Steve Hilton, Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer have emerged as the leading contenders to advance to November's general election as vote counting continues.

The labor market continues to show strength despite rising inflation and concerns about slowing economic growth.

RISC-V has been in the “promising” phase for a long time now, especially for general purpose computing, never really breaking through into the mainstream in any measurable way. While I think that breakthrough is still relatively far away, we now do have newer RISC-V SoCs on the market supporting the RVA23 baseline RISC-V profile. One of them is the SpacemiT Key Stone KЗ, which promises to deliver a massive performance increase over previous RISC-V offerings. It’s exactly this chip that’s finding its way into complete, turnkey mini PC solutions, like this one from a company called Firefly.

The base model comes with 8GB of LDDPR5 RAM and 128GB of storage, at a price of about €300 or so (there’s also a 32GB/128GB model at well over €600). This is the first time I’m looking at a complete RISC-V solution where I feel like it might actually make for a good moment to jump in for us enthusiasts. No, the performance won’t rival anything Intel or AMD has to offer, but it seems capable enough for a lot of day-to-day tasks, and I’m curious to see just how far along the Linux world is when it comes to RISC-V support.

It’s not part of our current set of fundraiser incentives, but if you’d like to see this RISC-V mini PC reviewed here on OSNews, you can always donate and add a note that you specifically want to see such a review (so I can gauge interest not just from our few commenters, but also from the more than 99% of our readers who only lurk). As always, you can donate through Ko-Fi, or, if you’re European, via a SEPA direct bank transfer (Name: Thom Holwerda – IBAN: SE08 8000 0820 1684 4657 8414 – BIC: SWEDSESS).

Thousands have protested in the streets of the Albanian capital, Tirana, this week against a planned luxury resort backed by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Groundwork has begun on the $1.6bn complex in an area long seen as one of the Mediterranean’s most environmentally sensitive, containing 200 species of birds including flamingos and Dalmatian pelicans.

After builders began erecting a concrete-based, barbed wire-topped fence around the site, alarm turned to public outrage at the environmental damage and lack of political transparency around the deal.

Lucy Hough speaks to US live news editor Chris Michael.

Data discredits claims reawakened by the death of Henry Nowak that UK police actions disadvantage white people

The US government has joined criticism of alleged two-tier policing in the UK in the wake of Henry Nowak’s murder. How did the term enter the mainstream, and is there any basis for the claim?

Out of an abundance of caution, NASA briefly directed five of the seven crew members aboard the International Space Station to wait inside the docked SpaceX Crew Dragon "Freedom" spacecraft.

Passage came after more than 18 hours of ‘vote-a-rama’ process; Lisa Murkowski was the only Republican senator to vote against it

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Nine out of 15 migrants deported from the US to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in April have returned to their home countries, Congo’s government, a migrant and her lawyer said on Friday.

The 15 migrants arrived in Congo on April 17 as part of a bilateral agreement with the Trump administration announced two weeks earlier to accept third-country deportees from the US. Congo’s government said in a statement on Friday that “more than half” of the migrants had since returned to their countries and that others would return “shortly“.

Greater Manchester mayor’s proposals amount to a notable criticism of Keir Starmer’s policy in the area

• UK politics live – latest updates

Andy Burnham has proposed a 20% cut to business rates for pubs with many smaller, family-run enterprises taken out of paying the levy altogether, in his first major policy initiative during the Makerfield byelection.

Burnham’s plans amount to a notable criticism of Keir Starmer’s policy in the area, with the Greater Manchester mayor saying: “Labour have got it wrong on small businesses.”

Paul Quinn sentenced to 21 years but minimum term of 14 years means he may serve less time than innocent man

A “savage” rapist who evaded justice for nearly two decades could spend less time in prison than the innocent man who was wrongly convicted for his crime.

Paul Quinn, 52, was ordered to serve a minimum of 14 years in prison on Friday over a 2003 rape for which Andrew Malkinson wrongly spent 17 years behind bars.

Announcement that ‘policymakers’ need to be convened by US firm viewed as marketing ploy by some experts

Anthropic has floated the idea of a worldwide “temporary pause” on AI development – and said it was going to convene “policymakers” to discuss the dangers of advanced AI – in its latest release touting the capabilities of its products.

In a long post on Thursday, Anthropic detailed the progress of its AI model, Claude, towards “recursive self improvement” – that is, being able to make better and more powerful versions of itself. Recursive self-improvement is a bugbear of AI safety researchers, viewed as the key step for AI to become superintelligent and therefore unleash widespread consequences on humanity.

A garnishment judgment is only the start. You should know what creditors can do next — and what you can do, too.

Crew previously told to enter docked spacecraft and don spacesuits in case an air leak worsened

Astronauts onboard the International Space Station have been told to return to normal duties after previously being on evacuation alert due to a worsening air leak.

The four astronauts of Nasa’s Crew-12 mission on the station – two US astronauts, a French astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut – received orders from Nasa mission control at 9.04am ET (2.04pm BST) on Friday to enter their Crew Dragon spacecraft docked to the station and don their spacesuits in case the air leak warranted an emergency evacuation, a Nasa official said.

This blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here

A former chair of an influential parliamentary committee said it was “shocking” that the public spending watchdog had not established Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s income from subletting properties.

Margaret Hodge, who led the public accounts committee, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme she was “very concerned” that the National Audit Office (NAO) was not able to find out how much money the former prince had made from letting properties.

NASA ordered astronauts on the International Space Station to shelter in their spacecraft and prepare for possible evacuation after a worsening air leak in the Russian Zvezda service module's transfer tunnel. The Guardian reports: The four astronauts of NASA's Crew-12 mission on the station -- two US astronauts, a French astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut -- received orders from NASA mission control at 9.04am ET (2pm BST) on Friday to enter their Crew Dragon spacecraft docked to the station and don their spacesuits in case the air leak warranted an emergency evacuation, a NASA official said. NASA and Russia's space agency Roscosmos, the station's two primary operators, have debated for months over the cause and potential fixes of small air leaks onboard Russia's Zvezda service module, a key structure of the football-pitch-sized laboratory. The air leaks have been relatively minor in recent months. But on Monday the problem escalated from a pound of air per day to two pounds (0.9kg) a senior Nasa official told Reuters on condition of anonymity. UPDATE: "Roscosmos has paused Friday's structural repair efforts inside the Zvezda service module transfer tunnel, known as PrK, as more measurements and data is assessed," Bethany Stevens, a spokesperson for NASA, posted on X. "Given this development, NASA has instructed the crew members inside the Dragon spacecraft to end the safe haven procedures and return to planned operations aboard the International Space Station. We look forward to working with Roscosmos on a collaborative approach to address the leaks." Developing...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PARIS, June 5, 2026 — Quantum computing company Alice & Bob has released a new five-criteria framework to define and benchmark logical qubits and establish a fair and comprehensive performance evaluation across hardware modalities. Logical qubits are a key milestone on the path to fault-tolerant quantum computing, but there is no industry-wide standard for defining, measuring or comparing them.

Investors, analysts, enterprise decision-makers and researchers can use this new framework to objectively compare achievements from hardware with different levels of performance, maturity, and capability.

The paper, Defining the Logical Qubit: Five Criteria to Benchmark Logical Qubit Claims, builds on a growing body of industry research to argue that a logical qubit should be defined strictly as a fundamental building block of a fault-tolerant quantum computer. It sets out five qualities a true logical qubit must demonstrate to be a credible candidate for scaling the technology.

“Logical qubits are rapidly becoming the industry’s primary benchmark for progress toward fault-tolerant quantum computing, yet the term is used to describe achievements with vastly different levels of performance and capability,” said Jérémie Guillaud, VP Quantum Software, Alice & Bob. “Without a common benchmark, it’s difficult for the industry to compare approaches and evaluate genuine progress. At Alice & Bob, we believe a logical qubit should be more than an experimental demonstration – it should represent a fundamental building block of a fault-tolerant quantum computer. By proposing a clear definition and common set of criteria, we hope to make logical qubit claims more transparent, comparable, and easier to evaluate.”

Alice & Bob’s five essential criteria to “score” logical qubit claims are:

1. Breakeven – Can you outperform your physical qubits? The logical qubit lifetime must exceed that of the physical qubits it is built from.
2. Scalable Parameters – Can you make it better? The error correction code has a parameter that can be tuned to lower the logical error rates.
3. Sufficient QEC Cycles – Have all the errors had time to happen? To measure the true logical error rate, the number of quantum error correction cycles must exceed the code distance.
4. Performance Across All Runs – Does it work without cherry-picking? Logical error rates are only meaningful if we can reproduce them during utility-scale computation, not just in experiments that rely on heavy post-selection.
5. Utility Timescales – Does error correction last the duration of the computation? A logical qubit must exhibit no logical error rates for the full duration of intended computations. Low-frequency errors are detected, not merely inferred from short benchmarking runs.

The whitepaper can be downloaded here.

“This is a strong, timely, and useful framework for cleaning up logical-qubit claims,” said Russ Fein, Managing Director, Corporate Fuel Partners. “It is especially valuable for investors and non-expert decision-makers because it provides a simple checklist for separating FTQC-relevant progress from weaker demonstrations.”

About Alice & Bob

Alice & Bob is a quantum computing company based in Paris and Boston whose goal is to create the first universal, fault-tolerant quantum computer. Advised by Nobel Prize winning researchers, Alice & Bob specializes in cat qubits, a technology developed by the company’s founders. Demonstrating the power of its cat architecture, Alice & Bob recently showed that it could reduce the hardware requirements for building a useful large-scale quantum computer up to 200 times compared with competing approaches.

Source: Alice & Bob

The post Alice & Bob Proposes Five-Criteria Framework for Evaluating Logical Qubits appeared first on HPCwire.

The Ilminster Ring was originally found by an amateur metal detectorist in 2018 and bought this week for more than $100,000.

Von der Leyen tells Balkans summit that bloc needs to make enlargement process ‘faster and more credible’

The EU must prove its willingness and ability to take in new members and speed up its enlargement process, leaders of the bloc have said, as they gathered with their counterparts from six western Balkan countries that hope to join soon.

“The European Union has to show that it is capable of enlarging and willing to enlarge, and we want to discuss that here,” Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, told reporters on Friday at the summit in Tivat, a coastal town in Montenegro.

Team now plans to see if they can use yeast strains harvested from Ötzi the Iceman to brew beer too

Scientists have baked a sourdough loaf of bread using yeast strains harvested from a 5,000-year-old mummy and now plan to see if they can use them to brew beer too.

The yeast came from Ötzi the Iceman, a famous corpse remarkably preserved by being frozen in Alpine ice near the Italy-Austria border until he was discovered in 1991. Ötzi has been the subject of intense study since he was found and has shed much light on pre-historic European people and their way of life.

The additional payouts come from uncashed settlement funds and will be issued to eligible claimants beginning on June 9.

A wave of federal student loan changes lands next month, and asking the right questions now could save you money.

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

A Netherlands court said the three men warranted a custodial sentence "because of the nature and gravity" of their crime.

Michael Gledhill, 44, was arrested on suspicion of murder after he turned himself in following the fatal stabbing of Handy, the LAPD said.

Experts warn primary vote-counting could go on for days in governor’s race, LA mayoral race and congressional races

Three days after Californians headed to the polls, key races in the primary election remained too close to call and experts warned the counting could continue for days.

In the governor’s race, the British-born conservative pundit Steve Hilton was narrowly leading with an estimated 60% of ballots counted by Friday morning. Xavier Becerra, a former US health and human services secretary under Joe Biden, followed closely behind, and billionaire Tom Steyer trailed behind the pair. The top two vote-getters will advance to the general election in November.

From Values to Action: Where do LGBTIQ+ rights sit in UK foreign policy? 30 June 2026 — 17:30 TO 19:30 BST Anonymous (not verified) 5 June 2026 Chatham House and Online

In an increasingly contested world order and global threats to LGBTIQ+ rights, experts discuss a path forward for LGBTIQ+ rights and the rule of law in UK foreign policy.

LGBTIQ+ rights are a meaningful but increasingly complicated pillar of UK foreign policy. The UK has positioned LGBTIQ+ rights as an integral aspect of its foreign policy, from diplomacy to development and international advocacy.
But UK foreign policy on LGBTIQ+ issues has been shaped by challenges of aid cuts, changing political priorities at home and the wider world order. LGBTIQ+ people in the UK continue to face significant systemic issues, including hate crimes, discrimination, healthcare disparities and transphobia. UK foreign policy also operates in an increasingly contested normative world order, with rising global backlash against LGBTIQ+ rights.
To commemorate Pride Month, Chatham House’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity Working Group has the privilege of convening a panel bringing together leading voices to examine what lies ahead for the UK’s foreign policy approach towards LGBTIQ+ rights.

What role does advocacy for LGBTIQ+ rights currently play in UK foreign policy?
How might the UK’s commitment to protecting the rule of law and LGBTIQ+ rights - at home and abroad - advance its soft power?
How does the UK’s domestic record on LGBTIQ+ rights affect its legitimacy as a global advocate?

This panel is followed by a drinks reception.

CBS News projects that incumbent Mayor Karen Bass will advance to the November election, while her opponents, Councilmember Nithya Raman and political newcomer Spencer Pratt, compete for the final spot.

Senate votes 52-47 to fund ICE and border patrol for three years, ending partial shutdown, with House still to vote

• US politics live – latest updates

The US Senate passed legislation to fund Donald Trump’s controversial immigration crackdown early on Friday morning, ending a partial government shutdown that has lingered since February.

The 52-47 vote on funding for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) passed with no Democratic support at 5am, after a marathon session of votes to knock down proposed amendments.

Collaboration expands quantum computing in LATAM, supporting quantum machine learning for digital pathology

SANTIAGO, Chile, and BOSTON, June 5, 2026 — Classiq and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (UC Chile) have announced a joint research project to develop hybrid quantum algorithms for biomedical image analysis, assisted by classical machine learning and the NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform for quantum-classical computing.

The 12-month engagement, titled “Enhancing Pathology through Quantum Computing,” is funded through Avanza UC 2025, the Internal Research and Creation Competition of UC Chile. To the collaborators’ knowledge, it is the first announced consortium in Latin America to combine quantum computing, machine learning and computational pathology.

The engagement marks quantum computing’s and Classiq’s growing presence in Latin America and reflects the company’s expanding work with academic, research and public-sector institutions, including in health innovation. It also reinforces Chile’s emerging role in quantum computing, AI and advanced technology development.

Quantum machine learning applies quantum computing methods to machine learning problems, including classification, pattern recognition and complex data analysis. The initial project focus is on renal pathology, an area of growing public health importance in Chile and across Latin America. This includes applying quantum machine learning to computational pathology, with an initial emphasis on kidney lesion classification, automated glomerular segmentation and semantic pattern search across full histological slides.

The work will be conducted in collaboration with Dr. Luciano Rebouças and Dr. Washington Conrado, researchers at Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (FIOCRUZ) and professors/researchers at Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA) in Brazil, combining expertise in digital pathology, computer vision and biomedical data analysis using curated histopathology datasets, provided by the Brazilian institutions. The research will leverage the Classiq quantum computing software platform and the NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform to leverage a seamless workflow from algorithm development through to simulation and execution.

“Latin America has the scientific talent, institutional momentum and public health needs to support this next stage of quantum computing applications,” said Nir Minerbi, CEO and co-founder of Classiq. “This collaboration brings together quantum software engineering, machine learning and biomedical data expertise in a workflow and project that can help strengthen the regional quantum ecosystem while exploring a practical research path for health.”

The project will be led by Dr. Dardo Goyeneche of the Faculty of Physics at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Dr. Goyeneche is the founder and director of QuDIT, the Quantum Development of Information Theory group at UC, which brings together more than 20 students working on quantum information theory and quantum computing. He also directs Project QuAntü, Chile’s first universal quantum computer initiative, currently under construction since December 2025 at the UC Faculty of Physics. The team also includes Dr. Daniel Uzcátegui from Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción (UCSC), Chile, whose research at the interface between machine learning and quantum information theory provides a key bridge between the two core domains of this collaboration.

“This project connects fundamental quantum research with an important biomedical challenge,” said Dr. Goyeneche. “By working with Classiq and collaborators in Chile and Brazil, we are creating a regional platform for quantum machine learning in health, while giving researchers experience with modern quantum software engineering workflows used internationally in research and industry.”

The research team will use Classiq’s quantum software platform to model, synthesize and optimize quantum convolutional neural networks, variational quantum classifiers and quantum kernel methods. Selected algorithms will be simulated on NVIDIA AI infrastructure, executed on IonQ quantum hardware, and benchmarked against classical machine learning approaches using standard computer vision metrics.

The collaboration aligns with Chile’s National Strategy for Quantum Technologies 2025–2035, a recently launched government initiative aimed at strengthening the country’s quantum ecosystem and expanding national capabilities in advanced computing, secure communications and scientific innovation. The project also supports UC’s efforts to expand quantum computing research and education as part of the Faculty of Physics’ 2025–2029 strategic plan.

About Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (UC Chile) is one of Latin America’s leading research universities, dedicated to the creation and transfer of knowledge and to providing a values-based education rooted in its Catholic tradition. With rigorous academic standards and international best practices adopted from top universities worldwide, UC Chile maintains a permanent commitment to excellence in service to the Church and society.

Ranked 116th globally and first in Chile by the QS World University Rankings 2026, UC Chile also leads the country in invention patent applications filed by academic institutions, reflecting a strong focus on research, innovation, and technology transfer. The University is made up of 18 faculties, which include 26 schools and institutes, 7 interdisciplinary institutes, the UC College program, and the Villarrica Campus, together covering all areas of knowledge.

About Classiq

Classiq is the leading quantum computing software company, providing the technology that makes it practical for enterprises and researchers to access and harness quantum computing. Classiq’s quantum software engineering platform transforms high-level functional models into optimized, hardware-ready quantum circuits automatically. This enables teams to develop algorithms faster, optimize them for cost and performance, and make quantum applications usable sooner, without deep hardware expertise.

Through partnerships with global leaders in quantum cloud computing, including major hyperscalers and hardware providers, Classiq ensures that customers including Rolls Royce, Comcast, The BMW Group, Intesa Sanpaolo and many others, can design once and deploy anywhere. Its synthesis technology workflow enables organizations to produce scalable, efficient quantum code that accelerates research and reduces execution cost.

Source: Classiq

The post Classiq and UC Chile Launch Quantum-AI Project for Biomedical Imaging appeared first on HPCwire.

Senate Republicans passed funding for the Department of Homeland Security's immigration enforcement agencies following a "vote-a-rama." The measure didn't ban the administration's "anti-weaponization" fund.

Claims of discrimination at UCLA and Yale show how laws meant to foster inclusion are being used for the opposite

The Department of Justice’s civil rights division was once known as the crown jewel of the agency, but under Trump it has become just another tool of this administration’s politicized and racialized attacks targeting Black, Latino and other people of color. The latest examples are the sham findings of discrimination the division issued against the medical schools of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Yale University for admitting high-achieving Black and Hispanic students. The administration is cynically wielding its anti-discrimination authority to tear down civil rights advances at the cost of equal educational opportunity.

In its findings, the justice department claimed the grades and test scores of Black and Hispanic admitted applicants were less competitive than those of white and Asian admits and said the schools intentionally discriminated against white and Asian applicants. But the justice department’s conclusions overstate the difference in scores between applicants and ignore other applicant data completely, including student transcripts, letters of recommendations and essays. The differences among GPAs and test scores – one standard deviation or less – were too small to be legally or statistically significant and may be explained by random factors unrelated to race. Comparatively, two standard deviations is the commonly accepted threshold that federal courts and social scientists consider statistically significant in racial discrimination cases.

ReNika Moore is director of the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program

CBS California Investigates reviewed online shopping carts at three major retailers selected randomly. We found prices fluctuated significantly over a period of weeks, making it difficult to determine when the best price is.

Seven Republican senators joined Democrats to block Fisa extension amid disquiet over nomination of Bill Pulte

• US politics live – latest updates

Seven Republican senators joined Democrats early on Friday to block the extension of a powerful government surveillance program, a rebuke to Donald Trump for choosing an inexperienced ally as the country’s top intelligence official.

The renewal had been in question amid bipartisan concern over the US president’s appointment of Bill Pulte, a major Republican donor and heir to a home construction fortune, to serve as acting director of national intelligence.

1.2.2 final release is now out.

Average tour earnings down 45%, with nearly three-fifths of musicians saying touring in Europe is no longer viable

More than a quarter of British musicians have lost all their work in the European Union since 2021, according to new research.

The report by European Movement UK, a cross-party campaign group advocating closer UK-EU relations, found that nearly half of British musicians had experienced a reduced amount of work in the EU since 2021, while more than a quarter had stopped working there altogether.

Cannabis has been legal for medical purposes in New York state since 2016, and it became legal for recreational use since then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed legislation in 2021.

Coffee, on the other hand, has been legal for centuries. 

Has cannabis use in New York state caught up to coffee in just a couple years?

That’s what John Kagia, acting executive director for the New York’s Office of Cannabis Management, said in an April 2 interview with Politico, for an article marking the law’s fifth anniversary.

"The number of New Yorkers who consume cannabis daily or near daily is the same as the number of New Yorkers who buy coffee from a coffee shop daily or near daily — 1.2-plus million people," Kagia said.

Kagia’s office told PolitiFact New York that the 1.2 million figure came from the New York State Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, an annual telephone survey of adults developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The survey found that in New York, 6.7% of adults aged 21 or older reported consuming cannabis daily or near daily. 

Applying that 6.7% figure to New York’s population of slightly over 20 million, and adjusting for the percentage of the population that is 21 or over, puts the figure at roughly 1.2 million.

But what about coffee drinkers? That’s less clear.

Kagia’s office told PolitiFact New York that they were relying on a 2024 study conducted by Drive Research that found that 8% of Americans said they buy coffee from a coffee shop every day. 

"It’s in the same ballpark as the percentage of Americans who grab a coffee on the way to work each day," said the Office of Cannabis Management’s chief medical officer, Dr. June Chin.

But that study does not address whether New Yorkers’ coffee behavior matches the nation. If the percentage holds for New Yorkers, that means about 1.6 million buy coffee outside their home nearly every day.

Other research suggests that consumption of store-bought cups of coffee is higher than cannabis use.

A 2018 Siena College Research Institute poll found that 48% of New York state adults said they drink coffee daily (42%) or five or six days a week (6%).

That’s a rate seven times higher than daily cannabis users, according to the more recent survey. However, the Siena College question did not ask the respondents whether they "buy coffee from a coffee shop" — as Kagia’s comparison phrased it — or made their own cup at home.

In June 2025, the publication Coffee Intelligence reported that 70% of customers were brewing their own cups at home. If that percentage held for New York state, then about 14% of the Siena poll’s respondents would be drinking coffee from outside their house five to seven times a week.

That would be about 2.8 million New Yorkers, or more than twice the level of daily or near-daily cannabis use reported in the CDC-designed survey.

Separately, the National Coffee Association found a higher percentage; the group’s 2026 national study found that 66% of Americans drink coffee daily. Using the same percentage of people buying their coffee at stores as Coffee Intelligence found, that would be nearly 20% buying coffee every day, or about 4 million, more than three times as high as the rate for cannabis.

"While there may be some estimates out there, this seems like a very difficult thing to calculate," said Mason Tvert, a marijuana rights activist and a partner at the consulting firm Strategies 64 in Denver. 

Ironically, Tvert said, the cannabis-coffee comparison has a long history among anti-cannabis activists, of which Kagia is not one. Cannabis critics, Tvert said, frequently claim that jurisdictions have more marijuana stores or dispensaries than Starbucks outlets as a way of saying cannabis sales have spiraled out of control.

Our ruling

Kagia said, "The number of New Yorkers who consume cannabis daily or near daily is the same as the number of New Yorkers who buy coffee from a coffee shop daily or near daily — 1.2-plus million people."

A 2024 survey showed that about 1.2 million New Yorkers age 21 and older consume cannabis daily or near daily. But the estimates of New Yorkers who buy coffee daily are all higher, some significantly so. In addition, estimating New Yorkers’ coffee patterns is tricky because most data is national, not state-level.

The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, so we rate it Mostly False.

IAIFI enters its second phase with increased funding, broader ambitions, and a growing community at the frontier of AI and fundamental physics.

June 5, 2026 — The MIT-led Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions (IAIFI) has received renewed support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for an additional five years, increasing annual funding from $4 million to $4.98 million. The renewal marks a new phase for IAIFI, which has spent its first five years building a research model and an interdisciplinary community around a central premise: that AI can open new ways of doing physics, while physics can help mold better AI systems.

Launched in 2020 as part of the National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes program, IAIFI brings together researchers from MIT, along with Harvard, Northeastern, Tufts, and Boston universities. Its work has shown that machine learning can accelerate discovery in physics, while insights from physics can make AI systems more principled and interpretable.

“From the beginning, IAIFI has been built around a two-way street: AI enabling better physics, and physics enabling better AI,” says Jesse Thaler, IAIFI’s director and a professor of physics at MIT. “We have seen this virtuous cycle play out across multiple areas of physics and AI over the past five years. The exchange is producing not just new results, but genuinely new ways of doing science.”

Research Across Physics and AI

IAIFI’s research spans particle physics, nuclear physics, astrophysics, and foundational AI, with many advances emerging from collaborations across those areas.

In particle physics, IAIFI researchers have developed AI techniques to handle the immense data rates from the Large Hadron Collider in real-time, helping turn a firehose of collision data into actionable physics. In nuclear physics, IAIFI researchers are using AI-based generative methods to model the interactions of quarks and gluons in lattice quantum chromodynamics, creating new ways to study the structure of matter from first principles. In astrophysics, machine learning is being used to uncover new cosmic phenomena and improve the sensitivity of the MIT-led LIGO gravitational-wave experiment.

At the same time, ideas from physics are informing the development of new AI methods. IAIFI researchers are developing learning algorithms and new model architectures that embed physics knowledge and best practices — including symmetries, geometric structures, exactness guarantees, and statistical methodologies — directly into neural networks, producing systems that are more reliable, interpretable, and data-efficient.

“AI has begun to transform how physicists tackle some of the field’s most challenging problems,” says Mike Williams, interim director of IAIFI and a professor of physics at MIT. “More importantly, it is starting to expand the frontier of what problems we can realistically address, making it possible to pursue questions that were once completely beyond our reach.”

Training the Next Generation

A defining feature of IAIFI is its investment in people. The IAIFI Postdoctoral Fellows program supports early-career scientists pursuing research at the intersection of physics and AI, pairing each fellow with mentors in both domains and fostering collaboration across institutions.

Eight fellows have completed the program to date. Three have secured faculty positions; others have taken research roles at leading AI companies or joined startups, reflecting how broadly the skills cultivated at IAIFI translate.

“The IAIFI Fellowship shows what can happen when early-career scientists are given the freedom and support to work across traditional boundaries,” says Phiala Shanahan, IAIFI’s interim deputy director and a professor of physics at MIT. “Our fellows aren’t just contributing to physics or to AI separately — they are helping shape a growing field at the intersection.”

IAIFI’s annual PhD Summer School has become a focal point for the growing community of “centaur scientists” with expertise in both physics and AI. For the 2026 edition, the program received nearly 600 applications for roughly 100 in-person spots, with about 300 additional participants expected to join virtually. Previous participants have strongly recommended the school to their peers for its combination of lectures, hands-on tutorials, coding sprints, and networking events.

At MIT, IAIFI has helped shape new educational pathways, including an interdisciplinary PhD program in physics, statistics, and data science — a collaboration between the Department of Physics and the Statistics and Data Science Center — which has awarded 20 doctoral degrees since 2021. IAIFI members Phil Harris and Isaac Chuang have also developed a course on computational data science in physics, offered both on campus (Course 8.16) and as a free online course through MITx.

A Growing Community

Beyond its core research and training programs, IAIFI convenes researchers through its annual summer workshop, which will be held this year at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing building. The institute also engages the broader public through collaborations with the MIT Museum, the Museum of Science in Boston, hackathons, and widely viewed online content exploring AI and physics.

“IAIFI shows what becomes possible when researchers in physics, computation, statistics, and data science organize around shared scientific questions,” says Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics. “That kind of sustained, cross-disciplinary collaboration is essential to the future of scientific discovery.”

IAIFI is hosted in the Laboratory of Nuclear Science at MIT, led by Director Jesse Thaler (currently on sabbatical), Interim Director Mike Williams, Interim Deputy Director Phiala Shanahan, and Managing Director Marisa LaFleur, along with steering committee members Lisa Barsotti, Isaac Chuang, Will Detmold, Bill Freeman, Phil Harris, Lina Necib, Tess Smidt, and Marin Soljacic (and steering committee members from other IAIFI universities).

Looking Ahead

As a member of the National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes program, IAIFI is part of a nationwide effort to advance AI-driven discovery and innovation.

“The connections among the NSF AI Institutes have been as valuable as the work within them and continue to grow,” says Marisa LaFleur, IAIFI’s managing director. “We’re sharing management strategies and resources for training, community building, and collaboration that make the whole network stronger.”

For IAIFI, the renewed funding is an opportunity to push deeper into what the institute calls the “physics of AI” — using physical reasoning, physical challenges, and physical tools not just to apply AI, but to understand and improve it. That agenda, along with a growing community of researchers trained to work across disciplines, is what drives the institute’s next phase.

“The first phase of IAIFI established the model: interdisciplinary research, early-career talent, and a dynamic community, organized around the idea that AI and physics make each other stronger,” Thaler says. “Now we have the foundation — and the entrepreneurial spirit of our centaur scientists — to push that model into new territory and raise our ambitions.”

Source: MIT News

The post NSF Renews IAIFI Funding to Advance AI-Driven Physics Research appeared first on HPCwire.

EU’s Maroš Šefčovič says summit will ‘probably’ be in July but sources say it could be put back as talks deadlocked

• UK politics live – latest updates

The EU has said Keir Starmer’s upcoming summit “resetting” the UK-Europe relationship may still happen in July, amid growing fears it could be postponed to the autumn as talks over youth mobility remain deadlocked.

“The summit is supposed to be mid-July but at the moment it could be put back to after the summer,” said one EU diplomat.

Republican states rebrand June as ‘nuclear family month’ or ‘fidelity month’ in latest attack on LGBTQ+ communities

June is widely marked as gay Pride month – when LGBTQ+ communities march to protest discrimination and celebrate their identities in the month that the modern US gay liberation movement was born out of the 1969 uprising at New York’s Stonewall Inn – although not so much in certain Republican-led states this year.

Some Republican governors have suddenly come up with alternative labels for the month, which both supporters and opponents view as counterprogramming.

Downing Street says it does not share state department’s view, which Lib Dems condemn as flagrant interference

• UK politics live – latest updates

No 10 has dismissed the Trump administration’s criticism of “two-tier policing” in the UK as the US state department offered condolences to the family of the murdered teenager Henry Nowak.

Downing Street said it did not recognise the state department’s position, echoing the justice secretary, David Lammy, who had earlier said it did not chime with his experience.

June 5, 2026 — The BSC AI Factory of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) is extending the technological and scientific capabilities and resources of this infrastructure across the entire territory with the launch of five sector hubs (nodes).

This initiative is promoted by the Ministry for Digital Transformation and the Civil Service of the Government of Spain, through the State Secretariat for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence. It involves a strategic alliance of five technology centers that jointly support the activity through cross-cutting and collaborative actions, serving the entire strategic sector nationwide.

These centers are: TECNALIA from the Basque Country, coordinator of the network, which will drive the Health, Pharma, and Biotech hub; Fundación CTIC from Asturias, responsible for the Agriculture, Climate, and Blue Economy hub; Eurecat in Catalonia, for the Communication and Media sector hub; Instituto Tecnológico de Galicia (ITG), to promote the Energy hub; and the Instituto Tecnológico de Informática (ITI) from Valencia, which will manage the Finance and Legal hub. These centers are officially recognized by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under the RED CERVERA program, which highlights centers with high scientific and technological capacity and R&D experience.

To this end, the BSC has awarded the creation of these sector hubs to the UTE AI4ES for 2.7 million euros, which works in a coordinated manner to develop and promote technologies based on AI and data.

AI Adoption in Strategic Sectors and SMEs

The hubs are designed to support and accelerate AI adoption, development, and application of artificial intelligence in strategic sectors of the Spanish economy, especially among SMEs and representative organizations of each sector. They aim to achieve a nationwide impact by energizing the ecosystem virtually and through various events that will take place in different cities. Specifically, work will be carried out across five hubs specialized in distinct strategic sectors: health, pharma & biotech; energy; agriculture, climate & blue economy (marine and coastal industries); finance & legal; and communication & media.

The project’s objectives are to systematically analyze the needs and potential of each sector regarding AI, adapting actions on an annual and strategic basis; to promote the creation of applied AI solutions with a real impact on the processes, products, or services of the corresponding sector; and to connect sector stakeholders with the capabilities of the BSC Artificial Intelligence Factory, including its technological and scientific resources.

The first event will take place on June 16—an online workshop open to all stakeholders and companies from the various strategic sectors. It will serve to introduce the program and host a participatory dynamic to identify the initial sector challenges and needs to address. A hybrid event is also scheduled to take place in Barcelona before the end of the year, featuring online streaming and networking workshops for SMEs.

Source: BSC-CNS

The post BSC AI Factory Launches Five Sector Hubs to Expand AI Adoption Across Spain appeared first on HPCwire.

Chemists have a scale problem. It is estimated that chemical space contains as many as 10^60 small organic molecules, however, only a tiny fraction of that have ever been studied in detail. Finding useful new molecules for batteries, materials and other applications remains a slow and labor-intensive process that often relies on a combination of lab experiments and computational screening. Even using modern computing resources, exploring more than a small portion of that space is difficult.

At TPC26, University of Michigan PhD student Anoushka Bhutani discussed one possible way to speed up that search and overcome the scale problem. 

Her talk focused on MIST – a family of large molecular models trained on billions of chemical structures and designed to predict a wide range of molecular properties. The goal with MIST is to help researchers point out the promising candidates before committing significant simulation or experimental resources. The real-world applications include everything from battery electrolytes to fragrance design.

Bhutani’s presentation highlighted how advances in large-scale computing and data availability are beginning to change how researchers explore the chemical space. This is making it possible to evaluate far larger numbers of candidate molecules than was previously practical.

The largest version of MIST was trained on roughly 2 billion molecules and contains about 1.8 billion parameters. With that scale in the context, Bhutani also talked about the cost of building the models. 

“Training a foundation model is an extremely computationally quite expensive,” said Bhutani. “And we wanted to make sure that we were using the compute we had been given as optimally as possible. So we turned to neural scaling laws. However, neural scaling laws only account for the amount of data you’re training on and the number of parameters your model has.” 

Bhutani explained, “Model performance is also sensitive to many other hyperparameters, such as learning rate or the depth of the model. So we added penalty terms to account for these. And this reduced the need for full factorial sweep over all possible hyperparameters which was done in prior scaling studies. In addition to this, we used Bayesian parameterization to fit the models, which gave us robust uncertainty estimates.”

To avoid wasting compute on extensive tuning runs, Bhutani and her team modified existing scaling law approaches to account for factors beyond model and dataset size, such as the effects of hyperparameters. The team also used Bayesian parameterization to guide the process. 

Those changes reduced model development costs by roughly 10x. For academic groups trying to build large scientific models on tight budgets, that sort of impact may be just as important as the applications themselves. 

The first application Bhutani highlighted was battery research. Her team focused on lithium-air batteries: a technology that has long attracted interest because of its potential for extremely high energy density.

The challenge with them is finding electrolyte materials that can survive inside the battery. Both the oxygen-related reaction products and the lithium metal anode are highly reactive, making the search for stable molecules difficult. 

“These are attractive because they have extremely high energy density, because they use oxygen from the air as a cathodic reaction, so they don’t need to store the extra mass of the cathode,” emphasized Bhutani. “However, it’s also very hard to find electrolytes for which can be used in these batteries because both the oxygen intermediates formed during the reaction and the lithium metal anode are highly reactive.”

The team used MIST to fine-tune models to predict a range of properties relevant to electrolyte design. This included stability, safety and phase behavior. Candidate molecules were screened against multiple requirements at the same time. This was more efficient compared to evaluating one property at a time.

Bhutani shared that the workflow identified 139 potential electrolyte candidates after running on eight H100 GPUs for around eight hours. The results show how large molecular models can help narrow enormous chemical search spaces before researchers move to more expensive simulations. 

The most unexpected results from the research came from olfaction – the sense of smell. This was a problem that Bhutani described as difficult because datasets are sparse and subjective. They are also often disconnected from molecular structure. Two molecules can look nearly identical but smell completely different – and structurally unrelated molecules can produce similar scents.

Even with those challenges, MIST performed well when it was optimized. More specifically, when it was fine-tuned for scent prediction, it was able to identify meaningful relationships between different scent categories. It was able to group similar smells together even though the task is notoriously difficult. The findings also pointed to deeper structural patterns that resemble those seen in neuroscience research on how humans perceive odors.

Bhutani’s presentation at this year’s TPC revealed how large-scale molecular models are beginning to move beyond prediction and toward discovery. This could go a long way in helping researchers navigate vast and challenging regions of chemical space that are impractical to explore through simulation or experimentation alone.

The post Foundation Models Offer a New Way to Explore Chemical Space appeared first on HPCwire.

Protesters say Mikie Sherrill has failed to address the dire hunger and labor strike at the immigration detention center

A few dozen protesters rallied outside the New Jersey statehouse in Trenton on Monday afternoon. They carried handmade signs with messages like “U made it worse” and “Gov Sherrill, stop lying about Delaney Hall”. One led a collective chant that summed up the rally’s mood: “Hey, Mikie, WTF?”

The target of their ire: the governor, Mikie Sherrill. Protesters say the newly elected Democratic governor has failed to adequately address the dire situation at the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark, where at least 300 detainees are on a hunger and labor strike.

I’ve mentioned it before, but Chris Siebenmann is basically the Raymond Chen of the UNIX world, and today he’s filling that role perfectly once again.

I recently read Simon Tatham’s Nitpicking the shell history scene in Tron: Legacy, where one thing that surprised Tatham was the film using ‘login -n root‘ to become root instead of ‘su‘. This surprised me because I found that perfectly ordinary, and this turns up both a bit of Unix history and a difference between modern Unixes.

Plain ‘su‘ can let you become another user, including root, but what it explicitly doesn’t do by default is create a new login shell for that user. If you do ‘su root‘, the new root shell normally inherits most of your environment, your current directory, and so on. Sometimes this is what you want and sometimes you really want a new login environment, and originally in Unix how you got the latter was to run ‘login‘ from your existing shell session (and this meant that login was setuid root, like su).

↫ Chris Siebenmann

Unsurprisingly, this distinction has persisted to this day in various UNIX-like operating systems, but in different ways. Some maintain the explicit distinction, while others have more or less standardised on using su for both use cases. It’s an interesting bit of UNIX archeology.

Government figures show unemployment rate at 4.3% amid rising inflation and economic uncertainty from Iran war

US employers added 172,000 jobs in May while the country’s unemployment rate held steady at 4.3%, a sign of a resilient labor market despite rising inflation and economic uncertainty brought on by continued conflict in the Middle East.

Economists initially predicted there would be about 80,000 new jobs and a steady unemployment rate of 4.3%. Job figures for March and April were also revised up 29,000 and 64,000, respectively, a 93,000 boost compared with initial figures.

The FDA is moving ahead with a safety study of the abortion pill mifepristone, a senior FDA official confirmed to CBS News, a step that could create a path for the Trump administration to restrict access to the medication.

It remains unclear how close the U.S. and Iran are to striking a deal to end the Iran war amid continued hostilities between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah.

Commentary: Google assumes all Android users are wealthy and sexy. Nice, if true.

The bipartisan Roadless Rule is under fire. It’s just one way Trump could make our public lands unrecognizable

Modern roads in the United States will last for decades. And yet the damage they cause in our national forests is immediate.

Since 2001, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule has protected more than 58m acres of national forests from development, barring road construction and timber harvests. The policy came to be with huge bipartisan support; almost 2 million people submitted comments on it, the majority of whom championed the protections.

Charles F Sams III (Cayuse and Walla Walla) was director of the National Park Service from 2021 to 2025. He is now director of Indigenous programs at the Yale Center for Environmental Justice

Review detects ‘forever chemicals’ in many of the state’s tested streams and rivers, including drinking water sources

Around half of California waterways tested by regulators are contaminated with pesticides considered Pfas, “forever chemicals”, a new analysis of state and federal records shows, highlighting a risk in the substances’ wide use that is only beginning to come into focus.

The pesticides are linked to a range of health problems, including cancer, and the review is the first to systematically check for the dangerous substances in streams and rivers, which include drinking water sources.

Powerful, rugged video doorbells don't have to empty your bank account. We've tested these budget models and like what they've got.

Cybersecurity experts say outdated router security protocols might be exposing your entire home network. Here's what to do.

Former student Almunthir Daqamah, 21, due to appear in court on Friday while campus safety officer is in stable condition in hospital

A man has been charged with attempted murder after a staff member was shot with a crossbow at the University of Surrey.

Almunthir Daqamah, 21, a Saudi national, has been charged with attempted murder, possession of an offensive weapon, two counts of possession of a bladed article and possession of class B drugs, Surrey police said.

In a CBS News interview, White House border czar Tom Homan defended conditions at the Delaney Hall ICE detention center, amid intense protests over the New Jersey facility. "

President Trump, a native New Yorker and self-described Knicks fan, said he was invited to attend a Knicks playoff game by the team's owner James Dolan, who has donated to his political campaigns.

Former attorney general says expected replacement, Todd Blanche, was in charge of controversial process. Plus: why are US consumers so angry?

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Good morning. Appearing before the House oversight and reform committee, the former attorney general Pam Bondi told lawmakers that Todd Blanche, the man Donald Trump has lined up to replace her, was “in charge” of the US Department of Justice’s controversial handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case. She also said she was “not certain of the extent” that Trump knew about the crimes of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell before they became public.

In her opening statement, Bondi defended the justice department’s handling of the records under her leadership and tried to distance herself from the release and review of the files, saying she did not “lead every aspect” of the DoJ’s effort, but that it was Blanche who oversaw it. If formally nominated by Trump to be attorney general on a permanent basis, Blanche would require confirmation from the US Senate.

Why is the release of the files under scrutiny? Several lawmakers as well as survivors of Epstein’s abuse, have criticized some of the department’s actions and raised concerns over certain redactions and the disclosure of sensitive personal information in the files. Bondi acknowledged “there were redaction errors” in the release, but added: “Since day one of this process, this department has been committed to accountability and transparency.”

What are the latest developments in Ukraine? In his first public letter to Vladimir Putin since the 2022 invasion, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has called for face-to-face negotiations. Acknowledging shifting US priorities while Washington remained focused on the Iran war, the Ukrainian president said it would be wrong to simply wait for the Trump administration to step in. The proposal comes as Ukraine regains some battlefield leverage through improved long-range strike capabilities, even as Moscow intensifies its deadly aerial campaign across the country.

The wing-back’s advanced positioning paid off against Senegal. More impressive play at the World Cup could go far for the US’s hopes and his transfer prospects

In the sixth minute of last Sunday’s friendly against Senegal, the US men’s national team were midway through what became a 20-pass sequence of sustained possession. Beginning with a throw-in along the left touchline, just inside the opponent’s half, the World Cup co-hosts tried to break down the visitors to no avail, eventually recirculating back to the center-backs to survey their next route.

Amid all that, Sergiño Dest stayed upfield to offer an outlet if a line-breaking window presented itself. Even when lined up as a nominal defender – he has logged most of his 38 international caps as a right-back or right wing-back – the 25-year-old has posed a threat with his determined dribbling and eagerness to join the attack.

My father joined the program when I was eight months old and retired 46 years later. He would be encouraging journalists at CBS to speak out

The end of the 60 Minutes broadcast as we know it has sickened millions of longtime viewers, colleagues, and all of us who are offended and threatened by our current administration and its cronies’ assaults on the first amendment. The news of Scott Pelley’s firing hits particularly hard. He spoke of “risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast”.

Having literally grown up with that broadcast – my father, Morley Safer, joined the program when I was eight months old and retired 46 years later – I am acutely aware of the costs of that devotion. 60 Minutes, particularly in its early days, demanded commitments of time and travel that were keenly felt at home.

Sarah Safer is the daughter of Morley Safer, who was a 60 Minutes correspondent for 46 years

School of the Art Institute of Chicago professor put under investigation after a student complained about a case study

A tenured art therapy professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) was suspended from teaching and placed under investigation following a student’s complaint about an assigned case study that mentioned violence against Palestinians.

Savneet Talwar, a faculty member with the school’s art therapy and counseling program, assigned the case study in April to a class on the cultural dimensions of therapy. The assignment asked students to develop an ethical treatment plan for a hypothetical queer, Muslim woman living in the US.

Detainees say they’re given ‘rotten’ water and denied meals for not signing papers in English that they don’t understand

Detainees at Florida’s notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail said guards were denying them food and fresh water on Thursday until they signed documents presented to them in English that they did not understand.

In an audio recording of a telephone call to an immigration advocacy group heard by the Guardian, more than half a dozen detainees alleged that the water given to them over the last three days was “rotten” and containing mosquito larvae, in an apparent attempt to pressure them to sign.

No more excuses: These workouts are at your fingertips and can be used at any time.

New York City’s new commissioner of consumer and worker protection is launching an “aggressive” campaign to fight junk fees and deceptive practices

• People in the US: tell us about your difficult consumer experiences

New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s top consumer watchdog has one gripe about New Yorkers – he would like them to complain more. “We get about 30,000 complaints a year,” said Samuel AA Levine, New York City’s new commissioner of consumer and worker protection. “I’d really like to get the number up.”

From downtown Manhattan, he has renewed a war on junk fees and deceptive subscriptions that he started in Washington DC as the Federal Trade Commission’s consumer protection director during the Biden presidency, banned hotels’ hidden charges, and cracked down on delivery companies’ “design tricks” that lower wages and predatory debt collection. Since January, his office has sued self-storage companies and won millions from Uber Eats and Amazon.

The National Transportation Safety Board released its preliminary report on a United Airlines plane that struck a light pole on the New Jersey Turnpike in May.

More than 1 million people advised to evacuate homes amid 80mph winds and heavy rain

Typhoon Jangmi (also known as Typhoon No 6) moved northwards over the course of this week. From Okinawa to mainland Japan, prolonged and heavy rainfall led to landslide warnings and the flooding of rivers, with Japan issuing level 4 warnings for some rivers, signalling a risk of overflowing. This level is high enough for municipalities to issue evacuation orders. Three-hourly rainfall totals on Wednesday reached 105mm in Chiyoda, Tokyo, which was a record high for the month. Sustained wind speeds of 80mph (130kph) were recorded on Monday – making it a category 1 typhoon – bringing damage and disruption to businesses, transport, infrastructure and the environment.

By Wednesday, 23 people had been injured, 17 of whom were in Okinawa. The typhoon damaged 57 homes and led to 60,000 homes losing electricity. In addition to this, 1.52 million people were advised to evacuate by authorities. The typhoon damaged the exterior wall of Himeji Castle, a Unesco world heritage site in western Japan. The maximum recorded wind speed at Himeji was 56mph, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency. The typhoon has now weakened into a tropical depression and has moved eastwards, away from the islands.

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

Rules against power: Does the world need a new economic alliance to balance the US and China? Independent Thinking podcast Audio sseth.drupal@c… 5 June 2026

In this week’s episode, our experts discuss Chatham House’s latest report: Saving global economic governance from the ‘Trump shock’.

Would the world benefit from a new international alliance to stop China and the US from undermining the global rules we all depend on – a new ‘third pole’?

That’s the conclusion of a new Chatham House report published this week. How would an economic bloc like this work? Who could build it? And how would China and the US – even post-Trump – react to such a challenge to their power?

Laurel Rapp, director of our US and North America Programme, talks over an audacious plan for a new world order with the report’s author and director of our Global Economy and Finance Programme, Creon Butler. They are joined by director of our Europe and Russia and Eurasia Programmes, Grégoire Roos.

Read our report: Saving global economic governance from the ‘Trump shock’. 

About Independent Thinking

Independent Thinking is a weekly international affairs podcast hosted by our director Bronwen Maddox, in conversation with leading policymakers, journalists and Chatham House experts providing insight on the latest international issues.

More ways to listen: Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Explore our other Chatham House podcasts.

Experts say dismantling the ocean observation system will ‘severely degrade’ the accuracy of weather predictions

The Trump administration’s plan to dismantle an ocean observation system vital to understanding the climate crisis and marine ecosystems would “severely degrade” the accuracy of weather predictions and El Niño forecasts, with economic consequences for the US, European and American scientists have warned.

Decommissioning the US system, which plays a major part in a global ocean observation network, would lead to a massive increase in error in the annual estimates of ocean heating rates, according to research published last month.

Israel and its lobby will use section 224 of the National Defense Authorization Act to bind the US to a state that has gone rogue

Congress is considering legislation that would embed Israel’s military deeply within the US military-industrial complex. Stunned by the cratering of public support for Israeli policies in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank and towards Iran, Israel’s advocates are frantically seeking to preserve and even escalate US support for the Jewish state in ways that do not rely on defense of its policies or permit scrutiny of the manipulations involved.

Politically, this means avoiding public discussion of Israeli policies in Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank or Iran and disguising the sources of massive amounts of money pouring into election races to defeat candidates raising questions about US support for Israel. The proposed legislation shows what this means bureaucratically.

If Eric Murphy loses his primary election on June 9, he believes he already knows one reason why.

Last year, the North Dakota state representative, a Republican, tried to expand the window of pregnancy in which women could access abortion. The state legislature had banned it for almost everyone from the moment of conception.

Tied up in court, the ban hadn’t yet gone into effect. But Murphy wanted to lock in a less restrictive law, making abortion accessible up to 15 weeks and even later for women whose doctors deemed it a medical necessity.

To convince his fellow legislators, he read out loud from two ProPublica stories about women in Texas who died without lifesaving care. “Physicians felt compelled to follow the law,” he said in a hearing, “and both women died so that an inane law could be followed.”

A conservative colleague had warned him not to file the bill, Murphy told ProPublica, recalling the man’s words: “I can no longer protect you from who’s going to come after you.”

There was some truth to that sentiment.

At least four Republican state lawmakers who challenged severe abortion restrictions lost support from anti-abortion groups and key party allies and went on to lose primary elections, ProPublica found.

The blueprint in those races was remarkably similar. Opponents either embraced stricter abortion policies or avoided the issue altogether. Anti-abortion organizations campaigned against the incumbents, party endorsements shifted to their opponents and activists worked to turn out voters in low-participation primary elections.

In some of the races ProPublica examined, lawmakers who replaced abortion-ban reformers went on to support even stricter abortion legislation. In South Carolina, for instance, two new senators supported a bill to eliminate almost all exceptions to the state’s abortion ban. One provision of the bill would send women convicted of illegally terminating their pregnancies to jail.

Murphy is one of at least two Republican state lawmakers now facing a contested primary after trying to modify their states’ abortion restrictions. Richard Briggs, a state senator from Tennessee, is also fighting to keep his seat. In 2019, Briggs voted for the state’s so-called trigger law — a ban that would snap into place if the federal right to abortion was ever overturned.

But he had second thoughts after that actually happened. A cardiothoracic surgeon, Briggs realized the newly activated law didn’t provide adequate protections for patients having medical complications. “As a medical doctor, I drew the line,” he said in an interview. He introduced bills for a clearer medical exception and protection for doctors who intervened in cases where a fatal fetal anomaly risked the mother’s health.

The latter bill failed and now serves as ammunition for the challenger vying for his seat in the state’s Aug. 6 primary. “My opponent consistently works to weaken Tennessee’s pro life laws,” Kent Morrell says on his campaign website, noting that Tennessee Right to Life had revoked its endorsement of Briggs.

Murphy, who teaches biomedical sciences at the University of North Dakota’s medical school, ultimately did not succeed at reforming the state’s ban. His bill failed 87-6, and the state Supreme Court later reinstated the original ban, which forbids abortion from conception, with exceptions for rape and incest up to six weeks and to save the life of the mother.

The first time Murphy ran for election, his county’s Republican Party had endorsed him. Not this time. Instead, the party endorsed his two challengers, including Jill Chandler, the executive director of a “crisis pregnancy center” who believes abortion should be banned from conception.

She told ProPublica she happened to be present in the committee room when Murphy made the case for his bill. “To know that he was an endorsed Republican candidate from my district and one that I had voted for because of that endorsement was eye-opening,” she said. “I remember thinking, ‘This can never happen again.’”

It was not the first time either Briggs or Murphy had taken positions that aggravated members of their parties in legislatures that have taken sharp turns to the right. Murphy voted against book bans and private school vouchers. Briggs had urged the public to get COVID-19 shots and has said that medical expertise should trump politics in decisions that involve public health.

Briggs expressed confidence in his election chances; he feels that voters agree with the decisions he’s made and noted that his Republican colleague, Sen. Becky Duncan Massey, survived a primary challenge over her support for abortion-ban exceptions.

Murphy believes the “silent majority” supports the intent of his abortion bill, but primary races historically have low turnout. It could come down to a handful of votes, he said.

“I might lose an election over this,” Murphy said, “but would I rather win an election by not doing the right thing?”

The Fallen Reformers

Mary DuBuisson, a former state Republican representative in a suburb outside of New Orleans, considers herself passionately “pro-life.” Like Briggs, she voted for her state’s near-total abortion ban in 2019. Three years later, just before Louisiana’s trigger law was implemented, it came before the legislature again.

Recognizing that women would now have to live under the restriction, DuBuisson wanted to make sure victims of rape and incest could terminate their pregnancies. When her colleagues refused to include those exceptions, she became the only Republican to vote against the ban.

A year later, she caused a stir when she sponsored a bill that would have allowed women whose pregnancies were not viable to end them. “To force a woman to carry to term with zero chance of survival is heartless and cruel,” she said at the time.

She didn’t feel it would be controversial. Other Republican women in the House told her she was doing the right thing. But when it was time to vote, another female Republican state lawmaker made a motion that ultimately succeeded at killing the bill in committee. “I mean, I just couldn’t understand,” she said of all her colleagues. “What if this was you, your daughter or granddaughter?”

When she came up for reelection, her primary opponent latched onto her record. Brian Glorioso was an attorney she had handily defeated in 2018. He called her proposed legislation a leftist attempt to circumvent the state’s abortion ban and said any “pro-abortion” doctor would falsely deem a pregnancy nonviable in records just to perform the procedure.

She beat him in the Oct. 14, 2023, primary by 384 votes — not enough to avoid a runoff.

Then, he got some extra support.

On Oct. 16, Louisiana Right to Life told its followers this runoff was key. Glorioso was expected to have a 100% “pro-life” voting record, while DuBuisson’s was 77%.

On Oct. 27, the state’s new governor-elect, Republican Jeff Landry, endorsed him, citing issues other than abortion; he wouldn’t tell ProPublica whether DuBuisson’s record on it played a role. But Landry, who had defended the state’s ban as attorney general, made clear during his campaign that he was “an unwavering defender of life, especially in the face of adversity,” citing his 100% rating from a national anti-abortion group.

“I think it partially cost me my election,” DuBuisson said of her attempts to reform the ban.

History repeated itself the following year, this time in South Carolina.

Three state senators — all Republicans who consider themselves “pro-life” — worked across party lines to defeat an abortion bill that essentially banned the procedure from conception and eliminated rape and incest exceptions. At the time, the state allowed abortion up to 20 weeks.

Sens. Sandy Senn and Penry Gustafson spoke out against limitations on abortion access for victims of rape and incest. Sen. Katrina Shealy, who had the longest tenure for a woman in the state legislature, pushed for making abortion accessible up to 12 weeks and later for exceptions in cases involving rape, incest and fatal fetal anomalies. Ultimately, a six-week window with rape, incest and fatal fetal exceptions became law.

Amid the Statehouse showdown, they were nicknamed the “Sister Senators.” All lost their county GOP’s endorsement to their male opponents.

But the bigger repercussions came from anti-abortion groups that mobilized a multifront grassroots campaign against them. Students for Life Action announced that it generated “37,000 pieces of mail, almost 130,000 personal text messages, more than 51,000 phone calls and thousands of doors knocked” to unseat the trio.

“All three of them got voted out — every single one of them lost because of that decision,” said Dr. Matthew Clark, the executive director of Personhood South Carolina, which believes abortion shouldn’t exist at all and that women who have them should be prosecuted for murder.

Clark, an allergist and Presbyterian pastor, said his group’s desired legislation has a better chance to advance now that the Sister Senators have been replaced.

Matt Leber, who beat Senn, previously co-sponsored a bill as a member of the state House that would make abortion a crime equivalent to homicide. It failed to advance, and Leber withdrew his name as a co-sponsor amid a controversy surrounding it in 2023.

This legislative session, Leber and Carlisle Kennedy, who beat Shealy, supported a bill that carries misdemeanor criminal penalties for women seeking abortions, with jail time up to two years. Senate Bill 1095 passed with supermajority support out of a committee Leber sits on.

The bill died before the session, but watchers of abortion restrictions noticed it got further than any other similarly repressive legislation ever has.

A Fateful Disconnect

The outcomes do not neatly match public polling. Surveys in states such as South Carolina and Louisiana have found that many Republican voters support at least some exceptions to abortion bans, including in cases of rape or threats to a woman’s health.

But primary elections often draw only a small share of eligible voters, giving outsized influence to highly engaged activists and organized interest groups.

DuBuisson’s runoff drew about one-third of registered voters. Participation in the South Carolina primaries was lower still. Some races were decided on tiny margins; Senn lost hers by 33 votes.

The North Dakota GOP has moved further to the right on abortion in recent years, even as polling suggested the state’s restrictions were losing support from Republican voters. At its 2026 convention, the party passed a resolution rejecting any policies that “normalize” abortion.

North Dakota is one of the few states with a multimember system, where two representatives and one senator govern together in the same district. District 43, which Murphy currently represents, is one of the only purple districts in an otherwise deeply red state. It includes part of Grand Forks, a growing college town home to the University of North Dakota.

Murphy’s fellow representative, Democrat Zac Ista, told ProPublica he hadn’t been able to make a dent in this legislature. He announced he wouldn’t be seeking reelection, opening up an opportunity for a Republican takeover of the district.

Ista said the lack of support rallying around Murphy is due to his position on abortion, as well as culture-war legislation he refused to support. “I think it’s illustrative of that schism, where at this district level, Republicans are really trying to sort of press the most extreme conservative opinions,” Ista said.

Richard Glynn, the GOP county chair in Murphy’s district, had previously supported Murphy’s abortion bill. In written testimony, Glynn shared his experience hearing about young women performing illegal abortions when he was a freshman at the University of South Dakota in 1966. Four young women who were in sororities died from using metal hangers to terminate their pregnancies, he wrote.

“These deaths were viewed as preventable if these girls could have received competent care. Unfortunately, North Dakota is going down the same path with limited access to obstetric care that negatively impacts the health of the woman,” his letter said.

When reached by phone, Glynn said delegates in the county voted and Murphy had the least amount of votes, which is why he did not receive the county’s endorsement.

Glynn declined to answer more questions before hanging up on a reporter.

One of Murphy’s opponents, Mike Holmes, has drawn a lot of excitement — and an endorsement from Gov. Kelly Armstrong — for his expertise in energy technology and industrial development. The governor said Holmes understands “what it takes to keep North Dakota’s economy strong.” Holmes has been silent on abortion and didn’t respond to ProPublica’s requests for an interview.

Chandler, who touted her “respect for life” in a campaign mailer, is favored among anti-abortion groups. “It’s a pretty stark contrast,” said Bridget Turbide, executive director of North Dakota Right to Life, who called Murphy’s proposal “the most extreme pro-choice bill we’ve ever seen.”

Citizens Alliance of North Dakota, a conservative group that opposes abortion among other causes, paid for a mailer calling Chandler a “champion of family values.” The same group marked Murphy in “bad standing” in an online roster of legislators, questioning his alignment with North Dakota values.

Murphy’s third colleague who also represents District 43, Republican State Sen. Jeff Barta, campaigned alongside him in 2022 as part of a unified Republican ticket when the primary election was uncontested.

Asked about the upcoming race and the candidates, Barta pointed to Murphy’s proposal that would have expanded abortion access in North Dakota.

“Last session, he introduced House Bill 1488, which created a little divide there,” Barta said.

Barta said Murphy has also broken with the party on other issues.

“That probably opened the door for the third candidate to run,” Barta added. Had that not happened, Murphy would have made it to the general election without having to defend his spot on the ballot.

Before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, lawmakers taking such nuanced stands on abortion bans may not have risked a career death sentence, said abortion historian and law professor Mary Ziegler.

“The kind of incrementalism that Eric Murphy seems to be doing is something from a bygone era, where people were more pragmatic in the movement and not punished for it,” she said.

The post These Republican Lawmakers Challenged Abortion Bans. Then They Faced Backlash. appeared first on ProPublica.

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

The strictly voluntary order is intended to review artificial intelligence models that could pose risks to the US.

Hundreds of detained people launched a hunger and labor strike at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, over Memorial Day weekend to protest inhumane conditions at the immigration detention facility run by the for-profit company GEO Group. Protesters flocked to the scene to echo detainees’ pleas for release and better conditions — and were met with brutal tactics from federal, local, and state law enforcement officials, who beat, tear-gassed, and arrested protesters.

“Detainees are raising that they have no access to quality medical care, that they’re not getting needed medications,” Andrea Sáenz, a former federal appellate immigration judge who was fired by the Trump administration last year, tells The Intercept Briefing. “They don’t have enough food to eat. The food that they are getting is spoiled. They’re facing hostility and harassment and violence from the guards.”  

This week on the podcast, host Jessica Washington speaks to Sáenz and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior policy fellow at the American Immigration Council, about the conditions at the 1,000-bed jail and other detention centers across the country. The Trump administration has restricted members of Congress and state officials from oversight of federal immigration detention centers. “ICE doesn’t want people to see the way that they’re treating human beings in these facilities,” says Sáenz. 

Intercept reporter Noah Hurowitz, who covers federal law enforcement and immigration, was on the scene at Delaney Hall on Monday. He describes the violence that erupted outside of the facility between protesters and law enforcement officers.

“The ICE agents on the scene were quite willing to use violence at times against protesters,” says Hurowitz. “But from everything I saw, the Newark and New Jersey police were much more indiscriminate with their violence and much more willing to attack outright and fire tear gas and really put people in danger.”

Reichlin-Melnick says that the Trump administration’s war on immigrants should concern everyone. “We’re seeing every government database being turned into a tool of the mass deportation state, and that is something that impacts all Americans,” he adds, “because you cannot carry out a mass deportation of 4 percent of the U.S. population without fundamentally transforming the United States into more of a police state.” 

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept. 

Noah Hurowitz: And I’m Noah Hurowitz. I cover federal law enforcement and immigration at The Intercept. 

JW: Noah, you were outside Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, on Monday afternoon after dozens of protesters were arrested the night before after clashing with state and local police. Noah, what can you tell us about what went down and why protesters were out there in the first place?

NH: The current wave of protests outside Delaney Hall started around May 28, and it was called in solidarity with detainees inside the facility who were withholding labor and hunger striking, some of them, to protest really bad conditions inside the jail, including bad food, maggots in the food, inadequate medical care. There’s all sorts of complaints that we’re hearing from people inside. A wife of one of the hunger strikers called on local organizations to rally in solidarity.

Now, the way that it began was, for several days, there were protesters standing directly outside one of the entrances to Delaney Hall. And the way it would go for several nights was that basically after dark, the protesters would be standing along the entrance. And every time a car had to go in or out, the ICE agents who were standing outside — full kit, masks — would push out and try to clear the way for cars to come in or out.

That is usually when some of the more spectacular clashes that you may have seen took place. So they’d be swinging batons, they’d be hitting people with pepper sprays. It was pretty ugly, but it was this weird choreography of static, static, static — and then conflict when the ICE agents would attack, and then back to a sort of status quo.

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But when state and local police arrived on the scene and tried to secure the area around Delaney Hall, that’s when things got really ugly. So on the night of Friday, May 29, and really on the evening of Saturday, May 30, there were these widespread scenes of disorder as police came in with riot shields and gas masks and started firing tear gas.

A number of people were injured, including a freelance photographer for The Associated Press who suffered a pretty severe injury to her leg. Everyone that I spoke to said that as rough as ICE could be — and as daunting as the image of these masked guys just taking swings at protesters was — it really got so much more chaotic when state and local police got involved.

Now, Mayor Ras Baraka declared a curfew, which is ironic because Mayor Baraka was previously arrested protesting conditions at ICE, and he’s, from the beginning, taken a stance of what’s happening at Delaney Hall is unacceptable but protesters need to be peaceful. The way that was enforced was very not peaceful.

On Sunday night, there was a curfew imposed for 9 p.m., and they had also set up a frozen zone on the industrial corridor that Delaney sits. So they had set up police checkpoints about a half mile in either direction so that protesters couldn’t even get in front of the detention facility anymore.

On Sunday night, according to a number of my colleagues who were covering it that night and other reporting that I’ve seen, after 9 p.m., when the curfew was imposed, police began to kettle protesters. They began to surround them and prevent them from leaving, saying that they were now in violation of the curfew.

They let media leave for the most part if they were able to show credentials, but a handful of more citizen journalists were arrested that night. They held dozens of protesters and a handful of reporters in jail. After a certain point, they needed to be released on Monday afternoon.

So when I arrived on the scene, late on Monday afternoon, people were just starting to get released. It was a pretty tame scene. No one was able to get close to the facility. The police had set up these free-speech zones with several dozen protesters there with signs and megaphones. There were many dozens of police and a lot of media.

When 9 o’clock rolled around, most of the protesters started to filter out, with the exception of a handful of protesters who played this brief game of cat and mouse with the police. As police were advancing, they were backing up to the supposed “free-speech zone” about 500 yards away.

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There were no arrests that night that I saw. There was a number of Newark community leaders on the scene who were also trying to bring down the temperature, which protesters were not happy about because they felt like this was just an effort to diffuse things.

From what I saw, the ICE agents on the scene were quite willing to use violence at times against protesters in order to maintain that entrance. But from everything I saw, the Newark and New Jersey police were much more indiscriminate with their violence and much more willing to attack outright and fire tear gas and really put people in danger.

JW: You and I have both covered the aggressive and deadly tactics used by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis. Noah, how is what we’re seeing different in New Jersey than what we saw in Minneapolis or even Chicago last year? Or is this just a continuation of more of the same?

NH: I think it’s a continuation of what we saw in those other places with some notable differences. Minnesota and in Chicago, the police and the state and local officials there got a lot of flak from the Trump administration for speaking out against the ICE raids that were happening and for taking a step back.

Here, the rhetoric was there from the state and local officials. Both the mayor and the governor were speaking quite stridently against the alleged abuses at Delaney Hall and against the violence being used against protesters. But they also seemed a lot more willing to use their authority to diffuse the protests, which has led to a lot of criticism from protesters who were saying that they basically were trying to co-opt this protest, they were trying to prevent any problems for their own political calculations — that law and order were their first priority, rather than the lawless and lack of order behavior of ICE agents and of this privately operated detention facility.

JW: We’re going to get into all of that and much more in our next conversation. I speak with Andrea Sáenz, a senior counsel at Co-Counsel NYC, a nonprofit providing immigration legal services and training. She previously served as an appellate immigration judge with the Board of Immigration Appeals in the U.S. Department of Justice from 2021 to 2025.

Also joining us is Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior policy fellow at the American Immigration Council, where he works to break down the complex reality of immigration law and policy to the media, policymakers, and the general public. 

NH: Hell yeah, let’s get into it.

JW: Andrea and Aaron, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: Thank you for having us.

Andrea Sáenz: Thank you.

JW: Andrea, we just heard from my colleague Noah Hurowitz, who’s been reporting from Delaney Hall. Detainees have been holding hunger and labor strikes at the New Jersey detention center. What more can you tell us about the conditions at Delaney that sparked these strikes?

AS: What’s going on at Delaney is really a microcosm of what’s happening all over the country in terms of incredibly harsh and inhumane conditions in ICE detention, that don’t have any accountability. 

At Delaney in particular, detainees are raising that they have no access to quality medical care, that they’re not getting needed medications. They don’t have enough food to eat. The food that they are getting is spoiled. They’re facing hostility and harassment and violence from the guards.

I’ve been really gratified to see elected officials and press and others paying attention to this. But unfortunately, it’s something that we’re seeing all over the country, from Adelanto to Dilley to Camp East Montana in Texas.

JW: So Aaron, your organization, the American Immigration Council published a report earlier this year about the Trump administration’s immigration detention expansion efforts this term. A section of the report reads, “A system of detention, which did not fully take off until the mid-1990s, is now on track to rival the entire federal criminal prison system by the end of President Trump’s second term in office. This expansion is fueled by an unprecedented increase in funding provided by Congress in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Combined with ICE’s annual appropriations, ICE has nearly $15 billion per year to use on immigration detention through the end of fiscal year 2029.”

Aaron, what can you tell us about the scale of the Trump administration’s efforts to expand detention centers? 

ARM: Since taking office, Trump expanded the scale of the detention system by 75 percent, rising from about 40,000 people in detention when he took office in 2025 to over 73,000 people in detention in January 2026. While that number has fallen somewhat in the months since “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis, the Trump administration is sitting on an unprecedented pot of cash that they can use to keep expanding the system even bigger.

JW: Andrea, I want to bring you in. We’ve been hearing about these efforts from the Trump administration to convert warehouses to detention centers. What do we know about those plans, and what can we surmise about what those conditions could look like?

AS: What we know is that the government has spent a whole lot of money to buy large facilities without really having any plan of how they’re going to humanely keep human beings there. We know this because they haven’t even had the plans to figure out how they’re going to handle water and trash and things like that at these facilities, and that’s been the source of some lawsuits. 

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But I think we have reason to be incredibly worried that the government is in no position to hold a large number of human beings. Delaney is a good example because it’s the largest facility on the East Coast. It can hold up to 1,000 people. We’ve got a human rights situation going on inside, pepper-spraying a U.S. senator on the outside.

So I can only imagine if you were to try to expand the capacity of these facilities, the government just doesn’t have the infrastructure, the accountability, the oversight to care for people. As we’re seeing the numbers of deaths in ICE detention rise — I believe it’s 18 deaths just in this calendar year, which is unprecedented. What really worries me is that these are preventable deaths, and that we’re going to see more of them if the government’s permitted to keep expanding, literally warehousing human beings in this way.

The key difference now is the speed at which the Trump administration is expanding the system and the ways in which accountability has been dismantled. When Trump took office, there was the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties inside the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman as internal watchdogs. Within the first month, the Trump administration slashed their staff to the bones and has since dismantled the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman entirely, shutting it down despite a congressional mandate that the office remain in existence. With no internal accountability, that’s left only external accountability, and there they are trying to prevent members of Congress from going into detention centers.

The end result of this is that conditions are worsening, deaths are rising, and the need for reform is growing every day.

JW: That lack of transparency that you’ve mentioned is something that’s come up a lot in our reporting — the inability to monitor what’s happening inside of these facilities is incredibly concerning.

Andrea, I want to ask, from your perspective, what does access look like even for immigration attorneys that are trying to reach their clients?

AS: It’s a good question because there are lots of ways that we should be able to know what’s happening in the detention center. It’s not intended to be a secret.

I’ve been representing detained people for 18 years, and it’s always been part of the practice to drive out and physically see your client, have them sign papers, that their family members are allowed to visit them. And that when they have a court hearing, they’re either produced in person or they’re there on video, and observers can come and watch because it’s a public court hearing.

Right now, what we’re seeing is that all of those things are being obstructed. It’s incredibly hard to even find out where your client is anymore because they’re being transferred from state to state. They disappear off the public detainee locator. ICE is not responsive. 

As Aaron mentioned, there aren’t oversight agencies to complain to, and the immigration court system is increasingly keeping out observers and press from even watching these hearings to know what’s happening.

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And then, of course, on the oversight side, as we’ve been talking about, part of what’s happening at Delaney, the reason why this escalated with elected officials, is because they wanted to get inside the facilities and exercise their right to oversight. They’ve been denied that right and in New Jersey, you have state health officials who weren’t allowed to go inside and inspect. And so ICE doesn’t want people to see the way that they’re treating human beings in these facilities. 

But at least I’m gratified that people from lawyers to family members to elected officials keep trying.

JW: Do we have a sense of whether or not conditions are deteriorating? Obviously, these are horrific conditions that we’re describing, but maggots in the food, lack of access to medical care, these are not necessarily new issues inside of detention facilities.

Aaron, are we seeing a much worsening of conditions, or is there just a lot more attention on this issue right now?

ARM: It’s a little bit of both. There are some issues that you’re seeing raised in the media and brought to people’s attention now that aren’t new. As you said, maggots in food, bad medical care. This is not a new problem.

When you look at spoiled food, there are DHS Office of Inspector General reports going back many years which document violations of standards at Essex County Jail outside of New York City, a jail that is no longer working with ICE. Inspectors went there in 2018 and found spoiled food, covered in mold in the fridge that was being served to people. So that’s not a new issue.

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But what is new is the way in which the Trump administration has made getting out of detention more difficult so that more people are being detained there. Before last year, the Trump administration adopted the legal position saying that essentially any person who ever entered the United States across the southern border is permanently barred from seeking release on bond, even if they’ve been here for 20 years with no criminal record.

That means more people in detention, more overcrowding, and as they open up these new facilities or repurpose old facilities, like Delaney Hall, it’s clear that there isn’t enough staffing to keep these places operating at the capacity that they are operating. This is not a problem that’s also unique to immigration detention.

There is a shortage of corrections officers in jails and prisons nationwide and a shortage of prison healthcare providers. One of the biggest ones, Corizon, actually went bankrupt two years ago. Given that, it’s not a surprise that the administration is failing to meet the standards that it is legally required to meet.

AS: I do think that conditions are deteriorating. And I think another factor is the increased enforcement itself is causing severe overcrowding, including in these facilities that were intended to be holding facilities. So one of the places that conditions have been the source of lawsuits is in places like the Baltimore Hold Room, 26 Federal Plaza in New York City.

These are facilities where people are supposed to be taken for an hour or two after they’re arrested by ICE, and instead people have been packed in like sardines, sleeping on the floor next to toilets, and judges have had to order that you can’t hold people overnight there. So that’s part of the problem.

A second aspect to the problem is because ICE enforcement is so indiscriminate at the moment, and, that’s gone back and forth with time, but I do think it is worse than I have ever seen it, that ICE is not holding back from arresting very young people, very sick people, very old people’s moms and dads. So you have medically vulnerable and sick people in ICE detention with these conditions, and you’re setting up a recipe for disaster.

JW: To your point, at The Intercept, we’ve covered the detention of pregnant women and postpartum women who previously have been exempted, generally speaking, from detention, who are now in these facilities, who are lacking access to medical care, water, all of these necessities you need to thrive in pregnancy.

[Break]

JW: The Trump administration recently made some pretty significant changes to the green card process. Aaron, can you walk us through what they did and how it’s going to impact people applying to become permanent residents?

ARM: A couple weeks ago, the Trump administration put out a memo from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, America’s legal immigration benefits agency. That memo said that for the first time ever, adjustment of status where someone applies for a green card from inside the United States, would no longer be treated as a normal part of the legal immigration process, but would instead be treated as an extraordinary benefit and only given in an act of administrative grace.

This was particularly strange because adjustment of status is the norm by which about half of all people get their green cards. These are people who are in the United States already, living here either on a visa or seeking to change their status. So it could be anything from a foreign student who comes here, falls in love with an American at college, and applies for a green card, to someone present on an H-1B visa for 10 years who is seeking to finally get their green card and become a lawful permanent resident.

Almost immediately, this set off a lot of backlash, and the administration has had to walk this back a little bit because their initial suggestion in this memo was that potentially as many as half a million people a year would have to leave the United States and seek an immigrant visa in their home country if they wanted to get a green card that they were legally entitled to.

Silicon Valley was not happy. A lot of people were very clear that this seemed like an unnecessary process because the vetting that someone gets inside the United States is identical to the vetting that they get if they’re outside the United States seeking a visa, which means the only difference is where the bureaucrat is deciding this.

Is it a bureaucrat at a consulate abroad deciding if you get a green card, or a bureaucrat at an office in the United States? From the government’s perspective, that should make no difference, but for the immigrant themselves, this means time away from their family and home in the United States, time away from their job, and the possibility that if there’s some error or red tape, they might not be able to come back for maybe weeks, months, or longer, which just threw a wrench in a lot of people’s plans for staying in this country and being on a path to citizenship.

However, crucially, the administration, ever since they put out that vaguely worded memo, has been trying to walk it back somewhat, and is now suggesting it may apply to a much more narrow group of people, potentially people who overstayed visas years ago and are trying to get a green card through a spouse, which would be a lot narrower a group, but still impact potentially tens of thousands of people.

JW: I’m not going to lie, this does seem like quite a mess. 

Andrea, are we seeing other ways that the Trump administration is targeting people with legal status?

AS: Yes. What really the big picture here is that’s alarming to me with both the green card memo and some of the decisions coming out of the Board of Immigration Appeals that I used to sit on, is that there is this level of contempt and dismissiveness even for people who have forms of status.

So it really, I think, gives lie to that idea that the administration or Republicans are only interested in illegal immigration, they’re only interested in people who are out of status. Because you’re also seeing increased targeting and detention of Dreamers, people with DACA, young people with special immigrant juvenile status who have an approved application to stay in the U.S. and are in a line to get their green cards, people who have visas for being victims of violent crimes or trafficking.

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These are all kinds of status that already exist in law that Congress has created, and you’re seeing these people additionally detained and put into proceedings. And the Board of Immigration Appeals is putting out case law day after day saying, “These classes of people are not special. They’re not worthy of particular protection. They can all be denied bond. They can all be put in removal proceedings and detained.”

JW: And we’ve also obviously seen a targeting of U.S. citizens who’ve stood up for immigrants as well. Since Trump fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and former Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino “retired” after violent raids in Minnesota killed two American citizens, it appears the Trump administration has at least toned down publicizing these aggressive raids.

But has there actually been a shift in tactics under the new DHS secretary? Aaron, I want to start with you, and then Andrea, I want to get you in as well.

ARM: The short answer is it does appear that yes, they have pulled back from the aggressive raids that were really characteristic of the Noem term, in particular under the leadership of Gregory Bovino, a mid-level Border Patrol official who was unexpectedly elevated to the position of “commander-at-large” of DHS operations in the interior.

What we are seeing now is a return in some ways to the more traditional targeted so-called enforcement tactics, where ICE officers have lists of people that they are specifically intending to arrest, go out into the communities to arrest those specific people. 

But we are seeing a major increase in so-called collateral arrests. If they arrest that one person, they also might arrest everyone else in the building who’s nearby or anyone who looks like an immigrant near there. The end result of this is that the administration is now arresting slightly fewer people than during Operation Metro Surge. Detention numbers have come down, about 10 to 20 percent from the height of that operation.

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But they are building out a more robust enforcement capacity, and especially relying on state and local police who are cooperating with them through so-called 287(g) agreements, agreements that allow local law enforcement to act as ICE officers. So the Trump administration’s new plan is to gradually build up the capacity rather than rushing out to make splashy headlines, and they believe that is more sustainable in the long term, both from an enforcement perspective and also importantly from a political perspective.

AS: We are seeing not only a decrease in maybe these large-scale campaigns that have a cute nickname. We’re also seeing a decrease in courthouse arrests, partly because they were stopped by litigation. But I am continuing to see waves of street enforcement and street arrests that are often racially motivated, and I think we have to keep our eye on that.

Early on during the Los Angeles ICE surge, we saw a lot of those stories of ICE stopping people, regular people, Latino people walking down the street, going to school and work, including U.S. citizens, and that got a lot of press. I think those arrests are still happening; they’re just happening one at a time in less obvious ways.

I do a lot of habeas corpus litigation, and so I get a lot of emails and calls about who has been arrested. And, Aaron mentioned this idea of targeted arrests, which is what ICE says that they’re doing, that they’re looking for a particular person who has a criminal arrest or who has a prior deportation order.

But there are a lot of arrests in which ICE says that they’re looking for a target, and really what they have done is drive up next to a Latino person and ask them for their ID and then arrest them — when they were very obviously not the target that they were looking for. So I think we can’t let the idea of targeted enforcement cover the actual reality that people, especially people of color walking down the street, have something to fear from ICE.

I think it’s a terrible state of affairs, but I think we have to continue to be vigilant and push back on it.

JW: In that vein, how would you characterize this phase of Trump’s immigration agenda? Where is Trump in this? What is the end goal here that we can visualize at this stage?

AS: This is part of the question is, like, how much does Trump himself have to do with this as opposed to other people in the administration?

We’re in a transitional phase as we have new DOJ and DHS leadership. Certainly, the people in the administration like Stephen Miller, who have had an agenda all along, are intending to decrease the amount of immigrants in the United States, both legal and undocumented. And that it’s intentional to have people be scared of the kind of enforcement that I’m talking about that the administration hopes that a lot of people will get scared and frustrated and leave the United States, including through things like the green card memo, that it’s just so confusing and overwhelming and expensive to stay here that people will pick up and leave, even at incredible cost to our economy and to our fabric as a community.

What’s exactly coming next I can’t say, but I’m guessing that there is more to come. Trying to advise clients in this atmosphere, trying to advise immigrant communities is really hard. People are scared, and it’s hard to tell them not to be.

What we are seeing them do is attempt to take a system that was always imperfect but strived towards due process and basic principles of fairness, and turning it into an assembly line for deportations — one in which basic legal rights are tossed aside and procedures are followed potentially to the letter, but in clear violation of the spirit.

You see this with new policies like “mega master” calendar hearings, 100 people scheduled for a hearing with maybe 72 hours of notice, maybe sent by mail or email that they might not even know about the hearing ahead of time because they were scheduled for a hearing in 2027, and all of a sudden they’re told, “Show up two days from now in New York City. Oh, and by the way, you might not have a lawyer.”

You have no idea what’s going to happen to you. When you show up at that hearing, you’re told, “You have 20 days to get everything on file. We don’t care that you don’t have a lawyer. We’re moving forward.” If you miss that hearing, you’re ordered deported immediately.

They’re doing this even for children, and they’re firing the judges that were seen to be too liberal or too willing to grant cases, even if those cases were legally meritorious. The asylum grant rate has dropped to less than 10 percent of cases, when before it was 30 to 40 percent of cases were granted. All of this is a system that is being systematically turned against the immigrant and against the idea of a fair day in court.

However, given the scale of immigration court backlogs, there are still over 3.2 million cases pending in the system. It’s not clear whether they will actually be able to clear these backlogs by the time Trump leaves office. Crucially, all of this funding in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the funding that Congress has been debating, the additional $70 billion for CBP and ICE that’s being debated in the most recent reconciliation bill — that is all set to expire at the end of Trump’s term, by the end of fiscal year 2029.

So we are in a situation where they may get all of this infrastructure in place, and then who controls Congress in 2029 will determine whether that infrastructure has to be slashed back and whether we can get some handle on the system and help right the ship.

JW: I want to get into control of Congress in just a moment.

But Andrea, first I wanted to ask you, because you have personal experience with being pushed out because of the perception of your views on immigration. So I’m curious, how are you viewing this effort by the Trump administration to push anyone out who could have any sympathy for immigrants in the system?

AS: So I was an appellate immigration judge on the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is the second level of the immigration court system. I was on the BIA for three and a half years during the Biden administration. Starting last year, the administration started to fire both trial-level immigration judges, and they also fired all of the remaining Biden appointees off of the BIA, which is the body that sets case law.

It’s been honestly devastating to see this happen to an administrative court system that obviously needed improvement, but was functioning and had a lot of excellent public servants that were trying to give people due process day in and day out. The Biden administration had really tried hard to put people with a variety of professional experience on the bench, both the federal bench and the immigration bench, in terms of not only having all prosecutors on the bench there because they can be good judges too, but also putting people who had been defense attorneys and civil rights attorneys, like myself. I think that had made the court system stronger and better.

One thing I can say is that when I was a judge, I didn’t have any pressure coming from the top telling me how to rule. We had training, we had expectations, we had normal job evaluations, but I didn’t have anyone looking over my shoulder and saying, “Why did you do that?” Or “You’re not allowed to do that.”

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What’s coming out now is that’s exactly what’s happened to the immigration court system such that it’s no longer independent. You have leadership of the system watching which judges grant asylum too much, which judges grant bond too much. It destroys any idea that judges are being allowed to apply the law independently as opposed to enacting a political agenda.

It’s also just exhausting and confusing for the immigrants actually appearing before the court, not knowing if they’re going to get a fair day or they’re just going to be immediately deported without a chance to present their evidence. It’s a crazy time to be an immigration lawyer and have to do hundreds of hours of work not knowing if you’re going to get a judge who’s going to give you 10 minutes to present your case.

So certainly a lot of us are gearing up to do more federal court and appeals work, but the bigger issue is that the immigration court system has ceased to function in a way that lets judges make decisions independently.

JW: Aaron, I want to get back to your point about Congress and the midterms.

So we’re obviously in the middle of an election year. What are you hoping to see from candidates on immigration, and what do you hope legislators change if they actually make it to Congress?

ARM: What we need to see is a fundamental rethinking of what interior enforcement looks like inside the United States.

Polling consistently shows that the American public believes ICE has gone too far. As much as 2 out of every 3 Americans think that the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign has gone beyond what they want. But at the same time, people still do want some form of immigration enforcement.

So I would love to see legislators look at revamping the system towards one that embraces principles of compliance and proportionality, accountability and safety, really focusing on actual public safety threats, not people who’ve been here for 20, 30 years who’ve never had any interaction with the criminal justice system.

At the same time, help restore a system that allows judges to decide that deportation doesn’t make sense in every case. Right now, our interior enforcement system has not been updated in 30 years. We are using laws that were crafted by Congress in the height of the tough-on-crime era of the 1990s.

We live in a very different time today. Most Americans believe there should be some form of path to legal status for people who have been living here for years without getting in trouble, working hard, raising a family, and being productive members of their community. But the law just doesn’t reflect that, and so Congress really needs to sit down and think through what kind of compromise will produce a better system that helps Americans and doesn’t take us further down this path of mass deportations, which just tear communities apart.

AS: I agree with Aaron’s frame, but I also want to say that I think we have a bigger issue that we’ve spent years now hearing this administration dehumanize immigrants and talk about people who are in our neighborhoods and communities like they are less than, that they don’t care about their families the way we do, and that asylum is a fraud on the system, that people don’t deserve asylum.

Related

You Should Stop Calling Immigrants “Migrants”

Both administrations recently, frankly, have done that. So I think going forward, it’s time for us to not be afraid to say that immigrants are an incredibly important part of our communities, and also that there is a place for the United States to welcome bona fide refugees and asylum-seekers. Both the refugee program and the asylum adjudication program have been totally decimated in recent years. And of course, we need regulations on that program. We need ways to handle the backlog.

But at its core, we have to decide that the United States is a place where people who are fleeing persecution and torture can, at least in some instances, find safety here. I think that’s part of our historical heritage that we shouldn’t turn away from. I don’t think candidates should be afraid to say that, at risk of seeing “soft on immigration.” 

It’s time to stand up for people who are an incredibly important part of our communities, and acknowledge their contributions, and then figure out what’s a system going forward that allows people to work and live in safety together.

JW: Just thinking about everything we’ve discussed today, there is so much happening in the immigration space, so much horror, frankly. What should people be paying attention to right now? Aaron, I want to start with you.

ARM: I think with everything else going on in the world right now, with the war in Iran, rising gas prices, and the deconstruction of the American state by the Trump administration, it’s easy to let the immigration issue fall by the wayside now that they are trying to be a little bit more quiet.

But every single day, the administration is arresting around 1,000 people, or slightly more than 1,000 people, and many of those have been members of our communities for decades. They have family members here. The climate of fear and surveillance that is being imposed on immigrants is growing.

That is something that impacts all of us. We saw this week the Trump administration say that they wanted to try to restrict undocumented immigrants from even having bank accounts. We’re seeing every government database being turned into a tool of the mass deportation state, and that is something that impacts all Americans because you cannot carry out a mass deportation of 4 percent of the U.S. population without fundamentally transforming the United States into more of a police state.

That should concern everybody, even if it’s not something that they’re seeing on the headlines because of splashy raids in American cities.

AS: A lot of this news is really sad and hard to keep reading. I feel that myself as someone who has to for my job, continue to read immigration news. I would encourage people to continue to pay attention to stories of courage and people who are bringing the conditions of detention centers and what’s happening to their families to light.

I just spoke yesterday to a client of ours who was released from Delaney Hall on Monday because of a habeas corpus petition that we won. I was asking her what people need to know, and while she was telling me about the poor medical care and the lack of food, I was just really struck by her care for the other people who were still detained there and her spirit and the way that when she was released from that facility, the protesters outside cheered and chanted her name.

There are folks inside Delaney and hunger strikers in Adelanto, people in Camp East Montana have brought a lawsuit to complain about their own conditions. And so there are a lot of examples, from Minnesota to detention of people being courageous and having hope in these times.

So that’s what I hope people can keep watching for and participating in.

JW: That’s a really beautiful message. And we’re going to leave it there, but Aaron, Andrea, thank you both so much for joining us on the Intercept Briefing.

ARM: Thank you for having me.

AS: Thank you.

JW: That does it for this episode.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor in chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow. Slipstream provided our theme music. This show and your reporting at The Intercept doesn’t exist without you.

Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or review. It helps other listeners to find us. Let us know what you think of this episode, or if you want to send us a general message, email us at podcast@theintercept.com.

Is there an immigration detention center near you that you’re concerned about or another issue? Send us an email or leave us a voicemail at 530-PODCAST. That’s 530-763-2278. 

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post “Warehousing Human Beings” appeared first on The Intercept.

Why should Delaware care?
For years, Delaware officials have viewed Wilmington’s downtown as an economic engine, and bellwether, for the state. But weighing on the area have been largely empty buildings that are part of the Bracebridge complex. Last year, state and Wilmington officials committed nearly $25 million in taxpayer-funded incentives to support Incyte’s move into those buildings .

Less than two years after investing nearly $80 million into two downtown Wilmington office buildings, the pharmaceutical company Incyte sold the properties to the city’s most prominent developer in a deal that generated just 10 cents in real estate taxes, according to public deed records. 

The tax payment suggests a sale price of $1 for each of the Bracebridge buildings that sit next to Rodney Square and once formed the backbone of Delaware’s credit card industry. 

That sale price also raises the question of whether the companies involved in the transaction earlier this spring avoided what might have been millions of dollars in taxes to Delaware and its largest city. 

Delaware imposes a tax on real estate transactions that amounts to 4% of a sale price, or the fair market value of the property — whichever is higher. The revenue is then split between state and local governments.

Last year, Incyte held a book value for the two downtown Wilmington properties of at least $76 million, according to a company earnings report. While a book value does not necessarily reflect what a buyer would pay in an open market, it does offer a benchmark that is difficult to reconcile with a transaction that generated only 10 cents in taxes. 

By writing off the value of the buildings as a business loss, Incyte will likely be able to reduce its future taxable income. But it won’t have the tens of millions of dollars in the bank that a sale might have produced.

Beyond the tax question, Incyte’s sale of the two buildings marks the end of the company’s ambitious project – backed by nearly $25 million in taxpayer grants – to renovate the buildings for what would have been a massive expansion into Wilmington’s city limits.

Instead, the drug company now plans a scaled-back move into the city, by leasing a portion of the buildings from their new owner, the Buccini/Pollin Group. 

Incyte did not reply to an emailed question about the real estate tax payments.

A spokeswoman for the Buccini/Pollin Group said in an email that the listed sale price of $1 does not reflect the entire compensation involved in the sale of the buildings. 

“We aren’t able to discuss the specifics of the arrangement,” the spokeswoman Claire Nester said. 

Nester did not reply to a follow-up question, asking whether the modest taxes paid on the sale were legally sufficient. 

Comments from Delaware’s government officials also did not shed light on the questions around the 10 cents in real estate taxes.

A spokeswoman for Wilmington Mayor John Carney said the city has no control over “what the property sells for.” 

The Delaware Department of Finance declined to comment, stating officials are barred from speaking about realty transfer taxes because of a law prohibiting them from revealing details about tax returns.

And the chief financial officer for New Castle County — which collects realty transfer taxes in northern Delaware — said only that “we’re looking into it.”

How we got here

For more than a decade, Incyte has maintained its corporate headquarters just outside Wilmington’s city limits in the Alapocas community.

Buoyed largely by sales of successful cancer drugs, the company in recent years had attempted to grow the existing campus, but faced resistance from neighbors. 

In light of the opposition, state and city officials began to collaborate then on a pitch to persuade the company’s leaders to instead expand downtown. 

The efforts proved successful when Incyte announced in the spring of 2024 that it had purchased the pair of Bracebridge office buildings — which once served as a home for the credit card giant MBNA — for its global headquarters.

The nearly $50 million purchase was seen as a significant win for the city because the largely empty buildings had long weighed on the city’s office market.

Following the purchase, Delaware state officials awarded Incyte with nearly $15 million to help it pay for the move into Wilmington. During a meeting of the state committee that approves such subsidies, Kurt Foreman, then the head of Delaware’s public-private economic development, said the deal could lead to the creation of 866 new jobs in Wilmington’s downtown core.

Months after the state’s grant approval, Wilmington officials quietly awarded Incyte another $10 million for the expansion. The award was not publicly known until the Delaware Business Times broke the story in April.

During the remainder of 2024 and through 2025, Incyte spent nearly $29 million on a renovation of its new properties, according to a company earnings report. 

Then, at the start of last winter, the work appeared to cease.

The stoppage came just months after Incyte had selected Bill Meury, a pharmaceutical executive with ties to Boston-area startups, as its new CEO, replacing longtime leader Hervé Hoppenot, who signed off on the deal with Delaware leaders. Weeks after assuming the helm, Meury stated the company would take “a fresh look” at its business, including its capital allocation, according to a report from Reuters.

In December, Incyte officials reclassified the two downtown Wilmington buildings as “assets held for sale,” according to a company earnings report.

Then they wrote off the value of the buildings on the company’s books by $76.3 million.

By February, Incyte publicly announced its scaled-back expansion plans through a series of media interviews in which officials said the company would sell the Bracebridge buildings to BPG, then lease back some of the space. 

The leased space could “accommodate up to 200 employees,” company officials said.   

In an earnings report released in April, the company said its sale cost it “an additional $23.2 million of expenses.”

It is not clear whether that $23.2 million relates to a portion of the taxpayer grants awarded by the city and state.  When asked, a company spokeswoman said “the expenses noted in the quarterly filing are related to transitioning the project.”

Today, the status of the taxpayer grants and where that money might flow next are not immediately clear.

A spokesman for the Delaware Department of State that oversees state grants said earlier this spring that officials are “active discussions regarding this project and will reach out to you when we’re able to provide more information.”

Klinger, the spokeswoman for Wilmington, said the city and Incyte “are actively in the process of finalizing an agreement related to the $10 million incentive.”

For their part, BPG said they would not be seeking the Council on Development Finance funding that Incyte had received from the state for their plan to convert the buildings into a mix of apartments, offices and commercial space.

Reporter Brianna Hill contributed to this story.

The post Incyte’s sale of Wilmington offices generates just 10 cents in real estate taxes appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Why Should Delaware Care?
In an increasingly technology dominated world, access to high speed internet is a priority for many Delawareans. While the state continues to roll out initiatives to expand broadband internet access in remote areas, some rural Delawareans are forced to turn to libraries and other short-term solutions for connectivity. 

Despite government pushes in recent years for high-speed internet to reach more residents, some rural Delawareans feel left behind by the broadband expansions and question the state’s approach to improving connectivity. 

After initially being sidelined by the Trump administration, the state announced this spring that the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program would invest roughly $100 million toward creating 4,700 new internet connections across Delaware. 

The program will use a combination of federal funds and private company dollars to provide connectivity to some of the forgotten – or “last mile” – homes in Delaware, eventually aiming to reach complete high-speed internet coverage in the state by 2030.

But some experts and residents are skeptical. 

Researchers who study broadband internet access say the BEAD program’s approach – prioritizing the quicker deployment of copper cables over more long-lasting fiber optic ones – is ineffective for long-term sustainability. 

At the same time, some residents and lawmakers have given up hope that high-speed internet will reach rural corners of the state. Instead, they have turned to Starlink – a satellite internet service created by Elon Musk’s SpaceX – or WiFi hot spots to get connectivity. 

And even when rural residents have gotten the option of broadband internet access in recent years, some say they cannot afford the cost of a internet bill. This has forced already stretched-thin independent libraries to meet community members’ needs for computers and internet hot spots, library directors said. 

“I don’t think it’s gonna happen,” said Chris Sylvester, who has been asking state leaders when his western Kent County property will be connected by cabling for years. “As far as I’m concerned, we’re forgotten in rural Delaware for high-speed internet.” 

Laying out the timeline

Rural high-speed internet access has quadrupled nationally over the past decade, and 86% of rural households now have some form of broadband subscription, said Matt Dunne, founder of the Center on Rural Innovation, an organization that studies technology access in rural America. 

In Delaware, by virtue of a small compact geography, the state already boasts roughly 98% connectivity. 

But experts also say these numbers don’t tell the whole story. Some areas may be considered to have broadband access, but the cabling could already be outdated or rusting, and connection could be unaffordable to residents in an area.

“Not all broadband is created equal,” said Christopher Ali, a Penn State University professor who studies telecommunications. 

Delaware initially began laying the groundwork for rural connectivity in 2015, when then-Gov. Jack Markell awarded a $1 million grant for the company Fibertech Networks to begin laying miles of fiber optic cables – widely considered the broadband option with the most longevity – in Sussex County. 

In recent years, the state has mostly relied on the influx of federal funds to expand connectivity since the onset of the pandemic, said Connor Perry, executive director of the Delaware Broadband Office. 

These federal funding sources together allowed the state to set up “middle mile infrastructure” closer to town centers and along roads like Routes 1 and 113 over the past decade, Perry said.

Now the state can focus on the “last mile” of harder to reach buildings, he added. 

The initial plan for the BEAD program included only fiber optic technology. The Trump administration, however, changed the program to a combination of traditional copper cabling and fiber. 

The program is planned to connect 425 new homes and businesses in New Castle County, 1,513 in Kent County and 2,790 in Sussex County by 2029, Perry said. 

IQ Fiber, a Florida-based company funded largely by private equity, also announced this spring a $150 million project to lay more fiber connections down the length of the state, largely following the Route 1 corridor. 

Perry said the state also received BEAD funding to create a census-block level map of high-speed internet rates across the state, in collaboration with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

A look at the most current version of the map, updated in December, indicates that virtually all of New Castle County has complete internet connectivity. The connection rate tends to decrease moving south, particularly toward Delaware’s western and southern borders with Maryland. 

Areas where internet access is less than 25%, according to the map, include western Kent County near Felton and Harrington, the southwestern corner of the state between Laurel and Delmar and the Georgetown-Millsboro region of central Sussex County. 

Rural residents respond

In rural pockets of the state, some residents say they were connected to broadband through one of the recent expansion pushes. Others, however, have resigned to never getting wiring, instead turning to newer cable-less options like Starlink. 

Rachel Culver used to live in a house just a couple minutes west of Georgetown town limits, on what she described as “the rural side of town.”

Culver, who is also the director of the Georgetown Public Library, said she relied on the library’s resources, like the building’s WiFi and checking out one of the highly sought after hot spots, in order to complete computer tasks. 

“It kind of really felt like we were camping,” she said. 

The area by her house was just starting the process of getting cable infrastructure when she moved out in 2022, Culver said. 

Chris Sylvester lives and operates a flower farm in the Sandtown area of western Kent County, near the Maryland border. He has not had such luck with progress toward connectivity. 

When Sylvester and his wife first launched their business in 2022, the lack of high-speed internet on their property forced him to drive to a coffee shop or public library to upload a single photo onto their website. 

The problem? The nearest public place with internet connection was a 30-minute drive away. 

“When you’re a business and trying to be as efficient as possible, it becomes challenging and frustrating,” he said. 

As his family was trying to scale their business and his daughter was beginning elementary school, Sylvester began contacting state lawmakers, asking when broadband internet might reach his area. 

Four years later, Sylvester said he still has not gotten an answer as to whether his area is part of planned future broadband expansions. 

“I think I’ll be 60 or 70 years old, and I’ll still be that little spot out in western Kent County that doesn’t have internet,” he said. “I just don’t see how it’s going to work.”

Sylvester said his family was able to set up a Starlink satellite last year, which has given them at least a short-term connectivity solution.

Third spaces fill in

Community leaders working at libraries and coffee shops say they try to be the space residents need to get reliable connectivity. 

The challenge, though, is that Delawareans in sparsely populated areas where internet cables do not reach also tend to be further away from these community spaces, compounding the accessibility challenges.

Culver, the Georgetown Library director, said all the libraries were given hot spots and Chromebook computers from a 2022 state grant program. 

Then, when she and her staff saw “such a need” for the hot spots, they applied for a grant to get more. Since then, however, the grant has run out, and the library’s tight financial position means residents are back to having to wait multiple weeks to check out a hot spot. 

Directors at other rural libraries similarly said they have a constant daily stream of visitors using their WiFi and computers. Sometimes people sit in the parking lot after hours to connect to the building’s internet, they said. 

Owners of coffee shops and coworking spaces say they also strive to serve as broadband resources. 

Amity Coffee Roasters, a coffee shop in Greenwood, is bustling on many days with mothers doing homeschool work with their children, pastors without internet at their churches planning upcoming sermons and Delaware Technical Community College or Salisbury University students completing assignments. 

Melody Slaubaugh, Amity’s co-owner, said she and her husband made a conscious choice to “pay a lot for very powerful internet.” 

She added that some of the design choices they made with the café, such as providing an outlet connector next to each table, were specifically to make it conducive to internet users. 

The Mill in Seaford, a co-working space slated to open this year, is another place where developer Rob Herrera said he aims to focus on the community’s need for connectivity. 

Herrera said in the process of creating the coworking space, he has heard from many Seaford-area residents who do not have high speed internet options, or their only option is “old copper and cabling lines,” so having a coworking space with fiber connectivity is appealing. 

A long-term solution? 

Some state lawmakers say they have been frustrated by the speed at which broadband internet access has expanded to their rural districts. Some view the emergence of Starlink satellites as a more cost-effective and accessible option.

Rep. Rich Collins (R-Millsboro) said the number of calls he has been getting from constituents about lack of internet access has steeply declined since the advent of Starlink a few years ago. 

“If you really want broadband, it’s a way to have that,” Collins said. 

Experts, though, say the efficacy of broadband options is a spectrum. While Starlink and the BEAD program’s cabling infrastructure are effective in the short-term, experts say they will not be a permanent solution, like a fiber optic network would be. 

“Fiber to the home is the most future-proof,” said Dunne, the Center for Rural Innovation director. “As broadband speeds can be increased and the demand for them to be increased goes up, they’re able to scale with it.” 

The problem, Dunne said, is that each installation of fiber is more expensive than traditional cabling. It is difficult to incentivize companies to invest in a fiber network in more rural areas, where they will reach fewer potential customers.

Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.

The post State continues broadband expansion program, sustainability in rural areas unclear appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

From potential MacOS nicknames to how many times "Apple Intelligence" will be mentioned during the WWDC keynote, here are CNET readers' contest guesses.

Entrepreneur died of colon cancer, with Mobo Organisation hailing her as ‘one of the most fearless champions’ in the music industry

Kanya King, the entrepreneur and tireless champion of Black British music who founded the Mobo awards, has died aged 57 from colon cancer.

The news was announced by the Mobo Organisation, which said she died on Wednesday “after a courageous and characteristically determined battle” with her illness.

The summit comes as China positions itself as a global power player projecting stability in contrast to the U.S.'s economically damaging war against Iran and erratic tariff policies.

Connor Bishop, 24, Reece Robinson, 21, and Noah Etherington, 18, charged with violent disorder after sentencing of Vickrum Digwa

Three more people have been charged with violent disorder after protests in Southampton this week over the murder of Henry Nowak.

Connor Bishop, 24, of Southampton; Reece Robinson, 21, of Havant; and Noah Etherington, 18, of Havant, were to appear at Southampton magistrates court on Friday morning, Hampshire police said.

As demand for cobalt, gold and other minerals grows, mining is accelerating deforestation in the Congo basin – and increasing the risk of deadly Ebola outbreaks

For decades after the discovery of Ebolavirus in 1976, outbreaks of the disease were relatively small and contained, affecting a few hundred people at most.

Not any more. In recent years, outbreaks of Ebola have been much larger, affecting thousands and even tens of thousands of people across multiple countries. The 2014 outbreak of Ebola in West Africa infected over 28,000 people in 10 countries on three continents. The current eruption, which began in early May and shows no signs of abating, has caused 363 confirmed cases in Democratic Republic of the Congo and has crossed into Uganda.

Sonia Shah is the author of five books including Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, and writes the newsletter Cross Pollinations on Substack

A new book looks at how rituals, charms and curses are central to the identity of America’s pastime

It’s a Chicago legend, nurtured like a hot dog with everything except ketchup. During the 1945 World Series, local bar owner William Sianis brought his pet goat, Murphy, to a game between the hometown Cubs and the Detroit Tigers. Murphy was denied entry, because he smelled. Thus began the Curse of the Billy Goat, dooming Chicago’s NL entry to decades of also-ran status. As Sianis reportedly wrote team owner Philip Knight Wrigley after the Tigers won in 1945, “Who smells now?” The Cubs would not win another title until 2016.

Welcome to the world of magic in baseball. On the macro level, a goat can apparently change the fortunes of an entire team; on the micro level, batters engage in elaborate rituals at the plate, and no one dares to say “no-hitter” until the final out. It’s a narrative that goes back to baseball’s 19th-century origins, and it’s all chronicled in a new book out this week – The Magical Game: The Spirit and History of Baseball’s Superstitions, Rituals, and Curses by author, journalist, astrologer and New York Mets fan Addy Baird.

Travel bans and conflict have disrupted supply chains in the Democratic Republic of Congo, leaving health workers without Ebola tests and protective gear needed to contain the outbreak.

The Belmont Stakes will host a New York rematch of the top two finishing horses from the Kentucky Derby​ to wrap up horse racing's Triple Crown for 2026.

Margaret Hodge concerned over use of taxpayers’ money after revelations about former prince’s subletting

• UK politics live – latest updates

A former chair of an influential parliamentary committee said it was “shocking” that the public spending watchdog had not established Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s income from subletting properties.

Margaret Hodge, who led the public accounts committee, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme she was “very concerned” that the National Audit Office (NAO) was not able to find out how much money the former prince had made from letting properties.

Evoke had been in talks for two months with Bally’s Intralot, which has extensive international operations

The owner of William Hill and the 888 online casino brand has agreed a £243m takeover by the Greek casino and lottery operator Bally’s Intralot.

Evoke had been locked in talks for the past two months with the Athens-listed Bally’s Intralot, which has extensive international operations, including in the US.

Draft treaty claims sexual and reproductive health and rights are an existential threat to the African family

An African treaty that rejects longstanding international human rights obligations moved a step closer to becoming policy this week as governments across the continent met in Ghana.

The draft African charter on family, sovereignty and values, seen by the Guardian, asserts that African values and culture are under attack from “foreign ideologies” and urges states to withdraw from any agreements that do not align with the principles of the charter, including the 2003 Maputo protocol, which promotes gender equality and protects the reproductive and health rights of women and girls.

We could get our first glimpse at software features for the upcoming foldable iPhone Ultra at WWDC 26, and I'm stoked.

Inside New York’s notorious jail complex, nearly 2,000 incarcerated people watched Game 1 of the NBA finals, arguing calls, roasting celebrity fans and sharing in a rare citywide moment

It’s nearly half past eight on Wednesday evening and approximately 30 men in tan uniforms drift into the common area of a housing unit deep inside the George R Vierno Center, an 850-bed jail and one of eight active facilities on New York’s Rikers Island. Some hover around a folding table piled to the edges with snacks. Others make their way into the smaller rooms on the perimeter of the two-floor communal space and drag plastic chairs closer to the flat-screen televisions mounted inside. The excited chatter and nervous energy bubbles as a familiar refrain cuts through the din.

Knicks in four.

Pictured above: An exterior view of the Rikers Island jail complex on 3 June 2026. Pictured below: The bridge connecting Rikers Island to Queens crosses a sprawling employee parking lot before reaching the jail complex, which houses the vast majority of people held in New York City’s custody. All photographs by Lauren Caulk.

Waymo and B2U Storage Solutions have struck a "strategic supply agreement" to repurpose used batteries from Waymo's electric robotaxi fleet into stationary storage for California and Texas power grids. The arrangement could give robotaxi batteries a second life storing renewable energy after they're no longer suitable for vehicle use. It will also "support B2U projects in regions where Waymo's autonomous robotaxis operate -- meaning the used Waymo batteries could bolster the local power grids that Waymo vehicles rely upon for charging," reports Ars Technica. From the report: Waymo's "proactive maintenance" for its autonomous vehicles includes identifying opportunities to "refresh the battery to improve efficiency overall for our fleet," Adam Lenz, head of sustainability and environment at Waymo, told Ars. "That's when we look to these second-life applications, because there's still a lot of life left in the battery," he said. Waymo did not specify the average mileage at which it swaps out batteries or retires vehicles from service. But Waymo robotaxis drive around much more each day than the typical EV, which means the Waymo fleet is likely to experience faster usage-related degradation of battery capacity over time. The company confirmed to Ars that "some of these vehicles have now been serving riders for years and have mileage beyond what a normal consumer drives." [...] "Put a little haircut on that in terms of degradation and the effective capacity that would be left in those batteries when they're suitable for repurposing, and we're still talking about pretty significant capacity per battery," Hall said. The growing Waymo robotaxi fleet could lead to "pretty large numbers in terms of megawatt hours of capacity that can be deployed pretty quickly" for stationary energy storage supporting power grids, he suggested. The agreement gives Waymo discretion over when and how many used batteries will be turned over to B2U. But the companies confirmed that B2U has "already started receiving smaller initial quantities of batteries" from the Waymo fleet. Over time, the agreement could give B2U "hundreds of megawatt-hours" of additional storage capacity from Waymo's thousands of electric vehicles, Lenz said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From Apple Intelligence to new leadership, here's what Apple's AI strategy has looked like since WWDC 2025.

Jess Asato’s lawyer says others want to take action over demeaning sexualised material created by Grok AI tool

New claimants have come forward to take legal action against Elon Musk’s company xAI after the Labour MP Jess Asato launched a test case against the firm over demeaning sexualised material created by its Grok AI tool.

A handful of complainants contacted Asato’s lawyer on Thursday in response to coverage of the MP’s decision to sue Musk’s company for damages over its creation and circulation of fake images of her in a bikini and an AI-created video that she said showed her “being chloroformed and prepared for a sexual assault”.

In today’s newsletter: ​Global powers​ are focused on oil markets and elections​ but those living through conflict in the Middle East feel abandoned

Good morning. It’s been another week of brinkmanship via Truth Social and ceasefires broken before they’ve been announced.

While US president Donald Trump claims an agreement with Iran could happen soon, for those living in the Middle East it does not feel like peace is anywhere near. People have seen more bombs dropped in Lebanon this week; and the death toll continues to rise, national economies falter, and displacement abounds.

UK politics | Andy Burnham has signalled he would begin transforming the broken social care system this year if he became prime minister, he has said in an interview with the Guardian, accusing Westminster of “flinching away” from tackling difficult policy problems.

Environment | Humanity can raise living standards, reduce inequality and keep global heating within a 2C rise, according to a sweeping vision for planetary survival.

Ukraine | The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has called for face-to-face negotiations in a public letter addressed directly to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

England news | The poorest and most nature-deprived communities in England will be further left behind in their access to green spaces if proposed changes to planning laws go ahead, a report finds.

UK news | Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor received private income from subletting three cottages on his Windsor Royal Lodge estate while paying a “peppercorn rent” to the crown estate, a report into royal property arrangements has revealed.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 5.

Do you know who you're opening your door to? A CBS News California consumer investigation uncovered food delivery drivers using rented or stolen app accounts to bypass background checks, exposing a loophole that could put customers at risk.

British Retail Consortium figures show footfall rose in May, with consumer confidence improving after spending squeeze

Greater numbers of consumers went shopping last month as spring sunshine brought welcome relief to retailers, which have faced a squeeze on spending since the US-Israel war on Iran.

Figures from the British Retail Consortium (BRC) and a separate survey by the accountancy firm BDO showed a bounce-back in footfall during May, reversing a sharp decline in April.

CBS News obtained a brief voice memo from Iranian American journalist Reza Valizadeh, who is being detained in Iran's Evin Prison and is pleading for help for him and other American captives.

CBS News has obtained a voice memo recorded by Iranian American journalist Reza Valizadeh, who has been detained in Evin Prison for over a year.

• Seth Jarvis scores 3:56 into overtime to seal win

• Hurricanes erase two-goal third-period deficit

• Failed Vegas challenge leads to crucial power play

Seth Jarvis scored on a power play in overtime after Carolina erased a deficit in regulation only to gave up a late tying goal, and the Hurricanes beat the Vegas Golden Knights 4-3 in Game 2 of the Stanley Cup final on Thursday night to the series.

Jarvis’ heroics 3:56 into OT came after a thrilling third period that included four goals being scored and another getting called off because of goaltender interference.

Pontiff’s resolve to highlight plight of migrants has aligned him with Spanish PM, whose inner circle and party are mired in corruption allegations

While Pope Leo XIV isn’t due to touch down in Madrid until 10.30am on Saturday, his presence in the Spanish capital is already verging on the ubiquitous.

The smiling, avuncular face of the first US pontiff greets visitors from posters, from the sides of buses, from commemorative travel cards and even from the digital screens on the metro system, where it flickers up between adverts for sun cream and banking deals.

Macron, Merz and von der Leyen among those due to gather in Montenegro for talks on integration of six countries

European leaders will seek to show six western Balkan countries that they have a real chance of joining the EU one day, despite splits over how to handle enlargement of the 27-member bloc.

Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz, Giorgia Meloni and Ursula von der Leyen are among more than 30 leaders expected to gather in the Montenegrin coastal resort of Tivat on Friday for summit talks. The focus will be on integrating the six Balkan countries – among them Montenegro and Albania – more deeply into the EU single market, paving the way for them to join the bloc.

A risky quest for strategic autonomy in a war-torn Middle East.

Beijing’s blind spots hinder real reform.

Overseas bases make the U.S. military dominant—and more likely to blunder into war.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Bumblebees can use tools to solve a problem, according to experiments that demonstrate their remarkably advanced cognitive abilities. The bees were given an adapted version of an experiment that, 100 years ago, first demonstrated chimpanzees could work out how to retrieve an out-of-reach banana by stacking boxes. Since then, various other primates, elephants and crows have joined an elite cohort of species known to be capable of this level of insight and spontaneous problem solving. In the latest research, bees were shown to be able to roll a polystyrene ball to a specific location and climb on to it in order to access an artificial flower on a low ceiling. The findings challenge the longstanding assumption that insects operate purely on instinct and mindless trial-and-error learning. "Most people think insects are reflex-based machines," said Dr Olli Loukola, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Oulu, Finland, and senior author. "That they can't have any emotional states or feel pain. Some people don't even realize that they have brains. I hope that these results change the worldview about that." "We are not claiming that bees think like humans," added Loukola. "But our findings show that miniature brains can generate flexible solutions to novel problems in ways we are only beginning to understand." The findings are published in the journal Science.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ukrainian president proposes meeting in neutral third country as Trump says both sides have to ‘make compromises’

• ‘You can stop your war’: Zelenskyy’s open letter to Putin – in full

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has called for face-to-face negotiations in a public letter addressed directly to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

The letter, the first Zelenskyy has publicly written directly to Putin since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, was a sweeping criticism of the Russian leader’s 26 years in power.

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• Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner rejects new allegations of abusive behavior

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email

Donald Trump’s former national security adviser-turned-foe John Bolton is expected to plead guilty over mishandling classified documents, multiple outlets are reporting.

According to CNN, which first reported the news citing three sources, Bolton intends to plead guilty to one count of illegal retention of sensitive national security documents, and has also agreed to pay a more than $2m fine. The New York Times hears the same, adding that he could face anywhere from no prison time to up to five years behind bars when he is sentenced.

Russians are increasingly tired of the conflict and the time to end it is now, Ukraine’s president tells his Russian counterpart in an open letter

• Zelenskyy calls for face-to-face Ukraine war negotiations in letter to Putin

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in an open letter to the Vladimir Putin, has called for a face-to-face meeting with the Russian president to end his war against Ukraine.

The letter sets out Zelenskyy’s view of the four-year-old conflict and says that while Ukrainians’ resilience remains intact, most Russians have grown weary of its effects and are ready for peace.

Workers say they deserve a greater share of the windfall and want protection from ICE and invasive data collection

Workers at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, are voting on whether to authorize a strike one week before World Cup soccer games are slated to begin in the Los Angeles area.

Unite Here Local 11’s strike authorization vote comes as ongoing negotiations for a new contract with stadium operator Legends Global have stalled, with workers saying they deserve a greater share of the windfall from a packed schedule of coming mega-events that include the World Cup, the Super Bowl and the Olympics.

A judge has dismissed a murder charge against Aaron Spencer, an Arkansas sheriff nominee who was accused of killing his teenage daughter's alleged abuser in 2024.

US secretary of state Marco Rubio says anyone providing services to listed entities ‘is at risk of sanctions themselves’

The United States has announced fresh economic sanctions on Cuba’s president and some of his immediate family, alongside members of the Castro family, in Washington’s latest ramping up of pressure on its communist-led neighbour.

Among those targeted were the son and a grandson of former president Raúl Castro, who no longer holds an official position but remains a key figure on decisions about the future of the island.

Legislation would also sanction key segments of Russian economy, overriding objections from Republican leaders

The House passed legislation on Thursday that would aid Ukraine and sanction key segments of the Russian economy, overriding objections from Republican leaders who warned the bill would undermine negotiations designed to achieve a comparable but stronger result.

The 226-195 vote is a sign of impatience with Donald Trump’s approach to the war and represents the House’s second major foreign policy break with Trump this week. The day before, the House, for the first time, approved a war powers resolution aimed at halting US military action against Iran.

The Colorado Court of Appeals reversed the criminally negligent homicide convictions for the former paramedics in the death of Elijah McClain.

Platner says claims in New York Times article of physical misconduct and offensive remarks ‘politically motivated’

Graham Platner, a Democratic candidate for the US Senate, has rejected an explosive new report about his treatment of women, insisting that allegations of abusive behavior are “politically motivated”.

Platner, a progressive running for election in Maine, was responding to a New York Times article published on Thursday that included an interview with a Republican operative who accused him of womanizing, physical misconduct and making troubling comments about rape.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for June 5, No. 1,812.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for June 5, No. 1,090.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for June 5 No. 824.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for June 5, No. 620.

James "Weston" Higginbotham, an Auburn University student, went missing last week in Japan after his family says he went to an area near Kyoto known for its hiking trails.

The U.S. has imposed sanctions on Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, according to a filing on the Treasury Department website.

The Steam Deck dominates gaming on the go, and the Steam Machine looks to conquer the living room.

The eight-foot dinghy that Brian Hooker says he and his wife, Lynette Hooker,​ were aboard when she disappeared in early April was seized by U.S. Coast Guard investigators.

Mail-in ballots and security measures contribute to counting delays in California's close contests, an election expert says, and last-minute voters in the governor's race may slow things down further.

Pulte, who is the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is a staunch loyalist of the president

Donald Trump has suggested his controversial ally Bill Pulte will investigate “rigged elections” while serving as the country’s top intelligence official, as the US president continues to make unfounded allegations about voting.

But Pulte, whom Trump appointed as acting director of national intelligence earlier this week, will only serve in the role temporarily, the president claimed on Thursday.

A former officer at the correctional facility where Jeffrey Epstein died testified before the House Oversight Committee that she was not the orange shape seen moving up the stairs of Epstein's cell tier the night he died.

If your produce is freezing in your fridge, this guide is for you.

Anthropic is urging leading AI labs to consider slowing development, warning that frontier models are advancing fast enough that they may soon be able to improve themselves without direct human intervention. The company says a global ability to pause or slow AI development would "likely be a good thing," citing internal data about accelerating model capabilities. From a blog post: Using public benchmarks and previously unreported data from within Anthropic, The Anthropic Institute is showing that AI is already accelerating the development of AI systems. To take just one example: today, Anthropic engineers on average ship 8x as much code per quarter as they did from 2021-2025. The technical trends discussed in this piece suggest that AI systems are going to become much more capable in coming years. These trends have huge implications. AI that can build itself would be a major development in the history of technology -- one that could bring enormous good for the world in science, healthcare, and beyond. But full recursive self-improvement also might increase the risks of humans losing control over AI systems. If systems are capable of fully building their own successors, the ways we secure them, monitor them, and shape their behavior all grow much more important. [...] If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing. But if a slowdown simply lets the least cautious actors catch up technologically, it could leave everyone less safe. Without a global coordination mechanism, companies and governments will have to make difficult decisions about safety while under competitive and geopolitical pressures. We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. The Anthropic Institute will conduct research -- in collaboration with many others -- and take actions to help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would require. These systems would enable frontier AI developers to verify that others globally have actually stopped or slowed, and that a bad actor could not use the auspices of a coordinated slowdown to jump ahead in secret. If such systems existed, we expect that we would slow down or temporarily pause, if other developers at or near the frontier also did so in a verifiable manner...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The subject of a recent high-profile trial filed a lawsuit against two police agencies, alleging that two officers involved in investigating her had exchanged racist and misogynistic messages.

A man who pleaded guilty to participating in the Jan. 6 riot as a 19-year-old — and later described the events of that day as a "disgrace" — now works for the Defense Department.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says he didn't expect this milestone until 2027.

Blanche, whom Trump plans to nominate to replace ex-attorney general, served as Bondi’s deputy at DoJ

Former attorney general Pam Bondi told lawmakers that Todd Blanche, the man Donald Trump has lined up to replace her, was “in charge” of the US Department of Justice’s controversial handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case.

Appearing before the House oversight and reform committee, which is investigating the late financier and convicted sex offender, Bondi also said she was “not certain of the extent” that Trump knew about the crimes of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime associate of Epstein who is serving a 20-year sentence for sex-trafficking crimes, before they became public.

Jeffrey Epstein was paid extraordinary sums by billionaire Leon Black, and Sen. Ron Wyden wants to know why.

A new npm supply-chain attack has infected 36 packages with Rust-based infostealer malware called IronWorm. According to BleepingComputer, the malware "targets 86 environment variables (key-value pairs) and 20 credential files that may contain OpenAI, AWS, Anthropic, and npm credentials, vault configuration files, SSH keys, and Exodus cryptocurrency wallet files." From the report: According to researchers at supply-chain and devops company JFrog, IronWorm is written in Rust, hides behind an eBPF kernel rootkit, and communicates with the operator over the Tor network. The Rust-based malware self-propagates by using stolen credentials for publishing on npm; this includes secrets associated with npm's Trusted Publishing workflow. Once it compromises a developer or CI environment, it can publish trojanized versions of packages owned by the victim, which then infect additional developers and CI systems. This behavior is conceptually similar to Shai Hulud, which had its code published on GitHub recently. Although JFrog researchers did not find a clear connection between IronWorm and Shai Hulud, they observed the same commit names in both supply-chain attacks. This opens the possibility that the new malware is an evolution of TeamPCP's payload, since IronWorm appears to be "a custom, carefully built implant from an operation with its own infrastructure." [...] The company provides a list of all impacted package names and their versions in the report and recommends that developers upgrade to fixed releases, rotate their keys, and enable two-factor authentication (2FA) for all accounts. At the same time, Endor Labs and StepSecurity have spotted a very similar but distinct attack involving a JavaScript-based malware named binding.gyp, performing registry poisoning and GitHub Actions infection, unfolding during the same time-frame.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow criticized an economic development program during a May debate, saying the state has shelled out billions for corporate subsidies but has little to show for it. 

"Michigan has spent more than $2.5 billion on incentives to companies since 2019, and so far, that fund, the (Strategic Outreach and Attraction Reserve) fund, has created zero jobs," McMorrow said during the May 28 Democratic primary debate. McMorrow supported the fund in 2021 but has since backed away from it, citing a lack of resulting jobs.

McMorrow, chair of the Michigan Senate’s Economic and Community Development Committee, is running for U.S. Senate in Michigan. Her opponents in the Democratic primary include former public health official Abdul El-Sayed and U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens.

Since Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, took office in 2019, she has focused on recruiting businesses to the state through subsidy and incentive programs. Her administration’s flagship program is the Strategic Outreach and Attraction Reserve Fund, or SOAR.

To back McMorrow’s statement, her campaign pointed to local reporting that said the state had pledged $2.5 billion of SOAR money to companies and other organizations. "SOAR cost billions and largely failed to deliver for Michiganders," McMorrow campaign spokesperson Jackson Boaz said.

Publicly available state data shows that about $2.2 billion has been approved for projects, and $1.3 billion has been spent. The state announced the first awards from the fund in 2022, not 2019. Companies self-reported creating at least 1,800 jobs; the state said it plans to verify that once milestones are reached.

How much has Michigan spent on SOAR?

State lawmakers created the SOAR fund through a series of 2021 bills and initially allocated $1 billion. Later state budgets provided more funding. 

Bridge Michigan, a local news outlet, reported that $2.5 billion in spending had been approved from the program. PolitiFact was not able to independently verify that figure. 

But not all of that has been spent. In 2025, state lawmakers stripped the program of future funding because of dissatisfaction with outcomes, but the previously budgeted amounts remained in place.

The SOAR funding is split into two pots: the Critical Industry Program, which pays companies to encourage hiring in Michigan, and the Strategic Site Readiness Program, which gives grants to economic development groups to prepare industrial sites. The site readiness grants aren’t paid directly to companies nor are they tied to a promised number of new jobs, but groups often have a company in mind when developing a site. 

As of October 2025, Michigan officials had spent $1.3 billion between the two programs, according to a report from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, a public-private partnership agency that administers the SOAR fund. The fund spent $720 million on company subsidies tied to promised jobs, and another $590 million on site preparation. The Michigan Economic Development Corporation declined to comment for this report.

The latest official tally of approved funding, which includes grants that have been awarded but not spent yet, sits at close to $2.2 billion, according to the development agency’s report.

Eric Lupher, president of Citizens Research Council of Michigan, a nonpartisan public policy center, said it’s reasonable to consider money committed to specific projects as money "spent" by the state. The work has been contracted, and the money will be spent when it’s complete, he said. 

"One way or another that money’s going to go out the door," he said. "Some of it’s sitting in an account waiting for the check to be cut when the time is right." 

But, Lupher said he’d have "some hesitancy" to judge the program’s effectiveness at creating jobs based on projects that are in progress. 

"You sort of have to wait for that facility to be up and running for a few years to let the dust settle and then look at it in its totality," he said.

To receive the full awarded funding, companies have to meet certain benchmarks and hiring standards. Some deals have already fallen apart, including a deal with electric vehicle maker Gotion to build a battery factory in Big Rapids. In that case, the state attorney general is trying to claw back $23.7 million that a development group passed onto Gotion from the site selection fund.

How many new jobs did SOAR create?

The Michigan Economic Development Corporation’s report said companies receiving SOAR incentives reported creating 1,846 jobs by October 2025. The companies promised a combined 14,559 jobs over several years.

Most of the jobs so far came from one company, Solar Technology LLC, which is building a 1 million-square-foot factory in Saginaw County. The company reported 1,244 jobs linked to a $68 million state investment. Other projects that reported new jobs included battery factories being built by Ford Motor Co. and LG Energy.

The jobs are self-reported. Because none of the job verification deadlines under the grants have happened yet, the state-verified count of jobs is zero, the report said. The first of those milestones, with Solar Technology, is not until December 2027.

Our ruling

McMorrow said, "Michigan has spent more than $2.5 billion on incentives to companies since 2019, and so far, that fund, the SOAR fund, has created zero jobs."

The SOAR fund has committed more than $2 billion toward attracting companies to create jobs in Michigan; since 2022, about $1.3 billion has been spent on companies and economic development groups. 

Companies reported creating more than 1,800 jobs. The state has not verified the jobs number yet.

We rate McMorrow’s claim Half True.

WASHINGTON, June 4, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), today announced an historic $1 billion strategic partnership making Japan the first international partner in the DOE’s Genesis Mission. Today’s announcement marks one of the most significant scientific and technological collaborations between the United States and Japan.

Under the partnership, eleven joint scientific teams will unite twelve DOE National Laboratories, one DOE Office of Science User Facility, and twelve leading Japanese research institutions—bringing together some of the world’s most advanced scientific facilities, computing resources, and research talent—to advance breakthroughs in quantum information science, fusion energy, biotechnology, advanced materials, particle physics, and autonomous laboratory systems.

“This partnership brings together two of the world’s great scientific powers to accelerate discovery and unlock breakthroughs that will shape the future,” said DOE Under Secretary for Science and Genesis Mission Lead Dr. Darío Gil. “For generations, DOE’s National Laboratories have set the global standard for scientific excellence, delivering breakthroughs that transformed industries, advanced human knowledge, and strengthened prosperity around the world. By combining their unparalleled capabilities with Japan’s world-class scientific institutions, we are helping define how science will be conducted in the age of AI.”

“Under Japan’s Seventh Basic Plan for Science, Technology and Innovation, we are expanding investments in science and technology, recognizing AI and computing resources as essential to both research excellence and industrial competitiveness,” said Dr. Yasuyoshi Kakita, Vice-Minister for Policy Coordination, MEXT. “Through our ‘AI for Science’ strategy, MEXT is advancing bold and timely investments in these areas. In this context, the Japan–U.S. strategic partnership will significantly strengthen research capabilities in both countries. We will continue to deepen our cooperation with the United States in close coordination with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.”

“Japan and the United States have built a complementary partnership that leverages each other’s strengths and has driven innovation in advanced fields. We recognize that the development of next-generation computing requires close Japan–U.S. collaboration,” said Mr. Takehiko Matsuo, Vice Minister for International Affairs, METI. “Japan is strengthening its industrial base and expanding investments under the ‘Semiconductor and Digital Industry Strategy Initiatives’ and the ‘Budgetary Framework for Strengthening AI and Semiconductors’. Building on these efforts, and in coordination with MEXT, we will contribute as a trusted partner to the United States’ Genesis Mission in advancing next-generation computing and further deepen Japan–U.S. cooperation.”

The collaboration builds on the U.S.-Japan Technology Prosperity Deal signed in 2025 and establishes a long-term framework for collaboration across government, academia, industry, philanthropic organizations, and research institutions in both countries.

Early projects include planned partnerships among RIKEN, the University of Tokyo, the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), and DOE National Laboratories to develop the next generation of autonomous laboratories powered by AI and robotics. Additional planned collaborations involving KEK, the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, RIKEN, J-PARC, the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex, DOE National Laboratories, and DOE user facilities will advance particle accelerator technologies and build upon decades of successful scientific cooperation between the United States and Japan.

The joint teams will have access to world class computing infrastructure—including the DOE’s high performance systems and Japan’s Fugaku—enabling unprecedented capabilities for AI driven research and scientific discovery.

Building on a joint Statement of Intent signed in January 2026, DOE and MEXT announced their plan to invest a combined $1 billion over five years—$500 million from each nation—to advance AI science and technology challenges and expand the computing infrastructure needed to support next-generation research, subject to the availability of future appropriations.

This historic partnership advances the Genesis Mission’s goal to double the productivity and impact of American science and engineering within a decade by harnessing AI, advanced computing, and deep international collaboration to accelerate discovery and transform how research is conducted for generations to come.

Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy

The post DOE Genesis Mission Adds Japan as 1st International Partner in $1B Research Initiative appeared first on HPCwire.

TACC staff and systems advance JupyterHub development while supporting Texas telescope data operations

June 4, 2026 — The Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX), which recently completed the largest survey ever taken of the early universe, has now released all of its immense, information-rich database to the public. Built from more than half a petabyte of raw and processed data, it will allow astronomers to study how the first galaxies formed and evolved, measure how gas and stars were distributed within these galaxies, map the large-scale structure of the cosmos, and investigate rare and unexpected objects not easily found in traditional surveys.

By mapping the distant universe one spectrum at a time (or rather, tens of thousands of spectra at a time!), HETDEX has plotted the location of over one million galaxies, back to when the universe was just 1.8 billion years old. At the center is our own galaxy, the Milky Way. HETDEX has released its extensive database of these galaxies and the space in between them to support astronomy research by scientists, novices, and artificial intelligence. Credit: E. Mentuch Cooper, S. Mukae, HETDEX.

HETDEX observations make use of a technique called spectroscopy. With it, light is broken apart into its various wavelengths: a spectrum. Astronomers examine spectra for peaks and valleys which tell them about an object’s chemistry, movement through space, and distance from Earth.

Cosmic Noon

The HETDEX database contains a whopping 600 million spectra for a period of history known as Cosmic Noon, 10 billion to 12 billion years ago.

“This is a spectral map of the universe. It turns every point of light into a barcode of physics,” said Erin Mentuch Cooper, HETDEX data manager and lead author on the paper announcing the release. “The real excitement is what happens when thousands of astronomers start exploring it.”

From 2017 to 2024, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory surveyed a region of night sky equivalent to 2,000 full Moons, creating a map of the distant universe. HETDEX is using that map to solve the riddle of dark energy, the unknown substance causing our universe to expand more and more quickly over time. To do this, it is charting the location of over a million early galaxies. However, it has also gathered data on all of the space in between.

Surveying New Galaxies

“The survey is untargeted,” explained Karl Gebhardt, HETDEX principal investigator, chair of UT Austin’s astronomy department, and co-author on the paper. “We aren’t picking and choosing specific objects to observe. Instead, we’re pointing one of the world’s largest telescopes at the sky and seeing what’s out there. We fully expect to find some really cool, wild stuff hiding in the data.”

The database consists of 431,000 data cubes that map information into three-dimensional space. When measured on the sky, each is roughly one thirtieth the size of the full Moon. Most correspond to regions around the Big Dipper and Orion.

“HETDEX gives us an unusually wide and detailed spectroscopic view of the universe at a time when most stars were being formed,” said Gebhardt. “Because the telescope and its instrumentation can capture tens of thousands of spectra at once, we can map galaxies across enormous cosmic volumes in a way that was not possible before. There’s a lot of potential here.”

Supercomputers Ease Discoveries

In addition to raw data, the release also contains a catalog of every object HETDEX has found so far: over one million distant galaxies, half a million nearby star-forming galaxies, 18,000 supermassive blackholes, and over 150,000 stars. Scientists, students, and citizen researchers can download customized subsets of data based on sky location. Or, thanks to a close collaboration with UT Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center, they can perform large-scale analysis using high-performance, cloud-based supercomputing resources, dramatically lowering the barrier to entry for working with data of this scale.

Cooper has worked with TACC researchers over the years to create both an internal and now public HETDEX Jupyter Hubs. These are cloud computing platforms one can access in a web browser that have all the data and software pre-built and easily accessible, available at this link: https://jupyter.tacc.cloud.

“We have relied heavily on TACC systems to store, process, and analyze HETDEX spectrographic data, including Lonestar6, Stampede2 and Stampede3, Wrangler, and Maverick. We are incredibly thankful to TACC for these resources,” Cooper said.

While the release is based on half a petabyte of data, the team was able to process it down to a more manageable 10 terabytes. It also developed extensive tutorials and tools to help users – both human and AI – to make the most of this massive, complex dataset.

“It’s been so important for me to make it as accessible as possible,” said Cooper. “We’ve turned more than half a billion spectra into something you can actually explore. It’s like compressing a universe of information into something you can hold in your hands.”

From 2017 to 2024, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory surveyed a region of night sky equivalent to 2,000 full Moons, creating a map of galaxies in the distant universe. A portion of that map, corresponding to a region of the sky in the direction of the Big Dipper, is shown here. It stretches back 12 billion years to an era known as Cosmic Noon, when most of the universe’s stars formed. Credit: E. Mentuch Cooper, S. Mukae, HETDEX.

Levering AI to Analyze Data

Due to the depth of the HETDEX database, AI is expected to play a major role in sorting through it all. And, in fact, AI has already been pivotal in its creation. For example, software provided by RAIC Labs automatically removed contamination from satellites and meteors crossing in front of the telescope. HETDEX also used automated methods to comb through its observations and identify possible early galaxies. In parallel, more than 24,000 citizen scientists helped confirm the presence of these galaxies through the Dark Energy Explorers program.

Today’s release marks the first time the full HETDEX dataset and survey catalog have been made available together. While the core survey is now complete, observations are ongoing, calibrations continue to improve, and supplementary releases are expected for the future.

To access the data and learn more, visit hetdex.org.

Adapted from a press release by Emily Howard, McDonald Observatory.

Source: Jorge Salazar, TACC

The post TACC: HETDEX Opens Massive Cosmic Dataset to Scientists, Novices, and AI appeared first on HPCwire.

As an Ebola outbreak continues to rage in Central Africa, the Trump administration keeps trying to blame the World Health Organization — revealing what experts say is a deep misunderstanding about global disease response.

In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, local health workers have been battling the devastating virus without adequate supplies, testing materials, or international support. The outbreak is further complicated by the rare strain of the disease, known as Bundibugyo, that standard field tests often miss and for which there are no vaccines or therapeutics. At least 62 people in Congo and one in Uganda have died according to WHO, but experts say this is likely a significant undercount due to the outbreak emerging in a remote, war-torn region.

“The outbreak had a big head start, and we’re still behind, but under the leadership of the Government of DRC, we are catching up,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told journalists on Wednesday, after a visit to the epicenter of the outbreak. African health officials say that it might take nine months or more to get a handle on the outbreak.

Experts say Trump administration policies — like dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development and withdrawing from WHO — have undermined global health security and negatively impacted the response to the outbreak. The U.S. had been the largest provider of humanitarian assistance and health sector support to the Democratic Republic of Congo, funding more than 70 percent of humanitarian work there, according to a 2025 report from Physicians for Human Rights which noted the aid cuts have “severely harmed” public health and humanitarian efforts, including infectious disease control. The Trump administration has reportedly even barred some U.S. health officials from communicating with counterparts at WHO.

In the face of criticism of a U.S. failure to quickly respond to the Ebola outbreak, State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott lashed out at WHO and heaped praise on his boss. “The security concerns in the area – which President Trump has taken unprecedented steps to address – and the WHO’s delay in informing the world of concerns until May 15 has had an impact,” he told The Intercept.

Related

Ebola Outbreak Rages After Trump Gutted Global Health Safeguards

Public health experts say Piggot’s response exposes a fundamental confusion about how authorities combat infectious disease. “It reveals a lack of understanding about how international health regulations work and what a ‘public health emergency of international concern’ actually is,” Margaret Harris, a former senior WHO official and a medical doctor who responded to Ebola outbreaks in West Africa in the mid-2010s and Congo in the late 2010s, told The Intercept.

On May 5, WHO issued an alert of a high-mortality outbreak in Congo’s Ituri Province, which included deaths among healthcare workers. On May 14, blood samples were finally analyzed across the country, in the capital, Kinshasa. A day later, the analysis confirmed Bundibugyo virus disease, a strain of Ebola.

Dr. Mohamed Yakub Janabi, the WHO Regional Director for Africa, explained that affected nations are the lead actors. “WHO does not declare. It’s the member states who declare,” he told The Intercept on Thursday. “On the 15th, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda declared. On the 16th, we declared the presence of Ebola, and on the 17th, Director-General Tedros declared this as a ‘public health emergency of international concern.’”

Dr. Marie Roseline Belizaire, WHO Africa’s Director of Emergency Preparedness and Response, further explained that under the well-defined protocols, states have the obligation to declare an outbreak after which the WHO informs the rest of the world and begins providing support. “There is a clear, well-defined methodology and it is clearly outlined in the international health regulations,” she told The Intercept.

The response is markedly quicker than in some previous outbreaks. During the 2014–16 Ebola crisis in West Africa — when more than 28,000 people were infected and more than 11,000 died in the largest ever outbreak of the disease — WHO became aware that Ebola was spreading in Guinea in March 2014 but did not declare a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” until almost five months later.

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Blame for any lag in response is not the fault of WHO, argued Harris, noting that USAID previously supported NGOs and healthcare workers in rural communities on the front lines of such outbreaks. “Dr. Tedros declared it without even calling the emergency committee together, so he wasted no time once they had information about the extent of the outbreak and the fact that clearly it had been running silently for a long time,” said Harris. “But the silence of the outbreak is not something you could lay at the feet of WHO. You lay that at the feet of a very fragile health system in the middle of a conflict that the rest of the world should be doing something to stop.”

The number of suspected Ebola cases in Congo has been reduced from over 1,000 last week to 116 as teams work through a backlog of tests. Experts say many suspected cases turned out to be malaria. This large number of people with untreated malaria demonstrates, they note, the chronic healthcare deficiencies in the region and a need for a comprehensive focus on public health there.

“We also need to remember that Ebola is only one health threat among many that these communities face,” said Tedros. “One of the things I heard from the community leaders is that they worry that the response to Ebola may take resources away from the health and humanitarian services they rely on for their many other needs.”

The Trump administration has faced scrutiny for pouring money into an Ebola quarantine and treatment center for infected Americans being built in Kenya, as a group of distinguished physicians, nurses, public health professionals, and humanitarian workers, including former top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called for Americans exposed to Ebola to be brought home for treatment. “We are deeply concerned by reports that the United States government is pursuing a policy under which American citizens with Ebola exposures requiring quarantine, isolation, or medical care would be transferred to a facility in Kenya,” they wrote in a letter to Congress, noting the “profound legal, ethical, and human rights concerns associated with preventing American citizens from returning home for care or diverting them to third-country facilities.”

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio doubled down on plans to bar Americans with Ebola from being treated in the U.S. “We cannot and will not allow any ‌cases of Ebola to enter the United States,” he said.

“It really sends the wrong message — that it’s a terrifying thing that you can’t possibly allow to arrive at your borders,” said Harris. Kenya has never experienced an Ebola outbreak, making it a perplexing choice of location for a treatment facility.

The U.S. could have set up a facility in Congo, Harris said, which has the most experience and expertise, having stopped 16 previous outbreaks. Or it could bring its citizens home for treatment and quarantine.

“If you’re going to not treat U.S. citizens on-site in DRC, bring them back to the U.S.” said Harris. “You’ve got one of the best health systems in the world, and you’ve got some of the brightest and best in the world in your country. So why aren’t you mobilizing them and showing that America is truly great?”

The post Trump Administration Tries to Shift Blame for Ebola Response appeared first on The Intercept.

The company reportedly keeps delaying the release of developer tools for its latest AI model.

Announcement seeks to close a difficult chapter for the company after the Guardian revealed its platform was used in mass surveillance of Palestinians

Microsoft has said it will tighten human-rights controls when working with national security agencies after an inquiry into how the Israeli military used its cloud technology for the mass surveillance of Palestinians.

On Thursday, Microsoft announced the completion of the inquiry and a series of new measures that include changes to how the company oversees employees with security clearances issued by foreign governments.

Announcement follows DoJ’s recent findings that medical schools at UCLA and Yale illegally used race in admissions

The US Department of Justice’s civil rights division has launched investigations into 15 medical schools over allegations of potential race discrimination in their admissions processes.

Thursday’s announcement follows the DoJ’s recent findings that the medical schools at the University of California, Los Angeles and Yale University illegally used race in their admissions.

Get one of the best standing desks as tested by our CNET experts.

June 4, 2026 — Data volumes are growing rapidly, AI applications are becoming more complex, and many questions in science and industry can only be addressed with specialized computing power. This is precisely where High Performance Computing (HPC) comes in. With its recently opened HPC Lab, the FHNW School of Computer Science has created an environment in which such computationally intensive applications can be developed, tested, and put into practice.

The University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz, FHNW) is strategically developing HPC expertise with the Lab. It is part of the strategic realignment of the FHNW School of Computer Science, which was founded in January of last year. In this context, labs were established as centers of excellence. They serve as open spaces for experimentation and development and promote exchange between students, industry partners, and the FHNW.

New Infrastructure for Research and Innovation

The HPC Lab was officially opened on May 28, 2026, with around 90 guests in attendance. Partners, interested parties, and employees gained unique insights into the new infrastructure, featuring high-performance GPU and CPU clusters, scalable storage solutions, and specialized software environments for AI, simulation, data analysis, and machine learning. This enables the efficient implementation of demanding applications such as training AI models, simulating physical processes, and conducting data-intensive analyses.

However, CPUs and GPUs are not the end of the road for HPC development. New computing technologies such as Dataflow, wafer-scale engines, neural processing units, and energy-efficient AI accelerators could create entirely new possibilities in computing through significantly higher speeds and lower energy consumption. The HPC Lab is a platform for experimentation and technology evaluation that focuses on practical applications of new hardware and is open to both industry and academic partners.

Responsibility and Sustainability in HPC

At the same time, the increasing importance of HPC is also bringing its ecological footprint more sharply into focus. Computing-intensive applications require considerable resources. The FHNW School of Computer Science takes this development into account and pursues the goal of using high-performance computing responsibly and in a resource-efficient manner. Topics such as efficiency, monitoring, and the sustainable use of infrastructure are therefore considered from the outset and integrated into teaching and research.

“The increased performance of HPC systems has been crucial for remarkable breakthroughs in AI. Training large language models would be impossible without fast and integrated GPU clusters,” said Prof. Dr. Tomasz Kacprzak, Head of the HPC Lab. “But this is just the beginning: In the future, more computing power will enable new inventions in the field of artificial intelligence. With the HPC Lab, we aim to be the central player in technology transfer in this development.”

From Theory to Practice

The HPC Lab is closely integrated into the curriculum of the FHNW School of Computer Science and forms a central learning environment, particularly within the AI & High Performance Computing specialization of the Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. Students acquire a solid computer science education with a clear focus on AI and HPC, applying their knowledge in practical projects from the outset. They develop and train AI models for applications in industry and research and learn to implement these efficiently on scalable infrastructures.

For example, students are working on the development and tuning of AI models for industrial applications, such as for quality control in production, for the analysis of large sensor data streams, or for predictive models in energy and climate research.

The HPC Lab also provides an important foundation for research projects and collaborations with companies. Industry partners can test new data-driven business models, develop prototypes, or improve existing processes using AI and simulation. This creates an environment in which knowledge is not only generated but also further developed collaboratively and directly applied in practice.

Learn more about the HPC Lab and the FHNW School of Computer Science here.

Source: FHNW

The post FHNW Establishes HPC Lab to Support Next-Gen AI and Scientific Computing appeared first on HPCwire.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The moderators of the biohacking subreddit say that peptide and hormone replacement therapy companies have been surreptitiously spamming Reddit in an attempt to get their posts scraped by AI chatbots. The strategy is an effort to systematically manipulate the answers provided by chatbots by manipulating the underlying source material that those chatbots will scrape -- in this case, a popular Reddit community. In a post last week, the moderators of r/biohackers said they would be banning new posts about peptides and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) because of attempted manipulation by the companies that make, market, and sell them. [...] "As AI search engines increasingly pull answers from Reddit, companies are using us for AEO. On top of that, there's been an explosion of peptide interest and AI usage flooding the sub. Together, this has put serious pressure on content quality," a post by the moderators read. [...] It has become incredibly difficult to stop Reddit manipulation, because the firms doing it are getting more sophisticated. The moderator said that there are really standard and long-running strategies where brands will hop in the comments and suggest their products: "That type of marketing has always existed and if people want to try something new because the brand resonated with them, cool. That's the way marketing should flow in my mind," they said. "But what I'm seeing that is way scarier to me is that there are companies that will reverse-engineer the actual prompt patterns that are prioritized by LLMs, and so you'll see someone post a super clickbait, high-traction, vague question like 'Is all the hype around Vitamin D actually worth it?" they added. "And that thread will do really well because everyone on biohackers actually has an opinion, so it gets engagement and prioritized by LLMs, and then brands will sneak in and they'll embed their brand mentions in those threads in the exact right places in a seemingly organic way. But none of it is organic, the entire thing is a strategy by an agency to prioritize brand mentions or a narrative within an LLM." The Reddit accounts that are doing this are "warmed up" or are made to seem human, meaning they have a posting history that is not just promotional. This makes them much harder to detect and moderate against. Some of the agencies doing this are paying real people to post promotional content, or have built communities where people are incentivized to post promotional content. The moderator said that Reddit's automated moderation tools have been helpful, but that the type of promotion happening has become so sophisticated that it has become more of a you-know-it-if-you-see it kind of thing. "A lot of it has become pattern recognition," they said. "You literally just sort of know what to look for. But the problem is you don't want to become punitive to the people who aren't doing this maliciously, and so I think the over-moderation risk is very real."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Asked if Bill Pulte has the national security experience for the job, President Trump said he does because he's "smart."

ALIYAH JACKSON
Contributing Reporter

On March 20, 2026, I got to see one of my favorite artists of all time and have been chasing that high ever since. Before I get into describing my amazing night filled with fun, high energy and great music, I have to introduce the man who made it all happen — Jordan Ward.

Jordan Ward is an alternative R&B and Hip Hop artist from St. Louis, Mo. He is known for his combination of intricate vocal performances and upbeat rapping, creating a widely-appealing and refreshing sound. At just 31 years old, he has worked very hard to make a name for himself and is steadily climbing the ranks of the music industry.

Interestingly, making music was not Ward’s initial focus. He actually began his career as a background dancer for some of the biggest names in the industry, including Justin Bieber, Usher, Janet Jackson, Prince and Beyoncé.

It wasn’t until years after I fell in love with his music that I watched Beyoncé’s “Homecoming” Coachella performance on Netflix and saw a younger Ward, with significantly shorter hair, dancing alongside her.

Despite his busy schedule as a touring dancer, Ward began to set time aside to focus on his own music career between dancing gigs. He released both his first single, “Tapas” and his first EP, “A Peak at the Summit,” in 2017. Although I still appreciate his earlier work, the songs that skyrocketed his career did not come out until the early 2020s.

His 2021 single, “Lil Baby Crush,” quickly became one of his most popular songs and launched him into the public eye. It was only up from there and Ward has been on a generational run ever since.

Between his 2023 release of what I would consider his most popular song, “WHITE CROCS (with Ryan Trey)” — which earned him a special shoutout from Tyler, The Creator — and the success of his debut album “FORWARD,” Ward quickly became a popular underdog in the music scene.

Now, we are in the midst of a new Jordan Ward era following the release of his latest album, “BACKWARD.” In my opinion, it’s the perfect continuation of the momentum he built with “FORWARD,” featuring tracks that range from upbeat hits perfect for dancing to ballads that’ll leave you teary-eyed. 

While “FORWARD” broke down Ward’s roots and where he came from, “BACKWARD” allowed fans a glimpse into who he is at his core, including his insecurities, regrets and mistakes.

This brings me to his current tour — “THE APARTMENT TOUR.” The name comes from Ward aiming to make the show feel like he was inviting all of us into his apartment — a promise he definitely delivered on. 

The stage was set up like a living room while Ward sang and danced around it all night like a little kid putting on a show for his family. From the minute he touched the stage to when the lights went up at the end, it truly felt like we were one big family.

The Theatre of Living Arts in Philadelphia provided the perfect intimate and cozy atmosphere to complement the homey feel of the show. Although I love my more well-known artists, I adore the closeness that comes with attending concerts held in theaters rather than arenas or stadiums.

The show was sold out and packed to the brim with attendees. The venue only offered standing and balcony options, so for less than $100 for two tickets, I got to spend my time in the pit, mere feet away from Ward with dozens of other fans.

I would say I enjoyed myself, but that would be an extreme understatement — I had one of the best nights I have had in a long time. He sounded amazing and his live vocals proved to be equally as good, if not better than his recorded ones.

His energy kept the crowd wrapped around his finger as we returned the same love we felt him pouring out to us throughout the night. Not to mention, he is probably the cutest 31-year-old man I’ve ever seen and is absolutely stunning, especially when he finally let his long dreadlocks fall out of the oversized striped beanie he wore for most of the show.

He even brought a few guests with him: his opener, Nali, whom I knew a few songs from and really enjoyed, along with surprise guest Destin Conrad, who performed his popular song, “KISSING IN PUBLIC,” as the crowd went absolutely wild.

My favorite songs of the night were “HIGH FUNCTIONING,” “Lil Baby Crush,” “TAKE-OUT,” “CHERIMOYA,” “WHITE CROCS,” “THEMSELVES,” “FAMJAM4000,” “CHAMPION SOUND” and “Y.”

Overall, Jordan Ward is an outstanding performer and puts on an amazing show. I had honestly forgotten just how much I love him and his music until he was standing right in front of me. My only regret was not getting meet-and-greet tickets when I had the chance, so that I could tell him just how much his music has helped me get through these four years of college. However, it’s definitely on my radar for next time. 

I’m tempted to gatekeep so that I can keep him in my little bubble of niche artists forever, but as a huge music-lover, I can’t with a good conscience continue to let y’all miss out on such a wonderful artist. If you’re looking for a charismatic, handsome and versatile R&B artist to add to your playlist, Jordan Ward is your guy.

House Democrats voted unanimously on Wednesday against continuing the Iran war without congressional approval — but a day later, Democratic leaders helped defeat a similar measure aimed at Israel’s parallel war in Lebanon.

The second measure failed 324-92 Thursday afternoon, a day after passage of a war powers resolution focused on Iran sent a message to the Trump administration.

Ninety-one Democrats voted for the measure sponsored by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., to block U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Lebanon. 117 Democrats voted against.

Citing a range of drafting concerns, Democratic leaders voted against the resolution but promised to support a tweaked version from Tlaib in the future.

At least some pro-Israel Democrats, however, said they opposed to anything that would tie Israel’s hands in Lebanon.

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Tlaib’s measure would have halted U.S. involvement in the Israeli assault on Lebanon without further congressional approval. The Israeli attacks have claimed at least 3,500 lives, displaced over 1 million people, and left wide swaths of the country, including entire towns, in ruins.

The war in Lebanon, which Israel had continued over reported objections from President Donald Trump, is widely seen as an obstacle to a deal with Iran to end the U.S. war there. Iranian officials have excoriated the Israeli attacks and threatened to suspend talks because of them.

U.S Aid for Israel War?

The Trump administration has not explained the extent of its involvement in the war being waged by right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel says its attacks are aimed at Hezbollah fighters despite the growing civilian death toll.

There are widespread suspicions that the U.S. government has provided support for the attack in the form of intelligence sharing and other coordination. The administration has not responded to a May 4 letter from Sen. Pete Welch, D-Vt., about whether and how the U.S. is aiding Israel.

Tlaib spoke out in support of her measure during a debate on the House floor on Wednesday.

“This vote on the Lebanon war powers resolution is a clear moral choice: Do you stand with the Netanyahu government and Trump’s endless war crimes, or do you stand with human life, peace, and justice?” she said.

In response, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Brian Mast, R-Fla., accused supporters of the measure of serving as “proxies for Hezbollah.”

That kind of language was not limited to the GOP. It echoed a similar statement made by Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., on social media last month.

“Hezbollah is evil — kneecapping our ability to track and respond to their terror serves nobody except Hezbollah and its Iranian overlords,” he said about Tlaib’s resolution.

Other Democrats said they were opposed to the measure on more technical grounds. In a joint statement Thursday, House Democratic leaders said they were worried that it might prevent the U.S. from securing its embassy in Beirut or assisting the country’s official military, the Lebanese Armed Forces.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.; Whip Katherine Clark, D-Mass.; and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., said they were opposed to the measure that was up for a vote Thursday, but would support another one that Tlaib has introduced addressing those concerns.

Hassan El-Tayyab, the legislative director for Middle East policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, said he was optimistic that support for halting U.S. involvement in the Lebanon war would grow in a future vote.

“If we don’t stop what’s going on in Lebanon, getting a true and lasting ceasefire with Iran is virtually impossible,” he said. “So it is critical we try to curtail U.S. involvement in any operations in Lebanon.”

The post House Dems Coming Around on Iran War — But Won’t Vote to Stop Israel’s Destruction of Lebanon appeared first on The Intercept.

RENO, Nev., June 4, 2026 — CIQ, the enterprise software company behind Rocky Linux and the Fuzzball AI and HPC orchestration platform, today announced full multi-cloud support for Fuzzball across CoreWeave, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Microsoft Azure. Enterprise teams define an AI training, inference or HPC workflow once and execute it across any of these environments or on-premises infrastructure, with Fuzzball routing each job automatically to the optimal destination based on cost, performance and data locality.

Enterprise AI and HPC teams pay a compounding price for every cloud (or system) they run on: rebuilt pipelines, rewritten deployment scripts, profiling, testing and validation, before a single workload can run on a new infrastructure. That cost scales directly against the speed the business demands. Fuzzball eliminates it and completely levels the playing field.

A genomics team that validates a sequencing pipeline on AWS moves it to Azure or OCI without modifying a single line in the workflow definition. A model training job that requires H100 density routes to CoreWeave automatically, while a data-sensitive simulation stays on-premises by policy. The workflow definition, container images, data orchestration and job sequencing remain identical across every environment. Teams reach production faster, access better GPU capacity at lower cost and carry no operational overhead for every cloud they add.

“AI teams today are asked to ship faster, control costs and maintain sovereignty over their data, simultaneously, across infrastructure that was never designed to work together,” said Gregory Kurtzer, CEO and founder of CIQ. “We built Fuzzball to solve that problem at the architectural level. When your workflow definition abstracts its requirements properly, you get portable access to every GPU environment the market offers and the freedom to route to wherever the best price, performance and data policy lives. Controlling your infrastructure and workloads is what enterprise AI infrastructure requires for production, and no other platform delivers it.”

One Control Plane Across Five Clouds and On-Premises

Fuzzball’s multi-cloud architecture rests on a provider-agnostic workflow definition. The file that describes compute jobs, data movement, container images and resource requirements carries no cloud-specific logic. Fuzzball’s orchestration layer translates that definition into concrete infrastructure on whichever environment sits underneath, whether that means Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, AWS or CoreWeave.

Fuzzball federates across all five cloud environments, alongside on-premises clusters. It simultaneously evaluates available environments at runtime and routes each job to its optimal destination. Enterprises gain the GPU density of CoreWeave, the breadth of three major hyperscalers and the sovereignty of on-premises infrastructure from one control plane, with no separate toolchains, deployment scripts or IAM models per provider.

One Security Model Across Every Environment

Each cloud deployment is provisioned through a two-phase automated process that stands up a complete, production-ready cluster without manual intervention. Fuzzball maintains one IAM model, one set of RBAC policies and one secrets management posture across every cloud it runs on. Static credentials are eliminated at every layer: Workload Identity on GCP, Managed Identities on Azure, Dynamic Groups on OCI and IAM Roles on AWS. Security and compliance posture travel with the workflow, not the cloud.

“Fuzzball turns multi-cloud from a liability into a competitive advantage,” said Bjorn Hovland, president of CIQ. “Five clouds used to mean five IAM models, five deployment pipelines and five sets of operational overhead, with complexity and risk being multiplied.”

Availability

Fuzzball’s CoreWeave, AWS, GCP, OCI and Azure deployments are available now. On-premises deployment on clusters built with Warewulf, VMware or bare metal remains a first-class target. Organizations evaluating multi-cloud AI and HPC infrastructure can request a demo at ciq.com/products/fuzzball.

About CIQ

CIQ is the founding support and services partner for Rocky Linux and a leading provider of enterprise Linux infrastructure. CIQ delivers commercially supported Linux offerings, high-performance computing solutions and AI infrastructure to enterprises, government agencies, research institutions and supercomputing centers worldwide. CIQ’s products include the Rocky Linux from CIQ (RLC Pro) family of operating systems, Ascender Pro for IT automation, Fuzzball job-based container orchestration, Warewulf cluster provisioning and Apptainer, the leading container system for high-performance computing. For more information, visit ciq.com.

Source: CIQ

The post CIQ Brings Multi-Cloud AI and HPC Orchestration to Fuzzball Platform appeared first on HPCwire.

Within the last few days, a camera trap caught images of three mule deer using structure for the first time

A trio of mule deer have already scuttled across a not-quite-finished $20m wildlife bridge in Siskiyou county, marking a triumph for the California department of transportation (Caltrans).

The bridge with its accompanying fencing over Route 97 in Siskiyou county is the first wildlife crossing constructed over a major highway in California. The project promises to both improve driver safety and reduce mortality for migrating mule deer, elk and other animal species.

The 12,060-piece Lego set of architect Antoni Gaudí's Barcelona masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia, is now available for preorder.

The new design is one of multiple new Cash App Tags on the way.

The National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot program has made big strides since it was founded in early 2024 to promote the study of AI for science in the nation’s 4,000 colleges and universities, and the pilot program is now transitioning into a full-blown foundation, the National Science Foundation’s Senior Advisor for Cyberinfrastructure Katie Antypas told the crowd at the Trillion Parameter Consortium’s annual all-hands meeting this week in Baltimore, Maryland.

“Over two years into the NAIRR, we’re supporting over 700 different projects, 7,000 students across all 50 states,” Antypas said during her keynote address at TPC26, which attracted nearly 400 attendees for four days of tutorials, hackathons, plenaries, and other talks about AI for science. “We are moving and transitioning this into a permanent sustainable [program]. We’re thrilled to be able to be at this stage.”

Antypas said that the NSF spent $800 million on AI research in 2025, and said the spending on AI should “significantly” increase in fiscal year 2026. As it moves into a permanent program, NAIRR stands to attract a significant chunk of that money, Antypas said. “We’ll be doubling the funding for NAIRR in this fiscal year,” she said.

The federal investment NAIRR comes against the backdrop of a major decrease in federal funding for the NSF as a whole. The Trump administration requested only about $4 billion in funding for NSF for the next fiscal year, which is about half of the current funding level. There’s also the matter of Trump’s recent firing of all 22 members of the National Science Board in April, which roiled members of the HPC community.

(Source: NSF)

NAIRR looks to be safe thanks to the Trump administration’s endeavor to bolster AI at the national level. That is also reflected in the $320 million investment the Department of Energy is making in AI for science and engineering through the Genesis Mission, which launched in November. While DOE funds AI for science research at the National Labs, the NSF uses NAIRR as a primary vehicle for contributing to the advancement of AI for science and engineering in the nation’s vast network of colleges and universities. Most of the country’s academic supercomputing centers, from the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), receive funding from the NSF.

The research done at these academic supercomputing centers is critical for achieving the nation’s goals, Antypas said. “The areas where NSF makes investments in AI is in that fundamental research, that research that is either too early or too risky for the private sector to take over and nurture along,” she said. “NSF has established a number of AI institutes that focus on different particular AI fields and cross-cutting challenges.”

The NAIRR Pilot’s goals are very much aligned with the Trump Administration’s AI Action Plan, which was first iterated in July 2025. The NAIRR Pilot also supports the administration’s broader AI goals, including the DOE’s Genesis Mission, which was launched in November 2025 (after NAIRR Pilot launched) and was the topic of the TPC26 keynote address by the DOE Undersecretary for Science Darío Gil just before Antypas took the stage.

“NAIRR is also absolutely supporting the Genesis Mission that you’ve just heard about, in that NAIRR will be nurturing and supporting those ideas that will be upwelling continuously from the education community and preparing and training the next generation that will go on to our national labs and industry, and support all of our mission agencies as well,” Antypas said.

There are four main goals of NAIRR, Antypas said, including driving AI innovation in AI-powered discovery; training the next-generation workforce; increasing the capacity, integration, and use of public and private sector resources; and advancing AI interpretability, security, and trust.

Anytpas cited two projects that demonstrate NAIRR Pilot is achieving its first and second goals.A Cornell University researcher created a three-dimensional simulation environment for spatial reasoning. Dubbed KnotGym, the project utilized the Frontera supercomputer at UT Austin and Delta at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne. KnotGym, which was highlighted in a paper at the NeurIPS conference in San Diego recently, showed AI could handle simple knots but not more complex ones.

Antypas also highlighted a NAIRR Pilot project out of the University of Rochester that involved the development of AI agents that can accelerate the pace of science by handling tasks like performing searches of scientific literature, developing hypothesis, and analyzing data. The work resulted in the development of the AVIARY and Language Decision Process (LDP), which is incorporated into a Futurehouse platform and licensed to a startup called Edison Scientific.

(Source: NSF)

There is also progress being made in achieving the third goal of bolstering capacity. The National Secure Data Service has a deep partnership with the NSF, Antypas said, while a company called LEXSE+ is helping to provide access to synthetic data for low probability events. The NSF is also working with OpenMined to provide access in the research and education community’s to privacy-preserving technologies.

The fourth NAIRR Pilot goal, advancing AI, interpretability, security and trust, is arguably the toughest. “The is by far the most challenging of the four goals of the NAIRR,” Antypas said. “How do I advance trust of a particular model or a particular output? What does it mean for an infrastructure to have a role in building trust? That’s something that our interagency steering committee has been thinking a lot about lately.”

Antypas said the NSF is prioritizing research in interpretability, security and trust areas. Specifically, the NSF is focused on developing different criteria for transparency requirements and best practices for contributed data and models. It’s also eager to make progress in benchmarking, tracking, and evaluating AI models.

As the NAIRR Pilot project approaches its third year, NSF officials have elevated the goals. The NSF seeks to create a NAIRR Foundation, which funds an “operating center” that touches 100,000 students and involves 10,000 projects, Antypas said. Finally, the roadmap calls for NAIRR to be scaled up another 10x, where it touches 1 million students across 100,000 projects.

“We’re at the next phase where we’re building that foundation,” Antypas said. “We believe we can scale to supporting 100,000 students, tens of thousands of different projects. Once we get that operating center in place and then ultimately where we go will obviously depend on the support we receive from stakeholders and Congress. But we really see that this is a platform that can scale to a million students and hundreds of thousands of projects and investigators that are really supported through the narrative.”

Over the next year, NSF expects to announce new data infrastructure and data services available through the NAIRR, Antypas said. “We continue to see that data integration data infrastructure is a key challenge,” she said. Demand is also high for education and training. NSF-sponsored workshops get filled up in just days, thanks to the huge demand for hands-on training, Antypas said.

“In summary, after two years of the pilot, I think we have many, many lessons learned,” she concluded. “One is that the public private partnership model has been really advantageous not only in expanding the scale of resources, but the variety of resources that are available to the research community. We see that demand for resources is incredibly high. That’s not really surprising.”

It’s also looking at how it can expand from the federal level to working at the state and regional level, along with tracking outcomes, such as job creation, rather than just counting the number of papers that get published.

“We need to challenge ourselves as a community to go beyond that and to really look at how this impacts regional job creation, how this how investments translate to inventions, impacts and new startups and businesses,” she said. “And so we are putting some of the collection mechanisms in place so that over the long term that we can judge these.”

The post NSF’s Antypas Reflects on Successes of NAIRR Pilot at TPC26 appeared first on HPCwire.

US president announces plans for two new coal plants, in Alaska and West Virginia, using Defense Production Act

Donald Trump is using wartime presidential authority to hand $700m to coal-fired power plants in the US, the latest move by the president to bolster what he called “clean, beautiful coal”, despite it being the dirtiest of fossil fuels.

“Today, we’re taking historic action to bring down the price of energy and the cost of living for all Americans with the power of clean, beautiful coal,” he said at xa press conference on Thursday.

Three GOP senators join Democrats as dispute over proposed payouts exposes party divisions

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Senate Republicans on Thursday narrowly scuttled an attempt by Democrats to stop Donald Trump from creating a $1.8bn fund to pay his allies, even as signs emerged that dissent over the proposal was spreading inside the US president’s own party.

Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer had proposed inserting language barring the payouts into Republican-backed legislation to fund Trump’s mass deportation campaign through the duration of his term.

There's been no word yet on if the Kennedy Center plans to remain open after July 5. It was to be closed for two years for extensive repairs beginning this summer.

Despite flare-ups in Middle East violence, investors remain optimistic that the U.S. and Iran will soon end the war.

Meta has reportedly delayed the developer release of its Muse Spark AI model API multiple times, and as of Tuesday, had no scheduled launch date, according to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled). Reuters reports: A Meta spokesperson told Reuters on Wednesday that the company is already testing the Application Programming Interface (API) with some early partners and is looking forward to releasing it this month. "The muse spark API will be coming soon," Meta AI Chief Alexandr Wang announced in a post on X in April. Meta unveiled Muse Spark in April as the first model built to close the gap with rivals. Muse Spark is the first in a new series of models created by the company's Superintelligence Labs. Earlier on Wednesday, Meta unveiled an AI agent aimed at helping businesses carry out day-to-day operations, hinting at the company's ambitions to compete with rivals such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Alphabet's Google.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sens. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, and Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, said the anti-weaponization fund violates multiple constitutional provisions.

The money will fund new and existing coal plants, as well as an export terminal in Oakland, California.

• Fan ran on to court during NBA finals opener

• Knicks guard appeared upset with fans

• Howard Bryant: Brunson the difference in Game 1

The NBA has banned two fans for life after an incident in which a man ran on to the court to take a selfie with Victor Wembanyama during Game 1 of the finals.

In a separate case, ESPN reports that the league is investigating an incident during Wednesday night’s game when New York Knicks star Jalen Brunson became upset after an interaction with fans during the fourth quarter of his team’s 105-95 victory over the San Antonio Spurs.

The new paid tier adds features like longer stories and deeper metrics as Meta looks to diversify revenue beyond advertising.

Since 2015, fires have undone years of effort to reduce ozone levels, underscoring a growing public health crisis

The highly destructive wildfires that have battered the US and North America in recent years have significantly increased emissions and been linked to tens of thousands of premature deaths, but their impact on air quality is greater than previously known, according to new research.

A study published in Science on Thursday found that, since 2015, wildfires have reversed US progress toward ozone air quality standards, as the worsening pollution caused by wildfire smoke has undone years of efforts to reduce emissions. Ground-level ozone (O3) is created when pollutants from cars, refineries and industrial sources react with sunlight, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

A stock market boom is elevating more Americans into the ranks of the nation's millionaires, a new study finds.

As Israel’s standing in the U.S., and among liberals in particular, continues to crater, the mainstream American media is vaguely taking notice. But when they report on this increasingly potent political dynamic, national publications continue to frame it as a tension among Democratic voters — rather than a tension between Democratic voters and their party leadership. 

“A Democrat’s Dodge on AIPAC Points to the Party’s Tensions Over Israel,” read one recent New York Times headline. “Tensions over pro-Israel lobbying group highlight rifts in Democratic primaries,” read another Reuters headline. “Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza has driven a significant, deeper-than-ever divide among Democrats,” NBC News reported last week. “The U.S.-Israel alliance has rapidly gone from a point of bipartisan consensus to a wedge issue dividing both parties,” opined the Washington Post.

All of those were just last month, but the false equivocation goes back further. “The Democratic primary electorate,” The Hill informed readers in March, “is increasingly divided over Israel.” “Israel tensions threaten Dems’ midterm plans,” Politico announced in a January headline, which continued in the piece: “Just as Democrats are finding their footing by focusing on affordability, their differences on Israel are threatening to tear them apart.” “New York City’s annual Israel Day Parade has long been considered a bipartisan tradition — but this year, the event is becoming a symbol of the growing divide within the Democratic Party over Israel,” Sinclair’s National News Desk reported last week. 

Related

DNC Shoots Down Resolutions Calling Out AIPAC and Limiting Arms to Israel

There’s only one problem with the “tensions,” “divided,” and “wedge issue” framing: It is not supported by any polls. The “divide,” such as it is, is increasingly not among Democrats or even liberals; it is between the supermajority of Democratic Party voters and party leadership. While party leaders such as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and big Democratic donors, are pro-Israel, actual Democratic voters have moved on from Israel with remarkable speed and consistency. Let’s take a look at the polling:

• According to an August 2025 Quinnipiac poll, 77 percent of Democrats think Israel is committing genocide in Gaza versus 11 percent who say it is not.
• According to a May 2026 New York Times/Siena poll, 74 percent of Democrats oppose “providing additional economic and military support to Israel,” while 20 percent support doing so.
• According to a June 2026 Institute for Global Affairs/YouGov poll, 67 percent of Democrats think the U.S. relationship with Israel does more to hurt the U.S. than help it, and only 5 percent think it does more to help than hurt. 
• According to a May 2026 NBC News poll, 67 percent of Democrats now sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis (17 percent). Just 13 percent of Democrats have a positive view of Israel, and 57 percent, a majority, have a negative view.

To contextualize that 13 percent — which is down from 34 percent of Democrats who said they viewed Israel positively back in 2023 — it’s even lower than the number of Democrats who say they support traditional right-wing stances, such as:

• Allowing teachers to lead children in Christian prayers in public schools (18 percent, Pew 2024)
• Making all abortions illegal (14 percent, Pew 2024)
• Not mandating MMR vaccines in schools (14 percent, Pew 2025)

The media justifiably treats all of these issues as Republican or conservative-coded views. Yet support for Israel is still treated as a mainstream, if contested, liberal value.

In reality, it’s simply not: It’s overwhelmingly a Republican, right-wing view not backed by a supermajority of Democrats. So why has this consistently misleading narrative in U.S. media been allowed to persist? 

Related

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

There’s an obvious tension over Israel and the U.S. role in supporting it, which has been writ large in high-profile battles, from Democratic Senate campaigns to debates over the Democrats’ platform. The media has to cover that tension, but describing it more accurately — as a divide between party elites and the rank and file — is an awkward narrative, one that requires a deeper class and material analysis.

So instead, it’s just indexed under the misleading and generic label of “party divisions.” Naturally, Israel is not a 100–0 issue in favor of Palestine among voters, but no issue is that one-sided. A minority of Democrats support all kinds of relatively fringe, right-wing opinions. Here are some of them compared alongside the issue of Israel–Palestine. The percentage of Democrats who: 

• Support sending military aid to Israel: 20 percent
• Believe teachers should be allowed to lead children in Christian prayers in public schools: 18 percent
• Say all abortion should be banned: 14 percent
• Have a positive view of Israel: 13 percent
• Support a ban on same-sex marriage: 11 percent
• Believe Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza: 11 percent
• Believe there is solid evidence of “widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election”: 10 percent

Polls are not a perfect snapshot of political beliefs and can be somewhat contradictory (a profile of the 2 percent of Democrats who think Israel is committing genocide and have a positive view of the country would make an interesting read). But polls over the past three years, and the last few months in particular, show a very clear trend that support for Israel is now an increasingly fringe belief among Democrats. It’s worth emphasizing that the issue of Democratic voters souring on Israel is not particularly sectarian, either, with Jewish Democrats, especially those under the age of 35, steadily abandoning Israel. A Washington Post poll from October found that among Jewish Americans ages 18 to 34, only 36 percent claimed to have an “emotional attached to Israel,” and half agree with the broad liberal consensus that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Related

DNC Autopsy of 2024 Loss Doesn’t Mention Gaza or Israel at all

But if watching how Democratic leadership and the party’s funders continue to back Israel to the hilt was your only barometer, you might assume there’s been no shift in public sentiment at all.

The dynamic is playing out over efforts to push a war powers resolution to end U.S. support for Israel’s bombing and occupation in Lebanon. On Wednesday, Axios, citing “numerous” anonymous “House Democrats” and “aides,” attempted to paint a Rep. Rashida Tlaib-led bill to end U.S. support as a provocation dividing Democrats. “An impending House vote to constrain the Trump administration from joining Israel’s war in Lebanon has some Democrats fuming that one of their own members is forcing them to take an agonizing vote,” reporter Andrew Solender lamented.

But what Solender fails to note is that Tlaib’s bill is overwhelmingly the majoritarian position among Democrats. A recent Arab American Institute commissioned poll found that 62 percent of Democrats “believe the U.S. should take more steps to pressure Israel to stop bombing and leave southern Lebanon,” and only 17 percent disagree. The substance of Tlaib’s bill is the Democratic voter position by almost 4 to 1. The tension in this story, such as it is, is between anonymous “Democratic leadership” and rank-and-file Democrats. And we know this because every single source in the Axios article opposing the war powers resolution had to be anonymous, while everyone supporting it proudly put their name on their quotes. What does this tell us about how popular support for Israel’s boundless violence in the Levant is? 

Meanwhile, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other majority pro-Israel groups are well aware of the existential shift that’s underway and have responded by intervening in primaries at an unprecedented clip. Already in this midterm cycle, as Donald Shaw at Sludge reported, “four major pro-Israel committees — AIPAC’s PAC, its outside spending arm United Democracy Project (UDP), the closely aligned Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) super PAC, and the Republican Jewish Coalition’s Victory Fund — have poured nearly $50 million into congressional races nationwide.” Receiving money from AIPAC has become politically toxic for Democrats, so much so that the lobbying group is deploying an elaborate web of shell organizations to funnel money to their preferred candidates.

Still, AIPAC is heading into the midterms bigger than ever, and its allied super PAC has a staggering war chest of nearly $100 million on hand — up from $35 million in 2022, when AIPAC first began directing funding in congressional campaigns. Since then, it has spent over $221 million, not including the $100 million set aside for the 2026 midterms.

Related

Who’s Spending in Your Congressional Election? We Tracked the Front Groups Fueling the 2026 Midterms.

The two most powerful Democrats in the country, Jeffries and Schumer, are prominent and consistent backers of Israel, despite their party’s sizable shift. Jeffries was the largest recipient of pro-Israel money in the House last election cycle out of 435 voting members. And Schumer, who has explicitly said his “job” is to “keep the left pro-Israel,” spent last weekend marching in a pro-Israel parade in New York City alongside war criminals and self-identified “fascists.” Leadership, like its Big Donor base, is entirely out of sync with the current sentiment within the party.

It’s not just pro-Israel donors driving this “wedge.” Backing Israel and the endless arming of its military has been, and continues to be, a boondoggle for the broader U.S. military–industrial complex that captures the Washington consensus. Of the some $22 billion in military aid that Israel has received since October 7, 2023, roughly 75 percent has gone to U.S. arms companies that themselves employ an army of lobbyists and think tank boosters to promote Israel and its sprawling, seemingly never-ending expansionism and mass violence.

Despite 77 percent of Democratic voters saying Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, only 8.5 percent of Democrats in Congress have. Despite Democratic voters sympathizing more with Palestine than Israel at a ratio of 4 to 1, the number of Democrats in Congress who put the rights of Palestinians ahead of the interests of Israel could likely be counted on one hand. How long will our media continue to act like there is meaningful disagreement among Democrats, as such, when — among the rank and file — it’s an issue as settled as prayer in public schools, abortion, and climate change?

As the gap between the will of Democratic voters and its leadership grows more and more apparent, our media will continue to vaguely acknowledge this “division” without identifying the actual source of it. It’s not between the voters themselves, whose opinions are measurable and consistent, but between the voters and the leaders they elected — in theory — to represent their interests.

The post The Real “Divide” Among Democrats Over Israel Is Between Party Leadership and Voters appeared first on The Intercept.

Policy agreement means trans people will continue to have access to Kenwood Ladies’ and Highgate Men’s ponds in north-west London

The bathing ponds at Hampstead Heath in north-west London will remain trans-inclusive after a public consultation overwhelmingly favoured its existing rules.

There are gender-segregated ponds for men and women, with trans people able to swim in whichever they feel most appropriate, or use the heath’s mixed-gender pond instead.

The U.S. and its Five Eyes intelligence partners issued a joint warning (PDF) that Chinese military intelligence services are using LinkedIn and other professional networking sites to recruit people with access to government, military, foreign policy, or sensitive economic information. "These actors use an aggressive online recruitment strategy whereby intelligence officers or their affiliates pose as employees of private consultancies, think tanks or human resources firms, and place online job advertisements for foreign policy and defense analysts," the agencies said Wednesday. "China's military intelligence services ultimately seek to acquire privileged military, political and economic intelligence that can provide China with a strategic and tactical advantage over the Five Eyes." Bloomberg reports: China was targeting Five Eyes nationals with security clearance, particularly those working in foreign affairs, security and intelligence, and military personnel including people stationed in the Asia-Pacific region, it said. People with more peripheral access to government information, such as academics, journalists and think tank employees, were also being approached. The Chinese embassy in the UK strongly condemned the accusations, calling the allegation of Chinese espionage threats "entirely fabricated" and "malicious slander." The "Five Eyes" members have "engaged in unscrupulous espionage and intelligence-gathering activities around the globe. Their activities are the real threat to peace-loving countries," the embassy said in a statement Thursday. [...] According to the agencies, Chinese spies have commissioned reports to be written by those they've approached, paying them anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars, with payments sometimes made in cryptocurrency. "Military members may be asked about their roles and unit activities, home base or naval vessel," the notice said. "Five Eyes agencies have identified individuals who have undertaken these activities, leading to criminal prosecutions, job losses, and security-clearance revocation," it warned.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ron Wyden tells of ‘grave concerns’ over plan, first revealed by Guardian, to hold families at sprawling Louisiana facility

The ranking member on the US Senate’s influential finance committee has demanded transparency over a proposed “first-of-its-kind” ICE family and child detention center in Alexandria, Louisiana, citing reporting by the Guardian that first revealed the Trump administration’s plans in March.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, has written to the project’s contractors and to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) expressing concerns over conflicts of interest, environmental contamination and “the absence of a public process” in the center’s planning.

In a May 16 Truth Social post, President Donald Trump cited updated climate change scenarios to misleadingly claim that experts had “admitted” prior climate change projections “were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” The regularly scheduled revision reflects in part the progress the world has made on moving away from fossil fuels.

Trump was reacting to a new set of seven scenarios of emissions by the end of the century, proposed in an April 7 paper by an international group of scientists. Over time, the range of plausible scenarios has narrowed. The most pessimistic scenario now shows lower emissions than 15 years ago, when the prior scenarios were developed, and the most optimistic one now shows more.

Trump, however, used the update to cast doubt on the reality and seriousness of global warming. “GOOD RIDDANCE!” he wrote. “After 15 years of Dumocrats promising that ‘Climate Change’ is going to destroy the Planet, the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!”

RCP8.5 was the most pessimistic of four scenarios that were selected in 2007 and described in 2011. The scenarios looked at how much the climate might change by 2100, relative to the industrial revolution.

“RCP8.5 was always this low-probability, high-impact case,” Detlef van Vuuren, a climate researcher at Utrecht University and PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, told us. He helped lead the effort to develop both the new and earlier climate scenarios. As 15 years have passed and the end of the century has gotten closer, it has become clearer what emissions paths are most plausible.

It’s “useful to consider possible outcomes that are less attractive, and it doesn’t mean that you were wrong by considering those if they didn’t come true,” van Vuuren said. “Unfortunately, the overall outcome of all of this is that we are in a situation that is actually leading to quite strong climate impact still.”

Van Vuuren also clarified that Trump is incorrect to call the international group of researchers behind the scenarios “the United Nations TOP Climate Committee.” A U.N. group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, summarizes the existing research on climate change. The scenarios are anticipated to have a “major role” in the group’s next climate assessments, he said, but it did not come up with the new scenarios.

“The paper belongs to the broader body of scientific literature produced by the international research community, under the coordination of the World Climate Research Program, not the IPCC,” the IPCC wrote in a May 20 statement.

We asked the White House if Trump was referring to the IPCC in his post and if he was suggesting that climate change is not a serious problem. In an emailed reply, White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said that “Dumocrats” and others had for years made “bogus ‘climate change’ claims that we would destroy the planet,” leading countries that pursued energy transition policies to be “destroyed” with “blackouts and sky-high prices.”

“The rogue climate activists continue to be ‘Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!’ and President Trump continues to be ‘Right! Right! Right!’” Rogers said.

Why Climate Scenarios Have Narrowed

Experts said that Trump’s comments on climate scenarios misrepresented their purpose.

“Scenarios are not predictions: they are ‘what-if’ pictures of the future,” Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and professor at Texas Tech University, told us via email.

“The highest-emission scenario serves as a basis for exploring the potential consequences of climate change if everything goes wrong,” a post on the new climate scenarios from the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, a Dutch government research institute, explained. “After all, it is important to ensure that we are also prepared for undesirable developments.”

Termed “representative climate pathways,” the older scenarios by design covered a broad range of climate trajectories, with RCP8.5 representing the 90th percentile of baseline scenarios in the literature at the time. (A baseline scenario illustrates a case where people do not take action to mitigate climate change, but there can be a range of baseline scenarios depending on other factors, such as how much fossil fuel use increases.) The most optimistic scenario, by contrast, represented below the 10th percentile of mitigation scenarios in the literature.

Van Vuuren likened the scenarios to a range of possible times a person might arrive at a destination on a drive. Initially, a person might want to consider the possibility of a traffic jam or other misadventures. But as the trip progresses, a traffic jam will or will not emerge, and the range of plausible arrival times will become narrower. In the case of the climate scenarios, the destination is the year 2100, and we are now 15 years closer to it than we were when the previous scenarios were laid out.

In recent years, the world has not followed the trajectory outlined in RCP8.5, van Vuuren said. There are lower emissions and greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere than were laid out in that scenario. This means that a new low-probability, high-impact case will “automatically” be lower than the previous one, he said.

On top of this, renewable energy became more economically competitive, he said. RCP8.5 assumed high use of fossil fuels, especially coal. When RCP8.5 was developed, “emissions had been growing relatively fast in Asia, and based on coal,” van Vuuren said. In the years since, the outlook has improved for the growth of renewables and gotten far worse for coal.

Between 2000 and 2015, “global emissions and temperature change had been reliably tracking” the RCP8.5 scenario, Hayhoe said.

But since 2015, reality diverged from the RCP8.5 scenario, due to “massive advances” in clean energy, she said, as well as climate policies that were enacted following the 2015 Paris Agreement, a major climate treaty that the U.S. has left during each of the two Trump administrations. “And that, in a nutshell, is why the higher of the new scenarios is lower than RCP8.5,” she said.

As time passed, some climate scientists began to critique the plausibility of RCP8.5, van Vuuren and his colleagues acknowledged in the new paper. Some also argued that it never was all that plausible. And some have said that researchers, policymakers and communicators have at times misused RCP8.5 by treating it as a likely outcome of the business-as-usual approach to climate change.

But Trump and his allies have overgeneralized these criticisms. We wrote in 2018, for example, that Trump administration officials had criticized the National Climate Assessment for being based on the “worst” or “most extreme” scenario, when it had used multiple scenarios.

And last year, a Department of Energy report released to justify rescinding the endangerment finding — the underpinning for greenhouse gas regulation in the U.S. — similarly used RCP8.5 in an attempt to discredit climate science. The DOE report “selectively focuses on high-end emissions scenarios, like RCP8.5, portraying them as failed predictions, to argue that the risks of climate change are exaggerated,” a comment submitted to the DOE on behalf of more than 85 scientists said. (The DOE report was written by five researchers who have long propagated contrarian views on climate change. In its final February rule rescinding the endangerment finding, the EPA stated that the agency is no longer relying on the DOE report “in light of concerns raised by some commenters.”)

“A tripling of global CO2 emissions by 2100,” as envisioned in RCP8.5, “may never have been particularly plausible even back in 2011 when RCP8.5 was originally published,” a trio of climate scientists wrote for the Climate Brink blog on May 18 on the retirement of the high-end scenario. “But a 21st century of increasing fossil fuel use leading to a doubling of emissions was within the realm of the possible.” It’s a “sign of progress” that the world is not heading toward a doubling of emissions, the researchers wrote, saying that the retirement of RCP8.5 doesn’t undermine “the edifice of all of climate science as both President Trump and some overly excited internet pundits claim.”

Major Impacts of Climate Change

Trump’s post also incorrectly suggested that climate change is not a serious problem.

“For far too long Climate Activism has been used by Dumocrats to scare Americans, push horrible Energy Polices, and fund BILLIONS into their bogus research programs,” he wrote. “Unlike the Dumocrats, who use Climate Alarmism nonsense to push their GREEN NEW SCAM, my Administration will always be based on TRUTH, SCIENCE, and FACT!”

Hayhoe said that Trump’s claims follow a familiar pattern of climate denial: claiming that climate change isn’t bad or its impacts aren’t serious. But the retirement of RCP8.5 does not change the fact that consequential global warming is occurring and will continue to occur.

Van Vuuren said that “by far the most important news” from the new climate scenarios publication is that the lowest plausible emissions scenario is now higher than before, hitting 1.7 degrees Celsius “or slightly higher” — the equivalent of more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit — before falling to around 1.5 C by 2100. This would mean the world would substantially overshoot the longstanding goal of limiting warming to no more than 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels. The scenario, notably, also relies on a high degree of carbon removal, which as a technology has yet to be deployed at large scale.

“The main message is that because emissions have been increasing instead of decreasing, we have increasingly lost our sight on the climate goals, which were formulated to prevent dangerous climate change,” he said.

Currently, the world is approximately following the medium scenario, van Vuuren said, which would lead to around 2.5 C to 3 C (4.5 F to 5.4 F), of warming by the end of the century. “That will bring quite substantial climate damage,” he said. “It will mean a substantial increase in extreme [weather and climate] events, it will mean sea level rise, it will mean impacts on agricultural yields, and also substantial increase in the risk of tipping points,” or levels of climate change that significantly and often irreversibly alter systems.

The RCP8.5 scenario translated to around 4.5 C of warming by 2100, or around 8 F. The new highest scenario includes expected warming of nearly 3.5 C, or around 6 F, and temperatures would continue to rise after 2100.

The Climate Brink post also explained that for a given level of warming, certain risks have increased. “So, even if the high-end emissions in RCP8.5 won’t materialize, the damages projected in these earlier climate simulations remain very much in play,” the researchers said.

Van Vuuren added that the temperature increases in the new paper are based on a “very simple” climate model but that further climate modeling will be done to understand how conditions will affect the climate system. In the past few years, he said that “we actually saw temperature increase going up much faster than in our scenarios.” The meaning of this is not yet known, but some research has suggested that this indicates the climate system is more sensitive to greenhouse gases, he said, which could mean much higher temperatures from those gases than previously thought. If that’s the case, “the temperature rise could still easily exceed 4°C,” or more than 7 F, the PBL post said.

The positive news, Hayhoe said, is that the scenarios show people can affect the trajectory of climate change. “The most important thing that these scenarios — both the older RCP ones and this newer set — show, without a shadow of a doubt, is that WE are the biggest uncertainty in terms of future impacts.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post Trump Misrepresents Climate Change Scenarios appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Mother demands overhaul of maternity care after settling case over birth at Queen’s hospital in Romford in 2019

The family of a girl left brain-damaged at birth have agreed to accept £28m in damages after the NHS trust involved admitted that its mistakes led to the tragedy.

Barking, Havering and Redbridge university hospitals NHS trust failed to monitor the baby’s heart rate while her mother was in labour or ask an obstetrician to review the case, either of which might have led to the girl being born in a healthy condition.

Exclusive: Greater Lincolnshire mayor walks out on cabinet minister after row over social media role in community tensions

Andrea Jenkyns walked out of a meeting with a cabinet minister and several other metropolitan mayors on Thursday after a heated discussion about the murder of Henry Nowak and the civil unrest that has followed.

The Reform mayor of Greater Lincolnshire walked out of the meeting with the communities secretary, Steve Reed, and other regional leaders after a row over the role social media has played in exacerbating community tensions.

The UK has banned Piker and Cenk Uygur from entry – but the objectionable things they’ve said are not more dangerous than Israel itself

This week, the British government banned Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur, two leftwing US commentators with millions of followers, from entering the country on the grounds that their presence would not be “conducive to the public good”. It did not spell out what it meant by this very broad phrase, but Piker and Uygur have accused the government of denying them entry because of their prolific criticism of Israel. Some critics have accused the pair of antisemitism, which they deny.

A lot has been written about the Piker-Uygur ban, and I don’t think I need to litigate everything they have ever uttered here. They have undeniably said some objectionable things (Piker, for example, said some Orthodox Jews are “inbred”, which he later apologized for). What sort of speech crosses a line that makes you detrimental to the public good, is not clear, however. Conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro, for example, has said that “Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage”. While he later apologized for this, he has repeatedly characterized Arabs as barbarians who “value murder”. The British government has never banned him from speaking in the UK.

Democratic attorney general’s office says it will continue to try to push 2020 presidential election case through courts

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The Arizona supreme court has denied a prosecutor’s appeal of an order that the state’s fake elector case against Donald Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and others over the 2020 presidential election be sent back to a grand jury.

The decision marks another setback for the state’s Democratic attorney general, Kris Mayes, as she struggles to push the sprawling case through the courts. Mayes’s office said it will again present the case in its entirety to a grand jury rather than end the prosecution.

Outcomes in key races for governor and LA mayor remain unsettled as mayoral hopefuls Spencer Pratt and Nithya Raman, as well as gubernatorial candidates Xavier Becerra, Steve Hilton and Tom Steyer await their electoral fates.

Roku, the company that makes TV boxes and sells ad space based on your usage patterns, has released its remote control operating system as open source – and by remote control I don’t mean robot stuff or whatever, but actual remote controls, the thing you use to control your TV or whatever from the couch.

Roku has announced the official availability of Roku LT OS – a lightweight, highly deterministic open-source operating system that is already used in our industry-changing Roku remote controls.

[…]

In addition to high-performance automotive platforms, Roku LT OS is designed to be accessible to the broader developer community. The operating system ships with native support for the ESP32 platform, a highly popular SoC among hobbyists and makers. Because ESP32 development boards are widely available online for just a few dollars, developers can get started with Roku LT OS with minimal hardware investment.

↫ Roku’s developers blog

As far as I can tell, this operating system is entirely new and not based on Linux or something else, but the available documentation is light on details so I can’t make much more out of it. Regardless, it’s nice to have another open source embedded operating system.

Borrowers have a short window to prepare for numerous upcoming student loan changes. Here's where to start.

While huge donations are nothing new in UK politics, some fear electoral finance is distorting democracy itself

Keir Starmer may be relaxed about allowing millions from cryptocurrency billionaires to flow into Reform UK’s coffers but Labour MPs are tearing their hair out every time the quarterly data on electoral finance drops.

“I look at it through my fingers,” says one MP, as the latest figures show a further £7m went to Reform UK from just two men, Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo.

Investors will buy into the market-leading tech and cult of Musk despite a price that is defying gravity

“Our mission,” says the opening sentence of SpaceX’s listing document with a straight face, “is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multi-planetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.”

The last bit has an echo of the laughable WeWork, which was going to “elevate the world’s consciousness” via the medium of shared office spaces. But, yes, if SpaceX could tick off all the items on Elon Musk’s to-do list, one could make a case that the company should be valued at $1.77tn (£1.32tn).

PM says Britons are ‘reasonable, tolerant people’ and backs MP’s legal action against Grok firm over fake sexualised images

• UK politics live – latest updates

Elon Musk is “interfering in our politics” and attempting to create division, Keir Starmer has said, in a significant toughening of government language about the X owner.

The prime minister’s comments come after weeks of posts by Musk on his social media platform about the murder of Henry Nowak, many of which have used far-right themes and talking points.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration Thursday in upholding the power of federal regulators to enforce data privacy laws on telecommunications companies. The 8-1 decision (PDF) preserved one of the Federal Communications Commission's key tools, though the companies also won a concession from the Republican administration that could shift the regulatory landscape. The appeal from telecommunications giants Verizon and AT&T challenged a combined $100 million in penalties imposed after the agency determined that the companies had failed to safeguard customer location data. The companies argued that the FCC's process was unconstitutional because it gave them little opportunity to tell their side of the story in front of a jury. The administration defended the fines are an essential regulatory tool. But the government also said companies did not have to pay the penalties right away, a regulatory shift in the companies' favor. The Supreme Court agreed, affirming the FCC's power to order fines when challenges are still available. "The orders at issue did not settle the carriers' legal obligations because, stated simply, they did not create an obligation to pay," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. [...] Other agencies use similar enforcement methods, so a sweeping victory for AT&T and Verizon could have had widespread effects, advocates said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Justice department filed charges against Trump’s former adviser in 2025 as part of onslaught against president’s critics

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John Bolton, the former US national security adviser who left Donald Trump’s first administration and became a staunch critic of the US president, has reached a plea agreement in a case criminally charging him with mishandling classified documents, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The agreement, subject to court approval, will allow Bolton to plead guilty to one count of illegal retention of sensitive national security information and requires him to pay a $2.25m fine, the person said, and serve anywhere between no time and five years in prison.

Ministers should end Palantir’s contract before medical confidentiality is sacrificed to Silicon Valley’s appetite for public data

Alarm bells ought to have rung when it emerged last month that Palantir engineers could gain “unlimited access” to identifiable NHS patient data. Such sensitive medical information was only supposed to be available either to someone involved in a patient’s care or with the patient’s informed consent. NHS England’s new position appears to have changed that, extending access to private companies because it may make data processing easier. Convenience is not a basis for undermining medical confidentiality.

Nicola Byrne, the government’s national data guardian, clearly thought the NHS had broken its promise that its £330m deal with Palantir would see “identifiable patient information … limited to NHS staff with a legitimate need”. Patients tell doctors things they may tell no one else. If they think that sensitive details can be disclosed to US tech corporations, trust will suffer – and patients will say less when the truth matters most.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

The president’s image and name are proliferating in Washington and beyond, overturning well-advised democratic taboos on glorifying sitting leaders

One of the surest signs of an authoritarian regime is the ubiquity of its leader. Mussolini’s face was plastered across fascist Italy. In North Korea, pictures of Kim Jong-un have appeared alongside those of his father and grandfather, which are present in every home and public building. The golden statue of Turkmenistan’s leader, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, perching on a marble cliff in the capital is one of a multitude of portrayals.

Thriving democracies spurn such displays, rightly judging it safer to laud leaders once they are out of power. The first US president, George Washington, refused to appear on currency, believing that redolent of European monarchs. The 47th has no such concerns. The administration wants a $250 bill depicting Donald Trump to commemorate the 250th anniversary of independence, though federal law does not currently allow banknotes to depict living people. His signature will soon appear on $100 bills: a first for a US president.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador says Washington is using investigations into governors and propaganda to boost rivals

Mexico’s former president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has accused US officials of trying to weaken the governing party to strengthen the opposition, amid rising tensions between the two countries over Washington’s investigations into several Mexican governors.

“Some US officials are plotting to weaken Morena and strengthen the rightwing opposition in Mexico with the aim of restoring a subservient, corrupt, mafia-like, and cruel government,” López Obrador wrote in a lengthy letter posted on X on Wednesday.

Beluga whales, which Marineland threatened to euthanize in 2025, will be moved to sanctuaries in Spain or across US

Canada and an embattled marine park have reached a tentative deal on the future of 30 beluga whales, ending a saga that has captivated the public and angered animal rights groups.

The federal fisheries ministry announced this week that all of Marineland’s belugas would be shipped to either Spain or one of four locations in the US, ending whale captivity in Canada.

Social Security could reportedly be cut by $500 per month in 2032. Here's how to increase your savings before then.

State election officials continue to sift through uncounted primary ballots, which could take days or even weeks

The California governor’s race remained unsettled Thursday, as state election officials continued to sift through uncounted primary ballots – a process that could take days or even weeks as voters eagerly await the results.

Polls indicated that British-born conservative pundit Steve Hilton was narrowly leading the race, followed by former US health and human services secretary Xavier Becerra. Billionaire Tom Steyer trailed behind the pair. Under California’s primary system, the top two vote-getters will advance to the general election.

Raymond Chen shares some history regarding Windows 8’s development:

During the development of Windows 8, we needed a name for “that thing we’re creating.” Not being a particularly clever bunch when it comes to code names, we just called it “the modern experience,” to distinguish it from what we had in Windows 7, which was called “the classic experience.”

And then, as Microspeak demands, we started abbreviating like mad.

↫ Raymond Chen

Basically, they added “mo” for “modern” in front of everything, so the Metro shell became “MoSh”, the Settings application “MoSet”, and so on. And yes, the code name for the Photos application was exactly what it sounds like.

Three solar flares burst from the sun this week, raising the chances of seeing the northern lights for people across the United States.

Social Security back pay comes with special protections, but unpaid debt can still create risks in some situations.

Even in today's unpredictable economic climate, retirees still have multiple ways to improve their finances.

Hair stylist Frédéric Fekkai and ex-Miami Beach mayor Philip Levine accused in new testimony, lawmakers reveal

Republican lawmakers have asked the Department of Justice to investigate sexual assault allegations involving two men made by Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime assistant.

In a transcribed closed-door interview in late May, as part of a congressional investigation into Epstein, Sarah Kellen, one of the late sex offender’s former aides, told the House oversight and reform committee she was “sexually and psychologically abused” by him during her employment – but also alleged she was sexually assaulted by the French celebrity hairstylist Frédéric Fekkai, and by Philip Levine, the former mayor of Miami Beach, in separate incidents in the early 2000s.

schwit1 shares a report from NJ.com: Samsung is pulling up stakes in New Jersey and heading to Texas, a move that could leave roughly 1,000 Garden State workers facing a stark choice: relocate or risk losing their jobs. The South Korean tech giant confirmed this week that it will move its US headquarters from Englewood Cliffs, NJ, to its existing campus in Plano, Texas, marking a stunning reversal less than a year after it celebrated the opening of a new headquarters in Bergen County. The relocation is expected to be completed by the end of the year, according to company statements. "Samsung Electronics America Inc. is undergoing a business transformation designed to better position our organization for long-term growth and future success. As part of this effort, we are relocating our U.S. headquarters from New Jersey to our existing campus in Plano, Texas, building on our 30-year presence in the state," said Samsung in a statement emailed to NJ.com on Tuesday. "As part of this strategy, we will be optimizing parts of the organization to ensure our roles and functions align to key business priorities. We recognize such adjustments will have an impact on our people and we will be providing support to those affected," it continued.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Country is shaken by the brutal murders of two girls, aged 14 and 17, whose bodies were discovered just days apart

Argentina has reacted with fury after the bodies of two murdered teenage girls were found just two days apart. The latest killings underscore the South American country’s enduring femicide crisis despite years of feminist campaigning, and have prompted alarm over the decision to cut support for victims of gender-based violence under the far-right administration of Javier Milei.

Police found the remains of Agostina Vega, 14, on Saturday, in a field on the outskirts of the city of Córdoba. She had been fatally strangled and her body had been dismembered, according to local media reports.

June 4, 2026 — When most people picture a supercomputer, they imagine endless rows of compute and storage racks, blinking lights and machines thinking faster than humans can conceive. What they don’t visualize is the system quietly working underneath it all — a complicated, choreographed dance that keeps all that processing power from turning into heat, and from heat into failure.

A complex system of cooling towers, chillers, pumps, heat exchangers, sensors and more than 2,000 feet of pipes all work together to remove heat from the liquid-cooled exascale supercomputer El Capitan. Graphic credit: Dan Herchek/LLNL.

At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), the exascale El Capitan supercomputer — capable of over 1.8 quintillion calculations per second on real-world benchmarks — depends on a cooling system so essential that without it, the machine would shut down fast.

If El Capitan is the brain, according to LLNL systems engineer Chris DePrater, the cooling system is the cardiovascular system — moving heat the way blood moves oxygen. And just as importantly, DePrater adds, the controls keeping El Capitan from overheating act like a nervous system, sensing changes and responding instantly to keep everything in balance.

Heat generates fast at exascale. As processors and accelerators work at extraordinary densities, they create energy faster than air can reasonably carry away. Once racks exceed a certain power threshold, air becomes impractical.

To keep El Capitan from overheating like a hiker in the desert summer, its cooling system uses two loops, one with treated water, and the other with a glycol-based liquid (like antifreeze), combining efficient heat transfer with protection against bacterial growth. At El Capitan’s scale, liquid cooling isn’t just a preference; it’s the only way to operate.

“We typically stop using air cooling if the rack goes over about 25 kilowatts (25,000 watts),” DePrater explains. “With the densities on El Capitan being 400 kilowatts a rack, there’s no other option. You cannot cool that dense of a rack in that small of space.” Without liquid cooling, El Capitan simply “wouldn’t function. It would completely stop working within minutes,” he says.

DePrater uses a campfire analogy: Toss an empty plastic bottle into the flames and it melts almost immediately. Fill that same bottle with water and it takes far longer to fail, because water absorbs heat much more effectively than air. El Capitan’s cooling system uses that same principle, circulating water directly to where heat is generated and carrying it away, back to the neighboring Exascale Computing Facility Modernization (ECFM) site, before temperatures can spike.

The system itself isn’t a single machine, but an ensemble — cooling towers, chillers, pumps, heat exchangers, sensors and more than 2,000 feet of pipes all working together to remove heat from El Capitan, through the facility and out to the atmosphere. DePrater compares the coordinated effort to a symphony, with the control system playing the part of the conductor.

“The controls need to conduct the systems to play or sing in harmony with each other, so that way nothing can be out of sync,” he explains.

Those controls matter as much as the plumbing. Sensors constantly monitor temperature, flow rate and pressure, allowing the system to respond to rapid power swings as workloads change. If cooling isn’t perfectly balanced, temperatures rise quickly. Built-in safeguards allow the system to shed load or shut down safely before damage occurs.

Despite the scale — tens of thousands of gallons of water recirculating constantly through pipes large enough for a human to crawl through — the goal is efficiency, not brute force. The water used in El Capitan is warmed to about 85 degrees, rather than chilled, avoiding energy-intensive refrigeration. Heat is removed largely through evaporation at the ECFM cooling tower, one of the most efficient cooling methods available. The result is a system designed not just to support today’s world-class computing machines, but to scale for what comes next. For DePrater, success is defined by invisibility; no news is good news.

“When nobody knows who I am, that’s the best thing, because it means everything has been working fine,” he says with a laugh. Using another analogy, the cooling system is like the drummer in a band, rarely in the spotlight but impossible to replace.

By enabling El Capitan to run reliably at scale, the cooling system supports the Laboratory’s national security mission and stockpile modernization efforts, including high-resolution, 3D simulations that underpin the safety, security and reliability of the nation’s nuclear deterrent.

While the world’s most powerful supercomputer gets the headlines, beneath the floor and behind the scenes, its cooling machines do the quiet work that makes everything else possible. Without it, there is no computation, and no mission-critical science.

Source: LLNL

The post LLNL Highlights the Cooling Network Supporting El Capitan’s Performance appeared first on HPCwire.

Live from San Francisco, we compiled all the biggest news from Microsoft's annual developer conference. This is how Microsoft sees the future of AI computing.

ENSCHEDE, Netherlands, June 4, 2026 — QuiX Quantum has announced the first installation of its Feed-Forward Control Unit (FFCU), a high-performance hardware component developed for the company’s universal photonic quantum computing architecture.

Credit: QuiX Quantum

The FFCU is designed to help the system respond to quantum measurements in real time, an essential requirement for photonic quantum computers that encode and process information in single photons moving through optical circuits at extremely high speeds. This capability, known as feed-forward control, is especially important for reaching universality in measurement-based quantum computing, where computation is carried out through a sequence of measurements and the outcome of one measurement can determine how later operations are performed. The FFCU performs this step at the hardware level by converting single-photon detector signals into control actions on photonic integrated circuits.

The FFCU is part of QuiX Quantum’s broader quantum computing architecture, which brings together photon generation, multiplexing, state generation, measurement, photonic assembly control and feed-forward control into a single photonic quantum computing stack. QuiX Quantum is working on its first-generation single-photon-based universal quantum computer, with the FFCU serving as one of the system-level components needed to support adaptive, programmable photonic quantum operations.

Considered a critical long-term goal by quantum hardware developers, a universal quantum computer will be able to run a broad set of quantum algorithms that can support a wider range of scientific, industrial and commercial applications.

“Universal photonic quantum computing requires more than high-quality photonic chips. It requires a complete system stack that can generate, route, measure and control photons in real time,” said Stefan Hengesbach, CEO of QuiX Quantum. “Our FFCU is a critical step in building that stack. It turns photon measurement outcomes into immediate control actions on photonic integrated circuits.”

QuiX Quantum’s FFCU combines FPGA-based digital processing with a custom analog front-end to support deterministic control of Mach-Zehnder interferometers on integrated photonic circuits. The current rack-mounted system includes two FPGA modules connected by a high-speed, low-latency bus, with 32 inputs, 32 outputs and a reported latency of approximately 150 nanoseconds from detector input signal to settled output voltage.

“Fast feed-forward is a prerequisite for universal photonic quantum computing because measurement-based architectures require the system to detect, decide and reconfigure the optical path in real time,” said Andrew Roos, vice president of R&D for QuiX Quantum. “To put that timing in perspective, in 150 nanoseconds light travels only about 30 meters in telecom fibre. That is the window in which the system has to make a decision and adapt the photonic circuit. This is not conventional control electronics — it is operating close to the physical limits at which information can move.”

The announcement comes as quantum computing gains commercial relevance, with McKinsey’s Quantum Technology Monitor 2026 reporting that more than 300 organizations are actively collaborating with quantum technology companies and estimating that quantum computing could create up to $2.7 trillion in economic value worldwide by 2035.

For that value to materialize, quantum computers must become scalable, reliable and deployable systems that can work alongside classical HPC and AI environments. That places greater emphasis on the broader system layers needed to industrialize quantum machines, including control electronics. QuiX Quantum sees the FFCU as part of this enabling control infrastructure, designed to turn photonic hardware into adaptive, programmable, and scalable quantum computing platforms.

About QuiX Quantum

‍QuiX Quantum is a leading provider of photonic quantum computing hardware driving innovation across Europe in the development of its Universal Quantum Computer. The first system, already sold and contracted for delivery, underscores the impact of QuiX Quantum’s market-leading hardware and renowned quality. Following its expansion across Europe and UK, QuiX Quantum pushes the boundaries of quantum technology and industry, strengthening Europe’s international competitiveness, leveraging a wide network of partners while serving a growing global customer base.

Source: QuiX Quantum

The post QuiX Quantum Installs Real-Time Control Component for Universal Photonic Quantum Computer appeared first on HPCwire.

Andrew Wilson appears in court over killing of Latoya Bulgin at protest over a police shooting days earlier

Authorities in Jamaica have taken the rare step of charging a police officer with murder after he was accused of shooting a 45-year-old woman in a case that prompted violent protests.

According to the Independent Commission of Investigations (Indecom), Constable Andrew Wilson appeared in court on Wednesday and was denied bail. Another hearing is scheduled for mid-June.

This blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here

The commander of the Quds Force, the foreign arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), said Hezbollah is demanding Israel retreat to positions it held before the start of the war, according to a statement carried by Iranian media.

“Supporting the resistance in Lebanon is the duty of all of us, and removing Israel from the region is an attainable goal for Muslims,” Esmail Qaani was quoted as saying.

Staff Sergeant Milovan Jovanović, a member of the Serbian Armed Forces who was serving with the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, died this morning as a result of injuries sustained after a projectile impacted the United Nations base where peacekeeping personnel, including a part of the Serbian contingent, are stationed. Following the incident, Sergeant Jovanović received immediate medical assistance at the base hospital and was later transported by helicopter to the University Medical Centre in Beirut, where he passed away at approximately 4.00 a.m. local time.

Interior minister announces review into handling of the cases after body reportedly found in search for 11-year-old

Outrage has erupted in France after it emerged the main suspect in the case of an 11-year-old girl missing since last week had been repeatedly accused of sexually abusing children with no action taken.

A body was discovered on Thursday and formal identification was under way, an informed source said.

Group calls ceasefire a ‘roadmap to annihilate part of the Lebanese people’, throwing regional peace talks into doubt

Hezbollah has rejected a US-brokered ceasefire plan agreed by the Lebanese and Israeli governments, throwing the future of a truce in Lebanon and regional peace negotiations into question.

The group’s leader, Naim Qassem, called the plan a “roadmap to annihilate part of the Lebanese people” in a statement on Thursday.

As Iran war reshapes the Middle East, Turkey’s regional role looks set to expand Expert comment LToremark 4 June 2026

Ankara’s deepening relations with Gulf countries and a potential rerouting of trade are among the factors likely to benefit Turkey.

The Iran war is fundamentally redefining politics in the Middle East and upending the regional status quo. It is also redefining Turkey’s role within the region, which presents both challenges and opportunities for Ankara.

For Turkey, the worst-case scenario was and is that Israel would seek to engineer state collapse in Iran, the fallout of which would consume both Iran and its neighbours for many years to come. It would pave the way for proxy conflicts, a refugee crisis and state fragmentation – and bring the Kurdish dimension of the war to the fore. This outcome would also further embolden Israel – with US backing – to continue its efforts to reshape the region on its own terms. But so far, Iran’s endurance has prevented Turkey’s worst fears from materializing.  

Related work

Why are Middle Eastern governments lobbying against a US attack on Iran?

At this stage, Turkey has two interrelated concerns. One, Turkey wants to prevent a return to war, but it is also worried about what it sees as Iran’s attempt to rewrite the rules of the game in the Gulf. For example, Iran’s new transit rules for the Strait of Hormuz could effectively give Iran significant influence over Gulf states’ security as well as their economy. Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has called for a return to the pre-war status quo in Hormuz, warning the new regulation could become a ‘new source’ of conflict. Plus, Turkey believes that Iran’s actions here will push Gulf states closer to the US and Israel.

However, the war also presents Ankara with opportunities in the shape of an expanded regional role: in defence industry and security partnerships; in regional connectivity and trade route redesign; and through regional alignments.

Defence industry

This war has brought the question of security to the forefront of policy conversations and considerations in the Gulf and the wider region. Although there is not yet an alternative to the US security umbrella, it has failed to provide the security that Gulf states wanted. For many countries in the Middle East – not least those of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – the US is indispensable, but also unreliable and coercive at the same time. However, despite their mixed feelings and discontent, Gulf countries will have no choice but to double down on their relations with the US. This will only be reinforced by Iran’s actions and attempts to rewrite the rules of the game in the Gulf.

At the same time, Gulf states will also gradually seek to diversify their security partnerships and defence industry cooperation, as a hedging strategy against over-dependence on the US in this area. However, they will be cautious about engaging in such partnerships with US adversaries to avoid incurring the wrath of Washington. This is probably good news for Turkey, a country with a growing defence industry – and on good terms with the US and President Donald Trump – to further expand its security and defence industry cooperation with Gulf states. This cooperation is unlikely to be confined to purchases of Turkish weapons or drone systems; it will likely also include joint production agreements, joint investments, and technology and knowledge transfers.

Trade routes and regional connectivity

The Hormuz crisis has brought the question of rerouting trade corridors and redesigning connectivity to the top of regional and international agendas. Turkey is well-positioned to benefit from such shifts. The wider Middle East and beyond have seen an increasing number of connectivity projects aimed at rerouting trade and redesigning supply chains, such as China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) – whose prospects are dimming following the Gaza and Iran wars – and the now-defunct Eastern Mediterranean Pipeline project. Turkey already plays a central role in two such projects: the Iraq Development Road project and the Middle Corridor. These strategic connectivity projects are not only redesigning supply-chains and rerouting trade, but they also redefine the geopolitics of the concerned regions.

Related work

Talk of a Turkish military alliance with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan reflects Ankara’s opportunistic ‘hedging’ strategy

Turkey and its partners should consider ways to further boost the prospects of Ankara-supported connectivity projects. For example, bringing Syria on board with the Iraq Development Road project would provide an even shorter route to the Mediterranean, while bringing Armenia on board with the Middle Corridor would strengthen the ongoing normalization process between Turkey, Azerbaijan and Armenia. In the post-Iran war era, Turkey and regional states are likely to engage in even more dialogue on trade corridors and transport connectivity. For example, the Hejaz Railway project – a prospective land corridor between the Gulf and Europe, which will connect Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, – is already attracting interest.

New regional alignments

The Iran war is also triggering or accelerating the formation of new regional alignments and groupings. The quartet comprising Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt is a case in point, although it is more of a platform than a pact. Ankara wants it to remain open to including more countries to avoid counter-alignment groups from forming, which can lead to more regional rivalries and fragmentation. Although individual members of this group, such as Pakistan and Turkey, have assumed active roles to find a diplomatic settlement to end the war, the quartet itself is primarily designed to address post-war regional geopolitics and security.

The heads of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and more signed an open letter raising concerns about the rising biosecurity risks posed by better AI models.

A federal grand jury indicted John Bolton, former national security adviser to President Trump, on 18 counts last year.

Federal authorities have busted what they say is a $30 million fraud conspiracy involving billing for children's behavioral health services that were never provided, officials announced.

One person died and three others, including a child, were injured in a shooting Wednesday night at a high school graduation in Northern California, officials said.

Iran says there's been no progress in talks with the U.S. after tit-for-tat strikes, as Hezbollah rejects new Israel-Lebanon ceasefire.

The races for governor and Los Angeles mayor are among the most closely watched contests yet to be decided in California's primary elections.

The $100 accessory includes a snap-on battery and large grips, but it makes the Switch 2 a bulky boy.

joshuark shares a report from The Verge: Apple will introduce age verification in the App Store for users in Texas starting on Thursday, June 4th. The move, as spotted by MacRumors, comes just days after a federal appeals court allowed Texas' App Store Accountability Act to go into effect while a lawsuit against it proceeds. People in Texas who are creating a new Apple account will need to verify they're over 18 using a credit card or government ID. Apple may also automatically verify users' age using the age of their account and whether they have a credit card on file. Despite Apple's attempts to push back on app store-level age verification, the company has announced plans to implement age checks to comply with laws in places like Utah, Louisiana, Brazil, Australia, Singapore, and the UK. Google is required to make similar changes to the Play Store and is also introducing age-checking tools for developers. Last December, a judge blocked the App Store Accountability Act (SB 2420) from taking effect, but an appeals court has now reversed this decision -- at least while the court figures out whether the law is constitutional. Even if this law gets struck down in Texas, a federal version with the same name is still making its way through Congress and could impose age verification at the app store nationwide.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Republican-led states growing renewable capabilities at faster rate as Texas emerges as clean-energy leader

Democratic-led states are eroding their climate policies, as red states are scaling up their clean energy deployment.

California on Friday scaled back its cap-and-invest program, offering more than $3bn in free pollution allowances to polluting companies. Earlier the same week, New York weakened its groundbreaking climate law, delaying a plan to regulate carbon from 2024 until 2028 and reducing emissions-slashing targets. Rhode Island’s governor, meanwhile, is attempting to roll back aggressive clean-energy programs.

Climbing support team rescue Hillary Dawa Sherpa almost a week on from when he was last seen

A Nepali guide who was believed to have died on Mount Everest has been found crawling to base camp a week after going missing – and after his funeral rites had begun.

Dawa Sherpa, also known as Hillary Dawa Sherpa after the famous climber Edmund Hillary, was last seen on 29 May but did not reach base camp with other climbing groups.

Can cities and states lead the shift to climate resilience? 24 June 2026 — 17:00 TO 18:00 BST Anonymous (not verified) 4 June 2026 Chatham House and Online

Hear from mayors, governors and regional leaders driving climate action and resilience from the ground up.

Cities, local and regional governments are playing an increasingly decisive role in delivering practical solutions on climate action. Their proximity to communities, infrastructure systems and local economies enables faster, more targeted responses to flooding, heat, energy insecurity and economic disruption.

But subnational leadership is not only about implementation. Local government and regions often control the policy levers, regulatory frameworks and long-term planning needed to scale resilience and accelerate the transition to clean energy systems. Together with cities, they are shaping new models of climate governance that are more connected to economic delivery, public services and regional development.

This event will discuss:

• Why are cities, local government and regions delivering climate action more effectively than national governments?
• What powers and advantages do subnational governments hold?
• What barriers limit climate action in under-resourced jurisdictions, particularly in emerging economies?
• How are subnational leaders balancing immediate resilience needs with long-term transition goals?
• What does effective multilevel governance look like in an era of geopolitical fragmentation and fiscal pressure?

If your wages are garnished, your employer plays a role — but how involved can they actually be in the process?

Summer is the time to enjoy live music, indoors and out. Scroll through our gallery of some of 2026's leading musical acts, featuring images by CBS News photojournalist Jake Barlow and photographers Ed Spinelli and Kirstine Walton.

June 4, 2026 — Scientists envision batteries will play a central role in improving the security and cost-effectiveness of America’s energy systems. But achieving this requires solving numerous technical challenges, such as designing high-performance battery materials and understanding how batteries degrade. This is no easy task.

Batteries are envisioned to play a central role in improving the security of America’s energy systems. AI can help achieve this vision by solving numerous technical challenges with batteries. Image credit: Shutterstock.

Could artificial intelligence (AI) help overcome these challenges? A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has outlined an ambitious technical roadmap to accelerate battery breakthroughs with the use of AI tools known as large language models (LLMs).

The lab is also advancing AI for research through DOE’s Genesis Mission, a historic national effort to transform American science and innovation through the power of AI, strengthening the nation’s technological leadership and global competitiveness.

“Argonne offers a rare combination of leading battery researchers and data scientists working under the same roof,” said Khalil Amine, Argonne Distinguished Fellow and leader of Argonne’s Battery Technology Development group. ​“They have collaborated to conduct a comprehensive review of emerging LLM applications in the battery field. The review presents short- and long-term objectives to harness the enormous potential of LLMs to revolutionize battery research.”

LLM Agents and Self-Driving Laboratories

LLMs are remarkably versatile machine learning tools. They can be trained on large, varied datasets to perform a broad range of tasks. For example, in response to human prompts, they can answer questions, write or summarize articles and translate languages. LLMs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini have already transformed how industries work.

While the use of LLMs in academia, industry and research institutions is growing, their potential is largely untapped in battery research. The Argonne review discusses potential LLM applications, exploring how to expand their use and improve their effectiveness.

A few examples of applications: LLMs could text mine hundreds to millions of battery research papers, extracting critical insights, identifying knowledge gaps and proposing new research directions. They could analyze battery performance datasets to identify failure mechanisms and mitigation strategies. They could even monitor and optimize battery operations in the field and provide personalized training for early-career battery researchers.

The Argonne review articulates a vision of coordinating activities among multiple LLM ​“agents.” These advanced AI systems use LLMs to analyze information, make decisions and employ tools. Agents specializing in different battery subject areas perform various research tasks while collaborating to achieve shared goals.

“LLMs can be integrated with existing battery research tools, such as simulation software and material property databases,” said Guiliang Xu, the review’s corresponding author and an Argonne chemist. ​“This can help scientists create AI-powered, self-driving laboratories that accelerate the research process through automation.”

Self-driving laboratories could have a significant impact on the discovery of new battery materials. Traditionally, this type of research has been performed through trial and error. Scientists manually test one material or synthesis parameter at a time.

A self-driving laboratory could speed this process by continuously executing an iterative experimental cycle. It would review literature, screen databases of material properties and propose promising new battery chemistries. Next, it would direct robotic devices to fabricate and characterize the materials. Then, it would analyze the experimental data and use the results to refine hypotheses, methods and experiments.

The benefits go beyond speed and efficiency. Automating research can also reduce errors and make experiments more reproducible.

Successfully implementing these AI systems will require extensive collaboration among battery researchers and LLM experts.

“Battery researchers can inform LLM experts on the most important research questions while LLM experts can inform battery researchers on the most appropriate models and techniques to address those questions,” Xu said.

Knowledge Bases, Data-Sharing and Adaptability

The paper points to technical challenges that must be addressed before the potential of LLMs can be fully realized. When selecting existing LLMs or developing new ones, researchers need to carefully consider their computational efficiency and adaptability to specific battery research tasks. For critical applications like predicting battery failures, it is important to use LLMs that can explain the step-by-step reasoning behind their conclusions. Protocols must be developed for effective collaboration among LLM agents.

A high-quality knowledge base is needed to train LLMs. This would be built from existing published literature and diverse battery datasets. Significant work is required to standardize the formats of datasets, and consortia are needed to share datasets across industry and research communities.

“Traditionally, researchers only publish data on successful results,” said Huihuo Zheng, one of the review’s authors and a computer scientist at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), a DOE Office of Science user facility. ​“For LLMs to work optimally, they also need to be trained on failure data, such as battery materials with poor experimental performance. Industry and academia need to implement new ways to make this data easily accessible.”

Battery and data scientists will need to regularly evaluate the capabilities, performance and usability of LLMs — and make improvements as needed. This might involve activities such as testing the LLMs’ ability to interpret data and retraining them on newly published literature.

What might battery research look like in the future if these challenges are addressed?

“Soon, most battery scientists will also be AI experts, and LLMs will serve as their smart research assistants,” said Wenhua Zuo, one of the review’s authors and an Argonne postdoctoral researcher. ​“Scientists will spend much less time reading papers, sifting through data and performing experiments. This will allow them to spend more time developing ideas and strategic research planning.”

The review was published in the Aug. 20, 2025, issue of Joule.

Other Argonne contributors to the review include Tanjin He, Venkatram Vishwanath, Maria Chan and Rick Stevens.

The review was supported by DOE’s Transportation Technologies Office through the Advanced Battery Materials Research Program, including the Low-cost Earth-abundant Na-ion Storage Consortium. It used the resources at the ALCF and is based on research supported by the DOE Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research Program.

The work is also funded, in part, by the Energy Storage Research Alliance, an Energy Innovation Hub funded by the DOE Office of Science, Basic Energy Science (BES). Work performed at the Center for Nanoscale Materials, a DOE Office of Science User Facility, was also supported by BES.

Source: Michael Matz, Argonne

The post Argonne Roadmap Explores LLMs and AI Agents for Battery Research appeared first on HPCwire.

US president alleges there is ‘big cheating’ in elections for governor and Los Angeles mayor as results are pending

Donald Trump has alleged without evidence that Democrats are cheating in California’s primaries and claimed in a late-night social media post that the US attorney’s office in Los Angeles was investigating.

As counting continues in the most populous state in the US, the president’s unfounded remarks are likely to further alarm election observers, who have warned of the risk of escalating misinformation in the absence of a final result.

Justices uphold FCC authority to impose in-house penalties, rejecting AT&T and Verizon jury trial claims

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The US supreme court backed the Federal Communications Commission’s system for levying fines, ruling on Thursday against wireless carriers AT&T and Verizon in their challenge to the agency and handing a win to Donald Trump’s administration.

The ruling was 8-1. At issue in the legal dispute was whether the agency’s in-house proceedings for imposing the penalties deprived the companies of their right to a jury trial under the US constitution. Trump’s administration defended the FCC’s system for assessing financial penalties, known as forfeiture orders.

CALGARY, Alberta, June 4, 2026 — CoolIT Systems (CoolIT) has announced that it developed the first 15kW coldplate design. Delivering nearly four times the performance of earlier single-phase direct liquid cooling (DLC) coldplate designs, this breakthrough demonstrates that single-phase DLC can scale to meet the thermal demands of future ultra-high-density GPUs and AI accelerators.

“Single-phase DLC is already cooling millions of AI accelerators today. This achievement shows it is also the architecture to cool AI infrastructure well into the future,” said Kamal Mostafavi, CTO of CoolIT Systems. “With validated performance at 15kW, CoolIT has proven that single-phase DLC is not only practical to cool millions of the most advanced AI chips today – but ready to cool the coming generations of GPUs and AI accelerators.”

CoolIT’s 15kW design delivers more than 10x the cooling capacity required for the current generation of AI GPUs and nearly 4x that of the then groundbreaking 4kW coldplate design the company announced in March 2025.

The 15kW coldplate uses CoolIT’s Split-Flow microchannel architecture and was validated with a standard water-glycol coolant at 1.2 L/min/kW, with system-level thermal performance suitable for 45°C warm-water cooling environments.

“AI accelerator innovation depends on cooling architectures that can keep pace with rising circuit density and packaging complexity,” said Dylan Patel, CEO of SemiAnalysis. “CoolIT’s work demonstrates that single-phase DLC has a clear path forward, giving both the semiconductor and data center industries greater confidence in the cooling architectures they can invest in.”

The announcement reinforces the continued momentum of single-phase DLC across the AI infrastructure ecosystem. NVIDIA has publicly highlighted single-phase DLC with 45°C supply temperatures as part of its next-generation AI platform direction, underscoring the importance of warm-water liquid cooling and advanced coldplate technologies in factory-integrated systems.

CoolIT is also advancing component coldplates and server architectures to extend the performance envelope of single-phase DLC. These efforts include cooling additional peripheral components to increase total heat capture, while developing coldplate designs capable of targeting the most intense hot spots within advanced AI chips.

About CoolIT Systems

CoolIT Systems is a global leader in liquid-cooling solutions for AI and high-performance computing. CoolIT designs, manufactures and services liquid-cooling hardware for global server, cloud service provider (CSP) and data center markets. The company’s single-phase direct liquid-cooling (DLC) technology is used in high-density, high-efficiency computing environments, and advanced AI infrastructure. CoolIT’s DLC systems are used in seven of the top 10 supercomputers and many hyperscale CSP sites. In 2026, Data Center Magazine named CoolIT as #1 direct to chip cooling company and in the top three cooling companies worldwide.

Source: CoolIT Systems

The post CoolIT Systems Demonstrates 15kW Coldplate, Extending Single-Phase DLC Roadmap Far Beyond 2030 appeared first on HPCwire.

Daniel Frost admits throwing bins at police and Matt Styler pleads not guilty to assaulting officer

A man has admitted throwing bins at officers and arming himself with a makeshift knuckle duster during the disorder in Southampton after the sentencing of a man for the murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak.

Daniel Frost, 44, from Southampton, admitted violent disorder and possession of an offensive weapon when he appeared before a district judge on Thursday.

Deliveries in 30 minutes or less coming to Manchester and Birmingham and fresh groceries service to start in London

Amazon is expanding fast-track deliveries in the UK, including adding fresh fruit and vegetables to same-day services, after closing its standalone grocery stores.

The firm said it would expand Amazon Now, its ultra-fast delivery service that already delivers goods in less than 30 minutes to parts of London, to also serve Manchester and Birmingham this year.

Nothing does more for your ego than realising you can make a better decision than a bot with all of human knowledge at its digital fingertips

I am not, by nature, an early adopter. There comes a point in our lives where change becomes more irritating than exciting and, I suspect, I reached it sooner than most. But when a workplace recently tasked me with exploring practical applications for AI, I spotted an opportunity to cast off my luddite inclinations.

It turned out AI was very good at mimicking most of the things I could already do. Irrespective of quality, it could churn out articles, reports, presentations, fiction, even podcasts with stammering hosts. That was no use to me. What I wanted help with was all the stuff I was useless at. There was an obvious target: DIY.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: UK regulators today ordered (PDF) Google to put clearer attributions and links to publishers' content in its AI-generated search features. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) also said Google must give publishers a way to opt out of AI features in search. "In a world first, publishers will now have effective tools to prevent their content being used to power AI features in search, such as AI Overviews," the CMA said today. "This will put publishers, like news organizations, in a stronger position to negotiate content deals with Google. To boost consumer trust, Google is also now required to make sure that publisher content is properly attributed, using clear links, in AI-generated search results." The CMA ruled that Google may not penalize publishers for opting out of AI, meaning that Google can't downrank opted-out publishers in general search results. The CMA said Google will have nine months to comply with all requirements but that the agency "expects important parts of the controls to become available to publishers well before that deadline. Google will also be required to submit and publish compliance reports, supported by key data and metrics, explaining changes it has made and how it has complied." [...] The CMA applied the rules to Google after determining that it has "strategic market status" in general search services, and has ongoing investigations into Apple and Microsoft. Google today said it will comply with the CMA decision. The News Media Association, a trade group in the UK, said that "the legally enforceable Conduct Requirements for Google Search published today are a significant step towards leveling the playing field and building a fair, transparent digital economy where premium content is properly respected and fairly compensated." The group called on the UK to implement "robust enforcement."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Deletion of the bureau’s website content is just the most recent part of a larger plan to ‘undermine an agency that’s helped people’

• People in the US: tell us about your difficult consumer experiences

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau deleted at least 2,200 webpages from its website last month, a move advocates say is part of the Trump administration’s latest effort to dismantle the federal consumer finance watchdog.

The removed content was all published before Trump’s second term, and includes press releases, consumer advisories, congressional testimonies, speeches and blog posts. Some of the material dates back to as early as 2010, when the agency was formed.

Republican lawmakers asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations raised by Jeffrey Epstein's longtime assistant that she was abused by two men.

The history, team and contact information for "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan," America's premier Sunday morning public affairs program.

IPO could raise up to $75bn, giving SpaceX market value of $1.77tn as it sets up Musk for extraordinary wealth

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is looking to raise $75bn (£55bn) from its blockbuster stock market listing next week as the rocket company aims for the largest initial public offering ever.

If the stock market launch – primed for 12 June – goes as planned, founder Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, could make history as the first trillionaire.

“We have given no commitment to anyone,” the Iranian-backed militant group's leader said after Israel and Lebanon announced a new U.S.-mediated agreement.

Jesse Calhoun's defense attorney entered a not-guilty plea on his behalf in a Portland courtroom.

The former Seahawks quarterback won a championship with Seattle and was a 10-time Pro Bowler. That doesn’t mean he’s seen as an all-time great

When a quarterback makes 10 Pro Bowls, wins the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award and leads his team to one Super Bowl win and (almost) another, you’d expect his Hall of Fame discussion would be fairly uncomplicated.

But in the case of one Russell Carrington Wilson, who appeared to announce his retirement on Wednesday after 14 seasons to join CBS Sports as an analyst, that discussion is multi-layered – much like Wilson’s career and legacy.

‘Retail theft ring’ stole goods from logistics sites in Pennsylvania, Virginia and New Jersey and sold them in New York, officials say

Eight people were indicted this week in New York in connection with what prosecutors describe as a “wide-ranging retail theft ring” that stole nearly $5m worth of goods – from steaks to cheeses to copper wiring and cigarettes.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office announced charges against the eight individuals on Wednesday, accusing them of “conspiring to impersonate shipping carriers in a wide-ranging retail theft ring throughout the north-east”.

The Climate Briefing: What does AI mean for the climate? Audio thilton.drupal 4 June 2026

Anna and Bhargabi speak to Boris Gamazaychikov (CEO and Co-Founder of the Sustainable AI Group) and Chatham House’s Rowan Wilkinson to discuss AI’s environmental impacts and the urgent need for better governance.

Attention is increasingly turning to artificial intelligence as its capabilities and influence permeate nearly every sector. AI’s growth raises important questions about its environmental footprint; risks associated with future scale, and how such a globalised industry can be effectively governed.

This episode of the Climate Briefing explores:

• Where are we today in terms of AI capability and use?
• Is AI’s environmental footprint being addressed in product design and the industry more widely?
• Looking ahead, across national and international levels, what could effective governance look like?

To discuss this, co-hosts Anna and Bhargabi are joined by Boris Gamazaychikov (CEO and Co-Founder of the Sustainable AI Group) and Rowan Wilkinson (Research Associate, Digital Society Programme at Chatham House).  

About The Climate Briefing  

The Climate Briefing explores key themes in the UN climate negotiations and international climate politics. The podcast is hosted by Bhargabi Bharadwaj and Anna Aberg from Chatham House and features interviewees from governments, international organizations, academia and civil society organizations from across the world. 
 
You can also listen to The Climate Briefing on Apple Podcasts and Spotify 

Want to spend less time on your phone? We asked psychotherapists, professors and specialists for practical (and achievable) ways to cut down

• The best screen-free activities

Everywhere you look, people are glued to their smartphones. If you haven’t noticed this phenomenon, it’s likely because you, too, are glued to the little dopamine-deliverer.

In March, Meta and YouTube had to pay a combined $6m after a US court found that the tech companies’ platforms were designed to be addictive. Put such tempting apps in a device that’s carried everywhere, and that’s a recipe for compulsive behaviour.

The ceasefire has held just enough to prevent a return to all-out war, but neither side is close to achieving peace

The US-Iran ceasefire is entering yet another round of escalation since it came into effect on 8 April. This week, there have been further strikes on Iran by the US, and Iranian retaliation on Kuwait and Bahrain, alongside Israeli escalation in Lebanon. Earlier flare-ups over the past two months were quickly contained. Both sides have tried to keep the balance between no war and no peace. But as this ceasefire drags on it risks becoming yet another Middle East stalemate, albeit one with international economic and political consequences.

Four obstacles are preventing progress. The first is trust. Iran does not believe Donald Trump can deliver a deal, much less stick to one. The fear is not only that Washington will walk away again but that the goalposts will keep moving, where first nuclear limits are imposed, followed by missiles, then regional policy and finally further political concessions dressed up as security guarantees.

Sanam Vakil is the director of the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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

LONDON, June 4, 2026 – OQC, JPMorganChase and AMD have announced a research collaboration leveraging a new and dedicated Quantum-AI Data Centre, built by OQC in London. JPMorganChase researchers will test near-term quantum and hybrid quantum-classical computing applications via a secure enterprise environment to examine how quantum computing, AI and high-performance classical infrastructure can work together on complex financial services challenges.

The partners will use the platform to conduct research on the application of near-term quantum and hybrid quantum-classical computing including areas such as portfolio optimization and expanding explorations around quantum machine learning, while also developing specialized AI models to improve quantum circuit performance. The partners also plan to investigate how these quantum-enhanced AI models can accelerate the discovery of novel algorithms purpose-built for financial use cases, and the role of classical compute toward scalable fault-tolerant quantum algorithms.

JPMorganChase will be OQC’s first dedicated user of the U.K. platform, which is expected to be fully operational within 12 months. The environment will physically integrate the OQC GENESIS quantum system with AMD-supported AI and classical compute, high-performance computing resources and application-level tooling for simulation, optimisation, AI model development and benchmarking. AMD compute technologies will provide infrastructure to support the AI and classical compute layer of the platform. By placing quantum hardware inside a secure enterprise compute environment, the platform is designed to let JPMorganChase test hybrid quantum-classical workflows for performance, scalability and reproducibility against the operational standards used in financial services.

“Quantum computing has to move from isolated experiments into the secure compute environments where enterprises actually work,” said Gerald Mullally, CEO of OQC. “That is what we are building with JPMorganChase’s quantum research expertise: a dedicated quantum-AI platform for financial services that combines quantum hardware, AI and high-performance computing to support serious technical research and move the industry closer to practical quantum applications.”

“The financial services industry depends on understanding complexity, managing risk and making decisions with speed, security and confidence,” said Lori Beer, global chief information officer of JPMorganChase. “Through this partnership, our teams will have a dedicated environment to research the near-term utility of hybrid quantum-classical computing in finance and assess how quantum, AI and high-performance computing can work together to address real-world challenges.”

“Advancing quantum-AI research will require tightly integrated compute platforms that bring together quantum systems, AI infrastructure and high-performance classical computing,” said Mark Papermaster, executive vice president and chief technology officer at AMD. “AMD is pleased to support OQC and its dedicated environment, which will explore hybrid quantum-AI workflows for financial services and evaluate their performance, scalability and reproducibility in a secure enterprise setting.”

The project marks a shift from experimental quantum access toward secure, integrated infrastructure designed for real enterprise workflows, starting with financial services.

More from HPCwire: Oxford Quantum Circuits Raises $350M to Expand Enterprise Quantum Computing Footprint

About OQC

OQC is a UK-headquartered company building quantum computers and a secure, scalable Quantum-AI Data-Centre platform for enterprise and government customers. The platform integrates quantum computing with trusted infrastructure and AI supercomputing to accelerate customer breakthroughs across science and industry. Learn more at www.oqc.tech.

About JPMorganChase

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM) is a leading financial services firm based in the United States of America (“U.S.”), with operations worldwide. JPMorganChase had $4.9 trillion in assets and $364 billion in stockholders’ equity as of March 31, 2026. With approximately 65,000 technologists globally and an annual tech investment of $19.8 billion, JPMorganChase is dedicated to improving the design, analytics, development, coding, testing and application programming that goes into creating high quality software and new products. Under the J.P. Morgan and Chase brands, the Firm serves millions of customers in the U.S., and many of the world’s most prominent corporate, institutional and government clients globally. Visit http://www.jpmorganchase.com/tech for more information.

About AMD

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) drives innovation in high-performance and AI computing to solve the world’s most important challenges. Today, AMD technology powers billions of experiences across cloud and AI infrastructure, embedded systems, AI PCs and gaming. With a broad portfolio of AI-optimized CPUs, GPUs, networking and software, AMD delivers full-stack AI solutions that provide the performance and scalability needed for a new era of intelligent computing. Learn more at www.amd.com.

Source: AMD

The post OQC, JPMorganChase and AMD to Explore Hybrid Quantum-Classical Computing in Finance appeared first on HPCwire.

Prosecutors say they intend to try all five killings together next year after brief arraignment in Portland

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An accused serial killer in Oregon was arraigned on Wednesday for the murder of a fifth woman.

A lawyer for Jesse Calhoun, who was already facing charges in the deaths of four women whose bodies were discovered in 2022 and 2023, entered a not guilty plea for the second-degree murder of Ashley Real, a 22-year-old who previously alleged he had choked her.

The parasite was found in a 3-week-old calf decades after it was largely eradicated in the U.S. Authorities said the risk to humans is low.

For the past few years, Microsoft has been phasing out NTLM in Windows in favor of Kerberos-based alternatives. Starting with the next versions of client and server editions of Windows, Microsoft will also be disabling the legacy authentication protocol by default. In the latest security baseline package for Windows Server 2025, the company is already allowing customers to audit incoming configurations. Now, it has announced a wave of changes to further reduce dependencies on NTLM.

With an upcoming Insider release of Windows 11 client and server, certain scenarios which previously required NTLM will be able to fall back on Initial and Pass-Through Authentication using Kerberos (IAKerb) and Local Key Distribution Center (LocalKDC).

↫ Usama Jawad at Neowin

I’m sure this is very important to “IT Pros”.

The first game in the franchise in seven years includes loads of modernization changes -- including adding social media misinfo to fighter plane fantasy.

BROOMFIELD, Colo., June 4, 2026 — Quantinuum Inc. has announced the pricing of the upsized initial public offering of 28,000,000 shares of its Class A common stock at a price to the public of $60.00 per share. Quantinuum has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 4,200,000 shares of its Class A common stock to cover over-allotments at the initial public offering price, less underwriting discounts and commissions.

The shares of Class A common stock are expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Market on June 4, 2026 under the ticker symbol “QNT.” The offering is expected to close on June 5, 2026, subject to customary closing conditions.

J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley (in alphabetical order) are acting as joint lead active book-running managers for the offering; Jefferies and Evercore ISI are also acting as active book-running managers; BofA Securities, UBS Investment Bank, Cantor, Mizuho, Needham & Company, Societe Generale and TD Cowen are acting as joint-book running managers; and Craig-Hallum and Rosenblatt are acting as co-managers for the offering.

A registration statement relating to this offering was declared effective by the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 3, 2026. The offering is being made available only by means of a prospectus. Copies of the prospectus, when available, may be obtained from: J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, New York 11717 or by email at prospectus-eq_fi@jpmchase.com and postsalemanualrequests@broadridge.com; Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, 180 Varick Street, 2nd Floor, New York, New York 10014, Attention: Prospectus Department or by email at prospectus@morganstanley.com; Jefferies LLC, Attn: Equity Syndicate Prospectus Department, 520 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10022, by telephone at (877) 821-7388 or by email at Prospectus_Department@Jefferies.com; or Evercore Group L.L.C., Attention: Equity Capital Markets, 55 East 52nd Street, 35th Floor, New York, New York 10055, by telephone at 888-474-0200 or by email at ecm.prospectus@evercore.com.

This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.

More from HPCwire

• Honeywell Confirms Quantinuum IPO Filing as Quantum Firms Face Market Scrutiny
• Commerce Takes Portfolio Approach with $2B Quantum Investment Initiative

About Quantinuum

Quantinuum is a leading quantum computing company offering a full-stack platform designed to make quantum computing deployable in real-world environments. The company has commercially deployed multiple generations of quantum systems built on the well-established QCCD architecture, which it has implemented with novel designs and capabilities to achieve the industry’s highest accuracy levels based on average two-qubit gate fidelity as of December 31, 2025. Quantinuum has active engagements with market leaders across pharmaceuticals, material science, financial services, and government and industrial markets. Quantinuum’s headquarters is in Broomfield, Colorado, with additional facilities across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Qatar and Singapore.

Source: Quantinuum

The post Quantinuum Announces Pricing of Upsized Initial Public Offering appeared first on HPCwire.

Scientific AI may be advancing rapidly, but its biggest challenge is not capability. It is trust. That was the view of Thomas Zacharia, Senior Vice President for Global Public Sector at AMD and former director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Speaking at TPC26 in Baltimore, MD, Zacharia warned that the reliability of AI systems still trails performance. In his view, that limits how far AI can be trusted on its own in scientific research.

Describing a better model, he presented his vision for the “continuous discovery engine,” which brings together AI, HPC, data systems and human expertise within the same scientific workflow.

The concept is becoming more central to the Genesis Mission – a DOE initiative designed to build the next generation of scientific infrastructure and extend the lessons learned from the exascale era into the age of agentic AI.

For Zacharia, the Genesis Mission is less about replacing exascale and more about building on everything the community learned from it. He reflected on the decades of work that led from Jaguar and Titan to Frontier and El Capitan, noting that none of those achievements came from hardware alone.

Thomas Zacharia speaking at TPC26.

Those were some of the leading supercomputers that marked different generations of HPC. They required years of software development and application readiness. But they also needed public investment and close collaboration between laboratories and industry.

“Exascale was successful because it is not simply a hardware project. It was a co design effort that brought together all of us application scientists, software developers, system architects, vendors, etc … That is a very successful model and I think it’s really important to ground that in our thinking as we look to the future.”

He warned against abandoning those lessons as attention shifts toward AI.

According to Zacharia, Genesis should be viewed as the continuation of that same effort. The design model that powered exascale to a new generation should be applied to scientific discovery systems.

He said that at its fullest realization, Genesis has the potential to connect computing, AI and scientific infrastructure into what could become the world’s most powerful scientific instrument.

Zacharia also urged caution when evaluating today’s AI systems. While autonomous agents are becoming more capable of handling increasingly complex tasks, he argued that scientific standards remain far higher than most performance benchmarks suggest.

“I’m not saying that we cannot do amazing things with the technology, but I’m here to tell you that at the level of maturity, yes, we should dream about the possibility. It’s exciting, but I’m in science. If you can only get the answer 50% of the time accurately, or 80% of the time accurately, then we have a long way to go.”

During the presentation, Zacharia emphasized that scientific discovery depends on results that can be validated and reproduced. In his view, that requirement becomes even more important as AI takes on a larger role in scientific research.

The increasing complexity was another issue highlighted by Zacharia. He emphasized that future scientific workflows will increasingly rely on a combination of AI, simulation, data infrastructure and emerging technologies such as quantum computing. While that offers advantages, there are also some risks that come with it.

He argued that if this inevitable heterogeneity is managed properly, it can become more of a burden for researchers rather than an advantage.

According to Zacharia, scientists should not have to spend their time managing complex technology stacks. Open software and common standards can help keep the focus on discovery.

Not all AI workloads are the same. Zacharia argued that scientific research has different requirements than consumer applications. Researchers need systems that go beyond answering questions. They must be able to work with simulations, code, experimental data and scientific literature. “The future of scientific discovery will not be determined only by the largest model,” he said.

He also pointed to an often overlooked challenge. “The hardest part is change management,” he said. Titan, one of the first major GPU powered supercomputers, was approved by just one vote after a lengthy debate. At the time, many researchers questioned whether GPUs had a place in scientific computing. Today, GPU acceleration is a standard part of modern HPC systems.

The post From Exascale to Genesis, Building the Infrastructure for Scientific AI appeared first on HPCwire.

Criticism comes from across political spectrum after blow to Friedrich Merz’s government

Germany’s unprecedented failure to win one of the rotating seats on the UN security council has prompted an intense round of soul searching in Berlin, and raised questions about its claims to international leadership under Friedrich Merz.

The council vote on Wednesday, which elected Austria and Portugal to a two-year term along with Trinidad and Tobago and Zimbabwe, was a blow to Merz’s struggling government, which has sought to position itself as a leading European voice on the world stage.

Google's Android settlement would resolve the lawsuit and change its terms of service, but not all users will get payouts.

Check out some old classics and great new releases on Netflix now.

USDA confirms first case of New World screwworm fly in cattle in six decades, posing threat to livestock industry

A flesh-eating parasite rarely seen in the US in six decades has been found in a calf in Texas, agriculture officials said, in an alarming development for the country’s cattle industry.

The New World screwworm fly (NWS) was confirmed in the animal in the south of the state, about 50 miles from the Mexico border, Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, said late on Wednesday.

New four-part documentary reignites criticism of Operation Peyzac, in which officers posed as music industry figures to gather intelligence

It was the undercover police operation that led to 37 people being jailed after officers set up a fake recording studio and record shop on a north London housing estate.

Now, a four-part television documentary has brought Operation Peyzac back under the spotlight, prompting renewed scrutiny of the tactics used by undercover officers and calls for the operation to be examined by the UK’s ongoing spycops inquiry.

Lebanese government agrees ceasefire with Israel but Israeli drone strikes continue. Plus the story of the man who launched Cuba’s first independent magazine

Good morning.

Israel and Lebanon have agreed to implement a ceasefire to end hostilities, the Trump administration has announced – but it comes with caveats. Not only is the deal contingent on a complete cessation of fire from the Iran-aligned Hezbollah armed group, and on the evacuation of all its fighters from the area south of the Litani River, but Hezbollah has not been part of the talks.

Where has Israel been targeting? William Christou in Beirut reports that three hospitals in southern Lebanon have been attacked by Israel in under a week, wounding more than 150 people and killing nine. Analysts and human rights experts have said the attacks on healthcare facilities were aimed at degrading the conditions for life in south Lebanon.

What did Israel say about it? The military said it had struck “Hezbollah infrastructure in the area of Tyre” and acknowledged a hospital was “affected incidentally”. It accused Hezbollah of “taking over” one of the hospitals it struck.

Is that number significant? Yes, the 90-day threshold is important because the 1973 War Powers Resolution lays down that a president must seek congressional approval to continue waging war after hostilities have continued that length of time. Trump’s White House has rejected that argument, citing a temporary ceasefire that has been in place since 8 April – although it has been broken several times by the US, Israel and Iran.

A Sherpa guide was found crawling to base camp on Mount Everest a week after he went missing.

Plan departs from policy of bringing CDC staff back to US for treatment and offering support to all health workers

Former top US officials and other experts are urging the Trump administration to abandon plans for an Ebola quarantine and treatment centre in Kenya, as the union for workers with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) calls for Americans exposed to Ebola to be brought home for treatment.

Soon after the US revealed it was setting up a field hospital in Kenya for the Ebola quarantine and treatment of Americans, the Kenyan high court blocked the order – but the Kenyan and US governments moved forward anyway, with the first American responders reportedly landing at the Laikipia airbase on Saturday.

The New York Knicks are fighting history as well as the Spurs. On Wednesday night in San Antonio, they took a crucial step towards defeating both

It is uncommon to begin counting down after the opening game of an NBA finals, but these are uncommon times in New York, and the Knicks have been counting since Richard Nixon was president, their coach, Mike Brown, was three years old, and their opponent, the San Antonio Spurs, played in the American Basketball Association as the Dallas Chaparrals. After the Knicks took Game 1 105-95, the anticipation in New York rose to yet another level.

Game 1 was not a good game, but it was a great game. The first quarter was ragged. So was the second. Neither team could shoot from distance – the Knicks shot 31% from three, the Spurs 26%. The Spurs’ Victor Wembanyama, the sport’s heir apparent, made his finals debut with six turnovers, 6-for-21 shooting from the field, defensively alive but never transcendent. Both Wembanyama and Jalen Brunson, the Knicks’ superb, always underestimated engine, took nine three-pointers. Each made two.

Howard Bryant is the author of 11 books, including The Heritage: Black Athletes, A Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism and Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America.

Recently we held our leader elections and after a lively discussion period on the (internal) mailing lists and voting phase with two candidates Levente "anthraxx" Polyák was re-elected as Arch Linux Project Lead.

As per our election rules he is re-elected with the term lasting two years.

The role of of the project lead within Arch Linux is connected to a bunch of responsibilities regarding decision making (when no consensus can be reached), community leadership, Code of Conduct enforcement, handling financial matters with SPI and overall project management tasks.

Congratulations to Levente, thank you for stepping up to serve this community and all the best wishes for another successful term! 🥳

The private meeting will take place in Downing Street

Kemi Badenoch has posted a message on social media saying she met Henry Nowak’s father, mother and stepmother this morning. She praises their courage, and says:

Henry’s family do not want anger to tear communities apart. They are a family who have friends across faith and race, and so did Henry. His family want his memory to help bring our society together.

Everyone knows I have strong views about how we should deal with equality under the law. What the family agreed with me on is that we need to bring common sense back, and that is what we should all be fighting for.

At “best” Jenrick is a political chameleon. Others words beginning with C might also be appropriate. I still remember him begging for my vote in the leadership (he called me on the day of the last MPs round) when he described Kemi as being too of the right & he was the moderate

President Trump is expected to nominate Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to serve in the role permanently, several sources familiar with the matter told CBS News.

The USDA said the only animal affected was a 3-week-old calf in Zavala County, Texas, after larvae were identified in its umbilical area.

Motorola's new Ultra is a lot like last year's model but its $1,500 price is $200 more. It's not the slam dunk that it should be, even though I like it.

The 2026 Razr Ultra is available in a Pantone orient blue color and with an Alcantara back. And it is gorgeous.

I knew the minute I put it on my finger that the sleek new ring was going to be a game changer. And that's before any of the health tracking.

The 2026 Razr Ultra has the same cameras as the 2025 version. But there's a new LOFIC image sensor on the main camera, which I tested around San Francisco.

White House says caps will lower tuition costs, but critics say they will exacerbate the country’s nursing shortage

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While the Trump administration has argued that new restrictions on the size of federal student loans will lower tuition costs, public health officials and Democrats say the measures will exacerbate the country’s serious nursing shortage.

As such, a group of 24 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia recently sued the federal government seeking to block the new rule, which is set to take effect on 1 July.

Violence flares before protests on Thursday over president’s decision to remain in office after his term expired

Fierce clashes have taken place between government troops and militias allied with the opposition in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, damaging property and forcing some civilians to flee.

In the runup to the fighting, which started on Wednesday afternoon, opposition leaders embedded with militias set up positions in their clan strongholds the city.

The floor of the US House of Representatives broke out in cheers after lawmakers voted to oblige Donald Trump to seek approval from Congress to continue the Iran war or withdraw troops. A small group of Republicans voted with the Democrats for the resolution, which now passes to the Senate. It was the fourth attempt to vote on reining in Trump's powers to continue the conflict. The resolution rejected the White House's argument that it does not need to abide by a legal requirement to seek congressional approval to continue the war beyond 90 days because a ceasefire was agreed in April

• US House passes war powers resolution to curb Trump’s authority in Iran

Registrations are up 7% in May, with battery electric vehicles recording the fastest growth and Tesla jumping 45%

British car sales rose in May to their strongest level for the month since before the Covid pandemic, driven in part by strong growth from the Chinese manufacturers BYD and Chery.

Car registrations rose 7% to 160,662 during the month, according to figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), a lobby group.

Israel and Lebanon agreed Wednesday to renew their fragile ceasefire and create a number of "pilot" security zones inside Lebanon where Hezbollah would be banned.

Catholic archbishop of US capital says Mgr Stephen Rossetti’s statements ‘gravely undermine’ church teaching

The Catholic archbishop of Washington DC on Wednesday removed a well-known priest as an exorcist of the archdiocese after he made public comments suggesting that UFO sightings were the work of demons.

Cardinal Robert McElroy said the archdiocese also was cutting ties with the St Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal, a Washington-based non-profit headed by the priest, Monsignor Stephen Rossetti.

Wildlife experts backed by a sniffer dog and a thermal-imaging drone operator are searching for the "extremely shy" marsupial, officials said.

Hungary agreed to drop its opposition to opening the formal access talks but is still opposed to the fast-track membership process that Ukraine says it needs as protection from Russia.

Polish, Spanish and French populists focus on clips of teenager’s dying moments and accuse UK of descending ‘into depths of the earth’

• UK politics live – latest updates

Polish far-right politicians have claimed that the murder of Henry Nowak symbolises “Britain’s descent into the depths of the earth” as populists from France, Spain and Japan focused on harrowing clips of his dying moments.

Despite pleas from Nowak’s family for people not to exploit the killing for political gain and to focus on cutting knife crime, their comments have focused on race and immigration.

Polish, Spanish and French populists focus on clips of teenager’s dying moments and accuse UK of descending ‘into depths of the earth’

• UK politics live – latest updates

Polish far-right politicians have claimed that the murder of Henry Nowak symbolises “Britain’s descent into the depths of the earth” as populists from France, Spain and Japan focused on harrowing clips of his dying moments.

Despite pleas from Nowak’s family for people not to exploit the killing for political gain and to focus on cutting knife crime, their comments have focused on race and immigration.

At least 207 people have been killed since the Trump administration began targeting those it calls "narcoterrorists" in September.

SpaceX says it plans to raise up to $75 billion when it goes public this month in what could be the largest stock market debut ever, and it would put Elon Musk on course to becoming the first trillionaire.

Exclusive: Analysis shows resort has yet to recoup Disney’s investment despite record revenue and 16m annual visitors

Disney has still not recouped $4.2bn of its investment in Disneyland Paris after more than 30 years, even though the resort is now its best-performing international outpost, according to an analysis of recent filings.

The sprawling theme park complex swung open its ornate iron gates in 1992 and now attracts about 16 million visitors every year. It is wholly owned by Disney and is home to two theme parks – the fairytale-inspired Disneyland and Disney Adventure World, which launched its largest-ever expansion in late March. The lavish land, themed to the hit animated movie Frozen, is part of a $2.5bn (€2bn) investment by Disney, and its new chief executive, Josh D’Amaro, was on hand for the opening alongside Emmanuel Macron.

While his bosses look (to varying degrees) like bumblers, cowards or corporate tools, Pelley will be remembered as a beacon of integrity

Journalism is supposed to speak truth to power, as when Walter Cronkite reported, on the CBS airwaves, that the Vietnam war was not progressing as the US government was claiming, or when the Washington Post revealed, through its Watergate reporting, that the Nixon administration was corrupt.

Truth to power. Or, as the New York Times motto has it, telling it straight, “without fear or favor”.

We’d like to hear about your frustrations with companies, from difficulties getting a refund to bad customer service

Polls show US consumers are angry and we’d like to understand more about the reasons why. Perhaps you have spent hours trying to replace a shoddy product, get a refund, or just force a company to fulfil a contract or promise? Or did you hit a customer service dead-end or get caught in an endless runaround, especially when it comes to something essential for day-to-day living?

We would like to hear about your experience and it would be helpful if you could include specifics such as dates and dollar amounts. A Guardian reporter may get in touch for more information.

There’s a stew of factors at work behind the rise in consumer rage – but there are potential solutions, too

• People in the US: tell us about your difficult consumer experiences

American consumers are angry. Nearly 80% of Americans had a service or product problem in 2025, and about two-thirds of those felt “rage” about it, according to the “National Consumer Rage” survey.

Many consumers feel they are constantly fighting against an onslaught of overcharges, customer service hassles, shoddy products and billing mistakes that always seem to go in the company’s favor. All of this comes against a background of soaring prices and rising inflation.

Loti AI CEO Luke Arrigoni breaks down the world of deepfakes -- of celebrities and beyond -- and some of it sounds a little dystopian.

NASA has officially ended the MAVEN mission after the Mars orbiter stopped responding in December, apparently after an unexpected spin drained its batteries and knocked out communications. Launched in 2013 and orbiting Mars since 2014, MAVEN spent more than a decade studying how the planet lost its atmosphere and helped explain how Mars transformed from a potentially habitable world into the cold, dry planet seen today. The New York Times reports: The NASA spacecraft MAVEN, short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, had been orbiting around the Red Planet since 2014. NASA last received a signal from MAVEN on Dec. 6, shortly before the spacecraft passed behind Mars. Then the spacecraft stopped responding. A review board found that MAVEN began unexpectedly rotating, causing its batteries to drain too quickly and resulting in a loss of power to the communications system. "The team is certainly broken up about this," said Shannon Curry, the principal investigator of the mission and a scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, at a news conference on Wednesday. "But at the same time, we are incredibly proud of the science we've accomplished over the last decade." NASA officials declined to speculate on the root cause of the mishap. A final report is expected to be released later this year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After the dramatic termination of Scott Pelley, four of the show’s seven full-time correspondents are out under Bari Weiss’s leadership

For many years now, CBS News employees entering the network’s New York headquarters have walked by a poster showing the seven correspondents who have helped keep 60 Minutes the most-watched show in news for 52 straight television seasons: Lesley Stahl, Scott Pelley, Bill Whitaker, Anderson Cooper, Sharyn Alfonsi, Jon Wertheim and Cecilia Vega.

Over the last tumultuous week, three of those correspondents – Pelley, Alfonsi and Vega – have been fired. Cooper – who is also a CNN primetime anchor – announced in February that he was leaving the show. Amid the most significant uproar in the show’s lengthy history, CBS News staffers and 60 Minutes veterans now have two central questions: who will be left to make the show’s 59th season, which begins in September? And will it still feel like 60 Minutes?

If everyone is spending like there won’t be a tomorrow, there probably won’t be a tomorrow

• People in the US: tell us about your difficult consumer experiences

Doom is the prefix du jour. Doomscrolling, doomposting, doomsplaining, doomspreading. Doom joins other recent suffixes -maxxing, -pilled, and -slop – giving discussions about contemporary life an overtly negative cast. Doomspending, in particular, is a new term for spending frivolously with no concern for future financial consequences. It has become synonymous with the declining fortunes of young westerners.

A survey by Credit Karma, a consumer fintech company, published in the fall of 2024, introduced the concept and the general parameters around it. Chronically online youth had begun coping with anxiety about the economy and world events with retail therapy. They claim 27% of Americans doomspend to deal with stress. The numbers rise to 37% of gen Z and 39% of millennials.

Scientists praise moves to investigate, retract or remove controversial studies. The authors stand by their work

Three scientific papers that raised questions about vaccine safety and were used by the Trump administration to justify controversial changes to US vaccine policies have over the last two months been removed, retracted or placed under investigation by the journals that published them.

In some cases, the actions occurred years after scientists first raised alarms about the studies’ scientific merits.

Commentary: Before he bows out after an undeniably successful tenure at Apple's helm, there's one final thing Cook will want to tick off his to-do list.

Bill Pulte, President Trump's pick for acting director of national intelligence, is being met with some skepticism on Capitol Hill.

The Israeli and Lebanese governments have agreed to implement a ceasefire, after weeks of deadly fighting between Israel and Hezbollah had imperiled broader negotiations between the U.S. and Iran to end their conflict.

The Southern Poverty Law Center asked a judge to consider sanctioning federal prosecutors, after the DOJ shared an unsigned and unstamped copy of a superseding indictment with members of the media.

"Chelsea Jane Doe," who was found brutally murdered in Massachusetts in 2000, has been identified as Tiffany Bradley of Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Will Peru’s booming economy survive its latest election? Expert comment jon.wallace 4 June 2026

The Keiko-Sánchez contest in this Sunday’s runoff election could tip the country into a deeper crisis. 

It’s commonly noted that Peru has had eight presidents in the past 10 years. That neat data point, though, obscures the political and structural reasons behind the constant upheaval. And it raises another remarkable fact: despite continuing political turmoil, Peru’s economy has grown at an average 5.5 per cent between 2002 and 2022 (excluding the 10 per cent contraction during the COVID 19 pandemic).  

This year’s 7 June second-round elections between conservative, perennial also-ran candidate Keiko Fujimori and outsider leftist candidate Roberto Sánchez may well mark the moment that the balance between political crisis and economic growth finally breaks.

Shadows of old presidents

In 1990 Alberto Fujimori, father of Keiko, handily beat Peru’s Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vagas Llosa in the presidential election.  

During his presidency Peru’s party system evaporated, with Fujimori ruling effectively as a dictator from 1992 until 2000, when he fled the country under a cloud of scandal.

Every presidential election since 2000 has been a cliff hanger. Each has seen voter preferences swing wildly from month to month in the lead up to the elections. Each has gone to a second round. And every election has raised fears that the country’s booming economy might not survive the fury of increasingly polarized politics. 

Sunday’s second round elections are no different. But this time, there are reasons to believe that Peruvian democracy and stability may finally have reached a tipping point. 

Keiko Fujimori finds herself in a familiar though potentially humiliating position. Keiko – as she is popularly known – has now run for the presidency a total of four times since her father’s resignation via fax in 2000.  Each time she made it past the first round only to lose in the second.  

In those past four first-round elections, who opposed Keiko has depended more on timing than loyalty to any one candidate, let alone party. In each contest, an eye watering list of candidates and what a friend once called ‘Toyota parties’ – so called because all their supporters could fit into a Toyota – jockeyed for fickle popular support.  

This year’s first round ballot in April counted 32 candidates, one of whom unfortunately was dead by the time the voting took place but remained on the ballot. Most people thought the two winners would be Keiko and the former mayor of Lima, the tough on-crime, Trump adjacent, Rafael López Aliaga. 

But in a surprise and contentious finish, Lopez-Aliaga lost to leftist congressman Sánchez by 21,000 votes, after logistical problems extended the elections. Lopez-Aliaga contested the results, but lost. He may yet use electoral confusion and his narrow loss to rally support against whoever wins the second-round vote – especially if it’s Sánchez. 

Sánchez is an ally of former president Pedro Castillo, who was removed from office by Congress after he attempted to impose a state of emergency in 2022. Last November, Castillo was sentenced by a Peruvian court to 12 years in prison for rebellion and conspiracy against the state. 

Impeachment as tradition

Peru’s fractious party system has made governing a challenge, even when there has been relative consensus over the country’s macro-economic stability. The last president to complete his term was Ollanta Humala who finished his term in 2016, though he too is now in prison after being sentenced for corruption.

Since Toledo, congressional impeachment and removal of presidents – elected and interim – has become a political tradition of sorts. The pattern of congressional obstinance, and outrage over cases of alleged corruption large and small, have often been led by Keiko’s ‘Fuerza Popular’, the party with the largest plurality in the national legislature.  

The fractiousness of the single unicameral legislative body – in which 12 parties were represented in the last single chamber National Assembly – was a consistent challenge. 

But the constitution was reformed in 2024, re-creating a two-chamber system, adding a Senate. And a per cent floor was placed on parties’ popular vote, intended to reduce the number of parties. It worked: as a result of the congressional elections in April, only six parties will now be seated in the lower Chamber of Deputies. 

Related work

State capacity, mining and community relations in Peru

But that may not be enough to bring stability. The smorgasbord of parties in the Congress remains an issue. And Peruvian politics have become a blood sport, fuelled in part by the Fuerza Popular and Keiko’s singular desire to occupy the presidential palace – and in part by a rudderless, all-consuming obsession over even a whiff of corruption. 

Some of the congressional charges have been merited. But others were just a pretext to hamstring and eventually remove a non-Fuerza Popular president.  

An exception was the case of Pedro Castillo. The former president drew support from the rural interior of Peru – comprising jungles and mountainous, often indigenous communities – that have large been under-represented in national politics. 

Many of them are on the frontlines of the country’s booming legal – and illegal – extractive economy. But after confronting an obstinate, opposition Congress and impeachment efforts, Castillo attempted to dissolve the legislature. That led to his removal and imprisonment, sparking social protests – primarily in the interior. 

The platforms

Sánchez may have learned from that experience, going big and going hard in his campaign. The surprise first-round winner has taken to wearing the large white sombrero worn by Castillo and has called for a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution.  

He is also running on greater state intervention in the economy, including in Peru’s all-important mining sector – which accounts for 9.5 per cent of GDP and has driven its booming economic growth over the past decade and a half. Those promises, and a pledge to raise taxes on the wealthy and use international reserves to boost government spending have worried investors and the local business community. 

Keiko’s platform is more modest and traditionally conservative. It includes promises to get tough on Peru’s rising crime rate and maintain macro-economic stability. But her and her party have alleged links to corruption, and it is their scorched earth policy that has taken down multiple presidents. That raises doubts about both their commitment to combatting corruption and to civic, democratic discourse.  

Farage’s party brings in £9m largely from crypto billionaires in three months, more than twice that of Labour and Tories

• UK politics live – latest updates

Reform UK is raising millions more than the other political parties from private donations, bringing in £9m largely from cryptocurrency billionaires in the first three months of the year.

Nigel Farage’s party took a £3m donation from the cryptocurrency and aviation investor, Christopher Harborne, who is a British-Thai dual citizen, and £4m from the cryptocurrency entrepreneur Ben Delo, who is relocating to the UK from Hong Kong.

Click your way through the group stage and the knockouts to crown champion

They were pillars of their church, congregants in a little-known denomination that sets itself apart from the world and teaches that even the most unconscionable acts can be wiped away — not just forgiven, but forgotten and never spoken of again.

So it went in a rural Wyoming church, where a man was accused of sexually abusing young girls hundreds of times in the pews during Sunday services. Though the preacher knew of the abuse, he never reported it to police, local prosecutors said. Instead, he told the man to seek therapy.

In Minnesota, a man from the same faith admitted that he began entering the bedrooms of his daughter and son at night around the time each of them turned 12. He and his siblings grew up in the church and were sexually abused themselves, and then he repeated the abuse with his own children.

And in Washington state, preachers knew a member of their congregation had sexually abused several young boys. Instead of reporting him to police, they allowed him to ask for forgiveness, according to a family member, and he continued to sexually abuse children. He was later found guilty of raping the 9-year-old son of a church member and sentenced to life in prison.

The abusers and victims all belonged to the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church, or the OALC, a Scandinavian-rooted revivalist church that teaches its followers that heaven is reserved just for them. To get there, according to current and former members, they must follow a strict doctrine, which emphasizes asking for forgiveness for their sins and says that being forgiven by a fellow church member washes away those sins. 

What’s more, the church teaches that once a perpetrator is forgiven, anyone who speaks about the wrongdoing — including the victim — can be accused of harboring an unforgiving heart. Those who have left the church, as well as some who are still with it, say this means the burden of sin shifts from the person who committed the act to the person who refuses to let the matter rest. 

Sexual abuse survivors say these rituals have created a culture where allegations of abuse are resolved outside of the criminal justice system and the victims must bear their pain alone or risk going to hell. In some families, sexual abuse stretches across generations, ensnaring a parent, child and grandchild. 

“This is what I would call institutionalism of abuse of young women and children,” said DaNece Day, the prosecuting attorney for Crook County in Wyoming, whose office has charged two OALC members in the past two years.

Day and other prosecutors said one of the biggest obstacles to breaking the cycle is the way church members move among congregations spread across the U.S. and Canada, often hundreds of miles apart but tightly bound by large, multigenerational family networks. 

Last fall, ProPublica and the Minnesota Star Tribune reported that preachers in Minnesota had known for years about allegations that one of its members, a man named Clint Massie, had sexually abused young girls in the congregation. But instead of reporting it to police, church leaders urged some of the victims to take part in sessions where they were brought face-to-face with Massie and encouraged to forgive the abuse. 

Now, new reporting by the two news organizations shows how the sexual abuse of children in the OALC, as well as the failure by church leaders to report it to authorities, is a persistent and national problem.

Some current and former OALC members are calling on elders from what the church regards as its mother congregation in Sweden — where the church originated — to intervene. In fact, those elders, who don’t have authority over the American church but wield considerable influence, are coming to the U.S. and Canada this summer to meet with congregations. What they’ll find are a growing number of criminal cases against church members and increasing legal scrutiny of leaders for failing to report allegations of sexual abuse to police. 

In a statement, representatives from the Swedish church said the cases are isolated incidents and they didn’t “observe any pattern” among the tens of thousands of members in 34 OALC congregations in the U.S. and Canada. They said sexual abuse should be reported to authorities and that it was possible “some matters have been handled improperly or without sufficient knowledge.” And they acknowledged that church guidelines “are being reviewed with the American missionary pastors in order to ensure compliance.”

Representatives of the OALC in the U.S. and Canada said in an email that they also “do not perceive there to be a general pattern of behavior,” describing sexual abuse as a serious and persistent problem across society. They acknowledged that bringing a victim to face their abuser, as a pastor for the OALC church did with Massie, can be traumatic. But they defended the church’s doctrine of forgiveness, saying it was not a means to conceal wrongdoing or to shield offenders from legal consequences, and no one is coerced to forgive or to ask for forgiveness. If those teachings had been misapplied or misunderstood in some cases, they said, it “does not reflect an error in our doctrine.”

ProPublica and the Star Tribune interviewed 20 people who said they were sexually abused, almost all as children, in OALC communities, along with parents of victims as young as 3. Reporters also traveled to OALC churches around the country and reviewed court and police documents from at least eight cases, along with victims’ statements to local authorities. 

Their abusers were family members, other children or men who were trusted to be alone with children because they are part of the same insular faith community. Some victims spoke anonymously for fear of retribution from the church or their own families. Others identified themselves as well as their abusers publicly, unafraid of the repercussions. 

Many of those victims said church leaders pressured them to keep quiet. In Minnesota, police records describe a woman telling a young girl that her abuse, which began when she was around 5 or 6 years old, was not a big deal and she “needed to get over it.” In Washington state, a police report notes a woman told law enforcement that her preacher had, for “spiritual reasons,” discouraged her from contacting authorities after her daughter told her she’d been raped by three men from church.

“We’re always told that what the preachers tell us, that’s coming from God,” explained one woman, who said she, too, was told not to speak of her abuse. “Who’s going to argue with that?”

Sexual abuse in the OALC has sometimes been a legacy passed from one generation to the next — hidden, quietly endured, repeated. Lorie Peldo was sexually abused for eight years by her older brother, starting when she was only 2, she said in an interview. A quarter century later, after the memories began to resurface during therapy, Peldo’s mother told her that she’d known about the abuse. But on the advice of her preacher in Battle Ground, Washington, her parents didn’t report the crimes to the police. Instead, they took her brother to a doctor, she said.

Peldo said she eventually confronted her brother, who said that it had haunted him his entire life. She tried to forgive him, she said, but the weight of what he’d done did not lift. She fell into such deep despair that she tried to commit suicide. She said she ended up in a psychiatric hospital. Her brother later died; her parents are also deceased.

It didn’t stop there. On a church road trip, Clint Massie — who was sentenced for child abuse in Duluth, Minnesota, last year — sexually abused Peldo’s daughter, Tonya, when she was 11 and he was a teenager, according to Tonya Peldo’s statements to law enforcement. Peldo’s case was included in the police file involving Massie, but it wasn’t charged criminally, according to a prosecutor, because the statute of limitations had run out. Massie has not responded to repeated requests for comment.

Tonya Peldo told investigators from the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office in Duluth that she didn’t see Massie again until some two decades later, after she moved to the city and recognized him passing out candy to kids at the church.

She said she told the pastors about what he’d done to her, yet one of the preachers told her to ask Massie for forgiveness, as if she had wronged him. “I was like, ‘No. No!’” she said in an interview. It would be more than a decade before Massie was charged with sexual abuse crimes.

In 2019, Tonya’s daughter was also sexually abused, making her the third generation of Peldo girls to be victims. The daughter was 14 when a 25-year-old relative, Blake Nelson, bought her a pack of cigarettes and then invited her into his trailer in Clark County, Washington, so that he could teach her how to give a massage, according to court records.

Nelson pleaded guilty to charges of communication with a minor for immoral purposes and fourth-degree assault in the case involving Tonya Peldo’s daughter. At his sentencing, Tonya told the judge how church leaders had tried to keep her daughter from reporting the abuse to police. Nelson’s own lawyer, Michele Michalek, said the pastors repeatedly called her law office to insist the case should be handled internally. 

“They think that law enforcement shouldn’t be involved,” Michalek said.

A judge in Minnesota commented on the cyclical nature of abuse in 2023, when a man from an OALC family turned himself in to police after repeatedly abusing his son and daughter. At his sentencing, the judge took into account that the man and his siblings, who grew up in the church, had also been victims of child sexual abuse. She said she found it “almost incomprehensible” that the adults in his life didn’t know about the abuse he and his siblings had suffered as children.

“All I can see are the ripples of consequences for you and all of your siblings, who were abused or abusers, and then for your children,” the judge said.

The OALC church is a branch of a broader faith called Laestadianism, a conservative Christian revival movement that began in the mid-1800s in northern Scandinavia. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, as millions of Scandinavians migrated to the U.S., some followers of the Laestadian movement brought with them more than language, traditions and religious devotion.

Alongside the faith came a deeply insular church culture shaped by strict obedience and a doctrine of forgiveness that critics and former members say enabled the concealment of wrongdoing.

One of them was Eija Marttinen. A photo in a newspaper in 1951 shows Marttinen as a little girl wearing a Finnish sailor suit and braids, standing alongside 14 family members and several large suitcases. Her family had just arrived in Nova Scotia from Finland, and they would soon launch Canada’s first Old Apostolic Lutheran Church. In the photo, Marttinen is smiling brightly toward the horizon, as if spellbound by the endless possibilities of a new world.

But even then, at age 9, Marttinen harbored a secret that would be the source of a lifetime of emotional pain. Now 84 and living in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, she said in an interview that her older brother sexually assaulted her starting when she was 5. Another brother soon started abusing her, too, she said. Both brothers are now dead.

Years later, Marttinen said she came to learn that there were other predators in the church. She kept silent about her abuse for most of her life, fearing she would be forced to forgive and still live with the stigma if she came forward. She only told her own daughter about the extent of the abuse in recent months, after reading the ProPublica and Star Tribune stories.

“They can do whatever they want and you have to forgive them. That’s not right. But you go along because you were brought up in it. 

“I wish I wasn’t,” she added. 

The Laestadian churches in Scandinavia have faced their own reckonings. From 2009 to 2011, a Finnish child welfare scholar, Johanna Hurtig, documented widespread sexual abuse cases among Finnish church members and found that the concept of forgiveness of sins had been warped into a tool to silence victims. 

At first, church leaders were defensive, according to news reports. But they later acknowledged “serious mistakes” in how the church handled sexual abuse, including pressuring victims to forgive offenders instead of reporting them. They urged members to report abuse to police and child welfare authorities.

Several men were convicted in Finnish courts and sentenced to long prison terms. 

In 2017, Norwegian police documented 151 cases of rape and abuse, many with child victims, in a remote northern village of some 2,000 people. Following a newspaper investigation, the police said they tied many of the cases to members of Laestadianism, with some incidents dating to 1953. The police found the practice of forgiving and forgetting often led to abuse being considered “settled” internally, effectively silencing victims and protecting perpetrators.

The church’s emphasis on large families has created booms in places like Minnesota, Wyoming and southern Washington. Families rely heavily on one another socially, financially and spiritually while keeping their distance from what members often call “the world” — outsiders and secular influences viewed as dangerous or corrupting. Even ordinary activities like watching TV and dancing are treated as transgressions that must be confessed. One abuse victim said she felt anxious every time she turned on her car radio, fearing that if she listened to a pop song and died in a crash before asking forgiveness, she could go to hell. 

Some church members hope the Swedish elders address sexual abuse during their visit, including the mother of a 15-year-old girl who revealed in May 2025 that her father had been abusing her for years. It happened both in Minnesota and after they moved to Washington, according to court records. The mother, according to child protection services reports, said she told her preacher about the abuse. 

Authorities did not learn of the allegations until August, when her daughter saw a therapist after weeks of her mother trying to get help through church channels, according to the reports. That visit triggered an investigation by child protection authorities in Washington, who substantiated the complaint. Prosecutors in Minnesota charged the father with criminal sexual conduct, but he hasn’t been charged in Washington. The father has asked the court for a public defender and has not yet entered a plea. He did not respond to voice and text messages seeking comment. 

Asked why church officials did not immediately contact law enforcement, a spokesperson for the church declined to answer, saying the case was “complex” and in authorities’ hands. However, he said that, in general, spiritual advisers need to use counselors and other professionals “to determine if there is a reasonable cause to report as dictated by law.”

But the mother said it was she — not the church — who set up the therapy session. 

“Their job is to pick up the phone and say, ‘Hi, I’ve got some confusing, conflicting information but I’m concerned for the safety of this person,’” she said. “They don’t have to be investigators, all they need to do is tell somebody.”

The mother said she plans to raise the church’s failure to notify police with elders when they visit this summer. Nonetheless, she plans to remain in the church. Asked why, she said, “Because I want to go to heaven.”

Last summer, in the rural expanse of eastern Wyoming, Moorcroft police drove up the long dirt road leading to the OALC church, a large brick building on the edge of town with a white cross emblazoned under the eaves. 

The investigators were looking for records that could verify the membership of a man who several children said had abused them during services. His name was Charles Massie — the brother of Clint Massie, who had pleaded guilty to similar crimes in Minnesota months earlier.

Over 10 years, authorities alleged, Charles Massie had sexually abused at least seven girls. Some of the abuse occurred at his house and some at his businesses, where young girls worked part time. But the vast majority of the abuse occurred at church, according to court documents. Investigators tallied 832 incidents where Massie sat near the girls’ parents, allegedly fondling the girls’ genitals and breasts. One victim, who told the police she was 5 or 6 years old when she was abused by Massie, said that he “raped me with his fingers.” 

Wyoming has charged Charles Massie with nine counts of sexual abuse and sexual battery. He is being held in jail in Nebraska, where prosecutors also have charged him in connection with sexual assaults. He has pleaded not guilty in both states. He could not be reached for comment.

When investigators in Moorcroft contacted families of the victims, they learned that the families already knew about the abuse. One had learned of it three years earlier, according to charges. But according to court records, none of them had told the police. Instead, the charges say, the father of some of the victims had told their preacher, David Lindberg, about the abuse in 2024. Charles Massie would later turn himself in, but not for another year.

Day, the top prosecutor in Crook County, Wyoming, said there was “no support” for victims and the church did nothing to punish Charles Massie. “There are no consequences for him,” she said. “He’s allowed to sit in church with them every Sunday, even after they’ve come forward and said, ‘This man has been hurting us.’” She said Charles Massie turned himself in to the Moorcroft police after he admitted to a mental health provider that he had abused children; the provider told him that they would report Massie if he didn’t go to police.

Lindberg disputed the characterization that he did not act when Charles Massie confessed to him. “All I can say is, when I first heard about it, he came to me and he had a problem, so I told him he needs to go get therapy and turn himself in to the police,” Lindberg said. “And he did.” 

He referred additional questions to a church spokesperson, Troy Massie, who is a relative of Charles and Clint Massie. In written responses, Troy Massie said the church told Charles to stop attending services after he confessed to Lindberg, though he could listen to services on the phone. 

“We continue to improve our efforts as needed to protect all children,” he wrote.

The Wyoming church isn’t the only one to face accusations that it failed to report abusers. In southwestern Washington in 2017, a jury convicted church member Carsie Tikka of raping a 9-year-old boy. But one woman, who was a member of the church at the time, said that years before he was charged, Tikka had assaulted her stepchildren and the leaders had done nothing to stop him. Instead, Tikka asked her family for forgiveness.

After Tikka was convicted at trial, a court-ordered psychiatrist wrote in a report that Tikka had “a history of offending 29 males,” an allegation that Tikka denied in court. At his sentencing, Tikka said his conscience was clean. He said he had already “received the testimony of sins forgiven” by one of God’s disciples.

“You clearly by your statement here are not remorseful,” the judge remarked before sentencing him to life in prison without parole. “You put the blame on everyone else.”

Then Tikka illustrated the central problem facing prosecutors and victims alike — a powerful religious culture that prioritizes spiritual absolution over secular justice — with his final, defiant words:

“My sins have been forgiven,” Tikka told the judge. “Have yours?”

The post In This Church, Child Sexual Abuse Has Gone Unchecked for So Long That It Spans Generations appeared first on ProPublica.

We've tested smart sprinklers: Here's why you should have one, and which models proved the best.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Almost a year after Delaware’s first-in-a-generation property reassessments sent shockwaves through the state, and particularly New Castle County, lawmakers are still dealing with the fallout. Legislators, after months of anticipation, will introduce a slate of bills today meant to ease taxpayer concerns. But the decision to extend a controversial policy combined with the little amount of time in this year’s legislative session could create roadblocks to enacting the reforms.

Editor’s Note: This story, originally published before the General Assembly’s slate of property tax bills were officially released, has been updated to include tracking numbers for each of the bills filed and clarify details about the legislation.

The biggest legislative controversy of last summer is back before the General Assembly.

Lawmakers introduced a bill Thursday that would indefinitely extend New Castle County school districts’ controversial ability to tax commercial and residential properties at different rates.

Authored by Rep. Kim Williams (D-Stanton), the bill was filed among a slew of property tax-related proposals by lawmakers who took part in the Delaware General Assembly’s months-long committee investigation into the fallout from last year’s first-in-a-generation property reassessments.

Enacted last summer as a one-time fix, the separated tax rates – sometimes called split rates – were meant to provide residents with temporary relief from the post-reassessment tax bill sticker shock. 

While the split rates reduced some homeowners’ property bills by several hundred dollars, they also sparked outcry from small business owners and spurred a months-long legal challenge by landlords and hotel operators in Delaware’s northernmost county.

Regardless, the ability for school districts to levy different tax rates for residential and non-residential property will expire on June 30 unless legislators act.

If Williams’ bill is enacted, commercial properties in New Castle County could continue to be taxed at a higher rate than their residential counterparts, but that potential increase would be slightly lower than currently allowed.

Commercial properties in New Castle County currently can be taxed at a rate up to two times higher than residential properties. Williams’ proposal would lower that multiplier to 1.85.

She said the decrease was meant to show small business owners that lawmakers were making a “good faith” effort not to overtax them while also ensuring residents can afford to pay their bills.

“It’s a balancing act,” Williams said.

A handful of other property tax-related bills and resolutions were filed today along with the split rate extension. 

If passed, the bills could work in tandem to make immediate changes to address short-term concerns and create new working groups to investigate long-term solutions.

Whether the General Assembly will pass the package in its entirety during the final 10 working days of the legislative session remains to be seen. 

Searching for standards, long-term solutions

Six pieces of property tax legislation were introduced today in the House of Representatives: Five bills and two resolutions.

Rep. Cyndie Romer (D-Newark) authored two of the bills and one of the resolutions. 

Her most sweeping proposal – House Concurrent Resolution 150 – would create a stakeholder working group to develop statewide standards for conducting property assessments. Those standards could include establishing requirements for how property data is collected and maintained, among others. 

According to HCR 150, the legislation developed by Romer’s working group could prevent counties from certifying their tax rolls should their assessments not meet the to-be-determined state standards.

While Romer said she usually bristles at the idea of creating working groups that can prolong direct action, she realized there is not a quick fix to address the multiple issues that occurred during New Castle County’s property reassessment. 

Those issues led to results that confounded Romer. Those included the results of a Spotlight Delaware analysis that found properties in some of Wilmington’s poverty-stricken communities saw some of the largest percentage increases in median property value across the state. 

So she set out to correct the assessment process, and to ensure the new property reassessments do not create the same fallout as their predecessors. 

“I didn’t feel like we could do nothing,” Romer said. “We needed to fix this problem, even though we realized it was going to take time to truly fix it.”

Along with Romer’s statewide standards resolution, another resolution aiming to address longer-term property tax policies was also introduced today.

While Romer’s is geared more toward establishing standard operating practices for assessments, the other — House Concurrent Resolution 151 — would create a working group to investigate other potential policy levers the state or its three counties could employ to ease the property tax burden on residents. 

The legislature’s joint property tax committee discussed some of these policy levers, such as homestead exemptions and circuit breaker programs, during hearings last fall. 

Looking for additional revenues

Meanwhile, State Sen. Dan Cruce (D-Wilmington) is set to introduce a bill he hopes will help counties and municipalities create additional revenues “not off of our small businesses and not off of our neighbors.”

Cruce declined to comment on the specifics of his bill ahead of it’s official filing, but he called it a “specific” proposal that relates to the state’s telecommunications tax cap.

Currently, Delaware counties can include the value of a telecommunication company’s poles, cables, wires and more when calculating its annual property tax bill. 

But state law limits how much those companies can be taxed to their 2015 levels. That means telecommunications companies are being taxed based on property valuations from more than a decade ago. 

Cruce previously filed Senate Bill 338 late last month which would remove this tax cap, but it is unclear what his new bill would specifically do. 

An examination of the legislation included in Thursday’s official filing revealed Cruce did not file any new bills. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday afternoon about whether he will file new legislation.

Other legislation in the package

Along with Romer’s assessment standards resolution, she also penned two bills for the property tax package.

One of those bills, House Bill 460, would require the city of Wilmington to share its permitting data with New Castle County, closing an information sharing gap that led to fingerpointing last fall about who was to blame for some of the most widely criticized assessment issues in northern Delaware.

Romer’s second bill, House Bill 461, would allow New Castle County school districts to reset their property tax rates this summer, following the conclusion of an ongoing review of the most recent assessment and the possible enactment of Williams’ split rate extension.

Williams also wrote a second bill for the package. That legislation would raise the income limits for seniors to qualify for New Castle County’s school property tax exemptions, building upon her previously passed House Bill 159. 

Today’s slate of bills comes on heels of another property tax bill working its way through the legislature from Senate President Pro Tempore David Sokola (D-Newark).

Senate Bill 322 would rescind school districts’ current ability to automatically implement a 10% tax increase after property reassessments, instead allowing them to seek additional funding without holding a referendum vote.

Instead of taking an automatic 10% hike, districts – should they meet certain criteria – would be able to implement an up to 2% tax increase each year without seeking approval from voters. That approach mirrors the process in many other states.

Lawmakers must pass each of the bills included in the forthcoming property tax package in both the House and Senate before the General Assembly gavels out for a final time on June 30. Any bills that fail to pass by that date will effectively be dead in the water.

The package will now join a growing list of legislation – including next year’s nearly $7 billion state budget, healthcare reforms, banking code modernizations, hemp regulations and more – that lawmakers have only 10 working days left to address.

Julia Merola contributed to this report.

The post Lawmakers look to extend NCC split property tax rates, advance reassessment reforms appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

Why Should Delaware Care?
High rents have been a consistent problem in Sussex County, especially near the beaches. A program meant to encourage developers to build more affordable housing has not produced enough new housing, so the county council will soon vote on whether to ease requirements to join it. 

Sussex County Council will likely vote next week on whether to allow higher rents and more density in the county’s affordable housing program.  

This would be the second time the council loosened restrictions on the Sussex County Rental Program in hopes of encouraging more participation. 

Only two projects have used the program since its creation in 2008. Housing developers say that’s because the rent caps are too low and the density incentives are too small for any housing projects to be financially feasible.

County Administrator Todd Lawson said the county worked with housing developers when drafting the reforms.

“The developing community was saying what we all know to be true… If you continue to keep the regulations that you have today, we’re probably not going to build any more [affordable homes],” Lawson said.  

Lawson said the council will likely vote on the reforms at the next council meeting. In the meantime, residents can submit comments about it online. 

The county is facing pressure from the state to address the growing affordable housing shortage around the county’s popular beaches. Next week’s vote could be the first major action the county has taken on the issue in years. 

Jon Horner, president of the Delaware Homebuilder’s Association, said he thinks the reforms do not go as far as he would have liked, but that they will help make the program more economically viable to join. 

“I think you’ll see new [housing] projects immediately,” Horner said. 

Sussex County has a projected need of 2,643 affordable rental units by 2030, according to the  Delaware State Housing Authority’s 2023 Housing Needs Assessment. 

At the meeting, council members Jane Gruenebaum and John Rieley appeared to support the proposed reforms, while Councilman Matt Lloyd expressed concern that they don’t go far enough. 

Councilman Steve McCarron’s comments appeared to be neutral, and Council President Doug Hudson did not make any comments. 

The few public comments about the proposal from Tuesday’s meeting and the last county council meeting were generally supportive. 

Former Sussex Preservation Coalition President Jill Hicks said at the last meeting that she supports the changes but wants the council to take out the part of the program that lets affordable housing projects bypass public hearings. 

“Public hearings don’t only allow the public to express its views. It gives the public the opportunity to witness and understand the process and justification of government decisions,” said Hicks, who is also running for county council this year.

What are the proposed reforms? 

Currently, in order for a housing development project to qualify for the Sussex County Rental Program, 25% of its housing units need to have a maximum rent of $810 for a one-bedroom, $970 for a two-bedroom and $1,120 for a three-bedroom.  

Those rents are meant to be affordable to households making half of the county’s median income, or $48,750 a year. 

The proposed reforms would keep that 25% threshold and add a tiered approach that raises the rent caps. 

The rents would have to be between $970 and $1,295 for a one-bedroom apartment, between $1,165 and $1,550 for a two-bedroom and between $1,345 and $1,790 for a three-bedroom. 

Lower priced apartments would count as more units for the purpose of reaching the 25% threshold. 

For example, a housing developer would be able to charge a higher rent if a quarter of the units were rent-restricted. But they could decide to make only 15% of the units rent-restricted if they charged a lower rent on those apartments.  

The proposed reforms are less sweeping than what was originally recommended by the   Sussex County Land Use Reform Working Group.

The County Council formed the working group after three newcomers won seats on the elected body by beating incumbents in the November 2024 elections. The victories largely were fueled by resident anger over how the five-person council had previously handled development. 

The working group recommended the council raise the rent caps to be affordable for households making 80% of the area median income and lower the threshold to 15%.

Councilman Matt Lloyd said he wanted the council to pass something closer to what the working group recommended, but Council Vice President John Rieley said the reforms would make the program flexible enough to still attract more projects.

“That’s what they said the last time,” Lloyd responded, referring to the council’s previous unsuccessful attempt to reform the Sussex County Rental Program. 

Horner, who was a member of the working group, said the changes are not likely to convince every housing developer to join the program, as he had originally hoped. 

But he said the reformed program would work well for properties outside of the prime real estate markets of downtown Lewes and Rehoboth Beach.

“It’s certainly far better than what it was,” he said. 

The post Sussex County Council to vote on affordable housing reforms next week appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

The convergence of HPC and AI is reshaping the future of supercomputing. Traditional modeling and simulation systems are now blending with AI, driving massive changes in infrastructure, processing capabilities, and physical data center design.

Converged HPC/AI workloads require an architecture that bridges high-precision scientific computing with high-throughput, low-precision AI training and inference. To make the leap, organizations are pursuing heterogenous compute which delivers exceptional performance and raw acceleration, while maintaining optimized operational efficiency. Selecting the right solution stack is critical to meet today’s evolving supercomputing challenges and evolve for what comes next.

A new system for converged supercomputing and AI

The HPE Cray Supercomputing GX5000 (HPE Cray SC GX5000) is a next generation unified supercomputing solution for the converged HPC and AI era, designed for organizations that depend on supercomputing-scale HPC and AI to achieve their greatest objectives. The new flagship HPE Cray SC system will replace the HPE Cray SC EX4000 that has achieved many historic firsts—like being first to break the exascale barrier and first to power 7 of the top 10 most powerful supercomputers in the world. ^[i]

The HPE Cray SC GX5000 will deliver improvements across software, compute, interconnect, and storage layers:

• 125% increase in power limit per DLC compute blades, enabling you to get answers to bigger questions faster^[ii]
• 50% reduction in floor space requirements for DLC infrastructureⁱⁱ
• 25% reduction in floor space requirements for new compute racks while maintaining 400 kW power per rackⁱⁱ

What sets the HPE Cray SC GX5000 apart is its ability to deliver exceptional performance and optimized price/performance for physics-driven HPC modeling and simulation as well as data-driven AI. The system can run both workloads separately or simultaneously at peak performance to predict joint outcomes.

How does the HPE Cray SC GX5000 meet these requirements?

1. One of the highest performance densities in the industry.

• Up to 81,920 AMD “Venice” CPU cores per rack
• Up to 112 AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs per rack
• Up to 2,048 high-speed interconnect ports per rack
• Up to 75 million IOPS per rack

2. A unified HPC/AI architecture for next generation systems.

• CPU-partition for high-precision performance and GPU-partition for mixed-precision performance
• Mixing different blades within a single rack for workloads that require a more granular design approach
• Unified management across the system lifecycle (provisioning, monitoring, power/cooling, and scaling)

3. Maximum performance for your budget.

• Up to 25% warmer inlet water for DLC reduces annual electricity costs by up to 25%^[iii]
• Low-latency interconnect with automatic congestion management and fine-grained adaptive routing
• HPC and AI storage systems with open-source economics
• High compute node utilization with an I/O subsystem that reduces bottlenecks

Customer supercomputing innovation

HPE and AMD are trusted partners for building next generation supercomputers, all the way to quantum. Our commitment to converged HPC/AI as the engine of global scientific discovery sets us apart in this dynamic industry. Our solutions fuel progress with an unstoppable combination of ultra-dense compute, the most comprehensive multivendor HPC/AI software stack for CPUs and GPUs, and global services that make your transformation turnkey.

HPE and AMD have built some of the world’s most powerful supercomputing systems, and the list is growing.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory is launching a new supercomputer in 2028, based on the new HPE Cray SC GX5000 and next generation processors and accelerators. The new Discovery supercomputer will deliver enhanced computing speeds and bandwidth to supercharge scientific discoveries—including AI modeling for nuclear energy, AI-driven digital twins for precision medicine, and shorter aerospace design cycles.

The HPC Center at University of Stuttgart has announced an upcoming system built on the same HPE and AMD foundation. The new Herder supercomputer will offer a major increase in performance and energy efficiency for advanced computational applications such as simulation, AI, and converged computing.

Explore the next era of supercomputing solutions

HPE invites you to explore the future of supercomputing solutions at ISC High Performance 2026. Join us in Hamburg, Germany from June 22^nd–26^th to experience the latest innovations. Plan to visit HPE at booth C10 and AMD at booth X03 to talk with our experts, experience demos, and much more.

The HPE Cray SC GX5000 demo will showcase HPE’s next generation supercomputer. Learn how this breakthrough system will transform HPC and AI workloads for years to come, and check out a model of the HPE Cray SC FX250 Compute Blade.

Discover how HPE and AMD are redefining AI-era supercomputing with open, scalable infrastructure for converged HPC and AI.

[i] Top500 List top500.org/lists/top500/2022/06/
[ii] “Build your next‑generation supercomputer on HPE Cray Supercomputing GX500,” HPE 2025 paths.ext.hpe.com/c/a50014207enw?x=_asidn
[iii] “Hot water, cold water,” Data Centre Dynamics Ltd. 2024

The post Discover the Unified Supercomputing Solution for Converged HPC and AI appeared first on HPCwire.

Cenk Uygur was due to appear at SXSW alongside streamer Hasan Piker but Home Office cancelled travel authorisation

• UK politics live – latest updates

A leftwing US political commentator has described the UK government’s decision to ban him from entering the country as “haunting and hilarious” and “Kafkaesque”.

Cenk Uygur, the founder and a host on Young Turks, a well-established progressive media outlet, was banned earlier this week from entering the UK to attend a speaking engagement alongside Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer who has become a popular figure on the US political left.

The Center for Photography at Woodstock (in Kingston, New York) recently opened the first-ever New York Upstate Photography Biennial, featuring the work of 39 artists who live and work across the Hudson valley and beyond. The show, co-curated by Marina Chao and Adam Giles Ryan, highlights the diverse work of photographers in the upstate region. Their images will be on view until 6 September 2026

We look at Mikel Arteta’s next steps, Liverpool potentially missing out on an old flame and Anthony Gordon’s move to Barcelona

The margins were so narrow that Arsenal might have finished Saturday as European champions had Gabriel Magalhães not skied his penalty in the shootout. Similarly, the Champions League trophy may have ended up in their grasp had Cristhian Mosquera stopped himself from tripping Khvicha Kvaratskhelia to give Paris Saint-Germain a way back after the Gunners had taken an early lead.

I was a new reporter at KQED in 2021 when former elementary teacher Joseph Brian Houg was sentenced to more than three decades in prison for sexually abusing 10 students. He’d taught at the same San Francisco Bay Area school for more than two decades. Were there warning signs?  

I soon discovered parents on social media saying they had complained to school administrators for years about Houg. I also knew that schools could release such complaints if they were substantiated or if teachers were disciplined. So I filed public records requests with Houg’s school — something anyone can do. 

I received 43 pages of records within a few months showing that parents had reported Houg to the principal at least four times since 2009. They complained about him for asking students to strip down to their underwear in his classroom in order to try on costumes for a play he was directing, and for coming into their changing room. They also complained about his touching boys’ chests or stomachs and tapping one boy on the butt. I learned that the principal had twice warned Houg to stop touching students. But he was allowed to keep teaching. (The principal said in a deposition that while Houg’s actions crossed professional boundaries, they were not reported to her as sexual.)

Over the next two years, I reported on similar cases of teachers remaining in the classroom after complaints of unwanted touching. Another Bay Area elementary school, in Benicia, reported a teacher to the state’s licensing body after he resigned due to accusations of misconduct. He was hired by another school, and his educator license remained in good standing until he was criminally charged. (He is currently fighting those charges.)

This raised a whole different set of questions for me: Should these teachers have been allowed to keep teaching in new schools? How much about a teacher’s disciplinary history did potential employers know? And what was the state’s responsibility for acting on, and sharing, the information it had about these teachers?

After I entered journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley in 2023, I wanted to investigate how common it was for teachers to continue working with kids after schools found that they had committed misconduct. California law bars the teacher licensing agency from releasing disciplinary records to the public, so my classmate and I requested records from the 300 largest school districts in California. We asked for complaints of teacher sexual misconduct made to schools in the five previous years. We also asked for any reports sent by schools to the state’s teacher licensing agency, which are required to be filed when public school educators are fired or resign due to alleged misconduct.

Read More

He Was Fired for Sexually Harassing Students. California Allowed Him to Keep Teaching Anyway.

Dozens of districts responded within two months. We began building a spreadsheet of teachers against whom complaints were raised. Getting the records was slow: California requires public agencies to determine whether they have records to disclose within 10 days, and to release them promptly, but most dragged their feet. Whenever schools stopped responding, I copied school board members and attorneys on my emails, citing the law. By the time I graduated more than a year after filing the records requests, I had received more than 350 complaints, which I used in my recent investigation with KQED and ProPublica.

To this day, Los Angeles Unified, the largest school district in California, still has not released any records pertaining to teacher misconduct cases that it reported to the state. Instead, the district said it would charge me $8,000 ($100 an hour for 80 hours of work) for it to “investigate approximately 2,500 potentially responsive personnel files.” The First Amendment Coalition, a California nonprofit that advocates for free speech and government transparency, is representing me in a lawsuit filed in May. We argue that the Los Angeles school district is violating public records laws with its failure to release documents pertaining to alleged educator misconduct. A Los Angeles Unified spokesperson told me in a written statement this week that its policies balance the public’s right to access records with “responsible stewardship of public resources” and the law. 

Districts slow-walking their responses isn’t the only obstacle to getting records from schools. Districts typically notify teachers before releasing complaints to give them the opportunity to block the documents’ release. The former Benicia teacher who was criminally charged with sexually abusing students in 2024 sued to block the release of complaints made against him at two school districts. The First Amendment Coalition represented me in that case, too, and we won. It took nine months to get the records. In another case in which I had requested records, the court granted an injunction preventing release of the teacher’s records, but the legal filings contained the details of the allegations against him, so the nature of the complaint became public anyway.

At least four teachers have called or emailed me directly to ask why I’m requesting their disciplinary records. They wanted to share their side of the story, which I was more than happy to hear, and some argued that their cases were not worth my time. One asked me to retract my request. (I did not.) Another sent a 1,700-word email saying that the allegations were only partially true and lamented that he did not have the money to defend himself. 

While I appreciated the complexity of individual cases, I believed that those misconduct complaints might contain important truths. Undeterred by school districts’ recalcitrance, I followed the public record-seekers’ mantra: If you can’t get records from one agency, the answers you’re looking for may exist somewhere else. 

Records of state disciplinary hearings are presumed public when teachers object to their dismissals by school districts or appeal the suspension or revocation of their licenses. And those records reside in the Department of General Services, a state agency that houses another agency responsible for convening administrative hearings of public employees. 

This agency proved helpful with the case of Jason Agan, a San Francisco Bay Area math teacher who KQED and ProPublica reported on last month. Agan had been fired for sexually harassing high school students but went on to teach at two more schools, even after an independent panel convened by the Office of Administrative Hearings deemed him “unfit to teach.” Because he had asked for an outside hearing after the district moved to fire him, I requested those records. 

I got them the next day. The documents contained summaries of testimony from students, administrators and Agan himself at his dismissal hearing. Agan, who has not been accused of a crime, admitted to touching students’ shoulders but denied any sexual motivation, stating during his dismissal hearing that he did so to offer them support and encouragement. He maintained his teaching license. 

Getting a response from the Department of General Services was like discovering a secret portal to obtaining records quickly and easily. 

So I requested five years’ worth of decisions about other teachers by independent panels from this agency, in search of further insights into how the state’s teacher disciplinary system works and where it falls short. I obtained a gold mine of documents in less than a week.

I had learned some important lessons: What seems to be secret isn’t always so. Sometimes you just need to know who to ask, and for what.

The post I Got Access to Hundreds of Teacher Misconduct Complaints in California — and You Can Too appeared first on ProPublica.

Authorities have been largely successful at erasing the massacre of protesters who fought for democratic reforms, but the facts are emerging in often unexpected ways.

While wealthy Americans hail a booming stock market, the rest of us worry about rising inflation and people struggling to make ends meet

• People in the US: tell us about your difficult consumer experiences

In case you’re not familiar with the concept of the K-shaped economy, it’s an important idea that captures a lot about Trump’s America. Wealthy Americans are represented by the line of the K that angles sharply upward to the right, while the line of the K that dips downward represents non-rich Americans and the difficulties they face.

The economy’s K-shape has been growing worse in recent months, in large part because of Donald Trump’s policies. The wealthy people’s line is climbing further upward, while the line for the non-wealthy – the vast majority of Americans – has fallen further.

Millions of fans have watched videos of Ronaldo the dog, named after soccer great Cristiano Ronaldo, playing goalkeeper.

Everything you need to know (and more) about every squad member. Click on the player pictures for more information

Who is winning the battle to be top scorer at the World Cup? Live and updated throughout the tournament

The Golden Boot is awarded to the World Cup’s top goalscorer, with assists used as a tie-breaker if two or more players finish level. The 2026 tournament has three former Golden Boot winners taking part: Kylian Mbappé of France (eight goals in 2022), England’s Harry Kane (six goals in 2018) and James Rodríguez of Colombia (six goals in 2014).

Mbappé and Kane are among the pre-tournament favourites to finish top scorer in North America, alongside Norway’s Erling Haaland – making his World Cup debut – and Argentina’s Lionel Messi, who is playing in his seventh World Cup and finished second-highest scorer in Qatar with seven goals.

Business secretary to meet European counterpart on Friday as EU industry leaders worry about retaliatory measures by UK

• Business live – latest updates

The UK business secretary, Peter Kyle, is to raise concerns about EU plans to dramatically reduce tariff-free imports of British steel with its trade commissioner, Maroš Šefčovič, in Brussels on Friday.

The UK steel industry has previously warned of “devastating” consequences from the new quota system being planned by the EU, which will cut overall tariff-free imports from non-EU countries by 47% on 2024 levels from 1 July.

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Amazon has reportedly killed its planned new Stargate series despite giving it a series order in 2025. According to Variety, studio executives were worried it would only appeal to longtime fans. ScreenRant reports: Reports of what became Gero's Stargate series started in 2022, after Amazon acquired MGM Studios. Dean Devlin, who co-wrote the 1994 Stargate movie with Emmerich, was another executive producer for the Amazon show, as were Joby Harold and Tory Tunnell via Safehouse Pictures. The project also had Brad Wright and Joe Mallozzi as consulting producers, with both having had extensive history working within the Stargate franchise. On X, Michael Shanks, who played Daniel Jackson in Stargate SG-1, posted in response to the news that: "Yep. They did that." Mallozzi was resistant to the idea that the series was being geared toward diehard fans: "Nope. No. Sorry. Gonna have to push back on this. We were ever mindful of creating a show that would have broad appeal." In an additional post, Mallozzi went into further detail about why the cancellation is so disappointing: Before the new series was canceled by Amazon, Stargate began with Emmerich and Devlin's movie starring Kurt Russell and James Spader. This paved the way for 10 seasons of Stargate SG-1, followed by five seasons of Stargate Atlantis. There has also been the two-season Stargate Universe, the one-season animated show Stargate Infinity, the web miniseries Stargate Origins, and the 2008 direct-to-video movies Stargate: The Ark of Truth and Stargate Continuum, along with numerous games.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sultanate says talks with Tehran are limited to lawful management of waterway, but Washington has doubts about neutrality

Oman is resisting US pressure to break its links with Iran, and insists it has only been negotiating with Tehran on a future management system for the strait of Hormuz that would be compliant with international law. The aim would be to implement any regime after consulting the UN’s International Maritime Organization (IMO).

Traditionally Oman, a longtime US ally that shares stewardship of the strait, has adopted the role of a back-channel mediator allowing it to remain neutral in disputes that have led to fissures in other parts of the Gulf.

Conservation groups say work has begun in protected coastal area, while prime minister insists project will bring jobs and investment

Protests in Albania over a proposed luxury resort backed by Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, are set to intensify after opponents rejected an offer from the country’s prime minister “to discuss solutions”.

Thousands took to the streets of Tirana for a third straight day on Wednesday, some of them brandishing inflatable flamingos in a nod to feared environmental damage, amid mounting calls for the project to be blocked.

Islamic State-linked militia blamed for raids in North Kivu as governor says three patients with disease fled clinics

Rebel attacks around a town that is one of the centres of the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have left more than 30 people dead over the past few days, complicating the response to the disease.

At least 10 people were massacred in raids on three villages around the city of Beni, in North Kivu, in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

In 2025, the tech journalist invited artificial intelligence to do nearly everything for her, including editing the book she was writing about the experiment. Some of it was useful, some not – but it was her time with a chatbot companion that really shook her

For a year, Joanna Stern decided to turn herself into a “lab rat” – the object of her own experiment. Throughout 2025, she invited artificial intelligence into “every corner” of her life. She let AI answer her texts, decide what she ate and cooked, mow her lawn, fold her washing, drive her places, parse her mammograms and even, in the darkness of a burner phone, be her lover. The resulting book, I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything, asks all the big questions, including: what happens when AI can do everything humans can do? And what comes after that?

If anyone can produce answers, surely it’s Stern. Last February, she ended a 12-year stint as a personal technology columnist at the Wall Street Journal. During her tenure, she won an Emmy for her short documentary E-Ternal: A Tech Quest to “Live” Forever, which explored digital legacies, and built a reputation for product reviews that were outlandishly creative and fiendishly stringent. She once took an Apple watch jetskiing on the Hudson river to evaluate its connectivity.

The Pentagon needs both quantity and quality to win modern conflicts.

Stronger checks likely to be needed in England to safeguard reputation of GCSEs and A-levels, says Ian Bauckham

Cheating in exams could be magnified by the new generation of wearable hi-tech devices such as smartglasses or invisible earpieces, according to England’s qualifications watchdog.

Ian Bauckham, the head of the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual), also revealed that GCSEs and A-level courses in England were being scrutinised over potential AI use in students’ coursework, after teachers said they were struggling to detect it.

The crisis between Washington and Europe may be a blessing in disguise.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 4.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The secondary market for decades old, low-tech John Deere tractors has been booming for years as farmers have sought reliable tractors that they can actually fix without having to deal with John Deere's repair monopoly. A Canadian company has seen that demand and came up with a radical thought: What if they made a new, repairable, "no-tech" tractor to solve what has become a gigantic pain point for farmers? Alberta's Ursa Ag says that it has been inundated with demand after announcing its tractor, which costs roughly half as much as a Deere and has the benefit of not being a repair nightmare. [...] Ursa Ag markets its tractors as "no frills" and "built to last." Ursa Ag's Doug Wilson told me that the company designed the tractor because of a need in the marketplace for a new machine that isn't loaded with tech and is easy to maintain. The company follows in the footsteps of consumer electronics companies like Fairphone, which makes a repairable smartphone and Framework, which makes modular, repairable laptops. The demand Ursa Ag has seen is part of the backlash to manufacturer repair monopolies and the injection of technology and internet-connected sensors and terms of use into even the most basic of gadgets. "I talk to farmers every day and I hear from farmers every day about how they went out and bought machinery from 1987 so that it wouldn't have a computer on it," Wilson said. "All of this came from a simple discussion with a customer who wanted to be able to turn [the tractor] on at the start of the day, to use it, and shut it off at the end of the day. It needed to work, so that's what we built." Ursa Ag's tractor has been hyped in agriculture circles after Wilson showed the tractor off at a Canadian farm show and it was featured by Farms.com. Wilson said more than a thousand farmers have contacted him after that show, from roughly 30 countries. "I got a handwritten letter from a farmer in France who doesn't own a computer and wanted us to mail him information about the tractors," he said. He said the company has thus far made a couple fewer than 100 tractors but is working on tripling its production capacity and has seen a lot of demand over the last few months. "Given the number of my customers that carry flip phones, I would say there is consumer pressure to back away from some of the technology that is unnecessary to perform everyday tasks," Wilson said. "So that is definitely transferable to dishwashers and washing machines, refrigerators. Refrigerators that have screens on them that'll tell you what's inside. It's a little crazy." "That high-tech stuff, the million-dollar John Deere tractor has a place. It has technology that is well worth the money," Wilson said. "But that technology is needed for 5 percent of what a farm does. There are so many applications for tractors on farms that don't require technology. The technology that goes into even a calculator is not required for most farming applications."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This blog is now closed. See our full report on the latest Middle East news

The Kuwaiti defence ministry said it intercepted 13 ballistic missiles and 17 drones launched by Iran today.

A drone and missile attack on Kuwait’s international airport killed one person, which Kuwaiti authorities identified as an Indian national. It is the first reported death in a Gulf state since the US and Iran agreed to a ceasefire in April.

The school has fought lawsuits in federal court since 2018 brought by former student athletes against the university over its failure to stop abuse by Dr. Richard Strauss.

https://pev.dev#p-6390-video-overlay-utility-by-lachlan-hurst-1Video Overlay Utility by Lachlan Hurst

Load Floaty or Float Control logs and generate a video overlay file:
ESC Log Video

https://pev.dev#p-6390-insta360-gpx-all-on-your-phone-2Insta360 + GPX, all on your phone

You can export GPX files from Float Control, Insta360 knows to match up the data with the right videos based on the timestamp data, for an example see Cameron’s Reel:

A possible case of the flesh-eating New World screwworm is being investigated in Texas, the USDA reported Wednesday.

This live blog is now closed.

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Iowa voters cast their ballots in yesterday’s heated primaries, setting up for months of fervent campaigning ahead of the November midterms in contests that could determine the balance of power in Congress.

A red state that the GOP has dominated for the past decade, Democrats believe they can be competitive in three of its four House races, its Senate election, and the contest to replace Kim Reynolds, the retiring Republican governor.

SwitchBot's new E Ink display offers a complete weather hub, smart calendar support and even travel recommendations.

Attack brings death toll to at least 207 since administration began targeting people it calls ‘narcoterrorists’

The US military attacked a boat accused of smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean on Wednesday, killing two men, as the Trump administration wages a months-long campaign against alleged traffickers in Latin America.

The latest attack brings the number of people who have been killed in boat strikes by the US military to at least 207 since the administration began targeting people it calls “narcoterrorists” in early September.

Vote sends resolution to the US Senate, where the chamber must promptly take up the measure under law – key US politics stories from Wednesday, 3 June at a glance

The US House of Representatives delivered a stunning rebuke to Donald Trump over his war on Iran on Wednesday, as representatives backed a move to force him to seek approval from Congress or withdraw US forces.

The House voted 215 to 208 in favor of the war powers resolution, as four Republicans voted with Democrats. The dissident Republicans were Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Warren Davidson of Ohio and Tom Barrett of Michigan.

Incumbent leads in primary, but with less than 50% of votes must face either Spencer Pratt or Nithya Raman

Los Angeles’s high-profile mayoral contest remained unsettled on Wednesday evening as the city waited to learn who will join incumbent Karen Bass in November’s general election.

Bass came out ahead in Tuesday’s heated primary but, after securing less than 50% of the vote, she will have to defend her seat against either Spencer Pratt, a former reality TV star, or progressive city council member Nithya Raman. As of Wednesday evening, with more than 60% of votes counted, Pratt had secured just under 30% of the vote, while Raman had won nearly 23%.

Silicon Valley is fighting against AI regulation and taxation and will benefit from having political leverage

Silicon Valley had a big night in California’s primary election, proving that the tens of millions of dollars funding candidates across the state was money well spent. While the tech industry’s preferred candidate for governor came in a scant sixth place, donations to smaller elections proved to be a successful strategy.

Tech billionaires have in past months thrown their full weight into politics as the industry fights regulation and taxation, while promoting the unfettered growth of artificial intelligence. Getting the right candidates in office, especially in its home turf of California, is existential. With favorable candidates, tech companies can gain both political and regulatory leverage to maintain their dominance in business.

Apple's first folding phone may be just a few months away. Rumors point to a September introduction, a $2,000-plus price and a possible new name: the iPhone Ultra.

Inventor Steven Cheng is developing prototypes for a mobile bug-zapping defense system.

Beginning in July, you won't be able to edit or create files in Office 2019 for Mac. The company blames this on an expiring digital certificate.

Measure in Amazon and Microsoft’s backyard expected to succeed next week as backlash grows amid AI boom

Seattle’s city government is on the verge of passing a year-long ban on the construction of new datacenters, the largest city yet in the US to consider such a moratorium as nationwide backlash grows.

Four companies sought to build five large datacenters in areas serviced by Seattle’s public utility; if approved, they would have consumed approximately a third of the city’s current daily demand for electricity.

The Middle East is Japan’s main source of crude oil, from which naphtha is extracted and used to make items including printing ink and plastics

Takeaways, supermarkets, and bakeries in Japan are running out of plastic bags, trays and food service gloves amid widening shortages of the key plastic ingredient, naphtha, due to the Middle East crisis.

The food sector accounts for nearly one-third of Japan’s annual plastic use of more than 8m tonnes, and price rises and shortages are hitting hard across the industry and beyond. Some outlets have begun offering perks to customers who bring their own bags, plates or containers.

Stunning rebuke to president as lawmakers vote 215-208 for measure forcing him to seek congressional approval

The US House of Representatives delivered a stunning rebuke to Donald Trump over his war on Iran on Wednesday, as representatives backed a move to force him to seek approval from Congress or withdraw US forces.

The House voted 215 to 208 in favor of the war powers resolution, as four Republicans voted with Democrats. The dissident Republicans were Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Warren Davidson of Ohio and Tom Barrett of Michigan.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for June 4, No. 1,811.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle No. 619 for Thursday, June 4.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for June 4, No. 823.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for June 4, No. 1,089.

First, he invented the web. Now Tim Berners-Lee is reinventing the AI agent to work for us.

El Dorado blaze that burned 22,744 acres and claimed the life of a firefighter was ignited by an illegal device

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Nearly six years after a couple’s gender-reveal stunt sparked a deadly wildfire in southern California, the companies that sold the pyrotechnic device have agreed to a multimillion-dollar settlement.

The Hubbard, Ohio-based Wholesale Fireworks Corp and its subsidiary American Fireworks Wholesale LLC have agreed to pay more than $4m, the US attorney’s office in the central district of California announced on Tuesday. A third company, the Miami-based Pink or Blue Gender Team Inc, agreed to pay $50,000.

The suspect was pronounced dead at the scene early Wednesday morning, the Bakersfield Police Department said.

In May, the Senate advanced a similar measure to force the president to end the prolonged conflict with Iran.

• NBA finals predictions: our writers give their verdicts

• Why Wembanyama is unlike anyone basketball has seen

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The waiting is the hardest part

The last time the Spurs won the NBA championship, Kawhi Leonard was the Finals MVP. The team had veteran leadership in Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili. The No. 1 song was Happy, by Pharrell Williams. Others in the top 10 included John Legend, Katy Perry and Ariana Grande.

By combining streamlined quantum ‘snapshots’ with classical data analysis, a new hybrid framework helps today’s early-stage quantum computers probe complex molecular energy states with far fewer computational resources.

June 3, 2026 — Quantum computers offer a powerful tool for discovering new materials and chemical processes. But hardware limitations have largely confined computational studies of molecules to their most basic, resting states. Berkeley Lab researchers have now developed a highly efficient hybrid framework called multiobservable dynamic mode decomposition (MODMD) to tackle this central challenge.

This schematic illustrates a hybrid workflow that efficiently calculates the fundamental energy levels of complex systems by dividing the computational labor between quantum and classical computers. It pairs noise-resilient quantum measurements of a system’s time evolution with an advanced classical data-processing algorithm—dynamic mode decomposition—to extract precise energy estimates using near-term quantum hardware. Credit: Yizhi Shen, Berkeley Lab.

By effectively calculating both the resting “ground” state and the “excited” energy states of quantum systems, this approach opens a practical route to spectral and dynamic information at the heart of molecular behavior. It achieves this quick, error-aware analysis using a fraction of the usual computing power. This marks a key step toward making today’s quantum computers useful for real-world chemistry and physics.

To understand how new materials behave or how complex chemical reactions occur, scientists need to calculate the various energy levels of a quantum system. While quantum computers are generally effective at simulating the lowest, most stable energy level, calculating the higher, “excited” energy levels remains extremely challenging. Traditional quantum methods require running long, continuous operations that easily overwhelm the limited capabilities of current, noise-prone quantum hardware. Finding a way to capture this vital spectral information without rapidly increasing computing time is a major roadblock for advancements in materials science and quantum chemistry.

The MODMD framework overcomes these hardware limitations by creatively combining a data-analysis technique used in fluid dynamics with a highly efficient quantum measurement strategy. Instead of running many quantum simulations to map out the energy states one by one, researchers use a quantum computer to take very quick, randomized “snapshots” of a system as it evolves over time. These snapshots probe shorter quantum evolutions and require much less measurement overhead, therefore significantly reducing the burden on quantum hardware while preserving rich information. The data is then handed off to a classical computer, which stitches the signals together to accurately predict multiple energy levels and related properties of the system. By shifting the complex data analysis to classical computers, this method bypasses the resource-draining optimization bottlenecks that bog down other quantum algorithms, allowing researchers to extract a wealth of information using a fraction of the usual resources.

Co-authors: Yizhi Shen (Berkeley Lab), Alex Buzali (Harvard), Hong-Ye Hu (Harvard), Katherine Klymko (Berkeley Lab), Daan Camps (Berkeley Lab), Susanne F. Yelin (Harvard), and Roel Van Beeumen (Berkeley Lab).

Publication:Efficient Measurement-Driven Eigenenergy Estimation with Classical Shadows

Funding: Department of Energy Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) Exploratory Research for Extreme-Scale Science

User Facilities: This research used computing resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).

About Computing Sciences at Berkeley Lab

High performance computing plays a critical role in scientific discovery. Researchers increasingly rely on advances in computer science, mathematics, computational science, data science, and large-scale computing and networking to increase our understanding of ourselves, our planet, and our universe. Berkeley Lab’s Computing Sciences Area researches, develops, and deploys new foundations, tools, and technologies to meet these needs and to advance research across a broad range of scientific disciplines.

Source: Linda Vu, Berkeley Lab

The post Berkeley Lab’s MODMD Approach Advances Quantum Simulations Beyond Ground States appeared first on HPCwire.

The images won't show real products you can buy, but they will illustrate general terms such as "cowl neck" or "rattan."

Ring's face-detecting AI is problematic, but it's far from the only security brand to use it.

Scheme aims to help 18-year-olds in England who lack support after leaving system to find trusted people with whom they have lost touch

Growing up and leaving the care system is daunting enough, but for 22-year-old Hannah, from Hertfordshire, the biggest anxiety was the sudden reality of no longer having a crowd in her corner.

Turning 18 as a care leaver in England has been described as a “cliff edge” at which young people lose access to their social worker and support staff who provide day-to-day advocacy and help in a crisis – a reassuring and constant adult presence.

Research suggests NHS trusts with higher empathy ratings also benefit financially and have improved staff wellbeing

Patients and staff fare better at hospitals that rank highly on empathy, research suggests, with institutions also benefiting financially by spending less on agency staff, locums and consultants.

The finding comes from the first study to rate NHS trusts in England according to an empathy score that is drawn from information on the organisation’s culture, leadership behaviour and practitioner empathy, among other factors.

Lord Mann’s review prompts new training for health bosses and restrictions on political symbols on uniforms

The NHS is taking action to tackle antisemitism after a government-ordered report found that Jewish patients and staff face “routine ostracism” in the service.

Anti-Jewish hatred in the NHS means some patients hide their identity and staff “suffer in silence”, a review by Lord Mann, the government’s adviser on antisemitism, has found.

Elahere is first new drug for chemotherapy-resistant ovarian cancer to be approved by NHS for 20 years

Hundreds of women with hard-to-treat ovarian cancer can now be offered a new life-prolonging treatment, after NHS England approved its introduction. It is the first new drug for resistant ovarian cancer to be approved for more than 20 years.

Ovarian is the 18th most common type of cancer globally, affecting more than 300,000 women a year. More than three-quarters of patients are diagnosed at an advanced stage, making it harder to treat.

Darren Jones’s messages include requests for advice on the reshuffle and remarks about former business secretary Jonathan Reynolds

The prime minster’s close ally Darren Jones sent his commiserations to Peter Mandelson after he was sacked as US ambassador in messages that were not disclosed as part of the humble address release.

Jones’s texts also included requests for advice on the reshuffle and disobliging comments about the then business secretary Jonathan Reynolds and the influence of trade unions.

BrianFagioli writes: Fedora Linux 43 users upgrading to the latest Dovecot mail server discovered something rather unsettling: some older Microsoft Outlook configurations may have been silently ignoring SSL/TLS settings for POP3 email connections for years. According to a Fedora community blog post, affected Outlook clients reportedly continued using insecure port 110 connections even when encryption was enabled in the application settings. The issue surfaced after Dovecot 2.4 disabled plaintext authentication on non secure connections by default, causing Outlook users to suddenly lose mailbox access after the Fedora 43 upgrade. The report suggests the behavior may date back as far as Outlook 2007, although modern Outlook builds were not fully tested. Fedora admins stress that the problem could be limited to legacy account configurations rather than current versions of Outlook itself. Still, the discovery has sparked discussion among Linux admins and security folks because many users likely assumed their email traffic was encrypted simply because Outlook claimed SSL/TLS was enabled. The incident also highlights how stricter defaults in modern open source infrastructure can expose ancient assumptions and questionable behaviors that quietly survived for decades.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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To any reasonable person, a ceasefire is exactly what it sounds like: It is the total cessation of military attacks to end a war. But to the mainstream American media outlets covering the U.S.–Israel war with Iran, what constitutes a “ceasefire” is a rhetorical exercise.

Today, Iran launched missiles at the international airport in Kuwait. As the New York Times reported: “The barrage was one of the biggest attacks on a Gulf nation since the U.S.-Iran cease-fire took effect in April.” ABC News’s live update coverage ran with the breaking news headline “Iran targets US forces, Kuwait airport amid ceasefire.” Over at CNN, the headline was “Kuwait’s airport attacked as fresh Iran-US strikes strain ceasefire.”

Related

Putting Fuel on a Ceasefire: Israel Tries to Kill U.S.–Iran Talks

Of course, Iran’s latest campaign didn’t come out of nowhere: It comes two days after the U.S. announced that it had bombed radar and drone sites in the country, and one day after Israel bombarded south Lebanon with airstrikes and artillery yet again, reportedly killing at least four people across two towns.

All that bombing, and all of its attendant death and suffering, sure doesn’t feel like a “ceasefire” in any real sense. Still, the Times, along with other national news outlets, continues to spin the fantasy that the ceasefire is intact — only now it’s increasingly “fragile” or “tested.” The paper of record has gone so far as to say that it “hangs in balance.” 

In a piece of news analysis in the Times last week — on the heels of the U.S. bombing Iran for the second time in three days — the paper made the case that “a truce isn’t necessarily doomed if the missiles are still flying.” It also argued that while a ceasefire might sound like an end to the bombing, the geopolitical definition hinges on whether both sides agree that a “ceasefire” remains in effect.

If government officials call it a ceasefire, who is the New York Times to question it?

For many months, another ceasefire in name only has been touted in Gaza. What that’s looked like in practice is Israel relentlessly bombing the Palestinians on a near-daily basis. Al Jazeera reported that since the “ceasefire” in Gaza was announced in October 2025, Israel has killed at least 922 people and injured 2,786.

To the people of Gaza and of south Lebanon, there is no ceasefire. Continuing to carry water for the idea that we’re no longer at war, or that there’s been any meaningful progress made to end this war, is to provide cover for the U.S. and Israel, the countries that launched this war of aggression and continue to execute it. It also provides President Donald Trump with the political cover he so desperately desires as he realizes that he’s powerless to end the deeply unpopular war he started with Israel, and that no number of testy phone calls will move the needle if our ally won’t agree to a true ceasefire.

Related

Amy Goodman on the Media’s “Access of Evil”

The mainstream media is perfectly comfortable spinning the fiction that we’re currently in a gray zone somewhere between war and peace because the stakes are an abstraction. To them, blindly supporting American imperialism and Israeli aggression are baked-in ideological assumptions, not matters of life or death. It’s no coincidence that the New York Times has done more than any other media organization to massage the language around Israel, Gaza, and Iran to an extreme degree.

But words like “ceasefire” matter a great deal, which is why it’s critically important for the media to call out acts of war for exactly what they are. In this way, the brutal fact of war is black and white: Your country is either killing people with the bombs it’s dropping, or it’s not. Failing to acknowledge that reality is worse than dishonest — it is to irrevocably deprive those paying the highest price of their humanity.

The post Stop Calling It a Ceasefire appeared first on The Intercept.

At its Build conference, Microsoft announced coreutils for Windows.

Coreutils for Windows is a Microsoft-maintained set of UNIX-style command-line utilities that run natively on Windows — the same commands and pipelines you use on Linux, macOS, and WSL. It ships as a single multi-call binary that exposes each utility under its standard name (cat.exe, grep.exe, find.exe, and so on), giving you the everyday tools developers already use on other platforms to script, automate, and process text. For the full list, see Commands.

The goal is to remove friction when moving between Linux, macOS, WSL, containers, and Windows. The same commands, flags, and pipelines work the same way, so existing scripts and habits carry over without translation. Each command supports the standard --help flag for full syntax and options.

↫ Windows Developer Tools website

It’s a port of the Rust-based rewrite of the GNU coreutils, findutils, and grep. There are a few caveats though, since these ports have to deal with a number of Windows-isms. The first thing that comes to mind for most of us are path separators; these ports will handle both the correct and incorrect Windows/DOS one, but since some tools may output only the incorrect one this may affect piping. You should also take into account things like Windows’ ACLs vs. POSIX permission bits, the lack of /dev/null, and a few other oddities.

Furthermore, there are a bunch of commands that rely on POSIX-only concepts, so those aren’t included, and a few other commands that aren’t useful on Windows are excluded as well. Since a number of commands conflict with built-in commands from cmd.exe and PowerShell, which commands run will depend on the shell, the PATH order, and PowerShell’s alias table.

Everything’s in preview, and installable through WinGet.

The Trump administration says it’s working to reduce the amount of fraud in federal government programs. However, fiscal experts have said that those reductions alone won’t “save” the Social Security program or result in “a balanced budget,” as President Donald Trump has falsely suggested. 

That’s because fraudulent overpayments in Social Security are a small fraction of that program’s total costs. Likewise, the most recent federal budget deficit was about 240% more than the highest federal estimate of annual spending due to fraud. 

Yet during a May 27 meeting with members of his Cabinet, the president talked about his administration’s efforts to root out fraud and what it could mean for the future of Social Security and the government’s finances.

“Under the leadership of Vice President JD Vance — very proud of this — the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud is waging war on waste, fraud, theft and abuse like nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump said at the White House. “And they’re finding billions and billions and billions of dollars.”

“And if he does really great,” Trump said of Vance, “we’ll have a balanced budget without having to do anything. This is the kind of money they stole.” Later in his remarks, the president said, “And I think we have a chance to save Social Security without doing anything to it, by just the numbers of fraudulent people on Social Security — people that are 115 years old, 125 years old, getting payments.”

But even if all fraud in government spending was eliminated, it wouldn’t save nearly enough money to accomplish those two budget goals, experts say.

When we asked about the president’s claims, the White House didn’t provide supporting evidence. Instead, Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, said: “Every day, President Trump’s Fraud Task Force is uncovering levels of fraud across various federal programs that were previously inconceivable to government forecasters and working Americans alike. President Trump pledged to slash the pervasive waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending, and from cracking down on Medicaid fraudsters to right-sizing federal employment levels, the Administration is focused on delivering record results for American taxpayers.”

Social Security

Social Security is in jeopardy of running out of money to pay full benefits in less than 10 years. 

In a 2025 report, the program’s trustees said that, together, the Social Security trust funds – one to pay retirees or their survivors, and the other for disabled individuals – are projected to become insolvent in 2034. At that point, money from the payroll taxes that fund Social Security would only be enough to cover 81% of scheduled benefits. 

Without adjustments, the trust fund for retirees, specifically, will be depleted a year earlier, with the ability to pay just 77% of benefits, the report said. That trust fund has dwindled because its reserves have been tapped to help pay beneficiaries, since Social Security’s expenditures began to exceed its payroll tax revenue more than a decade ago.

Social Security paid out almost $1.5 trillion in 2024, both for the retirement and disability programs, which was more than the programs’ income of about $1.4 trillion.

The combined trust funds face an estimated shortfall of about $25 trillion over 75 years, through 2099, according to last year’s annual trustees report. (However, the disability insurance trust fund on its own won’t become depleted during the 75-year window.)

That imbalance can’t be fixed simply by going after fraud.

“The scale of fraud and overpayments is tiny relative to the program’s finances,” Gopi Shah Goda, the director of the Retirement Security Project and a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, told us in an email.

She noted that in a February 2025 report, the Social Security Office of the Inspector General reported that, between fiscal years 2020 and 2023, overpayments of retirement and disability benefits totaled roughly $13.6 billion, or about $3.4 billion per year on average. Most of the overpayments were attributed to beneficiaries not reporting information that affected their benefits.

The IG report said that 3% of the overpayments went to “beneficiaries who fraudulently obtained benefits or were noncitizens … who did not report to SSA they had been living outside the United States for longer than 6 months.” The report also said that 4% of the overpayments were attributed “to payments issued after a beneficiary’s death or from family members or representative payees who did not timely report the beneficiary’s death.”

But there shouldn’t be any such payments to anyone 115 or 125 years old, as Trump claimed. Since September 2015, the Social Security database has been set to automatically terminate benefits to individuals listed as 115 or older.

Last year, Trump claimed that millions of people over the age of 100 could be wrongly receiving Social Security. But as we reported in February 2025, the Social Security Administration distributed a total of $158 million in benefits to about 89,000 individuals aged 99 or older in December 2024. Internal audit reports indicated that only a small portion of the payments were likely disbursed to dead Americans wrongly recorded as alive in the Social Security database.

“Even if one were to wave a magic wand and eliminate SSA’s entire administrative cost budget while preventing all overpayments, the total ‘savings’ would amount to only about $10.2 billion per year — equal to just 2.5 days’ worth of benefits, or about 2.7% of the annual amount needed to close the 75-year actuarial deficit,” Goda said.

She said that the projected 75-year funding gap is the kind “that can only be closed through major policy changes — raising taxes, adjusting benefits, or some combination of both.”

In an August 2025 explainer answering common questions about Social Security, Emerson Sprick, director of retirement and labor policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said, “Minimizing fraud is a vital aspect of good governance, but eliminating fraud would not fix Social Security’s underlying fiscal challenges.”

Federal Budget

The same thing could be said of fraud and the federal budget in general.

“Looking beyond Social Security to government programs, there is actually a lot more fraud,” said Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. He told us in an email that, compared with Social Security, “it’s much easier” to defraud programs such as Medicare and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. 

“Nonetheless, there is nowhere close to enough fraud to balance the budget,” he said.

As we wrote in February — when Trump made a similar claim about balancing the budget by finding fraud — the Government Accountability Office estimated in a 2024 report that the federal government “could lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud.” Meanwhile, the federal budget deficit was almost $1.8 trillion in fiscal year 2025, and the Congressional Budget Office has projected that the deficit will approach $1.9 trillion in fiscal years 2026 and 2027 — before rising to more than $2 trillion in 2028 and subsequent fiscal years.

So, the annual imbalance between federal outlays and receipts is currently more than three times higher than the highest federal estimate of government money lost each year to fraud.

The CRFB is “very supportive” of efforts to address waste, fraud, errors and abuse, “but again, they are not gonna balance the budget,” Goldwein said.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post Stopping Fraud Won’t ‘Save’ Social Security, Create ‘Balanced Budget,’ as Trump Suggests appeared first on FactCheck.org.

With colorful signage depicting corporate greed and pollution, AI data center protesters staked out Microsoft's annual Build conference.

June 3, 2026 — The agentic AI moment has arrived, but delivering on its promise requires more than good models. It also takes fast hardware, secure runtimes, a responsive data layer and models tuned for long-running reasoning. NVIDIA and Microsoft are bringing that full stack to developers across Windows devices, Azure cloud and local deployments.

At Microsoft Build, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang joined Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote via livestream from Taipei to discuss the expanded partnership: NVIDIA RTX Spark and DGX Station for Windows, NVIDIA GPU-accelerated Microsoft Fabric, NVIDIA open models on Microsoft Foundry, the NVIDIA OpenShell secure runtime in GitHub Copilot and the next generation of NVIDIA-powered AI factories.

Reinventing Windows for Agents: From RTX Spark to DGX Station for Windows

NVIDIA and Microsoft are reimagining Windows PCs for the age of AI agents. With RTX Spark laptops and small desktops, and DGX Station for Windows deskside AI supercomputers, developers can build, tune and run agents natively on Windows.

RTX Spark is a new beginning, powering the world’s first Windows PCs purpose-built for personal agents, with 1 petaflop of AI performance, up to 128GB of unified memory, all-day battery life, and full AI and graphics performance unplugged. Bringing over 30 years of NVIDIA innovation, including CUDA, RTX, DLSS and TensorRT, systems arrive this fall from Microsoft Surface, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and MSI.

DGX Station for Windows is the most powerful deskside AI supercomputer for building and running agents on Windows enterprise applications and workflows. Powered by the NVIDIA GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra Desktop Superchip with up to 748GB of coherent memory and 20 petaflops of FP4 performance, it runs frontier models of up to 1 trillion parameters for always-on enterprise agents. Systems are expected from ASUS, Dell, GIGABYTE, HP, MSI and Supermicro in Q4. Both products run NVIDIA OpenShell, a secure-by-design runtime for autonomous agents.

Powering Agentic Workflows at Enterprise Scale With NVIDIA Open Models on Microsoft Foundry

Agentic AI runs on a system of models. With NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI models — plus Hermes special agents — now on the hosted agents in Foundry Agent Service, enterprises can bring agentic systems to life on Azure with built-in identity and governance. Anthropic’s Claude models now run natively on NVIDIA GB300 Blackwell Ultra systems on Azure, with customer availability in the weeks ahead.

NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra, a new open frontier reasoning model for long-running agents across coding, research and enterprise workflows, is available this month on Foundry managed compute, alongside Nemotron 3.5 ASR for speech recognition and Nemotron 3.5 Content Safety. Developers can compose Nemotron alongside frontier and local models, optimizing cost and quality for each workflow.

NVIDIA’s open model portfolio on Foundry now spans agentic, physical and scientific AI. NVIDIA Cosmos 3, the first fully open omnimodel for physical AI, brings vision reasoning, world simulation and action generation. NVIDIA Earth-2 AI weather models are available through Microsoft Planetary Computer Pro and Foundry for enterprise forecasting and risk analysis.

NVIDIA Agent Toolkit and NVIDIA NemoClaw blueprints give developers an open source platform to build production agents on Foundry. NVIDIA CUDA-X libraries including cuDF, cuOpt, AI-Q and NeMo are now accessible to agents as domain-specific skills.

Accelerating Enterprise Data Warehouses for the AI Era

Data fuels agentic AI, and fast access to it is critical.

NVIDIA accelerated computing is now built into Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse, with Microsoft’s internal benchmarking delivering SQL execution up to 6x faster than the CPU-powered baseline and up to 7x faster than three other leading cloud data warehouse providers for high-concurrency workloads.

The enterprise data layer can now keep pace with AI agents that continuously query and reason over data, the result of years of deep engineering collaboration between NVIDIA and Microsoft, from research to production.

Advancing Physical AI and Autonomous Systems

Physical AI is the next frontier for agents.

Microsoft is integrating NVIDIA’s open source physical AI skills and tools with Azure and its Physical AI Toolchain. Developers get a unified platform, powered by Cosmos 3’s mixture-of-transformers architecture, to simulate, train and deploy autonomous systems, including robots, autonomous vehicles and industrial systems that can perceive, reason, plan and act in the physical world. Cosmos 3 ranks first among open models on key benchmarks for vision reasoning, world generation and action generation.

Enhancing Azure Local and Foundry Local With NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition and Nemotron Models

Agentic AI is moving beyond the cloud.

Microsoft is bringing Foundry Local on Azure Local to the NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition platform. Paired with the NVIDIA Nemotron open model family, enterprises can run high-performance AI workloads where their data resides, whether in on-premises, hybrid or sovereign environments, without sacrificing performance or governance.

Foundry Local on Azure Local now supports multinode deployments and the vLLM runtime, scaling inference for manufacturing, energy, sovereign data centers and other latency-sensitive scenarios.

Bringing Secure Agent Development to GitHub Copilot With NVIDIA OpenShell

As agents move from coding assistance to autonomous execution, they need real capability without real credentials.

NVIDIA OpenShell, now integrated into GitHub Copilot, solves this: Each agent runs isolated in its own sandboxed container, and every outbound call is evaluated against policy before it can reach files, networks or credentials. Policies are written as code, versioned in the repository and updatable on the fly. OpenShell is open source under Apache 2.0, model-agnostic and spans on-premises, hybrid and cloud environments.

Fairwater Wisconsin Goes Live, Validated for NVIDIA Vera Rubin

Microsoft’s Fairwater Wisconsin AI factory is now live, ahead of schedule, running hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA Grace Blackwell systems as a single AI factory, and connected with a similar AI factory in Georgia to deliver a scalable and distributed AI system for the most demanding frontier models. Through joint engineering on power, cooling, NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet and the new Multipath Reliable Connection (MRC) transport protocol, Microsoft’s Fairwater AI data center designs are optimizing token economics.

In addition, Microsoft has already validated the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform, now in full production, for deployment across Azure data centers.

Vera Rubin slots in alongside Blackwell with no retrofits, delivering up to 10x inference throughput per megawatt and reducing cost per agentic token by an order of magnitude. Built-in NVIDIA Confidential Computing protects models and data as agents reason at scale. The NVIDIA Dynamo inference framework extends those gains into software, accelerating model cold starts on AKS and bringing Kubernetes-native distributed inference orchestration via NVIDIA Grove.

Source: Dave Salvator, NVIDIA

The post NVIDIA and Microsoft Expand Partnership to Build the Full Stack for Agentic AI appeared first on HPCwire.

Ancient Slashdot reader whitroth shares a report from Politico, with the caption: "shutting down Microsoft Office for the International Criminal Court (ICC) was clearly a wake-up call." From the report: The EU is moving to counter American dominance in technology by reaching for one of the oldest tools in its arsenal: industrial strategy. As the European Commission unveiled a plan Wednesday to reduce Europe's reliance on the foreign technology providers that underpin the modern economy, it was careful to stress that it was not picking a fight with U.S. digital giants. Instead, the tech sovereignty package -- motivated in no small part by U.S. President Donald Trump's weaponization of Europe's dependence on American firms -- takes a longer-term view: boost the continent's players so they can eventually challenge their U.S. rivals. [...] If adopted, the package will direct public money toward products that contribute to Europe's economy and independence from foreign firms; cut red tape for data centers; beef up research and innovation through "leadership initiatives"; incentivize countries to share digital capacities in a new "Eurocloud" forum; and require EU governments to come up with national strategies to boost the adoption of cutting-edge tech, including AI. The package will also seek to ramp up the bloc's demand for advanced chips -- a response to criticism by the industry -- with a series of industrial initiatives to revise a 2023 chips law. [...] As part of its proposal to keep a list of trustworthy countries, the Commission would require EU governments to run a so-called "sovereignty risk assessment" for every digital service they rely on, measuring foreign control, potential access to sensitive data and the risk of operational disruption. Within a year, they would have to determine the appropriate level of protection for each public sector and procure digital services accordingly -- unless they can prove doing so would come at a "disproportionate cost," the proposal reads. However, the Commission reserves the right to overrule their assessment in future legislation if it believes they downplayed the risks. The Commission estimated that just one percent of Europe's public services are so sensitive that they would be required under the proposed certification scheme to rely on the strict level that totally excludes foreign technology. "We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable and our services secure," Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement. "This is about protecting our citizens, defending our interests and making our own choices."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• President likens South Lawn setup to Eiffel Tower

• Area will stage Freedom 250 fight card on 14 June

Donald Trump has floated the idea of permanently keeping the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) arena that is being constructed on the White House South Lawn for a series of fights later this month.

In a video posted on his official TikTok account on Tuesday, the president likened the structure to the Eiffel Tower.

NASA officials said the $582 million MAVEN orbiter could not be recovered after a problem on the far side of Mars late last year, and that its extraordinarily successful mission was at an end.

On the Vogon forums, user MarkDastedt posted an interesting bit of source code he discovered on an old company DVD: a very basic, very rudimentary implementation of multicore support for DOS. Another user, dartfrog, took a closer look and had this to say:

Interesting stuff nonetheless. A worker core is running with no interrupt handlers, no page tables, no memory protection, and no OS. That’s about as close to bare metal as you can get, meanwhile the other core is still running DOS. Fascinating.

↫ MarkDastedt at the Vogon forums

It’s effectively a simple demo, but according to other users in the thread, it fits in neatly with sporadic other attempts to bring some form of SMP or multicore-awareness to DOS. For instance, Michael Chourdakis worked on something similar to this demo for a series of articles now only available on the Wayback Machine. It makes for a cool demo, but moving from this to something robust and usable in DOS is not an easy task.

Still, the possibilities are definitely there, even if you don’t implement full, modern SMP or multicore support. You could have specific DOS applications offloading dedicated tasks to different cores, but as others in the same thread note, individual cores are already stupidly powerful for anything DOS can do, making the use case for additional cores rather moot.

Partnership paves the way to pair AI-enabled semiconductor design with GF’s U.S. manufacturing platform to bridge the gap from research to prototype for next-generation computing initiatives

MALTA, N.Y., June 3, 2026 — GlobalFoundries today announced a strategic partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, the department’s initiative to accelerate scientific discovery through artificial intelligence and advanced computing.

Through the agreement, GF will open its U.S. manufacturing platform and design enablement resources to Genesis Mission researchers — giving the nation’s National Laboratories, universities, industry partners and startups a direct path from AI-enabled chip design to working prototype silicon. GF Labs, the company’s frontier research and development organization, will lead collaboration with the Genesis Mission.

Progress in AI and advanced computing depends on more than algorithms and ideas; it depends on the ability to turn them into devices. As a semiconductor manufacturing engine accelerating America’s technology leadership, GF brings the manufacturing capacity and design enablement that connect three communities — the National Labs, universities and industry — around a shared path from concept to silicon.

“American science is generating extraordinary ideas in AI and advanced computing. What’s been missing is the bridge from lab to fab,” said Tom Caulfield, executive chairman of GlobalFoundries. “By bringing our U.S. manufacturing platform, our PDKs and our multi-project wafer program to the Genesis Mission, we can give researchers a real path from concept to working silicon — and help the National Labs, universities and industry pull in the same direction.”

Areas of Collaboration

Working through GF Labs, the partnership contemplates cooperation in several areas of mutual interest, including:

• AI-enabled semiconductor design
• Access to GF technology platforms, including process design kits, device models and design enablement resources for Genesis Mission-supported research teams.
• Prototype fabrication through GF’s multi-project wafer program, giving researchers a manufacturable route from design to silicon.
• Support for the translation of research outputs into functional prototypes and pre-commercial designs.
• Advancement of next-generation technologies, including silicon photonics for data centers and quantum computing for quantum-systems discovery.

About the Genesis Mission

The Genesis Mission is a U.S. Department of Energy initiative, led by the Under Secretary for Science, to accelerate scientific discovery through artificial intelligence and advanced computing. Industry partners contribute technical expertise, capabilities and infrastructure to advance the mission’s objectives in partnership with the national laboratories and the academic research community.

About GF

GlobalFoundries (GF) is a leading manufacturer of essential semiconductors, enabling AI at scale from the cloud to the physical world. Through deep partnerships with customers, GF delivers differentiated, power-efficient and high-performance solutions for automotive, aerospace and defense, data center, smart mobile devices, internet of things and other high-growth markets. With global manufacturing operations across the U.S., Europe and Asia, GF is a trusted and holistic technology partner for customers around the world. GF’s talented, global team remains focused every day on security, longevity and sustainability.

Source: GF

The post GlobalFoundries Joins DOE’s Genesis Mission as Industry Partner appeared first on HPCwire.

June 3, 2026 — Commercial artificial intelligence (AI) development is progressing at a breathtaking pace. Yet many of the most consequential AI challenges for national security remain underexplored because they lack immediate commercial applications and are not the primary focus of private industry. There is a critical need to bridge the gap between commercial AI innovation and the unique requirements of national security.

To this end, DARPA and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) have jointly developed a research and development program called AI Forge to catalyze breakthroughs in AI for national security, working in close collaboration with the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. AI Forge aims to accelerate progress towards AI that is significantly more reliable and predictable in high-stakes settings, understandable to its operators, and secure in contested environments. It also envisions building a durable research ecosystem around priority AI challenges and enabling a more robust exchange of talent and ideas across universities, frontier AI companies, and government than is possible today. AI Forge is strategically aligned with America’s AI Action Plan.

The program convened representatives from frontier AI companies, chief AI officers from more than 15 Department of Defense and Intelligence Community agencies, and other government stakeholders to explore and reach consensus around core AI challenges for national security. These challenges comprise the newly released AI Forge Critical AI Challenges for National Security report, which will serve as a roadmap to focus research under the program.

The report synthesizes insights from experts across industry and government into 15 research challenges in three thrust areas for which university-led teams will develop aligned ideas and research proposals. The thrust areas are:

• AI interpretability: Research challenges focused on making the behavior, decisions, and impacts of AI systems understandable to humans, with an objective to move beyond explanations in routine settings toward operational interpretability.
• AI control: Research challenges focused on pioneering tools that can provide strong, verifiable evidence of bounded, auditable, and reliable model behavior today, while laying the essential groundwork for maintaining meaningful human control over future, more capable AI systems.
• Adversarial robustness: Research challenges focused on building the scientific foundations for AI that is not just capable, but resilient by design so that it maintains its integrity and intended performance even when under deliberate attack from a thinking adversary.

The program hypothesizes that pre-competitive AI research in these thrust areas can accelerate the adoption of AI innovations by industry and federal agencies. To reflect the fast-changing technical AI research landscape, the challenges will be revisited every six months during the program.

A Call for Bold Thinking

AI Forge is calling upon the university research community to share their capabilities to conduct research on the challenges described in the program’s Critical AI Challenges for National Security report. University researchers interested in submitting their capabilities are encouraged to do so through the AI Forge Request for Information. Responses to this RFI will be used by the program stakeholders to establish a repository of U.S. universities interested in accelerating next-generation AI research to solve national security challenges. Responses are due by June 22.

A Forum for Unlocking National-Security Focused AI iInnovation

Moving forward, the program will establish a forum comprised of universities, industry, and U.S. government representatives to fund, guide, and manage fast-paced, university-led research projects. The forum aims to combine academic talent with frontier-scale compute, models, and expertise to address mission-driven challenges informed by national security AI leaders from across the DOD and IC.

“We’re taking a unified approach to create breakthroughs in AI for national security,” said Matthew Marge, DARPA program manager for AI Forge. “The frontier AI companies build and commercialize massive, high-capability models and compute. Universities are engines of deep, foundational research and, importantly, they cultivate our nation’s future talent. At the intersection is high-risk, high-reward research that requires both massive scale and deep, mission-driven work – something that is difficult to pursue in either environment alone. With AI Forge, we’re looking to build an ambitious new ecosystem that bridges this gap.”

“NSF is excited to partner with DARPA, working alongside CAISI, on this groundbreaking effort to catalyze AI innovation for national security” said Erwin Gianchandani, NSF Assistant Director for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships. “By linking the rapid advances of frontier AI companies, the research and talent at universities, and the use cases surfaced by the intelligence community, AI Forge will propel advancements in AI capabilities for the benefit of U.S. national security and, ultimately, all Americans.”

The forum will be administered by a nonprofit and will launch in summer 2026. More details will be available in the coming weeks.

Source: DARPA

The post DARPA and NSF Launch AI Forge to Advance National Security AI Research appeared first on HPCwire.

The string of sewer episodes has baffled New Yorkers and spurred speculation online about what the subterranean explorers are doing underground.

According to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple has reportedly doubled 2026 MacBook Neo production from 5 million to 10 million units after stronger-than-expected demand for its $599 budget laptop. MacRumors reports: On an earnings call in late April, Apple's CEO Tim Cook said that customer response to the MacBook Neo was "off the charts," and the popularity of the laptop has reportedly led the company to significantly boost production. [...] Apple was very optimistic about the MacBook Neo before announcing it, but the company still "undercalled" the level of enthusiasm that the laptop would generate, according to Cook. He said that MacBook Neo demand exceeded Apple's expectations and helped to drive a record number of first-time Mac buyers last quarter. New figures from market research firm IDC support Apple's claim that the MacBook Neo is selling well, and the Windows PC industry has taken notice. For example, Dell recently introduced a redesigned XPS 13 laptop from $699 and said it has features "you won't find on a MacBook Neo," such as a touch screen and a backlit keyboard. "Apple's MacBook Neo is a capable machine, and its arrival confirms that there's real appetite for premium quality at accessible prices," admitted Dell.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Senate Republicans moved forward with a package to fund the Department of Homeland Security's immigration agencies Wednesday.

Fears that push for ballroom spending could jeopardize $70bn funding for immigration enforcement

Senate Republicans on Wednesday formally dropped their attempt to spend $1bn on security improvements for Donald Trump’s White House ballroom, as it became clear the president’s demand for the money could jeopardize long-term funding for immigration enforcement.

The Senate judiciary committee had last month included funding for security improvements related to the new ballroom in a broader measure that would authorize $70bn in spending for agencies involved in Trump’s mass deportation campaign through the duration of his term.

American Airlines said it is temporarily cutting six routes amid rising jet fuel costs, including several flights to Los Angeles.

Order strips job protections from workers earning up to about $200,000 a year and deemed to be ‘influencing’ policy

Donald Trump has signed an executive order making it easier to fire thousands of the best-paid workers in the US government aspart of a broader drive by his administration to overhaul the federal workforce.

The order, released by the White House and the office of personnel management (OPM) on Wednesday, strips job protections from a mostly senior group of federal workers – about 8,000 employees – earning up to almost $200,000 a year, and who are deemed to be “influencing” government policy.

Guardian sources say Ernst Tanner has not rejoined the club after he was found to have violated league policies

Despite being eligible for reinstatement, former Philadelphia Union sporting director Ernst Tanner has not resumed duties with the club, multiple sources with knowledge of the situation said this week, in part because he has yet to complete his league-ordered restorative practices training.

Tanner was suspended through 1 June by Major League Soccer after a league-ordered investigation found he had violated “policies and standards of professional conduct required of League and Club leadership”. That investigation, which concluded in March, was the league’s second inquiry into alleged misconduct by Tanner; he had previously been investigated after an MLS Players Association complaint alleged multiple instances of racist, sexist and homophobic behavior.

Nations in the Five Eyes intelligence partnership warned that fake profiles and job offers are targeting military officers, spies, and others with access to classified or sensitive information.