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A gunman who opened fire at cars on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, Massachusetts Monday afternoon was shot by a responding State Police trooper and a civilian.

The KV cache has emerged as the key linchpin in the quest to build AI systems that deliver the deep reasoning capabilities with large context windows that people need to do real work. Nvidia has fleshed out its vision for breaking through the so-called “GPU memory wall” with its Context Memory Storage (CMX) architecture, which it unveiled in January and which will start trickling into customers’ data centers later this year. But there’s plenty of room for innovation at multiple levels of the stack to grow and get the most out of the KV cache.

As the short-term memory for AI inference sessions, the key-value cache (KV cache) serves a critical role in making sure that an AI inference service delivers a useful experience for users, particularly those who demand very large context windows for AI reasoning workloads. The KV cache does this by essentially storing pre-computed answers to common agentic queries, which reduces the time to retrieve the answer the next time it’s requested.

Values computed from prefill stage are stored in KV cache for later use (Image courtesy Nvidia blog post “Optimizing Inference for Long Context and Large Batch Sizes with NVFP4 KV Cache”)

Technically, the KV cache is storing the results of the prefill stage of AI inference, or the read stage, which is heavily reliant on the GPU or AI accelerator. Once the attention states have been computed for each attention layer as part of the AI input, the answer is generated from the attention states one token at a time during the decode stage (or the write stage). By storing the most common keys and values of the attention states, the KV cache eliminates the need for the GPU to re-compute these answers from scratch, speeding up token generation and reducing latency for the user.

Ideally, the entire KV cache is stored on High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) sitting right next to the GPU or other processor. That minimizes the physical distance the data has to travel, keeping latencies low and throughput high. However, HBM is simply not big enough to contain the massive context windows that users are demanding, while simultaneously handling the other memory tasks required to keep the AI model running.

According to James Coomer, the senior vice president of products at DDN, the neural network typically will take up about 30% of the HBM’s capacity, while another 30% is consumed by working bits and pieces. “And 30% is available for this KV cache,” he said, “and you run out almost immediately.”

One common solution to this HBM capacity problem is to spill the KV cache into other available memory or storage. First up is DRAM. When that fills up, the KV cache spills over into high-speed storage, preferably NVMe connected over a speedy network. While solid state disk is fast, it’s significantly slower than HBM and introduces more latency. But with current technologies and AI demands, there’s really no feasible workaround.

This is what Nvidia’s CMX architecture does: provide a mechanism to spill KV cache onto external storage. The CMX blueprint that Nvidia unveiled in January is providing to its storage partners leans on BlueField-4 data processing units (DPUs) to provide the RDMA-goosed data connection from the complex of processors powering AI inference (its Vera Rubin Platform, which spans Rubin GPUs, Vera CPUs, and Grok LPUs) into the high-speed storage provided by the likes of DDN and others.

Nvidia’s CMX platform will utilize Bluefield-4 DPUs

KV Cache Is All You Need

CMX is still under development, and DDN and its competitors are working with Nvidia to build their own solutions based on Nvidia’s CMX blueprint. It will be interesting to see how the various storage vendors position their CMX solutions. But that will come later in 2026.

In the meantime, customers are still building AI inference setups, and that requires ensuring that customers are aware of the significance of the KV cache and the various architectural decisions that can impact it. “It’s very important,” Coomer said. “We’re spending a lot of time sort of level-setting and making sure that we can really understand what a customer is going to experience with KV cache acceleration.”

There are several factors that can impact KV cache performance and the experience of end users. Having a fast network connection and fast storage media certainly helps. Parallel file systems will play a role here, as will other techniques for speeding up the S3-based object systems that are expected to form the storage layer for CMX and KV cache solutions.

Other factors, limitations, and expectations will impact KV cache usage, including:

• How many users are you intending to support with your AI service? Supporting a dozen or 100 is one thing, but supporting 1,000 or 10,000 users is something else entirely.
• How big of a context window will you offer your users? Some users may only need a handful of tokens, while engineers and scientist may need 100,000 or more tokens to answer complicated questions.
• How long are you going to maintain sessions? Some users may require their sessions to last a day, while other use cases may require sessions to stay online for weeks or months on end.
• What are your latency goals? In some use cases, waiting a few minutes to get an answer will not impact usability. In other cases, waiting more than 10 seconds will make the AI service untenable.

Every new AI inference service will start out with a KV cache at zero, which means that every new query will require the GPUs or AI accelerators to create the attention states (the keys and value) from scratch. Over time, as users query the service, the KV cache will get bigger, and the number of “cache misses” will decline. According to Coomer, an 85% cache hit rate is not uncommon for DDN customers.

The amount of HBM/DRAM and the amount of storage will obviously impact the performance of a distributed KV cache system. Coomer says it’s reasonable for a customer to have 1,000 times more storage than memory. So if a customer had an Nvidia NVL72 system with about 13TB of HBM, perhaps they might need a storage system with 13PB. Again, a lot depends on the other factors at play.

A KV cache hit leads to re-used KV tensors and less GPU load, whereas a cache miss leads to recomputation of key values and more GPU load (Image courtesy Nvidia blog post “Optimizing Inference for Long Context and Large Batch Sizes with NVFP4 KV Cache”)

Compression is another factor to keep in mind. Google recently published a paper on a new compression technique dubbed TurboQuant that could dramatically increase the scale of vector quantization, thereby lowering storage and memory requirements for KV caches as well as vector databases.

Other variables in AI stack can also impact KV cache, including the processor, the AI model, inference framework, and inference engine. Nvidia’s CMX platform obviously will support its hardware and software, but Google has its own approach for managing KV cache spillover cloud Lustre environments, among others.

According to this March blog post, Nvidia’s CMX platform spans multiple components, including its open source distributed inference framework, called Dynamo; an intelligent router dubbed DOCA Memos; and an open source library for accelerating point-to-point data transfers in AI inference frameworks called Nvidia Inference Transfer Library (NIXL). “DOCA Memos provides KV-aware services and I/O control on BlueField-4, while NVIDIA Dynamo and NIXL integrate context placement and reuse into the inference serving layer,” the company states in a product brief.

A Wild West Cache Dash

DDN is working to sort all this out, along with storage vendors like Vast Data, WEKA, Everpure (formerly Pure Storage), Vdura, NetApp, and others who are competing to deliver CMX solutions that conform to Nvidia’s STX rack design.

“Nvidia is doing an excellent job as well in trying to build a proper, well-defined playing field for this to go and take place,” Coomer said. “Right now, it’s maybe a little bit Wild West. Everybody’s trying it out and doing all sorts of different things. They may not be talking about it too loudly now, but everybody’s working out how to build these KV cache environments.”

Coomer is an active AI user who sees the potential that it could have, but he’s not quite happy with AI’s current level of knowledge retention. In particular, he’s frustrated with the AI’s “lost in the middle” problem, where it remembers the first and last things it’s told, but forgets everything in the middle.

“Of course it’s amazing how good it’s become. But also I get frustrated with AI within about five minutes every day because it doesn’t have enough attention,” he said. “It’s still got serious flaws around being able to pay attention to enough things at once when it’s answering you. One of the critical pieces is cracking this attention problem, expanding the amount of attention an AI can have when it’s responding to a large context query.”

Trillions of dollars are being invested building massive data centers and outfitting them with gobs of GPUs and TPUs, enough HBM to tile the island of Manhattan, and all of the data collected throughout human history. Could it be that expanding humble KV cache to allow AI to hold more thoughts in its head is the secret to unlocking AI potential?

It very well could be, said Coomer. “Whoever cracks this one, wins.”

The post Why The Race to Expand KV Cache Is Critical for AI Inference Success appeared first on HPCwire.

Map designed to boost Democrats’ US House seats was thrown out by Virginia’s supreme court last week

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Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump reiterated that Iran’s peace proposal was “just unacceptable”.

The president went on to insist that he had a “very simple plan”, and maintained that Tehran could not have a nuclear weapon, without elaborating on the next negotiating steps.

A multiple-year time jump sets the third season in the middle of the war between Sauron and the elves.

The body of a seventh person was located Monday nearly 150 miles north of a Union Pacific rail yard in Laredo, where six bodies were discovered on Sunday afternoon.

US president said Iran’s response to the US peace proposal was ‘stupid’ and that the ceasefire is ‘unbelievable weak’

• Trump calls Iran’s response to peace plan ‘totally unacceptable’ as ceasefire frays

Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, will visit Qatar later today for talks on the war, its impact on the region and efforts to ensure navigational safety in the strait of Hormuz is resumed, a Turkish diplomatic source told the Reuters news agency.

Turkey, which neighbours Iran, has been in close contact with the US, Iran and mediator Pakistan since the start of the conflict. It condemnded the US and Israel for launching the war, widely seen to have been done illegally, but also criticised Iran’s counter strikes on Gulf states.

Taiwan, tariffs and the strait of Hormuz are on the meeting’s agenda for Beijing – but will the US president be forced to ask for help in ending his war with Iran?

On 20 February, a White House official confirmed that US president Donald Trump would be travelling to Beijing the following month to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Top of the agenda: the US-China trade war.

One week later, Trump approved joint strikes with Israel against Iran, starting a new war in the Middle East. Its ramifications have spread far beyond the region and caused alarm in Beijing. The presidential summit was postponed.

Every single software product is dealing with the question about what to do with “AI”-generated code, but the question is particularly difficult to answer for open source operating systems like Linux distributions and the various BSDs, which often consist of a wide variety of software packages from hundreds to thousands of different developers. On top of that, they also have to ask the “AI” question for every layer of their offering, from the base install, to the official repositories, to community-run ones.

As users, we, too, are asking these same questions, wondering just how much “AI” taint we’re willing to spread across our computers. I understand the difficult position Linux distributions are in with regard to “AI”. I mean, when even the Linux kernel itself is tainted by “AI”, a no-“AI” policy is basically an empty gesture for them at this point. Personally, I find a policy of “we don’t do ‘AI’ in our work, but we don’t have control over the thousands of components we consist of” to be an entirely reasonable, if deeply unsatisfying, position to take. What else are they going to do? You can’t really be a Linux distribution without, you know, the Linux kernel, which is, as I’ve already said, utterly tainted by “AI” at this point.

Still, in the back of my mind, I always had a trump card: if all else fails, we’ll always have OpenBSD. Its project leader Theo de Raadt is deeply principled, every OpenBSD user and contributor I know hates “AI” deeply, and the project routinely sticks to their principles even when it’s difficult or inconvenient. Yes, this makes OpenBSD not the most ideal desktop operating system, but I’d rather use that than something that embraces the multitude of ethical, environmental, quality, and legal concerns regarding “AI” code completely.

Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that OpenBSD already contains slopcode in its base installation, with the project’s leaders and developers remaining oddly silent about it. My friend and OSNews regular Morgan posted this on Fedi a few days ago:

Nearly six weeks later, and the question of whether “AI” generated code in tmux — not tool-assisted bug finding, not refactoring, actual LLM-generated slop with questionable license(1) — that was consequently merged into OpenBSD base, is considered acceptable by the lead devs, remains unanswered. Despite Theo de Raadt’s concrete stance against any code of questionable license origin polluting the project — and the tmux merge was indeed questionable — it seems this is being swept under the rug. This makes me extremely uncomfortable; it’s like seeing a fox in the henhouse but the farmers are all looking the other way and no one can convince them to admit they can see it and root it out.

I really don’t know what to do being just a user; I feel like even if I tried to chime in on the mailing list I would just be ignored like the others trying to raise the alarm. I hope, as they do, that this is being discussed internally, away from the public list, and that a positive outcome is near. Maybe they are waiting for the 7.9 release before setting anything in stone.

Or maybe the “AI” disease has infected one of the last pure operating system projects we have left and there’s no going back.

↫ Morgan on Fedi

I obviously share Morgan’s concerns, and like him, I’m also afraid that opening the door to a few drops of slop in base will quickly grow into a torrent of slop as time goes by. Yes, it’s just a patch to tmux, but it’s in base, and the “base” of a BSD is almost a sacred concept, and entirely the last place where you want to see code that raises ethical, environmental, quality, and legal concerns. For all we know, this patch of slop or the next one contains a bunch of GPL code because it just so happens that’s where the ball tumbling down the developer’s pachinko machine ended up.

GPL code that would then be in the base of a BSD.

I echo the call for the OpenBSD project to address this problem, and to set clear boundaries and guidelines regarding “AI” code, so users and developers alike know what level of quality and integrity we can expect from OpenBSD and its base installation going forward.

More than 100 figures sign open letter criticising closure, just months after MA was launched

More than 100 academics, writers and activists from around the world have signed an open letter condemning plans to close an MA in Black studies and global justice at Birmingham City University (BCU), just months after it was first launched.

The move follows the controversial closure of BCU’s undergraduate course in Black studies in 2024, and has prompted warnings that Black studies are being erased from UK higher education.

Dip in credit card spending in April, particularly on travel, suggests Britons preparing for harder times amid Iran war fallout

Households cut back on their spending in April at the fastest pace in 18 months, as the conflict in the Middle East provoked fears of another cost of living crisis, a report from one of the UK’s biggest banks has suggested.

Barclays, which processes nearly 40% of the UK’s credit and debit card transactions, said its data showed there had been a 0.1% fall in card spending last month compared with a year earlier. This was the first year-on-year fall since November 2024.

Research from UCL suggests visiting art galleries or museums, singing and painting can help improve health outcomes

Singing, painting or visiting a gallery or museum helps people age more slowly, according to the latest study to link taking an active interest in art and culture with improved health.

The findings are the first to show that both participating in arts activities and attending events, such as viewing an exhibition, lead to people staying biologically younger.

Digg is relaunching again, this time as an AI-focused news aggregator rather than the Reddit-style community site it recently abandoned. TechCrunch reports: On Friday evening, the founder previewed a link to the newly redesigned Digg, which now looks nothing like a Reddit clone and more like the news aggregator it once was. This time around, the site is focused on ranking news -- specifically, AI news to start. In an email to beta testers, the company said the site's goal is to "track the most influential voices in a space" and to surface the news that's actually worth "paying attention to." AI is the area it's testing this idea with, but if successful, Digg will expand to include other topics. The email warned that the site was still raw and "buggy," and was designed more to give users a first look than to serve as its public debut. On the current homepage, Digg showcases four main stories at the top: the most viewed story, a story seeing rising discussion, the fastest-climbing story, and one "In case you missed it" headline. Below that is a ranked list of top stories for the day, complete with engagement metrics like views, comments, likes, and saves. But the twist is that these metrics aren't the ones generated on Digg itself. Instead, Digg is ingesting content from X in real-time to determine what's being discussed, while also performing sentiment analysis, clustering, and signal detection to determine what matters most. [...] The site also ranks the top 1,000 people involved in AI, as well as the top companies and the top politicians focused on AI issues.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Santa Clara County is seeking restitution, damages and policy changes.

An ethics watchdog found that a Trump administration-appointed former U.S. attorney committed professional misconduct in response to allegations that included retaliating against a newspaper for negative coverage. But details about John Sarcone’s case have been deemed “private and confidential” — and aren’t being released to the public.

One of New York state’s grievance committees, disciplinary panels that determines penalties for violations of legal ethics, notified nonprofit groups last week of its finding against Sarcone, Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again U.S. attorney in Albany.

The committee is keeping mum on the exact nature of its findings, and in a letter to a press freedom group last week, it even tried to claim that the foundation could not disclose the very fact that it found “there was sufficient basis for a finding of professional misconduct.”

The letter from the Attorney Grievance Committee for the Appellate Division, Third Department, was dated April 1 and sent via email on May 8. The committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment on when the finding was reached.

The committee’s actions fit in a larger pattern of New York shrouding prosecutorial misconduct investigations in secret. One of the groups that filed a complaint, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said it was time for the state’s legal ethics cops to stop insisting on silence.

“Sarcone is a high-ranking prosecutor who is at the center of national news as we speak and who the New York Grievance Committee found had engaged in professional misconduct after he retaliated against a news outlet,” said Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the foundation. “No complainant, but especially a press freedom organization, should be told to keep quiet about something so plainly newsworthy and important to New Yorkers and Americans.”

Sarcone and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In an emailed statement, the grievance committee said it was following state laws. Under that law, chief committee attorney Monica Duffy said, “until such time as charges of professional misconduct are sustained against an attorney in a public order of the New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division, all papers, documents and records concerning this Committee’s investigation and disposition of any grievance complaint concerning the conduct of that attorney are sealed and deemed private and confidential.”

Sarcone had no prosecutorial experience when the Trump administration tapped him to lead the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of New York last year. Since then, he has been involved in a long-running saga over whether he can even run the office.

Sarcone has never been confirmed by the U.S. Senate. After his temporary appointment to the post expired, judges appointed a veteran prosecutor to fill the post. That replacement was fired within hours. Sarcone has continued to oversee the office as state Attorney General Letitia James and Justice Department lawyers argue in court over whether he lawfully holds the office.

The administration has a major incentive to keep the Trump loyalist in charge: The Albany prosecutor’s office has jurisdiction over New York state politicians who have drawn the president’s ire, including James.

In addition to the question of whether he can hold the office, Sarcone has faced criticism for booting the Albany newspaper off his office’s press list after it reported that he had attempted to claim a boarded-up apartment building in the district as his home to satisfy residency requirements.

Related

Trump Justice Department Appointee Oversaw “Systemic” Misconduct in Previous Job

That action was a violation of the First Amendment, the Freedom of the Press Foundation argued in the August 11 complaint it filed with the grievance committee, along with Reinvent Albany and the Demand Progress Education Fund. The complaint alleged that Sarcone may have violated at least four of the state’s rules of professional conduct.

In the response to the complaint sent last week, the committee said that “after deliberation, the Committee determined there was a sufficient basis for a finding of professional misconduct and took appropriate action.”

The case was now closed, the committee said. In the letter dated April 1, the committee said that it had reached its conclusion at a “recent” meeting.

What “appropriate action” the committee took is unclear. There are no records of public discipline in Sarcone’s entry on the state attorney directory. The committee has a range of actions it can take short of public discipline, including private letters of reprimand.

Another group that filed a similar complaint against Sarcone, Campaign for Accountability, received a near-identical letter from the grievance committee. In a statement, that group noted that Sarcone remains in charge of the U.S. attorney’s office with a title of first assistant.

“While we’re pleased the New York Attorney Grievance Committee recognized that Mr. Sarcone, who remains First Assistant in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, engaged in professional misconduct, a secret slap on the wrist is insufficient. Mr. Sarcone’s pattern of conduct reflects on his credibility as an officer of the court, so any court in which he appears — along with the public — deserves to know what he was sanctioned for and why,” said Campaign for Accountability’s executive director, Michelle Kuppersmith.

The letters to both complainants including a heading indicating that they were “confidential.” Stern said that attempting to force people who filed complaints to remain silent about the letters they receive in response would be unconstitutional.

One state grievance committee previously tried to clamp down on law professors who shared details about the complaints they had filed against local prosecutors accused of failing to turn over exculpatory evidence or lying in court. The professors sued and won a federal district court ruling in their favor.

The post A Trump U.S. Attorney’s Professional Misconduct Must Be Kept “Private and Confidential” appeared first on The Intercept.

The measures will target Israeli settlers and organizations and Hamas members, the bloc’s chief diplomat said.

After testing over 20 electric toothbrushes, one model stood out thanks to its affordable price and effective features.

The Supreme Court set aside lower court decisions that had blocked the state from using a congressional map drawn by Republicans in 2023 that contained one majority-Black district.

Home secretary Shabana Mahmood reported to be among those who have told the PM to consider his position.

Botterill says voters she spoke to during the campaign felt the country does not work for them. She is a working-class Yorkshire woman, she says. She knows that the opportunities she has enjoyed would not be there if if had not been for the achievements of Labour government.

She says Labour is one of the best vehicles for changing the lives of working people that this county has ever known.

The British political strategist drew swift criticism in a state where tacos are practically the official dish

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Polls have shown California voters have been largely disengaged from the upcoming election for governor, but over the weekend one candidate managed to capture the public’s attention – and ire.

Steve Hilton, the British political strategist seeking the state’s top office, drew derision after posting a video outside a southern California location of the fast food chain Del Taco while holding the hard-shell tortilla concoction that he referred to as a “street taco”.

A second season of The Paper premieres in September.

Audi's upcoming full-size flagship SUV inches closer to its July world premiere. I got an early look at its luxurious cabin.

The trial has exposed even more details about OpenAI’s fractious corporate past than previously documented

OpenAI, despite its name, is usually extremely secretive about its operations. It promotes a carefully crafted image to the world. Over the course of Elon Musk’s case against the startup and its CEO Sam Altman, however, the artificial intelligence firm has been forced to publicly contend with some of the messiest parts of its rise to power in public.

The Musk v OpenAI trial, which on Monday entered its third week, has featured a who’s who of Silicon Valley testifying about OpenAI’s past and its CEO’s contentious leadership. Musk’s attorneys have used former executives, private text messages, diary entries and internal email exchanges to portray Altman as untrustworthy. Altman, who denies Musk’s allegations, will take the stand in the coming days. OpenAI has likewise issued denials.

In a rare public appearance, Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams warned of ‘networks of powerful elites’ using wealth and influence to silence dissenting voices

Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams and the late Virginia Giuffre have jointly won the Freedom to Publish prize at this year’s British book awards, marking the first time the award has been shared.

Wynn-Williams, a former Facebook executive, was recognised for Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism, her bestselling memoir about her years inside Meta, formerly Facebook. The book makes allegations about the company’s internal culture and practices, including its approach to political influence, China and the wellbeing of teenagers. Meta has disputed the claims.

We tested Dreame's pet-focused air purifiers to see if they live up to their promises.

Nvidia's real AI moat isn't "a piece of hardware," writes Wired's Sheon Han. It's CUDA: a mature, deeply optimized software ecosystem that keeps machine-learning workloads tied to Nvidia GPUs. An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: What sounds like a chemical compound banned by the FDA may be the one true moat in AI. CUDA technically stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture, but much like laser or scuba, no one bothers to expand the acronym; we just say "KOO-duh." So what is this all-important treasure good for? If forced to give a one-word answer: parallelization. Here's a simple example. Let's say we task a machine with filling out a 9x9 multiplication table. Using a computer with a single core, all 81 operations are executed dutifully one by one. But a GPU with nine cores can assign tasks so that each core takes a different column -- one from 1x1 to 1x9, another from 2x1 to 2x9, and so on -- for a ninefold speed gain. Modern GPUs can be even cleverer. For example, if programmed to recognize commutativity -- 7x9 = 9x7 -- they can avoid duplicate work, reducing 81 operations to 45, nearly halving the workload. When a single training run costs a hundred million dollars, every optimization counts. Nvidia's GPUs were originally built to render graphics for video games. In the early 2000s, a Stanford PhD student named Ian Buck, who first got into GPUs as a gamer, realized their architecture could be repurposed for general high-performance computing. He created a programming language called Brook, was hired by Nvidia, and, with John Nickolls, led the development of CUDA. If AI ushers in the age of a permanent white-collar underclass and autonomous weapons, just know that it would all be because someone somewhere playing Doom thought a demon's scrotum should jiggle at 60 frames per second. CUDA is not a programming language in itself but a "platform." I use that weasel word because, not unlike how The New York Times is a newspaper that's also a gaming company, CUDA has, over the years, become a nested bundle of software libraries for AI. Each function shaves nanoseconds off single mathematical operations -- added up, they make GPUs, in industry parlance, go brrr. A modern graphics card is not just a circuit board crammed with chips and memory and fans. It's an elaborate confection of cache hierarchies and specialized units called "tensor cores" and "streaming multiprocessors." In that sense, what chip companies sell is like a professional kitchen, and more cores are akin to more grilling stations. But even a kitchen with 30 grilling stations won't run any faster without a capable head chef deftly assigning tasks -- as CUDA does for GPU cores. To extend the metaphor, hand-tuned CUDA libraries optimized for one matrix operation are the equivalent of kitchen tools designed for a single job and nothing more -- a cherry pitter, a shrimp deveiner -- which are indulgences for home cooks but not if you have 10,000 shrimp guts to yank out. Which brings us back to DeepSeek. Its engineers went below this already deep layer of abstraction to work directly in PTX, a kind of assembly language for Nvidia GPUs. Let's say the task is peeling garlic. An unoptimized GPU would go: "Peel the skin with your fingernails." CUDA can instruct: "Smash the clove with the flat of a knife." PTX lets you dictate every sub-instruction: "Lift the blade 2.35 inches above the cutting board, make it parallel to the clove's equator, and strike downward with your palm at a force of 36.2 newtons." "You can begin to see why CUDA is so valuable to Nvidia -- and so hard for anyone else to touch," writes Han. "Tuning GPU performance is a gnarly problem. You can't just conscript some tender-footed undergrad on Market Street, hand them a Claude Max plan, and expect them to hack GPU kernels. Writing at this level is a grindsome enterprise -- unless you're a cracker-jack programmer at DeepSeek..." Han goes on to argue that rivals like AMD and Intel offer competitive specs on paper, but their software stacks have struggled with bugs, compatibility issues, and weak adoption. As a result, Nvidia has built an Apple-like moat around AI computing, leaving the industry dependent on its expensive hardware.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stellar eclipses may hold the key to finding new hidden worlds in binary star systems.

Google is launching the Research Program at the Intersection of Life Sciences & Quantum AI (REPLIQA), an initiative committing $10 million to five universities to apply advanced quantum science and AI to the life sciences, to improve human outcomes.

May 11, 2026 — Understanding human biology and health at the molecular level is one of science’s greatest challenges. To help tackle this, Google is launching the Research Program at the Intersection of the Life Sciences and Quantum AI (REPLIQA).

Credit: Google

REPLIQA is an effort by Google Quantum AI and Google.org to apply advanced quantum science and AI to the life sciences field. Part of this effort is a commitment of $10 million from Google.org to advance research at five leading academic institutions.

The Quantum Advantage in Biology

Biological processes, like how a protein folds or how a cell reacts to a new drug, involve incredibly complex interactions at the atomic level. Classical computers often struggle to accurately simulate these interactions. Quantum technologies, however, operate using the very same quantum mechanics that govern these molecules.

For example, quantum sensors can now observe biological processes with unprecedented precision. Recent experiments even suggest that quantum spin — the way subatomic particles rotate — might play a role in how cells function. Furthermore, quantum computers have the potential to drastically accelerate simulations of complex molecular interactions, like the behavior of the P450 enzyme, which is critical for drug development.

As quantum computing technology continues to mature, there is now an opportunity to combine it with AI and biological science to unlock new discoveries and improve human outcomes.

A Scientific Ecosystem

Tackling problems of this scale requires a shared vision across the scientific community. Google is proud to commit funding to Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California San Diego, University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Arizona, institutions that are already pioneering in this space.

Foundational Research for Future Breakthroughs

Google sees immense potential in this emerging field. However, REPLIQA is a foundational research effort. There won’t be results overnight. Instead, Google is working to build the essential tools, such as quantum sensors or quantum-enhanced AI algorithms, needed to make those future breakthroughs possible. By laying this groundwork today, the company hopes to spark the next generation of discoveries.

Source: Hartmut Neven, Google Quantum AI

The post Google Commits $10M to REPLIQA Initiative Linking Quantum AI and Life Sciences appeared first on HPCwire.

Hamilton was fired as acting administrator last year after he opposed plans to abolish the agency at a House hearing

Donald Trump has once again nominated Cameron Hamilton to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) after Hamilton was previously fired for publicly opposing plans to abolish the agency.

Hamilton was dismissed last year from his role as acting administrator of the disaster relief agency after testifying before a House appropriations subcommittee. During the hearing, he said: “I do not believe it is in the best interests of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”

Jay Bhattacharya, the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CBS News that the hantavirus outbreak should be treated differently from COVID.

WASHINGTON, May 11, 2026 — A total of 75 PhD students from 55 universities and 27 home states have been selected for the prestigious Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program.

SCGSR prepares doctoral candidates for careers of critical importance to the Office of Science’s mission of transforming our understanding of nature and advancing the energy, economic, and national security of the United States. Participants receive world-class training and access to state-of-the-art facilities, expertise, and resources at DOE’s National Laboratories.

“We are incredibly proud to offer students the opportunity to conduct their cutting-edge thesis research at our world-class national laboratories through the SCGSR program,” said DOE Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil. “This experience will undoubtedly equip them with the skills and knowledge to become future leaders in critical scientific fields.”

Awardees were selected from a wide pool of graduate applicants. Selections were based on scientific merit review by external experts.

SCGSR awardees work on research projects to address critical energy challenges at national and international scales. Projects in this cohort span seven Office of Science research programs, including research in artificial intelligence, quantum information science, fusion energy, and accelerator science. Awards were made through the SCGSR program’s second of two annual solicitation cycles for Fiscal Year 2025.

Graduate students currently pursuing PhD degrees in areas of physics, chemistry, material sciences, biology (non-medical), geology, planetary sciences, mathematics, engineering, computer or computational sciences that are aligned with the mission of the Office of Science are eligible to apply to the SCGSR program. Research projects will advance the graduate awardees’ overall doctoral research and training by providing access to the expertise, resources, and capabilities available at the DOE National Laboratories.

Find out more about applying for the next cycle at the SCGSR How to Apply | U.S. DOE Office of Science (SC) page.

Since 2014, the SCGSR program has provided over 1,400 U.S. graduate awardees from 173 universities with supplemental funds to conduct part of their thesis research at DOE national laboratories in collaboration with DOE National Laboratory scientists.

A list of the 75 awardees for this selection, their institutions, host DOE Laboratory/facility, and priority research areas of projects can be found at the SCGSR Awards and Publications page.

Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy Office of Science

The post DOE Selects 75 PhD Students for SCGSR National Lab Research Program appeared first on HPCwire.

Microsoft is currently testing a brand new performance-enhancing feature in Windows 11.

Microsoft, too, is introducing something to Windows 11 called “low latency profile” and it this will work irrespective of the processor, be it AMD64 CPUs like Intel or AMD or ARM64 ones like from Qualcomm. Essentially what this new tech will do is apply a maximum available clock frequency boost for a very small span of time, like for one to three seconds, when a user launches any app. The idea is that the app launch time will reduce while the quick clock burst should not impact the overall efficiency of the system by much.

↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin

Unsurprisingly, boosting the processor’s clock speed to its maximum for a few seconds will make a menu or application open a little faster. I’m not entirely sure why anyone seems surprised by this, but here we are. Yes, the Start menu will load faster and applications will be ready quicker if you boost the processor to its full potential, but that does raise the question of why Windows 11 would need to do that just to open a menu or load an application in the first place.

According to Microsoft’s Scott Henselmann, who defended Microsoft’s approach (weirdly enough he did so on a nazi platform called “Twitter” that I’m obviously not linking to), every other modern operating system does the exact same thing, pointing specifically to macOS and GNOME and KDE on Linux. He also pointed out that the Start menu today does a lot more than the same Start menu back in Windows 95, including making network requests and rendering everything in HiDPI.

I just want a cascading menu of stuff I can run and don’t want my launcher to make network requests, but alas, I guess I’m old.

Anyway, I don’t know enough about the intricacies of how modern processors work to make any statements about how this affects battery life, but instinctively, you’d think this would not exactly be conducive to that. I also wonder if this will trigger a lot of laptops to spin up their fans whenever you open the Start menu, because the few seconds your processor goes full tilt raises its temperature just enough to make that happen. Once this new feature comes out of testing and is generally available, I’d be quite interested in seeing battery tests, as well comparisons to other operating systems to see how it fares.

The company has diverted resources away from producing the next mixed-reality headset.

May 11, 2026 — You might be surprised to find out that most profound breakthroughs in modern astrophysics no longer happen solely at the lens of a telescope, but within the world’s most powerful supercomputers. With the help of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Center for AstroPhysical Surveys (CAPS), we have entered a new era of discovery where the practical impact of space science is measured by our ability to transform petabytes of raw data into actionable knowledge. Today, in addition to looking at the stars through massively powerful telescopes, research is also about the computational resources required to decode the data collected from these observations.

Rubin Observatory in March 2024. Credit: Rubin Observatory/NSF/AURA/A. Pizarro D.

At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U. of I.), this shift is driven by NCSA and CAPS. In many ways, the universe is the ultimate big data challenge. Through a partnership that has yielded numerous breakthroughs, NCSA and CAPS prove that studying the furthest reaches of space drives the very hardware and AI innovations that define our technological future. “This is literally a new era in astronomy,” said Joaquin Vieira, director of Astronomy and CAPS.

The power of these partnerships is showcased in events like the annual AstroFest conference. Hosted at NCSA, the conference brings together researchers from around campus to discuss their progress and achievements. This year, one of the presenters was Britt Lundgren, a U. of I alumnus (Ph.D. Astronomy 2009) and Philip G. Carson Distinguished Professor in the Sciences at the University of North Carolina Asheville (UNC Asheville). Lundgren is also notable for being a member of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee (AAAC). The committee recently presented its annual report to Congress, U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) leadership, NASA and the Department of Energy. The report assesses the federal astronomy and astrophysics research portfolio and progress toward the priorities outlined in the Astro2020 decadal survey, a blueprint for federal investment in space science, that highlights NCSA and CAPS as key contributors to the nation’s progress in handling massive survey datasets. Specifically, the AAAC report identifies the processing of massive survey datasets, like those from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and the South Pole Telescope (SPT), as a critical achievement in the nation’s progress toward understanding the fundamental laws of the universe.

“We’re currently experiencing a golden age for astronomy, in which large surveys like SDSS and Rubin/LSST are producing vast datasets that enable astronomers to answer big questions with new precision and also discover and pursue rare objects and phenomena,” said Lundgren. “What excites me the most about the current moment is the relatively new paradigm of making these large, science-ready datasets publicly accessible through the web – a transition that has truly democratized exploration and discovery in our field. Data from these massive surveys can be accessed and visualized by anyone with a web browser, enabling students and the public to explore cutting-edge professional astronomy data while building transferrable skills in coding, big data analysis and visualization. Federal investment has been critical to developing this modern survey technology and data infrastructure, which directly supports the education of the next generation of astronomers and the development of the STEM workforce more broadly.”

The following three projects serve as evidence of this computational revolution, demonstrating how high-performance computing (HPC) is powering the next wave of astrophysical breakthroughs.

Dark Energy Survey

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is a U.S.-led international project that has mapped large portions of the sky at optical wavelengths, surveying everything from galaxies to supernovae. The main goal of the project is to better understand dark energy and why it seems to accelerate cosmic expansion. In the first six years of operation, the DES recorded information about 550 million galaxies, giving researchers an unprecedented amount of data to study. NCSA, along with Fermilab and NOIRLab, is a founding partner of the DES project. The DES project is funded by the NSF and DOE.

DES recently published results that combine all six years of data collected from weak lensing and galaxy clustering probes – a first for the international collaboration that is mapping hundreds of millions of galaxies, detecting thousands of supernovae and analyzing patterns of cosmic structure that could reveal what is accelerating the expansion of the universe.

NCSA led end-to-end data processing and archival for DES using the DES Data Management System. NCSA operated the data management and computing infrastructure that processed, quality-controlled and served the full DES imaging and catalog data set, enabling the creation of science-ready sky maps and cosmological measurements.

“Dark energy and the universe’s accelerating expansion sit at the boundary between what we can measure precisely and what we can explain,” said Vieira. “Pinning down what is driving that acceleration would reshape our understanding of the universe’s fate and force revisions to the deepest laws that describe space, time and matter.”

Rubin Partnership

There are many trillions of objects in observable space. The NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory began tracking a sampling of these trillions of objects last year and released its first images in June, 2025. The AAAC report highlights the Rubin Observatory as a top national priority for the coming decade. NCSA has been a partner in the Rubin project since its inception, ensuring the infrastructure is ready for this massive influx of data.

The Rubin Observatory project aims to conduct a 10-year optical survey of the visible sky. Such an enormous undertaking requires decades of research and work. This spring, after meticulous planning, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera was installed on the Simonyi Survey Telescope at Rubin. The camera is the world’s largest digital camera, and it’s expected to capture 500 petabytes of image data over the course of the project.

Stephen Pietrowicz, a principal research software engineer at NCSA, is part of the CAPS team, and his recent work has been with the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science.

Stephen Pietrowicz and Gregory Daues at AstroFest 2026.

He’s now part of the middleware team for Vera C. Rubin’s Data Management group. The NCSA team’s work encompasses many different parts of the project’s data management. They’re responsible for gathering data used to construct the images, data movement between sites and orchestration of image processing campaigns. Pietrowicz manages several different tasks, including the Observatory Operations Data Service, or OODS. “I wrote the OODS, which handles images sent by the Simonyi Survey Telescope. My software quickly ingests those images at the summit in Chile, so they can immediately be used by scientists.”

Support from NCSA has helped Rubin make such breakthroughs as their recent First Alert system, a “near-real-time alert system” that will “enable scientists around the world to coordinate follow-up observations like never before,” according to the recent First Alerts press release posted by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

“These projects are large and complex,” said Vieira. “They require sustained partnerships and coordination among national laboratories, researchers, and institutions such as NCSA. CAPS plays a crucial role on campus by enabling the University of Illinois to act as more than a collection of individual faculty. It allows us to operate as a peer institution with national labs and to contribute meaningfully to major big-science efforts, including large cosmological surveys that cost nearly a billion dollars and span more than a decade.”

SkAI Institute

Funded by a five-year, $20 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Simons Foundation, in 2024, NCSA partnered with other academic institutions and federal laboratories in the Midwest to develop new artificial intelligence (AI) tools to advance astrophysics research and exploration of the universe.

Led by Northwestern University, the collaboration established the NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky or SkAI (pronounced “sky”), one of two AI research centers that will help astronomers better understand the cosmos. This move directly aligns with the AAAC’s emphasis on the ‘computational revolution’ in astronomy, where AI is no longer just a tool but a foundational infrastructure for interpreting the next generation of celestial data.

“Our mission at the Center for AstroPhysical Surveys (CAPS) in NCSA has been to bring together innovative software and cutting-edge hardware to tackle the most pressing questions in the universe,” said SkAI co-principal investigator and CAPS Deputy Director Gautham Narayan. “We’re very excited to have our students, postdocs, faculty and staff deepen our involvement with our colleagues at Northwestern and U of Chicago, provide the entire SkAI community access to NSF’s Delta and DeltaAI supercomputers here at NCSA and build tools and services that lead to AI methods becoming more interpretable and reliable. Our goal is to democratize AI and make it more trustworthy – not just for astrophysics and cosmology, or our campus, but for everyone. This is a big leap forward, and Illinois will lead the way.”A number of CAPS personnel hold leadership positions within the SkAI Institute Project, and several SkAI-funded projects led by CAPS members are underway.

Source: Megan Meave Johnson, NCSA

The post NCSA and CAPS Highlight HPC’s Role in Processing Next-Gen Astronomy Data appeared first on HPCwire.

New voting maps flipped four Republican-held seats to give Democrats an edge in redistricting race sparked by Trump

Virginia Democrats asked the US supreme court on Monday to revive a congressional map designed to boost their party’s chances in November’s midterm elections, turning to the court as Republicans – including allies of Donald Trump – seek to preserve narrow control of Congress.

The case thrusts Virginia into an unusual, mid-decade redistricting showdown, as courts weigh whether lawmakers can remake House districts outside the normal post-census cycle – with control of a narrowly divided Congress potentially hanging in the balance.

Recent consumer alert on ebike safety laws says some vehicles should be classified as mopeds or motorcycles

Amazon said it plans to stop selling certain high-speed electric bicycles in California after a string of high-profile incidents and a consumer alert that the state attorney general issued last month.

In April an 81-year-old man in Orange county died after a teenager illegally riding an e-motorcycle struck him. The teen’s mother, Tommi Jo Mejer, has since been charged with involuntary manslaughter in Ed Ashman’s death as officials say she was warned it was illegal for her son to operate the vehicle.

cURL creator Daniel Stenberg says Anthropic's hyped Mythos bug-hunting model found only one confirmed low-severity vulnerability in cURL, plus a few non-security bugs, after he expected a much longer list. He argues Mythos may be useful, but not meaningfully beyond other modern AI code-analysis tools. "My personal conclusion can however not end up with anything else than that the big hype around this model so far was primarily marketing," Stenberg said a blog post. "I see no evidence that this setup finds issues to any particular higher or more advanced degree than the other tools have done before Mythos." He went on to call Mythos "an amazingly successful marketing stunt for sure." The Register reports: Stenberg explained in a Monday blog post that he was promised access to Anthropic's Mythos model - sort of - through the AI biz's Project Glasswing program. Part of Glasswing involves giving high-profile open source projects access via the Linux Foundation, but while Stenberg signed up to try Mythos, he said he never actually received direct access to the model. Instead, someone else with access ran Mythos against curl's codebase and later sent him a report. "It's not that I would have a lot of time to explore lots of different prompts and doing deep dive adventures anyway," Stenberg explained. "Getting the tool to generate a first proper scan and analysis would be great, whoever did it." That scan, which analyzed curl's git repository at a recent master-branch commit, was sent back to him earlier this month, and it found just five things that it claimed were "confirmed security vulnerabilities" in cURL. Saying he had expected an extensive list of vulnerabilities, Stenberg wrote that the report "felt like nothing," and that feeling was further validated by a review of Mythos' findings. "Once my curl security team fellows and I had poked on this short list for a number of hours and dug into the details, we had trimmed the list down and were left with one confirmed vulnerability," Stenberg said, bringing us back to the aforementioned number. As for the other four, three turned out to be false positives that pointed out cURL shortcomings already noted in API documentation, while the team deemed the fourth to be just a simple bug. "The single confirmed vulnerability is going to end up a severity low CVE planned to get published in sync with our pending next curl release 8.21.0 in late June," the cURL meister noted. "The flaw is not going to make anyone grasp for breath."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Texas Attorney General alleges that Netflix has designed its platform to be addictive and plans to sell data "for a handsome profit."

Palestinian activist is awaiting another legal decision on a separate track in a narrowing effort to stay in the US

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A lawyer for Mahmoud Khalil, the first noncitizen activist arrested in the Trump administration crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech, called his client’s immigration proceedings “preordained and a complete sham” after it was revealed that the case was prioritized to be fast-tracked.

“These revelations make clear that this case has been controlled from day one by higher-ups in the administration,” said Marc Van Der Hout, an attorney on Khalil’s legal team, in a statement. “The immigration judge was hand-picked and the Board of Immigration Appeals decision was predetermined. We will continue to fight for Mahmoud in every court we can.”

Virginia Democrats asked the Supreme Court to restore its congressional map that aimed to give Democrats an edge in the midterms, days after it was blocked​ by the state's highest court.

Grab two of your smartest word-nerd friends. Wordle is looking for teams of contestants.

Microsoft acquired GitHub and applied their unique brand of enshittification. Amongst their achievements was the spawning of the Copilot circle of hell. Now they’re effectively DDoSing themselves with slop. I won’t dwell on what else went wrong. I don’t know and I don’t care. GitHub is impressively bad now. It’s embarrassing. Shameful.

↫ David Bushell

Luckily, there’s really very little in the form of lock-in with GitHub, unless you really value your stars or whatever. There are countless alternatives, and if you’re a programmer, it’s probably absolutely trivial for you to run your own instance of any of the various available forges. If you’re still on GitHub, you should really be thinking about, and planning for, leaving, as it seems it’s circling the drain.

Elon Musk, Tim Cook and other high-powered business leaders have been invited to be a part of the U.S. delegation traveling to China this week.

Leaked images purport to show a portable wireless mouse that folds in half for easy packing.

A controversial real estate expo that advertises properties for sale in the occupied Palestinian territories is returning to New York City on Monday, less than a week after a previous event drew dueling protests on the Upper East Side.

The “Great Israeli Real Estate Event” will take place Monday evening at Young Israel of Midwood, an Orthodox synagogue in southern Brooklyn. Event organizers confirmed the location in an automated response to The Intercept’s request for comment, but they did not comment on the event itself.

Related

Israeli Soldiers Killed 15 Protesters in the Same Place They Shot Aysenur Eygi

The roving expo is co-sponsored by several real estate companies with ties to Israel, and it is typically held at synagogues and other centers of Jewish life. At the event held last week at Park East Synagogue, The Intercept saw at least one table advertising land sales in Kfar Eldad, Karnei Shomron, and other Israeli settlements in the occupied territories — sales considered illegal under international law.

The event presents a test for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has caught flak from the pro-Israel side for condemning the illegal land sales, and from pro-Palestine groups and free speech advocates for allowing the NYPD to maintain “buffer zones” that keep protesters away from houses of worship.

Compounding the mayor’s entanglement is the fact that Young Israel of Midwood, the synagogue where Monday’s event will take place, is home to a city-funded senior center called Young Israel Senior Services. The senior center received more than $800,000 from the Department for the Aging in 2024, according to a city budget document.

A spokesperson for Mamdani, who campaigned on his pro-Palestine bona fides, declined to comment on the latest real estate event, pointing instead to comments about last week’s expo.

“Mayor Mamdani is deeply opposed to the real estate expo this evening that includes the promotion of the sale of land in settlements in the Occupied West Bank,” spokesperson Sam Raskin told The Intercept last week.

The mayor has also affirmed attendees’ rights to go to and from synagogues without interference, in line with a controversial “buffer zone” bill the New York City Council passed last month. The new law, sponsored by the council’s moderate speaker, requires the New York Police Department to address physical obstructions and interference at houses of worship — which opponents see as a means to crack down on protests.

Related

Mamdani Condemns NYC Expo Promoting Property Sales in Israeli West Bank Settlements

Last week’s event, held Tuesday at Park East Synagogue on the Upper East Side, prompted heated protests from Pal-Awda and other pro-Palestine activists, which in turn drew a counter-protest from pro-Israel groups including members of the extremist group Betar U.S. The NYPD kept the groups separate and kept protesters, members of the media, and members of the public alike away from the synagogue with a tight cordon of security barriers that impeded movement along numerous city blocks in the vicinity of the synagogue.

After last week’s event, Mamdani praised the NYPD’s handling of the crowd at an unrelated press conference on Wednesday.

“We in this city believe in the sacrosanct nature of the right to protest and also are committed to ensuring that any New Yorker can safely enter or exit from a house of worship and that access never be in question while we also protect the First Amendment, and I do believe that the police ensured that yesterday,” he said. “I think that critique of the policies of a government is very much separate from bigotry toward the people of a specific religious faith. And there is no tolerance for antisemitism.”

The New York Civil Liberties Union, by contrast, offered a rebuke for the police force, calling the NYPD’s barricaded area a “no-speech zone.”

“When politicians use Freedom of Religion as a pretext to impose severe restrictions on speech, they undermine all New Yorkers’ rights,” said Donna Lieberman, the NYCLU’s executive director, in a statement released Wednesday. “The subject of last [week’s] protests was not a religious service but a private, politically-charged real estate event held at a synagogue.”

More protests are expected at Monday’s event in Midwood, putting the NYPD and the mayor under scrutiny once again.

Correction: May 11, 2026, 4:59 p.m. ET
Due to an editing error, this story previously stated that Mamdani signed the City Council’s new “buffer zone” law. The bill passed with a veto-proof majority, and Mamdani allowed it to become law without his signature.

The post Israeli Real Estate Expo Advertising West Bank Settlements Returns to NYC appeared first on The Intercept.

Exclusive: In a letter 40 lawmakers demand the FAA address allegations of mistreatment of immigrants and the ‘urgent need for transparency’

A group of 40 House Democrats have described “grave concerns” over the Trump administration’s secretive program of deportation flights and demanded the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) address allegations of mistreatment and inhumane conditions on ICE charter jets.

In a letter shared with the Guardian and addressed to the FAA administrator, Bryan Bedford, the lawmakers describe the “urgent need for transparency” over ICE’s expanded use of commercial airliners to transfer detained immigrants and its “inappropriate and dangerous” efforts to shield these flights from public scrutiny.

Police confirmed that there were six people dead, five men and one woman.

Suspending the federal gas tax would have a modest impact on fuel prices, while also requiring congressional approval.

President Trump is expected to encourage China to pressure Iran into making a deal to end the war when he visits Beijing later this week and meets with President Xi Jinping.

The popstar appeared on the boxes used to sell Samsung TVs -- but she says she owns the rights to the image.

Seeking support from Americans worried about the economy, elected Republicans have been touting a spike in tax refunds — the first refund season following the 2025 enactment of President Donald Trump’s signature tax and spending legislation. 

"The average IRS tax refund is up 11% compared to last year thanks to the Working Families Tax Cut that expanded the standard deduction and child tax credit, eliminated taxes on overtime, tips and Social Security...and more," wrote Rep. Nick Langworthy, R-N.Y., in a March 31 X post. 

PolitiFact has previously written that Trump’s tax legislation did not eliminate taxes on Social Security but rather reduced taxes for older Americans, many of whom do collect Social Security; this earned his campaign promise a Compromise. His pledge to eliminate taxes on overtime also received a Compromise, while his promise to end taxes on tips earned a Promise Kept.

But what about tax refunds? Are they up by 11%, as Langworthy said?

When we reached out to Langworthy’s office, a spokesperson told PolitiFact New York that the 11% figure came directly from the IRS. 

IRS statistics for the week ending March 27, shortly before Langworthy’s post, showed an 11.1% increase in average refunds, from $3,170 in 2025 to $3,521 in 2026. IRS data released in subsequent weeks shows that the 11% figure has remained steady, varying by small fractions of a percent.

Garrett Watson, director of policy analysis at the Tax Foundation, cautioned that filing season averages can fluctuate as more returns are processed, but tax changes such as expanded deductions and credits largely boosted refunds. 

Watson told PolitiFact in December that if taxpayers maintained their existing withholding rates, then instead of gradually receiving the benefits of the tax cuts through higher take-home pay during the year, taxpayers would receive it all at once when they filed their returns.

Our ruling

Langworthy said, "The average IRS tax refund is up 11% compared to last year."

Official IRS statistics show that by late March, average refunds were about 11.1% higher than they were in 2025, a number that has remained steady in the weeks since. Tax experts agree that the 2025 tax bill is the main reason, as taxpayers reap the rewards of tax reductions they had not planned for in their withholding.

We rate the statement True.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for May 12, No. 1,066.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for May 12, No. 800.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for May 12, No. 596.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for May 12, No. 1,788.

GM is laying off about 500 to 600 salaried IT workers, mainly in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan, as it restructures its technology organization and trims costs. "GM is transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future. As part of that work, we have made the difficult decision to eliminate certain roles globally. We are grateful for the contributions of the employees affected and are committed to supporting them through this transition," the automaker said in an emailed statement. CNBC reports: GM reported employing about 68,000 salaried workers globally as of the end of last year, including 47,000 white-collar employees in the U.S. Despite Monday's cuts, GM still is still hiring IT workers. The company has 82 open IT positions that include positions working in artificial intelligence, motorsports and autonomous vehicles, according to the automaker's careers website.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Justice Samuel Alito extended an administrative stay that maintained access to mifepristone through the mail.

• ‘It’s going to be really hard … but how fun would that be?’

• Bradley is in field for this week’s PGA Championship

Keegan Bradley still reflects on the pain of captaining the United States to a home Ryder Cup defeat last year but says he would love to make the 2027 team as a player.

Bradley took full responsibility as his USA side endured a chastening first two days at Bethpage Black last September, slipping to a record 11.5-4.5 deficit, before a valiant fightback fell short.

Power up your career with savings up to 65% off training, certifications, bundles, and subscriptions. Offer ends May 20.

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The post 🎮 Mega May Cyber Deals — Level up & save up to 65%! appeared first on Linux.com.

The rumored Low Latency Profile mode supposedly boosts your system's processor to maximum frequency for high-priority tasks, like opening new apps.

The Cultural Landscape Foundation seeks to block the replacement of pool’s ‘gray stone’ appearance

A historic preservation group on Monday filed a lawsuit seeking to halt Donald Trump’s ongoing renovation to the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool, the latest in a string of court challenges to efforts to remake Washington DC landmarks from the US president and former real estate developer.

The lawsuit, filed by the Cultural Landscape Foundation, alleged the renovation violates the National Historic Preservation Act, a law passed by Congress in 1996 that outlines procedures for changes to historic properties.

Guardian staff contributed

Infectious disease experts have sought to reassure people that the hantavirus cruise ship outbreak poses very low risks to the wider public.

A growing number of Labour MPs are in no mood to heed calls from the PM’s allies to keep faith with their leader

• UK politics live – latest updates

“Has Keir done enough to survive?” was the question anxious Labour MPs were asking each other throughout Monday, after the speech regarded by many as crucial to Starmer’s chances of political survival.

But the anxiety for many of them – badly bruised by Thursday’s election crushing – did not stem from concern the prime minister might be ousted. But that he would not.

The Sixers’ season ended in a humiliating sweep at the hands of the Knicks. There are reasons to believe the franchise can recover though

“You guys wanna see a dead body?”

Old heads remember that scene in Stand By Me, four boys hike through the Oregon wilderness to find the body of a dead boy. They walk for miles for the morbid prize of seeing something that can’t be unseen. When they finally arrive and stand over the body, nobody says a word. There’s nothing left to say.

As AI and HPC workloads drive unprecedented demands on data infrastructure, the concept of the “parallel file system” (PFS) has re-emerged as a critical architectural foundation. However, it remains widely misunderstood and often misrepresented. Originating in the late 1980s and early 1990s alongside massively parallel processing systems, true parallel file systems were designed to eliminate storage bottlenecks by enabling concurrent access to data across distributed nodes.

Parallel File System Defined

Across HPC, AI, and large-scale analytics, practitioners share a common understanding of what constitutes a parallel file system – a distributed storage architecture in which many clients access data directly and in parallel across multiple storage nodes, based on metadata delivered out of band, within a single shared namespace.

Direct client-to-storage communication is a foundational requirement. In a true parallel file system, clients do not communicate through front-end controllers, NAS heads, or proxy gateways. Rather, they establish parallel data paths to many storage nodes simultaneously, enabling performance to scale linearly and predictably as more compute nodes or storage nodes are added. If data flows through controllers, proxies, or gateways, the architecture is not truly parallel.

This principle is not limited to legacy HPC systems; it’s used in modern standards-based designs such as Parallel NFS (pNFS), especially pNFSv4.2, which is included in all major Linux distributions. With pNFSv4.2, clients receive layout information from a metadata server and then communicate directly with the appropriate storage nodes. The metadata server coordinates the layout state and access but never proxies data flows, a hallmark of true parallelism in practice.

Separating Metadata from the Data Path

AI workloads require massive data movement

Separating metadata from the data path is the most essential characteristic of a parallel file system. In a real PFS, metadata is architected so it doesn’t become a serialized bottleneck. Instead, metadata operations are distributed, delegated to clients, cached, or orchestrated in parallel.

In architectures where metadata and data traffic are intermingled or where metadata operations pass through controller nodes, concurrency is fundamentally constrained, regardless of how much backend capacity is added. In contrast, modern PFS designs allow metadata to flow independently from the data, enabling the system to scale horizontally without sacrificing performance. Protocols like pNFS reinforce this by providing layouts out of band while leaving data movement entirely to distributed parallel paths.

Data Distribution and True Parallelism

Parallel file systems also distribute data across many storage nodes, allowing clients to access different parts of files concurrently. Whether accomplished through explicit striping, negotiated layouts, or client-driven placement, the result is the same: a system optimized for multi-node, multi-stream I/O at scale.

This parallelism arises from direct multi-node access rather than from aggregating performance behind front-end controllers, as is common in scale-out NAS architectures. In a parallel file system, scalability is an inherent property of the data path architecture itself.  Adding more controllers to a NAS system may increase aggregate capacity or throughput to a point, but it does not eliminate the architectural limitations imposed by controller-mediated I/O, which remain the limiting factor at scale.

Performance Scales Linearly Across Clients and Storage Nodes

Another distinguishing feature of true PFS architectures is that performance scales directly with the number of clients and storage nodes. Adding GPU servers and/or storage nodes, aggregate throughput and concurrency increase naturally.

Architectures that funnel I/O through controllers, however, cannot offer this type of scalability. No matter how many backend storage devices they manage, their front-end controllers remain fixed chokepoints. In high-concurrency environments, such as those powering modern AI pipelines, this limitation becomes apparent very quickly. These bottlenecks do not disappear with scale; they become more pronounced.

The Importance of Metadata Architecture

Metadata design is often reduced to overly simple labels like “centralized” or “distributed,” but effective AI and HPC performance requires much more nuance. At scale, metadata must support high concurrency, serve namespace operations in parallel, and enable delegation or client-side metadata caching. To power modern AI workloads, it must preserve locality across multi-site and multi-cloud environments and ingest metadata from external storage systems into a unified global context.

These capabilities matter because AI workloads increasingly span datasets stored across silos, protocols, and geographies. Metadata must operate at a global scale without entering the data path, something that favors true parallel file system architectures.

NFS separates data from metadata (Image courtesy Hammerspace)

Global Namespace Doesn’t Guarantee Parallel I/O

Many storage systems now promote the idea of a “global namespace,” but this feature alone does not make a system a parallel file system. A parallel file system requires both a shared namespace and the ability for clients to access data directly and concurrently across storage nodes, with metadata fully separated from the data path. Some parallel file systems provide this capability only within their own storage domains, while standards-based approaches such as pNFS allow metadata to unify access across heterogeneous NFS-backed storage systems. These differences significantly affect the usefulness of a global namespace is for AI-scale workloads.

AI Workflows Commonly Require Both POSIX and S3 Access

While many systems claim support for file and object protocols, the architectural model that delivers that support is critical. In some designs, S3 access is implemented through gateway or controller layers, forcing object traffic through the same bottlenecked pathways used for file I/O.  In others, object semantics are integrated directly into the distributed parallel architecture, allowing object access to scale horizontally and follow the same direct-to-storage data paths as file access. Supporting both file and object protocols is meaningless if either is funneled through centralized front ends.

The Evolution of Modern Parallel File Systems

Modern designs incorporate distributed metadata services, dynamic layout negotiation, scalable and distributed locking, client-side delegation, parallel namespace operations, and global data awareness that extends across multiple sites or storage types.

These advanced capabilities reflect a shift toward AI, interactive, and heterogeneous computing environments rather than the batch-oriented workloads that shaped early HPC systems. The state of the art has advanced significantly.

Enabling Direct and Concurrent Client Access

One of the simplest ways to distinguish scale-out NAS from a parallel file system is to examine how clients perform I/O. If clients must route data or metadata through controller nodes, regardless of how many controllers exist, the architecture will eventually reach a performance ceiling determined by the controller CPUs and network capacity.

This constraint becomes especially problematic in AI environments where thousands of GPUs generate massive amounts of east-west traffic, where inference workloads require extremely low latency, and where metadata operations must be served in parallel. Parallel file systems avoid these limits by removing controllers from the data path, enabling direct client access to storage nodes without intermediaries.

Parallel file systems minimize bottlenecks for AI workloads (kubais/Shutterstock)

Rebuild and Durability Capabilities are Table Stakes

Many modern distributed systems support advanced erasure coding, parallel rebuilds, and flexible fault domain configurations. These features are widely available across object stores, scale-out NAS, and parallel file systems, and do not indicate whether a system is architecturally parallel.

AI Workloads Extend Well Beyond Training

Much of the industry conversation still centers on training benchmarks, but real enterprise AI performance increasingly depends on inference, microservices, agentic AI behavior, and multi-modal models that require rapid access to diverse, widely distributed data types. These workloads involve high fan-out traffic patterns, extreme concurrency, and sensitivity to latency.

Architectures that rely on controller nodes or serialized metadata operations struggle under these patterns. True parallel file systems are well-suited to these workloads because they provide direct access paths, distributed metadata management, and high levels of concurrency without introducing centralized bottlenecks.

Modern AI Data Platform Requirements

Storage systems designed to support AI at scale share a common set of architectural principles. They enable direct, parallel I/O between clients and storage nodes, allowing bandwidth and concurrency to scale with cluster size. These systems separate metadata from the data path and distribute it in ways that support high levels of parallelism.

At the same time, such modern systems provide unified semantics for file and object access without inserting gateways into critical I/O paths, allowing multiple access models to share the same scalable data plane. They extend across heterogeneous storage systems, clouds, and sites by unifying metadata rather than confining it to a single physical or vendor-defined environment. These systems also account for locality within GPU clusters, ensuring that data access aligns closely with the compute fabric.

Finally, modern parallel architectures favor open, standards-based client access over proprietary client layers, enabling broad compatibility and long-term flexibility at scale.

Taken together, these architectural traits define both modern parallel file systems and, more broadly, the storage foundations required to support AI data pipelines effectively.

True Parallelism is the Way Forward

A parallel file system is not simply “fast” or “scale-out.” It is an architecture defined by distributed metadata, direct and concurrent client access to storage nodes, and the removal of controller bottlenecks from the data path.

Modern implementations, including those based on open standards such as pNFS, demonstrate how these principles enable scalable operations across heterogeneous, multi-site, and multi-cloud environments.

As AI infrastructure continues to expand, organizations should evaluate technologies based on these architectural fundamentals rather than on labels or marketing terms. Only systems built on genuine parallelism are best positioned for AI workloads. Anything less is simply repackaged scale-out storage.

About the author: Floyd Christofferson is the Vice President of Product Marketing at Hammerspace. Chistofferson has been involved with data management and storage for more than 25 years, focused on the methods and technologies needed to manage extreme volumes of data to keep up with the needs of modern, distributed storage resources and workflows.

The post Killing the Bottleneck: Why a True Parallel Architecture is the Secret to Scaling AI Workloads appeared first on HPCwire.

Apple says end-to-end encryption for RCS messages between iPhone and Android is now available in iOS 26.5, though the feature is still considered beta and depends on carrier support on both sides. MacRumors reports: Apple says that it worked with Google to lead a cross-industry effort to add E2EE to RCS. iOS users will need iOS 26.5, while Android users will need the latest version of Google Messages. End-to-end encryption is on by default, and there is a toggle for it in the Messages section of the Settings app. Encrypted messages are denoted with a small lock symbol. On iPhones not running iOS 26.5, RCS messages between iPhone and Android users do not have E2EE, but the new update will put Android to iPhone conversations on par with iPhone to iPhone conversations that are encrypted through iMessage. Along with Google, Apple worked with the GSM Association to implement E2EE for RCS messages. E2EE is part of the RCS Universal Profile 3.0, published with Apple's help and built on the Messaging Layer Security protocol. RCS Universal Profile 3.0 also includes editing and deleting messages, cross-platform Tapback support, and replying to specific messages inline during cross-platform conversations.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The effort potentially shielded Iranian aircraft from American airstrikes, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.

School board elections are one of the highest-leverage, lowest-participation decisions in Delaware. Turnout is low. Margins are small. In some cases, candidates run without a real contest. When voters do not engage, leadership is not selected. It is decided by default. When governance is decided by default, the system performs accordingly.

It’s clear that when residents fail to vote, it can have consequences — ones that most people recognize, but rarely connect to the ballot box. It shapes whether schools are focused on clear priorities or pulled in competing directions. It determines whether resources are invested in what improves student outcomes or spread thin. Those decisions show up in real ways: in the preparedness of students, the confidence of families, and the strength of Delaware’s workforce and economy.

In 2024, fewer than 5% of eligible voters cast ballots in Delaware school board elections, even as concern about outcomes, funding, and district leadership remained high across every sector of public life. The disconnect between what communities demand and how they participate is one of the most significant, and most solvable, barriers to progress in our state.

Data from the 2026 Delaware Opportunity Outlook reinforce this disconnect. A majority of Delawareans believe school board members have a direct influence on the quality of K–12 education, yet far fewer report understanding how improvement efforts are being carried out, or how decisions are made at the local level. In other words, people believe boards matter, but are not consistently using the one mechanism they have to influence who serves and how decisions are made.

What governing actually requires 

A strong board member asks clear, outcome-focused questions and expects specific answers. They connect decisions to priorities, work through tradeoffs with colleagues, and ensure decisions are understood before the board moves forward. They listen for whether information reflects progress or activity, and press for clarity when it does not.

These are not intuitive responsibilities. They require preparation. School board governance is often treated as something individuals can step into without training, but these are complex roles that involve setting priorities, interpreting data, making tradeoffs, and ensuring decisions lead to results over time.

The Delaware Opportunity Outlook suggests that this is not how the role is widely understood. While Delawareans recognize that school boards influence the quality of education, far fewer identify training and professional preparation as essential. 

That gap has direct consequences. As the state advances new priorities, the effectiveness of those efforts will depend on whether local board members are prepared to implement them, monitor progress, and make results visible.

Delaware’s moment 

Delaware has established a clear direction for public education: defined priorities, a statewide literacy commitment, and a funding reform that will place significant new responsibilities on local boards. Plans set direction. Boards determine whether those plans turn into results.

What happens next will not be determined by those plans alone. It will be determined by how effectively school boards translate those priorities into decisions, how consistently they track progress, and whether they make results visible to the public.

Candidate evaluation

Evaluating a candidate is straightforward: Can they name a small number of district priorities and explain why those matter? Can they describe what data they would review regularly and how they would use it? Can they explain how resources should align to outcomes and what they would do if results do not improve? Candidates who can answer those questions demonstrate an understanding of the role. Those who cannot speak to governance beyond the issues that brought them to the race may find the role more demanding than they anticipated.

Make your voice heard

Voting in a school board election is one of the few places where individual participation has a direct and immediate impact on how the system performs. School board elections are decided by small numbers of voters. Your decision to engage, or not, determines who governs. Choosing not to participate is not neutrality. It is a choice, and it carries the same weight as the vote itself.

Today, a decision will be made about who governs Delaware’s schools. You can be part of that decision, or it will be made without you. Either way, the results will show up in classrooms, in communities, and in the long-term strength of this state.

Find out who is running. Evaluate them on the work the role requires, not only on the positions they hold. Vote, and encourage others to do the same.

For more details about voting in today’s elections, visit First State Educate’s 2026 School Board Elections page.

The post Who governs matters: Why school board elections deserve your attention  appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

The update also brings some changes to your Maps app and loads of bug fixes to your device.

ATLANTA, May 11, 2026 — Red Hat today announced that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has migrated to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization for its mission-critical IT infrastructure.

JPL selected Red Hat OpenShift with its built-in Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization capability to support a sophisticated, high-performance environment. This unified application platform combines hybrid cloud flexibility with powerful automation, providing a high-efficiency path for managing virtual machine (VM) workloads while supporting a consistent, hybrid cloud foundation for future containerized applications.

This approach uses cloud-native tooling, such as pipelines for VM creation and management, to streamline day-to-day operations and strengthen a foundation for future innovation and evolving workload demands that come with space exploration.

Red Hat OpenShift provides enhanced platform security and compliance capabilities. VMs running on Red Hat OpenShift gain the enterprise-grade security features of the platform, including robust network policies, role-based access control (RBAC) and automatic SELinux security contexts. This foundation is further bolstered by tools like the compliance operator and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes, which provide multi-layered security capabilities for build, runtime and cluster operations.

“Organizations today are grappling with the need to advance their digital capabilities while maximizing the value of their existing application investments,” said Sachin Mullick, director, product management, Hybrid Platforms, Red Hat. “With Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, customers can simplify VM migration and management while taking advantage of built-in automation to reduce operational complexity. Red Hat provides the flexibility, confidence and operational efficiency to help our customers meet their evolving mission goals.”

Learn more about Red Hat Summit here.

About Red Hat

Red Hat is the open hybrid cloud technology leader, delivering a trusted, consistent and comprehensive foundation for transformative IT innovation and AI applications. Its portfolio of cloud, developer, AI, Linux, automation and application platform technologies enables any application, anywhere—from the datacenter to the edge. As the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, Red Hat invests in open ecosystems and communities to solve tomorrow’s IT challenges. Collaborating with partners and customers, Red Hat helps them build, connect, automate, secure and manage their IT environments, supported by consulting services and award-winning training and certification offerings.

Source: Red Hat

The post NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Advances Deep Space Mission Operations with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization appeared first on HPCwire.

LIVINGSTON, N.J., May 11, 2026 — CoreWeave, Inc. today announced it has achieved the strongest combination of speed and price-performance¹ for Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.6 in independent inference benchmarking conducted by Artificial Analysis. Across 11 inference providers evaluated on the current top open-source model, CoreWeave simultaneously delivered the highest output speed at the most cost-efficient performance level measured.

CoreWeave ranked first in the most attractive quadrant for inference speed and price-performance on Kimi K2.6, as independently measured by Artificial Analysis.

As AI applications move from training into production, inference efficiency increasingly determines real-world product viability. For organizations running the full AI loop from training to inference to continuous improvement, throughput, latency, and cost per request directly shape how reliably and economically AI can scale in the real world. This is especially significant where performance is non-negotiable, like coding assistants, agentic systems, and real-time enterprise copilots.

“Training launched the first wave of AI, and inference will define the next one. That’s why the effectiveness and economics of inference are becoming critical to organizations bringing AI into the products people use every day,” said Chen Goldberg, Executive Vice President of Product and Engineering at CoreWeave. “This benchmark reflects the investments we’ve made across our full stack, and the deep expertise of CoreWeave engineers in optimizing performance and efficiency. This is a clear signal that speed, responsiveness, and predictable economics are attainable for customers today.”

“Performance gains in inference systems come from optimization across the full stack, including hardware, inference runtime, and model configuration,” said George Cameron, Co-founder at Artificial Analysis. “Artificial Analysis benchmarks are intended to give organizations transparency in how inference offerings perform. CoreWeave performed strongly across speed and price-performance dimensions in our benchmarking of providers of Kimi K2.6. For those deploying agents in production, inference speed and price are critical to user experience and to making open source models a viable choice at scale.”

The gap between theoretical compute capacity and actual production throughput is influenced by how well hardware, model optimization, and runtime execution are tuned together. CoreWeave has optimized its platform across all three layers.

The benchmark result, as validated by Artificial Analysis, reflects the company’s investment in full stack infrastructure optimization for production AI workloads. CoreWeave Inference and Applied Training teams achieved top speed by training an in-house NVFP4 Quantization with Eagle3 Speculative decoding on NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 hardware delivering 205 token/sec at $0.7 per million tokens blended (7:2:1 agentic blend) price. Teams can access this performance directly through CoreWeave Inference offerings:

• Serverless Inference, which provides immediate API access to optimized models with no infrastructure to manage.
• Dedicated Inference, which provides a predictable path to production with explicit control over the number of GPUs for the required scale, while all inference services are still managed by CoreWeave.
• Inference on CoreWeave Kubernetes Service (CKS), which means developers can work with direct, bare-metal access to AI infrastructure, allowing for deep control over the entire stack.

Artificial Analysis is an independent platform that benchmarks and analyzes AI models, API providers, and infrastructure. It provides data on model quality, speed, cost, and reliability, helping users (developers/enterprises) compare and select AI technologies. Artificial Analysis independently benchmarked Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.6 by testing its performance across 10+ core metrics – including MMLU-Pro, GPQA, and agentic coding tasks –to evaluate speed, cost, and reasoning capability.

The Artificial Analysis result is the latest in a series of independent validations of CoreWeave. The company is the only AI cloud to earn the top Platinum ranking in both SemiAnalysis ClusterMAX 1.0 and 2.0, which evaluate AI cloud performance, efficiency, and reliability, and also demonstrated record-breaking MLPerf benchmark results.

Learn more about CoreWeave’s recognition on the blog or on Artificial Analysis’s website.

¹Price performance is measured in Speed vs. Price

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. Trusted by leading AI labs, startups, and global enterprises, CoreWeave serves as a force multiplier by combining superior infrastructure performance with deep technical expertise to accelerate breakthroughs. Established in 2017, CoreWeave completed its public listing on Nasdaq (CRWV) in March 2025.

Source: CoreWeave

The post CoreWeave Reports Top Kimi K2.6 Inference Performance in Artificial Analysis Benchmark appeared first on HPCwire.

National average for gas prices has risen by well over a dollar a gallon since late February

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Donald Trump pledged to suspend the US federal gas tax in an effort to reduce pressure on Americans after the US-Israel war on Iran sparked a sharp rise in fuel prices.

The US president told reporters on Monday that his administration would look to pause the tax “till it’s appropriate”, as drivers count the cost of the surge in oil prices in the two months since US and Israeli forces attacked Iran.

When comparing these three account types over the next year, there's a clear, lucrative winner for savers to know.

Violence in Guerrero state has driven as many as 1,000 households from their homes, rights group says

Hundreds of Indigenous families have been forced to flee their homes in the mountains of central Mexico by intense attacks from a local criminal group, including drone bombings, an Indigenous rights organisation said on Monday.

A gang known as Los Ardillos has been carrying out attacks in Guerrero state for years, but they started to intensify last week. Villages were subjected to eight hours of bombings on Saturday, the National Indigenous Congress said, forcing between 800 to 1,000 families to flee to other towns.

Google's virtual Android event will arrive one week before I/O 2026, where the company is expected to spotlight Android, Gemini and its broader AI push.

US president says he is considering restarting naval escorts in strait of Hormuz in attempt to end Iranian blockade

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Donald Trump has said the ceasefire with Iran is on “life support” and that he is considering restarting US navy military escorts of ships through the strait of Hormuz in an attempt to end the Iranian blockade of the vital waterway.

The US president dismissed Iran’s peace proposals as stupid, and denied he was under any domestic pressure to reach a deal.

The Dreame X50 Ultra can leave every floor type spotless, and now you can grab one for under $1,000.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Speaking to graduates of University of Central Florida's College of Arts and Humanities and Nicholson School of Communication and Media on May 8, commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield, vice president of strategic alliances at Tavistock Group, told graduating humanities students that AI is the "next industrial revolution," and was met with thousands of booing graduates. "And let's face it, change can be daunting. The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution," Caulfield said. At that point, murmurs rippled through the crowd. Caulfield paused, and the crowd erupted into boos. "Oh, what happened?" Caulfield said, turning around with her hands out. "Okay, I struck a chord. May I finish?" Someone in the crowd yelled, "AI SUCKS!" Her speech begins around the hour and 15 minute mark in the UCF livestream. [...] Before the industrial revolution comment, Caulfield praised Jeff Bezos for his passion and use of Amazon as a "stepping stone" to his real dream: spaceflight. Rattled after the crowd's reaction, she continued her speech: "Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives." The crowd cheered. "Okay. We've got a bipolar topic here I see," Caulfield said. "And now AI capabilities are in the palm of our hands." The crowd booed again. "I love it, passion, let's go," she said. "AI is beginning to challenge all major sectors to find their highest and best use," she continued. "Okay, I don't want any giggles when I say this. We have been through this before, these industrial revolutions. In my graduation era, we were faced with the launch of the internet." She goes on to talk about how cellphones used to be the size of briefcases. "At that time we had no idea how any of these technologies would impact the world and our lives. [...] These were some of the same trepidations and concerns we are now facing. But ultimately it was a game changer for global economic development and the proliferation of new businesses that never existed like Apple and Google and Meta and so many others, and not to mention countless job opportunities. So being an optimist here, AI alongside human intelligence has the potential to help us solve some of humanity's greatest problems. Many of you in this graduating class will play a role in making this happen."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Authorities said they seized unidentified narcotics, cash, 10 guns, 11 vehicles, six motorcycles — and seven tigers.

A cluster of cases aboard the ship have been linked to a type of hantavirus found in Argentina that can spread from person to person, the World Health Organization said.

Most of the Americans who were on a cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak were taken to specialized facilities at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

Trump reportedly involved in securing visa for Zbigniew Ziobro, who is wanted in Warsaw on criminal charges

Poland has said it expects Washington to extradite a former justice minister wanted on criminal charges after reports emerged that he had fled to the US from Hungary, where the former prime minister Viktor Orbán had granted him asylum.

“You can’t hide these days. You can flee, you can delay it for a while, but eventually your options run out,” Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, said on Monday in reference to Zbigniew Ziobro.

Stuart Prior quits as scrutiny grows of new councillors accused of racist, antisemitic or anti-Muslim remarks

A Reform UK councillor has resigned days after being elected, after he allegedly celebrated on social media the rape of a Sikh woman in the Midlands, declared white people the “master race” and called Muslim people “rats”.

Stuart Prior was elected as a councillor for Essex county council last Thursday, winning 2,404 votes, the highest total of any candidate in the ward.

Marty Makary has served as Food and Drug Administration commissioner since March 2025.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 11, 2026 — Building on more than 30 years of collaboration, Applied Materials, Inc. today announced a new innovation partnership with TSMC to accelerate the development and commercialization of semiconductor technologies required for the next era of AI. Working together at Applied’s EPIC Center in Silicon Valley, the companies will co-innovate to advance materials engineering, equipment innovation, and process integration technologies designed to deliver energy-efficient performance from the data center to the edge.

“Applied and TSMC share a long history of deep collaboration built on trust and a shared commitment to advancing innovation at the leading edge of semiconductor technology,” said Gary Dickerson, President and CEO of Applied Materials. “By bringing our teams together at the EPIC Center, we are strengthening that partnership and accelerating the development of technologies to address the unprecedented complexity driving the chipmaking roadmap.”

“As semiconductor device architectures evolve with each new generation, the demands on materials engineering and process integration continue to increase,” said Dr. Y.J. Mii, Executive Vice President and Co-Chief Operating Officer at TSMC. “Meeting the challenges of AI at a global scale requires industry-wide collaboration. Applied Materials’ EPIC Center provides an ideal environment to accelerate equipment and process readiness for next-generation technologies.”

Through the EPIC Center engagement, Applied and TSMC will collaborate on materials engineering innovations targeting the most critical challenges facing advanced logic scaling. Areas of focus include:

• Process technologies that enable continuous power, performance and area improvements across leading-edge logic nodes, addressing the growing demands of AI and high-performance computing.
• New materials and next-generation manufacturing equipment enabling precise formation of increasingly complex 3D transistor and interconnect structures.
• Advanced process integration approaches that improve yield, variability control and reliability as devices move toward vertically stacked and highly scaled architectures.

“Advancing leading foundry technologies calls for a new model for collaboration and innovation,” said Dr. Prabu Raja, President of the Semiconductor Products Group at Applied Materials. “As a founding partner of the EPIC Center, TSMC gains earlier access to Applied’s innovation teams and next-generation equipment, helping accelerate the path from technology development to high-volume manufacturing.”

Applied’s new, $5 billion EPIC Center in Silicon Valley represents the largest-ever U.S. investment in advanced semiconductor equipment R&D. The center, which will be operationally ready this year, is designed from the ground up to dramatically reduce the time it takes to commercialize breakthrough technologies from early-stage research to full-scale manufacturing. For chipmakers, the EPIC Center will provide earlier access to Applied’s R&D portfolio, faster cycles of learning and accelerated transfer of next-generation technologies into high-volume manufacturing, within a secure collaborative environment. In addition, the co-innovation programs at the EPIC Center will provide Applied with greater multi-node visibility to guide R&D investments while increasing R&D productivity and value sharing.

About Applied Materials

Applied Materials, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMAT) is the leader in materials engineering solutions that are at the foundation of virtually every new semiconductor and advanced display in the world. The technology we create is essential to advancing AI and accelerating the commercialization of next-generation chips. At Applied, we push the boundaries of science and engineering to deliver material innovation that changes the world. Learn more at www.appliedmaterials.com.

Source: Applied Materials

The post Applied Materials and TSMC Partner at the EPIC Center to Accelerate AI Scaling appeared first on HPCwire.

Chuck Schumer accuses GOP of ‘asking working families to pay the price while Trump pockets the perks’ in letter

• US politics live – latest updates

Chuck Schumer, the US Senate’s top Democrat, has vowed to oppose a Republican plan to spend $1bn on security improvements for the ballroom Donald Trump is seeking to build on the White House’s former East Wing.

The money is set to be included in a measure Republicans plan to pass that would allocate about $70bn to the federal agencies leading Trump’s mass deportation campaign, with the intention of keeping them operational through the remainder of the president’s term.

Move comes after PM insisted he would prove his doubters wrong and fight any leadership challenge

• UK politics live – latest updates

More than 60 MPs have called on Keir Starmer to set a timetable to depart as prime minister, including backers of his leadership rivals Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting.

MPs from across the party’s ranks said the prime minister had failed to convince them he had what it took to lead the country into the next election.

Apple and Google start rolling out end-to-end encrypted RCS chats in beta for iPhone owners and Android phone users.

ATLANTA, May 11, 2026 — Red Hat and Voyager Technologies today announced the successful deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.1 and Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI) to Voyager’s LEOcloud Space Edge IaaS Micro Datacenter aboard the International Space Station (ISS). This collaboration extends a container-optimized, enterprise Linux platform into orbit, providing a more consistent and hardened operating foundation for AI-ready workloads to run in space. The milestone advances the evolution of space-based cloud services and orbital data centers (ODCs), delivering a security-enhanced operating foundation for real-time processing at the edge.

As commercial and government organizations increase their reliance on space-based data, the ability to process data in orbit is increasingly critical. Running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the Space Edge Micro Datacenter enables workloads to operate at the data source, reducing latency and operational costs while supporting a more proactive security posture for edge environments.

“Space is the next frontier for hybrid cloud, where success depends on having a trusted, resilient cloud infrastructure wherever data is generated,” said Travis Steele, chief architect of Air and Space Forces, Red Hat. “Together with Voyager, we’re extending trusted open source technology into space, enabling organizations to process data in orbit and act faster with greater confidence.”

Addressing Orchestration Constraints of Spaced-Based Computing

The emergence of Orbital Data Centers (ODCs) requires open innovation and extreme resilience. This collaboration addresses the unique challenges of space-based environments by optimizing for limited power and constrained hardware resources, managing data processing across delayed or disrupted network conditions, and delivering a hardened, enterprise-grade Linux foundation. By integrating these orbital workloads with existing terrestrial DevSecOps practices, Red Hat and Voyager can help organizations extend their hybrid cloud footprint with greater consistency and operational confidence.

Red Hat and Voyager are laying the foundation for a new era of space-based computing, where cloud capabilities extend more consistently from Earth to low earth orbit (LEO), the lunar region and beyond. This approach helps organizations extend existing DevSecOps practices, container strategies and proactive security postures across emerging operational domains with greater operational alignment.

A Durable Foundation for IT Innovation

The deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.1 and Red Hat UBI addresses the extreme operational demands of low earth orbit through several core technology pillars:

• Immutable, container-native operations: By utilizing image mode, Voyager deploys a consistent, immutable operating system that resists configuration drift in harsh space conditions. Soft-reboots help minimize downtime for mission-critical space applications.
• Quantum-resistant security: NIST-approved, post-quantum cryptography helps safeguard sensitive data, providing a strategic and durable security posture for the edge of space.
• Portable workloads: Red Hat UBI provides a lightweight, container image foundation that reduces resource overhead on constrained space hardware. This enables a more portable environment for space partner integrations while maintaining a hardened, enterprise-grade Linux footprint.
• Hybrid cloud extension to space: Voyager extends DevSecOps practices to orbit using Podman as the container engine and Ansible Automation Platform, with containerized applications running from ground to orbit and AI-optimized tooling.

Learn more about Red Hat Summit here.

About Red Hat

Red Hat is the open hybrid cloud technology leader, delivering a trusted, consistent and comprehensive foundation for transformative IT innovation and AI applications. Its portfolio of cloud, developer, AI, Linux, automation and application platform technologies enables any application, anywhere—from the datacenter to the edge. As the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, Red Hat invests in open ecosystems and communities to solve tomorrow’s IT challenges. Collaborating with partners and customers, Red Hat helps them build, connect, automate, secure and manage their IT environments, supported by consulting services and award-winning training and certification offerings.

About Voyager Technologies

Voyager Technologies is a defense and space technology company committed to advancing and delivering transformative, mission-critical solutions. By tackling the most complex challenges, Voyager aims to unlock new frontiers for human progress, fortify national security, and protect critical assets from ground to space.

Source: Red Hat

The post Voyager and Red Hat Propel Red Hat Enterprise Linux into Orbit with Space Edge Micro Datacenters appeared first on HPCwire.

Brain trauma and football have become inexorably linked. But a recent Harvard study suggests there are other dangers for football players

When an NFL player takes his own life, there is often speculation about why. Injuries and unemployment – a common occurrence in a violent sport where players are frequently traded and cut – have been linked with increased risks of suicidal ideation. In parallel to those factors, however, exists chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). A degenerative brain condition caused by repeated trauma to the head, CTE’s links with football are established and almost impossible to ignore. Players ranging from widely admired Pro Bowlers such as Junior Seau and Dave Duerson, to those infamous for more notorious reasons, such as Aaron Hernandez and Phillip Adams, were all confirmed to have CTE by autopsies. (The condition can only be diagnosed posthumously.) All four players killed themselves.

Such anecdotal observations imply a certain, coherent logic that connects playing football with suicide. Tackle football, by its nature, increases participants’ risk of head injury. Head injuries increase the likelihood of an affected individual attempting suicide. CTE is often the cumulative consequence of years of head injuries and, indeed, many high-profile NFL players who have taken their own lives have been confirmed to suffer from CTE. So it’s easy to reason that football and/or CTE, by their very nature, lead to an increased risk of suicide.

In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. 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

Google says it has seen the first evidence of cybercriminals using AI to create a zero-day vulnerability. "Google reported its findings to the unnamed firm affected by the vulnerability before releasing its report," reports Politico. "The company then issued a patch to fix the issue." From the report: Google Threat Intelligence Group researchers detailed the development in a report released Monday. Zero-day exploits are considered the most serious type of security flaw because they are not detected by security companies and have no known fixes. The report noted that this was the first time Google had seen evidence of AI being used to develop these vulnerabilities -- marking a major change in the cybersecurity landscape, as it suggests newer AI models could be used to create major exploits, not just find them. Google concluded that Anthropic's Claude Mythos model -- which has already found thousands of vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser -- was most likely not used to create the zero-day exploit. [...] The Google Threat Intelligence Group report also details efforts by Russia-linked hacking groups to use AI models to target Ukrainian networks with malware, while North Korean government hacking group APT45 used AI technologies to refine and scale up its cyber methods. John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, said the findings made clear that the race to use AI to find network vulnerabilities has "already begun." "For every zero-day we can trace back to AI, there are probably many more out there," Hultquist said. "Threat actors are using AI to boost the speed, scale, and sophistication of their attacks."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A nonprofit group is suing to block the Trump administration's blue resurfacing of the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

Month was one of driest Aprils on record with rainfall 23% less than average, according to Met Office figures

One of the driest Aprils on record for central and southern England has left river levels below normal, raising fears of drought in some areas over the summer.

The latest UK hydrological survey – which tracks river and groundwater levels – suggests central and southern England and eastern Scotland will experience notably low river flows over the next three months, raising concerns about water shortages if dry weather persists.

The family of one of the victims in last year's deadly mass shooting at Florida State University accused ChatGPT developer OpenAI of enabling the suspect leading up to the attack.

Why Should Delaware Care?
In Spring 2025, residents and elected officials raised alarms about increased air pollution coming from the Delaware City refinery. The problem, which led to hundreds of thousands of pounds of excess sulfur dioxide emissions, occurred when pollution controls were circumvented during necessary repairs. The same thing is about to happen again over the next four weeks.

Air pollution surrounding the Delaware City Refinery is expected to spike over the next four weeks as workers at the facility repair equipment, state officials announced Thursday.

Regulators said the refinery reported that repairs to its coker carbon monoxide boiler will require it to change the way it captures gases emitted during the oil refining process.

Shifting from “primary” pollution controls to “secondary” devices during maintenance activities is what caused the refinery to exceed its permitted air pollution limits during a period last May and June. 

During that time, the refinery released nearly a million pounds of sulfur dioxide and other toxic chemicals into the atmosphere. 

The Delaware City oil refinery is one of the most complex on the East Coast because it refines both light and heavy crude oil. During the process, which includes the use of extremely high heat, certain “undesirable” components are burnt off creating hazardous gases, such as sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide.

Today, the Delaware City Refining Company, which is owned by PBF Energy, is appealing a state violation order that includes a $300,000 fine for the emissions last spring and for other permit violations in 2024 and 2025. 

The company also is facing a lawsuit from an area resident on behalf of her young son, claiming the springtime emissions resulted in over $18,000 in medical bills and expenses.

In a Wednesday statement, the refinery said it had been monitoring the equipment that caused pollution problems last spring and that operators last week “observed new signs of a possible water-tube leak.”  To address the leaky equipment, refinery workers need to shut down the boiler system entirely for repairs. 

The company said it will lower production rates in order to reduce emissions, and that “modeling indicates that impact will remain well below thresholds for public health.”

The company over the weekend launched a new online monitoring platform, where the public can access data from five new, real-time air monitoring devices installed “around its fenceline.”

On Thursday afternoon, Delaware environmental regulators released the first public notification about sulfur dioxide pollution from the planned repairs. The notification does not estimate the amount released. 

The Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control said it will “monitor the situation.” Unpermitted emissions “will be assessed for violation and penalties,” the agency stated.

Acute exposure to sulfur dioxide can cause respiratory distress, but state and refinery officials say the current pollution is emitted at a height that is well above ground level where people are. 

DNREC also said sulfur dioxide readings did not exceed the federal action limit last spring.

Community reaction

Despite the assurances, some residents are apprehensive about the pollution.

Tim Konkus, owner of the Delaware City Marina, said that everybody who is near the refinery “should be worried about their health.” 

“On the one hand, it’s a great thing they’re going to fix it. On the other hand, it’s at great cost while they make billions every year,” Konkus said, while also lamenting that emissions will coincide with a celebration of Delaware City’s Bicentennial on Saturday and Sunday. 

House Speaker Melissa Minor-Brown, a Democrat whose home district includes Delaware City, also issued a statement criticizing the refinery for the increased air pollution. She also thanked DNREC officials for “their willingness to hold the refinery accountable.”

“By many accounts, this was not an unavoidable accident, but instead the result of decisions made by the refinery, including the decision to delay necessary maintenance despite clear warnings and opportunities to act sooner,” Minor-Brown said.

In the statement, Minor-Brown did not propose policy changes, nor did she note whether the pollution may place the refinery into the status of “chronic violators,” under a relatively new Pollution Accountability Act. 

Refinery signed new consent order

Thursday’s notice of increased air pollution came only a day after state regulators announced a separate consent order related to a Thanksgiving 2025 release of butane and butane-related chemicals from the Delaware City refinery.

Through that agreement, signed by facility manager Michael Capone, the Delaware City refinery must provide real-time air monitoring data on emissions of volatile organic compounds, known as VOCs. 

In addition to the company’s new fenceline pollution sensors, DNREC also maintains air monitors east of the refinery on Route 9 and farther to the west near Lums Pond that provide hourly sulfur dioxide readings that can be found at de.gov/data.

Call to action: Residents can learn more by calling the Delaware City Refining Company Community Information Line at 302-834-6200. The public can report problems and concerns related to environmental issues to DNRECs complaint line at 800-662-8802.

The post Delaware City Refinery air pollution to spike during repairs appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

The bloc’s foreign policy chief said recent remarks from the Russian leader suggested the war may be coming to an end

Russian affairs reporter

The EU on Monday dismissed Vladimir Putin’s suggestion that the Kremlin-friendly former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder could serve as a European mediator in peace talks aimed at ending the war in Ukraine.

MILAN, May 11, 2026 — Algorithmiq has established Milan as its global headquarters, signaling its confidence and commitment to Italy and Europe as the future hub for leadership in the industrialization of quantum algorithms.

To date, the quantum computing narrative has been dominated by the crowded race to develop hardware; Algorithmiq is building and industrializing the algorithmic layer in the technology that can transform quantum computers into tools with real-world applications. Algorithmiq’s decision to situate itself at the heart of the Italian quantum ecosystem reflects a deliberate European bet on quantum’s software layer as the primary area of future innovation in the sector.

Algorithmiq has raised €18 million in funding led by United Ventures and Italian institutional investor Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP), with continued participation from Inventure VC. This funding round brings Algorithmiq’s total funding raised to €36m, and represents Italy’s largest-ever venture capital investment in a quantum startup.

Milan will serve as the base for Algorithmiq to further its commercial operations as the software partner to the world’s leading quantum hardware companies. From Italy, Algorithmiq will also tap into Europe’s deep scientific talent base to expand its rapidly growing team and leverage the region’s growing strategic focus on quantum.

Betting on Italy’s Quantum Future

Algorithmiq’s relocation of its global headquarters to Milan (previously in Finland, where Algorithmiq will maintain significant operations) reflects Italy’s burgeoning quantum technology ecosystem and a broader European effort to close the gap between research and the commercialisation of deeptech.

The decision follows Italy’s National Quantum Strategy, launched in 2025, with a commitment to support the creation of a robust quantum infrastructure in Italy.

Access to national and pan-European capital backing for quantum, paired with the Italian government’s progressive policy commitments, makes Milan a highly attractive strategic base for expansion across European and global markets.

Industrializing Quantum Algorithms

From the theoretical quantum pioneers of Via Panisperna Boys led by Enrico Fermi to today’s research ecosystem, Italy has long contributed to the foundations of modern physics that now underpin the algorithms and applications driving the next phase of the quantum industry. As this industry matures, building better machines remains essential, but it is no longer enough: without major advances in algorithmic efficacy, quantum hardware risks becoming impossible to commercialize and therefore muted in its real-world impact.

Rather than competing in the capital-intensive race for hardware, Algorithmiq focuses on building the algorithmic layer that helps quantum machines become tools of industrial value.

Algorithmiq has recently become the sole winner of the $2 million Wellcome Leap Q4Bio Challenge making it the first company ever to prove that end-to-end quantum-classical algorithms can simulate complex therapeutics, marking a clear path to commercially useful quantum computing and beating competitors such as Harvard University, Oxford University, Stanford University, Nottingham University and Infleqtion.

In 2025, Algorithmiq also became the first company globally to achieve quantum advantage for a useful scientific problem using an Algorithmiq-designed model on IBM quantum hardware. This followed the launch of its commercially available quantum product, an algorithm for noise mitigation designed for researchers and industry practitioners alike, on IBM’s Qiskit Functions Catalog.

Algorithmiq’s relocation to Milan and latest funding round follow a year of exceptional business performance in 2025, in which Algorithmiq signed major commercial agreements with Microsoft, IBM, and Rigetti, demonstrating continued momentum as the elite quantum software option for the world’s largest technology companies.

Dr Sabrina Maniscalco, CEO and Co-Founder of Algorithmiq, commented: “2026 is a year in which more meaningful applications of quantum will become a reality, and we want to be at the centre of that change. This strategic move and funding injection give us the template to hit scale and continue to serve and work with the biggest quantum players in the world. Our quantum software makes quantum computers actually useful, and we’re delighted to be taking that message global from our new headquarters in Milan. As quantum computing matures, the question is shifting from who can build the biggest machine to who can make the machines matter. That challenge sits at the intersection of science, software, and industrial execution, and it is increasingly where the real competitive edge may lie.”

Jacopo Drudi, Partner at United Ventures, added, “With quantum, Europe has the opportunity to set the pace rather than follow it. Italy has always been at the frontier of the mathematical and physical sciences — from Leonardo to Fermi to Marconi — and that foundation gives us a structural advantage in this next technological revolution. Bringing a world-class international team like Algorithmiq to Milan is a win not just for United Ventures, but for the country. We are building a continental tech titan, and for European quantum talent looking to come home, Italy now has a place where they can do their best work.”

Professor Tommaso Calarco said, “It is particularly valuable when a company’s trajectory sends a broader signal about where innovation can be built. Europe needs more of this: decisions that connect scientific excellence, entrepreneurship, and long-term industrial ambition. Italy is well placed to play a role in this context.” Professor Calarco authored the Quantum Manifesto that launched the European Commission’s Quantum Flagship, where he currently serves as Chair of the Quantum Community Network (QCN).

More from HPCwire: Wellcome Leap Announces $2M Prize in $50M Quantum for Bio Challenge Program

About Algorithmiq

Algorithmiq develops quantum software that makes quantum computers useful, enabling breakthroughs in chemistry, materials science, and life sciences through physically meaningful, energy-efficient quantum computation. Algorithmiq is the software counterpart to the world’s leading quantum hardware players, working with the likes of Google, IBM, Microsoft, AWS, Rigetti, Cleveland Clinic and CERN. Headquartered in Milan, Italy, with operations in Finland, the UK, Ireland and the US, Algorithmiq is led by CEO & and Co-Founder Dr Sabrina Maniscalco, CSO and Co-Founder Dr Guillermo García-Pérez, CTO and Co-Founder Dr Matteo Rossi and Lead Researcher and Co-Founder Dr Boris Sokolov. Algorithmiq has raised €36 million to date, backed by United Ventures, institutional investor CDP and Inventure VC.

Source: Algorithmiq

The post Algorithmiq Establishes Milan Headquarters, Raises €18M for Quantum Software Expansion appeared first on HPCwire.

Vin Diesel dropped the news on Monday.

Sean Gardner, a gymnastics coach who trained elite young girls, will be in federal court in Mississippi on Monday facing 12 felony counts of sexual exploitation of children.

Though the number of police officers killed in the line of duty has dropped, non-fatal assaults against them have been rising since 2021, according to new data released Monday by the FBI.

The Senate is returning to Washington to resume work on funding immigration agencies with a package that includes $1 billion for the renovation of the White House East Wing.

President Trump made the comments in a phone interview with CBS News chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes.

Health officials have identified at least 10 confirmed or suspected cases of hantavirus tied to an outbreak on the M/V Hondius cruise ship.

Apple now requires Education Store shoppers in the U.S. and several other countries to verify their student, educator, parent, or homeschool-teacher status through UNiDAYS, ending the previous honor-system approach. 9to5Mac reports: Starting today, Apple requires shoppers in the United States to complete verification when making a purchase via the Education Store. This change also applies to Australia, Hong Kong, Turkey, Canada, and Chile. In many other markets around the world, such as the UK, Apple already required verification. As a refresher, people eligible for Apple's Education Store include current and newly accepted college students and their parents, as well as faculty, staff, and homeschool teachers across all grade levels. Apple is teaming up with UNiDAYS to handle the verification process. Students and educators will be asked to create a UNiDAYS ID and then verify their academic status by logging in to their school's academic portal. Alternatively, users can upload a photo of their student or faculty IDs. Homeschool teachers, meanwhile, will need to provide an identity document such as a driver's license, state ID card, or passport. They'll also need to provide one homeschool document, such as a Letter of Intent (LOI) or Letter of Acknowledgment. Most customers will be verified instantly, and those requiring manual verification should hear back within 24 hours. The same verification process applies both in-store and online for Apple Education Store shoppers. Meanwhile, Apple has added Apple Watch to the Education Store for the first time, offering discounts on the Series 11, SE 3, and Ultra 3.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An American on the repatriation flight began showing symptoms of hantavirus and another "tested mildly PCR positive for the Andes virus," the Department of Health and Human Services says.

Pop singer accuses electronics manufacturer Samsung of using a copyrighted image of her face to sell TVs.

The soldier who put the cigarette in the statue’s mouth was jailed for 21 days, and the one who took the photograph for 14.

Have $100,000 saved in a retirement account? Here's how much you'll be expected to withdraw annually.

Jimmy Fallon will produce show, which will begin filming over the summer, based on New York Times’ hit word game

Savannah Guthrie is to present a TV game show based on the New York Times’ hit word game Wordle, the newspaper announced Monday.

It will be the first new onscreen venture for the host of NBC’s Today show since her return in April after the disappearance two months earlier of her mother.

Exclusive: Britain expected to be allowed to keep ban on live animal exports, sources say, in fillip for Keir Starmer

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Brussels is preparing to offer Keir Starmer a key concession in talks over an agricultural deal, giving the beleaguered prime minister an important victory in his efforts to move closer to the EU.

European officials have conceded that the UK can keep its ban on live animal exports as part of any joint deal on food and agricultural products, according to sources on both sides of the talks, even though the EU has not imposed such a ban.

The collaboration supports development of next-generation global and lunar compute and data storage infrastructure and space-based data resilience capabilities

TAMPA, Fla., May 11, 2026 — Lonestar Data Holdings Inc., a leader in resilient space based data storage and infrastructure, today announced it has signed a Space Act Agreement with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) through NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

Credit: Lonestar

The agreement establishes a framework for collaboration focused on advancing technologies and operational concepts supporting lunar data storage, resilient off-world compute infrastructure, and next-generation space communications architectures. The collaboration is intended to help accelerate development of secure, independent, and disaster-resilient data capabilities beyond Earth.

The initial activities under the agreement are expected to focus on technical collaboration and evaluation of lunar-edge data infrastructure concepts designed to support future commercial, civil, and scientific space missions.

“Signing this Space Act Agreement with NASA Ames represents an important milestone for Lonestar as we continue building the future of resilient space-based data infrastructure,” said Steve Eisele, CEO of Lonestar. “As humanity expands beyond Earth, trusted data resilience and secure digital infrastructure will become as essential as power and communications. We are proud to collaborate with NASA Ames in support of technologies that can help enable the next era of lunar and cislunar operations.”

NASA Ames Research Center has long played a leading role in advancing spaceflight technologies, autonomous systems, and exploration capabilities supporting NASA’s missions and commercial space partnerships.

Lonestar’s vision is to establish the all Earth orbits and especially the Moon as the ultimate secure and resilient location for critical data storage and disaster recovery infrastructure. The company is developing lunar data centers designed to provide sovereign, secure, and independently recoverable storage capabilities for governments, enterprises, and mission-critical applications.

The Space Act Agreement reflects growing momentum between NASA and the commercial space sector to develop infrastructure and operational capabilities supporting long-term lunar exploration and commercialization initiatives.

Lonestar successfully demonstrated successful lunar-edge data operations through its Freedom mission in 2025 and continues development of future Earth orbit and Lunar data storage missions designed to expand commercial access to resilient off-world digital infrastructure.

Space Act Agreements are authorized under the National Aeronautics and Space Act and enable NASA to collaborate with industry, academia, and other organizations on projects that advance NASA’s mission and broader U.S. space leadership objectives.

About Lonestar

Lonestar is a pioneering data infrastructure company developing resilient space based data storage and edge processing capabilities. The company’s mission is to provide secure, sovereign, and disaster-resilient data services supporting governments, enterprises, and future space operations. Lonestar is building the foundation for the cislunar digital economy by extending critical infrastructure beyond Earth.

Source: Lonestar

The post Lonestar Announces NASA Ames Agreement Focused on Lunar-Edge Data Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.

Report suggests that popular initiatives such as NT Live and NT at Home are making UK audiences more adventurous

Theatre streaming services and cinema screenings of stage performances are not a threat to “in-person” attendance and are making audiences more adventurous, according to new research commissioned by the National Theatre.

Introducing the findings on Monday, the NT’s director, Indhu Rubasingham, said that the boom in filmed theatre had raised major questions including the concern that popular initiatives such as NT Live and NT at Home would have a negative impact on live attendance. The organisation commissioned research by the agency Indigo to learn more about audiences’ attitudes to filmed theatre.

Survey of 27,000 Australian supermarket items found some products boasting environmental benefits had significantly higher emissions than unlabelled counterparts

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Foods in supermarkets boasting environmental terms such as “natural” or “sustainable” are mostly just using marketing speak, rather than verified claims, Australian researchers have found.

More than 27,000 packaged foods sold at Coles, Woolworths, Aldi, IGA and Harris Farm supermarkets in Sydney were assessed by researchers from the George Institute for Global Health.

Kirk Moore, the principal at Pauls Valley High School in Oklahoma, exclusively told CBS News how he acted on "just instinct" when tackling a school shooter.

Casting director urges Keir Starmer to intervene in case of Paata Burchuladze, 71, jailed for seven years after singing at anti-regime demonstrations

The Royal Opera House in London has urged Keir Starmer to intervene in the case of Paata Burchuladze, a world-renowned bass singer who has been imprisoned in Georgia since October on a charge of leading a coup against the country’s authoritarian leader.

The 71-year-old has performed at the Royal Opera House and the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and collaborated with the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and José Carreras. He was arrested after joining a protest outside the presidential palace in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Last week he was given a seven-year jail sentence which Burchuladze suggested to the court was equivalent to a life sentence given his age.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Fictional portrayals of artificial intelligence can have a real effect on AI models, according to Anthropic. Last year, the company said that during pre-release tests involving a fictional company, Claude Opus 4 would often try to blackmail engineers to avoid being replaced by another system. Anthropic later published research suggesting that models from other companies had similar issues with "agentic misalignment." Apparently Anthropic has done more work around that behavior, claiming in a post on X, "We believe the original source of the behavior was internet text that portrays AI as evil and interested in self-preservation." The company went into more detail in a blog post stating that since Claude Haiku 4.5, Anthropic's models "never engage in blackmail [during testing], where previous models would sometimes do so up to 96% of the time." What accounts for the difference? The company said it found that training on "documents about Claude's constitution and fictional stories about AIs behaving admirably improve alignment." Related, Anthropic said that it found training to be more effective when it includes "the principles underlying aligned behavior" and not just "demonstrations of aligned behavior alone." "Doing both together appears to be the most effective strategy," the company said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Far-right extremist Ivan Jennings had earlier pleaded guilty to dissemination of a terrorism publication

A rightwing extremist who called for “killing migrants when they arrive on their boats” has pleaded guilty to terrorism offences.

Ivan Jennings, 46, from Stafford, admitted encouraging terrorism between 15 August and 14 November 2024 at Leicester crown court on Monday.

• Running back underwent surgery for gunshot wound

• Football team pay tribute to ‘deeply loved’ player

Missouri star running back Ahmad Hardy is in stable condition after being shot at a concert in Mississippi, school officials said on Monday.

Missouri’s football program announced in a statement that Hardy was shot early Sunday morning and that the All-America running back underwent surgery for the gunshot wound later that day.

Defense secretary accuses senator of disclosing classified info but Kelly says ‘that’s not classified, it’s a quote from you’

Pete Hegseth said he has referred Senator Mark Kelly to Pentagon lawyers for allegedly disclosing classified information about depleted US weapons stockpiles – information Kelly says he heard from the defense secretary, in public, under oath.

Speaking on CBS News’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Kelly said American inventories of Tomahawk cruise missiles, Army Tactical Missile Systems, SM-3 interceptors, Thaad rounds and Patriot missiles had been severely drawn down during the Iran conflict, warning that replenishment could take years and leave the US exposed in any future confrontation with China.

Cole Tomas Allen, accused of attempting to assassinate Trump last month, did not speak as plea was entered

The suspect accused of attempting to assassinate Donald Trump last month at a gala in Washington DC has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Cole Tomas Allen did not speak in court on Monday as his attorney entered the plea on his behalf.

Want to buy a home or refinance your current one? Here are the mortgage interest rates you'll need to know first.

Criminal groups and state-linked actors appear to be using commercial models to refine and scale up attacks

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In just three months, AI-powered hacking has gone from a nascent problem to an industrial-scale threat, according to a report from Google.

The findings from Google’s threat intelligence group add to an intensifying, global discussion about how the newest AI models are extremely adept at coding – and becoming extremely powerful tools for exploiting vulnerabilities in a broad array of software systems.

Leaders cannot ignore support for reparations resolution this November, says St Vincent and Grenadines ex-PM

• What are reparations for slavery and colonialism – and will the UK pay?

It is “inconceivable” that reparatory justice from Britain for the transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans will not be “front and centre” of the next Commonwealth leaders’ meeting, the former prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines has said.

Ralph Gonsalves was in Jamaica to discuss the next steps of the “alive and growing” movement to advocate for reparations for hundreds of years of chattel slavery.

Discovery was made by Union Pacific employee inspecting stopped train at the yard in Laredo before it continued its journey north

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Rail workers in Texas found six people dead inside a boxcar at a yard close to the Mexican border on Sunday afternoon, officials said.

The discovery was made by a Union Pacific employee inspecting the stopped train at the yard in Laredo before it continued its journey north, a spokesperson for the Laredo police department said, citing the railroad freight company.

Certain gold investing strategies could work better for seniors this month. Here's what to consider right now.

Allen is charged with attempting to assassinate President Trump, assaulting a federal officer with a deadly weapon and two gun counts.

Kevin González, 18-year-old who had terminal colon cancer, died shortly after reuniting with his parents in Mexico

A Chicago-born teen who advocated for his parents’ release from US immigration authorities’ custody while fighting terminal cancer has died shortly after reuniting with them in Mexico, his family has told media outlets.

The parents of 18-year-old Kevin González had been taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in Arizona in mid-April after they crossed the US border from Mexico without permission in an attempt to see him in Chicago as his health waned. González since then traveled to be with relatives in Mexico, and in recent days he had publicly pleaded for them to be released from ICE custody so they could be with him as he battled metastatic stage four colon cancer.

Carly Schwartz wanted a solution for her mental health struggles. She found one, but not where she expected

On a threadbare carpet in the living room of a Bernal Heights bungalow, I lay blindfolded on my back. Two middle-aged rescue terriers, one missing an eye, sniffed my feet and climbed up and down my legs. F**kin’ Perfect by Pink blared in the background, but the music sounded muffled and distant, like I was listening from underwater.

It was 1pm on a Thursday. Instead of going to the office, I’d allowed a shaman named Jonathan to inject my thigh muscle with a large dose of liquid ketamine. Even in my compromised state, high and spread out like a corpse on a stranger’s rug, I knew I’d reached peak absurdity. I also knew I wouldn’t emerge from this activity with even a slight improvement to my mental health.

Carly Schwartz is the author of the new memoir I’ll Try Anything Twice: Misadventures of a Self-Medicated Life and the former editor in chief of the San Francisco Examiner

Joint postdoctoral research projects will focus on quantum algorithms and applications in research areas across chemistry, computer science, materials science, physics, optimization, and more

May 11, 2026 — New York University and IBM have initiated a postdoctoral program to conduct quantum computer research in the areas of chemistry, computer science, engineering, materials science, physics, and optimization.

This collaboration, as part of NYU’s role as a member of the IBM Quantum Network—a consortium of academic institutions, enterprises, startups, and government labs working to enhance quantum computing through research excellence and technological advancement—is intended to push quantum algorithms and applications development for today’s quantum-centric supercomputer architectures, which combine quantum and classical HPC workloads, as well as for future, large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers, which are expected to accelerate time and cost efficiencies in fields such as drug development, materials discovery, chemistry, and optimization.

“Quantum computing’s potential to understand and address engineering, mathematical, and scientific barriers is unmatched,” says NYU Professor Javad Shabani, director of NYU’s Quantum Institute, who will oversee the university’s role in the postdoc program. “But maximizing its contributions requires developing a network of quantum pioneers across academia and industry who can reach beyond today’s technological boundaries. NYU welcomes the opportunity to work with IBM to help postdocs with their innovative and comprehensive approaches in meeting these challenges.”

“This postdoctoral research sponsorship will give some of NYU’s top talent an opportunity to push IBM’s quantum-centric supercomputing architecture not just for immediate application development, but to lay the groundwork for the algorithms that will power tomorrow’s fault-tolerant quantum computers—all while engaging with the broader quantum community of students, researchers, and industry professionals,” says Jamie Garcia, Director, Growth & Strategic Partnerships, IBM.

NYU postdoctoral researchers chosen for the program will conduct quantum-related projects, sponsored and supported by IBM and the company’s quantum researchers, at NYU’s Quantum Institute and at IBM Research headquarters—the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York—using the company’s quantum computers. The program follows an earlier NYU-IBM program, which included the training of NYU undergraduates and graduates in quantum information physics.

NYU’s Quantum Institute

Last fall, the university established the NYU Quantum Institute, which aims to drive cutting-edge research across three pillars of quantum information science—quantum computing, quantum communications, and quantum sensing—while also serving as a hub for the exchange of ideas and interactions between academia and the private sector, including New York’s startup ecosystem.

“When we launched the Quantum Institute at NYU, its success was to be based on the ingenuity of the outstanding faculty and students leading innovation at NYU, but of equal importance was the collaboration with industry leaders—such as IBM,” notes Juan De Pablo, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Executive Vice President for Global Science and Technology and executive dean of the Tandon School of Engineering. “Together we can help make New York a vital part of the quantum universe.”

Source: James Devitt, NYU

The post NYU’s Quantum Institute, IBM Team Up for Postdoctoral Research Program in Quantum Computing appeared first on HPCwire.

The ESPN star has done brilliant work for Black students. I wrote an open letter to him explaining why his comments on politics alienate much of his audience

Dear Stephen A Smith,

Let me first say that I tremendously respect all you do for historically Black colleges and universities. You have helped generate millions in scholarships, promoted student enrollment and brought national media attention to HBCUs across the United States. Specifically, as ambassador, you have promoted the annual HBCU College Fair, which has garnered over $12m in scholarships. You encourage students to consider HBCUs for their higher education, highlighting the community and nurturing environment they provide.

Etan Thomas played in the NBA from 2000 through 2011. He is a published author, podcaster, poet, activist and motivational speaker.

Data from missions showing critically low snowpack on mountains across the west raises alarm among experts

High above the jagged peaks of California’s Sierra Nevada, the view from the cockpit is breathtaking. At first glance, the mountains appear draped in a pristine white blanket. But as the flight crew gears up for a high-stakes mission, the sensors onboard this specialized aircraft prove that looks can be deceiving.

“This is a distinct dry year,” says Tom Painter, CEO of Airborne Snow Observatories.

AI-powered license plate readers, car trackers and police drones are spreading fast. Here's how state laws are trying to keep pace.

Comedy debuts at Versailles featuring dialogue, music, costumes and scenery created with help of AI tool Le Chat

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Molière is to the French what Shakespeare is to the English: the last word in historical literature, drama, wit and satire.

Now, more than 350 years after his death, the 17th-century dramatist has been revived after scholars at the Sorbonne University in Paris used artificial intelligence to help write an experimental play in his style.

Vice-president is accused of misusing public funds and threatening the lives of President Marcos Jr and his wife

The Philippine vice-president, Sara Duterte, has been impeached over allegations she misused public funds, amassed unexplained wealth and threatened the lives of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and his wife, in a case that could complicate her presidential ambitions.

Duterte, the daughter of the detained former president Rodrigo Duterte, was impeached by an overwhelming majority of lawmakers in the House of Representatives, which is dominated by allies of Marcos.

French woman taken to Paris in serious condition while American flown to Nebraska is asymptomatic, say officials

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A French woman and an American national evacuated from the cruise ship at the centre of a deadly hantavirus outbreak have tested positive for the virus, as the complex operation to repatriate those onboard continued on Monday.

The French woman was one of five French passengers who disembarked from the ship in Tenerife on Sunday before being flown to a hospital in Paris.

Health service has given US tech firm ‘unlimited access’ to certain data to build integrated platform, according to reports

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MPs have warned that an NHS decision to grant Palantir access to identifiable patient information in its plan to use AI to improve the health service is “dangerous” and will fuel public fears that data privacy is not being prioritised.

NHS England has allowed staff from the US tech firm and other contractors to access patient data before it has been pseudonymised, despite internal fears of a “risk of loss of public confidence”, the Financial Times reported.

Amazon faces a proposed class-action lawsuit over claims it used software tactics to shorten the lives of older Fire TV Sticks without telling buyers.

Levels of Pfas in northern gannet eggs in Canada fell up to 74% over 55-year period of study

Levels of some of the most dangerous Pfas compounds have dramatically fallen in Canadian seabird eggs, which the authors of a new peer-reviewed study say illustrates how regulations are effective.

Researchers looked at Pfas levels in the eggs of northern gannets in the St Lawrence Seaway basin over a 55-year period. Pfas levels shot up from the 1960s through the peak of the chemicals’ use in the late 1990s and early aughts, then fell.

Opponents say administration’s plan prioritizes big agriculture at expense of wildlife and protected species

New legal action aims to head off a Trump administration plan to open up to 24m acres of federal lands to cattle grazing, which opponents characterized as a gift to big agriculture and said could cause a spike in deaths among already imperiled wolves, grizzlies, steelhead salmon and other wildlife.

The plan also calls for opening up parts of Grand Canyon national park, and other sensitive landscapes. Cattle destroy critical habitats for wildlife because they strip land bare of essential vegetation and pollute streams with feces, urine, sediment and carcasses. Meanwhile, park rangers and ranchers often kill grizzly bears and other predators who prey on cattle, despite that ranchers and the government pushed the cattle into the predators’ home range.

Backbench MP calls prime minister’s speech ‘too little, too late’ but stops short of moving to stand against him herself

• Who are the main threats to Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership?

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Catherine West, the Labour MP who announced a challenge to Keir Starmer’s leadership, has changed course to say she instead wants the prime minister to set a timetable of September for his departure.

West, the MP for Hornsey and Friern Barnet and a former Foreign Office minister, announced on Saturday that she would seek to gather the 81 Labour MPs’ names needed to formally challenge Starmer, saying this was just a device to tempt others to stand and that she did not wish to take over.

President’s remarks came as Benjamin Netanyahu said the war was ‘not over’. Plus, American passengers of the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship travel to Nebraska

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Good morning.

Donald Trump has condemned an Iranian response to a US peace proposal as “totally unacceptable” as the month-old ceasefire appeared to be wearing thin.

What is the US position on Iranian nuclear facilities? The US parameters for nuclear talks reportedly included a moratorium on Iranian nuclear enrichment for up to 20 years; the transfer overseas, possibly to the US, of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU), and the dismantling of Iranian nuclear facilities.

What is the sticking point? According to the Wall Street Journal, the Iranian counter-proposal suggested a shorter moratorium, the export of part of the highly enriched uranium stockpile and the dilution of the rest, and refusal to accept the dismantling of facilities.

How have markets reacted? After Trump rejected the counter-proposal on his Truth Social platform, there was a 4% jump in Brent crude on Monday to $105.50 a barrel, before it settled at $103.50.

Follow our liveblog for the latest updates.

What measures are being taken to control the spread? As well as one who tested positive, another passenger has mild symptoms of hantavirus, the US health and human services department confirmed. These passengers were travelling in the plane’s biocontainment units, it added.

Is the World Health Organization mandating a quarantine? No – it has recommended, but not mandated, a 42-day quarantine once passengers have landed in their home countries. As some countries enforce stricter rules than others, here is how the responses vary.

Linux 7.1 started phasing out support for Intel's 37-year-old i486 processor. Linux 7.2 removed drivers for the old AMD Elan 32-bit systems on a chip. And now some i586 and i686 class processors are being removed, reports Phoronix: Supporting those vintage GPUs without the Time Stamp Counter "TSC" instruction are becoming a burden... TSC-capable Intel Pentium processors and the likes will still be supported with this just being for TSC-less i586/i686 CPUs. Among the CPUs impacted by this latest change is the AMD K5 as well as various Cyrix processor models. The K5 was AMD's first entirely in-house designed processor that was first introduced in 1996 to counter the Intel Pentium CPU. TSC "support can now be assumed as a boot requirement for modern Linux," the article points out, which will allow the removal of various non-TSC code paths from the Linux kernel's x86 code. Tom's Hardware remembers the K5 "wasn't a very popular processor as it arrived late, then offered lackluster performance in the competitive environment it joined." Launch SKUs in 1996 were limited to clocks from 75 MHz to 133 MHz, and, due to being late, Intel's Pentium line was already faster. AMD still managed to get an edge on the Cyrix 6x86, though.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The host of the film awards ceremony at which Tourette syndrome activist John Davidson shouted a racial slur has said he won’t host it again

Alan Cumming has criticised the organisers of the Bafta film awards in February as “bad people who weren’t doing their jobs properly” after the N-word outburst by Tourette activist John Davidson, which was broadcast by the BBC during its coverage of the ceremony.

In an interview with the Sunday Times, Cumming, who was the host of the ceremony, said: “It was bad, bad, bad, bad leadership … Bad people who weren’t doing their jobs properly, who really had not prepared and let people down.”

Move by largest donor to environment programme poses further uncertainty for already troubled negotiations

The largest donor to the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) has paused funding to the body before its revised budget on 12 May, triggering concern among member states and NGOs.

The news could carry significance for the already troubled plastic treaty negotiations being overseen by Unep. Since 2022 countries have been struggling to agree on how to deal with the volume of plastics being produced and used, a subject widely acknowledged to be one of the most serious environmental issues of the age, but despite six rounds of talks there has been no agreement in sight.

Also: James Rodríguez finally makes his mark with Minnesota, and a perfect stat line appears in the Bronx

There are points up for grabs in the East. Inter Miami tooled up to defend their MLS Cup title with uneven results. The Philadelphia Union have dropped them from the top of the heap to the cellar. The Ohio duopoly of Columbus and Cincinnati are below their previous standard, while Orlando City played the long game, conducting minimal business before Antoine Griezmann’s summer arrival.

Nashville SC have been the greatest beneficiary of The Great Points Migration in 2026, storming to the top of the East. But right behind them after a gritty 2-1 win over Philadelphia this week are the surprising New England Revolution, led by Marko Mitrović in his first MLS head coaching role after four years with the US youth national teams.

Debates over secession overshadowed by revelations separatist-linked group gained access to list of electors

The illegal use of voter information by rightwing separatists in the province of Alberta has raised fresh fears over Canada’s electoral integrity by making valuable and “incredibly confidential” personal data easily accessible to malicious actors, security experts have warned.

The data breach, one of the largest in Canadian history, has prompted warnings of a “truly terrifying” new battleground over information, persuasion and foreign interference in already weakened democratic systems.

A new divide is emerging: between workers who use AI at work and those who are managed by it

The real danger that artificial intelligence poses to work is not just job loss – it is the growing divide between people who use AI to extend their skills and those whose working lives are increasingly shaped by opaque, AI-powered systems of surveillance and control.

The debate about artificial intelligence and how it will affect workers is stuck in the wrong place. On one side are warnings that machines are coming for millions of jobs. On the other are claims that AI will turbocharge productivity. Both stories miss what is already happening in workplaces across the world, from Britain to Kenya to the United States.

Liban Mohamed is the progressive underdog in the race for a House seat but victory at the state party convention offers grounds for optimism

Liban Mohamed, a 27-year-old son of Somali immigrants, is headed into a high-stakes Utah Democratic congressional primary in June after narrowly winning the state party convention last month with 51% of the vote in what was seen as an upset for the party’s political establishment.

The sudden emergence of an unknown progressive candidate in Utah has exposed a growing divide within the state’s Democratic party, one that mirrors a broader tension across the national party between its moderate establishment and a younger, more progressive wing.

Address was billed as make-or-break amid mounting speculation of a challenge. Has he done enough to hang on?

• Who are the main threats to Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership?

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer’s speech and press conference on Monday morning was almost universally billed as his final chance to save his premiership. Was it enough? And what – if anything – did he actually offer?

Global health reform cannot wait for a new world order. Middle powers must act now Expert comment LToremark 11 May 2026

The World Health Assembly in Geneva presents a narrow window of opportunity for action to save multilateral cooperation on global health. Three things need to happen.

The 79^th World Health Assembly (WHA) – the decision-making body of the World Health Organization (WHO) – will take place in Geneva on 18–23 May amid major challenges to global health cooperation. The United States has withdrawn from WHO, leaving a $600 million funding gap and forcing WHO to cut its budget for 2026-27 by 20 per cent. Bilateral health deals under the America First Global Health Strategy are being signed across Africa and Asia, bypassing multilateral frameworks and transferring costs onto the partner countries without commensurate power. In February, WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described 2025 as potentially the most difficult in the organization’s history. 

Two recent speeches provide the clearest political diagnosis of the current international moment. On 5 March, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney told the Australian parliament that the rules-based order is not in transition – it is in rupture. That same day – and building on Carney’s speech – Finland’s President Alexander Stubb opened the Raisina Dialogue by arguing that the Global South will decide what the next world order looks like, and that the West has one last chance to prove it is capable of dialogue rather than monologue. Although neither mentioned global health explicitly, both were talking about it. 

Related work

The good, the bad, and the possible: What the America First Global Health Strategy means for Africa – and the world

As global health diplomats head to Geneva, the question WHA79 must answer is not whether WHO needs reforming, but who will drive that reform, in whose interests and on what political basis. Although Carney and Stubb approach the issue from very different angles, they converge on a clear answer: middle powers must act with urgency – and Western middle powers must act in genuine partnership with the Global South.

Carney’s argument is strategic: great powers can compel; middle powers can convene. But not every country can convene because convening power flows from trust, which is earned through consistency between stated values and demonstrated actions. In the global health context, this matters enormously. WHO has never had enforcement powers; its authority has always rested on the legitimacy conferred by member states who believe it acts in their collective interest. That legitimacy is now under structural pressure. A WHO seen as a residual institution – one that the powerful use when convenient and abandon when not – cannot perform its core functions of surveillance, standard-setting and emergency coordination. The middle powers who remain committed to it must therefore act not merely as supporters but as active co-architects of its renewal. 

Carney’s concept of ‘variable geometry’ is equally important for global health. Rather than waiting for a comprehensive multilateral settlement that may take years, middle powers should build different coalitions for different issues, based on shared values and common interests. This is not a retreat from multilateralism, Carney argues, but its evolution. For global health, the implication is direct. Issues such as pandemic preparedness, antimicrobial resistance, digital health governance and climate-health linkages each require a different coalition, moving at different speeds. The WHO reform process is necessary but slow. Variable-geometry coalitions can build the normative and financial infrastructure that a reformed global health architecture will eventually need to incorporate. The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control showed what is possible. Similar courageous steps must now be taken in other areas, such as negotiations on a pandemic agreement or possibly in relation to digital health.  

Stubb’s argument adds a political dimension to Carney’s intervention: the Global South cannot be a passive recipient of whatever order emerges – it is the decisive actor. The triangular contest he describes between a Global West, Global East and Global South is directly visible in WHO’s governing bodies. How Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and South Africa engage at WHA79 – whether they drive the reform process or treat it as a Northern preoccupation – will shape the outcome far more than any European position paper. Stubb’s challenge to the West is blunt: stop treating engagement with the Global South as a communications exercise and start treating it as a power-sharing negotiation. The global health corollary is equally blunt: a reformed WHO governance structure that still reflects 1948 power distributions, rather than today’s distribution of disease burden and health capacity, will not be legitimate in the world that is now emerging.

In his speech, Stubb called for concrete structural reform of global multilateral institutions: new permanent representation for Asia, Africa and Latin America in global institutions, not as a rhetorical concession but as a condition of legitimacy. Passivity is not a strategy, he said – a charge directed at Europe as much as anywhere. For the European and other Western middle powers who dominate WHO’s financing and governing bodies, this is uncomfortable but necessary. Being present is not the same as exercising leadership and showing willingness to cede structural power. Professing commitment to multilateralism while resisting the governance reforms that would make multilateral institutions genuinely representative is precisely the double standard that Stubb warns will cost the West its last chance.

Authorities added that the victim's mother has also been arrested for aiding and abetting the monk.

Influential IPPR proposes capping rents at whichever is lower of consumer price inflation or wage growth

• UK politics live – latest updates

One of the thinktanks closest to the Labour government is urging ministers to introduce private sector rent controls in England, as the chancellor weighs up how to ease a surge in living costs caused by the Iran war.

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has published a paper calling for a rent “double lock”, which would link rent increases to either wages or inflation, depending on which was lower.

Data from University of Toronto suggests Canadians are avoiding US cities during the second Trump administration

A new research tool that tracks cell phone activity has found a 42% drop in visitors from Canada to big metropolitan areas in the US that is much higher than official border-crossing data, suggesting Canadians during the second Trump administration are avoiding US cities in particular.

Researchers from the University of Toronto said the tool showed a “year-over-year median decline of approximately 42% in Canadian visits to US metropolitan areas – significantly higher than official border-crossing data, which showed a roughly 25% decline”.

As the president’s popularity withers, the party has no will to stage an intervention against him

Donald Trump wins, Republicans lose. The Indiana primaries on 5 May, in which five of seven Trump-backed candidates ousted stalwart conservative Republican state legislators who had refused his command to redraw congressional districts, has been the only victory Trump can claim recently. Indiana, happily for him, is not Iran. His appeal still prevails at least over the increasingly narrow band of Maga voters. But the persistence of Trump’s domination is a sign of mounting haplessness. His victory is an augury of repudiation. Maga devotion is hardening in response to his dwindling popularity, a telltale reaction of true believers to a failed prophesy. The cult survives, the party withers.

On the same day the Indiana Republicans went down to defeat to sate Trump’s vengefulness, a Democrat won a bellwether Michigan state senate seat by 20 points in a district that Kamala Harris carried by less than a point. The bell tolls for thee.

Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill Clinton as well as Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist

Why Should Delaware Care?
Delaware ranks as one of the top states in the nation for healthcare costs. For years, lawmakers have tried to bring prices down, often meeting fierce resistance from hospitals. A new bill meant to address those costs has been held up for months in negotiations with those hospitals. 

Nearly two months after lawmakers introduced a bill aimed at bolstering the state’s primary care infrastructure, it has yet to see a vote on the Senate floor as hospital lobbyists continue to negotiate with legislators over the bill’s most contentious provision.

Delaware senators held their first debate over Senate Bill 1 — which would implement price caps on how high hospital systems can negotiate costs with insurers — in March, during an abnormally packed committee hearing. Delaware’s hospital systems descended on the statehouse in protest of the bill, saying it would decimate revenues and lead to job losses. 

Multiple lawmakers decried the hospitals’ projected job loss claims, saying they are using healthcare workers as “pawns” in an effort to maintain profits. 

“Your campaign of fear, threatening the elimination of 4,000 jobs, is just disgraceful,” said State Sen. Ray Seigfried (D-Wilmington), who is a former ChristianaCare employee and executive of 25 years.

The bill, aimed at rewarding providers that keep patients healthy and away from costly trips to emergency rooms, has largely sat stagnant since then. It quietly passed through the Senate Finance Committee, which doesn’t publicly vote on bills, in April. 

Senate Majority Leader Bryan Townsend (D-Newark/Glasgow), who sponsored SB 1, confirmed Wednesday that negotiations with the state’s hospital systems over amendments to the bill were ongoing, but he declined to elaborate further. He did say he anticipates an announcement on amendments soon. 

Brian Frazee, CEO of the Delaware Healthcare Association, a trade group that represents the state’s hospitals, also declined to comment on specifics of the negotiations. 

But he said he appreciates the opportunity to work with lawmakers to put forth “a resolution that we can all support.”

The bill currently has the support of the state’s insurance department, the Medical Society of Delaware and the Mid-Atlantic Association of Community Health Centers. 

At the center of the hospital systems’ campaign against SB 1 is a provision that would regulate the rate at which insurers carrying plans for state employees and some commercial plans regulated by the Department of Insurance can reimburse hospitals for covered services. Those changes would also apply to the state’s Medicaid plan. 

Essentially, the state is seeking to drive down its own healthcare spending by capping how much money insurance providers will pay hospitals, which hold a majority of the market share in the state, for their services.

If passed as is, it could save the state hundreds of millions of dollars on medical costs. 

By taking aim at how high Delaware healthcare providers can negotiate their prices with insurers in addition to making those insurers spend 11.5% of their medical costs on primary care, the state hopes to better compensate providers proactively working to improve Delawareans’ health outcomes.

What’s in the bill?

One provision in the bill would introduce reference-based pricing to medical services covered under both insurance for state employees and some commercial plans regulated by the Department of Insurance. Essentially, this would limit the amount of money a provider could be reimbursed by insurers, tying that amount to a predetermined benchmark. 

Under Delaware’s proposal, that benchmark would cap reimbursement rates at 250% of what the federal government pays providers through Medicare. 

For services covered under the state’s health plan that do not have a Medicare rate to compare to, like pediatrics, the state would be able to set those rates through the State Employees Benefits Committee.

The bill would “conservatively” save the state more than $280 million over the first five years of implementation, the Department of Insurance said after announcing the bill.

Frazee, of the hospital association, pointed to that Medicare benchmark, saying it was a provision lawmakers tried, and failed, to introduce in previous legislation — House Bill 350 — that led to a year-and-a-half long lawsuit between the state and Delaware’s largest hospital system. 

Officials in Oregon, which implemented a similar proposal in 2017, told Spotlight Delaware the state realized massive savings after enacting price caps. Within a couple years, those officials said the provisions saved the state more than $112 million.

Delaware’s SB 1 also includes language that would exempt hospitals and other healthcare providers from the 250% benchmark requirement if they use a “global budget model” that is approved by the state insurance department. 

Global budget models set annual fixed prices for inpatient and outpatient procedures, meaning hospitals are paid on the front end to deliver services at a cost set by their previous Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements from previous years. 

In neighboring Maryland, the state implemented global budgeting for all of its acute care hospitals in 2014, according to a report from Mathematica.

The hearing

Up to this point, the only public debate over this bill happened in March during a Senate Health and Social Services Committee hearing. 

As part of that debate, one physician, who has practiced in Delaware for more than 35 years, said the state’s primary care infrastructure is in “dire straits.” 

Dr. Jim Gill said independent primary care physicians are currently reimbursed far below the proposed price caps, and that SB 1 is not about giving primary care doctors more money. 

Instead, he said the law allows primary care doctors to receive higher reimbursements for care they do during office visits, as well as care they do in between visits, which he said goes frequently unreimbursed. 

“Let’s face it, no one went into primary care for the money, but we need enough funding to fully care for the people of Delaware,” Gill said. 

Additionally, a rift emerged between doctors working in hospital systems and independent practitioners. 

Independent doctors and the Medical Society of Delaware, which represents all licensed state physicians, said they were in support of the bill because primary care is underfunded, while hospital doctors said they were against the bill because of the impacts it could have on their programs.

Richard Henderson, of the Medical Society of Delaware, said SB 1 comes after years of discussion about how to improve primary care in the state. While he said the bill is “not perfect,” he said it would bring down costs and improve people’s health. 

“The data both then and now is clear and unequivocal,” Henderson said. “Independent primary care practices improve outcomes and reduce the overall cost of care.”

Henderson also said the bill is “critical” to the survival of independent practices and will create an environment that attracts physicians to the state. 

Dr. David Tam, the CEO of Beebe Healthcare in Lewes, also testified at the committee meeting. He aimed his criticism of the bill at the impact it would have on his hospital because of its share of Medicare patients. 

Under SB 1, hospitals and providers would be barred from charging more than 250% of what the federal government reimburses for Medicare. But Medicare typically underpays physicians for their services.  

Since his hospital serves a large share of Medicare patients from a growing elderly population in Sussex County, Tam said the new price cap on other insurance would make it difficult to cover losses from treating Medicare patients. 

It is unclear if and when the Senate will hear any proposed changes to SB 1, though lawmakers will have to move quickly if they want to send the bill to Gov. Matt Meyer’s desk before the end of this year’s legislative session on June 30.

The post Delaware primary care reforms held up in negotiations for months appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Wilmington’s charter requires at least one of the city’s four at-large council members to be elected as a member of a minority party. In the liberal city, the rule ensures that one person on the elected body will not be a Democrat. Last fall, the council’s lone Republican became a Democrat, sparking questions of whether the policy goal has been undone.

A majority of Wilmington City Council members voted Thursday to oust their colleague, Councilman James Spadola, but their decision will not immediately remove him from the elected seat. 

Just hours before the vote, a Delaware judge ruled that any such council action would be paused until a lawsuit Spadola brought against Council President Trippi Congo and the broader council could be adjudicated.

The court will ultimately decide whether the City Council has the power to remove him. 

It all amounts to the latest chapter of a monthslong feud between Spadola and his colleagues, stemming from his decision last fall to change party affiliation from Republican to Democrat. 

Currently, Wilmington’s charter prohibits a majority party – currently Democrats – from nominating more than three candidates for the city’s four at-large seats on the council. 

The rule effectively guarantees the election of at least one minority party candidate. But the charter does not explicitly prohibit council members from changing party affiliation while in office. 

Since Spadola made the switch, several members of the all-Democratic City Council said he had exploited a “loophole” in the city’s charter and disenfranchized the residents who voted him in. 

Another council member noted that Spadola and Congo may each have plans to run for higher office.

As part of a council backlash against the party change, Congo sent a letter to Spadola in February, stating his seat would be declared vacant if he did not switch back to the Republican Party. 

Then, last month, the City Council approved a resolution asking Delaware’s legislature to prevent any future minority-party at-large member from switching parties mid-term. If they did, they would forfeit their seat. 

For his part, Spadola has said his colleagues on the council have misinterpreted the city’s charter. 

Whose rights are infringed?

In his lawsuit filed Monday, Spadola’s attorney upped the rhetoric, calling the council’s likely decision to oust him an “extreme and reactionary path.” He said the move would infringe on Spadola’s own rights and on those of Wilmington voters.

“The sole impetus for the Council’s action is merely that Mr. Spadola has switched political parties from Republican to Democrat in an exercise of his First Amendment,” the legal complaint stated.  

Spadola’s attorney in the case is William Larson with the Wilmington-based law firm, MG+M. 

Representing the City Council is Jane Brady, who has served in a variety of public capacities in past decades, including chair for the Delaware Republican party, a Superior Court judge, and Delaware attorney general.

As of Friday, Brady had not yet responded to Spadola’s central claims because the immediate issue was whether the council’s decision to oust him should be paused pending the lawsuit’s outcome.

Still, even in those arguments, Brady emphasized the City Council’s stance that Spadola’s party switch “disenfranchised” voters who chose him on the ballot.   

The case is expected to be resolved between June and July, Spadola and Congo have each said.

Several council members, including Congo, declined to comment for this story, citing the pending lawsuit. 

Congo, who introduced the resolution to vacate Spadola’s seat, has previously noted that the City Council sought legal advice from the city’s law department on the matter, but said they were misled. 

Last fall, City Council Chief of Staff Elijah Simmons said Spadola would be able to finish his term, which ends in 2028.

He stated the city’s charter contained “no written prohibitions against party affiliation changes while in office.” 

The court will decide

The City Council resolution that passed Thursday states that the intent of the city’s charter is to ensure representation for minority parties. 

The resolution also states that Spadola was elected over other candidates because of his party affiliation, and claimed that his choice to become a Democrat has “disenfranchise[d] approximately 15% of non-majority voters.” 

During the meeting Thursday, Congo announced that a Delaware Chancery Court judge presiding over Spadola’s lawsuit would allow the City Council to vote on the resolution but that it would be “stayed,” or paused, until the case is resolved.

Spadola was the only council member to make comment about the resolution before the vote. He noted that during a court hearing earlier in the day the judge — Chancellor Kathaleen St. J. McCormick — was surprised the council would hold a vote before getting the court’s opinion first. 

Spadola also asserted that the council moving forward with the resolution amounted simply to a “show vote.”

“I joined the Democratic Party because it is a big tent party, and despite the lack of inclusiveness that this council may be showing me, I have full faith the rule of law will prevail,” Spadola said during the meeting. 

After his comments, eight members of council voted in favor of the resolution, including Councilmembers Alexander Hackett, Coby Owens, Shane Darby, Zanthia Oliver, Christian Willauer, Yolanda McCoy, Chris Johnson, and Congo. 

Councilmembers Latisha Bracy and Nathan Field voted “present.” Councilmembers Michelle Harlee and Maria Cabrera were absent. 

Spadola was the sole vote against the resolution. 

The post Wilmington City Council votes to vacate Spadola’s seat but court pauses removal appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Senator Chris Van Hollen and other Democratic lawmakers are embracing a policy that hardly benefits the middle class

Soul-searching within the Democratic party is to be expected after its loss in the 2024 election. Donald Trump’s edge over Kamala Harris in voters’ perceptions of economic competence (perplexing though it now appears following a year of erratic policymaking) was bound to inspire a call to rethink the party platform.

Yet the second-guessing is steering the Democrats down a dangerous path to embracing a tax-cutting strategy that risks defeating the project to enable a healthier, more equitable society.

A Georgia congressman running for one of the country’s most competitive U.S. Senate seats has vowed in social media posts and interviews to make America’s roads safer — by taking commercial driver’s licenses away from noncitizens.

“If you can’t read English road signs,” Mike Collins, a Republican, posted on Facebook in April, “you don’t belong behind the wheel. Period.”

Collins, the owner of a trucking business and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives’ transportation committee, is one of the loudest champions of the Trump administration’s effort to revoke licenses from nearly 200,000 noncitizen commercial drivers, including thousands of truckers. The Trump administration has pushed the policy forward even though its own officials have written that there’s no empirical evidence to show that foreign truckers cause more crashes than truckers who are American citizens.

At the same time, however, Collins has opposed rules that experts say actually would reduce the odds of serious crashes. Those rules could have required that Collins’ family business sink substantial money into new safety measures for its fleet.

Over the past 25 years, crashes involving truckers for Collins’ business killed five people and injured more than 50 people — including one woman who now needs around-the-clock care due to a severe brain injury — according to federal data, court filings, plaintiffs’ attorneys and police records.

Drivers and passengers who were injured in those crashes later claimed in lawsuits that truckers for Collins’ business have caused them to collectively incur hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical expenses. The figure the business has paid out is not known because the settlements it reached with crash victims have been confidential, as is common in such suits.  Court filings in one suit state that both parties agreed to a $1 million payout from the business’s insurer. Collins’ business denied wrongdoing by truckers and the business itself in those cases.

ProPublica’s analysis of federal motor vehicle data from the past two years shows that Collins’ business has a higher rate of unsafe driving and speeding violations per mile than the majority of trucking companies with substantial mileage. The analysis also shows that the company’s recent crash rate sits around the median of similar companies, while the rate of injury from those crashes sits in the top fifth.

Safety experts told ProPublica that some of the technologies opposed by Collins, which include devices on semitrucks to limit their speed and sensors on big rigs to automatically brake in the face of a potential collision, reduce the odds of crashes leading to serious injuries and deaths. The country’s largest trucking trade group — a group that Collins’ family business is a member of, according to the company’s website — has supported mandates for those technologies.

“These are proven technologies,” said Zach Cahalan, executive director of the Truck Safety Coalition, which advocates on behalf of crash victims and their families. He added that the technologies would “protect those we hold dear on our roads from horrific tragedy.”

Neither Collins’ campaign nor his congressional office responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment or to questions about his family business’s safety record or his policy positions on trucking safety. His campaign manager declined to make him available for an interview. The business did not respond to questions sent by ProPublica; an employee told ProPublica that press inquiries about the business are handled by Collins’ congressional office.

In recent years, Collins has described his efforts to keep foreign truckers off the roads as “purely a safety issue.” He has also questioned the effectiveness of other safety measures and said that they would have saddled his industry with extra costs.

“We want to be safe,” Collins said in one congressional hearing. “I don’t know of a trucking company out there that doesn’t want to be safe. And when they are not safe, they are taken off the road.”

Toward the end of 2023, his first year in Congress, Collins had one of his first chances to support a measure that experts believed could make the roads safer. The Biden administration had proposed a rule that would require the installation of devices to limit the speed of trucks, capping it as low as 60 miles per hour.

But Collins questioned the need for the rule. He told officials at a transportation committee hearing that the federal government shouldn’t require the safety measure. He said insurance companies already serve as a sufficient speeding deterrent, because they have the ability to cut off coverage to truckers with unsafe driving records. He also said the rule wasn’t needed because of yet another deterrent that had long been in place.

“They are called speed limit signs,” he said. “They are enforced by law enforcement.”

Collins’ position stood at odds with the industry’s largest trade group, American Trucking Associations, which that year had expressed support for capping the speeds of trucks between 65 and 70 miles per hour. Collins did not respond to questions about why his views are at odds with ATA, which represents the interests of 37,000 members, including Collins’ family business.

In 2025, the Trump administration withdrew the speed limiter proposal. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy celebrated the decision as one that would get “D.C. bureaucrats OUT of your trucks.”

Collins also pushed back against a different proposal, which would have required trucks to have automatic emergency braking systems. That technology can force a truck to slow down if the potential for a collision is detected.

Federal officials had estimated that the braking system mandate could prevent more than 8,000 injuries a year. ATA supported much of the proposal, too. Yet Collins, whose family business has used those systems in some trucks, explained at recent congressional hearings that the technology was “very expensive” and didn’t work that well. “People don’t understand that these things are actually hurting more than they’re helping right now,” Collins said at a hearing last year.

Some of Collins’ truckers have been involved in crashes because of their alleged failure to slow down, according to citations and police reports obtained by ProPublica. Over the past five years, three people hurt in those crashes have sued Collins’ fleet because its truckers allegedly failed to maintain a safe distance, leading them to cause crashes. The plaintiffs claimed that they sustained serious injuries that cost five to six figures in medical expenses.

The truckers and Collins’ business denied wrongdoing in the cases. The three cases were dismissed. Lawyers for two plaintiffs said the cases ended in a settlement; a lawyer for the third plaintiff did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the dismissal of the case.

The fate of automatic emergency braking requirements is now up in the air, too. The Trump administration has delayed the rule from going into effect and, according to ProPublica’s reporting last year, may narrow the scope of it.

Collins has said that his decades in the business make him especially attuned to safety measures that work, compared with bureaucrats who have “beaten to death” his industry with too many regulations. In the late 1980s, Collins became the head of the family’s trucking company before he had graduated college. He took over for his dad, Mac Collins, who served as a congressman from 1993 to 2005.

Shortly into Mike Collins’ time as president, one of his company’s truckers lost control of his trailer. The crash that followed sent a 19-year-old woman to the hospital. The trucker later pleaded guilty to driving under the influence of cocaine. The business drew scrutiny because that trucker had pleaded no contest to drunk driving earlier that year but was allowed to stay on the road. A political opponent later aired a TV ad that accused the family’s trucking business of being cited for “more than a hundred” safety violations.

At the time, Mac Collins blamed the company’s insurer for missing the drunk-driving conviction in a background check. He said the ad contained “falsehoods” but didn’t specify what was wrong. The company ultimately fired the trucker after the crash, Mac Collins told the Ledger-Enquirer in 1994.

The larger the Collins trucking fleet grew — into one of about 100 trucks, hauling timber for Georgia-Pacific as well as tires and steel — the more traffic citations and inspection violations its truckers received. The data ProPublica reviewed showed that truckers have gotten into more than 90 crashes that have led to at least 51 injuries and five deaths since 2001.

In 2007, one Collins trucker veered into oncoming traffic on a North Carolina highway and hit a white Honda CR-V. The CR-V’s driver, Bridget Murphy, and the trucker both died. Murphy’s estate and two of Murphy’s passengers filed a lawsuit and, according to a court filing in 2009, agreed to a $1 million payout from the company’s liability insurance coverage. The company wrote in a filing that the trucker had been “stricken by a physical impairment beyond his control.”

In 2021, another trucker switched lanes on an Indiana highway and collided into a car driven by Larkin Cooper. She claimed in a lawsuit that the trucker’s “negligent and reckless” driving caused injuries that forced her to drop out of nursing school and switch to a lesser-paying career. Her lawyer wrote that the total damages were likely to exceed $75,000.

In 2023, a trucker failed to stop quickly enough while approaching a red traffic light on a northeast Georgia highway, causing a four-vehicle crash, according to court records. Drivers in two vehicles later said in lawsuits that they had sustained serious medical injuries. One of them claimed that the costs to treat his back, knee and neck totaled more than $120,000.

Collins did not answer ProPublica’s questions about the lawsuits. Lawyers for the family’s business denied wrongdoing in the suits in Indiana and Georgia. Soon after, the business settled for undisclosed sums.

During a televised debate in April, just weeks before the May 19 Republican primary for the U.S. Senate race, Collins told viewers that his time in the trucking business had taught him how to work across the aisle in Washington, D.C. His political ads feature him behind the wheel of a rig, and his yard signs have a logo of an American flag in the shape of a semi.

Yet his messaging about making roads safer centers on one main idea: getting noncitizen truckers off the road.

In one social video from November, Collins was on one side of a split screen, speaking about a sign on the other screen.

“You know what this sign says?” Collins asked. “Nah, neither do I.”

“Y’all, It’s a road sign from Uzbekistan, which is exactly why I’m able to drive a truck in Georgia, but not Uzbekistan,” he continued. “But somehow, y’all, that common sense, well, it didn’t apply to one man on our roads.”

Collins then replaced a photo of the sign with a mug shot of an undocumented trucker named Akhror Bozorov. Collins said he had been “wanted in Uzbekistan for terrorism and spreading Jihad.” After Bozorov was arrested last year, the Department of Homeland Security published a press release that criticized Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s transportation department for issuing a license to Bozorov and President Joe Biden’s administration for granting the trucker his work authorization.

Collins went one step further and used the trucker’s story to attack the politician he’s trying to unseat, U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., for not being tough enough on immigration.

He also cited Bozorov’s story as justification to strip noncitizen truckers of their licenses — but failed to present evidence that noncitizen truckers make the roads less safe.

In March, the Trump administration enacted its rule that could eventually revoke commercial licenses from nearly 200,000 noncitizen drivers. But according to the administration’s initial analysis of its own rule last year, “There is not sufficient evidence, derived from well-designed, rigorous, quantitative analyses, to reliably demonstrate a measurable empirical relationship” between a trucker’s citizenship status and safety outcomes.

A letter from nearly 20 Democratic state attorneys general pointed out that the Trump administration cited only five fatal crashes last year that were caused by noncitizens with commercial driver’s licenses, out of more than 4,000 deaths involving CDL drivers nationwide. The letter said that the Trump administration’s rule presented “no facts” to support the claim that revoking thousands of licenses would “benefit public safety.”

Public interest lawyers have also filed a legal challenge to the rule. The challenge is pending.

“The notion that immigrant drivers are less safe than other drivers is not supported by the facts,” said Wendy Liu, one of the lawyers who filed the challenge.

The same week that Trump’s rule was enacted, Collins doubled down on his calls to restrict commercial licenses for noncitizens, writing in an Instagram post that “this isn’t some game. Lives are at stake. Deport these thugs now.”

The post A U.S. Senate Candidate Says Foreign Truckers Are Making America’s Roads Unsafe. His Own Truckers Have Caused Harm. appeared first on ProPublica.

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 you will find information about the most important or interesting public meetings happening in Delaware this week. 

• House and Senate to discuss EVs, bartending age, and Delaware’s budget, among other topics 
• Legislative committees to consider more than 40 bills, including gun regulations and hemp laws. 
• Dover set for its ‘State of the City’ following a tumultuous year.  
• New Castle County to receive updates on the embattled Police Athletic League 

Delaware legislature begins to sprint

Get ready for a busy week in Dover.

Delaware lawmakers are set to hold hearings on nearly 50 bills this week, kicking off an eight-week sprint toward the end of the legislative session.

The bills closest to becoming law have already cleared their legislative committees and are now awaiting votes before the full House or Senate.

In the House, lawmakers are expected to consider two pieces of electricity-related legislation, including one that would remove a cap on utilities’ purchases of electricity generated by household solar systems and another that would lay the groundwork for expanded electric vehicle tax credits.

Also on the House agenda is a bill that would lower Delaware’s legal bartending age from 21 to 18.

Among the bills before the full Senate is one that would increase fees paid by hundreds of thousands of companies registered in the state – a measure in line with Gov. Matt Meyer’s proposed budget.  

Another measure related to Delaware government revenue also is before the Senate – and it is one that could rekindle tensions between the governor and lawmakers. 

Delaware House Majority Leader Kerri Evelyn-Harris (D-Dover) introduced House Bill 370 in early April to enshrine into law the existence of the state’s longstanding budget forecasting committee – known by its acronym DEFAC. 

Following its introduction, supporters in the House Republican caucus argued the legislation became necessary after actions by Meyer “raised questions about its (DEFAC’s) future.” 

The GOP statement noted that the bill followed Meyer’s firing of a longtime budget forecaster after he had criticized the governor’s administration over transparency surrounding the state’s prominent corporate franchise.

WHYY later reported that certain lawmakers said disagreements existed on the bill between the Meyer administration and legislative leadership, but that the Senate’s top member said a discussion between the parties had been productive.

Two weeks ago, the House of Representatives passed an amended version of the bill with no opposition.

📍 The full Senate will meet to consider the DEFAC bill and others at 2 p.m. Tuesday at Legislative Hall, located at 411 Legislative Ave. in Dover. For more details, click here. For information about watching online, click here.
The full House will also meet at 2 p.m. Tuesday at Legislative Hall.  For more details, click here. For information about watching online, click here. 

Lawmakers will also hear dozens of additional bills in front of legislative committees this week, including proposals that would:

• Increase regulations on gun shops;
• Require the state to establish rules for reporting deaths in prison;
• Allow the Delaware Electric Cooperative to deny service to data centers;
• Require an audit of Delaware’s automatic voter registration system;
• Reinforce prohibitions on certain nonprofits from engaging in partisan activities; and
• Regulate hemp-derived THC products under Delaware’s marijuana laws.

Delaware residents can attend committee hearings in person or participate virtually through the General Assembly’s online meeting system. To view details of all hearings, scroll through the “What’s Happening” box here. 

Dover to hear ‘State of the City’

Also happening in Dover this week will be the annual “State of the City” address given by Mayor Robin Christiansen. The speech will occur during the city’s annual meeting, which also will feature the city council’s vote for a new council president. 

Christiansen, who has come under fire in recent weeks for a prolonged, unexplained absence from city duties, will give his annual reflection on the landscape of the city, and what he hopes to accomplish going into his 13th year as mayor. 

This past year has been tumultuous for the city. Its police chief faced calls to resign, the city council spent months debating a failed panhandling ordinance, and City Manager Dave Hugg was fired. 

Most recently, the capital city revealed it is facing a $7 million budget shortfall heading into the next fiscal year, and will be forced to choose between dipping into its budget balance from previous years, or raising taxes on residents. 

📍The Dover City Council is scheduled to meet at 6:30 on Monday inside the Dover City Hall council chambers, located at 15 Loockerman Plaza in Dover. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here. 

What’s the status of the PAL? 

Last summer, former-Delaware House Speaker Valerie Longhurst quietly resigned from the Police Athletic League of Delaware, just as the publicly-funded nonprofit was facing a financial crisis. 

In the weeks and months that followed, officials revealed that New Castle County police officers took over management of the cash-strapped organization, even as it faced a criminal investigation and an audit that could force it to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars it likely did not have. 

On Tuesday, the New Castle County Council will receive an update about the county’s oversight of the Police Athletic League, and its plans for the future. The update will occur during the council’s regular meeting of its public safety committee. 

The PAL of Delaware, as it’s known, operates athletic, arts and academic programs for children throughout the year.  It does so at community center locations in Hockessin, Delaware City and suburban New Castle – settings that put children in contact with law enforcement.

The nonprofit also has been an integral piece of Delaware’s political landscape, with elected officials regularly making public appearances at its locations.

And, up until recently, it also was one of several prominent Delaware organizations led by a state lawmaker.

📍 The New Castle County Council Public Safety Committee will meet at 4 p.m. Tuesday at the  Louis L. Redding City County Building, located at 800 N. French St. in Wilmington. For more information, including about virtual attendance, click here.

The post Get Involved: Lawmakers to vote on dozens of bills; Dover to hear its state of the city appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Exclusive: Human rights group warns of ‘deep collusion’ between criminals and officials in some parts of country

State actors are involved in disappearances in Mexico at an “alarming” rate, according to a report from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

The sweeping investigation, to which the Guardian was given exclusive access, presents a dire picture of the crisis of disappearances in Mexico, where more than 130,000 people have gone missing, mostly in the last 20 years since the government declared its war on drug cartels.

• Average cost of one ticket claimed to be $3,000 (£2,200)

• Fifa insists terms and conditions of sale were made clear

Numerous Football Associations have been hit by increased prices when buying World Cup tickets for their players’ family and friends, with teams competing at the tournament affected by Fifa’s dynamic pricing model. While Fifa offered all national associations that have qualified for the World Cup a six-week window to buy tickets at a fixed price after the draw in December, any requests for tickets from the end of January have been subject to what Fifa describes as “adaptive pricing”, with the cost rising for most matches.

An executive at one national association said they had requested hundreds of additional tickets in recent weeks and have been surprised at the size of the bill. An executive at another association claimed the average cost of securing attendance at matches for their players’ family and their guests has risen to about $3,000 (£2,200) a ticket after extra purchases, a significant ­additional cost that will eat into their ­tournament funding. Fifa sources insisted the average cost of tickets bought by national associations is far lower than $3,000.

European partners question viability of a Trump plan to arm Ukraine as weeks of war with Iran deplete U.S. supplies of critical weapons.

Big news from the Debian release team: Debian is going for reproducible package builds.

Aided by the efforts of the Reproducible Builds project, we’ve decided it’s time to say that Debian must ship reproducible packages. Since yesterday, we have enabled our migration software to block migration of new packages that can’t be reproduced or existing packages (in testing) that regress in reproducibility.

↫ Paul Gevers

Reproducible means, in short, that you can verify that the source code used to build a package is indeed that source code. This provides a layer of defense against people tampering with code or otherwise trying to fiddle with the process between source code and final package on your system. This effort constitutes a tremendous amount of work, but it’s massively important.

Toon Kelder artwork from famed Goudstikker collection resurfaces with descendants of Hendrik Seyffardt

• Europe live – latest updates

An artwork looted by the Nazis from the renowned Goudstikker collection has resurfaced in the home of descendants of a notorious Dutch SS collaborator, according to an art detective.

Portrait of a Young Girl, by the Dutch artist Toon Kelder, is believed to have hung for decades in the home of Hendrik Seyffardt’s family, Arthur Brand said, describing it as “the most bizarre case of my entire career”.

Holding no illusions about making lasting deals at this week’s summit, China’s leader looks to project Beijing as an alternative to U.S. volatility on the world stage.

More than a decade ago, a federal court found that the New York City Police Department had been unconstitutionally stopping and frisking Black and Hispanic residents. The ruling laid out required fixes, including something quite basic: The NYPD would review officers’ stops to make sure they were legal.

But for most of the past three years the nation’s largest police department failed to do that for a key part of an aggressive and politically connected unit as it stopped New Yorkers.

The lack of court-required review was recently discovered and disclosed by the NYPD’s federal monitor, which oversees the department’s compliance with the 2013 stop-and-frisk decision.

In all, more than 2,000 stops weren’t properly reviewed, according to data from the monitor.

The failure involved the Community Response Team, or CRT. A ProPublica investigation last year found that the unit had often sidestepped oversight as it went after so-called quality-of-life issues, such as unlicensed motorbikes and ATVs. The team’s tactics, including high-speed car chases, and its opaque operations disturbed some NYPD officials, but the unit expanded significantly amid the support of then-Mayor Eric Adams.

The lack of reviews is part of a pattern of the NYPD failing to deliver on its obligations under the long-standing court order. Officers across the department, for instance, have often not documented stops.

The importance of reviews is particularly critical for aggressive teams like the CRT, which has a record of unconstitutional stops. It has also drawn hundreds of civilian complaints since it was created three years ago. More than half of the officers assigned to the team have been found by the Civilian Complaint Review Board to have engaged in misconduct at least once in their career, according to a ProPublica analysis of board data last year. That compares with just a small fraction of NYPD officers overall.

Prior to its latest discovery, the federal monitor had raised alarms about the unit’s behavior. A report last year said that only 59% of stops, searches and frisks by CRT officers were lawful, a far worse rate than the NYPD’s patrol units. Nearly all of the stops involved Black or Hispanic residents.

In a letter to the court, the federal monitor said the newly discovered failure means the monitor’s own figures on the CRT’s rate of compliance with the Constitution is probably wrong. The actual rate, the monitor wrote, is “likely lower” than reported.

The court-appointed monitor, Mylan Denerstein, lambasted the NYPD and its failure to review the stops.

“The failure to audit these stops means unconstitutional stops, frisks and searches went undetected,” Denerstein said in a statement to ProPublica. “This is unacceptable. The City must do more and prevent this from happening.”

In a statement to ProPublica, the NYPD said it moved to fix the issues: “Under Commissioner (Jessica) Tisch the NYPD has taken significant additional steps to increase oversight and accountability. The Monitor and the NYPD identified this error, and the NYPD is working collaboratively with the Monitor to address it.”

For the first two and a half years after the unit was created in 2023, the failure to properly review stops affected just part of the unit, which was led by top brass.

But last fall, the issue became more widespread after the NYPD restructured the CRT to put officers stationed across the city under a central command. The move was intended to increase oversight of the team, which had new commanders. But in the process, stops for the entire unit, which had grown to about 180 officers, went unaudited.

One of the unit’s former commanders, John Chell, defended its record.

“This team really changed the game,” said Chell, who retired as the department’s top uniformed officer last year. “Did we make mistakes? Sure. But we stabilized the city. We did our job.”

Lawmakers and civil rights advocates, however, have long criticized the CRT’s aggressive policing and said the latest reporting failure underscores a need to disband the unit.

“The Community Response Team has operated with too little oversight and caused too much harm,” said state Sen. Jessica Ramos, who has recalled being wrongfully stopped and frisked by the NYPD more than a decade ago. “A unit with this record should not continue.”

Lawyers at the New York Civil Liberties Union, one of the original litigants in the stop-and-frisk case, also called for the CRT to be shuttered.

“These units have a long history of aggressive policing against people of color. There is no basis for them,” said Daniel Lambright, the organization’s director of criminal justice litigation. “They do more harm than good and they need to go.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who took office in January and pledged during his campaign to reimagine public safety, has endorsed shuttering another unit that has drawn scrutiny for its heavy-handed approach to protests, but his office declined to address the rising calls to disband the CRT.

“We’re aware of issues raised about the Community Response Team, as well as the steps the NYPD has taken to address them,” a mayoral spokesperson said in a statement to ProPublica. “The Mamdani administration is committed to improving public safety in a way that meets the needs and values of New Yorkers.”

When it started three years ago, the CRT focused on Adams’ shifting priorities, such as cracking down on illegal motorcycles. The unit roamed the city proactively looking for crime rather than waiting for calls, the same approach once used by one of the NYPD’s most notorious units.

The CRT quickly developed a reputation for brutality. Just months after the unit started, one officer in an unmarked police car spotted a man on a dirtbike and swerved across a yellow line into oncoming traffic, hitting the motorcyclist head-on and sending him flying. The man later died from his injuries. The NYPD said that it punished the officer by taking 13 days of vacation from him.

Department leaders told ProPublica that even they had a hard time overseeing the unit’s work because it was essentially created off the books — a setup that ultimately led to the dropped reviews of stops. Officers who were part of the unit were often not formally assigned to it, meaning their conduct wasn’t properly tracked.

“It was one of those teams where everyone is a ghost,” one former department official told ProPublica last year.

That approach extended to stop-and-frisk.

When the monitor learned about the CRT in the unit’s early days, the NYPD assured the monitor that it would not do many stops. Only later, the monitor noted in a report last year, it discovered the team was “frequently” doing them.

In 2025, the CRT recorded 1,400 stop-and-frisks, according to data from the monitor and the NYPD. More than 900 were not properly reviewed.

The post Despite Court Order, NYPD Failed to Properly Monitor Stop-and-Frisks by Aggressive Unit appeared first on ProPublica.

ymawky is a small, static http web server written entirely in aarch64 assembly for macos. it uses raw darwin syscalls with no libc wrappers, serves static files, supports GET, HEAD, PUT, OPTIONS, DELETE, byte ranges, directory listing, custom error pages, and tries to be as hardened as possible.

why? why not? the dream of the 80s is alive in ymawky. everybody has nginx. having apache makes you a square. so why not strip every single convenience layer that computer science has given us since 1957? i wanted to understand how a web server actually works, something i know little about coming from a low-level/systems background. the risks that come up, the problems that need to be solved, the things you don’t think about when you’re writing python or c.

this (probably) won’t replace nginx, but it is doing something in the most difficult way possible.

↫ Tony “imtomt”

I love this.

Ada is incredibly well designed. One way this shows is that it takes the big, monolithic features of other languages and breaks them down into their constituent parts, so we can choose which portions of those features we want. The example I often reach for to explain this is object-oriented programming.

↫ Christoffer Stjernlöf

Exactly what it says on the tin.

Brent crude rises after US president calls overture from Tehran ‘totally unacceptable’

• Business live – news updates

Oil prices have climbed after Donald Trump condemned Iran’s response to US proposals to end the war as “totally unacceptable”.

The president’s rejection of Tehran’s overture in a post on his Truth Social platform triggered a jump in Brent crude, the international benchmark for oil prices, by as much as 4% on Monday to $105.50 a barrel, before easing back to settle at $103.50.

Temperatures soar in California and Arizona, while deluge continues across Western and Northern Cape

Heat is expected to intensify across western parts of the US and Mexico this week as a ridge of high pressure pushes temperatures well above the seasonal norm. Daytime highs are forecast to reach 10-15C above average in some areas.

The US National Weather Service has issued heat advisories for parts of California and Arizona, with extreme heat warnings in force on Monday and Tuesday in places such as Palm Springs, where temperatures could reach 40-43C (104-110F). More broadly, temperatures are expected to climb into the high 30s celsius before the heat shifts eastwards towards the midwest later this week.

President Trump didn't provide details on the issues he had with the response or what would come next.

Twenty-two people from MV Hondius cruise spend first day isolating in self-contained flats in Merseyside

• What is hantavirus?

Passengers evacuated to the UK from a cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak are spending their first day at an isolation facility after being repatriated from Tenerife.

A chartered Titan Airways flight transported the MV Hondius passengers from the Canary Islands to Manchester airport on Sunday evening. The evacuation of passengers of all nationalities will be completed on Monday, with flights arriving from Australia and the Netherlands, Spain’s health minister has said.

It's time to crown the ISP you love and trust. Here's how.

Warsh would succeed outgoing Fed chair Jerome Powell as Trump continues his push to influence the US central bank

• Sign up for the Breaking News US newsletter email

The US Senate is expected to confirm Kevin Warsh this week as chair of the Federal Reserve, as Donald Trump continues his campaign to influence the world’s most important central bank.

The Fed’s influence over the economy spans from the job market to mortgage rates, and its every move is carefully scrutinized by investors on Wall Street. Warsh’s confirmation comes at a turbulent time for the central bank, which has fallen under intense scrutiny from Trump for not lowering interest rates.

Ford's sales of electrified vehicles — including hybrids and all-electric models — dropped 31% from April 2025, reports Electrek. "Hybrid sales fell 32% to 15,758 vehicles, while EV sales continued to crash with just 3,655 all-electric models sold last month, 25% fewer than in the year prior." After discontinuing the F-150 Lightning in December, sales of the electric pickup have been in free fall. Ford sold just 884 Lightnings last month, 49% less than it did last April. The Mustang Mach-E isn't doing much better. Sales fell another 9% year over year in April, to just 2,670 models last month. Through the first four months of 2026, Ford's EV sales have fallen 61% from last year, with F-150 Lightning and Mustang Mach-E sales down 67% and 50%, respectively. Ford has sold just over 10,500 electric vehicles in total so far this year... For comparison, Toyota sold just over 10,000 bZ models in the first quarter alone. That's more than Ford's total EV sales in Q1. April was Ford's fourth straight month of lower sales figures from 2025, the article points out. So Ford is bringing back "employee pricing" discounts on most new 2025 and 2026 Ford and Lincoln vehicles., while also offering "purchase incentives" of up to $9,000 for 2025 Lightning models and up to $6,000 for 2025 Mustang Mach-Es. "It's also offering EV buyers a free Level 2 home charger, 24/7 live support, and proactive roadside assistance through its Power Promise program."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The grand music halls and theatres of the 1920s gave way to the era of the moving image, prompting the acquisition and conversion of lavish cinemas across the US – many of which became enduring cultural landmarks. From the rise of television in the 1950s to today’s streaming platforms and smartphone screens, media consumption has become individualised. As a result, many of these once-grand movie theatres have been abandoned, repurposed or left suspended as hybrid ruins. Photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have documented these early 20th-century relics and the haunting beauty of their decline

• Exhibited at Kyotographie 2026 in Japan until 17 May

The Trump–Xi summit: can progress be made on Iran? Expert comment jon.wallace 11 May 2026

President Trump should not concede much on issues like Taiwan. But both powers have an interest in opening the Strait of Hormuz and making progress on AI safety.

For Beijing, President Donald Trump is the gift that keeps on giving. His decisions have handed China’s leadership advantages of which it cannot have dreamed before he arrived in the Oval Office for the second time.

Trump has cancelled the Biden-era subsidies for clean technology, allowing China to extend its lead. He has slapped tariffs on allies including Vietnam and India, driving them towards Beijing. He has called NATO into question and sided with Russia in its aims over Ukraine. And now he has tied up the US military and his own attention in a war with Iran which he cannot easily end.

That comes after a year in which China demonstrated its rising power. In October, President Trump was forced to back down on tariffs, after Beijing threatened to withhold critical minerals. In March, Xi’s government published its latest five-year plan, showing how it intends to reap the fruits of its strategy of becoming the world’s dominant advanced manufacturer. Meanwhile China continued to rapidly develop a lead across much of the waterfront of technology, with the exception of the most advanced AI.

Seeking short-term wins?

When Trump meets President Xi Jinping this week in Beijing, therefore, one question is whether the encounter will confirm a further rebalancing between the two superpowers – in China’s favour.

Trump’s allies, at home and abroad, are afraid that the president will make long term strategic concessions for a handful of soybean, sorghum and Boeing jet sales – seeking short-term ‘wins’ ahead of the midterm elections in November.

He should resist that impulse. Hugely important issues for world stability are at hand, and there are vital US interests that he should pursue.

Tension between China and Japan is rising, becoming an even more likely flashpoint than Taiwan, which Beijing considers Chinese territory. China’s assertiveness in the East China Sea and South China Sea worries other neighbours, including the Philippines and South Korea, with the latter openly debating whether to acquire nuclear weapons.

Related work

What lessons will China, India and other Asian nations draw from the Iran war? Independent Thinking Podcast

China is also asserting that it is a ‘near-Arctic nation’, a triumph of language over geography which signals its ambitions for both a mining and military presence in that opening maritime region. In space, China’s ability to block or destroy other countries’ satellites is growing.  

Most immediate, though, is the conflict in Iran. The world needs a solution, and China has influence over Tehran that it has so far chosen not to use. 

Trump should also make cooperation on AI a priority: both Washington and Beijing increasingly recognize the  threats emerging from the technology, as well as its transformational opportunities.

Trump and the Washington consensus

US discomfort over its relative loss of power to China, notably in manufacturing, has been rising for decades. The US has never had a rival like China: its economy size, technological ability, military capacity and ideology make it far more formidable than the USSR ever was.

Alarm at Beijing’s growing challenge to US dominance is one of the forces that brought Trump to the presidency – twice. And China’s position as the greatest threat to the US is one of very few issues on which Republicans and Democrats can still agree.

Europeans and other US allies have tended to see that Washington consensus as excessively belligerent – or they did until they began to realize the existential challenge that China’s export policy poses to their own manufacturing industries.

Trump’s position has been something of an anomaly. The president is more doveish on China than almost all his administration. Many were disconcerted that he agreed to let Nvidia, whose chips underpin the US’s slender lead in AI, sell its H200 chips (only one generation behind the premier Blackwell chips) to China. He has frequently talked of his ‘friendship’ with Xi. That has led to fears that in search of election-year gains he might, for example, change US language on Taiwan from saying it ‘does not support’ independence to a statement that it opposes it.

Enough voices are warning against that outcome that it may deter the president. But for all the intense preparation for the trip, delayed because of the Iran conflict, there has been a lack of clarity on the US side about this meeting’s goals – partly because both the standoff in the Strait of Hormuz and the state of AI have been developing so fast.

On Iran, Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat, has called for the Strait of Hormuz to be opened ‘as soon as possible’ in talks with his Iranian counterpart. Asian countries including China have been among the most affected by the interruption caused to supplies of oil, gas, fertiliser and helium (needed for semiconductors, healthcare and pharmaceuticals). China has some leverage with Iran but will want something from the US in return, if it is to use it.

Members' summer drinks 2 June 2026 — 18:00 TO 20:00 BST Anonymous (not verified) 11 May 2026 Chatham House

Join us for the Chatham House members’ summer drinks reception.

Join us for the Chatham House members’ summer drinks reception.

Chatham House members are invited to join us at 10 St James’s Square for drinks and a chance to meet with fellow members, council members and our staff.

FoI responses collected by insurer show brigades tackled 1,760 battery-linked fires in 2025, up 147% in three years

Fire brigades across the UK are tackling lithium-ion battery fires at a rate of one every five hours, figures show, as fire chiefs warn that public awareness and government regulation have not kept pace with the ubiquity of this new hazard.

Lithium-ion batteries power most rechargeable devices including mobile phones, electric toothbrushes, toys and vapes, as well as ebikes, e-scooters and electric vehicles.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for May 11.

How the war created a new geopolitical divide.

How the summit could change the course of U.S.-China competition.

The ADL said in a statement that it "deeply mourns the loss of our longtime national director," without providing details about where and when Foxman died.

The free/open source project OrcaSlicer is a popular fork of 3D printer slicing software from Bambu Lab. But Tuesday independent developer Pawel Jarczak shuttered the project "following legal threats from Bambu Lab," reports Tom's Hardware: Jarczak's fork of OrcaSlicer would have allowed users to bypass Bambu Connect, a middleware application that severely limits OrcaSlicer's access to remote printer functions in the name of security. Jarczak said in a note on GitHub that Bambu Lab threatened him with a cease and desist letter and accused him of reverse engineering its software in order to impersonate Bambu Studio. From Bambu Lab's blog post: Bambu Studio is an open-source project under the AGPL-3.0 license. Anyone can take its code, modify it, and distribute it... That's what OrcaSlicer does, and 734 other forks do as well. We have no issue with that and never have. At the same time, a license for code is not a pass to our cloud infrastructure... Our cloud is a private service. Access to it is governed by a user agreement, not the AGPL license... [T]he modification in question worked by injecting falsified identity metadata into network communication. In simple terms: it pretended to be the official Bambu Studio client when communicating with our servers... If this method were widely adopted or incorrectly configured, thousands of clients could simultaneously hit our servers while impersonating the official client. "User-Agent is not authentication," counters OrcaSlicer's developer. "It is only self-declared client metadata. Any program can set any User-Agent." And "the User-Agent construction comes directly from Bambu Lab's own public AGPL Bambu Studio code.... So on what basis can anyone claim that I am not allowed to use this specific part of AGPL-licensed code under the AGPL license...? My work was based on publicly available Bambu Studio source code together with my own integration layer." But the bottom line is that Bambu Lab "contacted me directly and demanded removal of the solution." I asked whether I could publish the private correspondence in full for transparency. That request was refused... They also referred to legal materials and stated that a cease and desist letter had been prepared... I removed the repository voluntarily. That removal should not be interpreted as an admission that all legal or technical allegations made against the project were correct. I removed it because I have no interest in maintaining a prolonged dispute around this particular implementation, and no interest in continuing to distribute it. YouTuber and right-to-repair advocate Louis Rossmann reviewed the correspondence from Bambu Lab — then pledged $10,000 for legal expenses if the developer returned his code online. ("I think that their legal claim is bullshit," Rossman said Saturday in a YouTube video for his 2.5 million subscribers. "I'm not a lawyer, but I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is.") The video now has over 129,000 views so far. "Rossman has not started a crowdfunding site yet," Tom's Hardware notes, "stating in the comments that he wants to prove to Jarczak that he has supporters willing to put their money where their mouth is. The video had over 129,000 views so far, with commenters vowing to back the case as requested."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Seventeen passengers to be taken to a Nebraska quarantine center to be assessed, with one testing positive and another showing symptoms

• Explainer: what happens to all the cruise ship passengers now and will they quarantine?

The 17 Americans onboard the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship M/V Hondius – including one person who has tested positive – have disembarked the vessel after it docked in Tenerife on Sunday and are being repatriated to the US.

Upon their arrival in Spain, medical teams from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) awaited and interviewed the passengers, whose identities have not been publicly disclosed and who have not tested positive for the virus, about their exposure on the cruise.

• Frenchman ejected for first time in his NBA career

• Minnesota level series 2-2 after Sunday’s 114-109 win

Victor Wembanyama was ejected for the first time in his NBA career after an elbow to the jaw and neck of Naz Reid as the Minnesota Timberwolves beat the San Antonio Spurs to level their playoff series at two games apiece.

Wembanyama was whistled for an offensive foul as soon as he struck Reid, who had swarmed the Spurs star outside the paint along with teammate Jaden McDaniels after the 7ft 4in Wembanyama rebounded a missed three-pointer by the Spurs.

In Polymarket's prediction market, "most people end up losing money," reports the Washington Post — typically a few bucks. "Since Polymarket launched in 2022, a few thousand people have lost the bulk of the money... and an even smaller group — .05 percent of users — has gone home with most of the overall profits, according to a new analysis from finance researcher Pat Akey and colleagues." A lot of users aren't that good at predicting the future. They're losing money at roughly the same rate as online gamblers betting on sports and other real-life events at traditional sportsbooks, according to the U.K. gambling regulator's analysis of 2024 data. On Polymarket, the odds of making a profit are slightly higher on weather and tech markets — and a little lower on sports... On Polymarket, just 1,200 people took more than half the profits — $591 million, or more than $100,000 each. ["The top 1% of users capture 76.5% of all trading gains," the researchers write.] When you dabble in prediction markets, you're competing against these sophisticated players who consistently win. Most of those 1,200 big winners didn't place just a few smart bets. They appear to be pros making thousands of trades, mostly in the past year and a half, that were probably automated. One user made $3 million since January on more than a million trades about the Oscars, according to TRM Labs... The most profitable participants are also just good at picking what to bet on, Akey found, winning so often it was statistically unlikely to be dumb luck. They had some sort of edge — expertise, deep research or, perhaps, inside knowledge. "Our results suggest that the informational benefits of prediction markets come at a cost to unsophisticated participants," the researchers conclude.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Taiwan, one of the world's biggest diplomatic flashpoints, will be top of mind for President Xi when he meets with President Trump.

Actor and comedian speaks publicly for the first time since his 42-year-old daughter died by suicide in February

Martin Short has spoken for the first time about the death of his daughter, Katherine Short, saying her death has been “a nightmare for the family”.

Katherine died in February aged 42, at her home in the Hollywood Hills. The County of Los Angeles Medical Examiner’s office confirmed she died by suicide.

In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. 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

Open-source PS3 emulator RPCS3 "has been around since 2011," Kotaku notes, and has made 70% of the PlayStation 3's library fully playable, "bolstered in part by the many users who contribute to its GitHub page." But their dev team "took to X today to very kindly and civilly request that users 'stop submitting AI slop code pull requests' to its GitHub page." Then they immediately proceeded to tell the AI-brain-rotted tech bros attempting to justify their vibe-coding nonsense to kick rocks in the replies, which is somewhat less civil but far more entertaining to read... My favorite one was when someone asked how the team was certain they weren't rejecting human-written code, to which RPCS3 replied: "You can't possibly handwrite the type of shit AI slop we have been seeing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for May 11, No. 1,787.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle No. 1,065 for Monday, May 11.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for May 11, No. 799.

The sailboat used by Brian and Lynette Hooker​ in their travels around the Bahamas — named "Soulmate" — has been seized by U.S. Coast Guard investigators.

It’s been nearly a quarter of a century since the city had a WNBA team, and fans showed their support by turning out in record numbers.

Iran says it has responded to US peace proposal as ceasefire comes under strain and Israeli prime minister says war is ‘not over’

Benjamin Netanyahu has said the war with Iran will continue as long as the country has a stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU), which could be used to make nuclear warheads.

“It’s not over, because there’s still nuclear material – enriched uranium – that has to be taken out of Iran. There are still enrichment sites that have to be dismantled,” the Israeli prime minister told the CBS programme 60 Minutes, according to an excerpt published before its broadcast.

Sculpt OS, the operating system based on the various components that make up Genode, has seen a new release, 26.04. A lot of the new features and changes to Genode that we’ve been talking about for a while now are part of this release, most notably the new human-inclined data syntax that replaces XML as the configuration language for Genode. That’s not the only major improvement, though.

Regarding technical advances of the new version and device support in particular, all Linux-based drivers have been updated to kernel version 6.18, making the system compatible with most modern Intel-PC hardware. Laptop users may appreciate the new USB networking option that is now offered by default.

Software-wise, the new version comes with a longed-after update of Qt6 along with the Chromium-based Falkon browser, downloadable at the depot of cproc. In the same menu, one can find the experimental first version of the Goa SDK running natively on Sculpt OS without the need of a Linux VM. For the first time, Genode components can now be developed, compiled, and tested using Sculpt OS on its own. The amazement of walking without crutches.

↫ Sculpt OS 26.04 release notes

This new release is available for common PC hardware, the PinePhone, and the MNT Reform. 

Sprite scaling. It is the coolest effect of the 2D arcade era, a must-have for games from Space Harrier to Real Bout Fatal Fury Special. Home consoles pretty much lacked it– sorry, Nintendo, but Mode 7 only scales a background, not sprites. So therefore you might be surprised to hear that Sega’s plucky underdog Master System could do it. Well, don’t get your hopes up; this is far too limited– calling it scaling is overstating things. But let’s dig in anyway!

↫ Nicole Branagan

Nicole Branagan has the best articles on obscure console features, and this one is no exception.

Read the full transcript of Major Garrett's May 10, 2026 interview with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu here.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the conflicts in Iran and Lebanon, the prospects for a peace deal, and the relationship between the U.S. and Israel.

After seeing Gout Gout run, Di Sheppard knew he was the real deal and wanted to coach him. In the years since, the teen has broken world records.

Correspondent Jon Wertheim breaks down the data behind 18-year-old Australian phenomenon Gout Gout's U20 world record 200-meter sprint, comparing it to Usain Bolt's standing 2009 world record, and what his coach said it will take to win Olympic gold.

After the Supreme Court ruled a Louisiana congressional map unconstitutional, Gov. Jeff Landry suspended primaries, the state is redrawing its map, and some Black voters fear losing their voice in D.C.

Australian sprinter Gout Gout is breaking records, including one set by Usain Bolt. Track coach Di Sheppard first saw Gout run at age 12 and predicted: "I'm going to make that one a champion."

• Knicks return to East finals after 4-0 series win

• Team hit record 11 three-pointers in first quarter

• Knicks fans dominate in 76ers’ home arena

The New York Knicks are back in the Eastern Conference finals, setting an NBA postseason record with 11 three-pointers in the first quarter in front of a raucous crowd mostly rooting for the road team in Philadelphia.

The Knicks’ 144-114 win on Sunday completed their series sweep of the 76ers. Deuce McBride hit seven of New York’s NBA postseason record-tying 25 three-pointers and scored 25 points. Jalen Brunson had 22 points and Josh Hart and Karl-Anthony Towns each scored 17 in the Knicks’ latest lopsided playoff victory.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek: A newly revealed Honda patent shows the company developing a simulated electronic clutch system for electric motorcycles, complete with torque-boost launches and even haptic feedback designed to mimic the feel of a combustion engine.... Instead of using a traditional mechanical clutch, the system uses electronics to alter how the motor responds based on clutch lever position. Pull the clutch halfway in, and the system proportionally reduces motor output. Pull it fully, and power is cut entirely, regardless of throttle position. But the more interesting part is how Honda intends to recreate the behavior riders actually use clutches for. According to the patent as reported by AMCN, riders could preload the throttle while holding in the clutch lever, then rapidly release the lever to trigger a burst of torque — essentially simulating the hard launches motocross riders rely on with gas bikes. Honda believes that could be useful in competitive riding situations where precise power modulation matters, especially on loose terrain or during aggressive starts. Honda also appears to be working on recreating the feel of a gas bike, not just the control inputs. The patent describes multiple vibration motors placed in the handlebars and near the clutch lever to provide haptic feedback that simulates engine vibration and even the "bite point" sensation of a clutch engaging. In other words, Honda may be trying to make an electric dirt bike feel mechanically alive, or at least the old-school idea of what a breathing dirt bike used to feel like.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US president expresses ire at Tehran’s reported demands, as drones strike Gulf nations and Israel warns war ‘not over’

Donald Trump has rejected an Iranian response to a US peace proposal as “totally unacceptable”, on a day the month-old ceasefire showed signs of fraying as drone strikes were reported around the region and Benjamin Netanyahu warned the war was “not over”.

The Iranian counter-proposal was passed to Washington through Pakistani mediators.

Countries such as US and Mexico that have longer hours also have higher obesity rates, research finds

Those who work longer hours are more likely to be obese and cutting how much time you spend working could help you keep the weight off, research suggests.

International research presented at the European Congress on Obesity in Istanbul compared working patterns and obesity prevalence for 33 OECD countries from 1990 to 2022. The study found that countries such as the US, Mexico and Colombia, which have longer annual working hours, also had higher obesity rates, even though northern European countries consume more energy and fat on average than those in Latin America.

Major American cloud companies with data centers in the Persian Gulf "are channeling data out of the war zone through fiber-optic cables that an Iraqi telecom has strung alongside crude-oil pipelines," reports RestofWorld.org: The data centers serve customers in more than 190 countries, processing transactions, storing files, and running applications for businesses and individuals from Latin America to South Asia. When Iranian drones struck Amazon's facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on March 1, the effects spread across the region. Apps of major banks in the UAE, including Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, stopped working. Payment and delivery platforms went offline. Snowflake, a U.S. enterprise software company used by thousands of businesses globally, reported Middle East service disruptions tied directly to the Amazon Web Services outage. Amazon told its customers to migrate their workloads out of the Middle East... [Data from] banking, payment, and enterprise platforms normally travels to Europe through cables running under the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz, then connects onward to users across the world. The war has put those cables at risk. The overland route through Iraq is meant to serve as a backup if the sea cables are disabled. The overland route through Iraq is meant to serve as a backup if the sea cables are disabled... [Martin Frank, strategic adviser for IQ Networks, the company that built the network, told Rest of World this overland route is already carrying live traffic.] The company, based in Iraq's Kurdistan region, runs fiber from the southern tip of Iraq to the Turkish border. It is now extending the network through gas-pipeline corridors across Turkey to the European border, with the first link expected early next year, Frank said. When that extension is complete, cloud providers will — for the first time — have the option of an unbroken land-based fiber path from the Gulf into the European network, connecting onward to Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London, and Marseille, from where their data connects back to U.S. users. The advantage of this alternative route is that oil and gas pipelines come with their own security perimeters, access roads, and maintenance corridors already built around them, allowing a telecom company to lay fiber without digging new trenches through difficult terrain. Iraq avoided the fate of earlier overland routes that collapsed because of a sustained period of stability, and because existing pipeline infrastructure provided ready-made corridors for laying fiber, Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at network intelligence firm Kentik, told Rest of World... IQ Networks' route, called the Silk Route Transit, has been running since November 2023. The network currently carries enough data to stream about 400,000 high-definition videos simultaneously, Frank said. The land route is faster. Data traveling through submarine cables from the Gulf to Europe takes about 150 milliseconds. The Iraqi terrestrial route cuts that to roughly 70 milliseconds — a difference that matters for video calls, financial transactions, and applications that run on artificial intelligence, according to IQ Networks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chances of Starmer remaining in No 10 appear to be diminishing as about 40 Labour MPs call on him to quit

Keir Starmer faces a fight for his political life in the next 24 hours as potential Labour leadership rivals from Wes Streeting to Angela Rayner began to position themselves for a contest.

Starmer is hoping to save his job on Monday with a speech promising to “face up to the big challenges” for the country on growth, energy, defence and Europe.

Writing by Narges Mohammadi, arrested 14 times for activism, offers a disturbing insight into treatment

• Read an exclusive excerpt here: ‘Blindfolded, I sat down slowly. Then the interrogation began’

In an exclusive extract of writing smuggled from prison in Iran, the Nobel peace prize laureate Narges Mohammadi has described the “torture” of solitary confinement, and her systematic medical neglect by the prison system.

The writing from the past decade will be part of a soon to be published memoir, A Woman Never Stops Fighting, that gives a rare and alarming insight into the treatment of Mohammadi, who is in critical condition. It details beatings, constant interrogations, deprivation of medical care and long stretches in solitary confinement during her numerous imprisonments.

1st Lt Kendrick Lamont Key Jr was participating in military exercise among US, Nato allies and African countries

A search team recovered the body of a US soldier who went missing near a cliff during a training exercise in Cap Draa, Morocco, the US army said on Sunday.

Moroccan searchers found the remains on Saturday in the water within a mile (1.6km) of where the soldier went missing on 2 May, the army said in a statement.

Britons among passengers and crew taken off vessel and put on flights to 10 countries as part of two-day operation

Dozens of passengers and crew from countries around the world have been evacuated from a cruise ship at the centre of a deadly hantavirus outbreak.

British people were among those taken off the ship as part of a two-day operation that began on Sunday in Tenerife. They were put on chartered flights back to the UK, where they will enter hospital quarantine in Merseyside. At about 9pm on Sunday, a plane carrying 22 UK citizens landed in Manchester, it was reported.

Ukraine president says Russian army is ‘not complying’ with the US-mediated truce and is ‘not even really trying to’

Russia has been conducting assault operations on the Ukrainian frontline in breach of a three-day ceasefire announced by US President Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday.

“The Russians are continuing assault activity in sectors key for them,” Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, said in his evening address. “On the frontline, the Russian army is not complying with the ceasefire and is not even really trying to.”

As the ADL’s national director for nearly 30 years, he battled antisemitism and other forms of prejudice, building the group into a powerful watchdog.

The Moroccan military recovered the body of one of two U.S. soldiers who went missing on May 2, the U.S. Army said.

Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona said the Trump administration's $1.5 trillion budget request for defense spending is "outrageous."

I’ve released Feature Preview 2. It’s mostly a more refined version of Preview 1, just getting closer to the final product: [ Refloat 1.3 feature preview 2

Cleanups across the board, the smoothing config options defaults are actually (IMO) good now and close to what they will end up being (focused a bit more on smoothness rather than responsiveness for casual users, racers are expected to tweak them a bit).

It’s also got a few new features for the Realtime Data plot and a rework of the remote move (remote wheel turning) for both physical remote and an app and a much better in-app remote tilt when riding.

This week Amazon opened up its parcel shipping, fulfillment, and distribution "to businesses of all types and sizes." Any business can now ship, store, and deliver "using the same supply chain that supports Amazon," according to Monday's announcement of "Amazon Supply Chain Services." The move sent shares of UPS and FedEx "tumbling" Monday writes GeekWire. And though both stocks bounced back as the week went on, GeekWire sees this as the latest example of Amazon "turning its internal capabilities into products and services for sale..." "Amazon had already surpassed both carriers to become the nation's largest parcel shipper by volume, according to parcel-analytics firm ShipMatrix." Initial customers include Procter & Gamble, which is using Amazon's freight network to transport raw materials; 3M, which is using it to move products to distribution centers; Lands' End, which is fulfilling orders across sales channels from Amazon's warehouses; and American Eagle Outfitters, which is using Amazon's parcel service for last-mile delivery. The service can fulfill orders placed through platforms that compete with Amazon's own marketplace, including Walmart, Shopify, TikTok, and others... Peter Larsen, vice president of Amazon Supply Chain Services, compared the launch to the origins of Amazon's cloud business... In addition to putting Amazon in competition with existing players in the logistics industry, the move also raises questions about data privacy. Amazon has faced accusations of using nonpublic seller data to compete against merchants on its marketplace, which it has denied. Larsen told the Wall Street Journal that the company prohibits using supply chain customer data for its own marketplace decisions, noting that hundreds of thousands of Amazon sellers already trust the company to fulfill orders placed on rival platforms. The article notes taht in his annual shareholder letter Amazon's CEO "said the company is also exploring selling its custom AI chips and robotics to outside customers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Washington last picked No 1 overall in 2010

• Wizards had worst record in the NBA this season

The league’s worst team this season are getting the No 1 pick in the NBA draft. The Washington Wizards won the draft lottery on Sunday and are poised to pick first overall for the first time since choosing John Wall in that spot in 2010. Wall was the Wizards’ on-stage representative for this year’s lottery.

Utah won the right to pick No 2, Memphis will pick No 3 and Chicago will pick No 4.

On this "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" broadcast, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Sen. Mark Kelly join Margaret Brennan.

"General Motors sold the data of California drivers without their knowledge or consent," says California's attorney general, "and despite numerous statements reassuring drivers that it would not do so." In 2024, The New York Times "reported that automakers including GM were sharing information about their customers' driving behavior with insurance companies," remembers TechCrunch, "and that some customers were concerned that their insurance rates had gone up as a result." Now General Motors "has reached a privacy-related settlement with a group of law enforcement agencies led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta..." The settlement announcement from Bonta's office similarly alleges that GM sold "the names, contact information, geolocation data, and driving behavior data of hundreds of thousands of Californians" to Verisk Analytics and LexisNexis Risk Solutions, which are both data brokers. Bonta's office further alleges that this data was collected through GM's OnStar program, and that the company made roughly $20 million from data sales. However, Bonta's office also said the data did not lead to increased insurance prices in California, "likely because under California's insurance laws, insurers are prohibited from using driving data to set insurance rates." As part of the settlement, GM has agreed to pay $12.75 million in civil penalties and to stop selling driving data to any consumer reporting agencies for five years, Bonta's office said. GM has also agreed to delete any driver data that it still retains within 180 days (unless it obtains consent from customers), and to request that Lexis and Verisk delete that data. "This trove of information included precise and personal location data that could identify the everyday habits and movements of Californians," according to the attorney general's announcement. The settlement "requires General Motors to abandon these illegal practices, and underscores the importance of the data minimization in California's privacy law — companies can't just hold on to data and use it later for another purpose." "Modern cars are rolling data collection machines," said San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins. "Californians must have confidence that they know what data is being collected, how it is being used, and what their opt-out rights are... This case sends a strong message that law enforcement will take action when California privacy laws are not scrupulously followed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Péter Magyar strikes radically different tone to predecessor but questions remain about how he will lead the country

Moments after he was sworn in as Hungary’s prime minister, Péter Magyar apologised to those who had been maligned by the state during Viktor Orbán’s time in power as questions continue to swirl over what lies ahead for the country as it launches into a new era.

Magyar used his first speech as prime minister on Saturday to address the many in Hungary who had paid a personal price for speaking up about the steady erosion of rights under Orbán and his Fidesz party.

Safety board says it is gathering information about plane evacuation after person on the runway hit in Denver

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is collecting information about the evacuation of a Frontier Airlines aircraft after the jet struck and killed a person on the runway during departure from Denver international airport.

The flight, which was headed from Denver to Los Angeles international airport, “reported striking a pedestrian during takeoff at DEN at approximately 11:19 pm on Friday”, according to a statement posted on the airport’s official X account. The individual has not been publicly identified.

Russia and Ukraine accused each other of breaking a U.S.-brokered ceasefire on Sunday.

Party leader has been vocal about its gains in London and there is a feeling that its losses could have been worse

By any sane person’s reckoning, the Conservative party had a night to forget in Thursday’s local, mayoral and devolved elections. It lost about 500 councillors in England and ceded control of three local authorities to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK – losing to the rightwing upstarts in England, Wales and Scotland. Why, then, is Kemi Badenoch hailing these results as proof that “the Conservatives are coming back” – and why do many Tory MPs appear to agree with her?

The Conservative leader was vocal on Friday about the eye-catching gains her party made in politically atypical London, where the Tories won back the totemic council of Westminster, took the most seats in Wandsworth council and saw off the threat from Reform in Bexley and Bromley.

Soldiers dropped oxygen supplies and medical aid to Britain’s most remote overseas territory

• What is hantavirus?

Paratroopers landed on a “golf course covered in rocks” to supply medical personnel and oxygen to Britain’s most remote overseas territory as it deals with a suspected hantavirus case, an army commander has said.

The UK Health Security Agency confirmed on Friday that a British national had disembarked from the cruise ship MV Hondius to the South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha, where they live, with a suspected case of hantavirus.

The following is the transcript of the interview with Rep. Ted Lieu, Democrat of California, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on May 10, 2026.

The following is the transcript of the interview with former Save the Children President and CEO Janti Soeripto that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on May 10, 2026.

The following is the transcript of the interview with former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who is on boards the of Pfizer and UnitedHealthCare, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on May 10, 2026.

Catherine West issues ultimatum for PM as ex-minister Josh Simons joins calls for prime minister to quit

At the start of her programme Laura Kuenssberg addressed Catherine West and Bridget Phillipson who were sitting waiting for the main interviews.

Kuenssberg told West she wanted a cabinet minister to challenge Keir Starmer. She said she was sitting next to one of them. What was her message to her?

Well, there’s nothing stopping Bridget from standing. Why are all the men better than the women? We do need some senior women to step forward and to challenge for what is going to be a really difficult two and a half years between now and the general election, and also to take us into that second term.

I love you dearly, Catherine, but I just disagree on this one.

Europol said an international operation successfully disrupted a major drug trafficking route known as the "cocaine highway."

Here's how to stream more of the series starring Zendaya, Jacob Elordi and Sydney Sweeney.

Officials reportedly drafting legislation likely to safeguard Britain’s last blast furnaces and save thousands of jobs

The full nationalisation of British Steel is expected to be announced in the King’s speech this week, a year after the government took over the daily running of the loss-making business from its Chinese owner.

The steelmaker, which employs 3,500 people at its plant in Scunthorpe, came under government control last April amid fears that its owner, Jingye, was planning to shut down the site.

Zsolt Hegedűs’s celebrations since the election of Péter Magyar have sparked joy across the country

As Hungary’s Péter Magyar took office, ousting Viktor Orbán after 16 years in power, the daylong event on Saturday was laced with symbolism, from the return of the EU flag to parliament to the ringing out of the European anthem, Ode to Joy.

But it was the 56-year-old tipped to be the new health minister – and more specifically, his dance moves – that may have become the most potent symbol of Hungary’s new political era.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Futurism: In November, Amazon leaders sent an internal memo to employees, pushing them to use its in-house code generating tool, Kiro, over third-party alternatives from competitors. "While we continue to support existing tools in use today, we do not plan to support additional third party, AI development tools," the memo read, as quoted by Reuters at the time. "As part of our builder community, you all play a critical role shaping these products and we use your feedback to aggressively improve them." It was an unusual development, considering the tens of billions of dollars the e-commerce giant has invested in its competitors in the space, including Anthropic and OpenAI... Half a year later, Amazon is singing a dramatically different tune. As Business Insider reports, Amazon is officially throwing in the towel, succumbing to growing calls among employees for access to OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude... Given the unfortunate optics of opening the floodgates for Codex and Claude Code, an Amazon spokesperson told the publication in a statement that teams are still "primarily using" Kiro, claiming that 83 percent of engineers at the company are leaning on it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The following is the transcript of the interview with Sen. Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on May 10, 2026.

The following is the transcript of the interview with Energy Secretary Chris Wright that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on May 10, 2026.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the war with Iran is "not over" because there's still highly enriched uranium that needs to be removed from the country.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II stars in Man on Fire, which drew 11 million views in its first four days. Yes, it's that good.

LUANA ROCHA
Staff Reporter

Earlier this week, I was sitting in a lecture hall shamelessly counting down the minutes until class ended. By the 45-minute mark, the discussion of our assigned reading for the week had devolved into a string of muffled sounds. My awareness suddenly pulled itself together when another student said, “We like because, we love despite.”

The context of why he said that is a bit hazy in my mind, but as an immediate reaction, I pulled out my notebook and wrote it down. For the next 35 minutes, I could not stop thinking about it. 

Or rather, I could not stop thinking about love itself.  

Wondering about love is a common human thought. As we grow up, we crave to experience the flowers, the perfectly planned date at the restaurant we have been hinting at wanting to try and the dramatic love confessions we watched on “Notting Hill” or “27 Dresses.” You want someone to love everything about you and do everything for you, and when you get that warm feeling of being secure and seen, the waterfall stops running and is suddenly still, as in your mind, you achieved the ultimate goal in life: romance. 

You run and tell your therapist you are going to cut down on the sessions because, for once, you are actually happy. You now don’t carry all the weight alone — you have a partner to hold your hand and go through life with. You feel kind of proud of yourself because after years of hearing things your parents screamed from the rooftops, such as “You are too young to know what love is,” or “ Just wait, and you’ll know it,” finally it quieted down, because you did it, you feel it and you know it.

But is that true? Is there such a thing as being too young to know what love is? Or is the truth that we forget what love is? 

When I was little, I lived on a farm, so my childhood was spent running around shoeless in the mud with my dogs more often than watching television or playing with blocks on my living room floor. This resulted, however, in a lot of injuries — I have the scars to prove it. 

Every time, I would run back to my house, hiccuping while trying to explain what happened to my mom. After cleaning my wound and placing a bandaid on it, she would then lean over and kiss it, and I swear for a split second the burning, painful sensation would stop. In those moments, I felt something. I felt secure. 

At the end of my freshman year of high school, my cat died. I was devastated. I cried to the point of not being able to breathe. When I went to school the next day, my friend walked up to me holding a bag. When I opened it, it was my favorite candy and a handwritten card telling me she was sorry for my loss and how good of a cat mom I was. I will admit that I started crying in the middle of the hallway, but at that moment, I felt something. I felt seen. 

My grandma and I share the same birthday. Every year, we gather as a family and sing happy birthday in front of a Carvel ice cream cake, and of course, we have the tradition of giving the first piece of the cake to someone special. 

So every year, she and I hold our pieces pretending to give them to someone else, just to turn around and give them to each other. Our other family members all laugh and say, “We knew this would happen, you guys do this every year.” My grandma and I don’t care, though — in fact, I think we laugh louder the older we get. In that moment, through all of us laughing, celebrating, singing, I feel something. I feel love. 

The truth is, I really doubt we have to wait to say we experienced love until we are a certain age or have lived through a real-life romantic movie plot. At some point in the course of humanity, love stopped being ordinary. It stopped being simple, and instead became about expensive chocolates and kissing on the lips. 

It became a competition about who found it faster, whose lasted longer and whose was more apparent and intoxicating. It became about stories that are loud and dramatic, forcing us to ignore the love around us because it’s quieter than the gestures we deem to be the dream. Humans have felt this since before we ever got into romantic relationships, because in reality we experience love from the second we leave our mother’s womb — we are raised with love. We feel the feeling, no matter how young we are or the status of a relationship. It just comes quickly, like a breath we are trained not to notice. 

We know what love is. Love is your mother ordering takeout on a Wednesday, even though it’s a strictly Friday activity, because she knows her daughter is going through something. Love is your cat running up to you first thing in the morning. Love is your friends begging you to go out with them because they want you there. Love is getting out of bed and showering even though you feel like you don’t want to be alive anymore. Love is quiet. Love is simple. We just forget it.

Nine groups in the Sioux Nation say an exploratory graphite drilling project endangers a recognized ceremonial site

Almost exactly a decade since the start of the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access pipeline gained national and international attention, new disputes are simmering over tribal rights in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Earlier this month, an environmental organization and a Native American advocacy group sued the US Forest Service, claiming that an exploratory graphite drilling project on national forest land threatened a recognized ceremonial site on mountain meadows known as Pe’ Sla, or Reynolds Prairie.

Barça can seal the title with a win in Sunday's Clásico.

For just the first three months of 2026, Rocket Lab's launch business reports $63.7 million in revenue, reports CNBC — plus another $136.7 million from its space systems business. Besides beating Wall Street's expectations, Rocket Lab also announced that its backlog has more than doubled from a year ago to $2.2 billion, and that it's buying space robotics company Motiv Space Systems. Friday its stock price shot up 34% in one day... Rocket Lab's stock has more than quadrupled over the past year, benefiting from skyrocketing demand for businesses tied to the space economy ahead of SpaceX's hotly anticipated IPO later this year. Demand for space systems and satellites is also escalating as President Donald Trump pursues his ambitious Golden Dome missile defense project and NASA's crewed Artemis missions rev up. Rocket Lab said Thursday that it signed its largest contract ever with a confidential customer for its Neutron and Electron rockets through 2029, weeks after landing a $190 million deal for 20 hypersonic test flights... "The demand signal is clear," CEO Peter Beck said on an earnings call with analysts, calling the pace of new product releases from the company this year "relentless".... Rocket Lab's good news lifted other space companies. Firefly Aeropspace and Intuitive Machines both jumped more than 20, while Redwire gained 19%. Voyager Technologies rose 14%. "The company anticipates revenue between $225 million and $240 million during the second quarter."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sports Direct founder says people in his employ recorded footage of Peter Cowgill meeting another retail boss

The Sports Direct founder, Mike Ashley, has admitted to arranging surveillance footage that brought down his rival Peter Cowgill, the former JD Sports chair.

Cowgill was secretly filmed in 2021 in a car talking with the Footasylum boss Barry Bown. JD Sports was in the process of acquiring the trainer retailer at the time and the two companies were not allowed to share commercially sensitive information.

Conservative and Reform leaders cheered as they address crowd, while Labour’s Pat McFadden met with boos and shouts of ‘where is Starmer?’

Thousands of people gathered outside Downing Street on Sunday to protest an increase in antisemitic hate crimes and violence, as senior politicians and interfaith leaders called for unity.

The Standing Strong: Extinguish Antisemitism rally, backed by more than 30 Jewish groups, drew thousands of people to Whitehall, as Conservative and Liberal Democrat party leaders, alongside Labour and Reform representatives, addressed a crowd studded with Israeli and union jack flags and ‘Where is Keir?’ placards.

The First Nations woman has been on the priority public housing list in WA since 2023. Despite nearly dying from sleeping rough, she still has a two-year wait

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The family of a homeless First Nations woman who is sick with septicemia fear she will die without a safe home, but advocates warn it could be years before she reaches the top of the public housing waiting list.

Andrea Woodley has been in and out of hospital for weeks with sepsis, triggered by infected blisters on her feet after sleeping rough in inner city Perth. The Noongar, Budimaya and Nyikina woman and her loved ones fear that without a home she is at risk of death.

IT sector unemployment "increased to 3.8% in April from 3.6% in March," reports the Wall Street Journal. But they add that the increase reflects "an ongoing uncertainty in tech as AI continues to play havoc with hiring. That's according to analysis from consulting firm Janco Associates, which bases its findings on data from the U.S. Labor Department." On Friday, the department said the economy added 115,000 jobs, buoyed by gains in industries including retail, transportation and warehousing and healthcare. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.3%. But the information sector lost 13,000 jobs in April. While it's still too early to say exactly how AI is affecting employment overall, some businesses, especially in the tech industry, have said it's part of the reason they're cutting staff. In April, Meta Platforms said it would lay off 10% of its staff, or roughly 8,000 people, as it seeks to streamline operations and pay for its own massive investments in AI. Nike will reduce its workforce by roughly 1,400 workers, or about 2%, mostly in its tech department, as it simplifies global operations. And Snap is planning to eliminate 16% of its workforce, or about 1,000 positions, as it aims to boost efficiency. In other areas of IT, which includes telecommunications and data-processing, employment is now down 11%, or 342,000 jobs, from its most recent peak in November 2022. But there's not just AI to blame. Inflation and economic uncertainty linked to the Iran conflict is giving some chief executives and tech leaders reason to pull back or pause their IT hiring, said Janco Chief Executive Victor Janulaitis. The article even notes that postings for software developer jobs "are up 15% year-over-year on job-search platform Indeed, according to Hannah Calhoon, its vice president of AI". But employers do seem to be looking for experienced developers, which could pose a problem for recent college graduates.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IT sector unemployment "increased to 3.8% in April from 3.6% in March," reports the Wall Street Journal. But they add that the increase reflects "an ongoing uncertainty in tech as AI continues to play havoc with hiring. That's according to analysis from consulting firm Janco Associates, which bases its findings on data from the U.S. Labor Department." On Friday, the department said the economy added 115,000 jobs, buoyed by gains in industries including retail, transportation and warehousing and healthcare. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.3%. But the information sector lost 13,000 jobs in April. While it's still too early to say exactly how AI is affecting employment overall, some businesses, especially in the tech industry, have said it's part of the reason they're cutting staff. In April, Meta Platforms said it would lay off 10% of its staff, or roughly 8,000 people, as it seeks to streamline operations and pay for its own massive investments in AI. Nike will reduce its workforce by roughly 1,400 workers, or about 2%, mostly in its tech department, as it simplifies global operations. And Snap is planning to eliminate 16% of its workforce, or about 1,000 positions, as it aims to boost efficiency. In other areas of IT, which includes telecommunications and data-processing, employment is now down 11%, or 342,000 jobs, from its most recent peak in November 2022. But there's not just AI to blame. Inflation and economic uncertainty linked to the Iran conflict is giving some chief executives and tech leaders reason to pull back or pause their IT hiring, said Janco Chief Executive Victor Janulaitis. The article even notes that postings for software developer jobs "are up 15% year-over-year on job-search platform Indeed, according to Hannah Calhoon, its vice president of AI". But employers do seem to be looking for experienced developers, which could pose a problem for recent college graduates.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When you learn what Martin Short has endured in his private life, as captured in the hilarious and heartbreaking documentary "Marty: Life Is Short," the comedian's irrepressibly sunny attitude is all the more astonishing.

In Los Angeles, rebuilding after last year's devastating wildfires has been a race to the status quo, with speed winning out over safety and strength.

The economic warnings are bleak, but full extent of shortages are still not felt for many European countries

The biggest energy shock in modern history, jet fuel shortages “within weeks”, a global recession – since Iran throttled shipping flows through the strait of Hormuz at the end of February the economic warnings have become increasingly dire.

Yet 10 weeks on from the first US-Israeli attacks, share indices, companies and governments have been surprisingly sanguine. Every day the divergence grows between the eerie quiet on markets and alarming warnings of an imminent supply chain crunch.

A Russian military intelligence unit compromised thousands of routers across 23 states. Here's how to make sure yours isn't next.

Luke Grimes leads the Yellowstone sequel.

Business owners may have to wade through paperwork, but the US government is now actually processing refunds

When the supreme court struck down Donald Trump’s tariffs, many small importers assumed any refunds would be tied up in bureaucracy for years. Surprisingly, that’s not what’s happening.

It’s estimated that roughly 330,000 importers paid more than $166bn in tariff fees imposed by Trump under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). If your business was affected, here’s good news: you can get your tariffs refunded. You just need to be a little patient.

Twenty years ago, Hope Edelman, author of the bestseller "Motherless Daughters," founded a global support network for women who, like her, were young when their mothers died – to share tears, sisterhood and affirmation.

Founded nearly a century ago, CBS Radio, featuring legends such as Edward R. Murrow, Robert Trout and Charles Osgood, created the template for broadcast journalists. But on May 22, CBS will end its heralded radio service.

Man, 45, and 52-year-old woman held on suspicion of conspiracy to commit arson after blaze in Whitechapel

Two people have been arrested by counter-terrorism officers investigating an arson attack at a former synagogue in east London.

A 45-year-old man and a woman, 52, were arrested on Sunday on suspicion of conspiracy to commit arson and have been taken into police custody.

The phone is on its third redesign so far.

The Supreme Court has ruled that, under the Voting Rights Act, Congressional districts can no longer be drawn along racial lines, but can be shaped by partisan aims. The result: A dash to re-draw voting districts in several states. What does this portend for democracy?

William Harrison, a US soldier stationed in the region, was convicted and hanged for the murder of Patsy Wylie

On the afternoon of 25 September 1944, William Harrison, a US soldier stationed in Northern Ireland, visited the cottage of the Wylie family in Killycolpy, County Tyrone, and offered to buy treats for the children.

He had visited before and was, if not a friend, at least known to the family. Mary Wylie let him take her seven-year-old daughter, Patricia, better known as Patsy, across the fields to the shops.

The supreme court has gutted one of the strongest federal tools we had against the most effective weapon in US politics

Maps can guide us home. They show us where we are, where we have been and where we might go. Electoral maps can do something even more sinister, though. They often tell us what and who is allowed to matter. They can decide, before a single ballot is cast, whether an entire voting bloc will become powerful or be buried by the design of a party that is indifferent – at best – to their needs and wants.

Memphis is the latest warning. Tennessee’s largest majority-Black city can vote, organize, turn out, remember and resist – and still be cut into pieces by politicians who fear what that city might do with power. This week, Republicans carved up the Memphis-centered congressional district, dividing its only majority-Black district into three Republican-leaning seats while weakening voter-notice requirements in the process.

Independent scientists who reviewed the results said most samples were contaminated with Pfas or phthalates

The Trump administration announced earlier this month that hundreds of baby formula samples it tested for toxic chemicals “meet a high safety standard”, but public health advocates warn this claim contradicts data showing a majority were contaminated with dangerous substances, such as Pfas or phthalates.

Independent scientists who reviewed the results say the data gaps and the contamination raise concerns, though they added the testing shows some bright spots, and praised the US Food and Drug Administration for expanding the testing program, then making the results public.

The problem wasn’t just the perfectly polished, yet mediocre prose. It’s what’s lost when we surrender the struggle to translate thought into words

I have been teaching fiction writing at MIT since 2017. Many of my students last wrote fiction in middle school, and very few have experienced a proper workshop, so at the start of every semester I offer these directions for writer and reader alike:

Read the story at least twice. Mark what works and what doesn’t – underline great sentences, flag clunky syntax, gaps in logic and unrealistic dialogue. Ask yourself: does the story work? Why or why not? What could improve it? Answer in a signed letter to the author, attached to their story. Give your honest opinions. Remember that an effective peer review demands close reading of the text accompanied by a boldness of spirit.

• Slavia could forfeit match and have stadium closed

• Slavia chair calls incident in derby ‘disgrace’

Slavia Prague face stiff punishment after their fans invaded the pitch during stoppage time in a derby against Sparta in the Czech league on Saturday night. At the time, Slavia were leading 3-2, a scoreline that would have secured their defence of the Czech league title with three games to spare.

The disciplinary committee of the country’s football association said after an extraordinary meeting on Sunday that “such behaviour will not be tolerated in professional football”. Slavia’s punishment could be announced on Tuesday, it said. It could include forfeiting the match, banning fans from the stadium and a fine.

Spain has begun the evacuation of the first passengers from the MV Hondius ship which arrived in Tenerife on Sunday

• Passengers begin evacuating cruise ship hit by hantavirus

In other news, there are reports of Russian attacks continuing on Ukraine despite a ceasefire that was meant to run from Saturday 9 May to Monday 11 May.

There are reports of people being injured by Russian strikes in areas including the Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Kherson regions.

In her latest book, "The Martha Way," Martha Stewart shares her classic methods for cooking – the building blocks essential to every home chef.

Several people were hurt after a possible boat explosion Saturday near the Haulover Sandbar in Miami, Florida.

Experts warn of ‘soft target’ vulnerabilities and intelligence gaps as federal agencies prepare to secure 78 matches across 11 cities

Fifa World Cup matches set to be held across the United States face heightened terrorism risks, with experts warning that vulnerabilities are being amplified by the US-Israel conflict with Iran and a depletion of counter-terrorism expertise within federal law enforcement.

The biggest threat stems from homegrown violent extremists, often lone actors that may have become radicalized online by extreme political views or jihadists such as the Islamic State (Isis), said four counter-terror experts interviewed.

Vitória Régia imagines rightwing Bolsonaro plot succeeded with US help – and highlights threats facing Indigenous peoples

The year is 2025 and far-right coup plotters have annihilated Brazil’s democracy, assassinating the president, closing the national congress and surrendering the Amazon rainforest and its untold riches to the United States.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Amazon of America,” a thick-accented North American soldier tells a group of journalists being taken on a propaganda tour of an oil refinery in the newly annexed jungle realm. Nearby, a replica of the Statue of Liberty has been carved out of the wilderness to celebrate Washington’s tutelage over more than half of Brazil.

SS and Glass Lewis back shareholder resolution amid fears over power wielded by Jamie Dimon, who holds both roles

Investors in JP Morgan have been urged to vote in favour of splitting the role of chief executive and chair at America’s largest bank, amid concerns over the power wielded by its billionaire boss Jamie Dimon.

ISS and Glass Lewis, which issue advice to some of the world’s biggest fund managers on how to vote at annual investor meetings, have thrown their weight behind a shareholder resolution that would ensure two separate people hold the office of chair and chief executive “as soon as possible”. Investors are due to vote on the resolution at the bank’s annual general meeting on 19 May.

Contradictory policies that gut harm reduction programs while supporting naloxone access are confusing experts

Within just a few weeks, the Trump administration has proposed multiple contradictory policies related to overdose prevention – some that could help save lives and others that experts say could further strain health resources and put people at risk for overdose.

These policies include a new prohibition on funding for fentanyl test strips, which help people avoid overdoses; proposed budget cuts that would gut the country’s overdose prevention efforts; and an ambitious drug control strategy that will be impossible to implement if the aforementioned cuts go through.

Google's merging Android and ChromeOS to take on the laptop space.

If you're in the market for a treadmill, these are the best to choose from.

CNBC reports: The European Union is considering rules that would restrict its member governments' use of U.S. cloud providers to handle sensitive data, sources familiar with the talks told CNBC. The European Commission — the EU's executive branch — is expected to present its "Tech Sovereignty Package" on May 27, which will include a range of measures aimed at bolstering the bloc's strategic autonomy in key digital areas. As part of preparations for that package, discussions are taking place within the Commission around limiting the exposure of sensitive public-sector data to cloud platforms provided by companies outside of the EU, two Commission officials, who asked to remain anonymous as they weren't authorized to discuss private talks, told CNBC... "The core idea is defining sectors that have to be hosted on European cloud capacity," one of the officials said. They added that companies providing cloud solutions from third countries, including the U.S., could be impacted. Proposals would not prohibit overseas companies' cloud platforms from government contracts entirely, but limit their use in processing sensitive data at public sector organizations, depending on the level of sensitivity, they added. The officials said that talks are ongoing and yet to be finalized... The officials told CNBC there are discussions around proposing that financial, judicial and health data processed by governments and public-sector organizations require high levels of sovereign cloud infrastructure.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rhun ap Iowerth says he hopes his party’s programme for government will get backing from across the Senedd

• UK politics live – latest updates

The leader of Plaid Cymru is hoping to become Welsh first minister as early as Tuesday after his party won a historic victory in the Senedd elections, soundly beating Labour and holding off Reform UK.

Plaid fell short of winning a majority in the Welsh parliament but Rhun ap Iorwerth said on Sunday he hoped other parties would work with him and told UK Labour not to punish Wales over the result.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Liverpool-born actor says depression and anxiety followed death of his father when he was 15

The actor David Morrissey has spoken of how “terrible” social anxiety contributed to him becoming an alcoholic.

“I am a recovering alcoholic,” Morrissey, who has been sober for 21 years, told Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. “Drinking first was about anxiety. I’ve had this terrible social anxiety and that helped me get through it.”

Saudi Arabia’s state oil company’s profits up 26% to £26.9bn in first three months of year

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Saudi Arabia’s state oil company reported a 26% jump in profits in its first quarter as its east-west pipeline allowed it to ship millions of barrels of oil out of the Gulf despite conflict in the Middle East.

Profits at Saudi Aramco hit $33.6bn (£26.9bn) in the first three months of the year, while revenue rose nearly 7% compared with a year earlier to $115.5bn.

Property disputes, predatory developers and surging sea levels are putting the historic Black community at risk

On Arthur Champen’s half-acre property in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, a thicket of southern live oaks, palmettos and pine trees muffle the roar of cars on nearby highway 278. His haint blue house, lightened by the sun, sits on stilts to protect it from flooding that comes with the high tide. During the spring, it is common for the marshland adjacent to his land to turn into a muddy soup. “Other than the cars,” Champen, 81, said, “you hear how peaceful it is?”

About a decade ago, Champen’s family nearly lost the grassy marshland next door that their family bought several generations ago.

The salacious gossip website is hounding politicians and tracking vacationing members of Congress

TMZ has only been in Washington DC for a matter of weeks, but the salacious gossip website is already having an impact: hounding politicians, tracking vacationing members of Congress and reporting on a senator taking a trip to Disney World.

It’s been quite the start as the website and TV channel attempts to break into the political scene, with its first focus on members of Congress taking a two-week recess – typically meaning the politicians return to their home districts and states to meet constituents – during a record partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

My activist group is about 80% women. Where did all the men go – and how can we get them back?

In Donald Trump’s first term, my Brooklyn-based activist group had the peculiar dynamic of being started by two men while being composed of about 65% women. Since November 2024, our group has doubled in size, and the gender imbalance has tipped even further: we are now about 80% women.

Almost 18 months into Trump’s second term, it is abundantly clear that the appetite for anti-Trump, pro-democracy activism has not dimmed at all. And yet, there is a substantial portion of the populace that, in my experience as an activist, seems to have lost its fervor for the fight.

Ditching my car for a week and riding an Onyx RCR 80V gave me a taste of freedom, without traffic or parking hassles.

You can't totally fix your TV's sound, but changing these settings and other tricks can help.

Previously prohibited use of websites such as Omoggle that connect a streamer to a stranger’s video feed now allowed

Last week, at 4am, 19-year-old Sammy Amz was scrolling through X when something caught his eye: a popular Twitch streamer was competing in a 1v1 “mog-off” with a stranger, and losing.

The next day he opened the Omoggle gaming website and began to play. Quickly he matched with another user – green dots appeared on their faces onscreen, as the website began to compare their measurements: canthal tilt, palpebral fissure ratio, nose-to-face width ratio and so on.

Replacing a leader is difficult, as Jeremy Corbyn proved – but MPs can apply pressure, publicly or privately

Many Labour MPs believe Keir Starmer will not survive as Labour leader for long enough to fight the next election. What they cannot agree on, however – even after a disastrous set of results in this week’s elections – is how his departure might come about.

The Labour rulebook makes it notoriously difficult to unseat a party leader: none has been formally ejected in the postwar period, though some, including Tony Blair, have resigned under pressure from their own MPs.

Zachary Alam spent four years in jail for his role in the Capitol attack before Trump pardoned him in 2025

A convicted participant in the 6 January 2021 US Capitol attack who was pardoned at the start of Donald Trump’s second presidency has been ordered to serve seven years in prison after a jury found him guilty of committing a burglary in Virginia in May 2025.

Zachary Alam, 34, had previously drawn one of the stiffest prison sentences – eight years – for his hand in the violence carried out at the US Capitol in Washington DC by supporters of Trump after his first presidency ended in defeat to Joe Biden after the 2020 White House election.

Mothers’ experiences often intersect with federal policy battles over gun violence, immigration and childcare

Sarah spent the first months of the year following immigration agents around the Twin Cities to document arrests and violations of constitutional rights. On the day Renee Good was killed by a federal agent after dropping her son at school, she too had been surrounded by agents who screamed that they were the good guys.

On the other side of the metropolis, Linsey Rippy showed up daily to a church, ready to assemble and distribute boxes full of produce, beans, rice, cereal, sometimes adding in formula for babies stuck at home with their parents because it wasn’t safe to go out during “Operation Metro Surge”, the Trump administration’s widespread and violent immigration enforcement crackdown.

Apple removed the lock screen's volume bar a few years ago with iOS 16, but you can bring it back to your screen now.

In his new book, the CBS News correspondent writes of the warning posed by the inadequate response to last year's catastrophic wildfires that destroyed thousands of homes and businesses in Southern California – as well as to the daunting task of rebuilding.

There’s a divisive court battle happening in Bergen County, New Jersey, over 1700s-era blue laws, which limit sales on clothes, home decor and more.

In Ukraine, specialized tour guides are ready for a small but unstoppable flow of visitors who ignore blunt travel advisories.

A judge ruled that the woman should not be deported there, so the Trump administration sent her to Ghana — which returned her to Togo.

Dawn Zuidgeest-Craft, who worked as a nurse practitioner for four decades while raising four kids, will start a three-year residency in July.

The conflict is not only sapping oil revenue, but also Gulf states’ efforts to expand their economies beyond it.

"Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable," reports the New York Times. And "After Meta said late last month that it would start tracking employees' computer use, hundreds of workers spoke up." (One employee even told Meta's CTO in an internal post, "Your callousness to the concerns of your own employees is concerning." In an internal post last month, Meta told its U.S. employees that it was making a change that would affect tens of thousands of them. What employees typed into their computer, how they moved their mouse, where they clicked and what they saw on their screen would be tracked, Meta said. The goal, the company said, was to capture employee data so Meta's artificial intelligence models could learn "how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers." Many workers immediately revolted. In online comments, they blasted the tracking as a privacy violation, calling it antisocial and callous... [One engineering manager even asked "How do we opt out?"] "There is no option to opt-out on your corporate laptop," replied Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer. Employees reacted by posting more than 100 angry and surprised emoji, according to the messages.... Meta is pushing its 78,000 employees to adopt AI tools and factoring their use of the technology in performance reviews. The company is also tracking employees' computer work to feed and train its AI models. And it is cutting jobs to offset its AI spending, saying last month that it would slash 10% of its workforce. That has led to anger and anxiety as employees await news of whether they are affected by the layoffs, which are slated to be carried out May 20, according to 11 current and former Meta employees. Some said they no longer saw Meta as a place for a long career. Others were looking for new jobs or trying to signal that they wanted to be laid off so they could receive severance pay, the current and former employees said. "It's incredibly demoralizing," an employee who does user research wrote in an internal post, which was reviewed by the Times... Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees' consumption of "tokens," a unit of AI use that is roughly equivalent to four characters of text, four people said. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. That led some employees to make so many AI agents that others had to introduce agents to find agents, and agents to rate agents, two people said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Beverly Hills detectives responding to the death of 67-year-old Violet Yacobi — who was found on the marble floor below a staircase in her mansion — suspected foul play and her dentist son, and wondered if the family fortune was a motive for murder.

African archipelago hopes startups, digital infrastructure and diaspora investment can transform its economy

For much of its history since its discovery by the Portuguese in the mid-15th century, the Cape Verde archipelago off the coast of west Africa served as a hub of the international slave trade, with Africans forcibly transported to marketplaces before being distributed across the Americas and Europe.

Now, almost 150 years since slavery was abolished in Cape Verde, and just over 50 years since independence from Portugal, Pedro Fernandes Lopes wants the country to become a beacon for the free movement of human and financial capital across the African diaspora.

Revolutionary Guards issue warning as Trump awaits Iran’s response to Washington’s latest proposal for peace deal

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have threatened to target US sites in the Middle East if its tankers come under fire, Iranian media reported on Saturday, as Washington was left waiting for Tehran’s response to its latest negotiating position.

“Any attack on Iranian tankers and commercial vessels will result in a heavy attack on one of the American centres in the region and enemy ships,” the force said, a day after US strikes on two Iranian tankers in the Gulf of Oman.

The San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Office has concluded its latest search connected to the disappearance of Kristin Smart​ at a property in Arroyo Grande, but officials say her remains were not recovered.

The US president will be counting on China to influence Iran and help him out of his latest mess. But the price may be high – including for Taiwan

Like an out-of-control wrecking ball, swinging wildly back and forth, Donald Trump smashes up the international order without much thought for the consequences. Lacking coherent strategies, workable plans or consistent aims, he power-trips erratically from one fragile region, tense warzone and complex geopolitical situation to another, leaving misery, confusion and rubble in his wake. Typically, he claims a bogus victory, demands that others repair the damage and pick up the tab, then looks around for something new to break.

The president will bulldoze into another international minefield this week – the fraught standoff between China and Taiwan – when he travels to Beijing for a two-day summit with President Xi Jinping. After a string of humiliating policy implosions over Ukraine, Gaza, Nato, Greenland, and now Iran and Lebanon, needy Trump craves a diplomatic success to flaunt at home. But his hopes of vote-winning trade pacts are overshadowed by his latest war of choice. He needs Xi’s promise not to arm Iran if all-out fighting resumes – and Xi’s help keeping the strait of Hormuz open as part of a mooted framework peace deal.

Tehran accuses Washington of ‘reckless military adventure’; Trump prepares for rare China visit amid turbulent backdrop – key US politics stories from 9 May 2026 at a glance

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has said Washington is expecting a response from Iran to its proposals for an interim deal to end the conflict in the Middle East, as Iran accused the US of breaching the increasingly fragile ceasefire announced last month.

In recent days there have been the biggest flare-ups in and around the contested strait of Hormuz since the informal truce began. The rise in violence followed Donald Trump’s announcement – then rapid pause – of a new naval mission aimed at opening the strategic waterway.

US leader enters talks with superpower rival from vulnerable position, but will be hoping for economic wins amid turbulent backdrop

If all goes to plan over the next few days – and that is a big if – Donald Trump will arrive in Beijing on Wednesday for a highly anticipated summit with Xi Jinping, China’s leader.

The trip will mark the first time a US president has visited China in nearly a decade. The last visit was also made by Trump, during his first term, in 2017.

Thirty years after first person-to-person transmission was documented in Patagonia, scientists say global heating could increase world’s exposure

An outbreak in rural communities 30 years ago in the Patagonia area of Argentina led scientists, for the first time, to document person-to-person transmission of hantavirus, which until then had been known only to spread through contact with rodents.

Nearly a decade ago another outbreak, also in Patagonia, provided detailed evidence of inter-human transmission when an infected 68-year-old rural worker attended a birthday party in a small village. The infection spread and resulted in 11 deaths.

With Trump wavering on Nato and war in Ukraine, Europe is scrambling to spend billions on weapons such as drones

In a small workshop in England’s East Midlands, engineers at the British startup Skycutter are designing weapons for Ukraine. A row of 3D printers make the fuselage for interceptor drones, while parts such as motors and navigation chips are slotted together by hand. The same process happens hundreds of thousands of times a month in partner Ukrainian factories.

The swarms of cheap, deadly and often autonomous drones deployed in that war have already changed combat completely. Troops far behind the frontline must move constantly to avoid attack from the air, travelling along netted tunnels and landscapes crisscrossed by fibre optic cables used to steer drones past radio jamming. Cities are terrorised by guided missiles that are cheaper and therefore more widely used than those that came before.

While Nvidia has dominated the "infrastructure boom" since 2022's launch of ChatGPT and "the generative AI craze," CNBC writes that "This week offered the starkest illustration yet of what MIzuho analyst Jordan Klein said could be a 'changing of the guard in AI.'" Chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices and Intel notched gains of about 25%, while memory maker Micron jumped more than 37% and fiber-optic cable maker Corning climbed about 18%. All four of those companies have more than doubled in value this year, with Intel leading the way, up well over 200%. Nvidia, meanwhile, is only slightly ahead of the Nasdaq in 2026, gaining 15% for the year, aided by an 8% rally this week. In spreading the wealth to a wider swath of hardware companies, investors are clearly betting that the bull market in AI has long legs and that data centers are going to need a wider array of advanced components for years to come. Memory has been the biggest theme of late due to a global shortage that's driven up prices and turned Micron, a 47-year-old company tucked in a sleepy corner of the semiconductor market, into one of the hottest trades over the past 12 months. Micron blew past an $800 billion market capitalization for the first time this week, and the stock is now up over 750% in the past year. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told CNBC in March that key customers are only getting "50% to two-thirds of their requirements" because of supply issues. The memory market is largely dominated by Micron, along with Korea-based Samsung and SK Hynix, which are also both in the midst of historic rallies... Bank of America estimates the data center CPU market could more than double from $27 billion in 2025 to $60 billion in 2030. AMD's quarterly results this week underscored the emerging trend, as earnings, revenue and guidance sailed past estimates on strong data center growth. The company has long led the CPU charge, and CEO Lisa Su said on the earnings call that AMD now expects 35% growth over the next three to five years in the server CPU market, up from a forecast of 18% growth that the company provided in November. The article cites two other big movers: Intel "is in the midst of a revival sparked by a major investment from the U.S. government last year. Intel's stock had its best month on record in April, more than doubling, and has continued notching massive gains, rising 33% in the early days of May." Nvidia still remains the world's most valuable company "and is expected to show revenue growth of 70% this fiscal year," the article points out — adding that companies like Corning are also benefiting from Nvidia partnerships. "Glass maker Corning, which celebrated its 175th anniversary this week, signed a massive deal with Nvidia on Wednesday that involves the development of three new U.S. factories dedicated entirely to optical technologies... likely a major step in Nvidia's move away from copper cables and towards fiber-optic cables as it builds out its rack-scale systems."

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Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for May 10.

Under the nonprofit Linux Foundation, "a new Sustaining Package Registries Working Group will seek to identify concrete funding, governance, and security practices," reports ZDNet, "to keep code flowing as download counts grow.... Because software builds, continuous integration pipelines, and AI systems hammer registries at machine speed rather than human speed, the sites can't keep up. "That growth has brought a surge in bot traffic, automated publishing, security reports, and outright abuse, exposing what the working group bluntly calls a 'sustainability gap'." Sonatype CTO Brian Fox, who oversees the Maven Central Java registry, estimates open-source registries saw 10 trillion downloads in 2025. And "The same pattern is appearing across ecosystems. More machine traffic. More automation. More scanning. More expectations around uptime, integrity, provenance, and policy enforcement. More cost. More support burden. More dependency on infrastructure that the industry still talks about as though it runs on goodwill and spare time." ZDNet reports that "To tackle that, Sonatype has teamed up with the Linux Foundation and other package registry leaders, including Alpha-Omega, Eclipse Foundation (OpenVSX), OpenJS Foundation, OpenSSF, Packagist, Python Software Foundation, Ruby Central (RubyGems), and the Rust Foundation (Crates)." The idea is to give operators a neutral forum to discuss money, governance, and shared operational burdens openly. Once that's dealt with, they'll coordinate how to explain those realities back to companies and organizations that have long assumed registries are "free." No, they're not. They never were. As the Linux Foundation pointed out, "Registries today run primarily on two things: (1) infrastructure donations and credits; and (2) heroic efforts from small paid teams (themselves funded by donations and grants) and unpaid volunteers that operate and maintain registry services. The bulk of donations and grants comes from a small set of donors and doesn't scale with demands on the registry." The working group is explicitly positioned as a venue where registry leaders and ecosystem stakeholders can align on "practical, community-minded" ways to sustain that infrastructure, rather than each operator improvising its own survival plan in isolation. ZDNet says the group will also coordinate security practices and information, and craft frameworks "that make it politically and legally possible to introduce sustainable funding models without fracturing communities." And they will also "align messaging and educational content so developers, companies, and policymakers finally understand what it costs to run these services."

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Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for May 10, No. 1,786.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle No. 1,064 for Sunday, May 10.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for May 10, No. 798.

More than 100 people from a cruise ship dealing with an outbreak of the rare and deadly hantavirus are set to be disembarked.

This derby clash at the London Stadium has massive implications for both ends of the table.

Florida wildlife commission investigating cause of incident that left passengers with burns and traumatic injuries

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A suspected boat explosion at a Miami sandbar sent at least 11 people to the hospital on Saturday with some suffering from burns and traumatic injuries, according to Juan Arias, the Miami Dade fire rescue battalion chief.

First responders received reports roughly around 12.45pm of a possible boat explosion on the water, Arias told WPEC 12.

To upgrade its grid for data centers, PJM Interconnection (which serves 13 states) plans to spend $22 billion — and charge nearly $2 billion of that to customers in Maryland, argues Maryland's Office of People's Counsel. The money "will be recovered in rates for decades" and "drive up Maryland customer bills by $1.6 billion over the next ten years alone," they said Friday, announcing an official complaint filed with America's Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Extra demand is expected from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois "where demands driven by data centers are projected to grow substantially by 2036," they explain. But that means that Maryland customers "are subsidizing data center-driven transmission buildout by virtue of geographic proximity..." Tom's Hardware explains: That means an extra $823 million for residential (approx. $345 per customer), $146 million for commercial (approx. $673 per customer), and $629 million for industrial customers (approx. $15,074 per customer)... "Maryland customers have neither caused the need for these billions in new transmission projects nor will they meaningfully benefit from them," [according to Maryland People's Counsel David S. Lapp].... This is one of the biggest reasons why many AI hyperscalers are facing pushback from the communities where they intend to place their data centers. At the moment, around 69 jurisdictions have passed some sort of moratorium on projects like these, and a survey has shown that nearly half of Americans do not want a data center in their neighborhood. Debates around these projects are passionate, with a few cases turning violent and even resulting in shootings (thankfully, without any casualties), especially as many feel that the construction of these power-hungry assets is threatening their lifestyles and quality of life. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader noshellswill for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A funeral for eight children killed in a mass shooting drew hundreds of mourners, including former congresswoman Gabby Giffords.

Broderick was serving a life sentence in California over killings and last month transferred to a medical center

Betty Broderick, who became infamous for the 1989 killings of her former husband and his new wife in a case that shocked the country and inspired movies and books, has died at the age of 78 while still serving a life sentence.

Representatives from the California department of corrections and rehabilitation confirmed to NBC News that Elizabeth A Broderick was moved from the California prison where she had been transferred to a medical center on 18 April. She died on the following Friday.

NASA's $500 million Neil Gehrels Swift space observatory was launched in 2004. But it's now "at risk of falling back through the atmosphere and burning up without intervention," reports Spaceflight Now. Fortunately, a mission to prevent that "just passed a notable prelaunch testing milestone." On Friday, NASA announced that the Link spacecraft, manufactured by Katalyst Space Technologies to intervene before Swift's fate is sealed, completed its slate of environmental testing at the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland... "Swift will likely re-enter the atmosphere sometime later this year if we don't attempt to lift it to a higher altitude, [said John Van Eepoel, Swift's mission director at NASA Goddard, in a NASA press release]. "Katalyst has gotten to this point in just eight months, and we're glad they were able to use NASA's facilities to test Link and draw on our expertise to help tackle questions that popped up along the way...." "Given how quickly Swift's orbit is decaying, we are in a race against the clock, but by leveraging commercial technologies that are already in development, we are meeting this challenge head-on," said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director, Astrophysics Division, NASA Headquarters, at the time... Attempting an orbit boost is both more affordable than replacing Swift's capabilities with a new mission, and beneficial to the nation — expanding the use of satellite servicing to a new and broader class of spacecraft...." Swift is in an orbit inclined 20.6 degrees from the equator, which is why Katalyst selected Northrop Grumman's Pegasus XL air-launched rocket in November to fly the mission. "The versatility offered by Pegasus' unique air-launch capability provides customers with a space launch solution that can be rapidly deployed anywhere on Earth to reach any orbit," said Kurt Eberly, Director of Space Launch for Northrop Grumman. The mission is set to launch in June.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One man critically injured following incident in Arnold and suspect is being held on suspicion of attempted murder

A man has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after five people were struck by a car in a town centre in Nottinghamshire, police have said.

One man suffered life-threatening injuries and remains critically ill in hospital while four other men sustained less serious injuries after the incident in Arnold shortly before 1.10am on Saturday.

The Victory Day celebrations didn't include a show of heavy weapons for the first time in nearly two decades.

Former reality TV star Spencer Pratt​ opened up about his run for mayor of Los Angeles in an exclusive interview with CBS News.

September 2025? January 2026? Delivery dates keep slipping for the Trump Organization's "Trump Phone" — a gold-coloured Android smartphone priced at $499 (£370). But in March the Verge spotted signs the phone was moving forward: FCC listings for a smartphone with the trade name "T1" show that it was tested late last year, and granted certification by the FCC in January... [T]he phone was submitted for testing by another company entirely: Smart Gadgets Global, LLC... Smart Gadgets Global's website promises "Top Quality Electronics created for 'YOUR' customer!" But in April the Trump phone revised its "Terms and Conditions" for preorders. The new language? A preorder deposit provides only a conditional opportunity if Trump Mobile later elects, in its sole discretion, to offer the Device for sale. A deposit is not a purchase, does not constitute acceptance of an order, does not create a contract for sale, does not transfer ownership or title interest, does not allocate or reserve specific inventory, and does not guarantee that a Device will be produced or made available for purchase.... Estimated ship dates, launch timelines, or anticipated production schedule are non-binding estimates only. Trump Mobile does not guarantee that: the Device will be commercially released... Trump Mobile will not be responsible for delay, modification, or failure to release a Device due to causes beyond its reasonable control, including but not limited to regulatory review, carrier certification delays, component shortages, labor disruptions, governmental orders, acts of God, transportation interruptions, or third-party supplier failures... If Trump Mobile cancels or discontinues the Device offering prior to sale, Trump Mobile will issue a full refund of the deposit amount paid... If Trump Mobile cancels, delays, or does not release the Device, your sole and exclusive remedy is a full refund of the deposit amount actually paid, and you waive any claim for equitable, injunctive, or specific performance relief relating to preorder priority or Device allocation. There was an unconfirmed report on social media that the updated Terms were also emailed to customers (cited by the International Business Times). And the new language also hedges that for the gold T1 phone, "Images, prototypes, beta demonstrations, and marketing renderings are illustrative only and may not reflect final production units...." But then eight days ago The Verge reported that phone "has just passed another milestone on its slow road to release," described as "a requirement for any phone launching in the US..." "The phone has received the little-known PTCRB certification, a first step toward being certified to work on major networks and be issued with IMEI numbers." [A]t least, I think it's been certified. What's actually been certified by the PTCRB is the SGG-06, a smartphone from Smart Gadgets Global, LLC, with support for 5G, 4G, 3G, and 2G networks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US transportation secretary announces The Great American Road Trip amid transportation crises and rising fuel prices

Sean Duffy, the US transportation secretary, hauled his family into a van for a wholesome, seven-month trek across the nation, which was filmed for an upcoming reality TV program, he told Fox News on Friday.

The revelation drew immediate blowback as “tone-deaf”, from critics who pointed toward various crises that have recently hammered the country’s transportation sector.

Cox managed the Braves for 25 seasons, winning the World Series in 1995.

He built a dynasty in Atlanta while winning more than 2,500 games during a 29-year managerial career.

‘In just a few weeks homelessness has killed a baby, a young mother and a student,’ head of advocacy group says, calling for more investment in upcoming budget

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Fourteen rough sleepers are dying in public parks or countryside areas each year on average in Australia, an analysis of hidden death reports reveals.

The deaths of a young international student sleeping rough in Hyde Park, a young homeless mother who died of sepsis in Western Australia, and a newborn baby at a makeshift homeless camp near Wagga beach have prompted an outpouring of grief and shock in recent weeks.

• Bueckers scores 20; Fudd makes debut off bench

• Clark has 20 in first game since July 2025

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Arike Ogunbowale scored 22 points, Paige Bueckers and Odyssey Sims tallied 20 each, and the Dallas Wings opened the new WNBA season with a 107-104 win over the Indiana Fever on Saturday in Indianapolis.

Sims, a crucial part of Indiana’s playoff run last season, led the Wings with 12 points after half-time and made one of two free throws in the final seconds of regulation. Caitlin Clark missed a 32-footer and Indiana fouled Bueckers on the rebound, but Bueckers missed both foul shots with 1.4 seconds left, giving the Fever one last chance.

"Plant seeds can sense the vibrations generated by falling raindrops," reports ScienceAlert, "and respond by waking from their state of dormancy to welcome the water, new research shows.... to germinate in 'anticipation' of the coming deluge." The finding, discovered by MIT mechanical engineers Nicholas Makris and Cadine Navarro, offers the first direct evidence that seeds and seedlings can sense and respond to sounds in nature... "The energy of the rain sound is enough to accelerate a seed's growth," [explains Markis]. Plants don't have the same aural equipment we do to actually hear sounds, of course. But the study suggests that seeds respond to the same vibrations that can produce a sound experience in our human ears. Across a series of experiments, the researchers submerged nearly 8,000 rice seeds in shallow tubs of water, at a depth of around 3 centimeters (1 inch), and exposed some of them to falling water drops over periods of six days... A hydrophone recorded the acoustic vibrations produced by the drops, confirming that the experiment mimicked the vibrations produced by actual raindrops falling in nature — such as the driving downpours that can sometimes pelt Massachusetts' puddles, ponds, and wetlands... In their study, the researchers observed that seeds exposed to the falling drops germinated up to around 37% faster, compared with seeds that did not receive the simulated rainstorm treatment but were housed in otherwise identical conditions. More information in Scientific American and Scientific Reports.

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Passengers evacuated safely after person jumped perimeter fence and walked on to runway, airport spokesperson says

A Frontier Airlines plane hit and killed a person on the runway of Denver’s international airport during takeoff, sparking an engine fire and forcing passengers to evacuate, authorities said.

The plane, headed to Los Angeles, “reported striking a pedestrian during takeoff” at about 11.19pm on Friday, the Denver airport’s official X account wrote.

Catherine West says she will try to get the necessary signatures herself to trigger a leadership contest

• Mapped: how Labour lost ground in different directions

Gordon Brown has been appointed as a special envoy on global finance.

Number 10 said:

The PM has committed to boosting the country’s security and resilience’

In this role, Gordon Brown will advise on how global finance cooperation can help to achieve this.

• Cox led team to 1995 World Series, 14 division titles in row

• Fourth all-time in wins as a manager and first in ejections

Bobby Cox, the Baseball Hall of Famer who led the Atlanta Braves to their 1995 World Series title and was a four-time Manager of the Year, has died at the age of 84.

The Braves announced Cox’s death in a statement on Saturday. The team did not give a cause of death.

Cisco has released an open-source tool "to trace the origins of AI models," reports SC World, "and compare model similarities for great visibility into the AI supply chain." [Cisco's Model Provenance Kit] is a Python toolkit and command-line interface (CLI) that looks at signals such as metadata and weights to create a "fingerprint" for AI models that can then be compared to other model fingerprints to determine potential shared origins. "Think of Model Provenance Kit as a DNA test for AI models," Cisco researchers wrote. "[...] Much like a DNA test reveals biological origins, the Model Provenance Kit examines both metadata and the actual learned parameters of a model (like a unique genome that comprises a model), to assess whether models share a common origin and identify signs of modification." The tool aims to address gaps in visibility into the AI model supply chain. For example, many organizations utilize open-source models from repositories like HuggingFace, where models could potentially be uploaded with incomplete or deceptive documentation. The Model Provenance Kit provides a way for organizations to verify claims about a model's origins, such as claims that a model is trained from scratch, when in reality it may be copied from another model, Cisco said. This may put organizations at risk of using models with unknown biases, vulnerabilities or manipulations and make it more difficult to resolve any incidents that arise from these risks. Thanks to Slashdot reader spatwei for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Even with the Iran war weighing Trump’s party down, Democrats face a challenge turning the upper chamber blue

The county of Louisa in eastern Iowa is so rural that there is not a single stoplight on its roads, and its largest town, Wapello, boasts an appropriately wry nickname: “Capital of the World”.

The moniker is not entirely off-base, for decisions made here have, in their own way, reverberated across the globe. Louisa is among a band of counties along the Mississippi River that backed Barack Obama both times he was on the presidential ballot, before, like Iowa as a whole, flipping to Donald Trump in 2016 and growing increasingly Republican each time he was on the ballot.

RUTHIE SHIGON
Staff Reporter

Spring elections for the university’s student government association (SGA) closed on April 24, following a week of events to get to know the candidates running for executive cabinet positions and academic affairs senator positions. Events included the Candidate Carnival, a Henwich Giveaway with UD Dining, Snacks and Speeches, Scoops and Senators and ended with Puppies on the Patio while students cast their final votes.

The newly elected members were announced on the official SGA Instagram in the afternoon of April 27.

Ava Cavolo, a rising senior psychology and criminal justice major and former vice president of external affairs, was elected student body president. Brianna Sherman-Blanding, a rising junior sociology and public policy major and former vice president of university affairs, was elected executive vice president.  

Meredith Eaton, a rising junior, is the new vice president of university affairs and Lea Giovagnoli, also a rising junior, is the vice president of external affairs. Another rising junior, Matthew McKay, was elected as chief justice. 

Eight senators were elected to represent each college at the university, except the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, which did not elect a senator. 

Elected senators include: Lola Sokolskiy representing the College of Arts and Sciences; Jacqueline Green representing the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics; Mikaiya Humphreys representing the College of Earth, Ocean and Environment; Catherine Williams representing the College of Education and Human Development; Julian Nesbit representing the College of Engineering; Dilana Winter representing the Honors College; Leo Olsen representing the College of Health Sciences and Brooklyn Holsten representing the Biden School of Public Policy and Administration.

More appointed positions for the fall semester will be announced over the summer. Additionally, students who do not hold a position can still participate in SGA and voice their ideas for campus change by attending weekly meetings, usually held on Wednesdays. 

Jubilation in Budapest as new leader invites people to ‘step through gate of regime change’

The pro-European centre-right leader Péter Magyar has been sworn in as prime minister of Hungary, marking the official end to Viktor Orbán’s 16 years in power.

Saturday’s ceremony – during which Magyar had invited people to join him to “write Hungarian history” together and “step through the gate of regime change” – comes a month after his opposition Tisza party won a landslide victory in parliamentary elections.

Keir Starmer set to face challenge as former minister says she will trigger race if no cabinet minister comes forward

MPs from Labour’s left are expected to urge Ed Miliband to consider a leadership bid in the coming days, as Keir Starmer faced the prospect of a definite challenge from his MPs next week.

Following grim results for Labour in elections on Thursday, former minister Catherine West said that if no cabinet ministers went public by Monday, she would launch a bid to end the impasse.

Adam Bedoui, 20, and Abdelkader Amir Bousloub, 21, guilty of religiously aggravated harassment

Two men have been convicted of religiously aggravated harassment after filming antisemitic TikTok videos in north London.

Officers were called to reports of a hate crime involving a group of men allegedly harassing members of the Jewish community on Clapton Common at about 9pm on Thursday, the Metropolitan police said. Officers arrested five men in Hackney after the incident, it added.

All 20 of America's state-run healthcare marketplace sites "include advertising trackers that share information with Big Tech companies," reports Gizmodo, citing a report from Bloomberg: Per the report, seven million Americans bought their health insurance through state exchanges in 2026, and many of them may have had personal information shared with companies, including Meta, TikTok, Snap, Google, Nextdoor, and LinkedIn, among others. Some of the data collected and shared with those companies included ZIP codes, a person's sex and citizenship status, and race. In addition to potentially sensitive biographical details about a person, the trackers also may reveal additional details about their life based on the sites they visit. For instance, Bloomberg found trackers on Medicaid-related web pages in Rhode Island, which could reveal information about a person's financial status and need for assistance. In Maryland, a Spanish-language page titled "Good News for Noncitizen Pregnant Marylanders" and a page designed to help DACA recipients navigate their healthcare options were found to be transmitting data to Big Tech firms... Per Bloomberg, several states have already removed some trackers from their exchange websites following the report. Thanks to Slashdot reader JoeyRox for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tyrone Scott, who didn’t think he had a hope in the election, wants to help the Greens rebuild ‘community cohesion’ in Hackney

You would expect most political candidates who pull off a shock win to celebrate their victory, maybe with a glass of bubbly and excitement for the challenges of elected office ahead. But on Friday, as thousands of new councillors celebrated their triumphs, some surprise victors were less than pleased.

Green party handlers apologised to one newly elected councillor in Finsbury Park, north London, put down as a “paper candidate”, who pulled off an unexpected win. “You’re going to be great, we’ll support you,” they said, according to the Islington Tribune.

Raymond Epps, a former Oath Keepers member, said he was the target of conspiracies over his role in US Capitol attack

A federal judge on Friday dismissed a lawsuit alleging defamation by Fox News, ruling for a second time against a former supporter of Donald Trump who claimed he became the target of death threats after the network broadcast inaccurate conspiracy claims about his involvement in the 6 January 2021 US Capitol attack.

Raymond Epps was wrongly accused by Fox of being a government operative who allegedly stirred violence around the Capitol that day in an effort to pin responsibility on supporters of Trump who were upset his first presidency ended in defeat to Joe Biden. According to Epps, formerly a marine and member of the far-right Oath Keepers group, the backlash from those reports led him and his wife to sell their ranch in Arizona and relocate to a recreational vehicle in an attempt to avoid the ongoing harassment.

CNN reports on a "sudden surge of claimed sightings" of "unidentified figures averaging 8 feet tall in wooded areas" along Ohio's Mahoning River. "And it stopped just as quickly as it started," says Jeremiah Byron, host of the Bigfoot Society Podcast, which collected and mapped the reports .... Byron doesn't take every report at face value, making sure he talks to people directly before publicizing their claims. Once word got out about the reports in Ohio, so did the obvious fakes. "I started to get a lot of AI-generated reports in my email. It got up to the point where I was probably getting about 1,000 emails a day," he says. But when Byron spoke by phone with people who made the initial reports, they convinced him they weren't making anything up. "It was obvious they weren't just wanting to get their name out there," says Byron. "They were just freaked out by what they experienced, and they didn't want anything else to do with it." [...] Local law enforcement in Ohio also seem to be enjoying the publicity. Portage County Sheriff Bruce D. Zuchowski made a series of gag posts purporting to show the arrest of Bigfoot and his detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, only for the creature to escape from custody at the Canadian border... Despite the levity, the sheriff's office really did get some calls from concerned residents, Zuchowski says. "Ten individual people were like, 'Yeah I was walking my dog at 4 a.m. and I saw this hairy figure and I smelled this musty odor and there was this big thing and all of a sudden it ran,'" the sheriff told CNN affiliate WOIO in March.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Disregard from UK Labour and struggling public services are just some of reasons behind ‘astonishing’ collapse

• UK politics live – latest updates

By Friday night, Keir Starmer and much of the Westminster Labour group were quietly relieved that the local election results in England hadn’t been quite as bad as feared. In Wales, however, Labour’s collapse in the Senedd was even more total than the most pessimistic predictions.

For more than 100 years, Welsh Labour was the democratic world’s most successful election-winning machine, but the political behemoth limped into third place this week with just nine seats in a 96-seat parliament. A new chapter in Wales’s political and cultural history has opened: pro-independence Plaid Cymru is set to form a minority government.

A company Trump has used for work at his Virginia golf course was awarded $6.9m to paint the iconic attraction

Donald Trump’s latest beautification plan for Washington DC – the restoration of the 2,000ft-long reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial – has been met with claims that a $6.9m contract to carry out the project was hastily handed out to a company that renovated a swimming pool at the president’s Virginia golf course.

The New York Times reported that the no-bid contract for the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool was given to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, based in New Canton, Virginia, on 3 April – despite company records showing it has not previously been awarded a federal contract.

Transit advocates laud first stations to open in city in more than 25 years, with World Cup and Olympics coming to town

The roughly 12-mile (19km) drive along Wilshire Boulevard from Los Angeles’s downtown core to its Westside region can be a soul-crushing experience. The road is among the busiest in Los Angeles, winding through Westlake, Koreatown, the famed Miracle Mile, Beverly Hills, Century City, Westwood and Santa Monica before ending at the bluffs overlooking the Pacific coast highway, a journey that can take an hour or even two at rush hour.

For decades, Angelenos accepted this time-eating crawl as fate. But this week, traversing this bustling corridor reached another level – about 50-70ft underground to be precise. How about Union Station to Beverly Hills in 21 minutes?

A pedestrian was hit by a Frontier airplane departing Denver for LA late Friday night, the airport and airline confirmed.

This is the second time within two months that a norovirus outbreak happened on a Princess ship based out of the Fort Lauderdale.

The plane was evacuated because of smoke in the aircraft after the collision, according to the flight crew.

Emissions understated by factor of five in Essex plans for tech giant, while Greystoke’s Lincolnshire plans show similar error

Developers working for Google have significantly misstated how much carbon two proposed AI datacentres will contribute to the UK’s total emissions in planning documents reviewed by the Guardian.

The tech company wants to build two huge datacentres – one 52-hectare (130 acre) project in Thurrock and another at an airfield in North Weald, both in Essex. To do so, developers are required to submit planning documents calculating how much carbon these projects will emit as a proportion of the UK’s total carbon footprint.

Showdown between Musk and Altman has rendered the world’s most wealthy comical under egalitarian eye of court

For the past couple of weeks, on the fourth floor of a courthouse on a quiet street in downtown Oakland, the world’s richest man and one of the world’s most valuable startups have been at war over the future of artificial intelligence.

Being one of the reporters in the room has felt like watching an updated, opposite-coast version of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities – ambition, ego, greed and the spectrum of social class on full display. The supporting cast has included Elon Musk fanboys, a stern judge and a who’s who of Silicon Valley’s most influential people.

A chain of 30 U.S. newspapers including the Sacramento Bee, the Miami Herald and the Idaho Statesman "has started to use a new AI tool that can summarize traditional articles and spit out different versions for different audiences," reports the New York Times. And the chain's reporters "are not happy about it." Journalists in many of the company's newsrooms are now withholding their bylines from articles created by the new tool, meaning that those articles will run with a generic credit rather than a reporter's name, as is customary. They are also labeled AI-assisted. "We don't want to put our bylines on stories we did not actually write even if they're based on our work," said Ariane Lange, an investigative reporter at the Sacramento Bee and the vice chair of the Sacramento Bee News Guild. "That in itself feels like a lie." The reporters' byline strike is one of the sharpest conflicts yet between journalists and their companies over the use of AI. Related debates are playing out in newsrooms across the country, as publishers experiment with new AI tools to streamline work that used to take hours, and some even use it to write full articles... [E]xecutives have promoted the tool internally as a way to increase the number of articles published and ultimately gain new subscribers... [Eric Nelson, the vice president of local news] said using reporters' bylines on the AI-generated articles was a way to show "authority" on Google so the search engine would rank the articles higher in the results. He also said the company was experimenting with feeding in reporters' notes to create articles. "Journalists who embrace and experiment with this tool are going to win," Nelson said in the meeting. "Journalists who are defiant will fall behind".... McClatchy's public AI policy states that the company uses AI tools to summarize articles to "help readers quickly understand the main points of a single story or catch up on multiple stories about a larger topic," and that editors review the output before publication.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brown to advise on global finance, while Harman will focus on social and economic improvements for women and girls

• UK politics live – latest updates

• Full results from England, Scotland and Wales

Keir Starmer has brought in Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman as advisers in a move to ease the mounting pressure on the prime minister to resign after the disastrous election results for Labour.

Brown, the former prime minister and long-serving chancellor under Tony Blair, has been made Starmer’s envoy on global finance, with a brief to advise on financial partnerships to help with defence-related investments, particularly with Europe.

From devolved parliaments in Scotland and Wales to councils and mayoralties in England, find out what happened in your area

• Elections mapped: how Labour lost ground in different directions

Péter Magyar's center-right Tisza party defeated Orbán's nationalist-populist Fidesz in a stunning blow last month.

America's school districts "spent billions on technology during the pandemic," reports the Washington Post. "But now some states are limiting in-school screen time because of concerns about its impact on children." Nationwide [U.S.] schools invested at least $15 billion and possibly as much as $35 billion from federal pandemic relief funds on laptops, learning software and other technology between 2020 and 2024, according to an estimate by the Edunomics Lab, an education think tank. By last school year, 88% of public schools reported in a federal survey they had given every child a laptop, tablet or similar device. Now, some states and school districts are walking back their technology use following pressure from parents who claim too much in-school screen time has zapped children's attention spans and left them worse off academically. At least a dozen states introduced or adopted policies this year that attempt to regulate screen time in schools — from prescribing limits to allowing families to opt out of virtual instruction... In Missouri, a bill would require every school district in that state to come up with a screen time policy is making its way through the state legislature. "Ed tech is just big tech in a sweater vest," said Missouri state Rep. Tricia Byrnes (R), who introduced the legislation and blames what she described as the overuse of technology for middling test scores... Complicating the issue is research that shows students do not see any academic gains when provided with laptops. A meta-analysis of studies on reading comprehension suggests paper-based texts are better than digital-based reading... A body of research has established that excessive or unstructured screen time can have detrimental effects on children, including harming language development, weakening social skills and triggering anxiety and depression. But the effects of school-issued devices and in-school usage on children's development are less understood, said Tiffany Munzer, a developmental behavioral pediatrician and digital media researcher at the University of Michigan. Some studies report that high-quality digital tools can support students' learning goals, Munzer said. But "a lot of the apps that are marketed as educational ... are not actually educational and contain a lot of commercialized content."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are some highly rated series to check out, plus a look at what's new in May.

Parent company of president’s Truth Social platform generated only $870,000 even as net sales were up 6%

The parent company of Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform – one of the president’s preferred communications channels – lost nearly $406m in the first three months of the year while generating a little over $870,000 in revenue, according to financial filings.

The Trump Media and Technology Group’s quarterly report for January to March 2026 showed that while net sales were up 6% year over year, the company took sizable losses related to other investments.

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The interior minister of Spain told Reuters on Saturday that Germany, France, Belgium, Ireland and the Netherlands have confirmed they will send planes to repatriate nationals from their respective countries aboard the cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak.

The European Union is sending two more planes for the remaining European citizens, and the US and UK have also confirmed planes and contingency plans for non-EU citizens.

A total of 8 cases, including 3 deaths, have been reported as of Friday. Six of these cases cases are confirmed as Andes virus and four patients are currently hospitalised.

One case previously reported as suspected hantavirus has now been reclassified as a non-case after testing negative for Andes (ANDV) virus.

A man who disembarked in Tristan da Cunha on 14 April is currently stable and in isolation. He is currently a probable case until laboratory confirmation.

Passengers who travelled on the same flight from St Helena to South Africa along with one of the confirmed cases have been contacted – 75 of those contacts have been identified in South Africa, of whom 42 have been traced by national authorities and are currently under monitoring.

Denmark’s king asks Troels Lund Poulsen to form government after PM struggles to gather support

The king of Denmark has asked a centre-right politician to try to form a new government after the prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, has failed to put together a ruling coalition.

The announcement on Friday night shook the political establishment as Frederiksen has been a staple of Danish politics for decades. Her left-leaning party, the Social Democrats, won the plurality of votes in parliamentary elections in March.

Simply hanging on could be a disaster for Iranians, while Trump needs to resolve this economic crisis he created

Exchanges of fire between Iran and the US demonstrate the serious instability of the situation in the Middle East. Though the US strikes late on Thursday were just “a love tap”, according to the US president, Donald Trump, the reality is that neither side can continue the high-stakes standoff in the strait of Hormuz indefinitely.

The US and its ally Israel demonstrated a comprehensive military superiority over Iran – taking minimal casualties in the 38-day war – but Washington has both failed to translate that into strategic dominance and allowed Iran to take control of the strait, driving up the oil price.

An exhibit of psyops leaflets released in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya finally shows American people the messages that were made in their name
By Moustafa Bayoumi

For over a century, the United States military has been dropping propaganda leaflets in deliberate psychological operations, or psyops, to achieve success in war. But the key question behind the effort remains unanswered: does it even work?

In 1918, the US released more than 3m leaflets behind enemy lines by plane and hydrogen balloon. To their delight, they found the leaflets helped erode morale and unit cohesion among the Germans in the first world war. Or so the story goes.

PHOEBE WOOSTER
Staff Reporter

Almost 26 years ago, a new reality TV show titled “Survivor” debuted. Contestants were placed on a remote tropical island, split into two “tribes,” and competed in challenges, all while trying to survive on their own and having to vote someone off the island after each challenge. 

This year, “Survivor” reached its 50th season, which has been titled “In the Hands of the Fans.” Jeff Probst, the host of “Survivor,” celebrated by inviting 24 players from previous seasons to return and compete for a prize of $1 million and the title of “Sole Survivor.” 

The season also includes new twists, such as inviting celebrities like musician Zac Brown and YouTube star Jimmy Donaldson, also known as Mr. Beast, onto the island. Fans were also able to vote on aspects of the game before the season began filming. 

This season has gained more viewership than those that aired over the past four years, with many old fans returning to watch the monumental season. But fans had differentiated opinions when Probst first announced the cast of the 50th season last year. 

The lineup includes returnees such as Cirie Fields and Ozzy Lusth, who are considered to be among the most iconic castaways. The lineup also features many “new era” players, referring to players from seasons 41 to 49. 

Many fans relied on social media to complain about the inclusion of so many new era players, who make up half of the cast. Among those fans was social media influencer “Zachary Reality” on Instagram, who commented on the video posted of the cast announcement. 

“I guess I just wanna know the strategy in casting SO many people from the 40s when the fans made it SO clear we didn’t want that,” Zachary said on Instagram. His comment gained 2,000 likes. 

Amanda Graziani, a freshman studying criminal justice at the university, has seen every season of “Survivor” and is currently watching season 50. 

“There’s too many people from new school,” Graziani said. “Some of those people I don’t even know, and I’ve been watching forever.” 

Despite her complaints concerning the cast, Graziani felt differently about the released episodes so far. 

“I think they’re actually pretty entertaining. I’ve actually enjoyed them so far. The old school people are there, which is why I like it more,” Graziani said.

The excitement for the 50th season of “Survivor” has been building for years. Fans’ criticism comes from their love for the show, and they want what Probst called a season of “celebration” to truly feel like it by celebrating the fans, as was promised.

They want to see that “Survivor” producers listened to the show’s viewers by creating a season with an entertaining cast, drama and a feeling reminiscent of old school “Survivor.” 

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer pledged Saturday to revive the Labour Party after a disastrous set of local and regional elections.

New York’s Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez brushed off question about run for presidency

The New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez answered a question about potentially running for higher office in 2028 by declaring: “My ambition is to change the country.”

The Democrat delivered that remark at a political forum in Chicago on Friday amid widespread belief that she is positioning herself to run for the White House in 2028 or challenge her party’s leader in the US Senate, fellow New Yorker Chuck Schumer.

Moscow blanketed in heavy security despite last-minute announcement of three-day ceasefire with Ukraine

Vladimir Putin has declared Russia will always be victorious as he oversaw a scaled-back Victory Day parade on Red Square held under heavy security amid mounting fears of Ukrainian attacks and growing public fatigue with the war.

Speaking to the crowd, the Russian leader invoked the sacrifices of the second world war to rally support for his soldiers fighting in the war in Ukraine. “The great feat of the generation of victors inspires the warriors carrying out the tasks of the special military operation today,” he said, using the Kremlin’s preferred euphemism for his invasion of Ukraine.

• Star matches Kareem, Hakeem and Shaq with stat line

• San Antonio take 2-1 lead over Minnesota

• Sixers on brink of sweep after Knicks dominate

Victor Wembanyama plays with an agility and a gracefulness beneath his daunting wingspan that can make his dominance for the San Antonio Spurs on both ends of the floor appear almost effortless.

Fresh cuts and bruises on those long arms after fighting for paint position and jockeying for rebounds all night with the Minnesota Timberwolves made clear Wembanyama had to put in plenty of work to compile 39 points, 15 rebounds and five blocks in a 115-108 victory in Game 3 on Friday that gave the Spurs a 2-1 lead in their Western Conference semi-final series.

Woman recovered after volcanic eruption on remote island, while operation to find two missing Singaporeans goes on

Rescuers have recovered the body of an Indonesian woman who was caught in a volcanic eruption on Mount Dukono on Indonesia’s remote island of Halmahera, officials have said.

Search operations continued on Saturday for the bodies of two Singaporeans. The dead hikers were among 20 who set out to scale the 1,355-metre (4,445ft) volcano in defiance of safety restrictions and became stranded when Dukono erupted early on Friday, spewing a thick ash column about 6 miles (10km) into the air.

Africa is leading a change in news consumption habits – and transforming the lives of current affairs enthusiasts

Last year Amahle-Imvelo Jaxa posted a TikTok video about South African peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She explained an argument that had erupted between the South African and Rwandan presidents, then listed roles different South African groups would play in a war with Rwanda: the Sotho strategists, the Xhosa negotiators, the Afrikaner muscle. The video went viral and she racked up 100,000 followers in three days.

This breakout video enabled Jaxa to pivot from being a marketing and restaurant entrepreneur to a “professional yapper and current affairs enthusiast”, part of a group of content creators explaining the news to young South Africans who, like many of their global peers, are eschewing traditional news in favour of social media.

Spirit Airlines helped turn flying into a fee-based nightmare. Now it’s gone, and fuel prices are soaring

Forgive me for not mourning last week’s demise of Spirit Airlines, the company responsible for making flying absolutely terrible. Due to rising expenses and billions of dollars in debt, Spirit shut down abruptly last Saturday, stranding thousands of customers who were unaware that an entire business meant to transport them through the sky was about to shutter for good.

Spirit was struggling for years, but it all got so much worse thanks to the soaring cost of jet fuel caused by the war in Iran and the crisis in the strait of Hormuz that halted the shipment of oil. It was bad enough being the country’s most ridiculed mode of conveyance outside of the Segway. But now it costs even more to suck that badly.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

Florida agreement grants US president control of licensing and merchandising at renamed airport, analysts say

It was a week in which one prominent name in aviation, Spirit Airlines, disappeared, killed in the company’s own admission by high fuel prices resulting from Donald Trump’s war in Iran.

Within days, however, another moniker was already flying high in industry circles: the president’s own.

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

Home reportedly occupied by mother of Paul Flores, who was convicted of killing college student who went missing in 1996

Soil testing at a property linked to the man convicted in the murder of California college student Kristin Smart, who disappeared in 1996, turned up evidence of human remains, a state sheriff announced on Friday.

“We can’t call it Kristin, but there’s evidence to support human remains – there at one time,” the San Luis Obispo county sheriff, Ian Parkinson, said at a news conference.

Mohamed Bulbul arrested in Mogadishu after covering case of woman allegedly being tortured in prison

A journalist who covered the case of a woman who said she was being tortured in prison was detained and beaten with pistols by Somali authorities, along with two others, for his reporting for the Guardian.

Mohamed Bulbul was arrested with the journalists Abdihafid Nor Barre and Abdishakur Mohamed Mohamud on Friday evening while in a restaurant in the centre of the Somali capital, Mogadishu. They said they were assaulted by members of Somalia’s US-trained counter-terrorism police unit and taken to be questioned by police. All three were released in the early hours of Saturday morning.

• World No 2 is not against return: ‘Just good business’

• Circuit’s future is uncertain after Saudi withdrawal

• DeChambeau has denied claims of PGA Tour talks

Rory McIlroy is no longer opposed to LIV Golf players returning to the PGA Tour, but he said Friday that “it’s a question of if they do want to come back”.

McIlroy said the answer will probably depend on what happens with LIV’s financial situation in the coming months.

The Nothing Phone 4A Pro offers a great overall experience and doesn't ask for much in return.

Maralee Lellio always dreamed of having a large family. A Stage IV cancer diagnosis almost caused her to lose hope.

Soaring oil prices have left many Americans with higher costs and fewer options for travel amid the Iran war

• Tell us: have your holiday plans changed in light of recent world events?

Chelsea Blackmore saves up every year for an annual vacation with her 58-year-old mother. This year, after landing an especially good deal, they made plans to embark on a Disney cruise from Orlando.

To keep costs low, she bought the least expensive plane tickets she could find: a $500 round trip fare on Spirit Airlines.

Council’s plan will leave Federal Emergency Management Agency ill-equipped to respond to extreme weather events, experts say

Sweeping changes may be in store at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), the nation’s frontline emergency response coordinator, that experts warned could further erode US capacity to handle disasters as the risks of extreme weather fueled by the climate crisis continue to rise.

Fears about a fundamental overhaul of Fema’s form and function have been brewing since Donald Trump returned to the White House. After castigating the agency over claims that it was too expensive and “doesn’t get the job done”, Trump set to gutting Fema as an early priority for his second term.

PM’s wife, accompanying him to the polls, follows a long line of women to mobilise the jacket when stakes are high

Not a white flag but a cream blazer was what Victoria Starmer chose to wear to accompany her husband, the prime minister, to vote on Thursday morning. She follows in a long line of women who have mobilised the power blazer at high-stakes moments.

Starmer’s, which looks much like a £1,690 ivory Alexander McQueen crepe design, comes hot on the lapels of another. In episode one of the new series of Amandaland, Amanda wears a beige double-breasted iteration in a high-stakes fictional moment: to give a toe-curling talk about her (not shallow) lifestyle brand Senuous as part of careers week at her kid’s school. Earlier in the week, the Princess of Wales launched the Foundations for Life report wearing a creamy beige high-waisted Roland Mouret suit.

Women’s sport is in its high-growth phase. With surging salaries and new – or even revived – teams, the league has plenty to reflect on and to look forward to

Opening night typically pulses with anticipation rather than gushes with nostalgia, but the New York Liberty wore a “court origins” uniform that alludes to their history as one of the WNBA’s eight founding members when they hosted the Connecticut Sun on Friday.

Protracted and pugnacious negotiations between the players’ union and the league threatened to delay or even wreck the new season. But an accord that hands the players significant pay rises means the league has much to look forward to, as well as plenty to reflect on, as it celebrates 30 years.

A supreme court decision will determine whether the cruel, unconstitutional execution of people with intellectual disability becomes even more prevalent

The supreme court will soon rule on Hamm v Smith, an Alabama death penalty case that could significantly increase the number of people with intellectual disability who are executed. In this case, Alabama is fighting to execute a man named Joseph Smith. Smith’s five IQ scores – 72, 74, 74, 75 and 78 – all fall around the bottom fifth percentile of the population.

Based on these IQ tests, which measure learning, reasoning and problem-solving, and Smith’s adaptive behaviors, which include the social and practical skills that Smith uses to navigate everyday life, a federal court determined that Smith is intellectually disabled. Because the supreme court held in its landmark 2002 Atkins ruling that executing anyone with an intellectual disability violates the constitution, Alabama cannot execute Smith.

Terry Reed, who had previously been convicted for sexually abusing two other minors, could be imprisoned for 40 years

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A suburban New Orleans religious pastor has been convicted of sexually molesting two minors in what is the third instance of a man called “the worst kind of predator” being found guilty of abusing teen boys.

Terry Reed, 66, cited biblical verses and scripture to “manipulate, normalize and justify his sexual behavior” with the two victims at the center of the newest case against him, according to a statement from Louisiana state prosecutors.

Critics say document outlining strategy is both ‘completely Trumpian’ and an ‘alarming’ escalation in rhetoric

When Donald Trump’s counter-terrorism “czar”, Sebastian Gorka, introduced the Trump administration’s long-awaited counter-terrorism strategy on a call with journalists on Wednesday, he also reportedly described critics of the administration’s war in Iran as “testicularly challenged”.

The at-times bizarre 16-page memo Gorka authored is only slightly more subtle – taking rhetorically charged swings at the president’s enemies, the Biden administration, transgender people and some Islamist groups, while offering little clarity about the threat posed by political violence domestically or abroad or any specific plans to address it.

Organizers, including Selma foot soliders, say ruling is latest chapter in long battle over Black disenfranchisement in US

The supreme court’s recent decision to gut the Voting Rights Act is an affront to everyone who marched, bled and died to make that law possible, civil rights activists said.

“When we look at the supreme court’s action against the Voting Rights Act, it’s really a kneecap – a way to discriminate, to silence voters who fought so hard for this right,” said Sheyann Webb-Christburg, who, at eight years old, marched with civil rights leaders in Selma, Alabama, in 1965.

Psychologist Edith Eger, who has died at 98, treated veterans and abuse victims. She had to heal herself first, she said, to truly help her patients.

A four-foot humanoid robot named Gabi has become a monk at a Buddhist temple in Seoul, participating in a modified initiation ceremony where it pledged to respect life, obey humans, act peacefully toward other robots and objects. "Robots are destined to collaborate with humans in every field in the future," Hong Min-suk, a manager at the Jogye Order, the largest sect of Buddhism in South Korea, tells the New York Times. "It will only be natural for them to be part of our festival." Smithsonian Magazine reports: For the temple, this marks the first time a robot has participated in the sugye initiation ceremony, when followers pledge their devotion to the Buddha and his teachings. Gabi -- a Buddhist name that refers to mercy, Yonhap News Agency reports -- was made by Unitree Robotics, a Chinese civilian robotics company. The model, G1, retails starting at $13,500. During the ceremony, Gabi agreed to five vows usually recited by human monks and slightly altered for the humanoid. The robot pledged to respect life, act with peace toward other robots and objects, listen to humans, refrain from acting or speaking in a deceptive manner and save energy. Gabi participated in a modified yeonbi purification ritual. While a human monk normally receives a small incense burn on the arm, instead Gabi received a lotus lantern festival sticker and a prayer bead necklace. The landmark event aligns with the promise made during a New Year's address by the Venerable Jinwoo, president of the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism, to incorporate artificial intelligence into the Buddhist tradition. "We aim to fearlessly lead the A.I. era and redirect its achievements toward the path of attaining peace of mind and enlightenment," he said, per a statement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Salvadoran-born bishop is leaving Washington to lead the Catholic Church in West Virginia, where Catholics and Latinos are a tiny slice of the population.

Diplomatic efforts continue despite fighting in and around contested strait of Hormuz in recent days

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has said that Washington is expecting a response from Iran to its proposals for an interim deal to end the conflict in the Middle East, as Iran accused the US of breaching the increasingly fragile ceasefire announced last month.

In recent days there have been the biggest flare-ups in fighting in and around the contested strait of Hormuz since the informal truce began. The rise in violence followed Donald Trump’s announcement – then rapid pause – of a new naval mission aimed at opening the strategic waterway.

Armed federal agents recently arrested Dr. David Morens, a 78-year-old retired government scientist, strip-searched him, and charged him with crimes that could carry decades in prison — all for allegedly using his personal email to try and evade Freedom of Information Act requests.

According to prosecutors, Morens, a former senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, used personal email accounts to dodge FOIA, deleted records, and sought to circumvent federal records requirements. In one message about communications about Covid research, he allegedly wrote: “I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I’m FOIA’d but before the search starts. … Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to my Gmail.”

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Top NIH Official Advised Covid Scientists That He Uses Personal Email to Evade FOIA

If true, his actions were egregious and wrong, and accountability should be both proportional and consistent with previous cases of records destruction and FOIA evasion. 

But the Justice Department has, for decades, largely taken a hands-off approach to enforcing FOIA. When it has enforced the law, it’s usually landed in civil rather than criminal court. The DOJ has almost never treated FOIA evasion behavior as a crime — at least until now.

Even in high-profile cases involving far more sensitive material, such as Hillary Clinton’s infamous use of a private email server or Bill Clinton’s national security adviser Sandy Berger’s repeated removal of classified documents from the National Archives, penalties were limited. Berger, for example, received probation, a fine, and community service, and Hillary Clinton wasn’t charged.

Morens, by contrast, faces real prison time if convicted: up to five years for conspiracy, up to 20 years per count for destruction of records, and additional penalties for concealment.

It should be irrelevant that Morens allegedly tried to evade FOIAs from a mix of organizations, including the Heritage Foundation, Judicial Watch, and U.S. Right to Know. But it raises a question the Justice Department has not answered: Would similar charges be brought if the requesters were environmental groups, press freedom organizations, or others less politically aligned with the current administration?

The answer is likely no, and that’s the real danger: making it so FOIA evasion is only a crime if the administration has a score to settle.

This prosecution also comes at a moment when the federal government’s commitment to FOIA has never been lower. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has hollowed out most of his department’s FOIA offices, and the FOIA office for the bureau where Morens used to work is drowning, with over 1,100 backlogged requests right now as a result. The agency is also more than two months late posting its annual FOIA report, which would give us a better idea of how well (or not) it is responding to public records requests for the first year of this Trump administration.

Related

DOJ Wants to Scrap Watergate-Era Rule That Makes Presidential Records Public

At the same time, public health, environmental, and scientific information has been removed from federal websites at an unprecedented pace, FOIA officials are being fired for lawfully releasing information that the administration doesn’t like, and the Justice Department is actively helping the White House evade record-keeping laws.

Against that backdrop, targeting a single retired official while systemic transparency failures go largely unaddressed is absurd.

There are legitimate arguments for stronger consequences when officials deliberately evade transparency laws. But selective criminal enforcement carries its own risks. It invites politicized prosecutions and risks reshaping FOIA itself into a system where compliance is influenced, consciously or not, by who is making the request. That would undermine the core purpose of FOIA: equal access to government records.

If the goal is better compliance, structural incentives may matter more than individual prosecutions. Agencies routinely under-invest in their FOIA operations, leaving small offices to manage massive backlogs with limited resources and political support. One way to change that would be to tie agency leadership’s discretionary budgets to FOIA performance, thus rewarding timely, lawful disclosure and penalizing chronic failure.

That approach would address not just willful evasion but also the broader system that allows noncompliance to persist.

Morens’s alleged actions warrant scrutiny and accountability. But this case is about more than one official. It is about whether the government is establishing a new standard for enforcing transparency, and whether that standard will be applied fairly.

If evading FOIA is now a crime, it must be enforced evenly. Otherwise, the transparency law risks becoming what it was meant to prevent: a tool that, when applied selectively, only serves the powerful.

The post Dodging FOIA Could Now Mean Arrest and Strip Search, Depending on Who’s Asking appeared first on The Intercept.

Labour party loses more than 1,400 English council seats and crashes out in Welsh and Scottish parliament votes

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, is facing increasing pressure to set a date for his departure after elections across much of the country resulted in massive losses for his ruling Labour party.

With the bulk of results now counted after voting on Thursday, Labour had lost more than 1,400 representatives from English councils, the local government structures that deliver many neighbourhood services.

• Kareem’s Daily Quote: Hunter S. Thompson’s weird take on weird.

• Stealing from the Grandkids: The truth about our National Checkbook.

• Video Break: Golden Tempo!

• Gas Prices: No, we’re not all carrying the same burden.

• The China/U.S. Summit: What has the two-month delay given us?

• What I’m Watching: Greyhound

• Jukebox Playlist: Blueberry Hill

Kareem’s Daily Quote

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson, the patron saint of high-velocity journalism, wrote the above in his campaign diary, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72. It’s the kind of sentence that works well on a T-shirt, but it’s more complex than it seems. It isn’t just about some people being eccentric; it’s about what happens when the “normal” world stops making sense and the only people left standing are the ones who were already comfortable on the fringes.

To understand what Thompson meant, you have to look at “weird” as a specialized skill set. In a stable, predictable world, “pro” behavior is about following the manual, staying within the lines, and trusting that the scoreboard is accurate. But what if we don’t live in that world anymore? What if we live in an era of 100% debt-to-GDP, shifting global loyalties, and systems that feel like they’re held together by Scotch tape and spit? What happens, in other words, if the manual catches fire? What happens is that the people who spent their lives reading it are the first to get burned.

Thompson’s weird-folks-turned-pros are the outsiders, the obsessives, the hustlers, the radicals and eccentrics and psychologically unconventional. They are the ones who don’t wait for a permission slip to act. In basketball, we’d call this “court vision”: the ability to see a play developing before the defense even realizes the ball has been snapped. When the game gets frantic and the crowd is screaming, the elite players don’t speed up; they slow down. They turn the weirdness into an advantage.

Thompson’s “turn professional” means that people move from the spin of the hurricane to the eye. They stop dabbling and become highly effective operators. So is that what Thompson is suggesting we do? Try to find that eye of the hurricane? Sit inside it as we would a storm cellar and bide our time until the weather changes?

Not remotely.

Thompson is not necessarily admiring them. He’s simply pointing out that, in bizarre times, unconventional people may understand reality better than respectable mainstream figures. But he also underscores that chaos creates opportunities for dangerous opportunists, manipulators, and fanatics who seem to thrive when institutions break down. That ambiguity—are these people good or bad?—is very Thompson-like. He distrusted “normal” authority figures, but he also knew that the counterculture and the fringe could become predatory, theatrical, or power-hungry.

When things in Washington and Wall Street get weird, when the debt spikes or the energy markets fracture, the traditional leaders often double down on the same old stories. They try to apply 1950s logic to a 2026 reality. This creates a power vacuum for the “weird,” those who were already adapted to a world that doesn’t follow the rules. During times of stability, institutions run things. During times of instability, those already adapted to instability suddenly gain influence.

What we’ve been seeing in the past few months is the emergence of “professional weirdos” seeking power. Are they creative truth-tellers? Or merely terrifying opportunists? Both possibilities are wide open. As always, it’s up to “we the people” to take a breath, discern the difference, and act accordingly.

Read more

Apple will likely announce iOS 27 soon, but don't forget to check out all these iOS 26 features.

As soccer fans turn their attention to the future of the sport in the States, we revisit four oft-overlooked moments – and one famous kick – that shaped its past

• This was originally published in the newsletter The World Behind the Cup. Sign up for it here.

The last time the US hosted the men’s World Cup in 1994, many Americans viewed soccer as a game they watched their kids play on Saturday mornings, not the world’s most beloved sport. Thirty-two years later, the sport has exploded in popularity and the USA have become a regular fixture at World Cups. But many people don’t realize the US’s World Cup history extends all the way back to the first tournament staged – when the US men had their best-ever finish, reaching the semi-finals.

The tale of those connected with the US team is often bleak, but it’s also more deeply rooted and richer than is often appreciated. As US soccer fans turn their attention to the future of the sport, we revisit four often overlooked moments – and one widely celebrated kick – of the USA’s early World Cup history.

This was originally published in the newsletter The World Behind the Cup. Sign up for it here.

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