his therapist told him colleagues had quit and he had to pick up the load.
His sessions went from an hour every week to half an hour every two weeks. “I can tell it’s rushed,” said Jones, a maintenance mechanic with the National Park Service. “I’m not able to work through something.”
Others have found it difficult to establish care in the first place.
Last summer, George Retes, 26, who left the Army in 2022 after serving for four years, was driving to work in Camarillo, California, when he was suddenly caught between immigration agents and protesters. Retes said the agents broke his car window, pepper-sprayed him and detained him for days. The incident, which ProPublica detailed last fall, left him shaken and exacerbated the PTSD that was first sparked after he faced missile attacks in Iraq, Retes said. (The Department of Homeland Security has not responded to ProPublica’s questions about Retes.)
Following his release, Retes found himself withdrawing from the world. “I wasn’t texting anyone or talking to anyone,” he said. “Not even my kids.”
A few weeks after being arrested, Retes sought help from the VA clinic in Ventura, California, where staffers told him they’d be in touch for an appointment. But Retes said he never heard back, even after he called to follow up. His incident with Immigration and Customs Enforcement was in July. Retes is still waiting.
According to data on the VA’s website, new patients seeking individual therapy at the Ventura clinic had to wait an average of two and a half months in early February.
The VA said it could not discuss Jones’ or Retes’ accounts because the veterans declined to waive their privacy rights.
The VA overhaul has also taken a toll on mental health providers, many of whom quit after spending years at the agency.
Natalie McCarthy worked as a social worker and mental health therapist for a decade before quitting the VA in May. Like many others working in mental health, she did all of her work remotely; from her Ohio home she saw vets mostly from the Washington, D.C., area.
But McCarthy and her colleagues faced pressure to return to agency offices after the VA issued new restrictions on telehealth workers. She was uneasy about the prospect of having to conduct sessions in makeshift spaces like conference rooms filled with other counselors — a situation that raised widespread ethical concerns over the legally mandated privacy for medical conversations.
Complicating matters, McCarthy said, were Trump’s orders eliminating diversity and equity initiatives within the federal government. She said she began to worry that therapists would no longer be able to discuss the subject of race with their patients or document patients’ thoughts on the topic in their session notes. So she quit.
“I was angry that veterans were in that position,” said McCarthy, who started her own practice. “I was angry that I was in that position. It just felt like an unnecessary thing to have to navigate.”
Psychologist Mary Brinkmeyer found herself in a similar situation. She started at a VA facility in metropolitan Norfolk, Virginia, in 2022 after seeing a posting for an LGBTQ+ care coordinator, which oversees support programs for LGBTQ+ veterans and helps navigate their care. She quit last February after her superiors began enforcing Trump’s anti-diversity orders.
Brinkmeyer said she was told to stop conducting training for physicians and other staff on best practices for caring for LGBTQ+ patients. Then, she said, staff members were ordered to remove all LGBTQ+ paraphernalia from the facility such as rainbow flags, identity-affirming literature and program brochures. Also, an edict was issued directing people to use the bathroom of their gender assigned at birth, Brinkmeyer said.
That’s when the VA stopped feeling like a welcoming place. “There was a failure of empathy,” she said.
The VA did not respond directly to either Brinkmeyer’s or McCarthy’s accounts of how the administration’s policies had impacted the quality of mental health care.
Much like those seeking mental health care directly from the VA, veterans referred to community care are also struggling to secure appointments.
Gwyn Bourlakov, 58, enlisted in the Army National Guard in 1998 and over the following 21 years she was awarded a Bronze Star for her service in the invasion of Iraq, climbed the ranks to become a major and won a Fulbright scholarship to study Russian history.
Today, after a series of professional setbacks, Bourlakov works as a museum security guard. Lingering PTSD from her time in the service, coupled with deep bouts of depression over her current circumstances, have kept her seeking the VA’s help despite long-standing frustrations with its services.
After she began looking for a new therapist last year following a move to Colorado, officials at her local VA clinic in Golden said at her intake appointment that its in-house providers were swamped and could not see new patients for at least six months.
She asked if she could get help through community care, but staffers told her that the system was so overwhelmed that it would be a “nightmare,” she recalled. Veterans living in eastern Colorado waited 57 days on average to get a community care appointment scheduled in December, VA figures show.
Bourlakov said she tried to get help through a separate VA clinic, but when her phone calls went unanswered, she finally gave up.
“I don’t have time for all of that,” she explained. “It’s just like shouting into the wind.”
Following inquiries from ProPublica, VA officials reached out to Bourlakov and other veterans interviewed for this story to offer additional assistance with their mental health care. The calls left several frustrated, saying it shouldn’t take questions from the media for them to get help from the VA.
Though skeptical, Bourlakov decided to move forward. She was contacted by three separate VA representatives in February asking about her health and if she needed help scheduling a therapy appointment.
The earliest telehealth appointment they offered was not until June, she said. The next available in-person slot was not until July. Bourlakov opted for June.
The post Veterans Who Depend on Mental Health Care Keep Losing Their Therapists Under Trump appeared first on ProPublica.
Decades after patients first warned Columbia University that one of its doctors sexually abused them, some university administrators have finally faced consequences.
On Tuesday, Columbia released a long-awaited report that details a culture of silence that allowed OB-GYN Robert Hadden to abuse more than 1,000 patients during his nearly 25-year career at Columbia.
In unveiling the report, the university also announced that two long-time administrators are leaving their positions.
Dr. Mary D’Alton, chair of the OB-GYN department and Hadden’s former boss, has stepped down. D’Alton will maintain her clinical practice.
Dr. Lee Goldman, the former dean of the medical school, will retire. The two were administrators above Hadden. They were also among those cc’d on a 2012 letter that let Hadden continue seeing patients even after he was arrested when one woman reported he’d assaulted her.
Yesterday’s report was prompted by a ProPublica investigation that revealed how Columbia had dismissed women and ultimately protected a predator. Amid outrage in the wake of the 2023 story, Columbia announced it would set up a $100 million fund for survivors and initiate an independent review.
More than two years after the review was announced, the 156-page report was published days after the New York attorney general said it was investigating Columbia’s response to the Hadden case.
The report outlines how more than a dozen patients’ complaints had gone nowhere, in part because of the lack of clear reporting procedures. The report also found a “hierarchal institutional culture” in which physicians occupied an “exalted” or “god-like” status that made it difficult for staff to report concerns.
One patient, Eva Santos Veloz, was 18 years old when she saw Hadden for an emergency delivery in 2008. At the time, she and her mother reported that Hadden had touched her in ways that made her uncomfortable, sometimes without gloves. Nothing happened after she filed the complaint. At the time, she said, she came to believe she was making the whole thing up because no one seemed to believe her.
Santos said that while the report confirms that she was right all along, it doesn’t tell her anything new. “The only peace it gives me is that they are publicly saying, ‘We knew about this and we did nothing,’” she said.
The report also lists five different complaints that were reported to leadership but resulted in no action against Hadden. Investigators note that the university’s record-keeping practices were insufficient and that higher-ups failed to conduct a full investigation into his misconduct.
In an internal email sent Tuesday to the OB-GYN department and obtained by ProPublica, D’Alton announced that she will remain on the faculty “to continue our department’s work of advancing women’s health.”
“I cannot adequately express the sorrow that I feel for the suffering Robert Hadden inflicted on his patients,” D’Alton wrote in the email. “That these acts were committed by a doctor in our department, including while I was chair, pains me deeply and always will.”
A similar statement posted to the Columbia website does not note her continued employment.
D’Alton did not respond to a request for comment.
In a statement, Goldman said his “heart breaks for the victims of Robert Hadden.”
He continued: “Throughout my tenure we focused on prioritizing a culture of ethics and patient safety at the medical school, and to reassess and enhance its policies and procedures on an ongoing basis.”
The report also confirms that executives at the top of the organizations — including former Columbia President Lee Bollinger, as well as one of the trustees at both Columbia and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, the Columbia-affiliated system where Hadden was an attending physician — had been alerted to Hadden’s arrest the evening it occurred.
Bollinger, who retired from his post in the summer of 2023, did not respond to a request for comment.
A letter accompanying the report’s release said, “The University remains steadfast in our commitment to our ongoing responsibilities. We must continue to operate with transparency and confront systemic failures when they occur.” Columbia did not provide an additional comment.
In a statement, a group of survivors, including Marissa Hoechstetter and Evelyn Yang, criticized the report for failing to examine what happened in the years after Hadden left Columbia — including the university’s documented efforts to destroy evidence, fight former patients in court and discredit those survivors.
The statement also points out that Claire Shipman, the current acting president of the university and who signed Tuesday’s announcement, has been on the board of trustees since 2013, amid the fallout from the Hadden case. She did not respond to a request for comment.
“What Columbia has released today offers the bare minimum accountability for failures that
should have been addressed years ago,” the survivors’ statement said. “It confirms the systemic breakdown that allowed Hadden to operate. But it stops short of examining the cover-up culture that survivors experienced firsthand once the abuse came to light.”
The deadline to submit a claim for compensation to Columbia’s survivor fund, which was established for former patients who do not want to file a lawsuit, was extended to June 15.
The post Report Confirms Columbia Ignored Decades of Doctor’s Sexual Abuse appeared first on ProPublica.
Nigeria and Ghana foreign ministers discuss security, AES countries, Boko Haram and US operations News release jon.wallace
During an event at Chatham House, HE Yusuf Tuggar and HE Samuel Ablakwa also discussed ECOWAS, West Africa-France relations, and allegations of attacks on Christian communities in the region.
Ghanaian Minister for Foreign Affairs Samuel Ablakwa and Nigerian Minister of Foreign Affairs Yusuf Tuggar discussed West African security and peacebuilding in a packed event held at Chatham House on 9 March.
The foreign ministers took questions from the audience on West African security issues, from the withdrawal of AES countries from the ECOWAS security bloc and US airstrikes in Nigeria on Christmas day, to West African relations with France and how to combat groups like Boko Haram.
During the event, Minister Tuggar emphasized the importance of local security solutions in West Africa, saying:
‘I think what has worked in our region successfully, what we’ve been able to achieve in Sierra Leone, what we’ve been able to achieve in Liberia… bringing about peace and peacebuilding successfully… I think we have done so when we have come up with our own solutions. This is why ECOMOG was so successful. It was led by forces from the region, with the support of the United Nations, with the support of other major powers… That should be the formula.’
Addressing the role of the United States in Nigerian and regional security, he said the US should play ‘an indirect role. A supportive role as opposed to…taking a more direct approach that would see perhaps boots on the ground.’
Asked by an audience member about the nature of violence in Nigeria and the region, and the role of religion, Minister Tuggar said:
HE Samuel Ablakwa discusses Ghana’s policy towards foreign military bases.
‘I’m not saying that the violence is not religious altogether. Some of it is motivated by religion. But it does not necessarily mean that there is a Christian genocide going on in Nigeria. That is false. It is incorrect…And it is not confined to Nigeria. It’s a regional problem. So that is why with framing we have to be careful.’
Minister Ablakwa, describing Ghanaians killed by terrorists in Burkina Faso, said:
‘These terrorists they didn’t ask them which religion they subscribed to. So, the point we are making is that we should be more nuanced…It is not just a simple, you know, religious matter.’ He also pointed out other drivers of violence including youth unemployment, climate change and state collapse.
Asked if the regional security bloc ECOWAS had been weakened by the withdrawal of three Sahelian ‘AES’ states (Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger) Minister Ablakwa said:
‘ECOWAS is still strong’ and spoke of Ghana’s plans to increase defence spending, build the country’s first electronic warfare centre, and improve its ISR capability.
Addressing AES countries’ poor relations with France, and Ghana’s viewpoint, Minister Ablakwa said:
‘We have to admit that there is a genuine concern in francophone Africa that their relations with France will have to be reset and that there is a need for a new approach.’
He also pointed to the responsibility of the international community in delivering security:
‘Terrorism taking root is a threat to the entire global community…the challenges we face today are direct consequences of certain actions by the international community, from Afghanistan to Syria to Libya…. not having a post Gaddafi plan, how we deal with the regime change agenda in Libya. We’ve had to bear the brunt.
‘What is going on now in the Middle East is going to further aggravate the situation. As you chase out the terrorists and dismantle those cells which you don’t want close to you, they will have to relocate… Should we allow Africa to be their safe haven?’
The panel event formed part of the Chatham House Africa Programme’s ongoing work on African peace and security. The Programme will shortly launch a new project focused on regional conflict systems in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel and Central Africa.
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