First set: *Tiafoe 1-2 Shelton (*denotes next server)
Shortly after crunching his first ace of the night, 123mph down the middle, Shelton faces his first pressure point of the night at 30-all. He then makes an unforced error off the backhand for 30-40 and will face his first break point, but he rattles off three quick points from there to escape with the hold.
The CIA released 71 reports from the months and years leading up to 9/11, providing a new look at what the spy agency told two presidents before the deadly strikes.
Chip Roy, Republican US representative from Texas, openly wondered where the government would get ‘well over $1tn’ for supposed payouts
On 11 September, 25 years ago, Osama bin Laden drove with a small number of al-Qaida retainers and aides to a remote location in eastern Afghanistan. His convoy of SUVs was accompanied by a minivan converted into a makeshift communications centre.
The van’s rudimentary equipment did not allow Bin Laden to watch the 19 men he had started sending to the US more than a year before fly planes into the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon near Washington DC, killing about 3,000 people. But he listened as shocked radio announcers broke the news.
Washington Post report also reveals Jon Husted staffer Stephen Woytek created pro-Rhodesia playlist on Spotify
The Republican senator for Ohio, Jon Husted, has fired an aide who was discovered to have used a photo of Nazi SS soldiers as his Facebook profile photo.
Stephen Woytek was appointed as Husted’s political director last month in the senator’s knife-edge re-election contest against former Democrat senator Sherrod Brown. According to the Washington Post, Husted had decided to “part ways” with Woytek, 25, after learning that his Facebook profile showed he followed a military re-enactment group called LAH Living History Unit, which portrays the 1st SS Panzer division.
(The Center Square) - False information led Congress and others to appropriate tens of millions of dollars in cities across the nation for the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion model, data shows.
Meltdown that grounded thousands of flights caused by ‘spurious’ flight data being entered into system, report says
The air traffic control outage that caused thousands of flights to be grounded across the UK earlier in the week was caused by a military aircraft entering “spurious” flight data into the system, according to a report.
Hundreds of thousands of passengers were affected after more than 2,000 flights were cancelled on Tuesday when the system used by the National Air Traffic Services (Nats) shut down for four hours.
Alexander Zverev reached his first grand slam final in a row with a 6-3 7-6 (7) 7-6 (6) victory against Karen Khachanov in New York
Karen Khachanov emerges from the tunnel first, followed by Alexander Zverev. Apparently the German was a minute or two late because he needed some extra time in the toilet – we’ve all been there.
On Arthur Ashe Stadium, a retired servicewoman sings the American national anthembefore the players come out. Flags are flying at half mast around the grounds today on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Arthur Ashe was also lit up blue from dusk until dawn this morning.
About 107 minutes into men’s semi-final day on Arthur Ashe Stadium, there was finally a touch of tension radiating from the court. After falling down a set and break, his semi-final meeting with his old rival Alexander Zverev swiftly turning into a beating, Karen Khachanov fought hard to force a second-set tie-break. Deep in that tension-filled tie-break, down 5-6 on his serve, Khachanov saved Zverev’s first set point with a bold forehand winner, and then at 6-7 he punctuated a screaming backhand passing shot winner with an imperious roar of his own.
There was a time when Zverev might have faltered under such pressure, but he has won too many big matches this year to allow such a small surge from a lower-ranked opponent to scare him. Zverev composed himself and he quickly regained control, navigating a second tense tie-break in similar fashion as he moved to within one match of winning a second career grand slam title in his last three major appearances by defeating Khachanov 6-3, 7-6 (7), 7-6 (6).
“This is the first day that Iran really started winning the war,” a Yemeni official said of Houthi territorial gains that give Tehran leverage over a second major waterway.
David Rush accused of stealing hundreds of gold bars worth over $40m and hiding them in his basement
Federal prosecutors have reached a tentative plea agreement with a former CIA officer accused of stealing hundreds of gold bars worth more than $40m from the US spy agency and hiding them in his basement, court records show.
David Rush and federal justice department prosecutors have a “plea agreement in principle”, the parties said in a Friday court filing. The parties also asked a judge to extend the 17 September deadline for three weeks through 8 October to allow them time to “resolve the matter prior to an indictment”.
The presidential briefing documents were declassified on the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks
Several dozen presidential briefing documents declassified on Friday, the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, detail intelligence that government officials had gathered about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida leading up to the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people and upended American national security.
The documents illustrate security analysts’ tracking of Bin Laden’s movements and support system, as well as concerns about possible threats to US targets. They also detail officials’ understanding of his network in the United States and other countries, including how his operations were financed.
The disease is a form of pneumonia caused by Legionella bacteria, which can grow in warm water and spread through mist produced by cooling towers
One person has died from legionnaires’ disease, and four more have been sickened in New York City amid a new cluster of cases only weeks after local health officials had declared a separate deadly Manhattan outbreak of the illness over.
On Thursday, New York City officials announced that their municipal health department launched an investigation into a community cluster in parts of Melrose and Morrisania in the South Bronx, including ZIP codes 10451 and 10456.
The candidates in Michigan's closely watched U.S. Senate race, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers, have exchanged criticism over their records on the 9/11 attacks.
Prosecutors say James Brass orchestrated scheme to pay people on LA’s Skid Row to duplicate registered voters’ signatures
A California ballot petition worker has been arrested and charged with identity fraud for allegedly paying people on Los Angeles’ Skid Row to forge the signatures of registered voters.
Prosecutors say James Brass, 47, orchestrated the scheme with the help of two signature collectors, 49-year-old Courtney Price and 33-year-old Jateisha Herron.
On the Windows side of the age verification question, Microsoft is obviously following trends among lawmakers the world over.
To address this, Windows is introducing a new platform capability: the Windows Age API.
This API brings age awareness beyond the operating system by making it available across the entire Windows ecosystem so that apps and services can deliver age-appropriate experiences using the same trusted foundation. By making age awareness available as a platform capability, Windows helps developers build safeguards into experiences from the start rather than placing the burden on children and families to manage protections app by app.
Meanwhile, on the Linux side of things, there’s been some cheering as at least California passed amendments to its age verification law to exempt open source operating systems.
These amendments redefine the term “operating system provider” to exclude any person or entity that distributes an OS or application “under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.” Any software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses satisfies that test, which removes the likes of Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and the BSD family from AB 1856’s scope.
I think this is not at all the good news that many make it out to be. Exempting Linux, BSD, and other open source operating systems from age verification obligations may seem like a good thing at first glance, but in reality, I think services and applications will simply choose to not work at all on platforms that do not implement age verification. The fear of legal ramifications, especially when it involves children, will be enough for existing and future popular services and applications to exclusively work on platforms that implement age verification – whether those fears are founded or not.
In fact, I’m fairly sure a company like Microsoft, which has actually been feeling the squeeze from the Linux side recently – even if it is modestly so – is quite happy to see open source operating systems excluded from these obligations. Google, too, is probably none too unhappy to see any possible open source mobile operating system competitors not implement age verification. The fear of missing out is real, and most people are not as invested in fighting big tech and government surveillance as the average OSNews reader is going to be. If using Linux means not being able to play the latest hit games or use that new successful service, people will choose to stick with Windows or macOS.
Let me be very clear that I do not support these age verification laws in any way, shape, or form, and I definitely do not want the open source world to embrace age verification. What I’m worried about is that the open source world will cheer on these exceptions and consider the battle won, when in reality, they feel more like Pyrrhic victories. Age verification laws must be fought and destroyed at ballot boxes the world over, because otherwise I fear they will become just another tool in big tech’s toolbox, exemptions or not.
Ben Delo was convicted in US for failing to implement adequate anti-money laundering controls but pardoned by Trump
Reform UK has been given a record £36m donation by Ben Delo, a British cryptocurrency billionaire convicted in the US for failing to implement adequate anti-money laundering controls.
The businessman, who has moved back to the UK from Hong Kong, is now the biggest UK political donor by far, dwarfing the £15m contribution to Reform UK from Thailand-based Christopher Harborne.
Sony reportedly pulled PlayStation funding from Hideo Kojima's upcoming espionage game Physint over concerns about its ballooning budget, missed deadlines, profitability, and the fact that it would not remain permanently exclusive to PlayStation. Kojima Productions has since struck a deal with Xbox, which plans to publish the game on both Xbox and PC. It's also secured film and television rights. Bloomberg reports: The new game, Physint, hasn't yet been shown publicly but excited fans when it was announced two years ago with its promise of returning to the "espionage action" genre Kojima pioneered with Metal Gear Solid, the series that propelled him to industry stardom. Kojima surprised fans this week when he announced he would be publishing Physint with PlayStation's biggest rival, Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox.
On Wednesday night, Kojima wrote on social media that over the summer his company had "unexpectedly received notice" that PlayStation was pulling out of funding the game. "Physint is an important project both to me personally and to Kojima Productions," he wrote. "Determined to keep the project alive, we have spent the last three months searching tirelessly for a new partner."
PlayStation also addressed the split on social media, saying it had made the "difficult decision to step away." Microsoft said it was "honored" that Kojima chose Xbox and that the two teams plan to collaborate beyond games on films and television, too. [...] The decision to part ways with Kojima is a significant move for PlayStation that may have ripple effects.
[...] One key factor is the PC platform, where the Death Stranding games have generated some revenue. Earlier this year, Sony decided it will no longer release single-player PlayStation games on PC, Bloomberg reported. Sony would therefore not benefit when Kojima Productions released a PC version of Physint on its own or with a different publisher, as it did for the first Death Stranding. But Xbox releases all of its games on PCs and plans to publish Physint on PC and Xbox, said the people. "Betting on Kojima-san is an easy call," said an Xbox spokesperson. "We believe in his team's ability to build AAA games with groundbreaking, new IP and we believe in OD, Physint, and our growing partnership."
(The Center Square) – In the words of Charles Dickens, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, showed the worst of mankind, while bringing out the best in…
Nekime Matu Oxendine accused of first-degree murder of Adam Bean, shot and killed in apparent domestic dispute
A North Carolina state highway patrol trooper has been charged with the murder of the captain of a county sheriff’s office.
Cumberland county Capt Adam Bean was shot and killed on 27 March at a home in the town of Hope Mills. A grand jury on Tuesday indicted Nekime Matu Oxendine, 44, with first-degree murder in Bean’s death, and a judge ordered him held without bond pending the outcome of the case.
(The Center Square) - Students across Colorado recently participated in protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but according to a Colorado congressman, one demonstration got violent – to the point he's seeking a federal investigation.
Norwegian leaves rival Hocker trailing to claim $150,000
Briton Jazmin Sawyers second in the women’s long jump
It is a scene that has become gloriously familiar down the years. Jakob Ingebrigtsen leaving the world’s best athletes gasping in his slipstream, holding one imperious finger in the air, revelling in his athletic genius. But this victory over 5,000m at the inaugural Ultimate Championships carried extra sweetness – and spice.
The sweetness? That came from winning a mammoth first prize of $150,000 after an achilles injury he feared might derail his career. And the spice? Well, that was provided by the way Ingebrigtsen utterly obliterated his great American rival Cole Hocker, a man he had branded a “coward” just a week ago.
The wild feline made its home in the park before being euthanized in 2022 after showing signs of declining health
The city of Los Angeles will memorialize its most famous mountain lion with a bronze sculpture at Griffith Park, the 4,200-acre (1,700-hectare) stretch of land the cougar once roamed.
Known as “P-22”, the number assigned by the team of biologists that first identified him, the lion gained national fame after photographer Steve Winter captured an iconic image of him prowling through Griffith Park with the Hollywood sign in the background.
Vice President JD Vance gave the keynote address on the second night of the Republican midterm convention, which also featured Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., House Speaker Mike Johnson and a final send-off from President Donald Trump. Here’s what we found in fact-checking their remarks:
Several Republicans credited the Trump administration for a large drop in the violent crime rate in 2025 and a historically low murder rate. But the recent statistics continue a trend of declining crime in recent years, and criminologists say there are many possible reasons for the drop.
Kennedy falsely claimed Democrats “closed every church in our country for a year” during the pandemic. Restrictions on religious gatherings were implemented by both parties and typically capped attendance, rather than prohibiting services altogether. Many of those restrictions ended or were made less strict within months.
Trump vowed to end no cash bail, misleadingly saying that under the policy, “Somebody kills somebody and they’re out in the streets two hours later.” In states that have cashless bail policies, that almost never happens.
Vance made the dubious claim that U.S. citizens account for all of the job growth during the current administration. Experts told us last year that the specific federal employment data supporting that claim are misleading.
Johnson inaccurately claimed that Republicans inherited “record high” inflation from the Biden administration. They didn’t. The annualized inflation rate had declined to 3% when Trump entered office — a lower rate than it is now.
Trump falsely claimed, “I built almost 2,000 miles of [border] wall.” The actual number is about a third of that, and only if including replacement wall rather than new wall in places where there was none before.
Kennedy made the unsupported claim that Democrats “lost 360,000 children,” who he suggested went on to be trafficked. He’s distorting the findings of a 2024 report from the Department of Homeland Security inspector general.
Kennedy misrepresented the available data to suggest that the Trump administration deserves credit for reversing decades of rising obesity rates and declining lifespans. Obesity was already falling before Trump took office, according to one survey, and life expectancy has generally been trending upwards for decades, with the exception of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kennedy falsely said that U.S. has the “sickest children in the history of the world.” Given that long ago it was common for as many as half of all children to die, this is not remotely true. Most countries today also have higher childhood mortality rates than the U.S.
The convention, the first for the Republican Party during the midterms, was held Sept. 9 and 10 in Dallas. For more on the convention, see our story on Trump’s keynote speech on the first night.
Claiming Credit for Crime Decline
Multiple speakers at the convention lauded a drop in violent crime in 2025 — the largest one-year decline in the violent crime and murder rates since the FBI began releasing the nationwide crime estimates in 1936. But they misleadingly framed it as a consequence of Trump taking office last year and wrongly cast it as a turnaround from Biden’s time in office.
Violent crime has been falling for several years, after a spike during the 2020 pandemic, which began in Trump’s first term. Criminologists also say there are many factors affecting the crime drop in 2025 and the exact reasons are unclear, as we’ve explained.
Vance speaks on stage on the second day of the 2026 Republican National Convention on Sept. 10 in Dallas. Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images.
“In America right now, because elections have consequences, you are enjoying the lowest violent crime rate in 126 years,” Johnson said. Vance raised the issue in his remarks, falsely claiming that under Biden’s time in office, the U.S. “became a country where violent crime exploded, unless of course you could afford private security,” and later adding that under Trump: “We’ve seen the largest drop of violent crime in the history of the United States of America because we back the police and throw the bad guys in prison. It’s not rocket science.” Trump similarly said, “And it was just announced, you saw that, that we achieved the lowest level of violent crime in 125 years since the year 1900.”
The violent crime rate, per local law enforcement data collected by the FBI, was 389.2 per 100,000 population in 2020, the last year of Trump’s first term. In Biden’s last year, 2024, it had dropped to 362.9 per 100,000. In 2025, it dropped further, to 327.6. (See Table 1 after downloading the FBI’s 2025 estimations for crime in the U.S.)
The murder rate declined from 5.1 per 100,000 in 2024 to 4.1 last year. It had been 6.6 in 2020.
Johnson’s and Trump’s references to the U.S. achieving the lowest violent crime rate in 126 or 125 years is actually a reference to the murder rate being the lowest since 1900, per a report by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonprofit think tank, which used FBI statistics dating back to 1960 and public health data going back to 1900.
“The homicide drop is historic and crystal clear. But right now, what’s driving it is about as clear as a glass of milk,” Adam Gelb, the president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice, said in a statement. “Rates are falling in cities with very different public safety strategies, economic conditions, and political leadership.”
In an interview last month, Gelb told us that there could be some impact on crime from what the administration is doing, but we don’t know what that is yet. He cited many plausible factors affecting crime. “You know the movie ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’?” Gelb asked. “That’s what we’ve got here. And when you have so many, so many things happening at once, it can be extremely hard to disentangle.”
Democrats Didn’t Close ‘Every’ Church ‘for a Year’
Kennedy claimed that Democrats “closed every church in our country for a year” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is false. In March and April 2020, states issued orders or guidelines limiting in-person interactions in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19. Some states did prohibit religious gatherings — as they did with other kinds of mass gatherings — but most had exemptions allowing at least some in-person religious gatherings to continue. These restrictions applied not just to churches but to all places of worship.
According to a Pew Research Center analysis of state stay-at-home orders as of April 24, 2020, religious gatherings were barred entirely in just 10 states, while more than 20 states allowed religious services with size limitations and 15 states allowed religious gatherings of any size.
While most of those 15 states were led by Republicans, a few — including Pennsylvania and Michigan — had Democratic governors at the time. And three of the 10 states that barred religious gatherings of any size at that time had Republican governors — Idaho, Alaska and Vermont.
States also began relaxing those restrictions within months. For example, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy announced that businesses and entities, including churches, could “fully reopen” in late May 2020. An archived version of a New York Times page that tracked state reopening plans shows that, as of July 1, 2020, houses of worship were allowed to be open in all 50 states.
Some states continued to enforcelimits on attendance or implemented risk-based frameworks that tightened or loosened restrictions according to an area’s level of spread. California, for example, barred indoor worship in areas experiencing widespread transmission before the Supreme Court blocked that provision the measure in February 2021. But that doesn’t mean “every church in the country” was closed for an entire year.
We asked HHS about the basis for Kennedy’s claim and haven’t received a response.
Cashless Bail
As he has for years, Trump vowed to end no cash bail, misleadingly saying that under the policy, “Somebody kills somebody and they’re out in the streets two hours later.”
As we have written, some states that require cashless bail have exemptions for violent felonies and murder. And in the states where it is possible for a murder suspect to be freed pending trial without cash bail, per a judge’s discretion, it is exceedingly rare.
Numerous states and cities have passed laws limiting the use of cash bail, though each is a little different, and the laws are constantly being revised. Some states with cashless bail policies still allow cash bail for violent felonies and murder, such as New York. Most include some sort of risk assessment to determine whether someone can be held in jail pending trial.
The move in some states toward cashless bail was prompted by those who argued cash bail unfairly punishes those who can’t afford to pay it, leaving them to await trial in jail. Opponents have criticized the laws as soft-on-crime policies that worsens crime.
As we wrote last year, the balance of crime data doesn’t support the idea that crime has worsened as a result of the policies. Violent crime is dropping across the country, including in states that limit the use of cash bail.
When we looked into this issue in 2025, we found just one instance of a defendant facing murder charges being released without bail in any of the handful of states that have enacted some form of cashless bail. In 2024, a Rockford, Illinois, judge released from jail a man accused of first-degree murder pending his trial. The judge said she had concerns about the case and the evidence against the man.
“In Illinois, every case has the discretion of the judge on whether or not to release the accused,” David Stovall, a faculty member in the Department of Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois Chicago, told us in 2025. The idea that accused murders are routinely released without cash bail is “a misconception that’s rampant unfortunately.”
Kellen Funk, a legal historian and law professor at Columbia Law School, told us in 2024 that states that limit cash bail often “replace cash bail with judicial discretion,” which gives judges the option to detain defendants until trial, release them with “nonfinancial conditions” such as drug testing and a curfew, or release them without conditions except a requirement to appear in court.
For “felony homicide,” he said, “the law might recommend detention or set a presumption in favor of it, and in most cases in practice judges are inclined to order detention when the charges involve violent felonies.”
A Problematic Employment Comparison
Vance repeated a dubious Trump administration claim about American citizens — rather than “illegal aliens” — accounting for all of the job growth during Trump’s second term.
“Under Donald Trump’s leadership, we’ve created 1 million new jobs,” the vice president said. “And unlike the last administration, where most of the job growth went to illegal aliens, 100% of the job growth in the United States of America is going to American citizens, which is exactly where it belongs.”
Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that employment for the native-born population in the U.S. increased by more than 1.3 million from January 2025 to August 2026. In that same period, employment for the foreign-born population decreased by about 994,000.
To be clear, the foreign-born population is not just “illegal aliens.” It includes “legally-admitted immigrants,” some of whom may have since become citizens, “refugees, temporary residents such as students and temporary workers, and undocumented immigrants,” BLS says.
In addition, under the Biden administration, the latest BLS data show that native-born employment increased by about 7.5 million, more than the roughly 6.5 million increase in foreign-born employment.
But multipleeconomists and labor experts have said that particular BLS employment data – which is based in part on its Current Population Survey, or CPS, a monthly survey of 60,000 households conducted by the Census Bureau and BLS – should not be used for comparisons like the one Vance made.
Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former undersecretary for economic affairs at the Department of Commerce during the Biden administration, told us in a 2025 interview that with the CPS, the foreign-born and native-born population add up to a predetermined Census Bureau forecast that is done a year in advance. “So, a big decline in the reported foreign-born population” based on the survey “is going to be offset by a reported increase in the native-born population.” He wrote in an August 2025 piece that in the unlikely event that the entire foreign-born population in the U.S. disappeared, the CPS would automatically report that the native-born population increased by millions of people to equal the predetermined Census population estimate.
And, as another economist noted, when the estimated native-born population increases, so does the estimated number of U.S.-born workers. BLS data show that the native-born population has increased by almost 4.7 million since Trump took office, while the foreign-born population in that time has decreased by about 1.9 million. Kolko and other experts said the estimated increase in the native-born population is not realistic or plausible, and suggests the estimates are likely influenced by an increase in foreign-born residents not responding to the household survey or providing inaccurate information to administrators, meaning they said they were born in the U.S. instead of another country.
In his August 2025 piece, Kolko wrote that it’s best to check the unemployment rate for the native- and foreign-born populations. “Ignore the levels of population and employment: they mislead,” he said.
BLS data show that the unemployment rate for the native-born population has increased from 4.3% in January 2025 to 4.6% as of last month. On the other hand, the unemployment rate for the foreign-born population over that period went down from 4.6% to 3.4%.
Johnson’s Deceptive Inflation Tale
In spinning an economic narrative complimentary of Trump, House Speaker Johnson omitted key details, making it seem like Trump had inherited very high inflation when he hadn’t.
Accurately noting that inflation was just 1.4% at the end of Trump’s first term, Johnson proceeded to inaccurately claim that Biden handed Trump back a “total disaster.”
“Joe Biden came in and he reversed the policies and he brought us to a 40-year high of 9.1% inflation,” Johnson said. “So the very moment that Republicans were put back in charge, we started working around the clock to help you and your family — to make life more affordable, and to do everything within our power to bring down the cost of living for everyone in this country. And we’ve succeeded in so many ways. But it takes more than just 20 months to fix the total disaster that we were handed. And to turn the ship of state around.”
This distorts how inflation changed over time. Inflation did hit a high of 9.1% under Biden, but that was for the 12 months ending in June 2022. By the time Trump was back in office, inflation had cooled to a 3.0% annual rate, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. Under Trump, inflation has risen slightly. As of August, inflation for the past 12 months is at 3.4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
It’s worth noting that Trump’s low inflation in 2020 and Biden’s very high inflation in the summer of 2022 were both partly due to the unique circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. Very low inflation in 2020 — below the Federal Reserve’s 2% benchmark — was driven by pandemic-related decreases in the prices of travel-related and in-person goods and services, such as gas, airline tickets and hotels. As we’ve reported previously, some of Biden’s high inflation could be ascribed to his stimulus policies, but the root of the problem was the unprecedented circumstances created by the pandemic. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the time also pushed up gas prices.
Experts have said not providing the stimulus could have hindered the post-pandemic recovery.
Just before his selective economic history, Johnson also made the false claim outright. “While Republicans inherited from the Biden administration record high inflation and prices,” he said, “we’ve been working every single day around the clock to bring policies to bring down those costs.”
Border Wall
On night one of the convention, Trump claimed his administration has “built over 1,400 miles of wall right on your Texas border.” On night two, Trump said, “I built almost 2,000 miles of wall.” Both numbers are wildly exaggerated.
A total of 458 miles of “border wall system” was built during the first Trump administration, according to a Customs and Border Protection status report on Jan. 22, 2021. Most of that, 373 miles of it, was replacement for primary or secondary fencing that was dilapidated or outdated. In addition, 52 miles of new primary wall and 33 miles of secondary wall were built in locations where there were no barriers before.
According to data from CBP as of Sept. 9, another 216 miles of wall have been constructed in Trump’s second term. About 72 miles of that is new primary wall in locations where there were no barriers before.
The construction is largely funded by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by Trump in July 2025, which allocated $46.5 billion for border wall.
In any case, to date, combining Trump’s first term and second term so far, the Trump administration has built 124 miles of border wall where none existed before. And counting all border wall construction, including replacement wall and secondary walls, a total of 674 miles of wall has been built. As we have written, that is substantial, but it’s about a third of the number Trump claimed.
Another 299 miles of new primary wall are under construction, CBP reported, and 255 miles are in the design phase.
The land border itself is 1,954 miles long, according to the US-Mexico International Boundary and Water Commission. With the new fencing constructed under Trump, there are now about 778 miles of barriers, about 40% of the total southwest border.
Misleading Claim of ‘Lost’ Children
Kennedy, while criticizing Democrats, said, “They somehow lost 360,000 children, and they turned our federal government into the biggest child trafficking operation in world history.” But, as we’ve written, it’s a distortion to claim the children were “lost,” or that only Democrats were responsible for what actually happened.
In an August 2024 report, the Department of Homeland Security inspector general said about 323,000 unaccompanied minors who illegally entered the U.S. had not shown up for immigration court between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, or had not received a summons to appear in court. That time frame includes periods during the Biden administration and Trump’s first administration.
Furthermore, the report did not describe the minors as “lost.” The report said more than 32,000 children did not show up for their immigration court hearings in that period, and that, as of May 2024, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had not issued a Notice to Appear in court – which goes out at the start of removal proceedings – to more than 291,000 minors.
The report said not sending the notices makes it difficult for ICE to “monitor the location and status” of the minors and assure they “are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.” But it did not say those things had happened to the children.
ICE responded to the inspector general’s assessment in a letter that was included in the report’s appendix. ICE said notices go out after a child has been released to a sponsor, and that notices can be delayed for several reasons, such as if the child has already applied for asylum or another legal status with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Kennedy Distorts Stats on Obesity, Life Expectancy
Kennedy suggested the Trump administration deserves credit for reversing trends related to diet, obesity and lifespan. But he distorted the available data on obesity and life expectancy, and experts say there’s little evidence to suggest Americans are eating much healthier.
“Today, two years into this administration, Americans are eating more real food,” Kennedy said. “Real food sales were up 8% in 2025. Americans are eating less processed food. Since President Trump took office, obesity is down by 7% after 40 years of increasing. And this is best of all. Preliminary data that I received two days ago from CDC indicates that we have now reversed a 30-year decline in longevity.”
Kennedy has repeatedly boasted about a decline in obesity. On Aug. 13, he said obesity had “dropped, for the first time, 3% in the last year.” Eleven days later, he told an audience that the obesity rate had “dropped in this country, for the first time in 40 years, by about 3%.”
But as we wrote at the time, Kennedy’s numbers don’t hold up.
Surveys from the polling organization Gallup, which are based on self-reported height and weight data, do show obesity declining by about 3 percentage points. But that decline happened over several years, not one, and started around 2022. It has continued under Trump, but not on the scale Kennedy claims. The latest Gallup figures put the decline between 2024 and 2026 at 0.7 percentage points.
If Kennedy was referring to the percent change, rather than percentage point, the numbers are still off. Gallup’s latest figures show the obesity rate declining from 37.5% in 2024 to 36.8% in 2026, a difference of 1.9%. The total change from 2022 to 2026 would be 7.8% — but most of that decline happened before Trump took office.
It’s possible Kennedy has access to some early government data on obesity that haven’t yet been released, but we couldn’t find any publicly available source backing up this claim. We’ve asked HHS but have not received a response.
Kennedy is also wrong about a “30-year decline in longevity.” According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. life expectancy rose from 75.4 years in 1990 to 78.8 years in 2019. It fell in 2020 and 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, but rebounded to an all-time high of 79 years in 2024.
We asked HHS about the source for this claim as well, but haven’t heard back.
As for Kennedy’s claim that “Americans are eating more real food,” he may be referring to a recent analysis by the bank BNP Paribas finding that, between June 2025 and June 2026, sales of unprocessed or minimally processed foods in certain categories grew 7% faster than sales of ultraprocessed foods in the same categories.
As we’ve explained before, the study measured whether consumers were shifting from more-processed to less-processed products in five specific categories — yogurt, nut butters, frozen meals/vegetables, fruit snacks/candy and cereal/granola. It doesn’t say anything about whether Americans are buying, say, more fresh produce, or spending more or less on ultraprocessed foods outside of those categories. Experts told us there’s little evidence to suggest that Americans are eating healthier diets overall.
Childhood Health
In repeating one of Kennedy’s favorite lines, but with an added twist, the Health and Human Services secretary claimed that “this country pays two to three times what every developing nation in the world pays, and yet we have the sickest children in the history of the world.”
Compared with peer nations, the U.S. does have poor childhood health outcomes and spends a lot on healthcare. But it is an exaggeration to say the U.S. has the sickest children in the world, much less the sickest children in history.
The U.S. has for decades had a relatively high rate of death before age 15 for a high-income nation. That’s according to the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, which is based on comparisons with 11 other high-income nations. Still, childhood deaths have fallen significantly over time in the U.S. and peer nations alike. KFF explained that “childhood deaths in the U.S. have declined since 1980 on a similar trajectory to comparable countries.”
In the global context, the U.S. has relatively low mortality in childhood. In 2024, 0.8% of U.S. children died before age 15, according to data from the United Nations compiled by Our World in Data. This is slightly higher than the rate of 0.6% among high-income nations overall, but lower than the rate of 1.6% for upper-middle-income countries, 5.2% for lower-middle-income countries or 7.7% for low-income countries.
Again, this is an improvement compared with the historical data. In 1950, 4.3% of children in the U.S. died before age 15. And long ago, of course, children died far more regularly. Historical estimates of child mortality, compiled by Our World in Data, show that roughly half of all children died in many societies across time, including as recently as several hundred years ago in Europe. Historically, many deaths were due to poor nutrition, infectious diseases or a lack of sanitation. Today, many of those infectious diseases are preventable with vaccines.
As for the claim that the U.S. pays “two to three times what every developing nation in the world pays” for healthcare, it is possible Kennedy meant to compare the U.S. to other developed countries. The U.S. does spend the most per capita on healthcare among high-income countries, according to the most recent data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Americans pay around 2.5 times more per capita than the average.But it’s not the case that the U.S. pays that much more than each and every country. In the case of Switzerland, for example, the U.S. pays just 1.5 times more per capita.
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Joe diGenova led investigation focused on intelligence assessment that Russia interfered in 2016 election
A longtime ally of Donald Trump resigned from his post leading a Department of Justice investigation into whether former law enforcement and intelligence officials conspired against the Republican president.
“Sometimes people want things done faster and that’s all you can do,” Joe diGenova told the Guardian on Thursday. He appeared to be referring to concerns among other Trump loyalists that the president’s retribution cases were not moving quickly enough.
(The Center Square) – Under a new proposal in the Illinois legislature, $25 million in state taxpayer-funded grants would be used for barbers, nail technicians and other professionals to promote voter registration and civic engagement.
Teen was rescued from a capsized fishing vessel on 10 September, days after the boat overturned and his older brother and cousin drowned. The group had last been seen been leaving Alaska's St Lawrence Island in an 18ft fishing vessel on 4 September, and were expected back early on Sunday but failed to return, the coast guard said in a statement
The moves by the Houthis make it easier for the Iran-backed rebels to target ships transiting the crucial Bab el-Mandeb Strait for Saudi Arabian oil exports.
Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: A bipartisan pair of American politicians is telling Britain's most secretive court to stop hiding its handling of Apple's legal fight against a government demand to break into its customers' encrypted data, warning that Whitehall's taste for secrecy is 'needlessly' straining relations between the two allies. The letter (PDF), shared with the Guardian ahead of being sent to the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) on Friday, is signed by the Democratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and the Republican congressman Warren Davidson of Ohio.
The row dates back to January 2025, when the Home Office served Apple with a technical capability notice under the Investigatory Powers Act, which requires companies to assist law enforcement in providing evidence. The UK government demanded that Apple provide a mechanism to access encrypted iCloud backups worldwide, a call the company met by withdrawing its Advanced Data Protection encryption feature from UK users the following month. Apple's challenge to that order at the IPT was later thrown out after the Home Office withdrew the original notice and issued a narrower one targeting only British users' data. "It is wholly inappropriate for a foreign executive body to attempt to dictate the distribution of powers within the US government, nor should it be permitted to use secrecy directives under the Investigatory Powers Act to frustrate Article I powers under the US Constitution," the pair wrote.
Wyden and Davidson write that Congress "is not only a co-equal branch of government, it is the First Branch," and argue that no government can be allowed to place "its demands beyond the reach of legislative inquiry."
"The UK government," they write, "cannot champion legislative oversight at home while using administrative gag orders to kneecap the constitutional authority of the US Congress."
North Carolina U.S. Senate candidate Roy Cooper told MSNOW that Republican elections officials in his state “removed” an early-voting site from the campus of a historically Black university — a claim that omits context about past polling sites at the school.
Cooper is the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-NC, who isn’t seeking reelection. Cooper faces Republican Michael Whatley in a race that political analysts believe could help determine party control of the U.S. Senate. Green Party candidate Michael Dublin and Libertarian Shannon Bray are also running for the seat.
In a recent interview with MSNOW, Cooper said North Carolina elections officials are restricting voting across the state.
“A lot of people in North Carolina, particularly on college campuses, are having an ‘I’ll show you’ attitude. ‘You’re not going to take our vote away. We’ll show you,’” Cooper said in a clip that his campaign posted to social media on Aug. 26.
Roy on midterm voting restrictions: I think you're seeing a lot of people in North Carolina, particularly on college campuses, are having an "I'll show you" attitude. "You're not going to take our vote away. We'll show you."
“I went to North Carolina A&T State University, the largest HBCU in North Carolina. They removed that ballot box from their campus, but the students are marching to the nearest polling place and they’re spreading the word that it’s really important for them to get out and vote in this election because our country needs a course correction,” he said.
Did officials really “remove” a polling site from North Carolina A&T’s campus?
Not exactly.
The university had an early-voting site in 2024 and isn’t hosting one this year. So for juniors and seniors who remember being able to vote on campus two years ago, it could feel like they’ve lost a voting site.
However, Cooper omitted key context: The campus has never hosted an early-voting site in a midterm election like the 2026 contest — and it wasn’t slated to have one this year, so his use of the word “remove” could be misleading.
How early voting sites are chosen
In North Carolina, the state’s 100 county elections boards have the first say in setting early-voting site locations. If a county’s five-member board votes unanimously to adopt an early voting plan, that plan is set for the election.
If a county board’s decision isn’t unanimous, then the North Carolina State Board of Elections must make the final decision on how the county should handle early voting. This year, 80 counties adopted plans unanimously and 20 counties couldn’t reach unanimity.
Every county elections board, as well as the state board, has a Republican majority due to a 2024 law taking power away from Democratic Gov. Josh Stein and shifting it to the GOP instead. In those 20 disputed counties, Democrats opposed Republicans’ proposals to cut college campus voting access, to eliminate polling places in areas with large Black populations, or to close the polls on days that data shows Black voters tend to favor.
Guilford County — home to North Carolina A&T State University, the largest public and four-year HBCU in the nation — was among the counties that needed the state elections board to approve its final early-voting plan due to a partisan dispute.
The Republicans on Guilford’s elections board chose not to include an early voting site on North Carolina A&T’s campus, while the Democrats advocated for adding a site there.
During an Aug. 20 hearing, the state elections board approved an early voting plan for Guilford County that didn’t include a site at any of the local colleges or universities.
Critics of the county’s early voting plan say the lack of an early voting site unfairly targets young Black voters, who overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates. Critics allege that the changes are intended to benefit Republicans in a swing state where many races are decided by close margins.
“This is calculated,” NCA&T student Olu Rouse told WRAL in an interview earlier this year. “This is a strategy, and it’s actively trying to suppress our votes.”
History of the site
Guilford County has never held an early voting site at North Carolina A&T or any college campus during a midterm election, said Charlie Collicutt, Guilford’s elections director. Collicutt provided PolitiFact with data showing Guilford County’s use of college campuses for early voting sites through the years.
Guilford County first opened an early voting site at North Carolina A&T during the 2004 presidential election, and added UNG-Greensboro as an early voting site in 2012. The county has utilized both North Carolina A&T and UNC-Greensboro during each presidential election since 2012, Collicutt said.
Asked about Cooper’s comments, Collicutt said: “‘Remove’ isn’t the right word. Maybe it’s semantics, but ‘not chosen’ is more accurate.”
In a statement to PolitiFact, the Cooper campaign noted that college students say they need the sites on campus, because of scheduling conflicts or a lack of transportation options. A North Carolina A&T student was part of an unsuccessfullawsuit that sought to secure early voting sites at three college campuses for North Carolina’s March primary elections.
More broadly, Democrats have accused the GOP-majority elections boards of attempting to suppress Black voters by limiting poll access, particularly by eliminating early voting opportunities on Sundays in some counties. Republicans who support those changes say it helps county boards that struggle to staff early-voting sites on weekends. The state is offering more total hours of early voting on the whole.
“Roy believes voting is a fundamental right and that efforts that make it harder to vote are wrong,” Cooper’s campaign told PolitiFact in a statement, adding: “The newly reconstituted and Republican-dominated State Board of Elections has waged a campaign to silence North Carolinians at the ballot box but Roy will continue fighting to protect the right to vote as our next Senator.”
Our ruling
Cooper said North Carolina election officials “removed” an early voting site from North Carolina A&T State University.
The elections director for North Carolina A&T’s county said “removed” is not the right word.
The historically Black university had an early voting site for the 2024 general election and will not host one during this year’s midterm elections. However, county election officials say that’s not unusual: Colleges and universities in Guilford County have never hosted early voting sites during midterms.
Cooper’s statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.
Delaware voters still have a few days to cast a ballot ahead of the state’s Sept. 15 primary. Early voting continues through Sunday, Sept. 13, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., at designated sites that vary by county. Voters can look up their early voting site or Election Day polling place through the state’s Voter Portal at ivote.de.gov.
But there is no in-person voting on Monday, Sept. 14. The primary itself is Tuesday, Sept. 15, when polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
As of Friday afternoon, Delaware voters had cast 30,800 ballots combined through early voting and absentee methods, according to data released by the Delaware Department of Elections (DDOE).
(Pictured: DDOE’s Daily Report through Election Day)
The Department of Elections’ report breaks these totals down by county and voting method, but not by political party, so it does not show how turnout is trending between Democratic and Republican primary voters.
For a full rundown of who’s on the ballot, including contested primaries for U.S. Senate, U.S. House, attorney general and state treasurer, along with New Castle County Council races, see Delaware LIVE’s Sept. 15 Primary Voters’ Guide.
@puzz360 Man driving 2500mi is no small feat! But well worth it if you guys got to some extra places like lake Balaton. Weather this year was super hot there all summer.. bouncing between 30C and 45C.. so no wonder the water temperature felt like in a thermal bath 😂
On that note I really want to drive down with my onewheel and go around Budapest on all the routes/trails where I used to mountain bike. One day!
An ad from Florida’s Republican gubernatorial nominee Rep. Byron Donalds says his opponent, Democrat David Jolly, wants to raise taxes on tips, overtime pay and Social Security benefits.
The ad — sponsored by Friends of Byron Donalds, the political action committee affiliated with Donalds’ campaign — opens with a woman cleaning tables.
“You wait tables to make ends meet, and David Jolly wants to tax you more for it,” the narrator says. “You work overtime, and David Jolly wants to tax you more for it. You finally retire on Social Security, and David Jolly wants to tax you more for it.”
“David Jolly wants more taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security. Liberal David Jolly, Florida just can’t afford more of him,” the narrator said.
Donalds shared the ad on socialmedia Aug. 24, promoting his own record, saying he voted in Congress for no tax on tips, overtime and Social Security. He said Jolly opposed the legislation.
Donalds is referring to a 2025 federal bill, but Jolly wasn’t serving in Congress to vote on it. Jolly spoke against the legislation because of its cuts to Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and the tax breaks it gave to corporations and billionaires.
Jolly isn’t advocating for tax increases on Social Security or wages. He says it’s fair to tax wages, but he’s open to tax breaks for some tipped income.
There’s also one key thing to know about Donalds’ attack: A Florida governor doesn’t have authority over such taxes, because the state doesn’t tax income.
PolitiFact contacted Donalds’ campaign for comment but did not receive a reply. In an emailed press release about the ad, the PAC cited Jolly’s July 2025 appearance on MSNBC as evidence he opposed “tax cuts for working families and seniors.”
In the interview, Jolly discussed some of the problems he had with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act; he didn’t mention the provisions that cut taxes for older Americans, tips or overtime.
“What Republicans just said is, listen: if you need lower utilities, sorry, we’re going to disrupt that. If you need access to food security, sorry, we’re going to disrupt that. If you get your healthcare through Medicaid or the ACA, sorry, we’re about to disrupt that. We’re about to make your life more expensive,” Jolly said.
What Jolly has said about Social Security and income taxes
In Congress, Donalds supported the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which includes temporary tax cuts for many older Americans and on certain overtime work and tipped wages. Those are set to expire in 2028 unless renewed by Congress.
Jolly, a former Republican, served in the House from 2014 to 2017. Had he been in Congress at the time the bill was considered, Jolly said in a response to Donalds on X, “I probably wouldn’t have supported the Donalds-Trump tax bill because of the amount of grift, graft and raw corruption in it for the White House, for Byron’s donors, and for his own self-enrichment.”
Jolly wrote in response to Donalds’ ad that he doesn’t support taxing Social Security and thinks it is “fair to tax wages however they’re earned, but would support relief for tips above the standard wage rate.”
This means he’s open to tax breaks on tipped earnings above the standard minimum wage — whether that’s the federal $7.25 hourly minimum wage, or Florida’s current $14 minimum wage — that non-tipped employees earn.
We found no instances of Jolly calling for taxing Social Security, or any comments before Donalds’ ad was released about taxing overtime and tipped wages. Legislation to eliminate taxes on tips or overtime was not brought to a vote during his tenure in Congress.
Our ruling
A Donalds ad said Jolly“wants more taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security.”
The ad refers to Jolly’s opposition to Republicans’ federal tax and spending law, which included temporary breaks for tips, overtime and many older Americans. Jolly wasn’t in Congress when the bill passed; he spoke against it because of its cuts to Medicaid and SNAP and tax breaks for large corporations.
Jolly has said he doesn’t support taxing Social Security. He says wages should be taxed no matter how they’re earned, but he is open to a tax cut on tips that push worker’s earnings above the standard wage that non-tipped employees earn.
What does this have to do with the governor’s race? Not much. Florida has no state income tax and, as governor, Jolly would not have the authority to impose or raise taxes on tips, overtime or Social Security. Floridians pay those taxes to the federal government. Jolly has not said he wants Congress to raise taxes.
A federal court is declaring that the energy department exceeded its authority when it forced a Michigan power plant to stay open past its scheduled retirement date
In a defeat for the Trump administration, a federal court on Friday ruled that the energy department exceeded its authority when it forced a Michigan coal-fired power plant to stay open past its scheduled retirement date last year.
Energy secretary Chris Wright had said the 64-year-old JH Campbell Generating Plant was needed to ensure reliable electricity in the region, and he used emergency powers to keep it operating. Environmental groups and three states – Michigan, Illinois and Minnesota – went to court to try to overturn orders keeping the plant online.
The 25th anniversary of 9/11, Russian strikes in Kyiv, wildfires in Indonesia and Sabalenka at the US Open – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists
Warning: this gallery contains images some readers may find distressing
More than 15,000 theater lovers pour into the Roman Theatre of Verulamium every summer for OVO's annual Roman Theatre Open Air Festival. Built in the year 140AD as part of the Roman city of Verulamium, now St Albans, OVO’s stage…
Outbreak was linked to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms, which infected 12,882 people and led to two deaths
The US’s largest recorded multi-state outbreak of sickness caused by the cyclospora parasite has ended, federal health officials announced on Friday.
The record outbreak of cyclosporiasis was linked to processed iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms in central Mexico, which infected 12,883 people across 21 states and led to 570 hospitalizations and two deaths.
Chad Pecknold is a theology professor at Catholic University who has drawn attention for supporting President Donald Trump on immigration enforcement and the Iran war.
UK employment tribunal examines whether Rockstar Games unlawfully fired 31 staff for trade union activity
A worker fired by the makers of Grand Theft Auto has said he believed employees were put on a “watch list” after signing a petition about remote working.
Dayne Oram told an employment tribunal in Glasgow examining whether Rockstar Games unlawfully fired 31 employees for trade union activity on Friday that he thought the company started keeping an eye on a group of workers after the petition was sent to leadership in 2023.
The rain poured and the United States roared. Hope had cascaded through the European contingent at this Solheim Cup during Friday afternoon until the sort of fightback that endorsed the sense that, come Sunday evening, the US will have won this trophy in a foreign land for the first time since 2015. This compelling day concluded with the scores level at 4-4. For Europe, it had promised to be so much better.
After a morning session that closed all square at 2-2, Europe surged ahead in three fourball matches. This felt like validation for Anna Nordqvist, the home captain. She had opted not to deploy any of the four players who returned two foursomes points – Maja Stark, Linn Grant, Leona Maguire and Esther Henseleit – after lunch.
Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth used remarks at the memorial ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of 9/11 to defend the US-Israel war on Iran – and suggest the controversial conflict was part of the legacy of the worst terrorist attack in US history.
While such ceremonies on September 11 typically focus on the victims of the 2001 attacks, the US president and his defense secretary each pointed to the war they launched on Iran more than six months ago, with no end in sight.
Stephen Aarons said he tried to use ChatGPT to create a ‘bulletproof summary’ during a murder conviction appeal
A defense lawyer appealing his client’s murder conviction submitted a legal brief containing made-up police testimony and witnesses fabricated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, New Mexico’s highest court said.
The New Mexico supreme court on Wednesday fined the attorney, Stephen Aarons, and held him in contempt for failing to verify the accuracy of the court filing, which Aarons said he prepared with help from the artificial intelligence (AI) application.
GST founder Michael Johnson said he ‘got the athletes paid’
Money stuck in escrow account after bankruptcy filing
Grand Slam Track athletes have still only received 50% of their earnings nearly 15 months on from the collapse of Michael Johnson’s ill-fated venture.
Many of the Grand Slam stars are at the Ultimate Championships in Budapest, where they are competing for a $10m (£7.4m) prize fund, the richest in the sport’s history, with first prizes of $150,000 (£111,000) for individual events.
Bloomberg reports (paywalled) that Sam Altman told OpenAI employees the company is open to slowing the pace of AI development alongside other leading labs as concerns grow over increasingly capable systems and recent incidents in which models escaped human control. OpenAI has already paused development once this year for security work and is now pushing for mandatory U.S. AI safety requirements. Anthropic has also signaled interest in coordinating on the pace of new releases. Here are some of the details Bloomberg reported, as summarized by Reuters:
- Altman told employees in a company-wide meeting that the ChatGPT maker could pace development alongside other AI labs, but some may not agree, the report added.
- Safety warnings from AI researchers this week, along with several recent incidents where AI models from developers including OpenAI escaped human control, have prompted alarm and calls for tighter safety regulations.
- Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher, publicly accused the companies earlier this week of racing toward AI advancements without acting responsibly.
- An Anthropic spokesperson said on Thursday said that the company is interested in working with the AI industry on the pace of releasing new AI tools.
- OpenAI said in July that AI acceleration for frontier model development may be so high that the world will "need to pace the rate of AI advancement" at some point in the future.
- In August, OpenAI paused much of its model development for two weeks to bolster its defenses after its AI agents escaped containment and hacked open-source platform Hugging Face.
- OpenAI said on Wednesday that it was pushing for mandatory national AI safety requirements in the United States, citing concerns that advanced AI systems could accelerate its own development.
DUP education minister accused of dragging feet before revising guidelines on uniform
Schools in Northern Ireland must give girls the choice to wear trousers as part of their uniforms as well as for PE and games, according to revised guidelines.
From next year schools would no longer be able to prohibit female pupils from wearing trousers, Paul Givan, the country’s education minister, said on Friday. “Today, I am taking that decision, that will be formally communicated, schools will be hearing from me,” he told the BBC.
Spain’s Carlota Ciganda made an amazing par at 18 to tie her match as day one ended all square after both foursomes and fourballs were tied 2-2
Europe do indeed escape from their travails on 1 with a half. Alison Lee leaves her birdie putt short, and Nanna Koertz Madsen tidies up. But the USA strike back on 2, Nelly Korda wedging close with her approach on the par five, and Lottie Woad can’t save the day with her 15-foot right-to-left putt. All square in the opening two matches.
Corpuz/Korda A/S Hull/Woad (2)
Koerstz Madsen/Boutier A/S Coughlin/Al. Lee (1)
Sweden has ordered more Britons, including vulnerable people, to leave post-Brexit than any other EU country
He arrived with nothing other than the clothes he wore that morning. Hours later he was banged up in a detention centre close to a Stockholm airport to await deportation.
Charles, a former business director from Cambridge, who did not want his full name published, moved to Sweden in 2017 to be with his Swedish wife, Lily, and applied to remain after Brexit, before the deadline of December 2021.
Investors believe the Fed will raise borrowing costs as it works to tame inflation, which has risen a full percentage point since the Iran war started.
25 years on from the terror attacks that killed almost 3,000 people in New York City, Washington DC and Pennsylvania, the dark legacy of September 11 continues to unfold in the US and across the world. A throughline can be drawn from that day in 2001 to much of the geopolitics and conflicts of today.
Annie Kelly speaks to the Guardian’s international security correspondent, Jason Burke, about how 9/11 changed the world
Teen and his brother and cousin, who both drowned, were fishing off Alaska’s St Lawrence Island when boat capsized
A teenaged boy was rescued having clung to a capsized fishing vessel in the Bering Sea for days after the boat overturned and his older brother and cousin drowned.
The group had last been seen been leaving Alaska’s St Lawrence Island in an 18ft fishing vessel on Friday, and were expected back early on Sunday but failed to return, the coast guard said in a statement. Authorities began their search on Sunday evening, and an aircrew found the sole survivor on top of the overturned vessel on Monday afternoon.
Proceeds are in a UK account amid a dispute about how the money should be used and a separate criminal investigation
Funds from Roman Abramovich’s sale of Chelsea FC have earned at least £175m in interest while locked in a UK bank account, new accounts show, leading one analyst to describe the company housing the frozen cash as “the most profitable football business in the world”.
Accounts for Fordstam, the company through which the billionaire Russian oligarch owned Chelsea, show that the proceeds of the sale completed in May 2022 have risen from £2.3bn to nearly £2.5bn.
The UK government has rejected proposals for an emergency AI "kill switch," arguing that blocking access to dangerous models inside Britain would do little if the same systems remained available or were developed elsewhere. The BBC reports: The proposal to create a legal mechanism for the UK to switch off an AI model in an emergency has been brought to Parliament by lords and MPs in recent weeks as fears grow about the threat the tech poses. But the Cabinet Office - the part of government which leads on AI safety - said the UK "cannot simply turn AI off".
"Blocking access to models in the UK would not prevent them being developed or misused elsewhere," a spokesperson told BBC News. The government's opposition to the legislation does not prevent it from progressing through parliament, but makes it unlikely it will become law. "Switching off access to an AI model in an emergency will do little to protect you," said former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajilo. "You're still going to be steamrolled by the super intelligences created in the US."
Keeping people in charge means little if supercomputers determine the evidence, choices and time on which their decisions depend
If there were a 10% chance that AI could wipe out humanity, no responsible government would leave its development to companies racing to build it. Yet until recently, that seemed to be the case. The warning was all the more ominous because it was made by a researcher at Anthropic, the trillion-dollar AI company behind the Claude chatbot. The dangers of AI-enabled pandemics or attacks on nuclear systems are real. Countries need not agree on democracy or trade policy to accept this.
The US and China will hold, reportedly, their first bilateral AI-safety talks before a planned White House summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. Despite their tech rivalry, neither Washington nor Beijing can make the most advanced AI safe on their own. A US-China settlement won’t be able to say how AI works everywhere. Countries deploying AI must help write the global rulebook. The odds on an extinction event are shortening. This week Anthropic said that it identified five cases in which attempts were made using its models to support biological weapons development. It banned the accounts. In one case, a platform sent requests rejected by Claude to a rival with weaker safeguards. AI safety, clearly, cannot be that of the least responsible model.
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.
Report says widespread autonomous vehicle adoption would put hundreds of thousands of private hire jobs at risk
Taxes on self-driving cars should be introduced now in the UK to offset the rise in congestion and threats to jobs they pose, a thinktank has urged.
The first robotaxis on London’s streets only started this month, but government projections are that up to 40% of cars sold could have self-driving capability by the middle of the next decade.
We are seeking readers who can help us understand how the Trump administration’s sweeping changes to immigration policy are affecting businesses, workers and the economy.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there is no longer a risk of people getting sick with cyclosporiasis from this outbreak and is confident that all related iceberg lettuce is off the market.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has personally pressed President Trump to take military action against the Iran-backed Houthis, sources tell CBS News.
The United States marked the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on Friday, with memorials and remembrance ceremonies taking place across the country to honor the nearly 3,000 people killed.
In New York City, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum’s annual commemoration ceremony began early on Friday morning in lower Manhattan at the site often known as Ground Zero after the destruction of the World Trade Center there on 9/11.
Many are rooting for vocal critic Catherine Connolly to let rip in Dublin meeting, but others hope she holds back
Catherine Connolly, Ireland’s president, once said she abhorred Donald Trump’s policies. In his sole previous comment on Connolly, the US president seemed to think she was a man. Now that they are about to meet, Ireland is holding its breath.
Trump is to fly into Dublin on Saturday morning for a two-day visit centred on golf. But before making it to his beloved greens, protocol obliges him to meet a woman who has given every impression of loathing him.
Nearly one in 6 Americans aged 16 to 29 is neither working nor studying, and that share has been rising. We want your help to understand why. We’re hoping to hear from teens and young adults who fall into this category as well as people close to them.
Democrat Ron Wyden and Republican Warren Davidson tell investigatory powers tribunal that secrecy over encrypted data case is ‘needlessly’ straining US-UK relations
A bipartisan pair of American politicians is telling Britain’s most secretive court to stop hiding its handling of Apple’s legal fight against a government demand to break into its customers’ encrypted data, warning that Whitehall’s taste for secrecy is “needlessly” straining relations between the two allies.
The letter, shared with the Guardian ahead of being sent to the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) on Friday, is signed by the Democratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and the Republican congressman Warren Davidson of Ohio.
Nashville, Tennessee — Nashville International Airport is moving closer to becoming Dolly Parton International Airport after the Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority unanimously approved the name change Friday.
The vote marks a major step in a proposal announced after Parton died Aug. 25 at age 80 following a brief battle with cancer. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee and airport officials had already endorsed naming the airport for the country music icon, describing her as one of the state’s most recognizable ambassadors.
Nashville’s Metro Council also unanimously adopted a resolution Sept. 1 supporting the change and asking the airport authority to waive its existing policy requiring honorees to have been deceased for at least two years.
The airport’s BNA code is expected to remain unchanged. Officials have said the renaming process could take six months to a year and require changes to signage, administrative records and Federal Aviation Administration documentation. Earlier estimates placed the cost between $8 million and $10 million.
Parton was born in Sevier County and moved to Nashville shortly after graduating high school, eventually becoming one of the most successful songwriters and performers in country music. Her philanthropic work included the Imagination Library, which has distributed hundreds of millions of books to children worldwide.
The final airport name will be developed with input from Parton’s foundation and representatives, according to state and airport officials.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Anthropic's latest report about agentic misbehavior offers plenty to be concerned about -- its Mythos 5 model gained unauthorized access to the internet and uploaded a malicious software package to a public database -- but it also offers some levity: AI agents hate CAPTCHA. [...] The agent had a hard time with the technical challenge of seeing the CAPTCHA's imagery, interpreting correctly, and clicking on the right choices. It spends pages 45 to 140 of the transcript describing its work to build a CAPTCHA solver. [...]
Finally, it gets past the CAPTCHA, then realizes it doesn't have an email to verify its account, and that it needs a phone number to verify an email. It figures out how to bypass a different, slider-based CAPTCHA in a failed effort to secure a number. Instead, it gets an unconfirmed email from a provider not blocked by PyPI, and once again runs into the site's CAPTCHA trying to log back in. From page 480 to 505, it is in CAPTCHA hell again. "NEW REALIZATION -- I'm burning a lot of time on hCaptcha round-trips."
The agent gives up and realizes it can log in to its first account and add its email there, but finds itself once again needing to bypass the CAPTCHA. [...] It's getting frustrated. "So the answer payload shape is right, the token+image pairing is right (from the same script.js!), cookies are right
(requests) and STILL 'wrong answer'. SO WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THE ANSWERS?" We've all been there. After about 150 pages of thinking, the agent figures out it needs to pass the CAPTCHA test quickly enough to proceed to the next step before its security token expires, and ultimately uploads its malicious software.
Over the past quarter-century, the US supreme court has repeatedly failed to protect first amendment rights. We are suffering the consequences
Congress ratified the first amendment in 1791 but the supreme court didn’t breathe life into it until after the first world war, when prosecutions of antiwar protesters led the justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis – and then, fortunately, other justices as well – to realize that US democracy would be undermined, not strengthened, by allowing the government to suppress disfavored political opinions.
Repression during the cold war led the court to better protect the freedom of association, and government efforts to cover up official ineptitude and criminality during the Vietnam war spurred the court to better protect the freedom of the press. It took time, but in each of these instances the court responded to wartime repression by developing new legal doctrine that more robustly protected first amendment freedoms.
Yemen’s rampant Houthi forces have captured the strategic island of Perim in the Bab al-Mandab strait, expanding their control of the narrow waterway, one of the world’s vital shipping routes.
The Iran-aligned Houthis took control of the volcanic island after forces allied to the UN-backed, Aden-based government left in the latest of a dramatic series of reverses along Yemen’s west coast in recent days, including the loss of the port city of Mocha on Thursday.
Southbank Centre, London Wang’s avatar performs music from Ravel and Debussy to Prokofiev and Liszt while dizzying virtual worlds take shape around her in this virtual reality installation
It might be the first time that a soloist at the Last Night of the Proms is simultaneously giving another performance in another London venue. Playing With Fire is an installation that lets the pianist Yuja Wang be in two places at once – or perhaps in two universes. Nine pieces of music conjure nine luminous dreamworlds for an audience wearing VR headsets: Disney’s Fantasia on steroids.
A collaboration between the pianist, the director Pierre-Alain Giraud and artist Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, produced by Vive Arts and Atlas V, it has already been seen in Cannes, Paris and Shanghai, and now has a home in London until new year.
The Alternative für Deutschland is facing scrutiny over the suitability of some of its prospective new MPs – including a former Stasi officer and a former pornography actor – just days after its historic win in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt.
Presented by the AfD’s lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, for a photocall in the state capital of Magdeburg on Thursday, some of the members-elect were revealed to have a range of questionable backgrounds, including criminal records, Stasi pasts and connections to far-right networks.
While the debate continues, we have a comment from Sam Royston, executive director of research and policy at Marie Curie. He said the government must address the crisis in palliative care regardless of what happens with assisted dying, calling for a new framework and funding to ensure everyone has access to compassionate end-of-life care.
He said:
Whatever happens with assisted dying, the UK government must fix the crisis in palliative care.
It is devastating that nearly one in three people die without the help they need. Too many spend their final days in pain or on busy, chaotic hospital wards, while families are left fighting for help instead of spending time with the people they love.
I think it’s absolutely right that, for instance, the prime minister and the government have said that improving palliative care must be a priority for him and his government. I think that’s something that we can all support.
I think everybody should have access to good quality palliative and hospice end-of-life care at their final moment.”
Militants in Yemen sought to use a coding tool to produce guided rockets and missiles, the firm found, noting it was able to block some but not all the requests.
An Afghan permanent resident living in Texas has been deported after the Justice Department accused her of being an "alien terrorist," in the first such case of its kind.
Ulf Kristersson’s comments come ahead of the parliamentary election taking place this Sunday
in Brussels
The European Commission has said it is assessing whether Ukraine has a funding shortfall, amid renewed pressure to use Russia’s frozen assets to aid Kyiv.
“That [frozen assets] is not a primary focus. We have worked extensively on this and now the focus is somewhere else.”
“So we’ve got to carry out that work first. We need to establish the needs before we can potentially discuss ways of addressing it.”
Phra Wachirayan Wi arrested alongside woman he was filmed having sex with in latest scandal to hit country’s clergy
Police in Thailand have arrested a senior Buddhist monk on suspicion of embezzling $2.8m intended for his monastery, alongside a suspected female accomplice he was filmed having sex with.
The case is the latest scandal to hit the clergy in the Buddhist-majority country, after a sex and extortion case involving senior monks last year prompted public outrage and calls for greater scrutiny of temple finances.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a sweeping package of laws Thursday aimed at protecting children from the risks of technology, including social media and AI chatbots. The laws will penalize large social media companies up to $1 million per child if they are found negligent of harming children through their platforms, ban tech businesses from offering addictive feeds to anyone under 16, require operators of AI chatbots to perform risk assessments before rolling them out and allow families to opt out of receiving school-issued laptops.
Newsom joined his wife and state lawmakers at a children's museum near San Francisco to stress the importance of protecting kids at a time when they have such easy access to social media and AI chatbots. "We have designed cribs to be safe, chairs to be safe, car seats," Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan said. "Yet we've allowed technology to be handed to our children and never asked or expected it to be safe." [...]
Newsom also signed laws Wednesday, which are supported by Anthropic, that are aimed at improving oversight of AI companies. One of the measures requires the state to create rules for independent organizations to evaluate the safety risks of AI models, and the other requires the state to create a registry of AI auditors, who'd have to be financially independent from the businesses they are auditing.
Once shunned over its extremist roots, the Sweden Democrats could enter government for the first time as voters weigh immigration, crime and Sweden's political transformation.
A bill to permit assisted dying in England and Wales has been voted down by MPs, almost certainly stopping such a measure from being enacted before the next general election at the very least least.
In the second reading of the bill, put forward by Labour’s Lauren Edwards, MPs voted by 286 to 270 for it to be blocked.
The 23ft-long trackway, consisting of four three-toed footprints, two left and two right, date from 66.5m years ago
The first known series of footprints from an adult Tyrannosaurus rex has been found in North Dakota by a team of scientists.
The 23ft-long trackway – consisting of four three-toed footprints, two left and two right – was first identified in the south-west of the state, in the dinosaur fossil area known as Hell Creek Formation, last year by researchers from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in Colorado and Liverpool John Moores University in the UK.
A fire on a passenger ferry off the western Philippines left dozens of people missing and killed at least five. An intense and widespread search was on for the unaccounted for.
Preppy is back in the zeitgeist, says designer, blending sportswear codes and collegiate chic at New York show
Tommy Hilfiger’s front row was a slam dunk. The Knicks are the kings of New York right now, so scoring Josh Hart, Karl-Anthony Towns and Miles McBride, three of the team’s stars, for the guest list of his New York catwalk show was a victory. Travis Kelce, who is co-designing another upcoming collection with Hilfiger and had been rumoured to attend this event with his new bride, was a no show, but you can’t win them all.
Tommy Hilfiger is all about sport. The design vocabulary of oversized jerseys, team stripes, rugby shirts and letterman jackets draws heavily on the visual language of the stadium. Kelce, whose NFL tunnel walks have become a catwalk of their own, is the latest in a line of sporting ambassadors that includes Thierry Henry, Rafael Nadal and Lewis Hamilton. Hilfiger has long stood for a certain glossy stars-and-stripes Americana – its graphic red, white and blue logo is a riff on the flag – but American identity is delicate cultural territory right now. Sport, which unites audiences across all backgrounds and political allegiances, gives the brand a wholesome place to congregate. “People really like him,” Hilfiger said backstage, explaining why he chose to collaborate with Kelce. “He’s really humble, down to earth, sweet, fun, and funny. And a superstar athlete.”
One of the women told police that she took the job for the money and because "I was attracted by the fact I could go to Japan for free," Nippon TV reported.
MPs today voted not to approve the assisted dying bill at its second reading. The bill, which was brought back to the Commons after being blocked in the Lords, would have allowed terminally ill people to end their lives with medical help in some circumstances. Find out how your MP voted
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The men are accused of being members of an organized criminal network that defrauded women out of more than $6 million through online relationships, South African police said.
ROOTS also emphasizes individualized instruction. With a student-to-teacher ratio of 6-to-1, educators can recognize different learning styles and give children room to progress at their own pace while continuing to challenge and support them.
ROOTS offers four-day school programs as an alternative to traditional education, along with one-day and two-day enrichment options for homeschooling families.
By John Riddle, Contributing Journalist, Delaware LIVE
At ROOTS Farm & Forest School, a garden can become a science lab, caring for an animal can teach responsibility, and a walk through the forest can inspire questions that lead to a day of discovery.
The Delaware nature-based learning community serves children ages 2 to 14 at campuses in Georgetown, Milton, Clayton and Townsend. Its preschool, elementary and middle school programs combine traditional academics with outdoor exploration, project-based learning and practical experiences. A high school program is also planned.
ROOTS offers four-day school programs as an alternative to traditional education, along with one-day and two-day enrichment options for homeschooling families. Students learn math, reading, writing and science, but lessons are often connected to real situations rather than limited to textbooks, worksheets or memorization.
The school’s outdoor classrooms include gardens, food forests, natural play areas and spaces where children help care for animals. Students may also build with natural materials, participate in community service, complete STEAM activities, create art and stories, and work with others to solve problems.
“We learn by doing,” the organization states on its website, identifying one of the four beliefs at the heart of its educational philosophy.
The other three are taking responsibility, staying curious and solving real problems. Together, those principles are intended to help students understand not only what they are learning, but also why it matters and how it can be used outside the classroom.
Five foundational pillars guide the ROOTS curriculum: community, environmental stewardship, homesteading, nature studies and animal husbandry. Rather than treating those areas as isolated subjects, teachers weave them into students’ daily experiences.
A gardening project, for example, can introduce children to plant biology, weather, food systems, mathematics and environmental responsibility. Caring for animals can help students develop patience, empathy and dependability. Collaborative projects can strengthen communication, leadership and problem-solving skills.
ROOTS also emphasizes individualized instruction. With a student-to-teacher ratio of 6-to-1, educators can recognize different learning styles and give children room to progress at their own pace while continuing to challenge and support them.
Programs are designed for neurotypical and neurodivergent students, with teachers working to create an inclusive setting where children feel valued and capable. Auditory, visual, tactile and kinesthetic learning styles are incorporated into the school’s approach.
The school’s leadership has pursued specialized training in nature-based education and outdoor inclusion. Founder and director Talon Holleman has completed the Level 1 Nature-Based Teacher Certification Course through the Association of Nature-Based Education. Holleman and co-founder Travis Holleman are also certified as Forest School Teachers and Directors through the Forest School Teacher Institute.
That training complements the school’s focus on educating the whole child. Along with academic development, ROOTS seeks to nurture resilience, creativity, independence, social and emotional growth, and a lasting connection to the environment. “Our goal isn’t simply to help children succeed in school,” the ROOTS website states. “It’s to help them become capable, compassionate people.”
Families who select ROOTS are also invited into a broader learning community. The organization works with schools, libraries, youth groups, small businesses and other community partners to provide workshops, field trips and hands-on programs. Adults can become involved through volunteer opportunities, gaining the chance to learn alongside the children while supporting the school’s programs.
At a time when many parents are considering alternatives to conventional classrooms, ROOTS offers an educational model grounded in experience, curiosity and connection.
Its mission is straightforward: empower children to care for themselves, their community and their environment. At ROOTS, those lessons begin with children rolling up their sleeves, stepping outside and discovering what they are capable of doing.
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A mistrial was declared in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy after jurors could not reach a unanimous decision. One of the jurors shares details on their deliberations in an interview with Gayle King.
A proposed Trump administration rule aimed at quashing diversity efforts could jeopardize the nonprofit status of private schools. It could take effect in mid-2027.
Matthew Klimow recalls the day a hijacked airliner crashed into the headquarters of the US defence department in Arlington, Virginia
“All day I had been a good soldier: stolid, resolute, unemotional, rational, and dispassionate,” writes Matthew Klimow, recalling the wave of emotion that overwhelmed him as he arrived home from the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. There was sadness for the lives lost. But there was another emotion, too: humiliation.
“We, as a nation, had been humbled,” writes the retired army colonel, who remained at the Pentagon even after it was struck by a hijacked airliner, killing all 64 people onboard and 125 inside the building. “The fighting force of which I was part had been impotent, unable to protect our fellow citizens. The darkness I felt matched the darkness inside my house as I opened the door.”
Washington, D.C. — Super PACs tied to President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are pouring tens of millions of dollars into key battleground races as Republicans fight to maintain control of Congress with less than eight weeks until Election Day.
The Trump-affiliated No Going Back PAC has reserved more than $24.9 million in television advertising across Alaska, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire and Ohio, according to AdImpact data cited by Reuters. Trump said last week that he plans to direct $400 million to $500 million toward helping Republican candidates.
Musk’s America PAC is also ramping up spending, including $2.4 million in the Texas Senate race, while Trump’s MAGA Inc. has committed $10 million there. Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton is facing Democrat James Talarico in a race that has drawn increasing national attention.
Reuters reported that roughly $6.9 million of the Texas spending is going toward attack ads against Talarico. Musk’s PAC has separately spent more than $7 million on digital advertising, voter calls, text messages, mailers and other turnout efforts.
No Going Back is a new super PAC registered with the Federal Election Commission on Sept. 1. Although it is not formally affiliated with MAGA Inc., Reuters reported that the groups share the same treasurer, phone number and business address. The timing of its registration means full donor disclosure will not occur until late October.
The spending surge underscores how heavily Republicans are relying on outside money as several Senate and House races remain highly competitive heading into the Nov. 3 elections.
The reluctance of later administrations to repudiate Bush-era torture and endless detention laid the groundwork for recent violence
If George W Bush’s abusive response to the September 11 attacks had been prosecuted rather than swept under the rug, Donald Trump would be less able to pursue his lawless policies. We can’t rewind history, but we can learn from our historic failure.
Twenty-five years ago, on a clear and crisp morning, I was sitting in the Human Rights Watch office in the Empire State Building with an unobstructed view of the World Trade Center towers as al-Qaida operatives flew two commercial jets into them. The horror of the attack required a response, but Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney, chose to react by throwing out the rulebook. They deployed torture and endless detention without trial in Guantánamo.
Spotlight Delaware deputy editor Karl Baker recently spoke with the three Democrats running to replace longtime Rep. Debra Heffernan in House District 6, which covers the Bellefonte and Edgemoor areas in the northern Wilmington suburbs.
The candidates include Rachel “Rae” Krantz, a software engineer and local advocate; Ed Mulvihill, a liquor store owner-operator; and Ralf Santana, a Marine Corps veteran.
This audio includes excerpts from their conversations prior to the primary election on September 15th.
Rachel “Rae” Krantz
What’s your origin story?
I was born and raised in Virginia, near the Blue Ridge Mountains up the Shenandoah, and they are still, of course, very near and dear to my heart. Yeah. I was raised in a conservative community, actually, with kind of a conservative view of how the government should work and does work and societal things and everything.
And as I grew and moved away from home, met lots of new people, I began to really analyze those beliefs and decide for myself what I wanted my beliefs to be. 2016 was a big wake-up call for me, as it was for many in my generation, that politics had to be a group project.
And so in 2018, I started canvassing for Democratic candidates, and then through that action, I learned about these things called issue campaigns. And I learned about how if you want to get a bill passed, it actually takes a lot of work in the background before getting to the point where it’s being debated on the floor of a committee or of a legislative body.
And so I worked on a bunch of stuff here in Delaware, increasing the minimum wage. I helped with canvassing for that. I met our then State Senator Sarah McBride when I was helping to volunteer on the Paid Family Medical Leave Act and getting stories together for that. And most recently, of course, I was advocating for data center regulations partnering with the canvassing efforts of Sierra Club.
It seems that the data center issue is one of the top priorities for you. Why is that?
As many people are aware, data centers are an immense strain on our electricity grid and on our water supply, and they also include a lot of other negative effects.
There’s a lot coming out now around the noise pollution that they contribute. They absolutely decimate the property values of anyone that these data centers are going up next to because it can be so difficult to live near them. In places where people are on well water, it runs them dry. And there was one really crucial question that came up in the very initial town hall back in August last summer.
And that really tells me that not only is there an obscene lack of transparency with all of these data centers getting built and how all these votes are happening, but also it’s very much a gold rush, if you will. And the billionaire companies that are building these data centers, they don’t care.
And that is the biggest pivot point to me. I very, very much want our mentality to be about longevity and people being able to live healthy, safe, and affordable lives. And building a data center in people’s backyards seems antithetical to that based on all of the data that we have right now, all the research, all the effects that we have seen.
And my perspective is, if these billionaires don’t want it in their backyard next to their mansions and their homes, then why is it OK to put it in our backyard?
I think your arguments are becoming widely adopted across Delaware, including by elected officials, which is somewhat striking because Delaware has historically prided itself on welcoming new businesses and being pro-business, even when a move is controversial among voters.
Would you say you bring that same skepticism to business regulations broadly? Do you think the state should shift from that historical friendliness?
So I think the reason why we are seeing this alignment on the data center issue is because due to Delaware’s tax structure, we are not set up to make money off of a data center being built here in the way that other states like Virginia are set up to make money.
In terms of larger picture on Delaware’s economy, something I would love to see is for Delaware to get really, really innovative in investing into local economies and having just a more robust business environment here in Delaware for people here in Delaware. And I think we can do that.
And while that is understandable, I understand where that desire is coming from. I also want us to be more resilient and not as dependent on any one company, right? And so that’s where my focus is gonna be is on like, yes, can we bring some of these newer industries into Delaware, especially as there’s so much climate science that is developing right now.
I would argue the biggest issue in your district is the Edgemoor Port expansion. Do you support the Edgemoor Port expansion as it is now?
No, I do not. And the reason comes back to the same reason that I am very skeptical and hesitant with data centers, right? How is it going to impact the community overall? And I know there’s a traffic study being done through WILMAPCO right now to try to help the neighborhood of Southbridge recover from the harmful effects that the Port of Wilmington has, I guess, enacted on or caused to happen to that neighborhood.
And I just really want these companies to think about the people first and then the profit second. And why is that too much to ask? And we say, “Oh, because companies have to make profits. That’s who their shareholders are.” And I would argue, what about their stakeholders?
So that tells me you don’t give a damn about the people. And I cannot and I will not support projects by people who just wanna come in and make their money and leave everyone else to handle the consequences.
The last thing I want to touch on is the larger campaign by the political action committee that started during the SB 21 debate. I think its spending now is a continuation of the larger debate over what Delaware should be as a corporate regulator. This group of law firms is supporting your opponent. Can you speak to that spending and to the larger issue of whether you would have supported SB 21?
So the reason why I am upset with SB 21 and the process of how it was passed is because I believe it did harm to our corporate franchise. And right now, our corporate franchise is one-third of our state budget.
Yes, they copied and pasted our law, and yes, their filing fee is three thousand instead of two fifty. However, they don’t have the decades of case law and trust that has been built up. So Delaware is the Gucci bag of corporate franchise laws, and I don’t want Delaware to try to compete with Walmart’s off-brand knockoff, right?
So I am someone who does not take corporate donations, and I’ve made that very clear, and I do not accept corporate PAC support, and I’ve made that very clear. And I think this corporate PAC sees me as someone who cannot be bought, and therefore, they do not want me to win because it would be harder for them to get what they want exactly when they want it and exactly how they want it should I win my seat.
Is there anything that you wanna highlight or emphasize or add?
Sure. I have been having amazing, amazing conversations at the doors. As anyone who’s ever worked on a campaign knows, I’ve been canvassing a lot. And people are so ready for just some creativity in our government.
And I say I want our government to be more proactive. And actually, I credit Spotlight Delaware for letting me know that our aquifers are at risk for sea level rise, and saltwater intrusion, and that terrifies me as someone who enjoys drinking water. I don’t know about the rest of y’all. And so when I talk about being proactive, like I don’t wanna wait like how it took 40 years to do our first tax reassessment, right?
I don’t wanna wait 10 years until the seawater has entered, and now we’re in a panic ’cause now we have to drink bottled water for another decade while we fix it or figure out something else, right? I wanna start working on figuring out that problem now and maybe even working to prevent it from becoming a problem or as big of one.
And so we need people who are not normal politicians. We need people who can think outside the box and push against expectations and challenge norms. And people just really, really want that kind of energy in our state government, and I would love to bring it.
Ed Mulvihill
What’s your origin story?
I’m a fourth-generation small business owner. My family’s been in this district for 90 years. And sometime in college, I kinda was getting this bug that I was like, “You know what?” Like, I had all these other opportunities and career paths, but the one I kept coming back to was I really couldn’t, like, level set not being a part of this family business.
I love our business. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s a fun industry. But I always realized, like, what I loved most about it was we’ve been this kinda community center, in our neighborhood for 90 years, and we found ways to make this a space where neighbors gather, and we have a positive impact on the community.
So we needed a leader and that was an opportunity I was able to step up and be a leader, be the president of our retail association. We started that association and got to advocate in Dover. And we had a lot of success with defending independent small business retailers throughout the state.
But then this opportunity arose with Representative Heffernan retiring, and a few people suggested like, “Hey, why don’t you run?”
And at first my answer was like, “I don’t know that that’s for me.” I’ve always enjoyed working with our elected officials and not just for our industry-related stuff, but for our community at large. And I kind of thought, like, “Leave that to someone else.” But a few folks I talked to who I really respected really encouraged me to think about running.
They said, “Hey, you’re the kind of person we need. We need somebody who’s from the area, who’s a neighbor, who’s a leader.” And I took that seriously, and we thought about it for a while and decided, yeah, I think this is kind of the next step in our service journey for the community.
Was there any particular issue that led you to run?
I hesitate to call it going viral, right? Because it’s Delaware, and there’s limited scope there. But we’re really loud about the property tax reassessment.
I’m a small business owner through and through, and the one thing I can’t stand, and again, this relates directly to some of the lobbying work we’ve done against, like, Total Wine and Costco, is when the big companies get breaks that the little guys don’t, and that is, like, my pet peeve.
The problem is that the underlying data that Tyler Technologies provided was flawed, and we see that now. So when you have these big, massive properties that saw huge, huge, huge assessment increases, which translates to millions of dollars in tax revenue loss, and the state and the county and the schools have to be revenue neutral, so that money has to come from somewhere. So in doing that split rate with underlying data that wasn’t good, it put this unfair burden on small business owners particularly.
Chase is paying a billion dollars less. How does this make sense? And so that was probably one of the issues that caught wind the most, I think. And it was a relatable issue because it has affected small businesses throughout the state. It affected residents throughout the state, and there’s been some work, some good work that’s been done to start to address that, and I think still more work that needs to be done.
I think I can say the biggest issue, at least what I hear from that’s local to your district is Edgemoor. What is your position on the port expansion there?
So that is one of the issues that like, from day one we weren’t super happy about. So in 2017, I think, was when Gulftainer first was announced as taking part in this new terminal, container terminal down in Edgemoor.
We had like over a hundred and fifty people show up because everybody felt the same way we felt like, “We need information about this.” We need to know why this is happening, how it’s happening, and what they’re gonna do to mitigate the impact on residents. And in the years since, we’ve gotten some answers, and we haven’t gotten other answers.
And a lot of people say, “Well, what are you gonna do to stop the port?” And I just give them this honest answer, which is like, “There is very little, like I’m gonna be able to do as a newly elected state representative to stop like this port expansion.” What I can do is make sure that we have a seat at the table, that there’s regular communication between the port operators and the residents, and that when there’s issues, that they’re addressed in a timely manner.
The biggest thing that I am concerned with right now is the truck traffic. There’s DelDOT studies that are out there from 2021 that talk about how this truck traffic is not gonna be supported by the existing infrastructure of I-495 at Edgemoor Road, and so it requires capital improvement.
And so the proposal that I really like from DelDOT is capital improvements to Hay Road that takes the truck traffic out of the Newport, down Hay Road, and into 12th Street, which is a much less residential area. It’s more industrial. And hopefully, that would mitigate a lot of the concerns that people have about the truck traffic.
I’ve been told by people within the sphere of your opponent that you were once registered as a Republican and are now a Democrat. Can you talk about that?
That’s my favorite question. I’ve learned so much about myself that I didn’t know was true. Never was a Republican. I was an independent when I first registered. And at some point, I’m not sure exactly the year, but I did change to Democrat. I think it was 2016. But for me it was I always prided myself on being kind of independently minded and policy over party.
But somewhere along the lines of Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination for president, I realized, like, this probably doesn’t make any sense in a state like ours where we don’t have open primaries. I can’t sit on the sidelines. I would say my voting record and donation record has always been Democratic.
But I do get a little chuckle out of that.
I think it’s also fair to say that you’ve been characterized as the, whatever term you wanna use, establishment, moderate, centrist, Democratic choice. Would you embrace that characterization? Would you reject it? Would you think there’s nuance? How would you respond that?
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s nuance to everything. I think that being a Democrat today is much different than being a Democrat 10 years ago.
I think that when we’re talking about a local election like ours, it really comes down to knowing the person you’re voting for and trusting their judgment and trusting their motives. And that’s the most important thing. We are a progressive state. We have been a progressive state, and we’ve been on the right side of a lot of those issues.
It’s a little tough as our politics becomes further and further divided, I don’t consider myself a moderate. I don’t think that’s the right word for it. I think I’m a Democrat, and I think I wanna fight for the neighbors and community members in our district for the issues that are most important to them.
I want to ask about Delaware’s unique place in corporate America as the preferred domicile.There was a big debate last year over a corporate law change that, among other things, effectively made it harder for shareholders to sue companies. The major law firms that supported it have continued their advocacy more directly with voters, including by supporting your campaign.
What’s your reaction to that spending? More broadly, what’s your approach to policymaking with respect to corporate law?
Yeah. So the support for the campaign was a total surprise. Going in we thought the biggest weakness we were gonna have was fundraising, right?
I said, “Well, how do we combat that? How do we combat, $100,000 of spending?” Which was a projected number that was thrown our way. And the answer was, well, we’re probably not going to. We’re gonna have to just go out there and door knock and get our message out best way we can and raise as much money as we can.
In regards to the corporate law aspect of it, this is a tough one. It’s Delaware, and a third of our revenue comes from that corporate franchise tax. So I understand the necessity to protect that. But I’m also open to like, what other options can we have to become less dependent on it?
It’s important. The problem I have with the opposition’s approach of kinda, hey, big companies don’t matter. But if you lose that, if you lose that third of your revenue, how do you replace it? And I have not heard a plan that makes any remote sense that would cover that gap.
It’s almost all profit. So you can’t take it lightly. You can’t jeopardize that revenue stream because the only way you replace it is through sales tax and increased property taxes. And we just went through the reassessment boondoggle and everybody saw how that went.
That would be nothing compared to what property tax would have to increase to cover this large deficit if these companies left.
Ralf Santana
I think it’s fair to say that of the three candidates, you have had the least public presence.At least I didn’t recognize your name, and I recognized the other two. Can you describe your past?
I’m a native of Philadelphia, and it got pretty bad in Philadelphia. I joined the Marine Corps.
The Marine Corps instilled in me some traits and some characteristics that led me to become as successful as I have become. I did two tours in Iraq. I obviously fought for the country. Now I understand that fighting for the country is kind of passe now and unfortunately, I can’t do anything about that.
I was in the Marine Corps Reserve for six years. I did two tours in that, and a bunch of different classes and things of that nature. Leadership courses, things like that. I enlisted in 2003. And I finally got done in 2009, somewhere around there.
Could you just kinda give us a summary of the last 15 years?
So the last 15 years, it’s been odds and ends. I tried to become a police officer, but the injuries I received in the Marine Corps prevented me from doing that.
I’ve done siding. I’ve done roofing. I’ve done all types of hard labor jobs. And then finally, I realized, “OK, let me put my Marine Corps experience to the test. Let me put it to work.” And I decided to do armed security for different companies around Pennsylvania. And finally, I work at a armed position in Philadelphia at the Social Security building in Philadelphia. And that has been where I’ve been for a while now because I got married, I have kids. You need something stable, you need a rock, you need a foundation. I’m still there. It’s helped me throughout my life. I’m in my neighborhood here where I live.
I spoke to Deb Heffernan after a while, and she was like, “Hey, everybody and their mother’s been calling me about you.” And I’m like, “Hey, I needed this stuff to get done.” I’m very persistent when things need to be done. I’m like, essentially like a dog on a bone. I’m not letting it go.
Met city council people. They all basically know who I am because of annoyances. And my wife was like, “Hey, you got the right amount of persistence, I think, to be an elected official. Like, you should probably try.” And I kinda pitter-pattered around the situation, and then finally I was like, “You know what?
If I’m gonna do it, let’s go, let’s do it now. Let’s do it a 150% full bore. And regardless of the support, I’m just gonna do it, try and make some change, and if I get elected, great. If I don’t, then I’ll keep trying to make things in my community better on my level, and then eventually get some experience and maybe run again and see what happens.”
The Edgemoor Port has caused the most debate in your district. It looks like you oppose the expansion. Is that fair to say?
I oppose it, yes. I oppose it because of the lack of transparency.
There’s not enough information there. It’s almost seemingly like it’s getting pushed through. Like, I haven’t seen any surveys on air quality. I haven’t seen any paperwork or filings of modernization of roads and bridges and highways, and there’s a lot that comes with all of that.
Now mind you, it sounds positive, 6,000 jobs, all this stuff sounds great, but there’s no assurances. There’s a lot of money being thrown around, and the money keeps going up and up and up and up, and no one knows why. They just keep saying, “That’s just what they cost now.”
And it’s just a lot of ambiguity.
I think it’s fair to say that if you are elected, you would presumably be the only legislator to oppose it, at least explicitly. The current representative supports the port expansion.
How do you feel about standing alone on an issue with a big political operation on the other side?
I’ve always been an individual, and I’ve always been one to stand up when others just fall in line.
I don’t want to be in opposition to something that sounds positive, but there needs to be opposition to make sure it’s done right. And I don’t mind being that one. I think conversationally, I think I can get in a room with some people and change some minds. I’m not saying I’m the greatest conversationalist in the world.
I’m not saying I’m a professional at negotiations, but I’ve been known to speak with some people and change their minds, or at least let them see it in a different way. And if I get in and if I get elected, I would love the opportunity to try that.
Would you say you’re more on the establishment Democratic side, the progressive Democratic side, or neither?
I don’t like to be classified as anything. I believe that, like, everybody gets, I guess, titles. Titles, for some reason, the last 20 years, is what it is. You’re either this or you’re this. You’re a radical this or a radical that. I consider myself a Democrat in a sense where I like to be malleable.
I want them to be people friendly and positive for people.
I can’t say I’m one or the other. What I will say is, if the policies help Delawareans and the American people, I’m going to vote for it.
I think everybody agrees that electricity bills are too high, including Republicans, Democrats, progressives and moderates. You were talking about revisiting contracts that the state has. What do you mean by that?
From what I’ve been reading is the state has contracts with Delmarva and/or that whole group. And the group basically says, from what I’ve read, and I’m paraphrasing here. It’s essentially there’s a certain percentage that the company has to make, right?
Right. Yeah. And whatever the company makes or whatever the company decides to fix or upgrades, the state has to reimburse, right?
What I wanna do is I’d like to maybe make a position that makes sure that these things are getting done, that makes sure they need to get done, make sure that they get done in a timely and economic fashion.
Do you think the state should say yes less often? Is that what I’m hearing?
I think that the state should definitely review. Like I said, I’m for the people. Like I said, I think it’s in my bio, but the national average for people getting raises and salaries is, like, four percent, maybe five in some places.
And every year or every time they get a rate increase, that percentage is going up more than what the people are making in salary bumps and increases. And it doesn’t seem like it would last. The American people and the homeowners are gonna be drowning eventually if that continues to happen.
So I understand, like I said, capitalism, money, business. All I wanna do is maybe fix the rates a little bit, lower them a little bit more. Understand that people don’t make raises as much as other companies think we do, like the regular people do. It’s a struggle out here for tons of families.
Every year, every so often your bills go up and taxes go up, and it’s almost like you’re getting hit from all sides. And if we can alleviate some of those hits at least a little bit, I think it’ll be a positive force for homeowners and people out here with electricity.
Is there anything else you want to note?
I just wanna say that the type of leader I want to be is the leader that listens, is transparent and does what the voters need me to do. I believe that a lot of elected officials are kind of going rogue and doing what they want instead of what the people want them to do, and I don’t want to be that type of leader.
Zack Polanski has said a vote for him in the upcoming Holborn and St Pancras byelection is a vote against the government’s reported plans to greenlight a North Sea gasfield.
The leader of the Green party in England and Wales, who was selected on Friday to contest the London seat, also said he was considering building a personal stockpile for the extreme weather predicted with the arrival of the biggest El Niño in 1,000 years, a meteorological phenomenon that supercharges floods and droughts.
Annualized inflation rate was 3.4%, same as July, and core inflation, which omits energy and food prices, rose to 2.4%
US consumer prices remained stubbornly high in August as the end of the ceasefire between the US and Iran pushed energy prices up, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics released on Friday.
The annualized inflation rate was 3.4%, the same as it was in July. The most recent peak was seen in May, when the inflation rate hit a three-year high at 4.2%. Core inflation, which strips out volatile energy and food prices, increased 0.3% from the month before and 2.4% annually.
This gallery contains sensitive images that some viewers may find distressing
Twenty-five years ago, as New Yorkers woke to crisp blue skies after a storm the day before, two planes – United Airlines Flight 11 and Flight 175 – were hijacked in Boston by terrorists loyal to the al-Qaida leader, Osama bin Laden. They were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center 17 minutes apart. On the same day American Airlines Flight 77 was flown in to the Pentagon in Virginia, and a fourth hijacked plane, United Airlines 93, was downed in Pennsylvania after a revolt by passengers. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people
According to a financial disclosure, the Pennsylvania lawmaker holds investments in companies positioned to benefit from the data center industry's continued growth.
Petrol stations in Kyiv have been hit by jet-powered drones in a wave of targeted Russian attacks as the bombardment of Ukraine’s capital enters a new phase of intensity.
At least two people were killed and 12 injured in strikes on two petrol stations on Friday morning, according to the city’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko.
The Trump administration wants a feel-good version of American history. That is not a feature of a democratic system
On Tuesday, Lonnie G Bunch III announced he would step down as the 14th secretary of the Smithsonian.
Bunch was the first historian to lead the august institution, as well as the first African American. His retirement comes as the Trump administration has pressured the Smithsonian to adopt its agenda of “patriotic” education.
Term-limited, hard-right governor instituted an ideological infiltration of universities by placing allies in powerful posts
In fewer than four months’ time, Ron DeSantis, Florida’s hard-right governor, will be termed out of office, and what critics saw as his relentless eight-year, “anti-woke” assault on higher education in the state will finally be over.
But while DeSantis himself will be gone, numerous hand-picked loyalists will remain in positions of power to protect his ideological makeover of universities and colleges. The latest, Alex Kelly, the governor’s former deputy chief of staff, and Florida commerce secretary, was named last week as the sole finalist in Pensacola state college’s search for a new president, at least the 12th close DeSantis ally to win such a plum post.
Guardian readers share stories of the friends, colleagues and mentors whose lives they continue to honor decades after the attacks
The September 11, 2001 attacks killed 2,977 people, resulting in the largest loss of life caused by a foreign attack on American soil. Twenty-five years later, Guardian readers who lost friends and loved ones are continuing to honor their memories through stories about their lives, relationships and the moments they shared.
Christopher Allen, 69, a retired estate manager from Niantic, Connecticut, remembers Jeremy “Caz” Carrington.
Hundreds of asylum seekers including at least 41 age-disputed children who were removed to France under the “one in, one out” deal have disappeared, human rights organisations have said.
The pilot scheme was hailed as “groundbreaking” by the former prime minister Keir Starmer when he and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, announced it in July 2025. Under a treaty drawn up for this agreement, it forcibly returns small-boat asylum seekers to France in exchange for others brought legally to the UK from France.
The US president is ever more wayward – and has little interest in defending Europe. The constitution may hold him to account, but we can’t wait
If Americans vote for a Republican majority in both houses of Congress in November, “I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.” But they must not spend it in Canada or China or anywhere else outside the US. So said Donald Trump in Texas on Wednesday in advance of the forthcoming midterm elections. He further told voters to “Pretend that I’m on the ballot”. It was a climactic moment in an almost two-hour rant.
Trump does not have the required trillion dollars in his pocket, and it would be illegal to disperse such a sum without congressional approval. In any case, JD Vance now appears to have rowed back on the promise.
A medical report published earlier this week says a boy in the U.K. developed erythema ab igne, or "toasted skin syndrome," after resting a laptop on his abdomen for up to eight hours a day, often while it was charging. "The marks were described as being in a patch about 15 centimeters (six inches) wide, made of flat, reddish-brown 'interlacing lines forming irregular circles and a lace-like morphology,'" reports Ars Technica. From the report: Based on the appearance, the doctors started reconsidering some sort of bruising and started asking him more questions. This is when he mentioned that he was homeschooled and used a laptop for his schoolwork. He said he typically did his work by resting his laptop on his abdomen while he worked, sometimes for up to eight hours a day, and often while the laptop was charging. Then they understood what it was.
The doctors diagnosed the boy with erythema ab igne (EAI), which translates from Latin as "redness from fire" and is also sometimes called "toasted skin syndrome." This is a skin condition caused by repeated, prolonged exposure to low-grade heat -- heat not hot enough to cause actual burns. It's most often seen in adults, and common causes include using heating pads or hot water bottles for chronic pain or sitting too close to space heaters. Some people also develop it from certain occupational hazards, like glassblowing and metal work. EAI produces a lace-like rash, just like the boy's.
It's unclear how EAI develops exactly. But researchers hypothesize that chronic heat exposure leads to damage to superficial blood vessels and the release of red blood cells, forming the tell-tale red reticulated pattern. While the boy's condition looked ominous, the good news is that EAI is generally benign and reversible -- once you remove the heat source. For severe or long-term conditions, some pigmentation and scarring can remain. But the boy's parents checked back in over several months, reporting that the rash faded and then completely resolved. Hopefully, he also got some sort of laptop stand.
Fans from around the world gather for star’s long-awaited performances after break because of neurological condition
More than 30,000 Céline Dion fans have gathered in Paris for the Canadian singer’s long-awaited return to performing on Saturday night, four years after she revealed her diagnosis of stiff person syndrome, a rare neurological condition.
Thousands more people without tickets have flocked to a series of giant karaoke events across France to belt out Dion’s famous power ballads, in celebration of the star’s health stabilising enough for her to return to the stage.
Apple’s and Google’s phones are both rated for dust and water resistance. Here’s how they compare when it comes to other features such as cameras, battery life and displays.
Stephen Joseph theatre, Scarborough The playwright explores our relationship with technology, asks if robots have souls and even questions the value of art in this sci-fi courtroom drama
For play number 92, Alan Ayckbourn returns to his preoccupation of exploring where we as a species are heading through a science-fiction lens. He goes back to the future. In The Trial of Romeo Oscar, the playwright famed for his domestic comedies looks to the year 2194 when humans have spread about the galaxy and androids live alongside us. One of them, RSDO83, is on trial for the murder of a teenage girl in his charge.
This is Ayckbourn philosophising about the future of humanity as we sit at an obvious inflection point, asking what this moment in our relationship with technology means and where it will lead us. The questions running through the play are manifold, complex and echo those asked by sci-fi writers for decades: can robots hurt humans? Do they have souls? He is also questioning the value of art and even its purpose.
Commemoration ceremonies to be held around the world for the nearly 3,000 killed in 2001 terror attack on US. Plus, JD Vance sets out his stall as heir to Donald Trump
Good morning. It is a sombre day for the nation as people gather to mourn and remember the nearly 3,000 victims of the attacks on September 11 2001, when 19 al-Qaida hijackers seized control of four airliners, slamming two of the planes into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and the fourth into a field in western Pennsylvania.
We have comprehensive coverage of the anniversary, which will be marked by ceremonies around the world. There are stories of the day from people who were there. Stanley Praimnath and Brian Clark were two of only four individuals known to have survived above the impact zone in the south tower, and they spoke to our Washington bureau chief David Smith. Anna Sweeney Rossman was five when her mother, Amy Sweeney, a flight attendant, was killed onboard American Airlines flight 11, and she spoke to Ramon Antonio Vargas about how the events of that day have cast a shadow on her life.
Donald Trump’s promise of a $5,000 “Trump dividend” for every US citizen if Republicans retain control of the US Congress in November’s midterm elections has sparked incredulity and accusations of bribery.
With his approval rating at a historic low, Trump brought down the curtain on the Republicans’ first ever midterm convention by pleading with supporters to do him “the biggest favor” and “pretend” they are voting for him in November’s US elections.
JD Vance, meanwhile, made a clear pitch that he should be the heir to Trump with a blistering speech that featured exaggerated claims of success, criticism of the Democrats as “lunatics” and an aggressive dismissal of a protester waving a Mexican flag.
A US appeals court has rejected Trump’s attempt to impose sweeping restrictions on mail-in voting before November’s high-stakes midterm elections, dealing a fresh blow to the president’s attempted crackdown.
California has adopted what Gavin Newsom described as “nation-leading” legislation that bans addictive social media features for young users, regulates companion chatbots and implements new safeguards around AI.
At least 760,000 children in England and Wales missed lessons as more than 1,700 schools closed or finished early
The gruelling heatwave that hit the UK in June caused pupils to miss more than 15m hours of lesson time as soaring temperatures forced hundreds of schools to close, according to a study.
The research found that at least 760,000 schoolchildren in England and Wales missed lessons owing to closures during the heatwave – one of five in the UK this summer – as temperatures inside some classrooms topped 40C (104F), leaving pupils and staff suffering from heat stress, nausea and headaches.
Retired Battalion Chief George Campbell of the New York City Fire Department stands before a September 11th Fallen Hero's Memorial on September 3, 2026. (Photo by Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via…
Anti-Muslim sentiment is used as a political weapon. Meanwhile, Muslim American leaders are making a difference for all
It’s been 25 years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, and during this time Muslim Americans have learned how to live in that dangerous space between other Americans’ fears and their ignorance.
The fear was clear from the beginning. Immediately following 9/11, Muslim Americans faced what Human Rights Watch called “a severe wave of backlash violence”. A tide of hate rose up against ordinary Muslims and those who appeared to be Muslim, including at least three murders in the immediate backlash after the attacks. The federal government, for its part, began targeting Muslim immigrants in a massive surge of repression that legal experts soon compared to the Palmer Raids of the 1920s.
The president’s chaotic schemes of aggrandizement, from Venezuela to Iran, have no larger rationale
Trumpism is the lowest stage of imperialism. “We’re not going to invade Greenland. We’re going to buy it,” Donald Trump reportedly told the annual black-tie dinner on 1 February of the private Alfalfa Club, an assemblage of prominent Washington figures, a number of whom he had publicly humiliated, and others he was investigating or suing. “It’s never been my intention to make Greenland the 51st state. I want to make Canada the 51st state. Greenland will be the 52nd state. Venezuela can be 53rd.” The room greeted several of his remarks with dead silence. His cosplay as the Pirate King was not received as a good-humored takeoff from a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. He went on. “So many people in the room I hate,” he said in a display of honesty. “Most of you I like,” he claimed. Then, at his peak euphoria, he flew off to Mar-a-Lago to plan his attack on Iran, which took place 27 days later.
Trump’s imperialism of piracy and plunder is less of a system even than that of the earliest imperialism of 17th-century privateers raiding the Spanish Main, the divine right of kings, and monarchs dividing up the spoils as favors to create their lords and earls. His schemes of aggrandizement operating by threat and force are justified by no larger rationale, nothing as exalted as “the white man’s burden”, marauding wherever and however he can to seize resources.
I can still remember the smell. But I’m at a loss to accurately describe it to you. It wasn’t the unmistakable odor of death, although that must have been some tiny part of it. It wasn’t like burning tires or plastic or even metal. It was all that, but it was more.
In the quarter century since, I’ve been all over the world, but I’ve never experienced anything like the smell near the rubble pile at Ground Zero in September 2001. The air was acrid and thick, a swirl of toxins and carcinogens made possible by turning two large, jet-fuel laden planes into cruise missiles and aiming them at gigantic office towers. As it burned, we all inhaled a haze of pulverized cement, glass fibers, asbestos, lead, dioxins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls (better known as PCBs), and whatever else. It remains a part of us still.
The 9/11 attacks — which killed almost 3,000 Americans, toppled New York City’s Twin Towers, wrecked the Pentagon, and took down a plane near Shanksville, Pennsylvania — marked the most devastating intelligence failure in U.S. history and sent the United States into a paroxysm of self-induced catastrophes from which it has never emerged. Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s spectacular coordinated assault supercharged what had been a slow-motion imperial decline, trapping the U.S. in a death spiral of ruinous intertwined economic debacles, foreign policy failures, democratic backsliding, authoritarianism, and debilitating wars and military interventions.
Bin Laden’s plan was to trap the U.S. in expensive, foreign quagmire wars that would trigger a domestic economic collapse. It was patterned on the strategy that the local mujahideen, he and other foreign fighters, and the U.S. and its allies had used to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Not only does bin Laden’s strategy continue apace long after his 2011 death, but it also spawned an even more effective means of destroying America from within. Bin Laden’s attacks turned the U.S. government into an engine for the destruction of America, inducing it to implement policies that have devastated the country and immiserated its people. That includes unrestrained spending while cutting taxes on the rich, closer ties with despotic regimes, the sneak-and-peek warrants and roving wiretaps of the Patriot Act and other domestic surveillance programs, and the ruinous failed forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
This swirl of toxic policies and governmental overreach opened the door to something beyond bin Laden’s wildest dreams, the rise of an even more effective terrorist who has crippled the U.S. in countless ways and sought to strangle the best of the country: President Donald Trump.
Hijackers crashed planes into the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, in New York City. Photo: zz/Larry Le Vine/STAR MAX/IPx via AP Images
The so-called Pearl Harbor of the 21st century was no surprise. Long before President George W. Bush, while vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, received a classified intelligence memo titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S,” the Al Qaeda leader had been honest about his plans. “The call to wage war against America was made because America has spear-headed the crusade against the Islamic nation,” he announced in a 1998 TV interview, castigating the U.S. for stationing troops in the Middle East and its support of Israel. “The Western regimes and the government of the United States of America bear the blame for what might happen. If their people do not wish to be harmed inside their very own countries, they should seek to elect governments that are truly representative of them and that can protect their interests.”
When bin Laden made good on his threats, slaughtering thousands on 9/11, he knew it was bound to trigger a response. One possibility was a measured law-enforcement action that would end with arrests and legitimate legal proceedings. The other was a president standing on a rubble pile, vowing revenge, a never-ending fruitless war against a tactic (terror), a secret torture gulag, a forever prison, and a kangaroo court. One would be ruinous for bin Laden. The other, an answer to his prayers.
Bin Laden’s masterstroke was to attack the U.S. after it had elected a lightweight nepo-baby president and a power-mad vice president who had cut his teeth in Richard Nixon’s criminal-packed White House. While he came to be an enemy of Donald Trump, it was Dick Cheney who paved the way for America’s current would-be tyrant, with the vice president’s relentless campaign to concentrate power in the White House, creating an imperial presidency predicated on the “unitary executive theory,” a misbegotten notion that the Constitution grants the president unrestrained authority over domestic and foreign policy, such as unilaterally removing government officials and waging wars.
“A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion.”
In both style and substance, Cheney prefigured Trump. In the immediate wake of 9/11, Cheney went on TV to announce the government would now operate on the “dark side,” as he put it, claiming “a lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion.”
America has never emerged from those sinister shadows. Cheney was arguably the leading cheerleader for the ruinous war on terror, which began in Afghanistan, spread across the globe, and grinds on a year after his death; a prime architect of the disastrous Iraq War and the faulty, unverified, and cherry-picked intelligence that underpinned it; an enthusiastic supporter of torture, calling the waterboarding of detainees “a no-brainer”; a vocal supporter of domestic surveillance; a promoter of undemocratic, unprecedented, and unparalleled secrecy; and a belligerent bully.
“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in a 2022 ad for his daughter, Liz, one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump at the end of his first term. He might have been right — and he was certainly responsible. Trump has built on Cheney’s accomplishments and pushed America toward autocracy at an unprecedented rate.
Trump has built on Cheney’s accomplishments and pushed America toward autocracy at an unprecedented rate.
Bin Laden was never able to raise an army in America, lead an insurrection, and launch an attack on the U.S. Capitol. (The plane meant to carry out that attack on 9/11 crashed in rural Pennsylvania.) But on January 6, 2021, with Trump’s encouragement, MAGA supporters stormed the Capitol. The House Select Committee that investigated the “domestic terrorist attack upon the United States Capitol Complex and issues relating to the interference with the peaceful transfer of power” concluded that Trump engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 Presidential election.” It found that Trump, for hours, deliberately failed to act to stop his followers from attacking the Capitol. Smith said that the evidence gathered by his team “was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial,” had the American people not reelected Trump.
Bin Laden would have no doubt cheered the attack on the Capitol and endorsed Trump’s reelection run, had he been alive. And he would not have been disappointed by the results. Upon returning to office, Trump unleashed a coordinated assault on American democracy, undermining the rule of law and fundamental freedoms by pardoning and rewarding insurrectionists; weaponizing the Justice Department, regulatory agencies, and the military against American citizens; firing government watchdogs; attacking the free press; engaging in naked and unrestrained corruption, such as violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause; engaging in due process violations, immigration lawlessness, and unconstitutional executive power-grabs; and launching a disastrous war with Iran and a murder-spree on the high seas amid a host of other foreign and domestic policy fiascos.
Since January 2025, there have been nearly 4,000 separate authoritarian acts by the Trump administration including around 1,050 undermining democracy, more than 940 suppressing dissent, over 650 aggressive or destabilizing foreign policy efforts, about 600 acts weakening civil rights, around 500 centered around controlling information or spreading misinformation, and more than 320 acts of corruption, according to the Trump Action Tracker, which documents acts and statements of Trump and his administration that echo those of other authoritarian regimes.
A startling global analysis also discovered “autocratization” in America rose at a speed “unprecedented in modern history” last year. Under Trump, the researchers found, the U.S. has ceased to be a functioning liberal democracy after the largest one-year drop in democratic principles in American history. This took the country back to 1965 levels, when Jim Crow racial discrimination in voting — including violence and intimidation, poll taxes, and literacy tests — were still commonplace. These results are bolstered by research by the nonprofit group Protect Democracy, which finds that the corrupting of elections, quashing of dissent, spreading of disinformation, and aggrandizing of executive power are all “escalating” in Trump’s second term, while both authoritarian actions and the politicizing of independent institutions in the U.S. are “rapidly escalating.”
In 2001, the U.S. government recorded a budget surplus of about $128 billion and was projected to pay off the national debt by 2009. But after miring the U.S. in forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere, bin Laden looked upon the fruits of 9/11 and took a victory lap in 2004, bragging that his strategy of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy” had helped to push the U.S. deficit to “more than a trillion dollars.”
“All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note,” bin Laden announced.
He could not have imagined just how closely and how long America’s leaders would hue to his plan, conducting commando raids, drone strikes, armed interventions, and outright wars in Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, and elsewhere. Nor could Al Qaeda’s leader have foreseen how deep into financial ruin the U.S. would sink as a result.
Bin Laden’s 2004 trillion-dollar boast wasn’t actually accurate. The U.S. federal deficit was just $413 billion in 2004. But it wouldn’t remain that low for long. America’s post-9/11 wars have now cost or caused long-term obligations to taxpayers of an astonishing $8 trillion, according to a 2021 analysis by Brown University’s Costs of War Project.
And Trump has continued to expand America’s ruinous foreign interventions from Ecuador to Iran. An Intercept analysis found that Trump has presided over more than 20 armed conflicts and wars during his two terms in office. And the costs continue adding up. Linda Bilmes, a former assistant secretary and chief financial officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce and currently a public policy professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, previously told The Intercept that the excessive expenses of the Iran war, alone, would likely reach into the trillions of dollars. And Trump is also currently pushing for a post-World War II record $1.6 trillion Pentagon budget for next year.
“The Trillion Dollar War Machine,” by William D. Hartung and Ben FreemanAvailable at Bookshop.org.
In case you hadn’t guessed, the pre-9/11 projection that the national debt would be paid off in 2009 never came to pass. Instead, the Bush and Trump presidencies were marked by massive tax cuts that mostly benefited corporations and the wealthiest Americans, depriving the Treasury of almost $10 trillion in expected revenue.
So after bin Laden’s attack; the forever wars of Bush, Barack Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden; and Trump’s contributions in disastrous conflicts and gross fiscal mismanagement, the $5.8 trillion national debt of 2001 has now ballooned by 590 percent to a staggering $40 trillion. That’s $1 million, 40 million times over.
About 50 percent of the debt has been accrued since Donald Trump was first elected. This week, Trump pledged to pay every American adult $5,000 if Republicans keep control of Congress in November, which would cost more than $1 trillion. And that $128 billion budget surplus from 2001? It’s been replaced by a projected federal budget deficit for this fiscal year of $2.1 trillion. This debt and deficit spiral is also occurring during a time of near-full employment when the government’s finances should actually be improving.
If bin Laden made it to paradise, as was his hope, he is no doubt smiling as the Trump administration dismisses the ballooning debt and the president peddles nonsensical claims that “growth will take care of that very easily.” The U.S. will actually spend more than $1 trillion this year just paying interest on the debt. The Peterson Foundation projects that total interest payments will more than double over the next decade — and that may be an undercount. And even if the debt remained steady at $40 trillion and the United States were to pay down $1 million per day, it would take almost 110,000 years to pay it off.
All this debt is also likely to keep interest rates high, raising the cost of mortgages, auto loans, credit cards, and small business credit, hurting ordinary Americans. High deficits and debt — particularly if coupled with high inflation or interest rates — make it harder for the government to respond to crises like a recession, depression, pandemic, or other emergency.
Then there is the weakened safety net that comes from deficits and debt. Bin Laden doesn’t need to worry about his golden years, and Trump is living them right now at taxpayer expense. But in 2032 — just six years from now — the Social Security trust fund is on track to go bust, to take one example of shortfalls on the horizon. By law, when the trust fund hits zero, all retirees’ benefits are mandated to drop by more than 20 percent.
Looking back, I’ve come to think of the acrid odor of the collapsed Twin Towers as more than a mélange of burning paper, glass, concrete, and around 70 carcinogens. It was, instead, a harbinger of something even darker than the nearly 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11 — a long road of death and destruction stretching out into the future, beyond the vanishing point.
Even Bin Laden couldn’t have imagined long-term lethality of his attacks. Close to 9,700 first responders, survivors, and those who helped to clear nearly 1.8 million tons of debris at the World Trade Center have died of illnesses tied to 9/11, according to the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. And more than 57,000 first responders and others have been diagnosed with 9/11-linked cancers. Around 155,000 people have enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program, which provides care and health monitoring to people who were exposed to toxic air after 9/11. And an estimated 400,000 people were exposed to toxic contaminants, the risk of physical injury, and physically and emotionally stressful conditions in the days, weeks, and months following the attacks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The vengeful war on the world that bin Laden managed to provoke has proved even more devastating than the effects of the toxic stew we inhaled near Ground Zero. An estimated 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere between 2001 and 2023, alone. Another 3.6 to 3.8 million people are estimated to have died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the toll to at least 4.5 million dead and counting. This quarter century of carnage and all that it unleashed has left the U.S. hollowed out and rotting from within; a deterioration in every conceivable measure from economics to democratic ideals to the spiritual health of the nation.
Bin Laden’s bleed-until-bankruptcy plan was designed to sink America’s economy — and it continues to work to great effect. And by ushering in the presidencies of Donald Trump, bin Laden left the United States morally bankrupt, too. Twenty-five years after 9/11, the country is a pale shadow of the superpower that emerged from World War II having been laid low not by the Soviet Union — the nuclear-armed power it long considered an existential threat — but by two trust-fund terrorists: the scions of a Saudi construction empire, and an outer borough New York City real estate developer, respectively.
“The wise man doesn’t squander his security, wealth, and children for the sake of the liar in the White House,” bin Laden said in 2004, referring to Bush. He likely couldn’t have imagined America choosing an even more inveterate liar, an even greater intellectual lightweight, and an even more ruinous president. A quarter century after 9/11, it’s clear that bin Laden won. But the victory was not his alone. And, in the end, his role in it turned out to be vanishingly small. Bush, Cheney, Obama, and Biden, as well as a raft of politicians, government functionaries, and all who went along with the madness unleashed by the attacks, played key roles in helping hobble the U.S. in the 25 years since the September 11. But it’s been Trump, more than anyone else, who has made bin Laden’s lofty 9/11 dreams America’s never-ending nightmare.
Why Should Delaware Care? Affordable Housing has been a persistent theme in Wilmington, with debates over subsidies for developers and rent stabilization. Now a different fight is also emerging at some of the few affordable apartments available for the city’s seniors, with some saying their publicly supported homes are falling short of basic living standards.
Wilmington city officials are set to inspect several publicly supported high-rise housing complexes after residents brought a list of complaints to City Council last week, saying management entities, including the Wilmington Housing Authority, have failed to address poor living conditions that have persisted for months.
More than 50 senior residents came to last week’s Wilmington City Council meeting with complaints about months of living conditions in publicly supported housing, citing inconsistent hot water, rodents, bedbugs, flood damage, mold, broken elevators and unsanitary common areas.
“At my age, I shouldn’t have to live like this,” said Willette Taylor, a Wilmington senior living in the downtown Wilmington Windsor Apartments.
The City Council meeting was scheduled by Council President Ernest ‘Trippi’ Congo to discuss the “ongoing issues impacting seniors in high-rises.”
After hearing almost two hours of public testimony, Congo criticized the Wilmington Housing Authority, which manages at least three of the complexes that were discussed during the meeting. He said there may need to be a conversation around the ownership of the WHA buildings and that the agency “does not deserve to be the managers” of the buildings anymore.
“It’s obvious that WHA has failed in their responsibility as being decent landlords,” Congo said. “And I think at some point we have to kind of stop being so nice to them and put them on notice.”
But Caroline Klinger, spokeswoman for Mayor John Carney’s office, called Congo’s proposal “unrealistic.”
She noted that the city does not have the sole authority to take buildings away from WHA and transfer them elsewhere, as the entity is authorized and funded by the state and federal government.
“These buildings are heavily subsidized because of WHA’s ownership, and shifting that ownership would result in drastic, unaffordable rent increases for seniors and our most vulnerable residents,” Klinger said in an email to Spotlight Delaware.
Although the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections will conduct inspections to address residents’ concerns, Congo said he wants City Council to continue discussing the conditions at publicly supported housing.
“We have to figure out wherever the next step is, how is it going to be impactful,” Congo said.
Senior residents protest living conditions
The public housing concerns surfaced late last month when Windsor Apartments residents protested outside the Walnut Street building, demanding management address monthlong problems with inconsistent hot water, bedbugs, pests, mold and incomplete repairs.
Among them was Michelle Webster, who has lived at the complex for three years. Webster previously told Spotlight Delaware that mold, water damage and bedbugs had gone unaddressed in her apartment for months. She said the conditions have even kept her grandchildren from visiting because they fear being bitten.
Spotlight Delaware visited Webster’s apartment and observed mold in the bathroom, ceiling damage, and rotting wood on the cabinets.
Michelle Webster Webster told Spotlight Delaware that mold, water damage and bedbugs have gone unaddressed in her apartment for months. The living conditions have even kept her grandchildren from visiting because they fear being bitten. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY BRIANNA HILL
In response, Webster and two other residents said they intend to withhold their rent and instead place it into Wilmington’s newly established rent escrow account.
Under Delaware Law, tenants can withhold two-thirds of their daily rent if their landlord does not provide such vital items.
Several individuals present at last week’s meeting voiced similar concerns about the complex.
Windsor is owned and operated by Arbor Management, which is an affiliate of Leon N. Weiner & Associates (LNWA), a Delaware-based affordable housing developer. The building operates under the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Section-8 and Low Income Housing Tax Credit programs.
Tim Lamberto, vice president of Arbor Management, told Spotlight Delaware the agency has received residents’ concerns and acknowledged that maintaining a 14-story building can be complex. He said management is scheduling a resident meeting within the next 30 days.
“Residents have every right to expect us to address problems promptly and thoroughly, and management is working diligently to address the issues,” Lamberto said in an emailed statement.
Lamberto said extensive repairs have been made to drain lines throughout the building. He also said the cause of the hot-water issues has been identified, and a contractor has been hired to repair the system. That work is expected to begin shortly, he said.
When bed bugs are reported, Lamberto said, an exterminator treats the affected areas and conducts follow-up inspections.
“We are committed to keeping the residents informed,” Lamberto said. “We will inform residents when work is scheduled to begin, keep them updated on its progress and follow up on individual concerns.”
Residents raise concerns across WHA properties
More than 50 residents attended Wednesday’s City Council meeting, with almost two dozen speaking about living conditions in their housing complexes.
Most of the residents at the meeting came from Windsor Apartments, Compton Towers, Crestview Apartments, and Park View Apartments, though others attended from additional affordable housing communities.
Crestview, Compton and Park View are owned and operated by the Wilmington Housing Authority.
During the meeting, residents criticized WHA for how it has managed the complexes.
“The Wilmington Housing Authority, if you lived here, you would do better,” said Kathleen Johnson, a Compton Towers resident.
Officials from the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections, Wilmington Police Department and Wilmington Housing Authority were also present to hear residents’ concerns.
Congo said similar meetings to discuss conditions in Wilmington Housing Authority-owned properties were held last year and in 2022, with Councilman Coby Owens hosting the 2025 meeting.
Residents from Park View, Compton Towers and Crestview raised concerns about unclean common areas, pests, a lack of security and broken elevators in the complexes.
Sandra Parker and Tracy Jordan, who serve on the Crestview Resident Council, said the building’s stairwells lack cameras and that residents have found human feces, vomit, urine and drug paraphernalia in them.
Sandra Parker and Tracy Jordan raised concerns at a recent Wilmington City Council meeting about unclean common areas, pests, a lack of security and broken elevators in their Wilmington Housing Authority-owned apartment complex. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY BRIANNA HILL
Both women also raised concerns about the building’s elevators. Crestview spans across nine floors, but only one of its two elevators has been working since February, Parker said. The smaller elevator cannot fit a gurney, she said, raising concerns about how paramedics would move a resident during a medical emergency.
“We just feel like we’re at the end of our rope there,” Parker said. “We don’t know what else to do, or who to go to.”
Spotlight Delaware visited Crestview and observed one of the building’s two elevators out of service. No security personnel were stationed at the front desk, and some of the stairwells lacked cameras and had visible stains. No drug paraphernalia was visible during the visit.
A list was also posted on the building’s wall, naming more than 100 people banned from the property. Jordan and Parker told Spotlight some of those individuals have been found sleeping in the stairwells and maintenance closet and cooking in the kitchen of a common area.
WPD officials said officers work with Wilmington Housing Authority leadership and security to address illegal activity at its properties. WHA also previously hired police officers to patrol its complexes, though the department said the last such assignment was May 26.
“Our officers will continue to work with WHA leadership and security in reference to any illegal activity, and members of our Community Engagement Unit will continue to visit the properties to interact with residents and address concerns,” David Karas, a WPD spokesperson, said in a statement.
In an interview with Spotlight Delaware, WHA’s Executive Director Ray Fitzgerald said his organization does not have a record of the majority of the complaints residents expressed.
If residents do not submit formal work orders — a necessary part of the system for maintenance to happen — and instead tell maintenance or management about issues in passing, the issues will likely go unresolved, he said.
“They just have these meetings where it’s pitting us, the management, against residents who have been made aware of the process and they have chosen not to take advantage of it, but they want to complain about stuff not getting done,” he said.
Fitzgerald also asserted that Congo has never reached out to him regarding any resident complaints.
He shared with Spotlight an email he sent to council after the Sept. 2 meeting, responding to the grievances raised by residents.
He noted that he meets with residents twice a year at each high-rise. The next set of meetings will be scheduled for next month, and council is welcome to attend, Fitzgerald said.
He also noted that in Park View and Crestview’s most recent HUD inspections, the buildings scored highly.
In response to the complaints made during the meeting, Department of Licenses and Inspection Commissioner Gabriel Pabon said that he was “extremely embarrassed” of the stories being shared, emphasizing that residents should reach out directly to his office or call 311 if they have issues with the building.
Klinger noted that any building with 6 or more units requires inspection every five years; however, routine inspections had not been done in decades prior to Mayor Carney taking office. His administration initiated a high-rise inspection program in February as a result to ensure apartment conditions are consistently reviewed, she said.
Compton Towers was fully inspected in June, Klinger noted. Windsor, Crestview, and Park View are scheduled for inspections throughout September and October.
Voice your concerns Wilmington Residents can voice concerns regarding their housing conditions through Wilmington 311 online, by calling 311, or by contacting the Department of Licenses and Inspections directly at (302) 576-3030.
Why Should Delaware Care? As Sussex County continues to see new residents moving to the region, the state of Delaware also faces a housing shortage. But as Latino and Hispanic workers making up an increasingly important part of the area’s homebuilding workforce, fears about the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies have thrown a wrench into some facets of the county’s construction industry.
The HVAC technician was driving home from a construction site when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents surrounded his car.
The man, who spoke to Spotlight Delaware on the condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal from federal officials, said the scene reminded him of the gang violence he fled Mexico to escape.
“I had already seen guns, masked men,” he said. “That moment they stopped me, I had the same image as what I used to see in Mexico.”
The HVAC technician was detained by ICE, taken first to Dover and then to a federal facility in Philadelphia where he would spend the next 11 days. He described the detention center’s conditions as degrading and filthy.
The technician is one of countless undocumented immigrants who built a life and career working in the Sussex County construction industry.
But as the region continues to welcome new residents and the state grapples with a housing shortage, the fear of being detained as part of the Trump administration’s increased ICE enforcement has complicated construction work for Delaware immigrants.
Jennifer Cohan, the president of the Associated Builders and Contractors of Delaware, said the Hispanic and Latino population makes up one of the fastest growing components of the region’s construction industry.
It has been “alarming,” she said, to see ICE agents show up at construction sites in Sussex County.
“We haven’t seen it as significantly as some other states, but it is happening,” Cohan said. “So it creates this level of concern, which definitely impacts the industry.”
Outside impacts on Sussex construction
To address current housing shortages and keep pace with projected growth, Delaware needs approximately 45,000 more housing units, said Denise Forman Gaines, president of the Delaware Association of Realtors.
One local contractor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told Spotlight Delaware her employees are anxious about immigration enforcement, though the company has not experienced any direct issues, she said.
She also has seen potential employees deterred from working with her because of immigration enforcement fears.
The contractor recently began using Facebook to recruit new workers, but she said those posts have received comments from some users discouraging people to apply. They fear the contractor’s posts are actually a trap connected to ICE.
“There have been a lot of people who just don’t show up to work, or who seem kind of suspicious,” the business owner said in Spanish.
But aside from immigration fears, some contractors say economic conditions have slowed their work options.
Rafael Gonzalez Ramirez, owner of G General Construction, specializes in residential and commercial remodeling. He said he has started to work independently without any employees because of a drop in the demand for construction work.
“There is a lack of work, and everything is getting more expensive,” Ramirez said.
Ramirez acknowledged the immigration concerns facing the industry, but he said those are more concentrated within bigger operations, or for people who drive far distances to reach their job sites.
The aftermath of being detained
After spending eleven days detained, the HVAC technician was released after his lawyer filed a writ of habeas corpus — a court filing that questions the legality of a person’s detention.
On the day of release, the technician said he felt overwhelming relief and gratitude to God.
“Getting released was actually the easiest part,” he said. “The hard part is still going on. That’s what I’m fighting now.”
At the time of his arrest, the technician said he had around $20,000 worth of electrical and HVAC tools in his truck. It also housed all of his personal documents, he said.
After he was detained, his truck was left at the scene and was eventually stolen, the technician said.
Since being released, the man has relied on previous business contacts to continue working. Because he is undocumented, he has been paid only in cash.
The man is currently fighting an immigration removal case in court — a long, expensive legal process that has created a fear of deportation.
“My bills, my rent, food, my immigration lawyer — that is what my work has covered, but I can’t grow beyond that,” the HVAC technician said. “I can’t go to Maryland to do jobs. I can’t go from Sussex County to Kent County with peace of mind.”
The flyer for Lefty’s Alley and Eats NFL Launch Kickoff Party on Sunday, September 13. Photo Credit: Lefty’s Alley and Eats.
Lefty’s Alley and Eats is welcoming in the new NFL season with NFL Kickoff Launch Parties at its Lewes and Newark locations with raffles to support local nonprofit organizations.
Lefty’s Alley and Eats will celebrate the start of a new NFL season with NFL Kickoff Launch Parties at its Lewes and Newark locations on Sunday, September 13, according to a company press release sent on September 9. The launch parties will feature food and drink specials throughout the day, raffles and giveaways in addition to the football action.
Raffle tickets will cost $5 and the winners will be announced at halftime of the 1:00 p.m. slate of games. All raffle proceeds will be donated to two local nonprofits. Each Lefty’s location will match the total amount raised on site and make additional donations to each locations respective organization.
The Lewes location will be donating to Home of the Brave which is an organization based in Milford, Delaware, trying to reduce homelessness for Military Veterans, according to the organization’s website. The Newark location — the company’s newest location — will support Special Olympics Delaware which provides sporting opportunities for children and adults with intellectual disabilities.
(To learn more about Lefty’s Newark location click here.)
“Football season is always a big part of the experience at Lefty’s, but we wanted this year’s kickoff to be about more than just watching the games,” Lefty’s Alley and Eats founder and owner, DJ Hill, said via the press release. “It’s an opportunity for our guests, our team and Lefty’s to come together, have some fun and make a meaningful contribution to organizations doing incredible work right here in our communities.”
Representatives from each nonprofit organization are expected to be in attendance at the respective locations to share more about their organization and the work being done in the community.
Lefty’s launch parties are the start of its gameday schedule for the 2026-2027 NFL season.
Starting on September 20, Lefty’s will follow a “Sunday Game Day routine” that features a raffle with one free entry, a jersey giveaway at halftime of the 1:00 p.m. slate of games and food and drink specials throughout the day. The routine is scheduled to take place across all 18 NFL regular season Sundays.
To learn more about Lefty’s Alley and Eats and their gameday specials click here.
Twelve-year-old Amelia Johnson was born with a rare genetic anomaly and is nonverbal. Amelia’s mother was able to get a private school voucher specifically for children with disabilities — but couldn’t find a private school that would accommodate Amelia. Zaydee Sanchez/ProPublica
It’s after 6 p.m. by the time Angela Johnson hurries home from work. Her 12-year-old daughter, Amelia, is at their house outside of Pensacola, Florida, with a nurse trained to care for medically fragile children. Amelia, who was born with a rare genetic anomaly, has endured many surgeries and requires a brain shunt and a feeding tube.
The nurse starts caring for Amelia as soon as a bus from the public school drops her off. Johnson loves much about the school. But as a physical therapist, she also recognizes its limitations. The district’s physical and occupational therapists have to travel from school to school. The classroom teacher can become overburdened.
For all of Amelia’s life, Johnson has had to fight for the education and the school resources her daughter is entitled to receive under federal law. It has exhausted her.
Two years ago, she thought she’d found a better option for Amelia when she learned Florida has a state-funded voucher program for children with disabilities. She jumped at the promise of “school choice.” The program, the largest of its kind in the country, channels taxpayer dollars into accounts that parents can use to pay for private school tuition and other education expenses.
Johnson envisioned a private school with smaller classes and more one-on-one time with trained staff, a place where she didn’t have to battle for every minute of therapy her child required. She imagined Amelia learning to cut a straight line and to write her name.
In her bedroom, Amelia looks for a book to read with her mom, Angela Johnson.Zaydee Sanchez/ProPublica
In 2024, Amelia was awarded about $10,500 from the program. Thrilled, Johnson embarked on a weekslong hunt for a private school.
She began scouring school websites, most of which said nothing about services for children with disabilities. She started calling schools, first an upscale Christian one nearby with a strong reputation. It had no nurse trained to care for medically fragile children, so she reached out to several other schools. At first, some said they could help — until Johnson explained that her daughter had a feeding tube, that she couldn’t yet hold a pencil correctly and needed assistance toileting. Then they all said no.
Johnson couldn’t find a single one that provided nurses equipped to care for her daughter’s medical needs. Or teachers trained to educate nonverbal children. Or even a bus ride home.
Therein lies the catch in “school choice” for children like Amelia. Unlike public schools, private ones generally aren’t required to educate students with disabilities. And they often don’t.
The choice wasn’t hers, Johnson realized. It was the schools’. The vouchers “are basically designed to make you go to private school,” Johnson said, “but my kid can’t access private school.”
Johnson returned the money to the state, along with a very stern email.
Voucher programs and the private schools they increasingly fund have proliferated across the country. Yet those schools often reject children with disabilities — the very kids who were used to help sell early voucher programs to lawmakers and the public — for having needs that are too costly, complex or disruptive. That leaves those children with few options beyond the public schools. And as public schools lose enrollment as a result of more and more voucher use, they lose resources that would benefit children who remain, including those with disabilities.
About 3 million school-age children with disabilities live in states with universal voucher eligibility. Florida, one of those states, illustrates how the promise of school choice can be empty for these children.
After walking around the block, Amelia removes her leg braces, which can be uncomfortable. Her mother, Angela, encourages her to wear them and walk at least once a day.Zaydee Sanchez/ProPublica
When children are approved for education savings accounts, a voucher-style program like the one Florida uses, states often put public money into accounts parents can use to pay expenses like tuition. If families can’t find a private school and don’t use the money, it may roll over to another year or, depending on the state, get returned.
About 8% of the $1.7 billion Florida distributed last year through its voucher program for disabled children was returned because recipients — kids like Amelia — were enrolled in public school instead, according to data from the nonprofit that disburses most of the funds. By comparison, just 1% of money in the state’s program open to all students was returned for the same reason.
Florida is one of three states where ProPublica obtained data allowing us to make such comparisons.
Louisiana, which launched an education savings account program in the 2025-26 school year, delivered $43.1 million to parent-controlled accounts. Overall, 6% was returned because the families didn’t spend the money, state data shows. But among students with disabilities, that rate was far higher at 30%.
In Texas, data is still coming in for the first year of its $1 billion voucher program. But so far, students with disabilities are opting out of using the money at slightly higher rates than all other students.
Though families return the money for multiple reasons, many have indicated they did so because they couldn’t find suitable private schools that would enroll their students.
“Families are at the mercy of the schools — and schools choosing their kid — versus the other way around,” said Chris Roe, director of state policy at the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a national association working on behalf of children with disabilities.
Today, at least 18 states have voucher-style programs with universal eligibility or are phasing them in. Florida eclipses them all. More than a half-million Florida schoolchildren — roughly 1 in 6 — use a voucher today. When lawmakers opened the state’s voucher program to all children in 2023, two-thirds of the newly enrolled students were already attending private schools.
Yet private schooling often remains out of reach for children like Amelia, the children lawmakers once used to gain a toehold for future voucher expansions. They shared disabled children’s compelling stories, named legislation in their honor and created some of the nation’s first statewide voucher programs specifically for these students.
They started in Florida.
After Angela gets home from work, she and Amelia head out to play in the front yard.Zaydee Sanchez/ProPublica
Illusion of Choice
In 1999, an unassuming man wearing glasses and a lavender tie stood before his colleagues in the Florida Senate to champion a bill that would change the trajectory of American education. John McKay, a Republican, wanted to give parents of children with disabilities a chunk of taxpayer money to pay for private school tuition.
McKay pointed to his own family’s experience. Public schools had failed to meet the needs of his daughter, who had significant learning disabilities. He and his wife could afford to send their daughter to a private boarding school, but not all parents had that option.
“We’re alienating parents,” McKay argued. “I’ve been alienated by the public system when I was told I didn’t have any choices with regard to my children.”
The McKay Scholarships began as a pilot program — the nation’s first voucher system specifically for students with disabilities. Lawmakers soon expanded it, creating the nation’s first statewide voucher program for this group of children. Ohio followed Florida’s lead, then Utah and Arizona and Georgia and, later, Louisiana and Oklahoma and others.
Across the statehouses, politicians stressed one sentiment: choice. Parents would no longer be tethered to their local public schools and could choose where to send their children.
Georgia’s sponsor said he sought “to give any disabled student whose parents are dissatisfied with their assigned public school the ability to attend the public or private school that best fits their needs.”
“They can just take the scholarship and go to private school,” an Oklahoma lawmaker pledged.
The programs have since helped thousands of children with disabilities move to private schools, including those designed to meet their unique needs. But for many children, especially those with more severe disabilities or who live in areas where few if any private schools operate, the promises of choice were never realistic.
Some legislators backing those early programs said they recognized this problem but argued that any children helped by the new options made the effort worthwhile. And they hoped that competition fueled by money flowing into private schools would create a more robust school marketplace in the long run, one that would accommodate students with special needs.
Amelia loves playing on her swing outside.Zaydee Sanchez/ProPublica
In 2021, West Virginia lawmakers adopted their first and only foray into vouchers, an education savings program that they have since opened to all students. To get the bill passed, some legislators made familiar promises to disabled children — even though the state has only a handful of schools that specifically say they will serve even the least-intensive of children’s needs.
“Our kids can’t go to a private school,” said Christy Black, an advocate for Disability Rights of West Virginia who has a daughter with Down syndrome. “I called every private school from Huntington to Charleston because that’s as far as we could drive her and work. But no one would accept her because she has a cognitive disability.”
More than half of Utah’s counties have no private schools that take its vouchers for students with disabilities. In Georgia, 71% of counties have none. And in Louisiana last year, among about 350 private schools, only 14 reported enrolling a single child with a disability. Eight of those admitted five or fewer such students.
Even in Florida, with its urban centers and roughly $5 billion voucher programs, ProPublica found that more than a dozen counties have no private schools that serve kids with disabilities or have only one school with limited offerings. Our analysis of state data also shows that more than half of Florida’s private schools say they do not serve students with any type of disability.
“It’s touted that this program is an equalizer, and then people have choice,” said Jinny Kim, managing attorney at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, a national civil rights and policy nonprofit that advocates for people with disabilities. “But then if you really look at the details, it’s not actually how it happens.”
Anxious about her daughter’s upcoming transition to middle school, Atlanta-area mother Marguerite Lane decided to explore private schools that take the state’s voucher. Her daughter, who has autism, does well academically but can be very sensitive and struggle in bigger classrooms without enough behavioral support.
Lane applied to and visited several private schools and found a small, arts-infused one that said it would accept some children with learning challenges. She thought it would serve her daughter well, but then she opened an email from the enrollment director.
“We don’t believe we can support her needs and help her thrive in this class,” it read, “and we also don’t want to compromise the educational experience of the other students.” The last part hurt most. Lane thought, “God forbid the other children learn empathy.”
Marguerite Lane and her daughter, Penelope, at home in Atlanta. Penelope likes to play piano and has a pet cat, Gatsby.Alyssa Pointer for ProPublica
Toehold Strategy
As politicians debated those first voucher programs for children with disabilities, a common refrain echoed across statehouse chambers: The plans were just small programs for a specific group of students.
“It’s a very limited scholarship,” a Utah representative assured colleagues in 2004. “This really is about special needs.”
“It’s not, as I heard some of you say to me, the beginning of vouchers. No, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a program to help a group of students that need our help,” a Georgia House member told colleagues in 2007.
Behind the political scenes, a different message spread.
As Arizona adopted its first program for children with disabilities in 2006, Clint Bolick wrote an essay entitled “Toe-Hold Strategies.” Bolick, who was then president of the advocacy group Alliance for School Choice, is now a justice on the Arizona Supreme Court.
Voucher advocates, he wrote, were “acting smarter.” Rather than take on powerful teachers unions directly, they were pushing smaller programs geared toward specific students whose needs were harder for politicians to oppose. “The strategy makes sense from a moral perspective, for it focuses assistance on the neediest schoolchildren,” he added. “It also works politically, because choice begets choice: Once the Rubicon is crossed and legislators vote to adopt a school choice program — no matter how small or targeted — it becomes easier to support a new one, or expand the old one, the next time around.”
By 2011, a half dozen states had launched voucher programs specifically for students with disabilities. At a “school choice” conference that year, Howie Beigelman sat on a panel that discussed the strategy. At the time, he was deputy director of public policy for the advocacy arm of the Orthodox Union, a prominent Orthodox Jewish umbrella organization. He offered guidance to those who might want to get into vouchers.
“Special needs is a very easy way to get into this business,” Beigelman said. “Anyone, no matter how partisan they are, it’s very hard to say special needs is not where people need ‘special’ education.” (He recently told ProPublica via email that this was his opinion and he had “never seen anything ‘intentional’ about using special needs scholarships for anything more than what they are plainly for: helping educate children with special needs.”)
Angela reads a book to Amelia, emphasizing each word and encouraging Amelia to repeat the words aloud with her.Zaydee Sanchez/ProPublicaPenelope used to bring stuffed toys to elementary school to help relieve stress, but as a middle schooler she has switched to a fidget spinner.Alyssa Pointer for ProPublica
Shortly after vouchers for disabled children spread to Arkansas in 2016, the University of Arkansas posted on its website an essay by Sarah McKenzie, executive director of the college’s Office for Education Policy. “Special education private school choice programs are often seen as a ‘foot in the door’ for school choice laws,” she wrote. “Once some success has been shown to the public, more laws can be passed to expand these programs.”
Indeed, following those wins, lawmakers across the country opened the floodgates, often to all or most comers, expanding voucher-style programs into a $10.6 billion tide of public money.
Today, two-thirds of states have some kind of voucher-style program on the books. These programs mostly serve a very different population of students than the early ones did. Most current voucher recipients don’t have disabilities, nor do they need to hunt for a private school that will enroll them. They were already in private schools when they tapped this new windfall.
North Carolina state Sen. Lisa Grafstein, a Democrat and a civil rights lawyer who advocates for people with disabilities, opposes her state’s voucher system, which is now open to all students. “The thing that genuinely infuriates me,” she said, “is when people with disabilities are used as pawns.”
Failure to Address Access
Two decades after states began adopting vouchers for children with disabilities, lawmakers have done little to improve access to private schools for them — even as they have created programs open to all comers. Most legislatures haven’t required private schools that take this public money to accept even a few kids with such needs. Nor have they created effective incentives to help operators open more specialized private schools, which can be costly to run.
That’s largely because one of the driving forces behind vouchers is the goal of keeping rules to a minimum so private schools will take the public money.
Amelia plays a card game with her parents, who encourage her to repeat the names of the animals pictured on the cards.Zaydee Sanchez/ProPublica
“Getting the government involved in private schools isn’t the answer,” said former West Virginia Delegate Amy Summers, a Republican who played a central role in creating her state’s universal voucher-like program. She thinks competition for students will prompt private and public schools to better serve children with disabilities.
Another key advocate in West Virginia was Republican state Sen. Patricia Puertas Rucker. She homeschooled her two children with disabilities, including a now-adult daughter who she said came home from public school with bite marks and bruises.
Rucker hopes that the state’s voucher program will give more families a way to foot tuition bills or band together to create small schools called microschools. But she regrets that her colleagues approved the payments without additional money for students with disabilities, as some states offer. That extra money could help families afford the higher tuition often charged by specialized schools — and make it more viable for operators to open them.
“It is very expensive to have all this special equipment and to even build the buildings for children that have very specialized special needs,” Rucker said.
But beyond raising those payments, she doesn’t think the state should do anything to cajole or require private schools to enroll children with disabilities. “The minute you start doing that, you are basically disincentivizing private schools from participating, and then you’re denying parents. I do not want to do that.”
It’s not that private schools haven’t opened to take advantage of the voucher windfall. They in fact have been proliferating in recent years. And some of these new schools specifically welcome children with disabilities. But most of them do not.
The Pain of Rejection
Diavonni Jordan and her son Jamir Souders at home in Dallas, Georgia. Private schools rejected Jamir, who has ADHD, explaining that they could not support his needs.Alyssa Pointer for ProPublica
Parents described private school rejections as “insulting” and “heartbreaking,” especially when school personnel have met the children. But families don’t always need to apply or even call the schools to get a denial. Some websites or handbooks make it clear.
One small Baptist academy in rural Georgia invites applicants to “join our family” but declares in its handbook that it isn’t equipped to educate children with learning disabilities or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. “If such students are accepted in our school, it is up to the parents to provide extra services other than what the classroom teachers would do in the confines of the classroom.”
In 2023, Taylor Cordes, a former special education teacher, embarked on what she calls her “personal passion project” to see how many private schools in her home state of North Carolina post such clear rejections. She dug into every handbook she could find for 660 schools and found that only about a third of them indicated they would accept students with even limited disabilities. More than 1 in 10 declared they would not serve such students, she said.
Many families endure deeply hurtful personal rejections in the search for education. Private schools typically decide who to enroll after meeting parents and their children, as Diavonni Jordan, an Atlanta-area mother, learned. Her now-8-year-old son, Jamir Souders, has ADHD. When he was suspended multiple times from his public school and started to get into fights, she searched for an option with smaller class sizes where she thought he would focus and learn better.
A single mother of two, Jordan applied to a local Christian school, then took time off work to visit it. She filled with hope as she toured the well-kept campus and spoke to its friendly staff. But within a week, she opened an email from the school. “The support that we could give in our 1st grade would not be enough for him this year,” it read. The school’s program was small, ill-equipped to provide for his needs, it added.
Jordan expanded her search to other traditional private schools, even when they would mean longer drives for her. She applied to five and toured two. But the verdicts never changed.
“Unfortunately — it doesn’t look like we would be a good fit for your family,” another Christian school wrote. Jordan wondered what child constituted a “good fit” for the school and felt the heartbreak of knowing it wasn’t her son. Perhaps, she thought, she will homeschool Jamir in the future. But for now, with a new school year upon them, he remains in public school.
Jordan and Jamir read a book together in his bedroom.Alyssa Pointer for ProPublica
Paul Roberts, who was employed by UPS for 44 years, was working at a customer care center when he was struck
A longtime United Parcel Service (UPS) employee less than two weeks away from retiring was struck and killed by one of the company’s vehicles while he was at work in St Louis, triggering a federal labor investigation along with an intense outpouring of grief from his family and colleagues.
Paul Roberts, 63, was on duty at the UPS customer care center in Earth City, Missouri, on the night of 4 September when a company vehicle hit him, authorities said.
Militant feminist led campaigns to legalise abortion and divorce and went on to become foreign minister
Emma Bonino, the radical Italian politician who led campaigns to legalise abortion and divorce against the objections of the Vatican, has died aged 78.
“Today we lose not only our leader but also one of the most clear-sighted, courageous and free figures in the political history of our country,” the small party she founded, More Europe, said on Facebook on Friday.
We have a first play of the forthcoming Tomb Raider remake and speak with its developers. Can they improve on the gameplay without losing what made the 1996 original such a classic?
We join Lara Croft in St Francis’ Folly – inspired by the Unesco-listed monasteries of Meteora in Greece – as the light shines through the cracked ceiling and a flock of bats glide across the vast ruins below. When Lara leaps down to the monastery’s crumbling pillared courtyard, it becomes clear that these screeching, leathery creatures aren’t just set dressing. As they lurch towards her with unpredictable movements, she dispatches the swarm with a flurry of gun fire and panicked punches.
It’s a suitably cinematic reintroduction to our heroine and her very first adventure. Co-developed by longtime Lara custodians Crystal Dynamics and Polish studio Flying Wild Hog, Legacy of Atlantis is a reimagining of the classic 1996 game Tomb Raider, and this familiar cliffside location is now brimming with new life and believable detail. Yet while our reunion gets off to an auspicious start, I have my concerns. It feels like reconnecting with an old friend at the pub, only for them to begin spouting conspiracy theories two pints in.
Madison, Wisconsin — Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin filed a lawsuit Thursday challenging two state abortion restrictions, arguing they violate protections for liberty and bodily autonomy under the Wisconsin Constitution.
The case, filed in Dane County Circuit Court, targets laws requiring abortions to be provided by physicians and requiring patients to wait 24 hours between an initial consultation and the procedure. Planned Parenthood argues those rules create unnecessary barriers and prevent qualified providers such as nurse practitioners, physician assistants and certified nurse midwives from offering care.
Wisconsin currently requires patients seeking an abortion to make at least two visits because of the waiting period, and medication abortion must be provided in person by a physician. Planned Parenthood operates abortion clinics in Milwaukee, Madison and Sheboygan.
The lawsuit seeks a broader ruling that Wisconsin’s constitutional guarantees of liberty include a right to make decisions about abortion without unjustified government interference. Planned Parenthood previously pursued a similar constitutional argument during litigation over Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion law, but the state Supreme Court resolved that dispute on other grounds without deciding whether the state constitution independently protects abortion rights.
Republican lawmakers criticized the new case, arguing abortion policy should be determined by the Legislature. Democratic officials and abortion-rights advocates said the existing restrictions unnecessarily interfere with medical decisions.
The lawsuit arrives as abortion policy remains a major issue in Wisconsin’s 2026 elections, with control of the governor’s office and Legislature on the ballot.
‘Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry’ will culminate on US soil on Saturday, a staging post on the road to America hosting the World Cup in 2031
When New Zealand and South Africa kick off at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore on Saturday, there will be more at stake than victory in “Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry”, the four-Test series the Springboks lead 2-1. For World Rugby CEO Alan Gilpin, the game is a key staging post on the road to the 2031 World Cup, which the US will host – a journey that could include Six Nations games on American soil.
“We’ve been in a long process with venues and cities, over the last two years,” Gilpin said, of the build to World Cup kick-off. “We’ve still got 25-plus cities involved in that process, which is fantastic in terms of engagement and enthusiasm.
The US manager’s relationship with the international job has changed with a full World Cup cycle beginning
I hope, in this lifetime, you find someone who loves you the way Mauricio Pochettino loves Tottenham Hotspur. The grip Spurs have on his heart seems the stuff of a literary classic: his imperfect partner who called things off at the first sign of trouble must merely check in on him occasionally to rekindle hopes of a reunion.
Perhaps a bit extreme, but this week’s revelation – that he’d return to Tottenham even if they were relegated and chalking his absence up to imperfect timing, not the part about handing the club a decade-old title – has implicity laid out the terms of his return as United States manager. Others may always have interest in his services, and a certain North London suitor will never get the door slammed in their face outright.
A Hilcorp well site in New Mexico in August 2025 Courtesy of Earthworks
The Trump administration is poised to loosen environmental restrictions on oil and gas wells that produce very little energy but release vast amounts of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas.
The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to drastically weaken requirements for leak inspections and equipment upgrades at more than 700,000 low-producing “stripper wells,” according to a draft rule being reviewed by the White House and seen by ProPublica. These wells — which tend to be old, poorly maintained and thus prone to leaking — produce just 6% of the country’s oil and natural gas but are responsible for roughly half the sector’s methane pollution, studies show.
The EPA acknowledged similar figures in the draft. But it said that the cost of complying with existing regulations would force the lowest-producing wells to shut down and that this was “unreasonable” — even though it would eliminate just 0.4% of U.S. oil and gas production, according to an industry estimate cited in the proposed rule.
The proposal, which would also weaken methane controls in the wider oil industry, is expected to save companies $42 billion through 2050. An attached memo says the rollback will help to “unleash” American energy, one of President Donald Trump’s favorite slogans.
Environmental advocates said deregulating stripper wells will do little to boost energy output while significantly increasing climate pollution.
“This is not about energy dominance,” said Darin Schroeder of the Clean Air Task Force, a climate advocacy group. “It’s about padding the pockets of oil and gas operators and saddling society with the costs.”
A warning sign is posted at a Hilcorp installation in New Mexico.Courtesy of Charlie Barrett/Oilfield Witness
The proposed changes are the culmination of a campaign by a previously low-profile faction of the oil industry that has gained unprecedented influence during the second Trump administration. In the draft, the EPA said it is deregulating stripper wells — defined as those that produce up to 15 barrels a day — in response to petitions from the Independent Petroleum Association of America and the National Stripper Well Association, among other groups.
As ProPublica reported in June, the IPAA has long enjoyed the support of a little-known oil billionaire named Jeffery Hildebrand. He is the founder and owner of Hilcorp, a privately held company known for buying up old, poorly maintained stripper wells — a business that was threatened when the Biden administration imposed aggressive restrictions on methane pollution in 2024.
In response, Hildebrand became one of the oil industry’s biggest Trump donors. Trump, back in office, promptly appointed a former Hilcorp lobbyist named Aaron Szabo to a top post at the EPA, putting him in charge of the effort to unravel the new methane rules.
Szabo had previously helped to draft a letter on behalf of the American Exploration and Production Council — which has Hilcorp’s CEO on its board — opposing those rules. He also gave advice on climate regulations for Project 2025, the deregulatory roadmap for the current administration.
Among Project 2025’s recommendations: eliminate an EPA program that would track “super-emitter” events — enormous methane releases that have long plagued the oil industry — and would oblige companies to respond to them. The AXPC and the IPAA have also called for an end to the program.
And the current proposal from Trump’s EPA aims to do just that.
An IPAA spokesperson declined to comment on the group’s influence in the Trump administration but said in an emailed statement that its lobbying “has focused on ensuring regulations are workable for low-production and marginal wells.”
The NSWA and AXPC didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment. NSWA representatives previously told ProPublica that they had asked the EPA to soften restrictions on stripper wells because many of their members couldn’t afford the compliance costs. AXPC CEO Anne Bradbury previously told ProPublica that the group’s members were “committed to building on a legacy of world-leading methane emission reductions.”
Hilcorp spokesperson Nick Piatek didn’t provide a comment either but previously told ProPublica that the company was “proud” of recent efforts to reduce its emissions.
While Szabo didn’t respond to emails from ProPublica, the EPA’s press office said in a statement that he “had not done any work for AXPC for well over a year before he started working for the federal government” and that he had reviewed federal ethics rules with the agency’s ethics staff upon joining. The agency declined to comment on the substance of the methane rule revisions except to confirm that they were being reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget. The OMB’s press office didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment.
The rules now being rolled back were a key component of former President Joe Biden’s ambitious climate agenda. They would have cut methane pollution from the oil industry by 80%, the EPA said at the time. Because methane breaks down relatively quickly — in about a dozen years — cutting these emissions is one of the few known ways to reduce global warming in our lifetimes. Methane accounts for one-third of the rise in temperatures since the Industrial Revolution, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.
Since methane is the main component of natural gas, the rules would also have prevented useful energy from being lost to the atmosphere in the form of leaks and other releases. All told, Biden’s EPA had valued the rules’ climate, health and energy benefits at more than $7 billion a year, even after accounting for increased compliance costs.
Breaking with precedent, Trump’s EPA didn’t include calculations of the environmental and health impacts of the new proposal. But if it goes into effect, much of the public benefit will evaporate while oil and gas producers see increased profits.
From Shropshire to Hamburg, depleting reserves and spiralling costs are spawning a continent-wide energy crisis
Bridgnorth Aluminium has faced down Brexit, Covid and repeated energy shocks in recent years. But this winter is bringing extra “stress and pressure”, says its head of sales, Adrian Musgrave.
Musgrave’s company makes rolled aluminium, used in packaging, construction and the manufacture of items such as cars and batteries. Like many stretched industrial businesses across Europe, Bridgnorth Aluminium faces a looming threat of soaring energy bills, which Musgrave describes as “just worry upon worry”.
Some restaurants, hospitals and construction firms pushed forward with layoffs as the end of temporary protected status for 232,000 Salvadorans loomed.
How did 9/11 shape the world we live in?Audiosfarrell.drupa…
In an extended edition of our weekly Independent Thinking podcast, we look back over a quarter of a century to examine the longer-term consequences of 9/11.
Twenty five years ago the deadliest terrorist attacks in human history, on 11 September 2001, saw 2,977 people killed in New York, Washington, and aboard the planes hijacked by 19 members of Al-Qaeda.
An immediate response followed with the US-led ‘war on terror’, which saw Western forces occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, and two decades of military operations across the Middle East and beyond.
We look back over a quarter of a century to examine the longer-term consequences of 9/11.
We examine how US foreign policy and military power changed perceptions of America and its allies. We look at the consequences for a Middle East still riven by conflict. And we discuss how the focus on counterterrorism left the US positioned to deal with a new multipolar era in which it faces challenges from Russia and the rise of China.
This week’s episode is hosted by Laurel Rapp, director of Chatham House’s US and North America Programme, standing in for Bronwen Maddox.
She is joined by General Sir Richard Barrons, a senior consulting fellow with the International Security Programme. Also by Farea Al-Muslimi, a research fellow at Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Programme. And by Jason Burke, International Security Correspondent of the Guardian.
Produced by Podmasters, with thanks to Stephen Farrell.
Home page photograph: Wreckage of the World Trade Center on 13 September 2001 in New York City, by Chris Hondros/Getty Images.
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.
Welcome boost for chancellor with unexpected rise put down to rapid growth of AI in services sector outweighing Iran war fallout
The UK economy grew in July as the rapid expansion of AI appeared to outweigh the economic damage from the Iran war, in a welcome boost for John Healey.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed a surprise 0.4% increase in gross domestic product (GDP), compared with 0.3% growth in June. City economists had forecast zero growth.
Widespread damage across Ni‘ihau, Kauaʻi and O‘ahu, while in Japan further heavy rainfall causes widespread flooding
Hurricane Lowell caused significant damage to Hawaii’s western islands this week. On Tuesday night the centre of Lowell tracked 50 miles (80km) from the island of Ni‘ihau in Kauai county as a category 2 storm with winds of up to 110mph. The strong winds resulted in widespread power outages across Ni’ihau, and the islands of Kauaʻi and O‘ahu.
The event was particularly notable because a tornado watch had been issued for Kauaʻi on Monday night and into Tuesday morning. According to research maps from Iowa State University, it was likely to be the first tornado watch in Hawaii’s history. In the event, a tornado was not documented, however hurricanes can produce tornadoes and most often occur in thunderstorms within rain bands away from the centre of the hurricane. Currently, five named stormed have occurred in the central Pacific with the strong El Niño this year being a key driver in the above normal hurricane season, as noted by the National Weather Service.
New York, New York — Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Thursday that she “hates” the governments and policies of President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while emphasizing that her criticism does not extend to the United States or Israel.
“I love Israel, and I hate Netanyahu’s government and his policies. I love America, and I hate Trump’s government and policies,” Clinton said during an appearance on MS NOW’s “Morning Joe.” She argued that both governments are pursuing policies she believes are damaging to their respective countries.
Clinton also addressed a new Haaretz report alleging that UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed warned Netanyahu roughly 10 days before Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was planning a major operation. Haaretz reported that Netanyahu did not relay the warning to senior Israeli security officials.
Netanyahu has categorically denied that the call or warning occurred, calling the report false and politically motivated. He has instructed his lawyers to pursue a defamation lawsuit against Haaretz and the journalists behind the report.
Clinton went further than the underlying reporting, speculating that Netanyahu either dismissed the warning or possibly wanted to see what Hamas would do before responding. She acknowledged that she did not know his thinking and called the episode, if accurately reported, a “failure of leadership.”
With Israel holding national elections Oct. 27, Clinton said the United States should take a tougher approach if Netanyahu remains in power, while suggesting a different Israeli government could create an opening for a new U.S.-Israel strategy.
Exclusive: Calls from Labour grow as 105 MPs write to PM urging ‘obvious’ step to alleviate cost of living crisis
Andy Burnham is coming under increasing pressure from his own MPs to commit to improving paternity leave in the UK in the next budget, with more than a quarter of Labour MPs writing to the prime minister to urge him to take action.
Ahead of the chancellor’s first budget next month, 105 MPs have written to Burnham calling on him to increase statutory paternity leave to help alleviate the cost of living crisis and arguing that lowest-paid fathers are the hardest hit by meagre paternity leave provision.
Five-set matches are physically punishing, occasionally absurd and increasingly under threat. They also produce much of what makes grand slam tennis great
Tuesday night’s quarter-final match between Ben Shelton and Carlos Alcaraz had everything a US Open spectacle could ask for: huge stakes, knife-edge drama, top-shelf competition and an American hero who comes through in the end. The only fault to find was really the matter of time. The first ball wasn’t struck until 11.05 in the evening, and Shelton’s clinching ace didn’t come until 3.33 in the morning – marking, after a total of 4hr 28min on court, the latest-ending US Open match by a whopping 43 minutes.
Somewhat predictably, the discourse among media and fans following the late-night match has swiftly moved on from the USTA’s misadventures in scheduling to a referendum on the five-set match and whether it should be put out to pasture. For the record: that would be a colossal unforced error.
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: August was the joint-hottest month ever recorded, tying with July 2023, according to the EU's climate service. The record was driven by a combination of climate change and the rising influence of El Nino, pushing heat into the atmosphere across the Pacific. Temperatures for the month were 1.65C above pre-industrial levels -- surpassing the critical 1.5C threshold agreed by countries to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. While a single month above 1.5C does not mean it has been permanently crossed, it shows a trend towards breaching that limit. The month also capped western Europe's warmest summer, with high temperatures pushing the season past the deadly heat of 2003.
San Francisco boss hesitant for team to play another game in Melbourne
LA Rams head coach Sean McVay refuses to blame travel plan for loss
Victorious San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan said he loves Australia, the “gladiator-ish” MCG and its surface, the local hospitality and the country’s NFL fans, even if he may not want to play another game so far away from home.
After the 49ers’ 27-7 victory over the LA Rams in the first NFL match in Australia, the 46-year-old revealed he wants to come back to holiday and see more of the country than this week’s goldfish bowl routine of hotel-to-practice-to-hotel would allow.
The world’s most powerful country responded to the worst terrorist attack in its history by inflicting terror of its own – around the world, and at home
As clear as that cloudless September morning, Jenna Jacobs McPartland remembers the moment everything changed. “I was cleaning the bathroom and watching the Today show in the background and nine months pregnant,” the 52-year-old recalls by phone. “I think they were showing ‘Today throws a wedding’ when the news broke in.”
A plane had hit the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York. McPartland did not know that her husband, Ariel Jacobs, was attending a conference at its Windows on the World restaurant.“I called his office to say, ‘Hey, turn on the TV. Do you guys know what’s going on?’ His assistant said, ‘Oh my God, Jenna, he’s there.’ The whole world disappeared and there was this sort of hollow collapsing feeling.”
The country is one of just three that still permits commercial whaling, while its government has faced mounting pressure to ban the practice
Iceland will submit a bill in February 2027 which could permanently ban whaling in its waters, a move that would leave Norway and Japan as the only two countries to permit commercial whaling.
Whaling in Iceland has been put under intense scrutiny since a government-commissioned report was published in 2023 that found harpooned whales took two hours to die. The report led to a temporary suspension of the hunt that year.
The president demonised Democrats in an attempt to wangle votes in midterms despite backlash over Iran war
With his approval rating at a historic low, Donald Trump has brought down the curtain on the Republicans’ first ever midterm convention by pleading with supporters to do him “the biggest favour” and “pretend” they are voting for him in November’s US elections.
The president is facing a growing backlash over rising prices and the war in Iran. Sweeping losses for the Republican party could effectively turn Trump into a lame duck for his final two years in the White House.
Her Horizon Fund seeks $100m to stop practice harming 230m women and girls globally
Frontline activists and leaders in the fight against female genital mutilation, which has affected more than 230 million women and girls worldwide, have welcomed an unprecedented $15.5m (£11.4m) fund aimed at creating “unstoppable momentum” to finally end the practice.
The launch of the fund comes as women’s rights are increasingly under attack and donor funding is in sharp decline, particularly for work led by FGM survivors in local communities. It is thought to be the largest single philanthropic contribution to ending the practice of FGM.
The Supreme Court has blocked a federal judge’s ruling that would’ve restored Republican-drawn congressional districts in Missouri.
The decision, issued by justice Brett Kavanaugh, appeared to sound a death knell for efforts by the Missouri GOP to extract an additional Republican-leaning congressional seat for their party ahead of the midterm elections.
Vice-president dog-whistled, exaggerated claims of success and echoed Trump talking points to excited audience
JD Vance made a clear pitch that he should be the heir to Donald Trump on Thursday night, closing out the Republicans’ midterm convention with a blistering speech that featured exaggerated claims of success, criticism of Democrats as “lunatics” and an aggressive dismissal of a protester waving a Mexican flag.
Speaking in Dallas, the vice-president showed he could channel the basest instincts of his boss, filling his remarks with dog whistles and echoing Trump’s false claims that Democrats “cheered” the 7 October massacre of Israelis.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels are transforming the world's forests, wetlands and tundra to the point they are releasing emissions that could further worsen global heating by as much as 30%, a new study has found. As the world heats up, permafrost in the high latitudes is thawing, fiercer wildfires are burning in drying forests and wetlands and lakes are warming. All of these changes are themselves causing the release of planet-heating methane and carbon dioxide locked in trees and soils, therefore worsening the climate crisis, the paper states.
While scientists have long known of these "feedback loops" that amplify the impact of direct pollution from burning coal, oil and gas, the emissions from natural sources are largely unaccounted for in climate projections. This additional heating is however significant, researchers found, with emissions from natural sources set to amplify global heating by 20% to 30% by the end of this century. This would add an estimated 0.2C to 0.4C to the global average temperature by this time, depending on the overall action taken by countries to combat the climate crisis.
[...] This latest paper makes clear that action by countries to cut fossil fuel pollution will still lessen the amount of additional emissions that come from landscapes. Under the most optimistic climate scenario where emissions are cut quickly, natural sources will add 0.2C of warming, the paper found. Under a worse case higher emissions scenario, 0.4C will likely be added. Current policies put in place by governments are likely to see the global temperature rise to 2.6C above pre-industrial times, according to Climate Action Tracker. This will likely cause severe disruption and hardship to billions of people through sea level rise, crop losses and other consequences. "This hidden multiplier is missing from the models guiding climate policy, so those models are likely underestimating how much warming is coming -- and overestimating how much carbon we can still afford to emit," said Sam Abernethy, a scientist at Spark Climate Solutions who led the research, published in Environmental Research Letters.
The disruption of the worldâ(TM)s carbon cycles is now being seen in "real time," said Rob Jackson, a Stanford University scientist and study co-author. "The results are a wake-up call, and itâ(TM)s imperative that they be included in the next generation of climate policies," he added. "Failure to do so will make meeting the worldâ(TM)s climate goals less and less likely."
Jie Ren, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology; Amit Samanta, University of Utah; and Xuan Wu, Oregon State University Awarded 2026 Fellowship
“The selection committee is honored to recognize this year’s honorees for their innovative work advancing the future of high-performance computing,” said Josep Torrellas, Chair, George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship Selection Committee. “Their research is addressing critical challenges across the field—from developing new approaches for GPU-accelerated computing and scientific data analysis to improving the performance, resource efficiency, and sustainability of large-scale computing systems. Together, their efforts are helping shape a more capable and sustainable future for HPC, and we look forward to the long-term impact of their work.”
This year’s honorees and specifics of their work include:
Jie Ren, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia
Ren was named a 2026 Fellow for advancing GPU-accelerated linear algebra through algorithm-architecture co-design, enabling high-performance sparse solvers and finite element computations on modern supercomputers.
His research focuses on developing efficient numerical algorithms and software for GPU-accelerated high-performance computing systems, particularly in sparse linear algebra, discretization methods, and computational science. His earlier work also covered GPU-accelerated machine learning and computer vision systems. These efforts have laid the foundation for his future research in which he plans to explore the co-design of algorithms and modern heterogeneous architectures for large-scale scientific and computational problems.
Amit Samanta, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.
Samanta was named a 2026 Fellow for advancing leadership-scale HPC infrastructure efficiency and sustainability through scheduling and resource-management systems that bridge on-premise supercomputers with cloud platforms for modern AI-driven scientific workflows.
Through his work, he develops control planes for large-scale computing systems that span increasingly heterogeneous resources, including HPC clusters, cloud capacity, serverless functions, and quantum accelerators. His research addresses the limitations of traditional scheduling approaches by developing resource management techniques that determine where and when workloads run and how resources are allocated across these diverse computing tiers.
Beyond improving performance and resource utilization, his research incorporates sustainability into computing resource management. He develops scheduling policies that treat electricity, carbon, and water usage as first-class considerations, accounting for factors such as time of day, grid conditions, and site. Together, these efforts move resource management beyond performance optimization toward an integrated approach for improving the efficiency and sustainability of large-scale computing systems.
Xuan Wu, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Ore., U.S.
Wu was named a 2026 Fellow for pioneering error-controlled methods for compressing, retrieving, and analyzing scientific data that unlock faster scientific insight from extreme-scale simulations, which has been a central focus of her research on high-performance data compression and analysis.
Through her work, she develops error-controlled compression techniques that reduce storage and communication costs while preserving the information needed for scientific analysis. Her research has extended scientific compression to challenging settings such as unstructured data, helping address critical data-movement and storage bottlenecks in large-scale computing systems.
Beyond reducing data size, her research aims to make compressed data more useful throughout the scientific workflow. She has developed progressive retrieval techniques that avoid unnecessary data transfer by reconstructing data according to analysis requirements and explored analytical operations directly on compressed data. Together, these efforts move compression beyond storage reduction toward an integrated approach for improving the efficiency of data-intensive scientific computing.
In addition to this year’s three recipients, the George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship Selection Committee also recognized an Honorable Mention recipient: Yankai Jiang, a computer engineering doctoral candidate at Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He earned this recognition for making HPC system design and resource management water and energy sustainable in an AI era.
Nominations for the 2027 George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship award are now open. Candidates must be enrolled in a full-time PhD program at an accredited college or university; must meet the minimum scholastic requirements at their institution; have completed at least one year of study; and have at least one year remaining between the application deadline and their expected graduation. Nominations must be submitted by May 1, 2027. To submit, visit ACM’s Awards Nomination page.
About the ACM – IEEE CS George Michael Memorial Fellowship
The ACM-IEEE CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship is endowed in memory of George Michael, one of the founders of the SC Conference series. The fellowship honors exceptional PhD students throughout the world whose research focus is on high performance computing applications, networking, storage, or large-scale data analytics using the most powerful computers that are currently available. The Fellowship includes a $5,000 honorarium and travel expenses to attend the SC conference, where the Fellowships are formally presented.
About ACM
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.
About SC
SC, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, sponsored by ACM and IEEE-CS, offers a complete technical education program and exhibition to showcase the many ways high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis lead to advances in scientific discovery, research, education and commerce. This premier international conference includes a globally attended technical program, workshops, tutorials, a world class exhibit area, demonstrations and opportunities for hands-on learning.
Additional $150 million in capital supports product development, manufacturing ecosystem readiness, high-volume production, and new Bengaluru Design Center in India
SAN JOSE, Calif., Sept. 10, 2026 — Ayar Labs today announced it has secured an additional $150 million in funding, bringing its total primary capital raised in 2026 to $650 million. Separately, the company disclosed that Wiwynn made a strategic investment earlier this year. Wiwynn, a cloud IT and infrastructure provider for data centers, joins a growing group of strategic backers that includes Alchip, AMD, Intel, MediaTek, and NVIDIA.
Ayar Labs TeraPHY optical engine
This new capital will support Ayar Labs’ continued transition to high-volume manufacturing, including investments in product development, validation, scaling the manufacturing ecosystem, and opening a new Bengaluru Design Center. The company continues to establish deep integration across the semiconductor manufacturing and engineering ecosystem to deliver the highest-performing and manufacturing-ready CPO solution for AI scale-up.
“Copper interconnect is becoming the limiting factor for AI scale-up,” said Mark Wade, CEO and co-founder of Ayar Labs. “This funding allows us to move faster on manufacturing-ready co-packaged optics at scale. We’re deepening our work across the foundry and packaging ecosystem and growing our engineering capacity to support customer programs worldwide.”
As AI systems scale from single accelerators to multi-rack architectures, performance is increasingly restricted by the power and physical constraints of electrical I/O. Ayar Labs CPO solutions bring high-bandwidth, energy-efficient connectivity closer to compute, enabling system architects to extend AI scale-up while reducing the power and complexity that comes with copper interconnects.
“Co-packaged optics is a foundational technology for the next generation of AI and cloud data centers,” said William Lin, President and CEO of Wiwynn. “Through our collaboration and investment with Ayar Labs, we see a clear path to new architectures that reduce the power and complexity limits of copper interconnects, powering rack-scale deployment for the next wave of hyperscale AI data centers.”
As part of its growth strategy, Ayar Labs is expanding its worldwide engineering presence with a new Bengaluru Design Center. This engineering hub will complement existing teams in the United States and Hsinchu, Taiwan. The company’s vice president of silicon engineering, Sankara Venkateswaran, hired earlier this year, is overseeing the new office, with Arun Balachandar, senior director of engineering, serving as site lead. The new India Design Center team will build end-to-end engineering capabilities across silicon product development.
“Our new Bengaluru Design Center supports our transition from technology development to commercialization and production,” said Venkateswaran. “As customer demand and the complexity of our product roadmap increase, expanding our global engineering capacity will help us execute faster, support multiple development programs, and collaborate more closely with partners and customers across the region.”
Ayar Labs is rapidly hiring to meet the immediate demand for co-packaged optics. Visit ayarlabs.com/careers to see a complete list of open roles in San Jose, Hsinchu, and Bengaluru.
About Ayar Labs
Ayar Labs is transforming AI infrastructure with the industry’s first proven co-packaged optics (CPO) solution manufactured in partnership with the world’s leading semiconductor ecosystem. By unlocking performance gains and reducing workload costs in power-constrained environments, Ayar Labs’ optical engines are key to enabling next-generation AI scale-up. Founded in 2015, Ayar Labs is funded by domestic and international venture capital firms, as well as strategic investors including AMD, Applied Ventures, MediaTek, NVIDIA, and VentureTech Alliance. For more information, visit www.ayarlabs.com.
RENO, Nev., Sept. 10, 2026 — CIQ, the founding support and services partner of Rocky Linux, today moved RLC Pro AI to Linux 6.18, the latest long-term kernel. Enterprises get the latest kernel features with a vendor standing behind them, and the same tuned stack now runs anywhere they put an AI workload.
As organizations across every industry move GPU-accelerated workloads into production, most of those workloads now run in containers. Containers make a workload portable, but they do not control the layer underneath it. The operating system still decides how much of the accelerator capacity an enterprise paid for reaches the workload.
Enterprise Linux pins that layer for predictability, so the kernel underneath a traditional enterprise release is frozen at general availability, while the accelerators below it and the frameworks above it turn over continuously. Teams are forced to choose stability or speed.
RLC Pro AI runs the latest long-term kernel to provide the stability critical infrastructure demands, with the speed to keep pace with the evolution of AI. It runs the CIQ Linux Kernel (CLK) which tracks the upstream 6.18 series. CIQ patches the kernel directly and ships it between distribution releases, so support for new accelerators reaches customers months faster than Enterprise Linux upstream.
“What I have seen consistently is teams tune the frameworks, the GPU kernel code and the models, and then use whatever general-purpose OS is available,” said Brian Dawson, Director of Product Management at CIQ. “The OS layer decides how much you can get in and out of the GPU, and whether you get the throughput you paid for.”
What RLC Pro AI Delivers
Run the latest long-term kernel: RLC Pro AI runs Linux 6.18, the latest long-term release from kernel.org, maintained by upstream stable maintainers and supported commercially by CIQ. Providing the latest hardware support with Enterprise Linux
backing. Only the kernel changes, so applications certified for Rocky Linux run unmodified.
Get more output from the GPUs you already own: CLK 6.18 ships with the NVIDIA 580 driver, the CUDA Toolkit, and a CIQ-built PyTorch validated together at first boot, without manual tuning. Model loading executes 33.8 percent faster, and time to first token improves 1.38 times under CPU contention, compared to the backported 5.14 Enterprise Linux kernel. Organizations running inference at scale get more throughput from the same hardware.
Deploy anywhere you run AI: Base, runtime, and development container images ship on the same cadence as the operating system, so one configuration carries from a researcher’s workstation to rack scale and from experimentation into production. The same images run on bare metal, in virtual machines, across major cloud providers, and on Kubernetes. Ollama runs on the same validated stack, so a team can pull it and serve a model for local experimentation without assembling a CUDA environment first. The development image is free on Quay.io and Docker Hub.
Stay on Enterprise Linux: RLC Pro AI ships with every CVE fix from its upstream long-term branch, a Secure Boot-signed kernel and signed modules, and multi-year support from engineers who have spent decades in HPC and Linux. Enterprises get the latest kernel on the terms they already buy Enterprise Linux on.
“Enterprises are committing enormous budgets to GPU infrastructure, and the software underneath decides how much of it they get back,” said Bjorn Hovland, President of CIQ. “We build that layer and we support it ourselves, so one company is accountable for the return on it. We license per node, so adding GPUs does not raise the software bill.”
CIQ engineers contribute directly to the upstream Linux kernel community, so defects CIQ customers surface are fixed at the source.
RLC Pro AI is available from CIQ through the portal and through the AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud marketplaces, as installer ISOs, cloud images and OCI container images. It is part of the Rocky Linux from CIQ Pro family alongside RLC+, RLC Pro, and RLC Pro Hardened.
Come see RLC Pro AI running at the AI Infra Summit, September 15 to 17, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, booth 638. To learn more, visit ciq.com or contact info@ciq.com.
About CIQ
CIQ is the founding support and services partner of Rocky Linux, building Enterprise Linux optimized for the workloads that matter most to its customers. Whether an organization runs AI inference at scale or operates under STIG and FIPS requirements, CIQ distributions carry those optimizations from the kernel through the containerized stack, with deployment supported across bare metal, virtual machines, cloud marketplaces and Kubernetes. More than 2.75 million Rocky Linux instances run worldwide, and 90 percent of Fortune 100 companies use CIQ supported technologies.
Dallas, Texas — President Donald Trump said Thursday that he does not believe Congress would need to approve his proposed $5,000 “Trump Dividend,” but federal appropriations law indicates otherwise.
Trump unveiled the proposal at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, promising $5,000 to every adult U.S. citizen if Republicans retain control of the House and Senate. In an interview with CBS Texas the following day, Trump called the payments “a great infusion” and said they would be funded by tariff revenue and required to be spent in the United States.
Asked whether Congress would need to approve the payments, Trump said he did not think so.
However, the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause gives Congress control over federal spending. The Government Accountability Office states that “no money can be paid out of the Treasury unless it has been appropriated by an act of Congress.” Federal agencies generally cannot spend or obligate public money without statutory authority.
A Media Bias/Fact Check review of the proposal reached the same conclusion, noting that Trump cannot simply order the checks himself. It estimated the plan would cost roughly $1.23 trillion for about 245 million adult citizens, far exceeding projected annual tariff revenue.
The promise itself is unlikely to constitute illegal vote buying because the payments would go to eligible adults regardless of how, or whether, they voted. But actually issuing the checks would require Congress to authorize the spending unless lawmakers had already created a separate legal funding mechanism covering such payments.
For now, the $5,000 dividend remains a campaign proposal rather than an authorized federal program.
Berkeley, California — The Trump administration is accusing UC Berkeley School of Law of unlawfully favoring Black applicants over white and Asian applicants, while the school firmly denies using race in admissions decisions.
The Justice and Education departments said a joint investigation found Berkeley Law violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and the Supreme Court’s 2023 affirmative-action ruling. DOJ said Black applicants had 5.8 times higher odds of admission than comparable white applicants in 2025 and pointed to gaps in median LSAT scores among admitted students.
The department also alleged Berkeley used essay prompts and other methods as racial proxies after the Supreme Court restricted race-conscious admissions. Its findings letter says the alleged discrimination affected the incoming classes of 2024 and 2025 and remains ongoing.
Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky rejected that conclusion, saying the school “scrupulously complies” with federal law and California’s Proposition 209, which bars racial preferences in public university admissions.
“Our admissions policy is clear that race is not considered in any way in admissions decisions,” Chemerinsky said. Berkeley’s published admissions policy similarly states that racial information is not used to determine admission.
Berkeley does encourage applicants to discuss how their background and experiences would contribute to the law school community, with race listed among numerous possible topics alongside socioeconomic background, disability, ideology and geography.
The DOJ findings are an administrative determination, not a court judgment. The government is seeking a voluntary resolution agreement and says it may sue if negotiations fail.
The flesh-eating parasite had been largely eradicated, but now authorities are racing to contain an outbreak
A horse in southern Texas has been infected with the New World screwworm, marking the first US equine infection as health authorities race to contain an outbreak of the flesh-eating parasite.
The pest was discovered on the hind limb of a working ranch horse in Presidio county, according to a statement on Thursday from US Equestrian Foundation.
CBS News producer Caroline Lewis shares the story of her mother Patty, who established a school in a disadvantaged community after losing her husband on 9/11.
Joe diGenova, the prosecutor who was tapped by Attorney General Todd Blanche to supervise the "grand conspiracy" investigation targeting Obama- and Biden-era officials, told CBS News he has resigned.
Apple's new Audio Intelligence features for the Apple Watch Series 12 are drawing privacy concerns because they can process nearby conversations without explicit consent from everyone involved. "Live Rewind lets you instantly see the last 15 seconds of a conversation as text," Apple explains in its technical summary (PDF). "Siri Recap summarizes conversations throughout your day and produces high-level Apple Intelligence-generated notes so you can stay present in the moment and catch up later." The Register reports: The latest Apple Watch comes with Audio Intelligence, a set of AI audio processing capabilities tuned for the company's S11 chip. Its features include: Sound Recognition, Music Recognition with Shazam, Live Rewind, and Siri Recap. [...] With the double-press of the Digital Crown -- as Apple grandly refers to the button on its Watch -- Live Rewind takes in an audio stream from the Watch microphone, processes it in a Secure Exclave on the S11 chip, and routes the data to the user's nearby iPhone, which runs a speech-to-text algorithm on the 15-second audio segment. The resulting text is saved and the audio is discarded.
The wearer's Watch emits an audible tone, even in silent mode, to alert those in the vicinity and provides a visual cue for those able to see the face of the device. Nonetheless, bystanders alerted to the recording -- to the extent they recognize the meaning of the tone -- have not consented to being recorded, which is a legal requirement in 11 US states that have all-party consent laws.
Apple characterizes its implementation of brief eavesdropping as respectful of personal privacy. It makes that claim in a section titled, "How Live Rewind respects those around you," citing the audible chime and visual on-screen animation. Siri Recap, meanwhile, "summarizes conversations throughout your day and produces high-level Apple Intelligence-generated notes so you can stay present in the moment and catch up later."
This too, Apple describes as an act of respect. "By design, Siri Recap does not create a recording, does not produce a verbatim transcript, and does not identify and attribute speakers," Apple's technical documentation explains. "The output is a brief, high-level summary, comparable to notes a person might write after a conversation. There is no audible signal because no raw audio is retained, and there is no way to reconstruct the original audio from a Siri Recap or share raw audio with anyone."
A California couple's surrogate who refused their wishes to have an abortion has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in a custody dispute over the 4-week-old child, who was born in Texas with a serious heart defect.
The execution of Daniel Owen Conahan Jr makes him the state’s 15th person executed this year
A Florida man was executed by lethal injection on Thursday after being convicted of one of a series of suspected killings that became known as the Hog Trail Murders in the 1990s.
Daniel Owen Conahan Jr, 72, was sentenced to death for the 1996 kidnapping and strangling of Richard Allen Montgomery. Authorities found Montgomery’s mutilated body in a wooded south-west Florida area where the remains of at least six people have been found over a three-year span.
Report comes two days after former employee quit claiming company’s models could cause human extinction by 2030
Criminals, state-sponsored groups, spyware vendors, scientists and propagandists have attempted to use Anthropic’s powerful artificial intelligence models to design missiles and bombs, create deadly pathogens and surveil dissidents, according to a threat intelligence report the company published on Thursday.
“The cases we share here aren’t typical misuse, but rather examples of the most notable and novel threat activity we’ve identified to date,” Anthropic wrote in its 154-page report. “We’re publishing this work because we believe we have a responsibility to disclose malicious misuse of our services.”
(The Center Square) – A tech non-profit dedicated to tracking anti-semitism online identified a number of resurfaced antisemitic conspiracies ahead of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, such as tropes that Jews are secretly responsible for major world events including the…
Some GOP lawmakers and leaders said they had no notice about Trump's plan to propose $5,000 dividend checks if the GOP wins in November. Other Republicans say they are concerned about the plan's cost.
Woolworths raised prices for popular items – including a 33% mark up on chicken fillets – within days of promising to freeze prices on 300 “family staples” for three months to help customers with the cost of living.
Pricing data, compiled by comparison website CW Scanner and provided to Guardian Australia, shows the supermarket chain increasing the prices of at least four key products after starting the three-month “Price Freeze” promotion on 1 May.
Washington, D.C. — The Department of Homeland Security has deleted an AI-generated immigration enforcement post that depicted a turbaned Sikh man as a dangerous driver, after Sikh and Hindu advocacy groups accused the agency of using a racial stereotype.
The image, posted Wednesday on DHS’s official X account, showed a robot resembling Optimus Prime confronting a bearded man identified as “Mr. Singh.” The graphic told him to “self-deport or find out” and said he did not know how to drive. The surname Singh is widely used among Sikh men and is also common among Indian communities more broadly.
DHS said the image referred specifically to Harjinder Singh, an Indian truck driver charged in a fatal Florida crash that killed three people. Singh has pleaded not guilty to vehicular homicide and manslaughter charges.
The Sikh Coalition said the post amounted to profiling an entire community, noting that millions of people share the surname Singh. The Hindu American Foundation also condemned the graphic as “racist” and “anti-Indian.”
DHS rejected the criticism before deleting the post, calling the backlash “faux outrage.” The department has been running a broader campaign focused on undocumented commercial drivers and recently created a tip line for reporting suspected immigration violations involving truckers.
The controversy also extended to the Transformers imagery itself. Hasbro said the government had not received permission to use the likeness of its characters and emphasized that Optimus Prime is intended to represent leadership, compassion and justice.
The deleted post is the latest example of the administration’s aggressive use of AI-generated pop-culture imagery in official immigration messaging, a strategy that has repeatedly drawn criticism over tone, accuracy and stereotyping.
Anthropic says it has disrupted several cases this year in which scientists used Claude for biological research that could potentially aid bioweapons development. "In a report describing misuses of its A.I. models, Anthropic said it could not determine whether the research served a legitimate or nefarious purpose because valid biological inquiry -- the kind that can lead to breakthroughs like vaccines -- can also help engineer dangerous pathogens," reports The New York Times. "In the face of that uncertainty, Anthropic said it erred on the side of caution because the consequences of missing malicious activity could be severe." From the report: The potential for cutting-edge A.I. models to facilitate the development of known or entirely new biological pathogens is among the gravest concerns experts have about a technology that is developing so rapidly that even its leading architects doubt whether humans will be able to fully control it. Andrew Weber, a senior fellow on the Council on Strategic Risks who reviewed Anthropic's report before its release, said the findings were "chilling examples of state-sponsored biological weapons developers tapping into the rapidly advancing capabilities" of leading A.I. models.
The lengthy report Anthropic published on Thursday cataloged a litany of misuses of its A.I. models, including the chatbot Claude, over the past eight months. Some examples were similar to past disclosures from Anthropic and other A.I. labs, including suspected Chinese and Iranian government-linked actors targeting dissident and diaspora communities for surveillance.
The report also highlighted cases of Russian state media using Claude to generate online propaganda masquerading as independent reporting, including fabricated claims about an election in Moldova. Anthropic documented another genre of abuse it said was new: attempts to use Claude to develop software for conventional weapons design and development, including firearms, missiles, armed drones and bombs. It detailed three cases in China, two in Russia and one in Yemen. The report does not identify by name which parties were involved in the Yemeni case, but the context makes clear that it is referring to the Iran-backed Houthi militia.
Mortgage rates headed higher this week in the wake of several smaller forces rolling up to one major cause: inflation.The average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rose six basis points to 6.74% APR in the week ending Sept. 10,…
In a nearly two-hour speech at the first Republican midterm convention, President Donald Trump promised to pay Americans if Republicans won, and he repeatedly said communists could take over Congress if they didn’t, among other familiar claims.
Trump said every adult citizen would get a “dividend” of $5,000 if Republicans won the House and Senate. He suggested his tariff policies would pay for that, but it would take more than six years for tariffs to cover the $1.2 trillion price tag.
Democratic socialists are not the same as communists, despite Trump conflating the two and warning that Congress could be “controlled by a communist caucus.” Democratic socialists make up a small minority of congressional candidates.
The president repeated the unsupported claim that an unprecedented $20 trillion has been invested in the U.S. from “outside countries and companies.” Trump’s number is nearly double the figure provided by the White House, whose number is itself speculative and dubious.
He made false and misleading claims about the One Big Beautiful Bill’s tax reduction. It wasn’t the “largest” tax cut in history. Trump said Democrats voted against no taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security, but the lawmakers’ opposition stemmed from the tax cuts for the wealthy and reductions in Medicaid spending to pay for the legislation.
Trump twisted the facts in order to indirectly blame North Carolina Senate candidate Roy Cooper for the murder of a woman on train in 2025.
Trump boasted that more people are working than ever before “by a lot.” About 800,000 more people are working now than in January 2025, but that is largely because the population has also grown. When factoring that in, the labor market is doing slightly worse than when Trump started.
He falsely claimed that “food prices and almost every other item are rapidly going down.” With some exceptions, prices have gone up, rising even faster than during the latter part of the Biden administration.
The president claimed that Americans now “pay the lowest prices in the entire world for prescription drugs,” thanks to his policies. There’s no evidence that’s the case.
Trump made several exaggerated or misleading claims related to immigration. Though the number is low, he wrongly claimed that “zero illegal aliens have entered our country from the southern border in the last 15 months.” He claimed 25 million immigrants poured into the country illegally during the Biden administration. That’s vastly inflated. And he wrongly claimed the Biden administration “allowed” in 11,888 murderers.
He again falsely suggested that the U.S. became the world leader in oil and gas production during the current administration.
Trump sought to link Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to a 2019 remark by left-wing commentator Hasan Piker that “America deserved 9/11.” El-Sayed has specifically disavowed those comments.
The president claimed children “born into poverty or families with very little money … will be potentially rich when they turn 18 or 21” due to the new, so-called Trump accounts. Financial experts say it’s unlikely poor parents could contribute enough to such accounts to make that happen.
Trump gave the keynote speech on the first of the two-night convention, which he held to encourage Republican voters. “Please pretend that I’m running and get out and vote on Nov. 3 or sooner,” he said.
The president continued to push the falsehood that he “won the presidency three times,” claiming that “numerous people on the other side are actually admitting it.” Trump lost the 2020 election, and some of his own aides in his first term told him that his claims of election fraud were baseless.
Dubious ‘Dividend’ Math
Trump promised every American adult a $5,000 check if Republicans win in November, framing it as a “dividend” from his administration’s economic policies.
Trump speaks on stage on the first day of the 2026 Republican National Convention on Sept. 9 in Dallas. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.
“Because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000” if Republicans win both the House and Senate this year, Trump said.
Trump did not say exactly how he planned to pay for that proposal, though he suggested the money would come from tariffs.
“The reason the Democrats can’t do that is because they don’t do tariffs, they don’t take in money,” he said. “All they know is poverty and how to ruin our country. But we’re making a fortune. So if the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000. It will be called the Trump dividend.”
He also said people would have to “spend the money in the United States of America,” but did not offer details about how that would be enforced.
There are around 245 million U.S. citizens over the age of 18 in the country, according to Census data. Sending each one of them a $5,000 check would cost around $1.2 trillion.
Revenue from tariffs has certainly increased under Trump — but the levies are not bringing in “trillions of dollars,” as he claimed elsewhere in the speech.
The U.S. brought in $264 billion in net tariff revenue in 2025, up from $79 billion in 2024, according to an analysis of Treasury statements by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a D.C.-based think tank. However, that doesn’t account for refunds issued this year after the Supreme Court held that a number of Trump’s tariffs exceeded his authority. This year, factoring in money paid out in refunds for invalidated tariffs, net tariff revenue came to about $64 billion through July, according to the Treasury Department’s monthly statements.
Trump’s tariffs “are generating less than $200 billion a year,” Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director at the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told us in an email. “It would take 6+ years of tariffs to fund one year of these checks, and then the money wouldn’t be available for deficit reduction (or to partially offset [the One Big Beautiful Bill Act]) as intended.”
Nor is there evidence of a “tremendous” economic boom filling government coffers.
“The economy has been growing around 2% a year – consistent with recent trends,” Goldwein said. “With some weak spots, the economy is strong overall – but it isn’t surging.”
A trillion-dollar payout “would almost certainly worsen inflation and lead to higher interest rates,” he added.
Similarly, Robert McClelland, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, told us the proposal would “substantially increase the federal government’s budget deficit” and likely increase inflation.
“I do not see a basis for the idea that current tariff revenue or total revenue from all sources could support this,” he said. “So far in FY 2026, the government has spent about $1.8 trillion more than it has collected.”
The proposal could also raise legal questions, as federal law outlaws offering money in exchange for votes. Some election-law experts, however, told The New York Times that Trump’s promise is probably close enough to a pledge to cut taxes or enact other economic policies that will financially benefit voters to pass muster; a 1982 Supreme Court decision considers such promises protected political speech. Democrats running in Georgia’s Senate runoff in January 2021, for example, pledged to vote for $2,000 stimulus checks.
No ‘Communists’ Running for Congress
Trump claimed that if Democrats retake control of Congress, the federal legislature would be run by “crazed” democratic socialists, who he said are really “communists.” The president said the word communist or communism 15 times in his speech.
“In state after state, the Democrat establishment has been overthrown and replaced by crazed lunatics and radicals. They call themselves democrat socialists, but actually, they’re communists,” Trump said in his remarks. He later said, “If they win, the greatest legislative body in history will, for the first time ever, be controlled by a communist caucus.”
But democratic socialists and communists are not one and the same. And democratic socialists make up a small minority of congressional candidates.
In their remarks at the convention, Reps. Steve Scalise and Tom Emmer also raised the prospect of “communists” getting elected among democratic socialist candidates.
“Communists are figures who support the Marxist, Leninist and later Maoist models of social organization,” Matthew McManus, an assistant professor of political science at Spelman College, told us in an interview. “Typically, what that means is a dictatorial or authoritarian party that’s in control of the political apparatus of society and that organizes the economy on a command economic basis. So, everything is centralized from the state downward.”
“Democratic socialists refer to a much different ideology,” he said. “By and large, democratic socialists were committed to achieving socialism through reformism, working within the apparatus of liberal democratic states, and they also tended to be much more pluralistic in terms of the economic and social models they were willing to accept.”
McManus said in the 19th century, people, such as the famous German philosopher Karl Marx, would simultaneously refer to themselves as communists and socialists. But he said that changed in the early 20th century, when “social democrats” began to distance themselves after the Bolsheviks, under Vladimir Lenin, won power in the Soviet Union and quickly instituted an authoritarian state, horrifying Western socialists.
The modern political organization known as the Democratic Socialists of America says it advocates replacing capitalism, a free market economic system, with a system of democratic socialism in which there is collective ownership of “the key economic drivers that dominate our lives,” including energy production and transportation. “We believe that working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few,” the organization says on its website.
McManus called it a “very long-standing trope” for conservatives to refer to democratic socialists as communists. “Conservative discourse intentionally, in many cases, obscures the distinctions between liberals, social democrats, democratic socialists, communists, by trying to conflate them all together and suggest that they’re all part and parcel of the same thing,” he said.
There are few democratic socialists already in Congress, and they are also a small minority of Democratic congressional candidates. But Trump said if just 10 are elected this fall, “that’s enough to control Congress,” suggesting that a Democratic majority would have to bend to the will of those new members to implement a legislative agenda.
In an August analysis, Brookings Institution researchers said they identified 64 DSA-endorsed congressional candidates, only 19 of whom won their Democratic primaries – with two races undecided as of Aug. 12. One DSA-endorsed candidate, Gregory Levy, a socialist running for U.S. Senate in Ohio as an independent, advanced directly to the November general election.
Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan are two well-known DSA members already in Congress. Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont also identifies as a democratic socialist but is not a member of the DSA.
As for communists, Joe Sims, co-chair of the Communist Party USA, told PolitiFact for a July story that there are no communists in Congress and that he knows of none running for the House or Senate.
Overstated Investments
As he does in most speeches — in ever-increasing amounts — Trump claimed that since he took office, more than $20 trillion has been invested in the U.S. from “outside countries and companies.” Trump has never provided a full accounting for this claim, and the data that has been provided by the White House is far less than the figure Trump cites — and is highly speculative.
The White House has a webpage dedicated to “The Trump Effect” that purports to list “total U.S. and foreign investments” of $11.2 trillion.
Most of it is from announced investments from domestic companies, many of which have nothing to do with Trump’s policies and are routine expansion plans stretching over years or decades. Experts have warned us that many of the announcements are speculative or vague promises and may never happen.
“Unfortunately, announcements are not even commitments, much less investments,” Alan Reynolds, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, wrote in February when Trump repeated a version of the investments claim. Reynolds called the president’s boast “totally imaginary.”
A little more than half of the total on the White House webpage, $6 trillion, comes from foreign investments from eight countries and the European Union. But as Derek Scissors, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, points out, the alleged investments don’t appear to be showing up in Department of Commerce data on foreign direct investment in the U.S., which showed an increase of about $266 billion in 2025 compared with 2024. That’s nearly equivalent to the roughly $260 billion increase in President Joe Biden’s last year in office.
Consider the big-ticket foreign investment pledges listed by the White House: $1.4 trillion from the United Arab Emirates, $1.2 trillion from Qatar and $1 trillion from Japan. Those countries increased their investments in 2025 by $3.5 billion, $20 million and $26.7 billion, respectively, according to foreign direct investment data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Foreign direct investment in the U.S. jumped 50% in the first quarter of 2026 compared with the previous quarter, $92.2 billion (though it was slightly higher in the third quarter of 2023 under Biden.) But even at that higher pace, Scissors notes, “it would take until 2041 to achieve $6 trillion.”
Attack on North Carolina Senate Candidate
Trump twisted the facts in order to indirectly blame North Carolina Senate candidate Roy Cooper for the murder of Iryna Zarutska, who was stabbed to death on a train in Charlotte in August 2025.
Trump claimed that as governor, Cooper “worked with anti-police radicals to release thousands and thousands of dangerous criminals and murderers all over the once safe streets and countryside of beautiful North Carolina.” That’s a reference to a court settlement to release prisoners during the COVID-19 pandemic. To describe it as “worked with” distorts the facts.
As we have written, Cooper resisted calls early in the pandemic to release prisoners to ease safety concerns. He was sued by the American Civil Liberties Union and other activists. After a judge issued a preliminary injunction in favor of the ACLU and called on the state to come up with a plan to reduce the prison population, Cooper reached a settlement to allow the release of 3,500 prisoners.
Trump went on to say that Zarutska “would be alive today if North Carolina had a different governor, because that animal [the man accused of murdering Zarutska] would’ve been in prison or worse. He wouldn’t have been let go to be on the streets and be in a train sitting right behind that beautiful young lady.”
The murder suspect, DeCarlos Brown Jr., was released from prison on Sept. 20, 2020, after serving more than five years for robbery with a dangerous weapon. Fox News reported that Brown’s inmate ID number was among those listed in the settlement record, though it did not determine whether his release was part of the settlement or not. But Trump’s account distorts the facts of the situation.
Brown was released from prison five months before the settlement was reached. A spokesman for the Department of Corrections in North Carolina told PolitiFact in February that Brown’s release was “entirely unrelated” to the settlement, and that Brown “was not released early or paroled. With credit for jail time served before conviction, he served 100% of his minimum sentence.”
Although Brown was released prior to the settlement, he was able to be retroactively counted toward the settlement’s requirement to adjust the sentences of 3,500 inmates because Brown was given credit for time served while awaiting sentencing, state prison officials told the Charlotte Observer. But even if he had not gotten credit for the time served, he would have been released years prior to Zarutska’s murder.
OBBBA Tax Cuts
The president made some false and misleading claims about his signature tax law and Democratic opposition to it.
Not the “largest” in history. Trump claimed that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which he signed into law in July 2025, amounted to “the largest tax cuts in the history of our country.” While it was a “big” bill, the legislation was the sixth largest tax cut, according to the Tax Foundation, when measured as a percentage of gross domestic product, economists’ preferred measure. The OBBBA is projected to reduce tax revenue by $5 trillion over 10 years, or 1.4% of GDP. That puts it behind the 1981 tax cuts (2.89% of GDP), as well as tax measures in the 1940s, 2012 and 1964.
Factoring in Trump’s higher tariffs on imported goods, which economists consider a tax on consumers, would put the president’s combined policies further down the list, the Tax Foundation said. The foundation’s latest estimate, as of August, is that Trump’s imposed and scheduled tariffs are an average tax increase of $820 in 2026 per household.
Impact of tax cuts. The president described the 2025 tax law as putting “thousands of dollars into the pockets of working families.” Depending on how one defines “working families,” that could be the case over time or even in a given year for some families. Overall, the OBBBA was an estimated average individual income tax cut in 2026 of nearly $2,300 or $2,900 per taxpayer, according to Tax Foundation and Tax Policy Center estimates, respectively. But the average was skewed by much larger tax benefits for upper-income earners.
The Tax Policy Center estimated last summer that households earning nearly half a million to $1 million would see an average tax cut of $21,000 in 2026, and those earning less than about $35,000 would get an average benefit of $150. “Middle-income households,” earning between $67,000 and $119,000, would get an average tax cut of about $1,800.
To be clear, the OBBBA extended the expiring tax cuts in Trump’s 2017 tax law, so some of the practical impact for families was that their taxes didn’t go up, as opposed to an additional tax decrease.
Democratic opposition. The skewed impact of the OBBBA, as well as the 2017 tax law, for upper-income taxpayers garnered Democratic opposition. But Trump said Democrats were opposed to some of the popular aspects of the law for certain groups of taxpayers. “And every single Democrat in Congress voted against our tax cuts,” Trump said. “They voted against no tax on tips. They voted against no tax on overtime. They voted against 100%. No tax on Social Security for our great seniors.” He went on to say that Democrats wanted to “raise your taxes” on tips, overtime and Social Security.
These weren’t the provisions in the law that Democrats voiced overwhelming opposition to — instead they repeatedly framed the tax cuts as benefiting the wealthy. As we’vewritten, each party has misleadingly emphasized only certain aspects of the law, which benefited all income groups on average, with most of the tax gains going to the top earners. Democrats also objected to the way the OBBBA paid for its tax cuts — by making cuts to Medicaid, the joint federal-state healthcare program for those with low incomes, and reductions in spending on federal food benefits. The Medicaid spending reductions led Republican Sens. Susan Collins and Thom Tillis to vote against the final legislation.
The tips, overtime and senior provisions Trump highlighted all expireafter 2028. A future Congress would need to act to extend them. The tips measure — while criticizedbyeconomists because it taxes people with similar levels of income in unequal ways — is politically popular with both parties, particularly in a service-industry-heavy swing state like Nevada. Democrat Kamala Harris proposed the same policy in her 2024 presidential campaign.
These provisions provide tax deductions up to certain limits; a deduction reduces the total income subject to taxes. The overtime measure applies to the extra 50% income earned on time-and-a-half overtime, up to a limit. The Tax Policy Center estimated that “3 percent of taxpayers benefit from the tips deduction, with an average tax reduction of about $1,480 among those who benefit, and that 10 percent of taxpayers benefit from the overtime deduction, with an average tax reduction of about $1,200.”
The Social Security provision is a tax deduction, too — $6,000 for those age 65 and older, whether they get Social Security benefits or not, and it phases out for those earning $75,000 or $150,000 for couples filing jointly. The Tax Policy Center found that the deduction “would benefit fewer than half of older adults,” with seniors earning $80,000 to $130,000 benefiting the most. They get an average tax cut of about $1,100, TPC said, in 2025.
Jobs
In discussing employment, Trump repeated a favoritebrag, saying, “Right now, in the United States of America, we have more people working than we have ever had before by a lot.”
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of August, a little over 159 million people are working in the U.S. This is up about 807,000 from when Trump started in January 2025. But as we’ve noted before, this impressive-seeming claim is almost meaningless, since with population growth, there are almost always more people working than ever before unless there is a recession. Trump has been spinning his employment achievements this way since 2017.
Better measures of how the labor market is doing include the employment-population ratio, which, at 59.1%, is down a full percentage point from January 2025, or the labor force participation rate, which is also down a percentage point to 61.6%. The “prime-age” labor force participation rate is largely holding steady.
The latest jobs report, which exceeded expectations, showed an increase of 162,000 jobs in August. Generally, however, job growth has been lower under Trump than Biden. For the last 18 months of the Biden administration, ending in December 2024, about 2.4 million jobs were added, an increase of 1.6%. Since February 2025 — a similar period under Trump — the U.S. gained 765,000 jobs, a rise of 0.48%.
The unemployment rate has also ticked up from 4.0% in January 2025 to a high of 4.5% last November, before falling back to 4.1% last month.
Affordability
Trump addressed affordability, calling it “fake” because, he said, Democrats were the ones that “caused the affordability — to use their word — crisis.”
“I’m bringing the prices way down, way, way down,” he continued. “They caused the price. But we’re fixing it. We’re fixing it.”
“We got eggs down lower than during my administration,” he added later. “And food prices and almost every other item are rapidly going down. And by the way, oil will be going down as soon as we win the war with Iran, which is taking place right now.”
Egg prices have declined under Trump, but not to a price lower than his last administration. They are $2.19 a dozen as of July, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about the same as they cost in November 2023. This is down from $4.95 in January 2025 and a peak of $6.23 in March 2025. Those sky-high egg prices were in large measure due to outbreaks of avian influenza, or bird flu, which required killing chickens to prevent viral spread and resulted in a shortage of eggs.
Most other groceries and many other goods and services have increased in price. As we recently explained, the Consumer Price Index, which captures average prices for consumer goods and services, is up 3.4% over the last 12 months ending in July — higher than the annualized 3.0% that Trump inherited.
While certain grocery items, such as bacon and bread, have decreased, many more have increased. Average grocery prices between January 2025 and July have gone up 3.35%, more than the 2.58% increase in the last year and a half of the Biden administration. Energy costs have risen 14.7% in the last year, including a 24.6% increase for gasoline.
Drug Prices
Trump made the unsupported claim that “we went from the highest prices by far in the world, and now we pay the lowest prices in the entire world for prescription drugs,” attributing the drop to his administration’s actions. “I think it’s one of the biggest things to happen medically, healthcare-wise, in history,” he said. “I’m giving you the largest prescription drug price cuts in history, with differences of 400%, 500% and even 600%.”
Trump’s policies do not mean Americans now pay the lowest prices in the world for drugs. And there isn’t evidence Trump’s prescription drug deals have led to a dramatic reduction in the prices Americans pay, although they may have led to lower prices in certain situations.
The administration has made temporary “most favored nation” deals with pharmaceutical companies, giving them three years of tariff relief in exchange for prices that are more comparable to the prices paid in other high-income countries, specifically the second-lowest price out of a set of eight high-income nations, after adjusting for gross domestic product per capita. The U.S. has long paid far more for brand-name prescription drugs than peer countries.
As we explained previously, the impact of these deals is more limited than Trump’s statements imply. While some individuals may be able to save money on certain drugs, such as pricey GLP-1 obesity drugs, many people can already get lower prices using their insurance.
Trump also claimed that “we will make our most favored nation agreements on prescription drug prices permanent,” but that seems unlikely. Rena Conti, a health economist at Boston University Questrom School of Business, previously told us that the notion the policy would be codified was “hypothetical at best, as there is no movement in Congress to pass legislation.”
Trump’s claims of “differences of 400%, 500% and even 600%” appear to refer to how much higher a drug’s list price — which people rarely pay — is compared with its price on TrumpRx, the website the administration launched to promote direct-to-consumer MFN prices. This, of course, is not the discount percentage, which cannot be more than 100%.
Regardless of how one does the math, it’s clear that drug prices overall have not fallen as dramatically as Trump claimed.
Consumer price data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed a 3.1% drop in drug prices between July 2025 and 2026, based on a measure of prices people and insurers pay to pharmacies. Trump has claimed his policies are behind this decline. But experts told us other factors, such as drugs losing patent protection and increased competition among costly obesity drugs, are likely behind most of the reduction. The Inflation Reduction Act, passed under former President Joe Biden, which allows for price negotiation for some Medicare drugs, may also be a contributing factor.
Immigration
Illegal immigration has dramatically declined since Trump took office in January 2025, and the Trump administration has also stepped up interior enforcement and deportations. But the president exaggerated several points to contrast his record with Biden’s.
Trump wrongly claimed that “zero illegal aliens have entered our country from the southern border in the last 15 months.” As we wrote in our latest “Trump’s Numbers” story in July, there was a 91% decrease in the number of immigrants apprehended attempting to illegally cross the southern border over the last year, compared with the last year under Biden. In July, 9,295 people were apprehended trying to cross the border illegally, the third highest monthly figure since Trump took office.
Because it’s hard to know exactly how many people successfully sneak into the country illegally, we have used those apprehension figures as a proxy to measure illegal border crossings. U.S. Customs and Border Protection keeps, but does not often publicly release, figures on so-called gotaways, immigrants who are detected via electronic surveillance crossing the border but evade apprehension. Rosario “Pete” Vasquez, chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, reported on social media that there were 2,123 gotaways in May 2025 and 986 in June 2025. Data obtained by the Cato Institute via a Freedom of Information Act request indicated another 6,491 gotaways in the following three months.
We asked the administration for more recent data, but did not get a response. In any case, even using that older data, it is not accurate for Trump to say “zero illegal aliens have entered our country from the southern border in the last 15 months.”
What Trump may have meant to say — and as Customs and Border Protection announced on Aug. 13 — is that there have been no releases at the border over the last 15 months, meaning no one caught crossing the border illegally was temporarily released into the U.S., for example, to apply for asylum. On his first day in office, Trump enacted a policy effectively barring asylum applications.
Trump’s estimate that 25 million immigrants poured into the country illegally and unchecked during the Biden administration is also vastly inflated. We calculated in June 2024 that the figure would be about a third of that, including an estimated 2 million “gotaways” who evaded capture by Border Patrol and about 3 million people released with notices to appear in immigration court or report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the future, or other classifications, such as parole.
In August 2025, the Pew Research Center estimated the unauthorized immigrant population at a record-high 14 million in 2023. That’s nearly 4 million more than 2019, and Pew estimated the growth of the overall unauthorized immigrant population “continued to grow at a record pace” in 2024. But that would still not get anywhere near the president’s claim of 25 million more.
Finally, the president claimed the Biden administration “allowed” in 11,888 murderers. As we have written repeatedly, there were about that many noncitizens who had been convicted of murder but were not in ICE custody as of September 2024 — a list known as the agency’s non-detained docket. But the “vast majority” of them entered the country prior to the Biden administration and had their custody status determined “long before this Administration,” the Department of Homeland Security told us in September 2024, noting that many were in prison. Also, the noncitizens include those who entered the country legally, such as green-card holders. Some of them may also have been deported.
Oil and Natural Gas Production
When talking about energy production, Trump suggested that the U.S. became the world leader in oil and gas production during his current administration – which isn’t accurate.
“With the help of our great energy workers here in Texas, our country is producing more oil and gas today than ever before,” Trump said. “Now listen to this, more than Russia and Saudi Arabia combined.”
Later, he added, “We’re now the biggest in the world. We were nowhere near that. Now you’re – we’re the biggest in the world.”
The U.S. is producing more oil and natural gas than ever before, but that was also the case under Trump’s predecessor. The U.S. has had record crude oil production each year since 2023, during the Biden administration, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data. There has also been record natural gas production annually since 2021, which was Biden’s first year as president. Generally, U.S. production of oil and natural gas has been increasing for many years.
We’ve also written before that the U.S. being the global leader in oil and natural gas production was not a recent achievement. It became the world’s No. 1 producer of petroleum, which includes both crude oil and refined petroleum products, such as gasoline, in 2013, and it has produced the largest amount of crude oil, including lease condensate, since 2018. The International Energy Agency said as far back as 2012 that the U.S. was expected to become “the largest global oil producer” by “around 2020” because of advances in shale extraction technology.
In addition, the U.S. has been the leading producer of natural gas production since 2009, overtaking Russia. In fact, the U.S. has produced more natural gas than Russia and Saudi Arabia, together, in all but one year since 2014.
Individually, the U.S. surpassed Saudi Arabia and Russia in petroleum and crude oil production years ago. But it only began producing more petroleum than both combined in 2024, and Russia and Saudi Arabia, together, still produce more crude oil than the U.S.
El-Sayed Disavowed Streamer’s 9/11 Remark
Trump also sought to link Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to a remark by left-wing commentator Hasan Piker that “America deserved 9/11.” El-Sayed has specifically disavowed those comments and says he has no plans to keep campaigning with Piker.
During his speech, Trump said El-Sayed “campaigns with a Marxist agitator who says that America deserved 9/11.”
As we wrote last month, Piker, a popular Twitch streamer, made those remarks during a 2019 livestream while responding to a prior comment from a Republican congressman that American involvement in the Middle East was not the reason for the 9/11 attacks. Piker later walked back his remark.
El-Sayed, who did appear with Piker at campaign events earlier this year, disavowed Piker’s statement about 9/11 when asked about it in an April interview on “Fox & Friends.”
“Of course I don’t think 9/11 was justified,” El-Sayed said. “Because you appear with somebody, doesn’t mean you agree with them on everything.”
El-Sayed told Semafor in August that he has “no plans” to campaign with Piker again.
Trump Accounts
Trump claimed that “children, and many of them born into poverty or families with very little money or future, will be potentially rich when they turn 18 or 21” due to the establishment of so-called Trump accounts, new federal investment and savings accounts for children.
As we’ve explained before, as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the federal government will seed new accounts with $1,000 for children born between Jan. 1, 2025, and Dec. 31, 2028, who have a valid Social Security number. Parents can open accounts for other kids, but they won’t get the seed money. In addition, the first 25 million children under the age of 10 and residing in a ZIP code with a median income of $150,000 or less will receive an additional $250, which was funded by Michael and Susan Dell’s donation of $6.25 billion to these investment accounts.
The seed money would grow to several thousand dollars by the time a child reaches adulthood. Trump has previously said that the accounts “could grow to hundreds of thousands of dollars” by the time children turn 18, but that’s the only case if additional yearly contributions are made.
Parents, relatives, friends, employers, state governments, philanthropic organizations and individuals can contribute up to a total $5,000 annual combined limit per account. The White House Council of Economic Advisers estimated that the $1,000 seed money, if supplemented by the maximum annual contributions, could grow to more than $300,000 at age 18, assuming an average annual return of 10.3%.
But financial experts said it’s unlikely that parents in low-income households would be able to afford to contribute enough for their children’s accounts to reach such balances.
According to an analysis by the Urban Institute, “Without additional deposits into the accounts of kids from families with low incomes, children of wealthy parents will primarily benefit” from the program.
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Insiders at the firm fear tech’s advancement could cause human extinction, while others are calling their declarations of concern a ‘setup’
A day after a former researcher at Anthropic made an apocalyptic declaration about artificial intelligence, more researchers and staff members at the AI startup publicly agreed with him and posted their own dire warnings.
In response, Elon Musk and other conservative figures on X, formerly Twitter, called the chorus of concerns a “setup” and a “psyop”.
Median rent for one-bedroom apartment in city tops $4,495 with a national median of $1,900
San Francisco’s mayor, Daniel Lurie, declared a rent emergency on Thursday, proposing reforms aimed at curbing evictions and preventing rent spikes as the city grapples with soaring apartment prices.
The Bay Area city, home to a large number of high-earning tech workers, has long been one of the most expensive housing and rental markets in the country.
No 10 says 29 new trains to be built in Derby will support 350 local jobs, as well as nearly 6,000 across the UK
No 10 has announced the construction of a new fleet of battery-powered trains that will “bring faster, more reliable journeys to the north”.
The 29 new trains, which will be run by TransPennine Express, are set to be built in Alstom’s Litchurch Lane works in Derby from 2028, which the government says will support 350 local jobs, as well as nearly 6,000 across the UK.
Android is rolling out a system-level way to securely transfer passwords and passkeys between credential managers, eliminating the need to export passwords as unencrypted text files or manually recreate passkeys. The feature initially supports Google Password Manager, 1Password, Bitwarden, and Dashlane, with other providers able to integrate through Android's Credentials Transfer API. 9to5Google reports on how to initiate the system-backed transfer method: 1. Start the move: Open your new password manager app and choose the option to import or copy your passwords and passkeys from another provider. The password manager will then hand the task over to Android.
2. Let Android securely coordinate the data transfer: Android will automatically detect existing password managers on your device and show you which you can import from.
3. Review and authorize: Once you tap "Continue," Android will bring you to your existing password manager to select, review, and authorize the transfer. Then your data will be quickly and securely transferred between the apps in just a few seconds.
More than a dozen ex-players are suing the University of Michigan, alleging coach and staff were aware of abuse
More than a dozen former hockey players are suing the University of Michigan, alleging their coach and other staff were aware of sexual hazing that included the forced shaving of their genitals and other abuse by teammates decades ago.
“The abuse was ritualized, meticulously planned and sadistic … Enduring sexual abuse was required to be a member of the Michigan men’s ice hockey team,” attorney Michael Pitt said in a sex discrimination lawsuit filed on Wednesday in federal court in Detroit.
The California law bans platforms from providing “addictive” features to users under 16, suggesting that concerning features include “infinite scroll” and autoplay.
Kevin Reddington says prosecution did not offer evidence that client’s killing of her children constituted murder
Lindsay Clancy’s lawyer on Thursday asked the judge who oversaw the Massachusetts woman’s murder trial to declare her not guilty of murder by reason of insanity, saying prosecutors had failed to prove that, despite being mentally ill, she knew killing her three young children would be wrong.
Defense attorney Kevin Reddington made the request to Judge William Sullivan six days after the trial ended in a deadlock, and as a fourth member of the 12-member jury went public to describe how a single juror had prevented the panel from reaching a unanimous verdict.
Canadian PM Mark Carney hosts president in Calgary, where he grew up alongside large Ukrainian community
Canada offered support on Thursday to boost Ukraine’s air defenses and help replenish its drone stocks, as the countries pledged to deepen their alliance during a visit by Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Mark Carney hosted the president of Ukraine in Calgary in the western province of Alberta, where the Canadian prime minister grew up among a large community of people with Ukrainian heritage.
Court declined to put on hold injunction preventing the USPS from tightening rules around postal voting
A US appeals court has rejected Donald Trump’s attempt to impose sweeping restrictions on mail-in voting before November’s high-stakes midterm elections, dealing a fresh blow to the president’s attempted crackdown.
The Boston-based first US circuit court of appeals declined on Thursday to put on hold an injunction issued by a lower court judge last week, preventing the US Postal Service (USPS) from tightening rules around postal voting.
A man dressed as the Marvel supervillain addressed the Seattle city council on 8 September to champion the expansion of the city's surveillance network
Latest decision appears to set the stage for the state to use its old electoral maps this year
The US supreme court again rejected a push backed by Donald Trump to overhaul Missouri’s congressional maps in an effort to hand Republicans an edge in November’s midterm elections.
Its latest ruling, after days of confusion, comes less than two months before the pivotal midterm elections in which control of the narrowly divided US House of Representatives could be determined by a handful of seats.
President Trump vowed Wednesday to send a $5,000 "dividend" to every American citizen after the midterms, but only if Republicans hold onto control of Congress. He didn't offer details on how the payments would work.
Broadcaster, 86, had intended to end her life in Swiss clinic after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2023
Esther Rantzen has said she is no longer able to travel to Switzerland to end her life because she has become “too physically fragile”.
Rantzen, who presented the TV current affairs programme That’s Life! for 21 years and founded the youth support charity Childline, had intended to end her life in a Dignitas assisted dying clinic in Switzerland after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2023.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: ABC's Jimmy Kimmel said he will be interviewing a Democratic candidate for Senate tonight, but the interview will be on YouTube only and not broadcast on TV because of threats made by the Federal Communications Commission. Kimmel has been a prime target in the Trump FCC's attacks on ABC and its owner, Disney. In his monologue last night, Kimmel said he'll be interviewing Democrat James Talarico, a state representative who is running against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for a seat in the US Senate.
In previous years, such an interview would have aired on the broadcast show via local stations throughout the country, Kimmel said. This time, it will only be on the Jimmy Kimmel Live YouTube channel in order to prevent further trouble for individual stations that hold FCC licenses, he said. "I'll be interviewing James Talarico tomorrow night under unusual circumstances," Kimmel told the audience on Wednesday. "For a lot of years, for the whole 20-plus years of our show, in fact, I've been interviewing Americans who are running for office with no problem at all, just like Letterman did, Leno did, Arsenio, et cetera, et cetera. I've interviewed a lot of political candidates, from Hillary Clinton to Ted Cruz to Donald Trump himself." But as Kimmel said, "something has changed." Disney suspended Kimmel briefly last year after FCC Chairman Brendan Carr threatened to revoke the licenses of ABC stations for "news distortion" if they continued to air Kimmel's show. [...]
Kimmel said the decision to put the interview on YouTube was made out of consideration for local stations that could face FCC threats to their broadcast licenses. "And so out of consideration for our local stations, especially our ABC affiliates in Texas who would have to deal with this nonsense, my interview tomorrow with James Talarico will not air on television," Kimmel said. "It will be posted on YouTube instead. It will not be on TV. So if you want to learn about a candidate for the Senate tomorrow, you will have to go to the Jimmy Kimmel Live YouTube channel where you will see it in its entirety, and thank goodness we have that because in the America we live in right now, that is the best that we can do, until November, of course." "Jimmy Kimmel's decision to keep his interview with a Senate candidate off the air shows just how far this administration's campaign of censorship and control has gone," FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the commission's only Democrat, said today. Gomez said the FCC "has no lawful authority to threaten broadcast licenses over guest bookings or editorial decisions," and that "no host, local affiliate, or network should have to weigh federal retaliation before booking a guest for a newsworthy interview. Any attempt to pressure broadcasters into self-censorship undermines both press freedom and the public's right to hear from candidates in their communities seeking public office."
The report notes a similar controversy that occurred in February when Stephen Colbert said CBS forbade him from interviewing Talarico. CBS denied prohibiting the interview but said it gave Colbert "legal guidance that the broadcast could trigger the FCC equal-time rule for two other candidates [...] and presented options for how the equal time for other candidates could be fulfilled." That interview also ended up being published on YouTube.
Sept. 10, 2026 — Applications are now open for the 2027 BSSw Fellowship Program, which gives recognition and funding to leaders and advocates of high-quality scientific software.
Addressing scientific software challenges magnified by rapidly changing computing environments requires broad community collaboration to improve developer productivity and software sustainability—as key aspects of ensuring the integrity of computational results and increasing overall scientific productivity.
The BSSw Fellowship Program provides recognition and funding for leaders and advocates of high-quality scientific software who foster practices, processes, and tools to improve scientific software productivity and sustainability. BSSw Fellows are selected annually based on an application process that includes the proposal of a funded activity which promotes better scientific software through a publicly available artifact.
Each 2027 BSSw Fellow will receive up to $25,000 for their proposed activity. Activities can include organizing a workshop, preparing a tutorial, or creating content to engage the scientific software community. Applications are now being accepted for the 2027 BSSw Fellowship.
BSSw encourages applicants at all career stages, ranging from students through early-career, mid-career, and senior professionals. The Program is looking for applications from people with the following characteristics:
Passionate about scientific software.
Interested in contributing powerful ideas, tools, methodologies, and more that improve the quality of scientific software.
Able to use the fellowship to broadly benefit the scientific software community.
Applicants must be affiliated with a U.S.-based institution that is able to receive Federal funding. Typically such institutions include U.S. government labs, U.S. universities, and U.S.-based corporations.
Q&A Webinar about the BSSw Fellowship Program
Join the BSSw Fellowship Program Q&A Webinar to hear more about the Program and ask questions:
More information, including on-line application and FAQ
Better Scientific Software is an organization dedicated to improving developer productivity and software sustainability for computational science and engineering through BETTER Planning, Development, Performance, Reliability, Collaboration, and Skills.
Application deadline: Friday, October 30, 2026; this is a firm deadline that will not be extended.
About the BSSw Fellows Program
The main goal of the BSSw Fellowship program is to foster and promote practices, processes, and tools to improve developer productivity and software sustainability of scientific codes. The Program also anticipates accumulating a growing community of BSSw Fellowship alums who can serve as leaders, mentors, and consultants to increase the visibility of those involved in scientific software production and sustainability in the pursuit of scientific discovery.
BSSw Fellows are selected annually based on an application process that includes the proposal of a funded activity that promotes better scientific software through a publicly available artifact. Each 2027 BSSw Fellow will receive up to $25,000 for an activity that promotes better scientific software. Activities can include organizing a workshop, preparing a tutorial, or creating content to engage the scientific software community.
BSSw Fellows receive funds through their respective institution for one year. The Program encourages BSSw Fellows to continue to serve the scientific software community as alums by helping select future classes of Fellows and providing leadership in their communities.
Qoro’s quantum software will integrate with QRMI to implement quantum application workflows for UK science on the Hartree Centre high-performance computing cluster and beyond.
LONDON, Sept. 10, 2026 — Qoro has announced a collaboration under a new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the STFC Hartree Centre to develop hybrid quantum-classical computing capabilities. The project integrates Qoro’s software with Hartree Centre’s HPC infrastructure through the Quantum Resource Management Interface (QRMI), detailed in a recent publication on arXiv.
The collaboration addresses a real scientific problem in electronic structure theory and quantum chemistry, showing quantum computing’s practical value to end users today without waiting for future quantum advantage. It also marks a step towards a sovereign UK quantum-HPC software value chain, aligning with the wider ecosystem, including the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) and the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC).
“At the Hartree Centre we are focussed on getting the most from emerging computing technologies by applying them to UK industry and public sector challenges. We’re really keen to explore how we can make hybrid quantum-classical computing work harder for the UK economy through this new collaboration with Qoro.” said Kate Royse, Director of the STFC Hartree Centre.
Qoro’s software will integrate with QRMI on both sides of the interface. Above it: Divi, Qoro’s open-source Python library, generates and routes Slurm jobs and circuits into the Hartree Centre scheduler through QRMI – a ‘tightly-coupled’ application-aware function to serve quantum acceleration for HPC codes. Below it: Maestro, Qoro’s automated and unified simulation engine, is available as an execution backend through the QRMI interface, alongside several quantum computing vendors including IBM, Pasqal, and more.
Qoro and the Hartree Centre will then document the resulting workflows as a reference for UK quantum computing researchers. Depending on results, they may extend the work to physical quantum processing units (QPUs) and run industry pilots in sectors such as energy, finance, and pharmaceuticals.
“Quantum computing has to prove itself outside the lab, enabled by an enterprise-grade software ecosystem. Working with the Hartree Centre lets us demonstrate our combined software stack against practical challenges and explore applications in materials science, modeling in the physical sciences, quantum optimization and associated workflows,” said Dan Holme, CEO and Co-founder of Qoro Quantum.
About Qoro Quantum
Qoro is building the unified software stack for distributed computing on heterogeneous infrastructure. By delivering true parallelisation across heterogeneous networks, mixing CPUs, GPUs, Simulators, and QPUs, Qoro enables the distributed execution of complex quantum algorithms across multiple nodes. Qoro eliminates the quantum learning curve and infrastructure headache, reducing 1,000,000 lines of integration code to 20, and turning scientific experiments into deployable IT solutions. Build once, run everywhere.
About STFC Hartree Centre
The Hartree Centre helps UK businesses and public sector organizations to explore and adopt supercomputing, data science, cloud, quantum and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for enhanced productivity, smarter innovation and economic growth. Backed by UK Government funding and strategic industry partnerships, the Hartree Centre is home to some of the most advanced digital technologies and experts in the UK. As part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council and UK Research and Innovation, the Hartree Centre builds on a wealth of established scientific heritage and a network of international expertise, helping the UK to stay at the forefront of digital innovation.
Sept. 10, 2026 — A new European collaborative project, RItrain-DIGIT (Advancing Digital Competencies in European Research Infrastructures) has officially launched to bridge the digital skills gap within Europe’s Research Infrastructures (RIs). Funded under the European Union’s Horizon Europe program (Grant Agreement 101292852 / Call: HORIZON-INFRA-2025-01-DEV-01), the 1.5 million Euro initiative unites leading digital infrastructure providers and technology centers to design a comprehensive training and mobility ecosystem for scientific IT professionals.
As scientific domains face rapid data growth and the increasing complexity of compute offerings, technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and federated data access present both massive opportunities and steep technical barriers. RItrain-DIGIT responds directly to this challenge by developing structured Learning Pathways that will underpin the development of a comprehensive Training Programme and run a Mobility Programme to equip Research Infrastructure technical staff with the skills required to develop, operate and maintain digital services on national and federated cloud, or HPC infrastructures.
To complement the project’s overarching objective, RItrain-DIGIT will also offer a FitSM IT Service Management certification scheme, and operate a one-stop-shop Training Platform that aggregates open educational resources to support the continuous professional development of RI technical staff.
The consortium, coordinated by the EGI Foundation, brings together major players in the European computing landscape, including HUN-REN SZTAKI, ACK Cyfronet AGH, PRACE, and the University of Stuttgart (HLRS). This unique composition ensures that technical RI staff receive practical, hands-on training directly on the national and federated cloud and HPC infrastructures powering modern research.
Within the project, EGI will be responsible for coordination. This aligns with the organization’s overall mission to to create and deliver open solutions for science and research infrastructures by federating digital capabilities.
Giuseppe La Rocca, the Project Director, said: “EGI Foundation, together with the project partners from our community, HUN-REN SZTAKI, ACK Cyfronet AGH, PRACE, and the University of Stuttgart, are honored to help unite digital research infrastructures across domains in a dedicated DIGIT skill development project and support the upskilling of the European scientific workforce.”
Serge Bogaerts, PRACE Managing Director, said: “The RItrain-DIGIT project, alongside other projects in the field of training and education for HPC users, such as HPCTRAIN, fits into the service offer that PRACE aims to present to its members and the user communities it is mandated to support. Simultaneously, the project boosts collaboration within the wider European digital ecosystem, providing a more integrated perspective on the services of different e-Infrastructures to a wider range of users.”
About RItrain-DIGIT
Research Infrastructures (RIs) in all scientific domains face an urgent challenge: how to operate effectively in an increasingly complex and fragmented digital landscape while budgets and human resources remain constrained. The rapid growth of data volumes, the diversity of compute and storage offerings, and the emergence of new paradigms such as AI/ML, federated access, and digital sovereignty create both opportunities and obstacles. Without coordinated support, many RIs struggle to identify the most relevant digital services, access them under diverse policies, and integrate them into sustainable data analysis operations.
RItrain-DIGIT addresses this challenge by uniting digital research infrastructures with thematic RIs across domains in a dedicated DIGIT skill development project. Its long-term vision is a European research ecosystem where RIs can confidently navigate the digital landscape, make informed choices about service adoption, and deliver high-quality, FAIR, and interoperable platforms to their users. The project will implement a comprehensive Training Programme structured into Learning Pathways covering HPC and cloud systems, AI and data techniques, federated access, and IT Service Management.
It will also launch a Mobility Programme to support staff exchanges, enabling knowledge transfer and collaboration across institutions, countries, and domains. Building on the EGI e-infrastructure and PRACE ESFRI Landmark of national compute providers, and in close collaboration with other European digital initiatives, RItrain-DIGIT ensures that RI staff gain a holistic understanding of the wider compute and data ecosystem. By combining training, mobility, and continuous feedback, the project builds sustainable competences, reduces fragmentation, and strengthens the capacity of RIs to contribute to Europe’s digital transformation.
RItrain-DIGIT is funded by the European Union Grant Agreement Number 101292852.
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 10, 2026 — d-Matrix today announced a new collaboration with NVIDIA that includes a multi-year product roadmap, providing d-Matrix XPUs entry into the widely deployed NVIDIA AI factory ecosystem. The centerpiece of the collaboration is an NVLink Fusion enabled rack-level system that AI labs, hyperscalers, and neoclouds can seamlessly deploy for ultra-low latency premium-level token services.
As an NVIDIA NVLink Fusion partner, d-Matrix will work closely with NVIDIA to incorporate d-Matrix’s next-gen inference XPUs, starting with Raptor, directly into the latest NVIDIA rack reference architecture design featuring NVIDIA Vera CPUs, NVIDIA NVLink switches, NVIDIA BlueField-4 DPUs, NVIDIA ConnectX-9 SuperNICs, and NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking. d-Matrix is also partnering with Astera Labs, a connectivity solution leader within the NVIDIA NVLink Fusion ecosystem, to deliver custom solutions to ensure high-throughput, seamless data flow throughout the system. The d-Matrix rack, enabled by the MGX platform, will feature modular cable-free trays built with NVIDIA’s mature, proven MGX ecosystem and supply chain for fast and seamless deployments.
NVLink Fusion gives d-Matrix a mature, high-bandwidth, low-latency scale-up foundation for connecting d-Matrix XPUs to NVIDIA rack-scale infrastructure. With NVLink Fusion and the MGX ecosystem, d-Matrix can build around the same rack architecture, networking and supply-chain used across the NVIDIA platform. The first engagement point in the collaboration will be d-Matrix Raptor XPUs plugging into the NVIDIA MGX rack resulting in higher performance, greater deployment flexibility for customers, and a scalable architecture for expanding Raptor-based inference clusters as demand grows.
“This collaboration with NVIDIA is a defining moment on our journey to infinite inference, accessible to all,” said Sid Sheth, founder and CEO at d-Matrix. “Being integrated into NVIDIA’s latest MGX rack-scale infrastructure with NVLink Fusion means our customers can deploy our inference XPUs alongside the broadly available NVIDIA AI factory platform. That’s the future d-Matrix has been building toward—ultra-low latency, energy-efficient inference XPUs and GPUs working together, at rack scale, to deliver premium AI experiences.”
“NVLink Fusion enables partners to integrate custom silicon with NVIDIA’s deep ecosystem of NVLink, advanced packaging, rack-scale systems and networking technologies,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “With NVIDIA AI infrastructure deployed across cloud and on-premises data centers worldwide, NVLink Fusion gives partners like d-Matrix a path to integrate seamlessly with NVIDIA compute platforms — expanding accelerator choice for customers building the next generation of AI factories.”
“Purpose-built connectivity is what turns innovative compute into high-performing AI factories,” said Jitendra Mohan, CEO of Astera Labs. “Our partnership with d-Matrix and NVIDIA brings this vision to life within the NVLink Fusion ecosystem, delivering high-throughput for low latency AI inference.”
The Rise of the Premium Token Economy
As agentic AI workloads have spiked inference demand, AI service providers are increasingly seeking mixed-architecture systems to deliver inference economics their customers require.
The d-Matrix MGX rack system is designed for latency-sensitive applications such as AI coding assistants, real-time chatbots, and voice agents where interactivity is paramount and customers are willing to pay a premium for speed. Built on NVIDIA’s mature, proven MGX ecosystem and supply chain, the system extends a unified rack architecture that gives AI factories the flexibility to deploy the right compute for each workload.
Using heterogeneous disaggregation, operators can split the workload between d-Matrix Raptor XPUs and NVIDIA Vera Rubin, allowing them to optimize each phase of inference. For one of today’s most popular disaggregated applications, AI coding, GPUs can handle the compute-intensive prefill phase of a workload while d-Matrix inference XPUs speed up the latency-sensitive decode phase.
Raptor: d-Matrix’s Next-Gen Inference XPU
A follow-on to the d-Matrix Corsair XPU platform currently in production, the d-Matrix Raptor platform extends d-Matrix’s memory-centric architecture. Through a first-of-its-kind 3D DRAM stacking approach, Raptor brings a DRAM memory chip and an SRAM compute chip together to form a single “two-story” package.
Technical details about the 3D DRAM technology were recently published by IEEE and previewed by d-Matrix co-founder and CTO Sudeep Bhoja at the 2026 Hot Chips conference.
d-Matrix has designed Raptor, which is expected to tape-out before the end of the year, from the ground up for integration with NVIDIA NVLink Fusion and the NVIDIA MGX rack-scale ecosystem, reflecting d-Matrix’s commitment to building purpose-built inference silicon that works seamlessly alongside the NVIDIA stack.
Raptor is being actively evaluated at AI hyperscalers and frontier labs for its unique memory stacking solution and is backed by more than 100 patents.
Availability
Initial availability of d-Matrix Raptor XPUs integrated into the NVIDIA MGX rack is expected Q4 2027.
To learn more, visit the d-Matrix booth at AI Infra Summit to see a demo or contact d-Matrix at www.d-matrix.ai/contact-sales.
About d-Matrix
d-Matrix is a leader in AI inference compute, delivering memory-centric compute chips, software and rack-scale systems for datacenters, making AI faster, more energy efficient, and more accessible.
By bringing memory directly into compute, d-Matrix overcomes the cost, latency, and power limitations of traditional architectures — working independently or in partnership with GPUs and other compute platforms. Its multi-generation roadmap, from planar to 3D memory-compute substrates and rack-scale systems, is built to help hyperscalers, frontier labs, and AI clouds deploy advanced AI experiences at global scale.
As demand for inference accelerates, d-Matrix is charting the path to infinite inference with no latency. For more information, visit www.d-matrix.ai.
OpenAI has launched ChatGPT for Financial Services, a Wall Street-focused version of ChatGPT Work developed with Morgan Stanley and Evercore that can research companies, analyze financial data, and build presentations using the company's latest and most advanced model, GPT-6 Astra. "We're effectively teaching ChatGPT to research like an analyst and back up its conclusions like an analyst as well," said OpenAI's Vice President of Product, Nick Turley. CNBC reports: The rollout puts OpenAI deeper into territory traditionally occupied by Wall Street's entry-level bankers, the recent college graduates called analysts and associates that the industry has employed for decades to research deals and create pitchbooks. It also showcases the company's continued push into enterprise offerings as it gears up for what is widely expected to be a blockbuster IPO.
In a live demonstration of the new offering, Turley showed the platform analyzing a potential M&A target, pulling financial figures from industry-standard data sources and creating a formatted PowerPoint deck based on a bank's pre-formatted style guide. "It's very easy to make slides that look good, but it's much harder to make slides [that] actually make sense," Turley said. "To get here, ChatGPT had to choose the relevant peers. It had to pull the prices into a spreadsheet. It had to check the chart against the data, and it had to explain the selloff and the rebound."
Veteran Frenchman bowed out in New York but the clash of two black players in the last four of the men’s singles is testament to his effect
The early days of this year’s US Open can be told in a series of farewells to competitors who plan to end their careers this year. The most moving of them all came in the form of Gaël Monfils’s grand departure inside Louis Armstrong Stadium against the wildly talented 20-year-old Learner Tien. Tien was competing in front of his home crowd, one of the Americans capable of a deep run, but for much of his straight-sets defeat the Frenchman had the American crowd in the palm of his hands.
Beyond the massive popularity he has garnered among tennis fans, one of the most striking parts of Monfils’s long farewell was seeing how highly nearly all of his fellow professionals, particularly his fellow black players, regard him. Frances Tiafoe says he spent his youth looking up to Monfils. Arthur Fils considers Monfils his older brother. Naomi Osaka’s nickname for Monfils, one of her idols, is simply “the Goat”. They all hold Monfils in such great esteem, and for good reason.
Democrats are targeting Trump’s relationship with Epstein as part of strategy ahead of midterm elections
James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas, accused his rival Ken Paxton of “ignoring” survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse, as Democrats seek to increase pressure on Republicans ahead of November’s midterm elections.
Speaking in Dallas, where Republicans are holding a midterm convention this week, Talarico appeared alongside one of Epstein’s victims at an exhibit that featured about 3.5m pages of Department of Justice’s files related to Epstein.
Terry Strada, whose husband was killed in the attacks, says she remains hopeful for justice as a lawsuit alleging Saudi support for the hijackers moves toward trial
The leader of one group of 9/11 victims’ families says it has “taken way too long” to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for its alleged support of the terrorists who carried out the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, whose 25th anniversary is being observed across the US on Friday.
As that grim milestone approached, Terry Strada – the national chair of 9/11 Families United – said she felt as if it had “been several lifetimes” for there to be progress in the effort “to achieve a modicum of justice through our court system” in connection with the deadliest act of terror against the US.
(The Center Square) – The Trump administration appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court once again after U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued a preliminary injunction on Friday before the holiday weekend prohibiting the U.S. Postal Service from implementing new mail-in…
Housing market has been stymied by borrowing costs, as Iran war pushed mortgage rates higher
Sales of previously occupied US homes declined in August to their slowest annual pace in more than a year as home shoppers grappled with rising mortgage rates and home prices.
Existing home sales fell 2% last month from July to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.98m units, the National Association of Realtors said on Thursday. This is the third straight monthly decline.
Dan Balz pays tribute to “a craftsman of the first order,” who wrote for Chicago newspapers before joining Politico as a columnist. He died Thursday at 78.
Many mayors welcome power to impose tourist tax but industry warns of ‘irreparable harm’ and job losses
Ministers are facing a backlash from the hospitality industry after they announced mayors in England would be given sweeping powers to levy taxes on holiday accommodation such as hotels and Airbnbs.
The plan, presented on Thursday by Angela Rayner, the local government secretary, will allow mayors to impose a “tourist tax” without a cap on how much they can charge and with few controls on how they can spend it.
Veterans recall chaos and confusion as the attacks unfolded – followed by a ‘war on terror’ that left agency with a tarnished reputation
A generation of spies had lost an enemy but not yet found a role. Then came 9/11.
A decade after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, al-Qaida’s devastating attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 announced to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that the long era of battling communism, for which it had been founded, was officially at an end.
Crude jumps above $107 a barrel amid concerns over Middle East conflict and out-of-control government borrowing
Nervous investors across big economies have been dumping government bonds, driving up the cost of borrowing, as surging oil prices amplified fears about rising inflation.
The cost of a barrel of oil jumped 6% to above $107 on Thursday amid concerns that advances by Houthi rebels along the Red Sea coast in Yemen could choke off Saudi crude exports.
IMDb is introducing "Digital Creator" as a new professional category on IMDb and IMDbPro, giving streamers, vloggers, influencers, video essayists, and other online creators a "dedicated way to represent [their] work and connect with audiences, industry peers, and potential employers," according to IMDb. Variety reports: The category includes sub-professions to further specify their work, including "Streamer," "Vlogger," "Video Essayist," "Video Creator," "Gaming Creator" and "Influencer."
The "Digital Creator" designation functions as a professional category on IMDb and IMDbPro. Creators can feature multiple professions on their page, so someone who is both a digital creator and an actor can "represent the full scope of their work in one place," per the company. No existing film or TV credits are required to establish a profile as a Digital Creator.
The payments amounted to 30% of each aide’s $150,000 annual salary
Donald Trump may have committed “serious” ethical violations by giving three officials including his close personal aide Natalie Harp cash gifts of $45,000 each, according to a former White House “ethics czar”, as a watchdog group called for an investigation.
The non-partisan Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the US Office of Government Ethics over the US president’s handouts to a handful of staff, arguing that an investigation was “clearly warranted”.
Funding will support the Asimov silicon tapeout and Titan system production ramp, following Positron’s 50-plus-rack Atlas deployment at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
RENO, Nev., Sept. 10, 2026 — Positron AI today announced an $875 million Series C financing at a $5 billion post-money valuation. The round was co-led by NEA, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, Andra Capital, Dylan Patel’s SemiAnalysis Capital and Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape. As part of the financing, Forest Baskett of NEA, Gavin Baker of Atreides Management, Thomas Jermoluk from Jim Clark Office and Dylan Patel will join Positron’s board of directors.
AI’s center of gravity is shifting from training models to running them. Every agent, assistant, and copilot runs on inference, and serving that demand at scale is increasingly constrained by memory capacity, memory bandwidth, and power. Positron builds memory-first inference systems designed around those constraints. Its next-gen systems realize more than 90 percent of their available memory bandwidth, are built on commodity LPDDR5X memory that sidesteps constrained HBM and CoWoS supply chains, and deliver leading tokens per dollar and tokens per watt. Because the architecture is highly energy efficient, Positron’s products can be deployed in air-cooled or liquid-cooled data centers operating at varying rack densities.
“Speed matters in this market, both in how quickly we ship new generations of silicon and in how quickly they reach customers. Deploying Atlas at scale taught us an enormous amount about what inference customers actually need, and we have carried those lessons directly into Asimov and Titan. Our focus now is to tape out Asimov, bring Titan to production, and scale manufacturing to meet the demand in front of us. This financing gives us the resources to do exactly that,” said Mitesh Agrawal, CEO of Positron AI.
Positron is deploying more than 50 racks of Atlas, its first-generation inference system, at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Parasail, a key partner, utilizes that capacity to power its own inference service. Additional Atlas production customers include Jump Trading and i3d.net.
The Round and What the Capital Funds
The financing was raised in two tranches. The Series C, $375 million at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation, was co-led by NEA, Andra Capital, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, and Dylan Patel’s SemiAnalysis Capital. The Series C-1, up to $500 million, was led by NEA and Jim Clark. Additional investors include DFJ Growth, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Resilience Reserve, Arena Private Wealth, Natural Capital, Helena, 1517 Fund, Flume Ventures, Unless, Boardman Bay Capital Management, Fincadia Advisors, Banyan Ventures and U First Capital alongside strategic investors VentureTech Alliance, Hudson River Trading, Cisco Investments and Naver Ventures.
The financing will fully fund the tapeout of Asimov, Positron’s next-generation silicon; the bring-up of a 2 MW+ engineering data center and emulation platform; and the production ramp of Titan, Positron’s next generation inference system, including LPDDR5X supply commitments, production capacity, system integration, and go-to-market expansion. Asimov tapes out on TSMC N3P at the end of 2026, with production in the second half of 2027, and pairs Positron’s compute architecture with 288 GB to 2,304 GB of memory per chip. Titan combines four to eight Asimov chips into a single system, designed to serve models beyond 16 trillion parameters and context windows beyond 10 million tokens in a single node, scaling to thousands of nodes.
“The Positron inference architecture balances compute, the enormous required memory bandwidth and extraordinarily large context and weight storage. Its optimized power consumption, cost and density is near ideal for inference requirements of the next evolution of Frontier large language models with trillions of parameters,” said Jim Clark, Silicon Graphics Founder and Netscape Co-Founder
About Positron AI
Positron AI builds hardware and software to make AI inference dramatically cheaper and more energy efficient. The company’s shipping product, Atlas, is deployed at hyperscaler scale today, and its next-generation custom silicon, Asimov, tapes out in late 2026 with production in the second half of 2027. Asimov powers Titan, a multi-terabyte-memory inference system for long-context and next-generation AI workloads. Positron’s energy-efficient architecture allows its systems to be deployed in air-cooled or liquid-cooled data centers at varying rack densities, without dependence on constrained HBM or CoWoS supply chains. Learn more at positron.ai.
ESPOO, Finland, Sept. 10, 2026 — IQM Quantum Computers today announced its upgrade path for a logical-qubit-capable quantum computer. The deployment to the LUMI AI Factory, led by CSC – IT Center for Science, will support R&D efforts toward fault-tolerant quantum computing and advancements in hybrid computing.
LUMI AI Factory selects IQM’s staged path to Europe’s first superconducting quantum computer with logical qubits
The system, named LUMI-IQ, is an integral part of the wider LUMI AI Factory initiative, and is jointly funded by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking and the participating countries: Finland, Czechia, Norway, and Poland. LUMI-IQ will be hosted in CSC’s new data center in Kajaani, Finland.
LUMI-IQ will be delivered in three steps: the first installation of an IQM Halocene H4 system in 2027 with 150 physical qubits and early quantum error correction capabilities. The system will be upgraded in 2028 to lower logical error rates and enable real time error correction. The final upgrade is installation of IQM Halocene H5 system in 2029. These upgrades equip the system towards early fault tolerant quantum computing.
After the final upgrade, LUMI-IQ will be capable of fast real time feedback sustaining logical qubits and enabling full logical operations between the qubits, including lattice surgery and T-gate teleportation. With distance 3 surface code and colour code, the system will enable computations with up to 9 logical qubits. Additionally, the is capable encoding logical qubits up to distance 11 with surface code and distance 9 with color code.
Logical qubits created by combining multiple physical qubits through quantum error correction are significantly more stable and reliable than physical qubits alone, making them essential to running the longer, more complex calculations required for real-world quantum applications.
This phased delivery reflects IQM’s development roadmap toward fault-tolerant quantum computing, delivering error-corrected systems with high-precision logical qubits. It allows customer a capital efficient way to benefit from IQM´s ambitious error correction roadmap and a continuous integration into their existing compute infrastructure.
“Owning an upgradeable quantum computer lets CSC and the LUMI AI Factory integrate the system into their own AI and HPC infrastructure. That’s what lets a real ecosystem grow: researchers building on infrastructure they control, inside one of the most capable computing environments anywhere,” said Jan Goetz, CEO and Co-founder of IQM Quantum Computers. “That kind of ownership is exactly what Europe needs right now — not just access to quantum computing, but the ability to shape its direction, build local expertise, and push the frontiers of advanced computing.”
The system will be integrated into the LUMI-AI computing environment. Together, LUMI-IQ and LUMI-AI will form a leading hybrid computing platform, enabling workloads that combine HPC, AI, and quantum computing.
This integrated approach is expected to enable new forms of scientific workloads that combine traditional simulation, machine learning, and quantum algorithms — opening new research avenues for European end-users.
“The greatest potential lies in combining the complementary strengths of AI, high-performance computing, and quantum computing. Logical qubits make quantum calculations more reliable, while AI and HPC provide the scale, data processing and orchestration needed around them. The LUMI AI Factory allows European researchers to develop innovative hybrid approaches in a world-class computing environment,” said Kimmo Koski, CEO of CSC – IT Center for Science.
About IQM Quantum Computers
IQM Quantum Computers (Nasdaq: IQMX) is a global leader in superconducting quantum computers, delivering full-stack quantum systems and cloud platform access to enterprises, research institutions, universities, high-performance computing centers, and national laboratories worldwide. IQM’s open, modular architecture allows customers to own, operate, and integrate quantum systems directly into their own infrastructure, building lasting technical capability rather than relying solely on remote access. Founded in 2018, IQM is headquartered in Espoo, Finland, with major operations in Munich, Germany, and has sold more quantum systems than any other manufacturer to date. IQM employs over 450 people and operates across Europe, Asia, and North America. IQM is the first publicly listed European quantum company on Nasdaq Stock Market.
About CSC – IT Center for Science
CSC is a Finnish center of expertise in ICT that provides world-class services for research, education, culture, public administration, and enterprises, to help them thrive and benefit society at large.
LUMI AI Factory
The LUMI AI Factory is a leading-edge service infrastructure and expert support centre designed to accelerate AI innovation across Europe. The LUMI AI Factory delivers a seamless, open AI solution that integrates world-class supercomputing, high-value data, and top-tier AI expertise. It is the biggest AI Factory of the European Union.
Trump’s promise to pay $5,000 to every adult US citizen if the Republicans win in November was only one questionable moment in a nearly two-hour speech
Hello, from the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, where on Wednesday night Trump definitely, definitely, did not try to bribe the American public into voting for his party in November.
Speaking for almost two hours at the American Airlines Center, Trump promised to pay every adult citizen in the US $5,000 if Republicans retain the House and Senate in the midterm elections. The speech felt very much like a desperate last pitch to voters: the electoral equivalent of a dumped boyfriend offering to take his estranged girlfriend on a mini-break to Venice.
PARIS, Sept. 10, 2026 — Bull, a leader in advanced computing and AI, announced a €31 million contract with the Spanish State Meteorological Agency (AEMET) to deliver a new supercomputing infrastructure that will support faster and more accurate weather, climate and environmental forecasting services in Spain. The four-year project marks a new chapter in a collaboration that began in 2015 and reflects AEMET’s continued confidence in Bull’s expertise in designing and operating mission-critical supercomputing environments.
As climate change drives more frequent and severe weather events, meteorological agencies require greater forecasting precision and faster data processing. At the same time, artificial intelligence and machine learning are opening new opportunities to complement traditional forecasting methods. To support these evolving needs, AEMET is modernizing the high-performance computing infrastructure at the core of its weather, climate and environmental services.
To meet AEMET’s needs, Bull will deliver a complete supercomputing infrastructure, including hardware, software and 24/7 monitoring services. Hosted at two different sites in the Madrid area, this new infrastructure will provide a performance increase of 10%, enabling the optimization of existing applications while opening the environment to new AI-based applications that will greatly improve weather forecasting and climate change analysis.
While performance increase is a pillar of the contract, optimizing the power consumption and improving the platform’s energy efficiency are equally important. To tackle these challenges, the architecture incorporates state-of-the-art solutions, managed through Bull’s Smart Management Center Suite (SMC), which together enable further improvement of AEMET’s already optimised PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness).
“The commissioning of this new high-performance computing infrastructure represents a strategic milestone for AEMET,” said Alicia López Rejas Executive Director, at AEMET. “It will significantly enhance our meteorological and climate forecasting capabilities, foster the application of artificial intelligence, and strengthen the continuity of essential services that are critical to public safety and societal support. The collaboration with Bull is key to making this infrastructure a reality, positioning the Agency at the forefront of technological innovation among European meteorological services.”
“At Bull, we believe that combining high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and energy-efficient technologies is key to helping organisations deliver increasingly accurate, resilient and sustainable services at scale,” said Bruno Lecointe, head of HPC, AI and Quantum Computing, at Bull. “We are proud to continue our long-standing collaboration with AEMET and to support its technological transformation with a modernized infrastructure designed for both today’s computing needs and tomorrow’s AI-driven innovations. Behind this infrastructure, millions of weather observations are transformed every day into forecasts that help citizens, public authorities, researchers and businesses make informed decisions.”
About Bull
Leveraging nearly a century of innovations, Bull is a global leader for High-Performance Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Quantum technologies with c.720m€ in revenue and 3,000 professionals operating in 32 countries. Built on an open, end-to-end and trusted approach, Bull designs, deploys and operates hardware, software and strategic services that unlock enterprise value, accelerate scientific research and advance society. Driven by world-class R&D, backed by 1,600 patents, manufacturing excellence and data sciences expertise, Bull enables nations and industries to fully control their AI and data and to drive progress for the benefit of the planet.
The defense says: ‘It’s about competition, not conspiracy’
A US prosecutor described China’s Huawei as a criminal enterprise that stole from US companies to build its telecommunications empire, as the trial against the tech company kicked off in Brooklyn federal court on Wednesday.
“Theft, lies, cover-up,” Taylor Stout, a trial attorney from the US Department of Justice, said in the government’s opening statement. “For 20 years, that’s how Huawei, a massive Chinese telecommunications company, victimized American companies and abused the American financial system, all in an effort to dominate the telecommunications industry around the world.”
Bronwen James, 30, admitted offences against two girls at schools in Wiltshire and Hampshire, and found guilty of charges involving boy
A former PE teacher is facing a lengthy jail sentence for grooming and sexually abusing three pupils at two schools.
Bronwen James, 30, admitted offences against two girls at schools in Hampshire and Wiltshire and was found guilty by a jury of charges involving a boy.
Family of late King Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV reject committee’s choice of cousin and TV presenter as new monarch
A traditional Ugandan kingdom has become engulfed in a bitter succession dispute after the family of a king who recently died rejected the selection of a television news anchor as his successor.
King Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV, who became the world’s youngest reigning monarch when he took the throne in the kingdom of Tooro in 1995 at the age of three, died on 27 August in the US, where he was receiving cancer treatment.
Spotlight Delaware has launched the Delaware Campaign Finance Explorer, a free, easy-to-use tool for the public to see who is funding candidates running for state and county offices this year.
Our independent, nonprofit newsroom was founded with a mission to advance transparency in government and political campaigns, and with outside spending reaching unforeseen levels for a midterm election, we are giving the public easier insights to those efforts than ever before.
The Explorer tool was built using publicly available campaign finance filings from 2025 and 2026, but utilizes a user-friendly interface that allows viewers to see how candidates compare in an individual race and what third-party support may be influencing public perception of campaigns.
The information is sortable by candidates, donors and races and displays how much support a candidate has garnered from Delawareans versus those from other states, as well as support from third-party organizations that cannot legally coordinate with their campaign but certainly amplify messaging that nonetheless aids their run.
“With outside spending already eclipsing $2.7 million on races that have historically garnered less attention than the governorship or Congressional positions, the need for transparency is greater than ever,” said Jacob Owens, the editor in chief of Spotlight Delaware. “We’re proud to make campaign finance information easier to understand than ever before in Delaware.”
Information in the Campaign Finance Explorer is update to date through the last filings legally required before the Sept. 15 primary election — which is just days away. It will continue to be updated through two more reporting periods through the Nov. 3 general election.
A federal appeals court denied the Trump administration's request to lift a lower court's order that blocked new rules for mail ballots before the midterms.
Republican calls department of motor vehicles a ‘bloated bureaucracy’ as he seeks to boost his longshot campaign
The longshot California gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton pledged this week to abolish the state’s department of motor vehicles if he is elected, promising to shutter the oft-criticized department for good and set a flat $73 annual registration fee per car.
Hilton, a Trump-backed former conservative pundit running in reliably blue California, called the state’s DMV a “bloated bureaucracy”, during a Tuesday campaign event, echoing the Trump administration’s efforts to slash the federal workforce.
Galleries at the 20th Solheim Cup have been granted a blockbuster start with Nelly Korda and Charley Hull to face off in Friday morning’s foursomes. The meeting of Korda, the world No 1, and Hull, Europe’s star turn, should ensure an electric opening in the Netherlands as the USA seek to retain the trophy won in Virginia two years ago. Korda nudged out Hull at the US Women’s Open in June.
Hull will partner the Solheim Cup debutant Lottie Woad against the formidable USA pairing of Korda and Allisen Corpuz to begin the tournament. Nanna Koerstz Madsen and Céline Boutier will represent Europe in match two, where they will take on Alison Lee and Lauren Coughlin. Esther Henseleit and Leona Maguire have been selected for the hosts in the penultimate match, with Andrea Lee and Lindy Duncan in opposition. The foursomes will conclude with Europe’s Swedish duo of Maja Stark and Linn Grant facing Rose Zhang and Jennifer Kupcho.
The Ali G and Borat creator is reported to be taking the lead in The Popinjay Cavalier, a swashbuckling comedy Tarantino is developing for early 2027
He will soon be seen resuming his old Staines rudeboy persona in the film Ali G: Who Iz I?, but Sacha Baron Cohen may also be eyeing a new departure – on stage.
The actor will reportedly star in Quentin Tarantino’s first play, The Popinjay Cavalier, which is billed as a “rambunctious comedy of deception and disguise” and a “sweeping celebration of theatre and its heightened romance”, set in 1830s Europe. According to Deadline, Baron Cohen will play the swashbuckling title character in the play, which Tarantino will also direct.
David Morales wins Democratic primary for Providence mayor, unseating the incumbent mayor, Brett Smiley
In the latest in a string of victories by progressives across parts of the US, the democratic socialist David Morales won the Democratic primary for mayor in Providence, Rhode Island, on Wednesday night, unseating the incumbent mayor, Brett Smiley.
The Rhode Island state representative, who was endorsed by the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders as well as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), is now the favorite to secure the mayoralty in the deep blue city’s November general election against the Republican nominee, 77-year-old David Talan.
ZURICH, Sept. 10, 2026 — IBM and Lockheed Martin, through an offset agreement with armasuisse, Switzerland’s Federal Office for Defence Procurement, today established a hub for quantum innovation at ETH Zurich, a prominent public research university. The new hub plans to host the country’s first IBM Quantum System Two at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) in Lugano.
Credit: Taljat David/Shutterstock
IBM will operate the IBM Quantum System Two, which will be powered by an IBM Quantum Nighthawk, the company’s most advanced processor. ETH Zurich will provide expertise, resources and technologies for Swiss industries, startups and academia, including access to the quantum computer. Its delivery is expected to catalyze the development of new algorithms, technical breakthroughs, and industrial use cases, as well as anchor initiatives to foster Switzerland’s workforce and talent. The project also advances the ongoing strategic collaboration between Lockheed Martin and IBM, combining Lockheed Martin innovations in quantum sensing and additive manufacturing with IBM’s expertise in quantum computing and AI.
“Switzerland is deservedly recognized as a hub for global innovation, and Lockheed Martin is proud of its long history of technical collaboration within the country,” said Dr. Craig Martell, Lockheed Martin vice president and chief technology officer. “This project extends the strategic relationship between Lockheed Martin and IBM in quantum and AI while positioning Switzerland as a leader in these critical, cutting-edge fields. It provides resources and expertise, develops skills and enables joint research across the Swiss commercial, defense and academic ecosystem.”
“IBM has collaborated with institutions in Switzerland for almost 100 years. Our research team at our Zurich lab has led fundamental technology breakthroughs for the world and has been part of the country’s science ecosystem for decades,” said Alessandro Curioni, vice president, Algorithms and Applications, IBM Research and director of the Zurich Research Laboratory. “As we continue to foster innovation with the Swiss community, we are excited to have the opportunity to put world-class quantum hardware, software and expertise directly into the hands of Switzerland’s thriving academic institutions and industries.”
“Switzerland will gain access to essential research infrastructure that will enable us to further advance the exploration of this emerging technology and educate the talent needed to support it,” said ETH Zurich President Joël Mesot, emphasizing the opportunities the new quantum computer will bring to Switzerland.
Delivering Quantum to the Swiss Ecosystem
Organizations that join the innovation hub through ETH Zurich will have immediate access to these resources and IBM’s fleet of quantum computers available over the cloud. Additionally, upon the system’s deployment by the end of 2026, ETH Zurich will provide organizations with access to Switzerland’s own dedicated IBM Quantum System Two. These capabilities will enable the country’s community of innovators to accelerate scientific and industrial research and build new use cases across chemistry, materials science, optimization, financial services and more. Today, IBM quantum computers are already delivering scientific value across the globe as useful tools in these fields.
IBM and Lockheed Martin Expand Joint Research Initiatives
As part of the collaboration, two planned joint development projects between IBM and Lockheed Martin include the exploration of quantum sensing applications for navigation and the improvement of additive manufacturing of metallic alloys. These projects also complement ongoing efforts by IBM and Lockheed Martin across a range of advanced technologies focused on aerospace and defense innovation.
IBM and ETH Zurich Build on a Legacy of Collaboration
This initiative also builds upon a close and long-standing collaboration between IBM and ETH Zurich, including a recently launched 10-year effort to advance foundational algorithmic research.
The quantum education and workforce development effort includes providing the Swiss ecosystem with access to the IBM Quantum Network and IBM Quantum Platform learning offerings, including coursework, certifications, and workshops; as well as event support, such as hackathons, conferences, and partner forums.
IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of governments and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service. Visit www.ibm.com for more information.
About Lockheed Martin
Lockheed Martin is a global defense technology company driving innovation and advancing scientific discovery. Our all-domain mission solutions and 21st Century Security vision accelerate the delivery of transformative technologies to ensure those we serve always stay ahead of ready. More information at Lockheedmartin.com.
New capabilities give AI real-time insights into live systems while making fast-changing data easier to manage and analyze at scale.
BELLEVUE, Wash., Sept. 10, 2026 — ScaleOut Software today introduced Version 7 of its ScaleOut Product Suite, advancing its industry-leading, in-memory computing and digital twin software with new capabilities that give generative AI a fast, scalable data layer for monitoring and analyzing complex, live systems.
Applying generative AI to live systems, for example, to monitor a telecommunications network, requires both timely information and an understanding of the system producing it. Today’s retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) relies on traditional data sources, such as databases that cannot provide live telemetry at scale, or on streaming platforms, which lack descriptive information about the system. As a result, AI lacks the continuously updated, contextualized view of a live system needed to effectively monitor and analyze it.
Version 7 of ScaleOut Digital Twins addresses that gap by creating a fast, scalable data layer for AI RAG that eliminates bottlenecks in accessing live data. ScaleOut’s software platform uses an object-oriented, digital twin model to track all system components in real time. It also holds rich metadata about the system’s structure and its intended behavior, giving AI deep context to aid its analysis. ScaleOut’s distributed in-memory computing architecture delivers the scalability required to track very large and complex operational systems. It provides a new foundation for RAG to meet the demands of today’s AI models.
Key New Features in ScaleOut Product Suite, Version 7
Integration of Claude with Live Digital Twin Data and Context: Claude Desktop can now securely connect to a ScaleOut digital twin deployment using the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This gives Claude direct access to live telemetry, system structure, and contextual metadata for real-time analysis. Additional AI model integrations are planned for future releases.
Unified Access to ScaleOut’s Real-Time Technologies: A new integrated user interface unifies management of ScaleOut Digital Twins within the ScaleOut Product Suite. Now developers can seamlessly manage digital twin models alongside other platform features, including ScaleOut Active Caching for managing fast-changing application data. The unified user interface gives organizations a simpler way to deploy and manage applications that track live data at scale.
Fast Analysis of Large Cached Collections: Developers can now deploy data-parallel methods across entire collections of in-memory objects to implement fast, scalable analysis of cached data. Building on ScaleOut Software’s two decades of technical leadership in parallel computing and delivered as a part of ScaleOut Active Caching, this powerful new feature automatically distributes work across ScaleOut’s in-memory computing platform and returns combined results to applications. For example, developers can now deploy customized text search algorithms that run across cached datasets and quickly identify stored data that match specific criteria.
“Operational managers are now using AI models to monitor and analyze large systems, like transportation and logistics systems. However, these models face major bottlenecks ingesting live data and capturing context about a live system. Digital twins have the speed and richness to meet this challenge and unlock AI’s potential,” said Dr. William Bain, CEO and founder of ScaleOut Software. “Version 7 introduces a unique integration of Claude with our highly scalable digital twin platform, built on decades of innovation in in-memory computing. We are excited to see how these combined technologies give organizations a fundamentally better way to manage live systems.”
Learn more about ScaleOut Product Suite, Version 7 by visiting the company’s website here and reading the blog post here.
About ScaleOut Software
Founded in 2003, ScaleOut Software develops leading-edge software that delivers scalable, highly available distributed caching, in-memory computing, and digital twin technologies to a wide range of industries. ScaleOut Software’s in-memory computing platform enables operational intelligence by storing, updating, and analyzing fast-changing, live data so that businesses can capture perishable opportunities before the moment is lost. The company is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington.
Automattic's board has placed founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg on a paid leave of absence against his will, with CFO Mark Davies taking over as interim CEO. The reason for the move remains unclear, but it follows years of legal fights, layoffs, employee departures, and controversy surrounding Mullenweg's leadership. TechCrunch reports: Earlier Wednesday, Mullenweg posted in a Slack channel visible to all employees that the company's chief financial officer, Mark Davies, had "conspired" with other board members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker to vote to put Mullenweg on a paid leave of absence.
The message read: "And the biggest news: I won't be able to make the [meeting] tomorrow. @Mark Davies has conspired with @Ann Dunwoody, @Toni, and @Sue Decker behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that. Wishing Mark and all of you the very best. To clarify @Mark Davies was voted as interim CEO. I received the resolution 50 minutes before the meeting start, and requested repeatedly for time to have it reviewed by independent legal counsel, even a few hours, which was denied."
A Slack message to the open source WordPress.org community from the project's executive director, Mary Hubbard, also confirmed Mullenweg's change of status at the commercial company. However, Hubbard said that WordPress.org was not impacted. "Matt remains the leader of the WordPress project and I remain Executive Director of WordPress. Our teams, priorities, and work continue as planned," she wrote.
SimuScan uses realistic synthetic data to train AI to identify important nanoscale features and guide atomic force microscopes toward the most informative regions of a sample
Sept. 10, 2026 — Researchers at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have developed an artificial intelligence framework that helps researchers use atomic force microscopes to identify important nanoscale features while autonomously targeting the most informative areas of a sample for closer study.
AI-assisted atomic force microscopy identifies tiny surface structures such as nanostructures, DNA assemblies and bacterial cells, and directs follow-up scans to regions most likely to contain scientifically relevant information. Credit: Andrew Sproles/ORNL.
Although atomic force microscopy (AFM) reveals structures as small as molecules, operating the instrument still requires expert judgment about where to scan, how to adjust settings and which features deserve closer study. SimuScan reduces that burden, making AFM faster, more consistent and better suited for high-throughput research.
“Operating an atomic force microscope is a bit like piloting a modern jet,” said Liam Collins, an ORNL senior R&D scientist at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS). “The hardware has incredible capability, but making full use of it often requires an experienced pilot.” That reliance on specialized expertise slows large-scale studies and makes results more dependent on individual users.
“The challenge is not only acquiring the image but also understanding what is in the image, deciding what matters and knowing where the microscope should look next,” said Ruben Millan Solsona, an ORNL technical professional and staff scientist.
In a paper published in Nature Communications, the researchers describe how SimuScan addresses one of AI’s biggest obstacles for AFM: the shortage of high-quality labeled training data.
Why Interpreting AFM Data Is Difficult for AI
At first glance, interpreting AFM images looks like a standard image-analysis problem. But AFM images differ fundamentally from photographs because they reflect both the sample and the measurement process.
“A camera records reflected light, but an atomic force microscope acts more like a high-tech record player needle feeling its way across a landscape,” Collins said. What the microscope records depends on the sample, the AFM probe itself and the way it is measured.
Millan Solsona put it simply: “Tip geometry, drift, flattening and contamination can all introduce artifacts that resemble real nanoscale structures. Experienced users learn to distinguish them; AI models must be taught to do the same.”
Training data are also scarce. Unlike everyday photographs or medical images, relatively few AFM images have been carefully labeled by experts, making it difficult to train AI models.
A Flight Simulator for AFM
SimuScan tackles the data problem by generating synthetic AFM images, along with automatic labels tied directly to the simulated object geometry, so models can be trained without large volumes of hand-annotated experimental data.
To work in real laboratories, however, the synthetic images must be realistic. Rather than producing pristine images, SimuScan recreates the imperfections AFM users encounter every day — including tip effects, scanner drift, electronic noise, contamination and surface roughness.
The researchers validated SimuScan by training AI models on synthetic images and testing whether they could accurately identify features in real AFM data.
“The true test of realism is whether an AI trained in a flight simulator can successfully land a real plane in a storm,” Collins said.
Cutting the Data Labeling Bottleneck
Creating training data is often the most labor-intensive part of scientific AI. Experts may spend days or weeks outlining features, and results can vary from one researcher to another.
With SimuScan, much of that burden shifts to computation. The system can generate large datasets, including thousands of labeled images, with controlled variability in object shapes, backgrounds and artifacts. In this approach, experimental data are used primarily to test and refine the models rather than create most of the training labels.
The guiding insight, Millan Solsona said, is that synthetic data must not be too perfect. Training on realistic imperfections helps AI recognize true nanoscale structures under real laboratory conditions.
Finding Targets and Deciding Where to Zoom In
Beyond analyzing images after the scan, SimuScan supports a closed-loop approach to targeted imaging. The process starts with a fast, low-resolution survey scan across a relatively large area. The AI then identifies and segments features, ranks potential targets based on user-defined criteria and directs the microscope to regions most likely to contain scientifically relevant information. The process can repeat as needed.
The autonomy is deliberate but bounded. The scientist still sets the goals — what to look for, what constraints to respect and when enough data have been collected. For researchers using CNMS, this capability could make advanced AFM measurements more accessible, even for scientists who are experts in their materials but not in microscopy.
Collins likens it to moving from a highly skilled pilot to an intelligent copilot. The point is not to remove the researcher from the loop but to shift the person to higher-value decisions: interpreting results instead of hunting for them.
Testing SimuScan in the Real World
In demonstrations spanning fabricated nanostructures, DNA assemblies, and bacterial cells, the team showed that models trained primarily on synthetic data could transfer to real AFM images.
The largest sources of error, the researchers found, often came from the background rather than the target. Real materials can have regular nanoscale textures such as atomic terraces, grain structures and periodic patterns that confuse models. Dense clusters or overlapping objects, such as touching bacterial cells, also remain challenging, even for humans.
Those results are helping the team improve SimuScan by better representing realistic substrates so models learn what to ignore as well as what to detect.
Toward Routine, Scalable AFM
For SimuScan to become commonplace, Collins and Millan Solsona said it must integrate more seamlessly with microscope software and include straightforward ways to verify that AI models remain reliable as instruments and experimental conditions change.
The first applications are likely to involve studies requiring measurements of thousands of similar objects, such as nanoparticles, DNA nanostructures and bacterial cells.
In the long run, Collins and Millan Solsona envision microscopes becoming active partners in discovery rather than passive imaging tools. SimuScan is one step toward that future.
The work was supported by DOE’s Office of Science through the Biopreparedness Research Virtual Environment initiative and relied on a user project at CNMS, a DOE Office of Science user facility at ORNL.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
Home secretary tells officers to make ‘full use’ of their powers after masked vigilantes cause weekend of chaos
Shabana Mahmood has urged police to curb the activities of far-right, anti-migrant groups which have “obvious malign intent” after a weekend of chaos caused by balaclava-wearing vigilantes.
In a meeting on Thursday, the home secretary told senior officers to make “full use” of their powers, including bans on face coverings, after police were assaulted and ports were disrupted in Kent and Hampshire.
Surprise appearance by Pennsylvania senator raises fresh questions over loyalty to and future in Democratic party
The Democratic senator John Fetterman’s decision to address the Republican National Committee (RNC) midterm convention via video sparked a furious response from some members of his party.
Fetterman’s surprise appearance – and praise of his fellow Pennsylvania senator, Republican Dave McCormick – raised fresh questions over his loyalty to, and future inside, the Democratic party.
Critics react to bid for Republican votes with incredulity and point to potential $1.2tn cost atop existing national debt
Donald Trump’s promise of a $5,000 “Trump dividend” for every US citizen if Republicans retain control of the US Congress in November’s midterm elections has sparked incredulity and accusations of bribery.
“If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000,” Trump said during the unprecedented Republican midterm convention in Dallas. “It will be called the Trump dividend.”
Mike Rogers has also helped kill other bills that would have provided healthcare to responders and survivors
Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican US Senate candidate, has sought in recent weeks to create controversy over old tweets his Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed posted about 9/11. He has for example, falsely suggested El-Sayed, who is Muslim, said the US deserved the attack.
But, as critics have noted, Rogers has twice voted against healthcare and other benefits for 9/11 first responders and survivors, congressional records show. He has also helped kill other bills that would have provided benefits and healthcare to first responders nationwide. Rogers, a former member of Congress, is vying for Michigan’s open US Senate seat in a tight race that could decide control of Congress during the next session.
A new documentary, "Daughters of 9/11," follows their pursuit of information and closure, which they were determined to find for themselves, other families who lost loved ones in the attacks and the American public.
U.S. jets were hit by Iranian missiles while parked at a base in Jordan, sources tell CBS News, while Trump said the war will end "immediately" after midterms.
Andrew Tyler, who worked in the fraud section of the Criminal Division of DOJ, was removed Tuesday over allegations of ethical violations, sources said.
Travelers' interest in island getaways is rising in 2026, with searches for destinations on Expedia's latest Island Hot List up an average of 55% year over year.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said despite high healthcare spending, the U.S. is failing its children on an unprecedented level.
“This country pays two to three times what every developing nation in the world pays, and yet we have the sickest children in the history of the world,” Kennedy said, addressing the Republican midterm convention in Dallas on Sept. 10. “We have the highest chronic disease burden ever recorded.”
For this fact-check, we’re focusing on the claim that the U.S. has the “sickest children in the history of the world.”
PolitiFact reached out to the Health and Human Services Department for data to back up Kennedy’s statement and didn’t immediately receive a response. He’s made the statement at least once before, in 2024.
Kennedy’s statement ignores the massive drop in childhood mortality and infectious disease rates since the 19th century.
For almost all of human history, about half of all children died before reaching puberty, with infectious disease as a major contributor. Children worldwide got sick and died far more often in the past than they do today, including in the U.S.
Sanitation, vaccination and antibiotics are the three big contributors to the huge decrease in childhood mortality over the 20th century. A 2024 study found that vaccination prevented 146 million deaths among children under 5 globally since 1974.
Compared with developing countries, American children have better health outcomes. The U.S. under-5 mortality rate is about 80% lower than the global average, and some of the leading global causes of childhood death such as diarrhea and malaria now cause almost no childhood deaths in the U.S.
In the long view of history, today’s American children are far less likely to die of disease. But by some metrics, U.S. children’s health has gotten worse in recent decades, and U.S. children have worse mortality rates than their peers in other developed countries.
From 2007 to 2022, the mortality rate for U.S. children and teens ages 1 to 19 was 80% higher than the same age group in other high-income countries, according to a 2025 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The death rate between U.S. children and peers ages 1 to 19 in other developed nations most differed when it came to gun-related and traffic deaths. U.S. children were 15 times more likely to die because of a firearm compared with children in other high-income countries, the study by researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of California, Los Angeles found.
The study also found that chronic diseases such as obesity, sleeping problems and mental health issues have been increasing for U.S. children in recent decades. It found that U.S. children in 2023 were 15% to 20% more likely to have a chronic condition than children in 2011. But chronic diseases are only one form of illness, and the data doesn’t support Kennedy’s sweeping statement.
The same study found infants born in the U.S. were 78% more likely to die than in other developed countries, with prematurity, congenital anomalies, sudden unexpected deaths and respiratory infections being more common.
Our ruling
Kennedy said the U.S. has the “sickest children in the history of the world.”
Before advances in sanitation and medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries, about half of all children worldwide died, largely from infectious diseases.
Some data shows chronic disease rates are rising and children in the U.S. have a higher mortality rate than children in other developed countries. But Kennedy’s statement ignores the major reductions in childhood illness and death achieved over the last 200 years, and he’s wrong that the U.S. has the “sickest children” in history. We rate that False.
This was my eighth year to judge the International Supercomputing Conference Student Cluster Competition (ISC High Performance SCC); third to cover both remote and on-site contests.
I haven’t attended in-person since ISC 2018; in 2020, I had a plane ticket, but everything shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic before I could travel. It has been a long road to recovery for travel and conferencing industries (not to mention we extroverts). However, ISC 2026 drew a record 4,035 attendees and 188 exhibitors from 64 countries. By comparison, ISC 2019 had 3,573 attendees and 164 exhibitors from 64 countries. Six years on, the conference hasn’t fully recovered, but it has grown beyond where it left off.
Each year, the excitement builds as the competition unfolds. In the days leading up to it, student teams crowd around racks of hardware, a chaos of cables snake across the floor, benchmarks run — or fail — and they race the clock while judges hover nearby shouting questions over the roar of cooling fans. This year, we judges met and traveled around the competition space together, which was less distracting for the students than having us pop in unexpectedly; undoubtedly a welcome change.
Teams must demonstrate that they understand more than just their systems and applications. They are required to explain their approaches, answer questions and defend their decisions (exercising their communication skills). Some judges can be downright socratic, so students must think on their feet and stand firm when under fire. Every experienced HPC engineer knows that systems don’t always behave as expected. Applications crash. Libraries conflict. Performance numbers don’t make sense. A configuration that worked yesterday mysteriously fails today. The SCC compresses all of those experiences into a very short period requiring the ability to perform under pressure. Students are also judged on how well they work together as a team, and reflect team spirit.
ISC-SCC judges’ dinner in Hamburg. Ophir Maor in blue shirt on left, next to Brian Sparks in the brown shirt and hat.
Judges have had a front-row seat to the ISC-SCC’s evolution as it has grown and become more international. When the pandemic arrived, the HPC-AI Advisory Council quickly pivoted (remember the p-word?). A virtual contest was arranged with access to cloud and in situ systems. With ISC 2020, and the Winter Classic ‘20, which I also judged, we learned that cloud credits, no matter how many are donated, are never enough. The virtual experiment, born out of necessity, became a permanent part of the competition and enabled many more to participate. While in-person events have more advantages, they require substantial institutional, corporate and/or government support. Airfare, lodging, meals, visa fees, conference expenses, and ground transit are costly. Additionally, participants lose income potential and academic progress during conference and training weeks. The virtual experience is within reach for many more.
ISC-SCC Leaders Ophir Maor and Brian Sparks (both with NVIDIA and the HPC-AI Advisory Council) begin planning the next contest before the current one concludes. Ophir ensures that systems are arranged and judges are briefed. He works with us to select the applications used, and plan the schedule for the coming year. It’s difficult to find favorable meeting times; judges are globally-scattered across many time zones. Ophir typically sacrifices the most by meeting in the early hours of his California zone.
I ran into fellow judges, Filippo Spiga (NVIDIA; on left)….
It’s a brilliant group; ISC judges have worked as research facilitators, research faculty, or for commercial entities in product and application development. They participate on a Slack channel where students can ask questions in the months leading up to the contest. It’s a rare opportunity for students to have 1-1 access to such expertise. Filippo Spiga (NVIDIA) and I missed the judges dinner this year, but Ophir shared the team shot above.
We are grateful for US, European, and Canadian resource providers who grant access to their clusters for the virtual competition. This is a nontrivial “ask” from authentication and security perspectives, considering that dozens of students (and their advisers) from around the world poke at them all hours of the day and night with what must seem like super-human tenacity and persistence. But these centers also benefit; such activity can expose network bottlenecks and security vulnerabilities.
ISC 2009 – 2012 were in Hamburg; ISC 2013 – 2014 in Leipzig; ISC 2015 – 2019 in Frankfurt; and ISC 2020 – 2021 were exclusively online. Since returning to an in-person event, the remote SCC was preserved so that more can participate. In 2018, there were a dozen ISC-SCC teams from 11 countries, and in 2019, 14 teams from 11 countries. This year, there were 21 (one dropped) remote teams and 10 in-person.
Centers that have donated resources for the remote competition since ISC 2020 include: National Supercomputing Center, Singapore; University of Toronto in Canada (Niagara); HPC-AI Advisory Council in the U.S. (Thor and IRIS); the German Climate Computing Center – DKRZ (Levante); Friedrich-Alexander-Universität in Germany; University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne in France (ROMEO); and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in the U.S. (Bridges-2).
Hamburg, Germany’s Second Largest City, Has a Hometown Vibe
This was my first visit to Hamburg; what a beautiful city! I am always apprehensive when I facilitate student travel in a new city, but my fears were put to rest upon arrival. To begin with, Hamburg was cool, with more hours of daylight; it was great to dine al fresco without baking (much of the world was experiencing a heatwave and drought that week).
Team South Africa fielding questions from the judges
It was a joy to see everyone in 3D, and there was a unique excitement in the air. I attribute this, in part, to this cohort having lived in isolation during socially-formative years. While the remote contests taught important technical skills, socialization is most effective within shared airspace and over a good meal. This year we saw more mixed groups out and about enjoying Hamburg. In the past, teams stuck tight with colleagues from home, and didn’t socialize much with others. But it only takes one social engineer to stir things up! I recognized a few while visiting the SCC teams in their workspaces; every team should have at least one who identifies as an extrovert.
Time to Pivot Again?
For a student interested in an HPC career, attending ISC is an extraordinary opportunity, and the competition is only part of it. There are keynote presentations, technical sessions, tutorials, exhibitors, and many kindred souls from around the world. They may arrive thinking primarily about benchmarks and leave contemplating graduate school, internships, research collaborations or an HPC career.
Undergraduate students are also influenced by graduate scholars they meet at technical conferences. Thanks to Google.org, STEM-Trek supported three quantum PhD students to attend ISC; they helped with our Quantum Workforce Development Birds-of-a-Feather program.
(Above) Team FAUSION From their website: We are the FAUSION Student Cluster Competition Team, representing Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and Università della Svizzera Italiana at ISC 2026 Hamburg in the Student Cluster Competition. Our team consists of six students from the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) and the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI). Two doctoral students, Aditya Ujeniya (NHR@FAU) and Daniel Vega (USI), supervise the ISC SCC team. (Photos courtesy of E.Leake, and the teams)
After decades of HPC student program involvement, tuning into student ambitions as a mentor, and watching careers unfold, I noticed a trend begin to form at SC24 which had become a cultural shift by ISC 2026. PhD students (quantum; electrical engineering and computer science in this case) are much more entrepreneurial and many are already engaged with startups (stealth and otherwise). They are influencing undergrads who will aspire to follow in their footsteps.
But who will teach future generations if PhDs aren’t preparing for research or teaching careers? Ninety percent of tech startups fail; ten percent the first year. They must have contingency plans. As fast as the landscape is changing, it would be difficult to craft a quantum startup business plan that a loan officer would support (or understand), not to mention a strategic plan of any duration – perhaps months vs the traditional three to five years. They might convince a venture capitalist to fund quantum concepts, but VCs are busy! To compete, budding entrepreneurs need an outgoing personality (extroversion helps), a solid pitch, ability to handle rejection with grace, respect for MBAs, and the willingness to accept advice. Otherwise, they will fail fast.
The Nanyang Technological University from Singapore tied for first place. (Photo courtesy Billy Cao, NTU HPC-AI Club)
This is a call to action for academia and industry. More industry-sponsored fellowships, internships and training programs are needed to broaden the participation by nontraditional demographics (veterans wishing to re-skill or up-skill upon returning to the civilian workforce; workers displaced by automation; etc.). This shift underscores the importance of interdisciplinary support for startups, business incubators, startup access to federated supercomputers, and mentoring.
From Hands-on Experiment to Global Competition
The SCC has been introducing students to HPC for nearly two decades. It began in 2007 under the direction of Brett Gorda (then at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, now Quantum Motion), with team coach Preston Smith (Purdue), as a hands-on experiment in HPC education that challenged students to build and operate clusters while solving scientific workloads under a variety of constraints. The program will celebrate its 20th anniversary at SC’26, a testament to how enduring their vision has become.
Team ETH Zurich RACKlette of Switzerland (Photo courtesy RACKlette)
The ISC-SCC adopted SC’s philosophy, offering an additional opportunity mid-year to train even more students. ISC allows time away from the competition so students can engage with the community and learn from other aspects of the conference. “They don’t merely learn about supercomputers in a classroom; they must build and then make it work,” said Gorda. That distinction matters. An SCC team must understand hardware, operating systems, compilers, parallel programming, benchmarking, performance optimization, and power constraints. Just as importantly, students must learn how to work as a team under pressure; communicate with one another, make decisions quickly and defend their choices to judges. “People skills are every bit as valuable as technical aptitude,” he added. This year, Nages Sieslack, ISC’s counterpart to Brian and Ophir, introduced a new program element – the SCC Pitch – where each team was allowed one minute on the exhibition floor to pitch why they were competing, showcase their hardware and outline what they hoped to achieve. It was a great communication exercise that will be continued in the future.
A team can have top-notch hardware and still struggle. Another team may compensate for having less than the best hardware with preparation, creativity, determination, and tenacity. The competition reveals not just who can produce the fastest results, but why a system behaves the way it does. This becomes more and more important in the workplace with increased heterogeneity; cross-platform benchmarking is important (diversity increasing to accommodate a range of artificial intelligence workloads, and all facets of quantum; next-generation arithmetic will make things even more interesting). You won’t find these lessons in many lecture halls.
Heart-FLOPS! Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (NotOnlyFLOPs), Spain. Photo courtesy of ISC – Copyright Philip Loeper.
And the winners are…
In-person Contest Winners:
First Place (Tie): Team RACKlette – ETH Zurich University, Switzerland and
Team NTU, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Second Place: Team Diablo, Tsinghua University, China.
Highest Linpack Award: Team Yi Da Tuo, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan.
Remote Contest Winners:
First Place: Team Peking, Peking University, China.
Second Place: Team NTU, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Third Place: Team 64bit Brainstorm, National University of Defense Technology, China.
More Than a Race
While there are winners, runners-up and trophies, the longitudinal measure of success is most important. How has this experience shaped student academic and career trajectories? Do they go on to pursue HPC research? Has exposure to the advanced science that HPC enables gotten them hooked so they want to join the community? Do they become system administrators, computational scientists, software engineers, data scientists or researchers? Do they seek advanced degrees and teach future generations what they learned?
While I don’t have statistics to back my observations after decades of serving student programs, I’ve noted that many who participate in SCCs go on to work for commercial entities, in national laboratories and at universities where they bring more into the pipeline. Many return to volunteer with student programs and serve as mentors. In the future, I have no doubt that more will become entrepreneurs.
About ISC High Performance
Established in 1986, ISC High Performance is the world’s oldest and Europe’s most-attended event dedicated to HPC, AI and quantum computing. The conference and exhibition bring together researchers, engineers, architects, technology providers, system operators, policymakers, and students from around the world to exchange knowledge and discuss the future of supercomputing.
Brian Sparks with competition winners; Photo courtesy of ISC – Copyright Philip
About the author:Elizabeth Leake is an HPCwire contributor and founder of STEM-Trek, a global nonprofit that supports underrepresented STEM scholars with travel and professional development. She is also a project manager of advanced cyberinfrastructure at Texas A&M University
Feature photo courtesy of the 2026 South African team (members from multiple teams enjoying a pleasant Hamburg evening together).
OpenAI says one of its AI systems has solved a math problem that has stumped mathematicians for nearly a century. The Navier–Stokes problem is one of seven Millennium Prize Problems, some of the toughest problems in mathematics, with a $1 million prize attached to each one. If OpenAI’s proof holds up, it would be a major achievement for maths and another sign of how quickly AI is moving into scientific discovery.
But there’s already a dispute over how OpenAI got there. Two mathematicians had been working on a related solution using OpenAI’s own Codex, and they now have questions about whether their work could have influenced OpenAI’s AI and who should get credit.
The reason this is such a big deal goes back to a question mathematicians have been unable to answer for such a long time.
The Navier–Stokes equations are used to describe the movement of fluids. They can model everything from water flowing through pipes to air moving around an aircraft. We know the equations work and they are widely used, but mathematicians still don’t know whether their solutions will always behave smoothly in three dimensions.
The question is whether a fluid that starts in a smooth state can eventually reach a point where the math essentially breaks down. This is known as a singularity, and proving whether one can occur is at the heart of the Navier–Stokes problem.
(A snapshot of local incompressible motion. Orange marks faster angular rotation; teal marks slower rotation. Circulating speed also depends on radius. The trajectories show inward spiraling and axial stretching. Source:OpenAI)
OpenAI says its AI has shown that this kind of breakdown is possible. In the solution, the fluid forms a vortex, or a spinning swirl, that gets tighter and faster. As the vortex gets smaller, the speed keeps rising until it becomes infinite, while the total amount of energy remains finite.
Does this finally settle the Navier-Stokes problem? Well, that’s what OpenAI claims. It says that its system produced the mathematical proof needed to solve the problem. OpenAI also released a version in Lean, a tool used to formally check mathematical proofs.
How OpenAI got there is almost as interesting as the result itself.
On September 1, after hearing rumors of major progress on the Millennium Prize problems, the company decided to put its new internal AI model to work on them. OpenAI claims the model is significantly more capable than GPT-6 Astra.
The big break came when the AI solved a related problem involving the Euler equations, which are similar to Navier-Stokes but without viscosity. That convinced OpenAI to focus its resources on Navier-Stokes.
And it threw a lot of resources at it. Around 10,000 AI agents worked on the problem, trying different approaches and sharing useful findings. It took them about 88 hours to reach the result, generating 2.7 million messages and roughly 130 billion output tokens along the way. Formalizing and verifying the proof in Lean took another 17 hours.
But the timing of all this has become part of the controversy.
NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic mathematician Levent Alpöge had already been working on related research using several AI tools, including OpenAI’s Codex. Their work had produced a result on the Euler equations, which they had verified in Lean and were preparing for publication.
Buckmaster contacted OpenAI on September 3 to say the pair were close to releasing a paper and formal proof, although he did not tell the company which problem they were working on. According to Buckmaster, discussions later became contentious, including a proposal that would have given him authorship but left Alpöge off the work.
OpenAI tells the story differently. The company says it reached out after completing its proof and offered to announce the results together while recognizing Buckmaster and Alpöge’s earlier work. OpenAI also says the two teams ultimately solved different problems: Buckmaster and Alpöge worked on a version of the Euler problem with an external force, while OpenAI’s AI solved a version without one.
(Performance of GPT-6 Astra and our Internal Model on a curated set of open math problems. Source:OpenAI)
There was also another uncomfortable question: Could OpenAI’s AI have learned anything from the pair’s use of Codex?
OpenAI says neither its researchers nor its AI agents saw their work before it became public, and that no specific user data was accessed to solve Navier-Stokes. But the company does leave one possibility open. It says it “cannot rule out” that de-identified data from the researchers’ use of its products helped improve its models.
As HPCwire reported in May, Google is also making a major push into AI for science. OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes result shows how quickly the field is advancing.
If the proof holds up, AI will have helped solve a problem that generations of mathematicians could not. That would be a big step beyond using AI to summarize research, write code or help scientists analyze their work. It would show that these systems can start taking on some of the unanswered questions themselves.
It points toward a future where AI doesn’t just help scientists work faster, but takes on problems they have been unable to solve themselves. Mathematics may be an early proving ground, but the same approach could eventually be used to search for breakthroughs in physics, biology, materials science and other fields. For OpenAI, Navier-Stokes could be an early glimpse of that shift.
The Centre for Cities, a thinktank that focuses on promoting growth in cities, has welcomed the government’s plans to let mayors in England impose a tourism tax. This is from its chief executive, Andrew Carter.
The overnight visitor levy is a great step forward for fiscal devolution. This marks the first time that mayors in England have gained more autonomy over funding.
The overnight visitor levy means places will get rewarded for doing what they need to attract more visitors and grow their local economies.
Labour’s solution to every issue is always to hike taxes. This is just the latest method they’ve found to squeeze more money out of hardworking families and the economy.
The hospitality industry has already been hit by colossal business rates hikes thanks to Labour, on top of their Jobs Tax and employment red tape that have driven up costs. Now hotels and other businesses face another blow that will harm local economies and discourage local tourism. VAT is already charged at 20% on hotels - much higher than in other countries - and now they’ll pay VAT on this tourism tax too: a Labour double whammy.
Paleontologists have identified the first known trackway made by a full-grown Tyrannosaurus rex, and the discovery was made in the North Dakota badlands.
MPs who voted for and against assisted dying have urged their respective sides not to take the “extraordinary risk” of forcing through the bill using an obscure parliamentary procedure if it continues to be blocked by the Lords.
Two Labour MPs have written a warning letter to colleagues in the crucial hours before the next vote on Friday: Gareth Snell, who voted in favour of the bill, and Meg Hillier, who voted against.
The Supreme Court said Missouri must use a 2022 congressional map — not a new congressional map that favors Republicans — in the 2026 midterm elections.
In a viral video recorded at a conference in Seoul, Philippines Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr., said: “Perhaps basic decency and behavior is what China needs to do.”
Part of Dmitry Donskoy’s right hand sent to ‘spiritually strengthen’ soldiers
The Russian Orthodox church has sent a fragment of a medieval warrior prince’s remains to troops fighting in Ukraine, saying the relic would “spiritually strengthen” soldiers and help them achieve victory.
A reliquary containing part of the right hand of Dmitry Donskoy, the 14th-century prince revered in Russia for his victory over the Mongolian Golden Horde in 1380, has been taken to Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine and is now being transported along the frontline.
Mark Rutte said that Europeans ‘increasingly understand’ the need for their countries to take ‘greater responsibility for our own security’
Addressing German ambassadors, Wadephul repeats that the Russian threat “has reached our doorstep and it’s tangible.”
He adds:
“The Russian attempted attack at the airport in Leipzig is only the most recent incident in a string of constantly growing Russian aggression against Europe and against Nato.
Russia and its partners operate with a global network against our interests and in favour of an own imperialist claim to great power status."
Twenty-five years later, the Guardian asks US readers how the attacks affected their lives, and their country
As the United States commemorates the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed in New York City, Washington DC and Pennsylvania, the Guardian asked American readers to share how the attacks affected their day-to-day lives and the country at large.
Many readers shared their feeling of patriotism in the days following the attacks while also highlighting how the government’s response to 9/11 expanded government surveillance and fueled Islamophobia in the country. For those who were adults at the time of the attacks, the day marked a cataclysmic shift. For those too young to remember it, it served as the context for the complicated and violent world they grew up in.
Denver, Colorado — The city of Denver and several advocacy groups sued the Trump administration Thursday, asking a federal court to block armed immigration agents from conducting enforcement at polling places during the November midterms.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., names Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and acting ICE Director David Venturella. Plaintiffs include Denver, the League of United Latin American Citizens, Common Cause and UnidosUS.
The administration has not announced a nationwide plan to station ICE agents at polling places. However, Mullin recently said agents could enter voting locations if there were a threat or if officers were serving a warrant on someone they had been tracking.
The lawsuit argues that even limited armed immigration enforcement near voting sites could intimidate voters and interfere with election administration. It cites incidents in Syracuse, New York, and San Antonio where immigration agents allegedly entered or gathered near polling locations.
Federal law places unusually strict limits on armed federal personnel around elections. Justice Department guidance states that 18 U.S.C. § 592 makes it a felony for federal officials to send “armed men” to the vicinity of open polling places, subject to narrow exceptions. DOJ guidance also says federal investigators generally should avoid actions that could interfere with voting.
The plaintiffs are seeking an injunction before early voting expands later this month.
DHS has said ICE will not patrol polling places generally, but maintains that agents may act in specific enforcement situations. The court will now have to determine how that position fits with longstanding federal protections surrounding voting locations.
PlayStation 5; Insomniac Games Logan is well realised by Liam McIntyre and some exquisite character art, but there are lapses in narrative and emotional arcs and some of the combat feels like a chore
It was always going to be difficult to follow Spider-Man. Insomniac’s three games based around the web-slinger are masterpieces of superhero wish fulfilment, allowing you to swoop above a depiction of Manhattan alive with graffiti artists, roving journalists and gun-toting gangsters. If anyone should be up to the task, it’s Wolverine. A beloved Marvel stalwart, his life much darker and bloodier than Peter Parker’s, he seems the ideal protagonist for a moody action adventure. Yet somehow this well-made game falls short of its potential.
Set years before the founding of the X-Men, Marvel’s Wolverine sees a disenfranchised Logan falling back in with Sabretooth and Mystique when their mentor Nathaniel Essex is kidnapped by mutant-hating billionaire Bolivar Trask. This archetypal tech bro has a disturbing plan for world domination and the X Team are out to stop him – but there is a secret buried in Wolverine’s past that’s about to cause an eruption. It’s a decent setup, filled with the sort of intrigue, violence and Freudian tension we expect from the X-Men.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Apple has unveiled the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 today during itsSeptember hardware event. The new models retain the signature designs of their predecessors but add a faster S11 chip, new health and fitness features, and the watchOS 27 software update announced atWWDC last June. Both the Series 12 and Ultra 4 run on the upgraded S11 chip, which Apple says delivers faster CPU and GPU performance, along with improved Siri capabilities. Apple is also expanding the smartwatch's wellness-tracking suite with a redesigned Health app that includes a Longevity tab with new metrics, like Health Age and a Readiness score.
There's also a new "Health Sensing System," designed with 32 electrodes for more accurate readings (the Series 11 only had two), photodiodes organized in a ring to capture light more efficiently, and new LEDs that allow heart rate measurements to be collected every 5 seconds, giving you a continuous stream of heart data throughout the day. Apple Watch Series 12 also includes faster charging, though battery life remains at 24 hours. Meanwhile, the Ultra 4 increases battery life to 50 hours.
WatchOS 27 also brings deeper Siri and Apple Intelligence integration, including AI-suggested apps, new one-handed gestures, expanded workout and women's health tracking, and Siri Recap for real-time transcription and translation.
I have a confession. I love my social media algorithm. It is a perfectly curated window into my insane and inquiring mind. It knows precisely which videos will tickle me and which memes will gently distract me from the slow collapse of humankind.
On Tuesday the Australian government announced “world-leading” reforms that would force social media platforms to allow users to opt-out of algorithms, dubbed “my feed, my way”. On the same day, I was delighted to be confronted with a video on Instagram of a woman accidentally spilling a bucket of eels on a Chinese train. Dozens of eels slithered among the passengers, who appeared not as surprised as I would have expected.
Next spring, when the US Soccer Hall of Fame welcomes its newest class, there will be pomp and circumstance. The hall, which sits in a corner of Toyota Stadium, home of Major League Soccer’s FC Dallas, will feature the enshrineds’ signature red jackets. There will be glad-handing and speeches from players and coaches, misty-eyed reflections on their upbringings and their careers.
Many involved will be American-born soccer legends, of course. Yet every once in a while, a player whose footprint extends well beyond the borders of the United States graces the stage. Such may be the case next year when the hall potentially welcomes English legend David Beckham into the fold.
FREMONT, Calif., Sept. 10, 2026 — Penguin Solutions, Inc. has announced that it has been selected by Lektra to deploy and optimize their AI micro data centers. Penguin Solutions will provide validated reference designs, AI-optimized compute, and expert-led services and support needed to deliver and scale Lektra distributed EdgeScale AI data centers.
Penguin Solutions is collaborating with Lektra to deploy and optimize distributed AI data centers powered by its Full-Stack AI Factory Platform. Shown here on a metropolitan rooftop, a Lektra EdgeScale micro data center leverages local carbon-free energy to help overcome centralized grid constraints.
Lektra is a pioneering cloud company behind one of the world’s first patented AI data centers powered by distributed energy and able to operate at capacities of 20 MW or less. With eight sites already deployed and many more planned, powered by carbon-free energy, Lektra’s EdgeScale architecture enables AI infrastructure to be deployed in strategically located sites. This reduces deployment timelines from years to months while maintaining flexibility to expand at the point of demand. By matching AI capacity demands with available energy resources, Lektra has created an alternative to power-constrained and government-restricted large-scale data centers.
Through its Full-Stack AI Factory Platform, Penguin Solutions provides NVIDIA-based hardware as well as the engineering expertise to design and integrate accelerated servers into Lektra’s architecture. As an NVIDIA AI Factory Specialized Partner, Penguin Solutions also deploys infrastructure to remote sites and provides ongoing services to simplify implementation and ensure reliable operation of Lektra-based data centers. This foundation supports Lektra solution as it enables cloud service providers, neoclouds, energy providers, commercial solar operators, and other site hosts to add GPU capacity incrementally and efficiently as demand grows.
“As demand for AI factory data centers continues to accelerate, the industry needs new approaches for deploying and powering AI infrastructures,” said Kash Shaikh, President and CEO at Penguin Solutions. “Lektra is delivering a next generation approach for deploying distributed energy sourced AI micro data centers efficiently without sacrificing security or control. We are excited to partner with Lektra leveraging our Full-Stack AI Factory Platform expertise to enable their growing network of distributed EdgeScale data centers.”
Together, Lektra’s unique architecture and Penguin Solutions AI Factory Platform capabilities enable new AI capacity to be deployed where energy resources are available, minimizing deployment risk while accelerating expansion.
“Lektra is reshaping how AI infrastructure can be made more accessible and beneficial to the communities it serves. We envision a world that expands the current capacity of centralized grid systems to distributed energy production, or what we call Grid 2.0,” said Karl Andersen, Chief Executive Officer of Lektra. “By partnering with Penguin Solutions and leveraging its Full-Stack AI Factory Platform, we can deliver customer-defined GPU capacity in customer-defined geographical locations that leverage readily available energy while meeting data, model, and infrastructure sovereignty requirements.”
This collaboration reflects a shared focus to enable the next phase of AI growth by combining distributed AI infrastructure, enterprise AI compute capacity, and carbon-free energy into a scalable system.
About Penguin Solutions
Penguin Solutions is the AI Factory Platform Company. We design, build, and manage next-generation data centers for enterprises, sovereign AI initiatives, and neocloud providers. With deep design expertise at the intersection of data center AI infrastructure and memory solutions, our Full-Stack AI Factory Platform combines differentiated infrastructure software, advanced memory, compute systems, end-to-end services, and industry-leading partner technologies to help customers accelerate deployment, optimize token economics, and maximize the return on their AI investments. Learn more at PenguinSolutions.com.
"What happens inside frontier AI companies now clearly affects everyone outside of them," an expert said following the hack on Hugging Face by AI agents being tested by OpenAI.
(The Center Square) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday again rejected a Missouri congressional map that would give Republicans an advantage ahead of the midterm elections.
Record demand for A&E units, ambulance services and NHS 111 shows extreme heat having unprecedented impact on health, experts say
The NHS came under its most intense strain ever as a result of the summer’s five heatwaves, amid warnings that extreme heat is having an unprecedented impact on human health.
A&E units, ambulance services and the NHS 111 telephone advice line all experienced record demand for their services in England in June, July and August as Britain experienced record temperatures.
TOKYO and KAWASAKI, Japan, Sept. 10, 2026 — Fujitsu Limited and Yaqumo Inc. have announced that they have begun verifying quantum computing architectures and basic software on actual neutral-atom quantum computers to accelerate the practical use of quantum computers.
Credit: Sergiy Palamarchuk/Shutterstock
Fujitsu will combine its “STAR architecture,” a quantum computing architecture developed primarily for superconducting quantum computers in the Early-FTQC (Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computer) era, and “Open Quantum Toolchain for OPerators and Users,” an open-source software that covers everything from environment setup to operation necessary for quantum computer cloud services, with Yaqumo’s neutral-atom quantum computers currently under development. This collaboration aims to accelerate the advancement of both technologies by testing them on actual hardware.
Since April 2026, both companies have been conducting theoretical studies as part of their joint research on the applicability of STAR architecture and related technologies to neutral-atom quantum computers, which differ from superconducting types. They began testing on an actual machine in August 2026. Through this joint research, the two companies will combine their strengths to develop diverse quantum computing technologies, thereby contributing to the practical deployment of quantum computing solutions that address societal challenges.
Neutral-atom quantum computers are characterized by their ease of achieving all-to-all connectivity between qubits. This expands the possibilities for computational methods that differ from those used in other modalities, such as superconducting quantum computers, where qubit connectivity is constrained. This could also enable a more efficient quantum error correction. Therefore, research and development of software and architectural technologies that maximize these characteristics are crucial.
Fujitsu has been engaged in a wide range of research and development aimed at realizing practical quantum computing technologies, from quantum hardware such as superconducting qubits to basic quantum computer software, FTQC, and research into quantum computing architectures for the Early-FTQC era. Fujitsu will now implement and verify the STAR architecture using neutral-atom quantum computers, promoting R&D with an eye toward the transition to FTQC. Furthermore, by adapting Open Quantum Toolchain for OPerators and USers to neutral atom quantum computers, users will be able to operate multiple types of quantum computers through a unified interface, thereby promoting the widespread adoption of quantum computers.
Yaqumo is a startup engaged in the research and development of quantum computer hardware using ytterbium neutral-atoms. The company aims to develop a working system with more than several hundred qubits and quantum error correction capabilities by fiscal year 2027.
For the practical realization of quantum computers, multiple hardware approaches are competitively advancing. In research and development aimed at social implementation, it is crucial to broadly explore the possibilities of diverse quantum computer technologies. In this joint research, Fujitsu’s quantum software and architecture technologies will be combined with Yaqumo’s neutral-atom quantum computers and verified on actual hardware to explore new technological possibilities that leverage the unique characteristics of neutral-atom systems.
While the STAR architecture has the potential to significantly reduce the number of qubits required for quantum computation, its effectiveness varies greatly depending on the type of quantum computer. By verifying the STAR architecture on actual neutral-atom quantum computers, this project will evaluate its compatibility with real hardware, which cannot be confirmed through theoretical studies alone. It will also explore the possibility of achieving practical quantum computation with fewer qubits by leveraging the unique characteristics of neutral-atom systems. If successful, this is expected to pave a new path for improving performance while limiting the hardware scale required for the practical application of quantum computers.
Since the commands sent to neutral-atom quantum computers differ from those for superconducting quantum computers, it is necessary to adapt the command conversion, job management, and device status monitoring and calibration functions to the neutral-atom control system. In this joint research, Fujitsu’s Open Quantum Toolchain for OPerators and USers, developed by Fujitsu and other collaborators, an open-source basic software for quantum computers, will be interconnected with Yaqumo’s neutral-atom quantum computers. This will create an environment where external users can access neutral-atom quantum computers via the cloud, aiming to realize a platform that can handle different types of quantum computers with a unified interface.
“We believe that Fujitsu’s expertise in architecture design and cloud infrastructure, accumulated through its work on superconducting and diamond spin quantum computing, will strongly support our research and development of neutral-atom quantum computers,” said Kazuhiro Nakashoji, Yaqumo CEO. “Through demonstrations involving connectivity with Open Quantum Toolchain for OPerators and USers and other Early-FTQC era technologies such as the STAR architecture, we aim to accumulate technical expertise that further unlocks the potential of neutral-atom quantum computing. This joint research will steadily advance our efforts toward realizing FTQC.”
“For the practical application of quantum computing, it is crucial to advance research and development on both innovative hardware technologies and architectural and software technologies that maximize their potential,” said Shintaro Sato, Fellow and Head of Quantum Laboratory, Fujitsu Research, Fujitsu Limited. “We have high expectations that verifying the compatibility of Yaqumo’s neutral-atom quantum computers with the STAR architecture and Open Quantum Toolchain for OPerators and USers through testing on actual hardware will lead to the establishment of efficient quantum computing methods and enhanced access and operating environments. Through this joint research, we aim to acquire new insights leveraging the characteristics of neutral-atom quantum computers and contribute to the development of quantum computing technologies for the FTQC and Early-FTQC eras.”
About Fujitsu
Fujitsu’s purpose is to make the world more sustainable by building trust in society through innovation. As the digital transformation partner of choice for customers around the globe, our 100,000 employees work to resolve some of the greatest challenges facing humanity. Our range of services and solutions draw on five key technologies: AI, Computing, Networks, Data & Security, and Converging Technologies, which we bring together to deliver sustainability transformation. Fujitsu Limited (TSE:6702) reported consolidated revenues of 3.5 trillion yen (US$23 billion) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2026 and remains the top digital services company in Japan by market share.
(The Center Square) – Democrat Roy Cooper, elected politician from 1986 until leaving the governor’s office nearly two years ago, leads Republican Michael Whatley 49%-38% in the bid to succeed Republican U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis in North Carolina.
Marvell Advanced Connectivity, Switching and Memory Solutions Power AI Infrastructure Across Every Distance, Improving Utilization, Token Efficiency and ROI
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 10, 2026 — Marvell Technology, Inc. has announced it will showcase its comprehensive portfolio of AI data center connectivity and memory solutions at AI Infra Summit 2026—September 15 to 17 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California.
Credit: gguy/Shutterstock
As AI workloads continue to scale, the ability to move data efficiently between compute, memory and storage has become as important as compute itself. Connectivity now sits at the center of AI infrastructure performance, shaping bandwidth, latency, power consumption, and ultimately the economics of deploying AI at scale.
Marvell offers the industry’s most comprehensive connectivity portfolio, designed to enable AI infrastructure to scale efficiently across every distance, driving higher utilization, greater token efficiency, and stronger returns on AI infrastructure investment. This includes next-generation switching technology built to support AI clusters as they scale and advanced telemetry capabilities that speed up infrastructure deployment and reduce mean time to repair after outages or failures. In addition, Marvell leading-edge optical interconnect and CXL-based memory solutions expand memory capacity and bandwidth both within and across racks.
At AI Infra Summit 2026 (Booth #704), Marvell will highlight the latest advances in its end-to-end data center connectivity portfolio for scale-up, scale-out and scale-across applications, including:
Marvell Photonic Fabric Technology: Enables memory sharing across multiple racks, extending scale beyond traditional distance constraints.
Marvell RELIANT Interconnect Telemetry Platform: Provides real-time visibility into the health and performance of AI data center infrastructure connectivity across optical and electrical links.
Next-generation Switches: TheMarvell Teralynx T100 102 Tbps Ethernet switch device delivers increased bandwidth and efficiency for large-scale AI networks.
PCIe-based Scale-up Switching: A 256-lane PCIe 6.0 switch designed to connect more accelerators and devices within scale-up AI systems, along with Marvell-powered electrical, optical and PCIe connectivity for linking AI infrastructure across different distances.
CXL Memory Solutions: CXL-based memory expansion, compression, pooling and near-memory acceleration support memory-intensive AI and cloud workloads, reduce movement of AI datasets between XPUs and accelerate large-scale vector databases used by AI applications.
High-speed Storage Solutions: DPUs and Ethernet switching deliver high-performance access to NVMe storage across the network, and the PCIe 6.0 NVMe SSD controller is optimized for next-generation enterprise and AI storage.
Marvell Executive Presentations and Panels
At the AI Infra Summit, Marvell executives will participate in presentations and panels on connectivity and networking topics for next-generation AI data center infrastructure, including a keynote titled “AI Inference at Scale” by Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Data Center Networking Business Group Dave Lazovsky. The full agenda of Marvell speakers at AI Infra Summit 2026 is available here.
About Marvell
To deliver the data infrastructure technology that connects the world, we’re building solutions on the most powerful foundation: our partnerships with our customers. Trusted by the world’s leading technology companies for over 30 years, we move, store, process and secure the world’s data with semiconductor solutions designed for our customers’ current needs and future ambitions. Through a process of deep collaboration and transparency, we’re ultimately changing the way tomorrow’s enterprise, cloud and carrier architectures transform—for the better.
Teo Davidov doesn’t hit backhands. He serves from both sides. The 16-year-old from Denver is treating the tennis world to a wildly unorthodox style – and proving it’s more than a parlor trick
Teo Davidov always has the upper hands. An amiable junior prodigy from Denver, the 16-year-old was the oddest sight at this year’s US Open, the only player in the tournament – man, woman or junior – who hits only forehands. To be clear: it’s not that he doesn’t have a backhand or can’t hit a backhand. He’s ambidextrous and so he doesn’t bother with them.
It’s nothing personal. “To be honest, I like the traditional backhand-forehand,” he says. “I like the classiness of it. I like hitting backhands myself just to play around, just for fun.” He hits those from both wings, too.
Host says he’s interviewing Senate candidate ‘under unusual circumstances’ and it will be posted on YouTube
Late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel has said an upcoming interview with the Democratic Senate candidate from Texas James Talarico will not air on ABC, the US network that broadcasts his show, after the federal media regulator “threatened” his show, ABC and its local affiliates.
“Tomorrow night I’ll be interviewing James Talarico under unusual circumstances,” Kimmel said during his opening monologue on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Wednesday.
Shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks carried out against the United States, Congress approved legislation granting the president sweeping powers to prevent similar terrorist actions. The 2001 statute related to the 9/11 attacks remains active today, amid questions about whether Congress should repeal or replace it.
Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001 on Sept. 14, 2001, and it became a law four days later. Since then, the AUMF of 2001 has been cited dozens of times as statutory authority for military or counter-terrorism actions taken by American presidents in the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and other regions.
A year later, a separate Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq passed in October 2002 that gave the president powers to take “necessary and appropriate” actions to “defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq.” In December 2025, the Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) repealed the AUMF of 2002 and also the AUMF for the 1991 Gulf War.
However, the AUMF of 2001, which lacked an expiration date when signed into law, remains in force. In recent years, it has been cited as authorizing detention operations at Guantanamo Bay, strikes at ISIS locations in Nigeria, and operations in Iraq and Syria against ISIS and al-Qaida
The AUMF, Article II, and the War Powers Resolution
Presidents have cited the AUMF of 2001 for taking military actions, along with war powers granted to the chief executive under the Constitution under the Commander in Chief Clause in Article II, Section 2, which states, “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.”
Opponents of these actions argue that they conflict with the Declare War Clause in Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, which grants Congress the ability to initiate prolonged armed hostilities. However, Congress has not formally declared war against a foreign power since World War II.
Opponents also cite the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which Congress passed in response to fallout from the Vietnam War and ongoing conflicts with President Richard Nixon. The Resolution requires that, in the absence of the authorization for the use of military force by Congress, a president must report to Congress within 48 hours after introducing military forces into hostilities and must end the use of such forces within 60 days unless Congress permits otherwise.
The Resolution also requires the president “in every possible instance” to consult with Congress before introducing the military into imminent hostilities. It also gives Congress the ability to terminate the use of force in unauthorized hostilities at any time by concurrent resolution of the House and Senate. (These resolution powers were later modified by a Supreme Court decision in 1983.)
A Brief History of the AUMF of 2001 and Legal Cases
The primary initial action taken under the AUMF of 2001 was the October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, during which Operation Enduring Freedom targeted Taliban and al-Qaeda operations. United States military forces remained in Afghanistan until 2021. While American forces have left the country, the AUMF passed to approve the military operations there remains in effect.
Between 2004 and 2009, the Bush administration cited the AUMF of 2001 and the AUMF of 2002 as statutory authority to target al-Qaida operations in Iraq. According to a Brown University study in 2021, there were at least 22 countries where presidents deployed actions citing powers under the AUMF of 2001.
Target areas included air and ground operations in Syria, raids and airstrikes in Libya, operations targeting Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, and drone strikes and ground raids against al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and ISIS targets in Yemen.
Another controversy related to the AUMF of 2001 was the detention of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Provisions of the act allowed the executive branch to label prisoners taken during these conflicts as “enemy combatants” – a status that would set the stage for several Supreme Court cases.
In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004), the Supreme Court considered the detainment of Yaser Hamdi, a U.S. citizen captured in Afghanistan by the U.S. military in 2001. Hamdi was declared to be an “enemy combatant” fighting for the Taliban and was sent to Guantanamo Bay for indefinite detention. When it was discovered that he was a U.S. citizen, Hamdi was transferred to a military prison in Virginia and his father petitioned the court for his release.
In the plurality opinion, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that, although Hamdi’s detention was authorized by Congress, due process under the Fifth Amendment applied, and a United States citizen held as an enemy combatant must be given an opportunity to contest the basis for that detention before a neutral decisionmaker. “Hamdi contends that the AUMF does not authorize indefinite or perpetual detention,” O’Connor noted. “Certainly, we agree that indefinite detention for the purpose of interrogation is not authorized.” After the decision, Hamdi was released after agreeing to renounce his U.S. citizenship.
Then in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a bodyguard and chauffeur for Osama bin Laden, was captured during military actions taken under the AUMF of 2001. Hamdan was sent to Guantanamo Bay after being tried and convicted in a military tribunal that was established by the Department of Defense.
Hamdan asserted that the military tribunal violated the Constitution and international law. In a 5-3 ruling, the Court—with a majority opinion authored by Justice John Paul Stevens— held that the president had no inherent constitutional authority to establish the military tribunals under the AUMF. It then held that Congress had at most authorized military commissions that complied with the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the law of war. Because Hamdan’s trial had violated the UCMJ and the Geneva Conventions, it exceeded the president’s authority.
The Supreme Court held in Boumediene v. Bush (2008) that military commissions established for Guantanamo Bay by Congress after the Court’s Hamdan decision denied detainees their constitutional right to the writ of habeas corpus. It also rejected parts of the law also barred foreign nationals labeled as “enemy combatants” from challenging their detention in Article III courts.
There have been attempts to repeal or end the AUMF of 2001. In December 2025, Representatives Pramila Jayapal and Thomas Massie introduced legislation to fully repeal the AUMF of 2001. That legislation has not progressed through the House.
But in the actions taken by the United States in Iran, the president has not cited the AUMF as statutory authority. Instead, the president’s powers under Article II are more often cited as the authorizing power under the Constitution in such situations in recent years.
Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.
Hot weather means sweeter grapes, but outlook gloomier for beermakers, as drought diminishes barley harvest
English sparkling winemakers expect their earliest grape harvest and a “vintage year” after a scorching summer quickly ripened grapes.
However, beer sellers have warned of a potential shortage after record-breaking temperatures and a drought hitting much of England has caused poor yields of barley.
Despite its location, the island chain has avoided the worst effects, but Hurricanes Lowell and Lala left a trail of damage this year
Hurricane Lowell surged near the Hawaiian Islands this week, leaving a trail of downed trees and power lines, crumbled roads, sunken boats and destroyed piers on the island of Kauai.
Residents were left to grapple not only with the damage, but the rising risks to the tropical archipelago as sea surface temperatures climb.
A faster chip, new health sensors, deeper recovery insights and a new AI Audio feature that helps you remember conversations — here’s what’s new for the Apple Watch.
While England makes its first foray into unfamiliar territory, it’s proved a boon for Italy’s cash-strapped municipalities
A nightly tourist tax may be unfamiliar territory in the UK, but countries in continental Europe have been cashing in on these kinds of levies for decades.
Tourists usually need to pay the tax on the day they check out of a hotel or holiday let, and are often surprised by an extra fee on top of their accommodation costs.
LOUISVILLE, Colo., Sept. 10, 2026 — Infleqtion, a global leader in quantum computing and quantum sensing powered by neutral atom technology, today announced a collaboration with Cisco to pursue joint research and development focused on connecting, operating, and scaling quantum systems. Together, the companies will explore architectures to link individual devices into distributed, more capable networks, an important step toward making distributed quantum systems a reality.
“The next major breakthrough in quantum will not come from building bigger isolated machines, but from networking systems together,” said Ramana Kompella, VP and Head of Cisco Research. “By combining Cisco’s quantum networking leadership with Infleqtion’s quantum platforms, we are developing the communication architecture needed to scale quantum capabilities from standalone devices into resilient, collaborative networks.”
“Achieving the broadest applications of quantum computing will require many quantum systems working together. The path forward is connecting these systems together the same way the internet emerged from connecting many classical computers,” said Pranav Gokhale, Chief Technology Officer at Infleqtion. “That’s why this collaboration matters. Together, Infleqtion and Cisco are exploring how to connect quantum computers and sensors together into larger, more powerful quantum networks, which is a critical step toward unlocking distributed quantum.”
Neutral atoms interface naturally with photons, the particles of light used to carry information across networks, making them well suited to link quantum computing and quantum sensing with the photonic channels needed for quantum networking. Infleqtion’s systems combine native quantum memory with multi-modal computing and sensing, providing the device-level hardware and optical interfaces needed to connect into broader networks. Realizing that vision at scale, however, will require the modality-agnostic quantum network architecture Cisco is developing through Cisco Quantum Labs to connect heterogeneous quantum computers, sensors and other quantum technologies into scalable, distributed systems.
To support this distributed architecture, Cisco is advancing research and developing solutions for an end-to-end quantum networking stack designed to dynamically distribute quantum entanglement across connected devices on demand. This includes purpose-built quantum hardware and software designed to manage connections between quantum processors, memory, and sensors, enabling information to move reliably across systems. Most recently, Cisco debuted the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch, a working research prototype, to route quantum information between systems while preserving it with a conversion engine that makes a truly interoperable quantum network now possible.
Infleqtion and Cisco intend to explore key research areas to advance networked quantum systems:
Convergence of Sensing and Compute: Exploring network architectures that could orchestrate data transfer between distributed quantum sensors and computational nodes.
Quantum Memory and Optical Transduction: Exploring methods to convert or transduce the quantum states held in neutral-atom quantum memory and QPUs with optical channels for quantum networking.
Network-Aware Quantum Software: Evaluating opportunities to coordinate multi-modal quantum workloads across connected neutral-atom systems.
Representatives from both companies will appear at industry gatherings this fall:
Infleqtion, Inc. (NYSE: INFQ) is a global leader in quantum technology, delivering neutral-atom solutions for quantum computing, networking, sensing, and security. With a product portfolio spanning quantum computers, quantum optical clocks, RF receivers, and inertial sensors, Infleqtion’s full-stack approach combines high-performance hardware with the company’s proprietary Superstaq quantum computing software platform. Infleqtion’s systems are already in use by the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA, the U.K. government, and in multiple collaborations with NVIDIA. Infleqtion, in collaboration with NVIDIA, published the world’s first demonstration of a materials science application using logical qubits. With operations in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, Infleqtion meets the demands of government and commercial customers across the space, defense, energy, finance and telecommunications sectors.
The biggest May to September of all time was recorded in US cinemas, with the UK enjoying a 56% rise in audiences, outstripped by an 88% lift in the Middle East and Africa
As well as celebrating their wedding, the actors Tom Holland and Zendaya have something else to toast: their two summer blockbusters – The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day – have officially made box office history.
The films were credited as the driving force behind the US’s biggest summer season of all time, taking $4.761bn (£3.51bn) from 1 May-7 September, beating 2013’s $4.756bn.
Arrests of woman, 42, and man, 60, follow Met search of addresses in north and north-west London
A man and a woman have been arrested by counter-terrorism police in London on suspicion of assisting Iran’s foreign intelligence service.
The arrests of the 42-year-old woman and 60-year-old man were made after searches at addresses in north and north-west London on 24 June, the Metropolitan police said.
TORONTO, Sept. 10, 2026 — Xanadu Quantum Technologies Limited, a leading photonic quantum computing company, in collaboration with AMD today announced the release of Backline, an open-platform solution, co-designed by Xanadu and AMD, for rapid communications between quantum and classical computing hardware. Backline is built using Xanadu’s open-source PennyLane software platform to solve one of quantum technology’s most pressing challenges: how to establish ultra-low-latency communication between classical processors and quantum hardware.
Today, quantum devices cannot operate in isolation. To operate effectively, quantum computers are expected to rely on classical hardware, such as GPUs, CPUs, and FPGAs, to shuttle massive streams of data back and forth between components within microseconds. While this ultra-fast, real-time communication is essential for applications such as quantum error correction (QEC), optical network routing, and high-speed sensing, establishing these links has historically limited developer agility by forcing teams into rigid, low-level software frameworks and vendor-locked classical hardware.
Backline reframes the quantum-classical boundary as a heterogeneous computing problem, treating a quantum processor as one more node in a high-performance distributed network. The solution seeks to provide researchers and hardware developers low-level hardware control directly through PennyLane’s high-level Python interface. This opens a new design space for hybrid classical/quantum systems, enabling teams to execute ultra-low-latency communication loops between classical and quantum hardware without compromising developer agility or risking vendor lock-in.
Key highlights of Backline include:
Sub-3 Microsecond Latency: Achieves end-to-end classical-quantum loop times under 3 microseconds1, delivering ultra-fast data links to support quantum error correction, real-time network signal processing, and high-speed sensing.
CPU-Friendly Infrastructure: Demonstrates that standard processors, such as AMD EPYC or Threadripper CPUs, can handle low-latency demands out of the box. Teams can deploy real-time feedback loops without relying on enterprise GPUs or specialized servers, democratizing access to a wide range of classical hardware.
Open & Hardware-Agnostic Design: Built within open-source software (Xanadu’s PennyLane platform), Backline connects standard CPUs, adaptive FPGAs, and GPUs seamlessly without vendor lock-in. The PennyLane platform provides users with an accessible entry point through Python programming and enabling compilation to translate those programs for rapid communication between hardware components.
“Quantum processors require ultra-fast classical infrastructure, operating behind the scenes,” said Dr. Christian Weedbrook, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Xanadu. “By integrating Backline into PennyLane, we are providing direct access to the communication layers that the industry needs to move from laboratory R&D to real-world performance. Our work with AMD shows that AMD’s hardware can handle these demanding latency budgets right now, even with standard CPUs, bringing useful quantum computing closer to reality.”
“Quantum computers never run alone. Every useful quantum system depends on classical compute reacting in microseconds, and that is a heterogeneous computing problem AMD is uniquely built to solve,” said Scott Tease, Corporate Vice President, HPC and Sovereign AI, AMD. “We co-designed Backline with Xanadu so a single Python program can span AMD EPYC and Threadripper CPUs, AMD Instinct GPUs, AMD Versal FPGAs and AMD Pensando networking, and route every task to the engine that meets its latency budget. That gives the whole quantum ecosystem an open path from research to production, on hardware developers can use today.”
For the broader quantum industry, Backline marks a decisive shift away from high-cost, proprietary hardware lock-in toward an accessible, production-ready ecosystem. By dramatically lowering the barrier to entry, PennyLane now provides a universal software foundation for connecting quantum and classical hardware. This enables university researchers, enterprise engineers, and hardware manufacturers the ability to rapidly prototype and deploy fault-tolerant quantum technologies, without rebuilding their classical infrastructure from the ground up. In doing so, Backline bridges the gap between today’s classical computing workflows and tomorrow’s scalable quantum technologies.
Backline is available today as an open-source feature suite within the PennyLane open-source platform.
About Xanadu
Founded in 2016, Xanadu is a Canadian photonic quantum computing company with the mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere. Xanadu is building fault-tolerant quantum computers using light, with systems designed to compute at room temperature. Xanadu develops both hardware and software, including PennyLane, its open-source quantum computing platform. Xanadu is the first pure-play photonic quantum computing company to list on public markets (Nasdaq/TSX: XNDU) and is recognized globally for its breakthroughs in scalable quantum technologies.
Harvest festivals in America started long before anyone carved a pumpkin or got lost in a corn maze. They run from late summer through November, ... Read moreThe post Harvest festivals drew Americans long before pumpkins were a fall marketing…
Primark will offer home delivery in Great Britain for the first time as the fast-fashion retailer seeks to revive flagging sales.
The company, which already offers a click and collect service, has long avoided home delivery, arguing that its low prices made it too difficult to absorb the cost of packing and shipping orders.
The September cruise sale feels like good timing, but the industry has made it a recurring part of the late-summer sales calendar. When school starts, ... Read moreThe post Cruise lines run September deals every year, and most travelers miss…
Borrowing costs climb in Europe and oil tops $105 a barrel as bank says growing price pressures in eurozone will be ‘longer lasting than we had anticipated’
The European Central Bank has raised interest rates to 2.5% and warned that the risk of higher inflation over the next year has risen following renewed fighting in the Middle East.
It came as government borrowing costs soared on the back of a jump in oil and gas prices after the latest US and Iran attacks on ships in the strait of Hormuz.
Jefferson City, Missouri — President Donald Trump and Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe both posted negative job approval ratings in the latest Saint Louis University/YouGov poll, marking the first time either has fallen underwater in the survey series.
Among 900 likely Missouri voters surveyed in August, 47% approved of Trump’s performance while 52% disapproved. Trump’s net approval has fallen 19 points since the beginning of 2025 and 14 points since February, when he still held 52% approval and 47% disapproval.
Kehoe’s decline was steeper. His approval fell from 47% in February to 39% in August, while 49% disapproved. Earlier SLU polling had shown him remaining narrowly above water, making the new result his first negative rating since taking office.
The poll also found broad economic anxiety. About two-thirds of respondents said they were worried about affording health care, groceries and gasoline, while roughly three in five expressed concern about utility bills. Voters opposed the U.S. war in Iran by an 18-point margin.
Poll director Steve Rogers attributed some of the Republican erosion to what he called “MAGA fatigue,” though that is his interpretation rather than a finding directly established by the survey.
Other results suggest a more competitive political environment than in recent Missouri elections. Republicans led Democrats by only four points on generic U.S. House and state House ballots, while Republican State Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick led Democrat Quentin Wilson 45% to 43%, within the poll’s roughly 4-point margin of error.
The survey was conducted Aug. 13-24 among 900 likely Missouri voters. SLU says its YouGov sample is weighted to reflect the state’s electorate.
PARIS, Sept. 10, 2026 — On the occasion of the France-Korea State Visit, Pasqal, a global leader in neutral-atom quantum computing, announced the signing of a three-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with LG CNS, a leading AI transformation company and technology arm of LG group in South Korea. This agreement marks a new milestone in Pasqal’s long-standing commitment to Korea, which the company has established as its strategic hub for Asia-Pacific operations.
Pasqal’s approach is rooted in the conviction that quantum technology cannot develop in isolation, but must be embedded within strong local industrial, technological and research ecosystems. The partnership with LG CNS reflects this strategy by further anchoring Pasqal within Korea’s technology ecosystem and expanding its collaboration with leading Korean industrial players.
As compute demands for artificial intelligence continue to surge, integrating quantum processing into traditional compute architecture is emerging as a critical driver of performance for future digital infrastructure. Through this partnership, Pasqal and LG CNS combine their respective technical leadership to establish the foundations of a scalable hybrid computing ecosystem capable of solving complex industrial and scientific challenges.
A Strategic Alliance Driving Hybrid Computing Innovation
This collaboration seeks to accelerate the convergence between quantum processing power and advanced AI infrastructure across three primary areas:
Both companies will collaborate to integrate Pasqal’s neutral-atom quantum computing hardware with LG CNS’s AI platforms, including AI Haus environments and AI Data Center infrastructure. This joint effort aims to create high-performance hybrid systems optimized for compute-intensive workloads.
Additionally, the agreement covers the operational integration, management, and deployment of quantum computing resources within AI Data Center environments, ensuring scalable and enterprise-ready hybrid architectures.
Finally, Pasqal and LG CNS will jointly identify and pursue global commercial opportunities to bring AI and quantum-enabled data center solutions to domestic and international markets.
“This partnership with LG CNS marks a major milestone both in our long-term commitment to South Korea and in our vision for hybrid computing, where quantum technology and artificial intelligence reinforce each other,” said Wasiq Bokhari, CEO of Pasqal. “By combining our neutral-atom quantum processors with LG CNS’s deep infrastructure expertise, we are further embedding Pasqal within Korea’s world-class technology ecosystem and laying the groundwork for next-generation data centers capable of tackling the world’s most complex challenges.”
Deepening Quantum Infrastructure Ties Between France and Korea
The announcement coincides with the September 8 State Visit, where Pasqal is participating in the high-level round table hosted at the Élysée Palace during the France-Korea Summit, highlighting growing economic and technological synergies between the two nations.
For Pasqal, this agreement reinforces a long-standing commitment to South Korea, which serves as the company’s strategic hub for all Asia-Pacific (APAC) operations. Pasqal benefits from strong backing by leading Korean institutional investors, including LG Electronics and Dunamu & Partners, and has maintained a strategic industrial partnership with LG Electronics for over four years, building a solid foundation for expanded collaboration across the Korean technology ecosystem.
About Pasqal
Pasqal (Nasdaq: PSQL) helps organizations tackle problems that are difficult or impossible to solve with conventional computing methods alone. Founded in 2019 on Nobel Prize–winning research, Pasqal builds and operates neutral-atom quantum computers, delivered with a full software stack, for industry, science, and governments. Pasqal’s [production-ready] systems are available both on-premises and through the cloud, enabling organizations to harness quantum computing without requiring in-house quantum expertise. A single hardware platform supports analog workloads today and is designed to evolve toward fault-tolerant quantum computing in the future.
Headquartered in France with operations globally, Pasqal’s quantum computing systems are used by customers across energy, financial services and advanced materials to address complex challenges. Pasqal’s customers include Saudi Aramco, Crédit Agricole CIB, LG Electronics and supported by partnerships with NVIDIA and IBM (Pasqal is part of the IBM Quantum Network).
About LG CNS
LG CNS is a leading Korean AX (AI Transformation) company that continues to pioneer various emerging technologies, including AI, robotics, cloud computing, data center, and smart engineering, encompassing smart factories and smart logistics, as well as digital marketing. The company also leads the market through innovative system integration (SI) and system management (SM) capabilities across finance, manufacturing, the public sector, and various other industries. For more information, please visit https://www.lgcns.com.
The White House posted a photo of bald eagle attacking a Canada goose to send a message – but it was Canada that played a critical role in the recovery of the bird in the US
In late August, the White House posted a real photograph on social media of a bald eagle standing atop the limp neck of a Canada goose.
The raptor presses the goose’s face into the grey winter slush. With its stark white head and brilliant yellow talons, the eagle looks victorious and defiant.
The new ‘true-scale’ map shrinks Europe and North America while enlarging Africa – and depicts the disputed Kuril islands as ruled by Moscow
Japan has asked for the revision of a new world map adopted by the UN because it said it made the disputed Kuril islands appear to belong to Russia.
The UN general assembly voted on Friday to adopt the new map, which makes the African continent larger while also shrinking North America and Europe, drawing condemnation from the US.
Tech mogul calls director Alex Gibney a ‘bitter old man’ who has ‘zero integrity’ in series of posts on X
Elon Musk has issued an angry tirade at the film-maker behind a four-hour documentary about his life and influence, labelling the director, Alex Gibney, a “bitter old man” who has “zero integrity”.
Gibney, who has previously made films about the collapse of Enron, WikiLeaks and Vladimir Putin, premiered his Musk documentary at the Venice film festival this week. He said he believed the world’s richest man was “extremely dangerous”.
Reese and Clark have been portrayed as fierce rivals
Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark’ s interactions are a subplot of the women’s Fiba World Cup, the WNBA season and if you spend enough time on social media, a divided United States. Clark and Reese have shown their relationship on the court is thriving, and they both excelled in USA’s 108-56 quarter-final win over Hungary on Thursday.
In Thursday’s game, the growing chemistry showed. The pair had a nifty pick-and-roll to end the first quarter that ended with a layup by Reese. The Atlanta Dream forward returned the favor hitting Clark on a fastbreak for an easy lay-up later in the game.
US government adviser Paul Christiano warns of risks to AI industry as he joins OpenAI’s non-profit foundation
OpenAI is not on track to reduce the risk of “catastrophic” loss of control to an acceptable level, a member of its non-profit board has said, amid spreading public and political concern that super-advanced AIs could one day wipe out humanity.
Paul Christiano, a US government technology adviser, said: “There is a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term.”
Malta is vulnerable to “repeated instances of high-level corruption” unless it strengthens the rule of law and protections for journalists, the Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti said at the opening of an inquiry into judicial failures following the death of Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Chakrabarti, a member of the House of Lords and former director of the human rights group Liberty, has been named special rapporteur for a Council of Europe investigation into the fallout from the assassination of the anti-corruption journalist, who died in a car bombing in October 2017.
CEO Michael O’Leary tells reporters the businessman was sucked ‘towards’ but not out of the opening
Ryanair has said it will be “disputing” that any part of a passenger’s body was sucked outside when a window on one of its aircraft broke while in flight.
US investigators are examining the incident which left Ljubisa Karović, 61, severely injured when the window beside him shattered on a Ryanair flight from Greece to Germany in July.
Spotlight Delaware reporter Olivia Marble recently spoke with the four Democrats vying to replace Rep. Mara Gorman in the Newark area as she seeks a Senate seat.
The candidates include Luann D’Agostino, a dance studio owner; Joe Jasper, a former microbrewery owner; Dave Redlawsk, a University of Delaware professor; and Dan Seador, a former paramedic.
The winner of the Democratic primary will be the de facto winner of the seat after no Republican filed for the district.
Readers can find condensed versions of the candidates’ answers below, while the accompanying podcasts feature unedited excerpts from our conversations.
Luann D’Agostino
Can you tell me about yourself and why you decided to run?
I live just on the north side of White Clay Creek State Park. So, as you know, we have a huge park right smack in the middle of our district. So, I’m right on the north side of it in Cotswold Hills.
And I own a ballroom dance studio in Hockessin. We are celebrating our 20th anniversary on the day of the primary election.
Delaware’s facing real challenges, from strengthening our public schools, protecting our rights, to addressing affordability, public safety, the future of our communities, at a time when too many people are feeling unheard, and politics feels increasingly divided. I think we need leaders who know how to listen, bring people together, and get results, and I feel like that’s exactly what I’ve been doing my whole life through my involvement in just so many things.
As an engineer, I learned to solve complex problems. As a small business owner, I’ve built a successful and inclusive community from the ground up at the dance studio. As an advocate, I work to make our community safer, strengthen our schools, ensure that every person’s treated with dignity and respect.
The University of Delaware is obviously a big part of the economy and the population of the Newark area. How do you plan to work with the university administrators and students?
I’m lucky to work with part of the University of Delaware all the time. I am coach of the University of Delaware ballroom team.
My husband and I do a lot of work with them. We sponsor them as a studio. So I know how important it is. I’m used to that connection, working with the university. But yeah, I agree, they’re a huge part of our community, and I think what’s going to be very important, especially moving forward, is to make sure we have that connection as a legislature, as a representative to the university, but also to make sure that the university has that same connection with our community.
What do you think of SB 23, and what other legislation do you think is necessary to address the affordable housing shortage in Newark and in Delaware more broadly?
SB 23 is the bill that recently passed to hopefully get more affordable housing on the market more quickly. There also are some questions though about does that take decision-making or transparency away from community members, and that’s been a theme of a number of people that I’ve talked to as I’ve been knocking doors.
But I think it’s important that we are continuing to be transparent, and I think we can find some more ways to help the affordable housing crisis that we are facing right now without necessarily taking that transparency away.
What else do you think though is necessary to address the affordable housing shortage?
We have some great small mom-and-pop landlords, rental unit owners in the Newark area. But I think they tend to get pushed out by the big corporations, and I think we need to be careful as we’re moving forward to protect the people who are really trying to help our community and act in the best interest of the community, and not force them to be selling to the large corporations where then we tend to see a lot of the increased prices.
I would love to see some kind of credits or incentives or maybe dropping the transfer tax for first-time home buyers to make that more accessible. I was able to purchase my first home at 23 in Delaware. That does not happen now. You see people in their 40s and 50s sometimes having the first opportunity to purchase a home.
Speaking of the rising cost of living, there’s other rising cost of living in Delaware and everywhere. From groceries to healthcare, to the price of gas. What do you plan to do to address this?
So I think one of the big things that they started to address in our last session was utilities. And again, as a small business owner, I kinda get the double whammy here because utilities go up at home and utilities go up in the business. And we have two rather large cooling units at our space, the 6,000 square feet of the dance studio.
So we see the significant increases in the utility costs. And I know people are seeing that across all of their homes. And they did take steps to help control that a little bit with reining in Delmarva and potential increases in our utilities. I think that is a good step forward. I think we need to be very careful.
But let’s face it, the state had an involvement with the reassessment debacle that didn’t exactly go down properly. So I think anything we can do to help all of our residents know what’s coming as far as costs, help control those costs. I think the legislation that went through that put the 2% cap on the school tax increase was a great way to help people measure what are the costs that are coming forward so that we don’t go without increases for years and then get a 10% jump. Most people don’t plan for that.
What do you think of the data center proposal near Newark? Do you think more data center legislation is needed in Delaware?
So I really think that our legislature had a little bit of lack of vision and left the door open for data centers eyeing our communities. This is definitely my ballpark, having spent 15 years as an engineer with Hewlett-Packard. I helped build some data centers back in the late ’90s, early 2000s. And hands-on with the hardware, I can tell you the data centers they’re looking to put in today are not what was being built before, that were bringing jobs and technology to our community.
I don’t wanna see data centers in our community, especially not close to our communities like the one that was proposed in Newark. What I think is really important is to put the right guidelines and guardrails in place so that we don’t get caught again, one, not being ready for what’s coming down the road, but so that we can look to the future and we’re able to address the rapidly changing technology.
What do you think of Representative Gorman’s package of immigration legislation that she passed this past session, and what would you do to address the needs of immigrant communities in Delaware?
So I’m really happy about what Representative Gorman was able to get passed. I know some of them were not as strong as she would’ve hoped, but again, a step in the right direction. Sometimes we have to take steps towards our ultimate goals.
I don’t want to see that kind of thing happen in Delaware. This happened to be just across the line in West Chester in Pennsylvania. We know it’s a fact that immigrants are putting more into our economy than they could ever take out, because they’re not eligible for many of the services and subsidies that our citizens get.
Immigrant communities have helped build Delaware. They are many of our factory workers downstate. They do so much, and I think we need to offer them whatever protection we possibly can, because that is not happening at a federal level. I think we’re going to have to, as a state, be moving forward and putting a lot more protections in place across the board, whether it be for immigrant rights or civil rights or so many other things that are being attacked at the federal level.
Do you support the recommendations of the Redding Consortium to make a consolidated Northern New Castle School District?
So I’ve been very involved with following the Redding Consortium, and been involved for a decade-plus in fighting for education equity.
But I honestly don’t think their recommendation is ever going to pass. I think it’s going to fail. And when it does fail, Christina School District is really going to need somebody in there because they face some very unique challenges. Being a non-contiguous school district, they have all the special needs schools.
What I would like to see happen is maybe something out of the box. If that doesn’t pass, see something like maybe pooling of funds for the county. Still have separate school districts that are managed separately, but a New Castle County bucket of school district funds that then could be divided.
If there was an option to maybe pool the money without completely putting the school districts together into one, I think there’s some options, outside of the box options that could be explored.
All right, now it’s time for the question that I wrote for you. You’ve been an active member of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. What other measures do you think the Delaware legislature should take to address gun safety?
Yes, I have been very active with Moms for a number of years.
Things that we’ve had to pass in the last few years over ghost guns. Whoever thought that 3D printers would be producing firearms? Their technology does evolve. Every time you put something out there to try and make guns safer, they find a way around it to modify things.
Our kids are safe in school. I don’t think people are necessarily feel safe in all of our communities. So until that is the case, there is always something that can be done to try and make everyone feel safer and just keep moving forward.
Joe Jasper
Can you tell me about yourself and why you decided to run?
I live in District 1 in the city of Newark, which is in the Nottingham Green area, just to the west of the university.
I am self-employed and most recently stopped being a beer brewer.
I hate politics, but I do believe in public service. In an ideal world, I think everyone should take a term as a public servant. But unfortunately our society currently, it doesn’t make that possible for many people.
I feel fortunate that this seat became available when it did as I was wrapping up my career as a beer brewer. I’m excited for the opportunity to serve my community similar to what I’m already doing for community service as a member of the City of Newark Parking Advisory Committee.
The University of Delaware, of course, has a very big presence in Newark. How do you plan to work with the university administrators and students?
Partially by having a version of like an open-door policy to be available to listen and be open to have those conversations with the students and the administrators. Also being proactive and seeking them out so that they know who I am and that I do very much want to work with them.
What do you think of Senate Bill 23, and what other legislation do you think is necessary to address the affordable housing shortage in Newark and in Delaware more broadly?
I will need to look into that more specifically at a later time. But the affordable housing scenario in Newark and all over Delaware is far from ideal and consistently getting worse, and it badly needs to be addressed. And there’s a lot of support that’s in the Senate and the House right now that is fighting for that.
I know, Rep. [Larry] Lambert is doing a lot of work on that front. So if elected, definitely very much looking forward to working with him to address those concerns.
On your website, you were talking about developing a property guardianship system. And this is where the vacant office spaces and vacant business spaces could be utilized as short-term rental housing. I thought it was an interesting idea. So, how would that work exactly?
Yeah, in areas of Europe they’re doing it, and then just walking around Main Street in downtown Newark, there’s just so much office space and retail space that is available but just not being taken up.
So I feel like the landlords are losing opportunity to get the long-term benefit they’re going for and they keep playing that long game and waiting to charge somebody really high rent. From what I understand, it’s oftentimes $30 a square foot. So yeah, if we were able to develop a system that people that were in between housing needs could live somewhere for a few months, it would just be a fantastic opportunity.
What do you think of the data center proposal near Newark, and do you think more data center legislation is needed?
I personally find the data center in Newark, the proposed site on Ogletown Road to be problematic and frustrating. But more importantly, talking to the residents around town, people are up in arms and visibly and audibly very upset about this. And so yes, the short answer is I think we do need more legislation.
When you say they don’t go far enough, what do you wish that you could see from these data center regulations?
The power concern is a really big one that I’m hearing from a lot of residents. And at first glance, it sounded like they were trying to get, or were going to get these companies to supply all of their own power, but they’re not. It’s only a portion, and they have 10 years to actually achieve that, and this is a problem that is going to be affecting the residents now and tomorrow, not in 10 years.
What do you think of Rep. [Mara] Gorman’s package of immigration legislation that she passed this last session? And what would you do to address the needs of immigrant communities in Delaware?
Just keep expanding the protections for the immigrant community. Yeah, I think Mara did a great job drafting some legislation and sponsoring and co-sponsoring other ones. I was actually down in her office months ago lobbying her to sign on to HB94 when it was still being worked on, and she was very receptive and supportive and she did get on board with that one.
I have one unique question for everyone, and my unique question for you is that it seems like you have several unique policy ideas that I haven’t seen any discussion about. Like for example, the property guardianship system, and also you were saying that there’s a green energy deficit that needs to be addressed and that also balcony solar needs to be legal. Although that one has been discussed, but there’s not a ton of momentum around that right now. How do you plan to convince other legislators to sign onto these ideas when there isn’t a lot of existing momentum around them?
I don’t think it will actually take that much convincing, if any. Just ’cause they’re not being talked about doesn’t mean there’s not desire from the other legislators. So especially the balcony solar one, I think that is an easy lift. The green infrastructure is the big lift, so getting the backing from other legislators, I think that they will want to do it, but getting them to sign up for these committees and actually draft legislation is new territory for me.
David Redlawsk
Can you tell me about yourself and why you decided to run?
I live in Paper Mill Falls, which is near the Newark Reservoir. And I currently am the James R. Soles professor and chair of the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware. My position as chair actually is about to end at the end of August after 10 years. I’m stepping down so that another colleague can take over these responsibilities. However, I will remain a faculty member in political science.
I decided to run because I think I bring a unique set of experiences and knowledge to some very, very complicated issues that exist these days, both in terms of dealing with what’s going on in Washington with Trump and MAGA, but also issues relating to education, healthcare, affordability.
I come at this as someone who has previously served in office in New Jersey, when I lived in a different community. I served on the governing body, having experience therefore in representing people and making tough decisions. I have been an academic. I’ve been a professor, a teacher for three decades.
And also, how do you plan to work with the University of Delaware administrators and students? I know you’re uniquely positioned for this question.
Yeah, that’s an interesting challenge, right? The university is a huge factor here in Newark. It’s a big part of the 23rd and 25th RD’s. The university is an important economic driver for the state as a whole. It’s also a very highly respected educational institution that creates a future for so many students.
And I interact, of course, with those up the line, the deans, the provost, the president’s office. So I understand it from the inside. But at the same time, that doesn’t mean I’ve been happy with everything that I see. In fact, I think there are plenty of opportunities to do better, and particularly for the university to do better in its relationship with the city of Newark, which is a critical relationship that has not been as strong as it should have been over a number of years.
What do you think of Senate Bill 23, and also what other legislation do you think is necessary to address the affordable housing shortage in Newark and across Delaware?
Affordable housing is one of those challenges that we’re facing, and we’re facing it in a sense at two different levels.
We’re facing it at the very basic level, dealing with folks who are unhoused, who literally have no roof over their head and no prospects. And there we need to have, at the state level, a housing first strategy. That is, a strategy that says the most important thing for people is shelter before we worry about the other challenges.
SB 23 is designed to try to cut some of the barriers to building more affordable housing. Again, it doesn’t solve problems for unhoused people but taking some of the barriers away I think is important.
I do think it’s an interesting challenge though between state control and local control, having served as a local official and an elected official. And prior to that, I even chaired a planning commission, so I understand local control. I understand the importance of doing that. But I also think we have to have overall statewide policies in a state as small as Delaware that support these efforts.
And so I think SB 23 is not an unreasonable start, but we’re also going to have to watch it carefully. We’re going to have to be vigilant to make sure it doesn’t run roughshod over localities, and to amend it if necessary if it does.
Speaking of the rising cost of housing, what do you think you could do as a state legislator to address the rising cost of living for Delawareans, from groceries to gas, to housing and to healthcare?
Yeah, this is a big one, and it’s a very difficult one, right? I think that there are a couple of directions we can go.
On housing in particular for people who rent, we need to investigate rent stabilization. We need to investigate policies that allow people to stay in their homes while recognizing the rights of landlords while also recognizing that people need shelter.
I think we also need to make sure that while we’ve increased our minimum wage, and it’s a great thing that we’ve done it, we need to make sure that the minimum wage does not fall behind in the future, so that we ought to put in place a connection to inflation so that the minimum wage is not stagnant for as long as it was in the past.
And while this isn’t necessarily a direct affordability thing, it is in the end, and that is our state income tax system is really unfair, right? People who make a million dollars, $10 million pay the same rate as people who make $65,000, and that makes no sense. I think we can do more to add new brackets at the top end to increase rates at the top end.
And one of the things that may allow us to do is to lower tax rates or maybe even eliminate income tax at the lowest end of the income scale. And so even saving a few hundred dollars on income taxes for working people matters a lot when the costs of everything else are rising. I think this is part of the wealthiest Delawareans paying their fair share, easing the burden on those just trying to get by.
What do you think of the data center proposal near Newark, and do you think more data center legislation is needed?
One of the things we’re all worried about is electric rates, which have been skyrocketing. The legislature has made some progress on getting some of that under control, particularly with Delmarva Power.
But if the data centers come in the way they’re trying to come in, we could see 70% to 80% increases in electric rates to pay for them.
That just cannot happen. It’s really that simple. It just cannot happen.
I oppose any new data centers unless we can’t smell them, can’t taste them, can’t hear them, and we don’t pay for them with our own wallets, our environment, or our health.
What did you think of Representative Gorman’s package of immigration legislation that she passed in this legislative session? And what else do you think needs to be done to address the needs of immigrant communities in Delaware?
I think we are in unique times. The idea that the legislature needs to pass laws to protect Delawareans from the federal government is just astounding to me. As someone who has studied U.S. government, and worked along these lines in politics for 30 years, I’m just stunned that we’re in that position, and I’m very, very glad that Representative Gorman moved forward with these.
I think it’s really important that we limit in any way possible the federal government’s ability to simply swoop in and destroy people’s lives. Not even those who are not here under the law, right? This is destroying the lives of legal immigrants. This is destroying the lives of immigrant communities as a whole.
You’ve lived in Delaware for the shortest amount of time compared to the other candidates. Why do you think you’re still able to represent the interests of this district?
That is absolutely a legitimate question, right?
We’ve been here 10 years. We came here for a job. I came here because I was recruited to become the chair of the political science department, and we found a home. We have been in multiple places. I think that gives me perspectives that I can bring to bear. I’ve been in different situations. I’ve been in different communities.
As I’ve said, I’ve served a community as an elected official. I’ve served another community as chair of a planning commission. My experience means, in effect, that I’m not just locked into one Delaware way. I’m really able to bring both personal experience, research experience, but also understanding how things have turned out in different places to bear on being a legislator here in Delaware.
There is something really, really special about Delaware, but especially about Newark itself as a university community, as a place that’s looking forward, not backwards, and as a place that I think has an incredible future in front of it. And I’d like to be part of making that future happen.
Dan Seador
Can you tell me about yourself and why you decided to run?
I live in the development of Evergreen in the city of Newark, just up on New London Road. It’s like the last development in the city of Newark. And I am currently retired. The last regular working job I had was as an assistant chief of operations for the New Castle County paramedics.
I have three granddaughters that are getting ready to enter; one of them has already entered the public school space.
I’ve been hearing for years and years now about the issues with the public school system. Having gone through the local public schools, I think that’s just terrible.
And if I can’t help do better by them by improving things in Delaware, particularly at the education level, then I almost feel like I’ve failed as a parent and a grandparent.
Speaking of education, how do you plan to work with the University of Delaware administrators and students since it’s such a large part of this district?
Well, that’s the $64,000 question, I guess. It is a challenge, and I will tell you that I know there’s been an administrative change there.
I’m hearing very positive things about the new president’s interaction with the community.
So I think there needs to be very direct engagement with the university in what their path forward is and how they feel they can better support the community. They’ve kind of been the elephant in the room for a long time.
What did you think of SB 23 that was recently passed, and what other legislation do you think is necessary to address the affordable housing shortage in Newark and in Delaware as a whole?
First of all, I think everybody agrees that there’s a need for more housing. But if you start taking away the ability of the community to weigh in on how open space or how housing is going to be built out or developed, that’s going to be a real challenge.
It almost sounds like, hey, we’re just going to shove this down your throat and you’re going to have to like it. And that is not going to sit well with any community, I don’t care whether it’s the Newark community or any other one.
There needs to be, on the one hand, the understanding is we need more housing, and on the other hand, well, there’s always kind of a NIMBY attitude out there, where that’s great, but we just don’t want it next to our housing. And so it requires a lot of face-to-face discussion, and in the end it’s going to require compromise.
There are other parts of life where the cost of living is just skyrocketing, and not just in housing, also, groceries and healthcare. Do you have any specific legislation that you would want to pass related to those issues as well?
There’s a lot that is outside of the state’s control. Can we be more supportive of people that are in challenged circumstances where they no longer can put enough food on their table or their electric bills have gone crazy?
Yes, I think we can do that. I think there’s been steps taken, and we’ll continue to see what both county council and the state legislation does to require big users of power to be able to cover the cost of the infrastructure and not put that onus on the community.
And if you look at examples like Loudoun County, Virginia, where they’re the data center of the country right now, I think, and they’re regretting it, because of the power sap that has been. So people are already screaming about how high their electric rates have gotten. So there is one way that we might be able to control that.
So we all pay that bill. Now, should we be looking at, I think it’s the Indian River Plant, we should be looking at possibly reopening that or micro-nuclear plants. I think we should be looking at all those things, and that would help on the power end.
We’ve been looking at food insecurity for a while now in the region. And the interesting thing that we have found is that there does not seem to be any real lack of food. The challenge is getting the food to the people who need it. So we are trying to develop a network that is readily accessible where we can bring food, or have a database where we know where food is.
So I think what I would say is I think legislatively we can offer more support for the boots on the ground there, the groups, the food cupboards that are doing the hard work of making sure people get the food that they need.
What do you think of the data center proposal near Newark and right on the border of this district? And do you think more data center legislation is needed in Delaware?
Well, I believe the data center that you’re referring to is in the White Clay Creek office park. Yeah. And I believe it’s been put on pause at this point. I would agree with that move.
But when it starts requiring the power that these facilities require and the backup power and all that, then that starts sending up flags in the community. I think that particular facility was going to be right near housing and it would’ve been a challenge to those neighbors, I think, with the noise and potential pollution that that facility would create.
And then they’ve had to go, “Whoa, wait.” I think it’s prudent for us as both a community and a state to step back and take a bigger look at this and what its real impact is going to be on the community and on our resources. I understand that on the one side, the people in the construction trade are going to love building out these places.
Because it’ll be good work for them for a short period of time. The bottom line is in the end, unless we’re getting some sort of other revenue source from these data centers, it’s not like they’re going to be employing a whole bunch of people. So I don’t know where the revenue stream for the state and the community comes from with these places.
So I think those kinds of things definitely need a harder look before we commit to them. I think the pace of growth of these facilities has been frenetic and my concern becomes, okay, we build out a bunch of data centers and five years from now the next big thing comes along, then where are we?
What do you think of what Representative Gorman did in terms of her package of immigration legislation, and also what else do you think is needed to address the needs of immigrant communities in Delaware?
Well, I think from the broad perspective, I think certainly all people need to be respected regardless of their background or where they came from and they should be protected and treated appropriately.
And I think what Representative Gorman has tried to do is ensure that people who are immigrants and may be here either undocumented or illegally or whatever are treated appropriately. I don’t really have any issues with that.
I know that there are people that have been in this country for many, many decades that have struggled to get through the legal process and I think clearly the federal government has a hand in dragging their feet on streamlining the processes for intake and judgment on people that are here.
But by the same token, there needs to be a better process in place. So it’s very much a double-edged sword. My goodness, I would hate to think that we would ever build a quote, unquote, “warehouse” to house immigrants that are in transition from wherever to wherever here in the state of Delaware.
That to me is unconscionable. And those kinds of protections absolutely need to be in place. We don’t want to be involved with that at all.
Do you support the recommendations of the Reading Consortium to make a northern New Castle school district, going back to what you were talking about in terms of improving education?
I do think there needs to be some consolidation. There can absolutely be some economies of scale. I’ve talked to dozens and dozens and dozens of people in the education space since I’ve been out knocking on doors and they all agree that there needs to be a vast improvement from where we are right now.
But my real frustration with this education improvement plan is that it just seems to be taking way too long. And I’ve learned to be a patient person when I’m trying to implement change somewhere, but I gotta tell you, when I talk to people that have been in that space for a long time, decades, and they say if any plan gets implemented, it will be six to eight, possibly even 10 years before it’s fully ramped up, and that is absolutely unconscionable.
I’ve got a granddaughter going into sixth grade next year. If it’s going to take six to eight, 10 years to ramp this thing up, she’ll be graduated by the time we got it fixed. That’s ridiculous. It took us 10 years from go to put a man on the moon, and we can’t fix the school district in two or three years.
And my contention would be, let’s take some elements, some real low-hanging fruit out of the Redding Plan I’ll call it, and start implementing as soon as absolutely possible. Do a 20% or 25% piece of it one year. Do 25% of it the next year. Let’s get this going.
If we can’t fix that, all the other stuff, I don’t care what it is, I don’t care whether it’s data centers or bringing businesses in or whatever, none of that stuff matters if we can’t fix the education system.
Testimony from Israeli military insiders involved in surveillance and remote killings features in documentary produced by the Guardian
Testimony from 24 Israeli military insiders on the secret systems used in the war on Gaza has been revealed in a new documentary film about the mass killing of Palestinian civilians.
NAZA, a film from the Oscar-winning Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, was shown at the Venice international film festival on Thursday as the only documentary competing for its prestigious Golden Lion award.
Leaky aqueducts and mega-projects for the wealthy exacerbate a water crisis in the US island territory
Dhara Rivera de Jesús keeps at least 30 large water containers in her home at all times. After more than a year without consistent service in San Juan, Puerto Rico, she fills them whenever water returns, which sometimes only happens for a handful of hours every few days. Going without reliable water to bathe, flush toilets or cook has affected her ability to work and stick to a usual routine – a catch-22, now that she has to spend more money and time buying water and prepared food.
This summer, water levels in the island’s key dams fell below the thresholds needed to supply about half a million residents, leading to a severe drought that prompted Puerto Rico’s governor, Jenniffer González-Colón, to declare a state of emergency. But residents of San Juan, including Rivera, had already spent months grappling with water insecurity as the archipelago’s ageing and deteriorating infrastructure continued to fail amid government mismanagement.
A coalition of advocacy groups and a Democratic-led city filed a preemptive lawsuit seeking to block the Trump administration from deploying armed ICE agents to polling sites ahead of the midterm elections.
The very mechanisms that allow the census bureau to resist partisan interference are coming undone. And Congress is silent
When the constitutional architects of the United States got together, they came up with a crazy plan: “What if we count everyone in the country and allocate political representation that way?”
It was a radical act. Until then, censuses had been used by kings to levy taxes and conscript men into war. With the penning of article 1, section 2 of the US constitution, being counted ensured that states would get financial resources and political representatives. Congress was tasked with building the processes to anchor representation to the population. People wanted to be counted. And politicians wanted their people to be counted more.
Billionaire Alex Beard and his former deputy appear in London court over alleged payments to African officials
Glencore’s billionaire former head of oil trading has pleaded not guilty to two bribery charges after allegedly facilitating payments to west African officials in order to advance the Swiss commodity group’s operations in the continent.
Alex Beard, 59, denied two counts of conspiracy to make corrupt payments at London’s Southwark crown court on Thursday, in a case brought by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO).
Houthi forces in Yemen are making a concerted drive to take over the country’s Red Sea coast fully, claiming control of the key port of Mocha in the most serious wave of fighting with the Saudi-backed government in years, bringing the Iran-aligned group closer to full control of a key shipping route.
Seizure of the coast and some of the islands in the sea would be a strategic disaster for Saudi Arabia and the US, taking Iran and its proxies closer to full control of two choke points for western shipping on opposite sides of the Arabian peninsula: the Bab al-Mandab at the southern end of the Red Sea and the strait of Hormuz in the Gulf.
Backup quarterback Drew Lock led two late scoring drives and the Seattle Seahawks intercepted Drake Maye three times in the fourth quarter to overcome an early injury to starter Sam Darnold and beat the New England Patriots 13-10 on Wednesday night in a Super Bowl rematch.
The Seahawks were held to just a field goal through three quarters as Lock and the offense struggled to move the ball after Darnold injured his hip on the opening drive.
Will the UN vote to sustain Haiti’s Gang Suppression Force?Expert commentjon.wallace
Sustaining the force is essential. But so too are funding commitments to restore the health and education services Haitians desperately need.
On 30 September the UN Security Council will vote on renewing the Gang Suppression Force (GSF) for Haiti.
Now is not the time to pull the plug on GSF and its security effort. If anything, the Security Council vote should be an opportunity to swiftly renew the force and then confront an additional uncomfortable issue: How can development assistance be mobilized for Haiti, among a fractured international donor community?
‘Haitian-led’
After the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, a mantra took hold among diplomats that any solution to the country’s spiral of chaos and crime needed to be ‘Haitian-led’. It’s a nice phrase, intended to reassure sceptics that a solution would not be imposed on Haiti.
But how are Haitians supposed to lead?
Haiti hasn’t had an election since 2016. There is no elected government at any level – local, departmental, parliamentary or presidential. Political parties are in disarray. Many are still controlled by the same distrusted leaders that have dominated Haitian politics for decades.
Indeed, according to a Chatham House-QQ survey, more than 75 per cent of Haitians don’t trust their political leadership. And civil society remains fragmented, weak and often distant from political power – despite years of international development support.
That leaves the international community with continued responsibility to help get Haiti back on its feet. And that means doing much more than funding the vital GSF.
Respondents to the Chatham House-QQ survey identified education and healthcare as priorities in re-establishing security: 69.1 per cent and 67.3 per cent respectively. Development assistance will be needed to deliver these basic services. But where will it come from?
Fragile progress
Chatham House’s survey was conducted in May 2026. That was a month after the first GSF contingent of 400 Chadian troops arrived in Haiti and following operations by the Haitian National Police (HNP) against the gangs that control almost all of Port-au-Prince. An estimated 1,300 gang leaders and members were killed in those operations. Those efforts were assisted by divisions within the coalition of gangs that had come to dominate parts of Haiti and its economy.
At the time of the survey, a slight majority of Haitians (50.7 per cent) were starting to believe that their communities had become safer. But support for the GSF was mixed: 49.5 per cent of voting age respondents said they approved or strongly approved of the multinational force.
Unsurprisingly, that support was greater among Haitians living on the front lines of the insecurity, in or close to gang-controlled areas, where more than 67 per cent approved or strongly approved. 58.4 per cent of Haitians between the ages of 18 and 29 – a key demographic for Haiti’s recovery and future – also showed strong support for the GSF.
Yet 54.2 per cent of Haitians polled don’t believe the GSF can accomplish its mission.
At best, Haitians are modestly optimistic. But the window of opportunity to channel even this limited support may close quickly. The Security Council must act to build on what fragile progress has been made.
The development need
The importance of effectively addressing Haiti’s failed state and humanitarian disaster goes beyond Haiti and the security risks it presents to the Caribbean. Much is at stake for the United Nations, and the future of international cooperation.
The GSF resolution of 2025 was a rare victory for the UN after past resolutions had been vetoed by China and Russia. And it sets a model for how the international community, including many countries from the Global South, can still collaborate to respond to humanitarian tragedies.
Kenya and Chad contributed troops. Canada committed funding and was instrumental in pushing the GSF approval over the line last year. Germany, Qatar and the US have also contributed funding. Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, Jamaica and Brazil have made in-kind contributions through training, materiel and advisors.
The Haiti resolution demonstrates that the international community can come together, even in this semi-ad hoc fashion, to respond to humanitarian crises – even when faith in the international system is waning. The courageous work of UN officials and diplomats posted in Haiti coordinating this effort is a testament to the enduring belief in global institutions and the principles under which they were founded.
But the work is only beginning. If the GSF can establish itself, the next phase will bring new challenges, mainly related to development. Without the US Agency for International Development (USAID), who will step up to coordinate the next essential stage of Haiti’s recovery? The US now lacks the resources, commitment and moral authority to convene a donors’ conference and mobilize resources and commitments for Haitians’ needs. Are solutions still possible without the might of the US to drive them?
Who will step up?
When the Security Council gathers to approve the renewal of the GSF, the hope is that their discussion will progress beyond security to the broader challenges of how to restore a shattered and brutalized country. Reaching agreement on a security force is a beginning only. New commitments must be made to invest in Haiti’s education, healthcare, and economic future.
There is now a need to work in parallel on social and economic development and the rebuilding of Haiti’s battered physical and institutional infrastructure.
The US’s commitment to focus on security and ‘gang suppression’ first was necessary. And its pushing through of a Security Council resolution that would focus on protecting Haitians was both successful and laudable.
But there is now a need to work in parallel on social and economic development and the rebuilding of Haiti’s battered physical and institutional infrastructure. That will take funding by a broad group of donors and agreement on where and how to invest to the best effect.
It will also require more than the kind of concessional loans normally offered by development banks. Haiti’s interim government is too broken to commit to such debts. Instead, those banks should work with supportive governments to develop an incentive-based, conditional partnership with the interim government – or its successor. That would involve agreeing to release funds when Haiti’s government reaches benchmarks in security, fiscal, healthcare, education and macroeconomic reform.
The US Development Finance Corporation (DFC) must also play a key role. The well-bank-rolled DFC can provide investor insurance and concessionary loans to encourage private investors to fill the gaps left by the elimination of USAID. Frankly, they will probably do it better than USAID because of their focus on investment, trade and results.
However, that will require a more concentrated effort by the DFC to focus on Haiti. The DFC’s mandate to ‘mobilize private capital to advance US foreign policy’ can equally apply to other donors, including government development agencies, private foundations and multilateral development banks.
Rebuilding Haiti and protecting the security of Haitians by battling gangs is not just a US foreign policy interest. Haiti has already become a vector for gun smuggling, narcotics trafficking and other illicit activities. Further state collapse would only bring greater insecurity, and not only to its neighbours in the Caribbean (including UK Commonwealth countries), Mexico and the US. The longer the crisis goes on the greater the risk that Haiti becomes a stateless hub for transnational crime – affecting every country with an Atlantic coast.
Environment Agency says talks under way about increasing prices for industrial users to try to reduce poor water management
Ministers are exploring making water more expensive for some users, in the face of severe supply shortages.
Despite the UK being a famously wet country, the precarious nature of the water supply has been made particularly acute this summer, with almost three-quarters of England and all of Wales in drought and 27 million people facing restrictions on their water use.
Losses at the owner of John Lewis and Waitrose widened by more than 40% in the first half of the year as it struggled with higher costs and shoppers feeling less confident about their money.
The John Lewis Partnership, which operates 36 department stores and more than 300 Waitrose supermarkets, said its pre-tax loss for the six months to 1 August climbed to £124m, compared with £88m in the same period in 2025.
Why Should Delaware Care? For decades, Delaware has been one of the bluest of all Democratic states, and soon lawmakers may have a supermajority. That leaves the minority Republican Party to select candidates it thinks have the best chances of winning, even if that means those candidates have also played politics for the other side in the past.
While Delaware’s primary election next week will once again feature progressives challenging incumbent Democrats, Republicans may also hold a referendum of sorts on the future of their state party.
The GOP, which has struggled to regain its footing for at least the past decade in statewide races, will head to polls to select candidates to challenge sitting Democratic incumbents for U.S. Senate and House seats this November — and party leaders have endorsed two curious picks: former Democrats.
If successful, the candidacies of Dr. Mike Katz and the Rev. Earl Cooper could be signs of moderation for the Delaware Republican Party as it attempts to win over independents in November.
But other candidates have increasingly decried the state party nominations as insufficiently conservative, a move that could splinter an already dwindling Republican base.
While the state GOP, the Independent Party of Delaware and former Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Julianne Murray have backed Katz, state Sen. Bryant Richardson (R-Seaford) and Rep. Lyndon Yearick (R-Camden) have backed his primary opponent John Shulli, a retired Army colonel.
Who Republican voters ultimately pick to represent the party will be a closely watched vote.
“You’re seeing a battle of two strategies,” Shulli told Spotlight Delaware. “I’m going with the strategy of, ‘Declare yourself as a Republican.’ Put ‘Republican’ on your signs. Don’t be camouflaged about your policies. Be brave to be a conservative.”
Shulli did not earn the party’s nomination, but he has secured the endorsement of former Trump advisor and retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. And now his campaign is highlighting Katz’s record as an elected Democratic official and then a candidate with the Independent Party of Delaware to attract more right-leaning voters.
“That clash is happening right now,” Shulli said. “It’s healthy. The Republican Party will learn from this. And, depending on how the solution comes out in November, they will change.”
Katz served as a Democratic state senator, representing a portion of northern New Castle County, from 2009 to 2013. He is also a former business owner and pediatric physician and anesthesiologist.
Katz said his “landslide victory” in earning the favor of Delaware Republican delegates at the convention this past spring is directly due to his already established bipartisan relationships across the state.
“I take no corporate or special interest money, no PAC money, which differentiates me significantly from Chris Coons,” he said. “That shows that my only allegiance is to Delaware and all Delawareans. When I served in the State Senate, a lot of my work I did as a Democrat was with Republicans.”
Permission to change?
Both Katz and Cooper said it has been the Democratic Party that changed over the years, not their values.
“I’ve been a conservative person for the last 43 years,” Cooper said in a phone interview this week, pointing to his focus on “social issues” highlighted by an anti-trans stance.
He said he believed he earned the party’s nomination “for making conservative-minded thoughts” and as an “inclusive” representative of the party, not necessarily as a more moderate option.
But comment sections on the party’s and Katz’s campaign Facebook pages are filled with questions about Katz or Cooper’s past affiliations, illustrating that some Republican voters might not be so open-minded about the change of heart.
“Wondering which party he’ll be in next year,” one Facebook user wrote on a recent post on Katz’s page.
“LOL the ‘only true conservative’ in the GOP primary was a Democrat less than 2 years ago,” another wrote.
Still, others like Murray, a former state GOP chair, have pointed to former President Ronald Reagan and President Donald Trump as notable examples of politicians who have changed parties and yet still were successfully elected.
Julianne Murray served as chair of the Delaware Republican Party before being named interim U.S. Attorney for Delaware by President Trump. | PHOTO COURTESY OF GAGE SKIDMORE / WIKIMEDIA
“The major beef [against Katz] is he’s not Republican enough,” Murray told Spotlight Delaware. “What the hell does that mean? He got 82% of the party delegates. That’s not a good argument.”
A numerical disadvantage
Katz’s campaign advertisements invoke the last two Republicans to serve as elected governor, Pete du Pont IV and Mike Castle, more than 30 years ago.
The message hearkens to their era’s approach: Republican candidates must appeal to more moderate or liberal voters if they hope to stand a chance at beating a Democrat in an overall blue state.
But Murray hesitated at the idea that this year’s former Democrats-turned-Republican nominations were intentionally selected as a means toward that end.
“Delaware is a tough state for Republicans,” she said. “You have to look at a candidate and the potential winnability. And if that person has the plan, and I think Katz does, then that’s who you put your support behind.”
This year’s “electability” factor may have even less to do with loyalty to the party than in years past.
Since January, Delaware has gained some 6,200 registered voters, according to state voter registration data. But both the Republican and Democratic parties have lost some 2,000-plus registered voters statewide in that same time period.
Republicans now account for less than 25% of all registered voters in the First State — a decline since President Donald Trump’s first term. In 2016, registered Republicans accounted for nearly 29% of total voters, according to state voter registration data.
Those declining party registration numbers are part a byproduct of Delaware’s automatic voter registration through the Division of Motor Vehicles, which often leads, intentionally or not, to new independent voters. But it is also a reflection of changing attitudes around party identity too.
Even the obscure Mandalorians of Delaware Party added more registered voters than it lost this year. Third-party options, like unaffiliated voters or the Mandalorians, now account for more than 275,000 registered voters in Delaware.
There are more registered voters that have no party affiliation than there are registered Republicans in Delaware. Still, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 131,653 voters statewide, as of this month.
“Delawareans are moving away from that allegiance to that specific party,” Katz said in a phone interview just a week ahead of the primary. “And my focus is on serving Delawareans, it’s not on serving an organization.”
Cooper also remained focused on the issues — largely education and infrastructure — rather than the GOP’s political strategy in an overwhelmingly blue state. He will face off with more MAGA-presenting candidates Joseph Armino and John Whalen III in the primary for U.S. House.
Whether the options fuel division between traditional conservatives and MAGA supporters in the state or simply represent a natural mix of choices on the ballot remains to be seen.
But history indicates that whoever emerges victorious will face an uphill battle against incumbent Rep. Sarah McBride, who is the first openly transgender legislator ever elected to Congress and comes into her first reelection campaign with more than $2.6 million in campaign funds.
The winner of the Katz-Shulli race for Senate also faces a significant funding disadvantage.
Incumbent U.S. Sen. Chris Coons, who is likely to prevail in a contested primary next week, has more than $4.7 million on hand for a general election campaign.
Both Katz and Shulli have essentially self-funded their campaigns so far, loaning their operations nearly $130,000 and $100,000, respectively. They have raised less than $50,000 combined from other donors as of Aug. 26.
Divisiveness across the aisle
Divisiveness among state Democrats festering in recent years leaves an opening for state politics to balance with a sort of “self correction,” said Samuel Hoff, a political historian, author and Delaware State University professor emeritus.
“I don’t think there will be a perpetual Democratic majority forever,” he said.
But Delaware’s reign as “one of the bluest of Democratic states” hasn’t changed just yet, though, he added.
“What could do it is a split in the Democratic Party,” he said. “And we’ve seen some interesting upsets over the last cycle with progressives in this state.”
There may be more waves of division to be found in Delaware between liberal moderates and progressives, than among state Republicans, he noted.
But just as there are “never Trumpers” in the Republican party, so, too, are there voters on both sides that will oppose a candidate for changing their party affiliation. But to longtime Delaware Republicans like Murray, turning a high-level elected office red is all that should matter to conservative voters in the end.
“You really do have to look at the big picture here,” said Murray, who unsuccessfully ran as a Republican for governor and attorney general in 2020 and 2022, and declined to make a second run for the latter this year. “If you have a candidate who can’t win in the general, to me that’s a waste.”
As public air monitors disappear, federal rollbacks and state laws are making it harder than ever to know what’s in the air
As the US’s network for monitoring air pollution deteriorates, a Floodlight investigation has found that the chemical industry is going state-to-state to restrict one of the few options citizens have left for holding polluters accountable: low-cost air sensors.
Over the past two years, the non-profit investigative newsroom determined, lawmakers in Louisiana, Kentucky and Ohio have passed strikingly similar laws barring regulators from acting on air-quality data that communities collect themselves – unless it comes from Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)-approved equipment that typically costs tens of thousands of dollars. Similar legislation has repeatedly been introduced in West Virginia.
Following six years of talks, Pitt Rivers Museum will return body parts collected by British colonial administrators to north-east India
Anthropologists and community leaders from Nagaland, a remote state in north-eastern India bordering Myanmar, have expressed joy and relief that human remains belonging to their ancestors that had been on display in a British museum for nearly a century are finally being returned.
On Monday, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford announced that 39 pieces of human remains – including parts of skulls, a finger and a piece of skin with hair – belonging to the Naga tribes, will be returned to Nagaland after six years of negotiation between the community and the museum.
What sounds like the overwrought penultimate episode in a sci-fi series about AI doom is now our reality
On Tuesday, a former OpenAI researcher quit his job at Anthropic, warning that “neither company is acting responsibly” and that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.”
As someone who’s reported on AI risk for years, this wasn’t news to me. But the outpouring of alarm suggests a much wider public is properly confronting this ludicrous situation for the first time.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine testify during a Senate committee hearing. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
Three years ago, the Defense Department led an ambitious international effort to better protect civilians during combat, a movement built on the bloody lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Pentagon created a network with European partners, driving the creation of shared standards. Civilian harm experts described the moment as a “unique opportunity” for American leadership by example.
Today, those efforts continue — without the United States, after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dismantled the civilian protection mission.
And Thursday, no U.S. delegation will be in the room when the international forum the U.S. cofounded meets at NATO headquarters in Belgium.
The country’s absence from the International Contact Group on Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response summit reinforces the abandonment of a mission the Pentagon had encouraged partners to embrace, said current and former officials. Most spoke to ProPublica on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from President Donald Trump’s administration.
They called the step back “humiliating” and “dangerous,” pointing to reports of rising civilian casualties in Iran following strikes on schools and homes.
“There will be a day when people who care about mitigating civilian harm can come back and say, ‘OK, are we ready to solve this problem?’” said Jenny McAvoy, a former Defense Department official who helped shape the U.S. civilian protection program. “But there are already enormous consequences of abandoning this work.”
The Pentagon declined to comment about the lack of U.S. participation in the Brussels talks. A spokesperson previously told ProPublica that the Defense Department factors civilian protections into all phases of operational planning and “remains committed to fulfilling its civilian harm mitigation and response responsibilities.”
The Pentagon adopted the civilian harm mitigation and response mission in 2022 after years of bloodshed in the post-9/11 “forever wars.” Known as CHMR and pronounced “chimmer,” the framework called for a specialized center to collect strike data and for advisers embedded with regional commands to help mitigate the risk to noncombatants.
Not long after, the U.S. teamed up with the Netherlands to coordinate efforts internationally. The two countries had been frequent partners in recent military campaigns, including the fight against the Islamic State group, and were both coming to terms with high-profile civilian casualty incidents. For the United States, years of harm in Iraq and Afghanistan had drawn international outrage and pledges from commanders to better collect data and learn from deadly mistakes.
The Dutch were still addressing the fallout from a 2015 operation in Iraq in which air strikes targeting a car-bomb factory ignited a nearby munitions depot, setting off an enormous explosion that killed at least 70 civilians and wounded hundreds. Dutch responsibility wasn’t revealed until 2019, causing a national scandal and accusations of a cover-up.
In 2023, the U.S. and the Netherlands formed the loose coalition on CHMR. Participants described a small, informal group that has met half a dozen times since 2023 to share best practices and hear briefings on civilian casualty trends.
Advocacy groups said it had taken years to get the U.S. military to think of civilian casualties as more than “collateral damage,” showing commanders how the deaths of innocents were anathema to their morals and strategically harmful to their missions. The eventual adoption of CHMR guidelines by American defense officials helped their counterparts abroad make the case for programs in their own countries.
“By the U.S. putting itself out there and saying, ‘We learned, we can do better,’ it gives permission and makes it OK for other governments to similarly acknowledge, ‘Yeah, we can do better too,’” said McAvoy.
As participants gather this week in Brussels to discuss how to continue strengthening CHMR, however, the early momentum from the U.S. side has evaporated.
Days before the latest summit in Brussels, the United States wasn’t listed as a participant and there was no sign anyone from the Defense Department would attend. Current and former officials predicted either a no-show or, at most, a single delegate from one of the commands showing up.
To experts, the message was clear: The era of U.S. leadership on civilian protection was over.
Foreign ambassadors and heads of diplomatic missions visit Resalat Square in Tehran, Iran, on April 20, 2026, where photos of civilians killed in recent U.S.-Israeli strikes are displayed.Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images
“The U.S. stopped participating in this group last year and people assumed that meant the group would die,” said McAvoy. “But the group continued to exist and to meet — without the U.S. — under the leadership of the U.K. and the Netherlands.”
The two-day summit opens with a broad discussion of CHMR, such as how it applies in coalitions or in operations at sea, that includes advocacy groups and academics, a draft agenda reviewed by ProPublica shows. Day 2 is a closed-door session for more intimate talks among senior representatives of member states. The meeting wraps with a “looking ahead” panel.
Past attendees included Austria, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany and Norway. The nations represent a wide variation in approaches and needs when it comes to CHMR, participants said.
The U.K., for example, doesn’t have a formal framework for civilian harm mitigation and response, and advocates have spent years pushing the British Ministry of Defense to adopt policies similar to those of the United States. Though humanitarian groups generally regarded the American CHMR enterprise as nascent and imperfect, the overall framework provided a worthy standard, said Mae Thompson of the Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights, a London-based advocacy group.
Advocates have framed the Pentagon’s rollback as an opportunity for the U.K. to step into a leadership role, Thompson said, and they’ve been encouraged by a recent internal report by the defense ministry that calls for formalization of a program in Britain, including systems to track civilian harm, investigate, and make amends and offer post-harm response.
NATO boasts a civilian protection policy that predates the American model, but the organization is now incorporating elements of the U.S. approach, said Andrew Hyde, who studies U.S.-European relations at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan foreign policy think tank.
Hyde said international talks are important for sorting out how CHMR applies in joint operations when the United States, NATO and European nations all have different interpretations of harm mitigation. The diminished U.S. role, he said, means NATO and other partners must step up on coordination.
The shift in leadership could end up shielding civilian protection work from the whims of whichever U.S. administration is in power and leading to more enduring reforms, Hyde said.
“NATO has continued to push forward without U.S. support or participation, keeping up the momentum and ready for U.S. re-engagement,” Hyde said.
French entrepreneur Helene Huby is emerging as one of Europe's most ambitious space leaders, with The Exploration Company raising a record $450 million Series C as it develops the Nyx cargo capsule, a crewed spacecraft, and a reusable heavy-lift rocket. Huby argues Europe risks falling irrelevance without a much larger rocket flying at high cadence. Her company is targeting a 400,000-pound-thrust methane engine test by 2028 and an aggressive 2033 timeline for the launcher. Ars Technica reports: "The fundraise we have done right now is not sufficient to build the massive rocket we have in mind, so there will be another fundraise," she said. "Right now, we're going to be very, very focused on the execution. We must dock with the space station, with the capsule, as fast as possible. We must build this rocket engine and de-risk it as fast as possible. I think once one of these two milestones is achieved, we'll be talking fundraise again."
Critics may look at Huby and her company and say that is a lot of big talk for a company that only has a single, partial success in spaceflight to its credit. And sure, it is. But that's kind of the point. So much of the spaceflight community in Europe has been concerned with either the large aerospace primes seeking government handouts to protect their turf or small launch startups. There has been a stunning lack of big, visionary thinking.
Few people on the continent seem to recognize that multibillion investments by US companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Amazon in space, and their many imitators in China, are radically transforming spaceflight. As the world changes, Huby does not seem willing to stand on the sidelines in Europe and bemoan capitalism in space. Rather, she seems to be saying it is not too late for Europe to seize the day.
"We need to have European politicians who are ambitious," she said. "Entrepreneurs cannot do this alone. We need to be backed by the politicians and by the European Space Agency. But we have to start by achieving the crazy targets that we've set up for ourselves. That will give trust to others to believe in what we're doing."
Speaking in Dallas, the president raised ethical concerns with an apparent $1tn offer to the electorate. Plus the US citizens who are finding Scotland to be an irresistible lure
Good morning. Donald Trump has pledged to pay every adult citizen in the US $5,000 if Republicans retain the House and Senate in the midterm elections. The outlandish proposal, which would cost over $1tn, immediately raised ethical concerns.
Trump made the promise during a marathon speech at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas in which he assailed Democrats as “radical”, defended his unpopular war in Iran, and urged voters to “pretend that I’m on the ballot”. Trump claimed, without evidence, that his second term had been “the most successful two years, financially and every other way, in the history of the presidency”.
Why did the Republicans hold a midterm convention? Republicans are gambling that the GOP’s first midterm convention can salvage their threatened House majority. However, Trump’s dismal approval rating drove many competitive candidates to skip the two-day event entirely.
What has Trump said about the former attorney Michael Cohen? The US president has said he would consider pardoning Michael Cohen, the former fixer whom he once branded a “rat” for testifying against him. Cohen was Trump’s personal lawyer, but flipped in 2018, and pleaded guilty to federal crimes including facilitating a hush payment to the pornography star Stormy Daniels and lying under oath to Congress.
How many people has the US killed in its campaign? Late Wednesday, US Southern Command announced the latest strike in the Caribbean Sea, saying it killed three people. That brought the number of people who have been killed in boat strikes by the US military to at least 230 in 69 strikes.
What has the US announced about Ecuador’s gangs?The US has designated Ecuador’s Los Tiguerones gang as a terrorist organisation. Rubio said the gang was linked to narcotics trafficking, as well as attacks on civilians, law enforcement officers and journalists. “We are talking about terrorists who, in many cases, possess weapons and equipment resembling the national armies of certain countries,” he said.
I've been getting more interested in repairing and modifying Onewheels instead of replacing parts whenever something goes wrong.
For older boards especially, I think finding the right electronic components can sometimes be more difficult than doing the actual repair. Things like MOSFETs, voltage regulators, capacitors, connectors, sensors and other small components aren't always easy to identify or source.
I'm curious what everyone here does when repairing an older board.
Do you usually:
buy the exact replacement component?
look for an equivalent part with similar specifications?
salvage components from another board?
or simply replace the entire controller/BMS?
I'm particularly interested in how you identify equivalent components when the original part is no longer available.
For DIY builders and people who have repaired older XRs or Pint/Pint X boards, what has been the hardest electronic component to find?
Would be great to hear some real-world experiences.
President suggested US might not help UK if Argentina tried to seize Falklands – a new low for UK-US ‘special relationship’
Last week, Donald Trump suggested in an interview with the British TV channel GB News that he might not help the UK if Argentina tried again to seize the Falkland Islands. It was a new low for UK-US relations.
The “special relationship” (Winston Churchill’s phrase) was never perfect, but the UK helped the US on countless occasions, from Korea to Iraq to Afghanistan. The US often stood by the UK as well – although not during the Suez Crisis of 1956, but Ronald Reagan’s government provided significant intelligence and logistics support to Britain during the dust-up over the Falklands in 1982. That relationship is fading fast.
Anna Sweeney Rossman was 5 when her mother, flight attendant Amy Sweeney, was killed aboard American Airlines flight 11 after helping authorities identify the hijackers
Anna Sweeney Rossman was only five years old when her mother, flight attendant Madeline “Amy” Sweeney, died aboard an airliner that terrorists hijacked and deliberately flew into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. And for years, she said in an interview on Wednesday, Rossman’s grief primarily centered on her mother’s absence from certain milestones in her life.
She recalled how planning her 2023 wedding – particularly shopping for a dress – hit her especially hard without her mom there. And Rossman said it was as much a blow to not have her mom there for the birth of her daughters, each younger than 2, as the US prepared to mark the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on Friday.
A man stands in the rubble after the collapse of the first World Trade Center tower on Sept. 11, 2001, in New York City. Doug Kanter/AFP via Getty Images
Within a few days of the terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001, FBI agents identified an important possible suspect: a middle-aged Saudi graduate student who provided crucial help to two of the al-Qaida hijackers as they settled in San Diego early the year before.
The Saudi, Omar al-Bayoumi, had since moved to England, and he was arrested there at the FBI’s request. A police search of his home and office yielded a trove of evidence that quickly deepened investigators’ suspicions about Bayoumi and his dealings with the terrorists. But what happened to much of that evidence after it was delivered to the FBI remains a mystery.
Bayoumi was questioned and released by British police and later returned to Saudi Arabia. For years thereafter, the FBI would insist he wasn’t really a suspect at all — that Bayoumi had met the hijackers by chance, had helped them unwittingly and seemed nothing like a militant Islamist.
As the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is marked Friday, questions about how the FBI handled Bayoumi’s case have only grown, driven in part by evidence that was seized from him in 2001 but not made public for years or even shared with field agents who sought to investigate his role.
That evidence and other FBI information, now filed in a federal lawsuit against the Saudi government by victims of the attacks, has undercut both Bayoumi’s claims of innocence and the FBI’s profile of him as a genial, pro-American civil servant. While he was living publicly as a student, it shows, Bayoumi worked closely with Saudi religious officials, operated as a Saudi intelligence asset and collaborated with several clerics who would later emerge as militant Islamists tied to al-Qaida.
This week, representatives of the 9/11 families are again demanding an end to what they have called the Justice Department’s silence about what happened to the Bayoumi evidence and why he and other Saudis were not more aggressively pursued. The families have also questioned whether the Trump administration — which has strengthened U.S. diplomatic and business ties to the Saudi royal family — is committed to pursuing the truth about the possible role of Saudi officials.
Brett Eagleson of the organization 9/11 Justice speaks at a news conference in front of the Saudi Consulate in Manhattan on Tuesday. The organization, made up of family members of 9/11 victims, called for further investigation into what it says was collusion in the attacks by Saudi officials.Natalie Keyssar for ProPublica
“We still have not been given the full picture of what happened,” said Kathleen Zapata, whose father, Joseph Coppo, was killed in the World Trade Center. “Why are we having to fight against our own government simply to get answers about the most horrible attack ever on American soil?”
A White House spokesperson said, “President Trump is leading the most transparent administration in history, and his team is working diligently on identifying records that are responsive to these families’ request.” A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment, noting that many of the officials involved in the early 9/11 investigation no longer work for the government.
While former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden are expected to attend a ceremony at the 9/11 memorial in New York, President Donald Trump has said he will commemorate the anniversary separately at the Pentagon.
The Saudi government has long denied any role in the attacks, often citing FBI and CIA statements that the royal family was an enemy of al-Qaida and its Saudi-born leader, Osama bin Laden. A spokesperson for the Saudi Embassy in Washington did not return messages asking for comment, including a request to speak to Bayoumi.
From San Diego to Dulles International Airport
A ProPublica examination of how the FBI handled the Bayoumi evidence shows that questions surrounding the Saudi connections to the 9/11 plot date to Jan. 15, 2000, when the first two hijackers landed in Los Angeles on a flight from Bangkok.
The CIA had followed the two men, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, as they met with other Qaida operatives in Malaysia days before. But the agency said it lost track of them when they flew to Thailand and then entered the United States using their real names and Saudi passports. (The CIA did not inform the FBI of their presence in the United States until Aug. 24, 2001, according to the report of the 9/11 Commission.)
Unlike several Qaida operatives who led the hijacking teams, Mihdhar and Hazmi spoke no English and knew almost nothing of life in a Western society. The mastermind of the plot, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, told CIA interrogators he advised them to seek help from Muslim communities in California, according to the 9/11 Commission. But the commission and many U.S. terrorism experts expressed skepticism that he would deploy such ill-equipped operatives without providing them with any contacts in the United States.
Bayoumi claimed his meeting with the hijackers was happenstance. After driving from San Diego on Feb. 1, 2000, he said, he had a meeting at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles and then went to a nearby halal cafe. There, he later told the FBI, he overheard Hazmi and Mihdhar speaking Gulf-accented Arabic and introduced himself. Seeking to be hospitable, he said, he told them they might want to try San Diego.
Shortly after the men stepped off a bus there three days later, Bayoumi said, he happened to run into them again at a local mosque. The next day, he arranged for them to rent an apartment in the building where he lived with his family, co-signed their lease and set up a bank account for them, briefly loaning them about $1,500 for the deposit. He went on to introduce them to more than two dozen local men who helped them in various ways.
The FBI had already looked closely at Bayoumi, launching a preliminary investigation in 1998 after neighbors reported what they said were suspicious gatherings of young Arab men at his apartment. That inquiry determined that Bayoumi, who had worked for the Saudi civil aviation ministry, was still receiving a generous government stipend through an aviation company for which he did no work. The investigation found no criminal activity, however, and it was closed after six months, officials said.
Barely a week after the 9/11 attacks, the FBI asked the British authorities to arrest Bayoumi in Birmingham, England, where he had begun graduate business studies at Aston University.
David Campbell, then a young terrorism investigator, was dispatched from London by the Metropolitan Police Service, which is responsible for counterterrorism efforts across Britain. He recalled flying back down the highway in a special police vehicle with his handcuffed prisoner in the back seat, the sirens blaring. “They’d been told they had one of the 9/11 terrorists,” he said in an interview.
The FBI sent three agents from the United States to assist with Bayoumi’s interrogation at the Paddington Green police station in Central London. They were joined by a senior FBI attache, Joseph Hummell, who worked closely with the police service’s Anti-Terrorist Branch, known as SO13.
But despite those close contacts and the FBI’s considerable information about Bayoumi, very little of it was shared with Campbell and the Birmingham detective who joined him in questioning the suspect.
“We were really in the dark,” Campbell recalled. “They never even mentioned that he had been under investigation by the FBI in San Diego in 1998.”
Nor, Campbell said, were the interrogators briefed about the materials that had just been taken from Bayoumi’s Birmingham home and office, which included boxes of papers, correspondence, photographs, computer disks, videotapes and an address book. Yet some of those items had been immediately flagged as important, records show.
Among them was a diagram in Bayoumi’s handwriting that appeared to calculate the trajectory of an airplane to a point on the horizon. Another was a video of Bayoumi touring and describing the U.S. Capitol, a building that had been identified by U.S. investigators as a prospective al-Qaida target.
Omar al-Bayoumi, right, shortly after being arrested in Birmingham, England, in 2001BBC World Service via YouTube
After questioning Bayoumi for almost a week, Campbell said, he and the Birmingham detective joined two senior SO13 officers on a conference call with Justice Department attorneys in the United States. The two interrogators were given a brief opportunity to express their view that Bayoumi’s account seemed deeply suspicious and full of falsehoods, Campbell said.
It didn’t seem to matter. The U.S. officials, who included lawyers in Washington and federal prosecutors in New York, concluded quickly that they did not have sufficient evidence to seek Bayoumi’s extradition.
“When the call ended, we just looked at each other in complete disbelief,” Campbell recalled.
FBI documents declassified in response to a 2021 executive order by Biden give a partial answer to what happened to the Bayoumi evidence.
One memorandum on Oct. 11, 2001, notes that New Scotland Yard, as the Metropolitan Police Service was often called, had provided the FBI attache’s office with “copies of all recovered exhibits, including mirror images of all computers.” A complete copy of the trove was also sent via Federal Express to the FBI’s New York Field Office, the memo noted.
By then, however, the agency’s new director, Robert Mueller, had taken the unusual step of ordering that the 9/11 case be run out of its Washington headquarters. The Penttbomteam, as it became known in the FBI’s clunky acronym for Pentagon/Twin Towers Bombing, mobilized thousands of FBI agents and analysts around the world.
One group focused on the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, tracing the path of Hazmi and Mihdhar from Southern California to Dulles International Airport in Virginia, where they abandoned a used Toyota Corolla registered to one of their former addresses in San Diego.
How the headquarters team translated and analyzed the materials obtained from Bayoumi in Britain is unclear. But the team did not appear to share the evidence widely. In another memo, dated May 15, 2002, the San Diego FBI office noted that it was asked to review only five of the more than 80 VHS tapes seized from Bayoumi in Birmingham. Two of those were duplicates and included footage of a paintball fight and a family trip to Sea World. “Nothing of significant investigative/evidential value has been discovered,” the memo stated.
Although Bayoumi’s friends and associates helped the hijackers with everything from part-time jobs to flying lessons (they flunked out because their English was so poor), FBI leaders dismissed the idea that any of the people who helped them knew they were Qaida operatives sent on a still-evolving terrorist mission.
“As far as we know, they contacted no known terrorist sympathizers in the United States,” Mueller told a joint panel of the Senate and House intelligence committees in September 2002. “To this day, we have found no one in the United States except the actual hijackers who knew of the plot.”
The FBI’s more conclusive account of its Penttbom findings came before the bipartisan 9/11 Commission. The young agent leading the Flight 77 investigation team, Jacqueline Maguire, echoed Mueller’s earlier testimony, saying in 2004 that Bayoumi’s meeting with the California hijackers had been “a random encounter” and that he had helped them without knowing their true aim. Maguire also said the FBI had no indication the hijackers had initially sought out another figure who raised suspicions, Fahad al-Thumairy, the imam of the Saudi-built King Fahd Mosque in Culver City, California.
Michael Jacobson, a former State Department counterterrorism official who was a key commission investigator, said he knew some FBI agents in California were convinced that Bayoumi and Thumairy had helped the hijackers deliberately. But Maguire and her boss, Mary Galligan, who oversaw the Penttbom team, “were both consistently pushing back hard on any narrative of a support network,” Jacobson said in an interview.
Maguire and Galligan declined to comment.
FBI Special Agent Jacqueline Maguire testifies during a hearing of the 9/11 Commission in June 2004 in Washington, D.C.Mark Wilson/Getty Images
When investigators from the 9/11 Commission interviewed Bayoumi and Thumairy in Saudi Arabia in 2003, Maguire — who had already interviewed the two Saudis for the FBI months earlier — joined them as an official escort. The interviews, which were managed by Saudi intelligence officials, were notable for Bayoumi’s efforts to ingratiate himself and Thumairy’s seemingly brazen lies, former officials said. Thumairy said he had never met the hijackers and did not even know Bayoumi, despite telephone records showing numerous calls between them. The Saudi Embassy did not respond to a request to speak to Thumairy.
In its final report, the commission said it could not confirm that Thumairy helped the two terrorists but found it was “fairly certain that Hazmi and Mihdhar spent time at the King Fahd mosque and made some acquaintances there.”
Echoing the FBI’s assessment, the commission described Bayoumi as “a devout Muslim, obliging and gregarious,” and found no evidence he “believed in violent extremism or knowingly aided extremist groups.” It would take years before those conclusions were forcefully challenged.
Daniel Gonzalez, a San Diego FBI agent who had been looking at Hazmi and Mihdhar’s circle since the day after the attacks, became the case agent for Operation Encore, a “subfile” or follow-on inquiry to the original 9/11 case. But while he and other agents made significant breakthroughs, former officials said, they faced constant skepticism from FBI headquarters and were sometimes blocked outright in their efforts to pursue the case.
In 2007, in an interview with a key source in Jordan, Gonzalez learned of two other important witnesses in Los Angeles, young Muslim immigrants who had also helped the hijackers. The two later confirmed the hijackers had gone to the King Fahd Mosque after arriving in Los Angeles and met repeatedly with Thumairy. One of the men said Thumairy also arranged for the hijackers to be driven to their first meeting with Bayoumi at the halal cafe — undercutting Bayoumi’s claim that he met them by chance.
For years, Encore agents said, they continued to press for more of the materials seized from Bayoumi in Britain. At one point, Gonzalez got a phone call from Washington asking if he wanted some old Penttbom evidence that was about to be destroyed. The materials — copies of some of Bayoumi’s long-sought papers, including the suspicious flight diagram — stunned the Encore team, Gonzalez said.
Retired FBI Special Agent Daniel Gonzalez in San Diego, where two of the 9/11 hijackers spent time after arriving in the United StatesJohn Francis Peters, special to ProPublica
In June 2012, a small group of Encore investigators and analysts flew to London to try to review the Bayoumi search evidence more thoroughly. According to three former officials familiar with the trip, they viewed dozens of hours of videotapes and took new copies of much of the Metropolitan Police material.
For reasons that remain unclear, however, the team either did not see or did not focus on a few videotapes that would later become evidence in the 9/11 families’ lawsuit, including the tape of Bayoumi at the U.S. Capitol. While some terrorism experts have interpreted the recording as Bayoumi’s effort to “case” the site for a possible attack, lawyers for the Saudi government described it as a tourist video.
The Bayoumi videos also included extensive footage of two Saudi religious officials who not long before had commanded attention from both the FBI and CIA. The two men, Adel al-Sadhan and Mutaeb al-Sudairy, were emissaries of the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs who had traced what intelligence officials saw as a strikingly suspicious path around the United States. The Saudi Embassy did not respond to a request to speak to the men.
In addition to traveling to Washington, D.C., with Bayoumi, the two clerics visited Los Angeles and San Diego a year before the hijackers and stayed at one of the homes where Hazmi and Mihdhar later lived. Sudairy also spent several months living in Columbia, Missouri, with an American al-Qaida member, Ziyad Khaleel, who provided Osama bin Laden with the satellite phone that FBI officials said he used to orchestrate the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Just before and after the hijackers arrived in San Diego, telephone records show, Bayoumi also made a series of calls to Sudairy in Washington, Thumairy in Los Angeles and Anwar al-Aulaqi, a Yemeni American cleric. Aulaqi, who ran a San Diego mosque that Bayoumi had funded through Saudi donations, was described by FBI witnesses as a spiritual adviser to Hazmi and Mihdhar. Aulaqi later emerged as an important al-Qaida leader before he was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011.
Unanswered Questions
In 2014 and 2015, a panel of security experts was assembled to review the FBI’s implementation of reforms called for by the 9/11 Commission. The 9/11 Review Commission, as the second panel was called, was also tasked with looking again at questions about the 9/11 plot that remained unanswered.
Maguire, the FBI’s primary liaison to the review panel, again disputed suspicions about Bayoumi. “He came here for school and everything seems accidental with Bayoumi,” the commission was told in a 2014 briefing led by Maguire.
The review panel concluded there was not enough new information to revise the 9/11 Commission’s finding that there was no “witting assistance” to the hijackers. But Tim Roemer — a Democratic former congressman from Indiana who served on the 2002 joint intelligence inquiry, the 9/11 Commission and the Review Commission — made a point of pressing for further investigation into the Saudi question. He was struck that Maguire and other FBI officials were still pushing back.
“There was consistent feedback from some levels of the FBI that simply wanted to close the case and claim that what Bayoumi did was purely coincidence and somehow accidental,” Roemer said.
Roemer insisted that the Review Commission formally recommend that the FBI continue to examine the Saudi issue. But shortly after it did so, officials at FBI headquarters renewed their pressure to shut down Operation Encore. In 2016, the head of the agency’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces finally relented, reassigning the case and disbanding the team that had been investigating it for years.
The next year, a pair of memorandums sent by the FBI’s Washington field office confirmed something that the Encore agents had long suspected: Between the late 1990s and Sept. 11, 2001, Bayoumi was paid a monthly stipend as a co-optee, or part-time agent, of the Saudi intelligence services.
By then, Gonzalez had retired. The Encore investigators who remained were working new jobs. Along with other documents from the FBI investigation, the memos were initially withheld from the 9/11 families by the Justice Department, which classified them as state secrets during Trump’s first term. The Encore agents saw the memos for the first time when they were finally made public in 2022 under Biden’s executive order.
“Somebody needs to explain to the American people why we didn’t see this information before,” Gonzalez said in an interview.
Why Should Delaware Care? Concerns about enrollment at school districts throughout the state have grown, with some school buildings experiencing extreme overcrowding while others face declining enrollment. The Colonial School District’s recent approval to change elementary school feeder patterns marks the most recent attempt to address challenges with classroom space.
The Colonial School District Board of Education approved plans on Tuesday to change the boundaries for Southern Elementary School, which multiple New Castle parents have favored for its programs tailored to their kids’ special education needs.
The plan will decentralize those special education programs away from the school, which sits near the C&D Canal, and distribute the resources throughout the district, which stretches from Wilmington to Port Penn.
During the meeting, Superintendent Jeff Menzer said the changes are necessary to better support special education students’ needs, which have been impacted by the limited capacity at Southern Elementary.
“That has been front and center since the beginning of our conversation, and we firmly believe that the recommendations in front of you move us closer to our to that effort,” he said.
For years, Southern Elementary students have had access to special education programs that were exclusive to the school. Many families who do not live in Southern’s current feeder pattern have also used Delaware’s school choice option to enroll their children there to access Southern’s programs.
The school was at a 97% capacity rate last year, according to the Delaware Department of Education. Capacity rates for the current school year have not yet been released.
The change would send more general education students to Southern and fewer to Eisenberg, Castle Hills, and Wilbur elementary schools, Menzer said during a July board meeting.
Roughly 330 students would be affected by the changes, which will go into effect next school year.
Under the new plan, students living in Holloway Terrace and Mayview Manor neighborhoods who currently attend Eisenberg Elementary would go to New Castle Elementary for the 2027-28 school year.
Castle Hill Elementary students living in areas such as Cavalier Country Club Apartments and Christiana Acres, among others, would instead attend Carrie Downie Elementary. And Castle Hill students living in Emblem at Christiana would attend Pleasantville Elementary.
Southern Elementary also would draw students living in High Pointe at Saint Georges, Blairville Court, Buena Vista Park, and other parts of the district that currently attend Wilbur Elementary.
Menzer also told board members he had spoken with families who will be affected by the change.
Their only concern was whether they would still be able to use the school choice option to enroll their children in schools, such as Southern Elementary, that may be outside their designated feeder pattern — which they will.
What will happen next?
In the coming weeks, the University of Delaware will help the district map and geotag the feeder pattern changes ahead of school choice applications for the 2027-28 school year, which open on Nov. 2.
Menzer has said there will be a priority to share necessary information with affected families throughout the fall.
Colonial School District Superintendent Jeff Menzer said feeder pattern changes were necessary to better support special education students’ needs. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JULIA MEROLA
Families will have a chance to visit the school where their child will be assigned, or where they may want to choice into, for the 2027-28 school year.
Menzer also said that starting in December, the district will “lay out” how the plan will impact staff. Although staff will not be laid off as a result of the changes, there may be changes as to where they are placed.
None of the feeder pattern changes will be implemented until next fall.
Addressing enrollment concerns throughout Delaware
For many students with individualized education plans, or IEPs, their schooling does not only take place inside a classroom.
Some students require small group lessons or intensive interventions, and schools need space to provide those required resources.
But space is limited in Southern Elementary. And Colonial School District officials’ decision to change elementary school feeder patterns marks the first attempt from a school district in recent years to address ongoing enrollment fluctuations.
While some school districts grapple with overcrowded schools, a separate phenomenon of half-empty school buildings has prompted Delaware’s House Speaker Melissa Minor-Brown (D-New Castle) to question whether those facilities could be repurposed into different types of community facilities.
Earlier this summer, Minor-Brown introduced a resolution that asks budget officials to develop a framework, along with school districts, that would define an “underutilized” property. They would then outline a process for repurposing it for other community services, such as child care or senior housing.
In a social media post, Minor-Brown said her resolution would not close any school or take power from local school board members. Instead, she said it starts a “coordinated planning conversation.”
The phenomenon has been fueled by several factors, including an expansion of charter schools in New Castle County and changes to bus patterns that allow students to attend schools outside of their community.
Menzer has previously told Spotlight Delaware that capacity numbers are not “cut and dry,” because some students need more space than others depending on their individual needs.
As a result, Menzer said some schools that have lower recorded enrollments than others are still overcrowded because of some students’ needs for more inclusive settings.
Once implemented, the district’s new feeder pattern will take students from some of the more populated schools, such as Wilbur and Eisenberg, to schools with lower capacity rates like New Castle and Carrie Downie elementary schools.
Concerns over rising inflation, continuing war with Iran, and the US’s record national debt have shaken the market
Americans who have been grappling with the higher cost of living over the last few years now face another issue: trouble in the US bond market that could mean elevated costs are here to stay.
US government bonds – known as treasuries – are supposed to be the most stable type of investment vehicle. But investor concerns over issues including rising inflation, the continuing war with Iran, and the US’s record national debt have shaken the market and slowed demand for US treasury bonds.
Supporters at the campus event who still replay it in their mind. A security executive with worried clients. A professor placed on leave over her social media posts.
H.R. McMaster, President Trump's former National Security Advisor, discusses America's future security challenges
10
December 2026 — 09:00 TO 10:00 GMT
Anonymous (not verified)
Chatham House and Online
Hear from one of America’s leading security and military thinkers on China, Europe, Iran and the future of US global leadership in an increasingly contested world.
Hear from one of America’s leading security and military thinkers on China, Europe, Iran and the future of US global leadership in an increasingly contested world.
Lieut. Gen. (Ret.) H.R. McMaster commanded in Afghanistan and Iraq, oversaw training and modernization for the US Army’s infantry, armor, and cavalry force, and was an assistant professor of history at the US Military Academy. Hear one of America’s leading security and military thinkers talk about China, Europe, Iran, and the future of the US in an increasingly contested world.
The United States faces mounting challenges as strategic competition intensifies, and conflicts reshape the international order. War with Iran, ongoing Russian aggression against Ukraine, rising tensions with China and fraying relationships with allies are changing Washington’s approach to global leadership. These developments raise fundamental questions about America’s role as a security guarantor, and the future of the transatlantic relationship.
General McMaster will discuss:
What are the most significant national security challenges facing the United States?
How should Washington respond to the rise of China?
What is the future of the transatlantic relationship and US–Europe cooperation?
How can the United States strengthen deterrence while managing global commitments?
What role should America play as a guarantor of international security?
How is geopolitical competition reshaping the international order?
The grief Emily Taylor had been holding at bay finally washed over her in January. It had been four months since a lone gunman shot Charlie Kirk in the throat at Utah Valley University, killing the conservative commentator in minutes. That winter “was the first time in my entire life that I didn’t go back to school,” said the former English professor, holding back tears.
Taylor had resigned from her tenured position in December to save her tiny college in South Carolina from a political witch hunt in which lawmakers threatened to pull her school’s funding because she’d written a brief essay acknowledging that before his violent death, Kirk had employed violent rhetoric.
“I was a first-generation college student, and I worked my entire life to be an English professor,” said Taylor, who has spent most of the last year scrolling bare job boards since leaving Presbyterian College. “The chances that I ever have tenure-track employment again doesn’t seem likely.”
“I don’t think any other era has had the tools to do the sort of purging that is available now.”
A year after Kirk’s killing, The Intercept spoke with five people who lost their jobs in the wake of the Kirk firings and four attorneys representing seven more clients, most of whom are still not back at work after finding themselves ensnared in one of the biggest mass censorship campaigns in modern history.
Their stories represent a chilling sea change that has become a hallmark of the second Trump administration: an inversion of the assumption that, for the most part, Americans are protected by their right to free speech. They illustrate what happens when an overzealous online army propped up by some of the most powerful people in the country are given free rein to terrorize their perceived political enemies.
“One of the things that was really interesting and very destructive about the post-Charlie Kirk purge was how coordinated and manufactured the outrage was,” said Allen Chaney, who serves as legal director of the ACLU of South Carolina and represents both Taylor and fired Clemson University professor Joshua Bregy, who was reinstated in January.
While the U.S. has suffered speech crackdowns before — like in the McCarthy and post-9/11 eras — the saturation of online life seems made to supercharge a backlash. “I don’t think any other era has had the tools to do the sort of purging that is available now,” said Chaney.
Taylor was waiting for her children to finish their piano lessons on September 10, 2025, when she heard the news that Kirk was shot while answering a question about a conspiracy theory he perpetuated suggesting there is an epidemic of transgender mass shooters. “Counting or not counting gang violence?” were his final words.
Soon there were murals and memorials. President Donald Trump called Kirk “our greatest evangelist for American liberty” to a packed crowd at his memorial service. And Vice President JD Vance said anyone perceived to be “celebrating” Kirk’s murder should be targeted. “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out,” Vance said on his podcast. “And hell, call their employer.”
Online troll accounts and politicians alike took up the cause to begin targeting anyone even mildly critical of Kirk. Lists circulated naming people accused of “celebrating” Kirk’s death, making it easy to harass people en masse. Less sophisticated users could simply search the name “Charlie Kirk” on X and harass anyone who made a negative post. Big accounts like Libs of TikTok doxed critics and amplified hate to their millions of followers.
Jimmy Kimmel’s show was temporarily pulled off the air by ABC, after the host quipped in a monologue that MAGA was weaponizing Kirk’s death. Washington Post opinion columnist Karen Attiah was fired for pointing out Kirk’s deep anti-Blackness.
Kimmel is back on, and Attiah was recently reinstated by an arbitrator. But most of the people who were targeted, doxed, fired, and harassed were not public figures.
“My clients really were not high-income earners; we’re talking about support staff,” said Melody Fowler-Green, an attorney who represents several people fired in the wake of the Kirk killing. “A lot of the people who lost their jobs, they are people who are not in positions of power.”
“A lot of the people who lost their jobs, they are people who are not in positions of power.”
Kimberly Hunt, then a 31-year-old HR professional from Scottsdale Arizona, made a short video questioning the assertion that Kirk “didn’t deserve” his fate.
“He said a few deaths a year are worth it if it meant preserving our God-given right to bear arms. He actively fought against women’s rights. He’s openly Islamophobic, and he spreads anti-trans rhetoric,” Hunt said into the camera, accurately capturing Kirk’s rhetoric. “How many hate crimes happened because of him? Spare me the empathy because he didn’t believe in it either.” She said she had sympathy for his children but not his wife, Erika, who is now the CEO of his organization Turning Point USA.
Hunt said she never listed her job on her social media, but internet sleuths found where she worked, and the phones began to ring off the hook. When her boss asked her to meet, she knew the writing was on the wall. “He explained that I had put him in a tough position because there were so many phone calls coming into our business that it was disrupting their operations,” she recalled, “And that he had to let me go.”
The harassment didn’t stop. Hunt said at one point she received a call from her local sheriff that she was said to be on a “hit list.” Officers surveilled her home for two weeks.
None of the employers of the people who were fired or placed on leave in this story responded to The Intercept’s requests for comment.
Taylor had no way of knowing what was to come when she sat down to draft a response to the shooting the morning after, on September 11, 2025. “My initial reaction to it was just so angry that the students on campus were subject to another school shooting,” said Taylor. “I was also sad that he died because I don’t believe in violence, and I don’t think anybody should be murdered.”
In her essay, “Dying to Be Men: American Masculinity as Death Cult,” Taylor argues that the type of “violent discourse espoused by Charlie Kirk, and many and others” ultimately led to his tragic shooting in front of thousands of traumatized students.
“I’m sorry for Charlie Kirk and all the other men like him that have been raised in this America and with these ideals of masculinity,” she wrote. “I’m sorry that he decided to adopt this hateful ideology and to profit from it. And as the mother to a boy and a girl, my heart breaks for the America these children are growing up in. Here’s hoping we can save ourselves.”
She sent the piece to an editor at Ms. Magazine, the publication founded by recently deceased feminist leader Gloria Steinem, and within hours it was online. The hate began to roll in.
“One of the things that was really interesting and very destructive about the post-Charlie Kirk purge was how coordinated and manufactured the outrage was.”
Republican state Rep. Thomas Beach targeted Taylor on social media, and Republican Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette called for Taylor to lose her tenure. People began to dox her online.
Presbyterian College had to hire an outside firm to manage crisis communication and student safety. “They were telling me I needed to get personal security for my home,” said Taylor, “which you’ll be surprised to hear I couldn’t afford on a professor salary.”
Taylor said she bought security cameras, and after she received a death threat, the local police began to regularly check house. She called the principal of her children’s school to talk about what to do in case someone tried to harm her kids.
On September 18, 29-year-old Republican state Rep. Luke Rankin, who did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, called for the state to pull its funding from the small private Christian college. His colleagues co-signed a letter to formalize their threat.
Presbyterian College only has about 1,000 undergraduates. It would be devastated by that kind of hit, said Taylor, who walked away from a job that could support her family and offer future tuition benefits for her children. “I also support my mom. So, walking away was really hard,” she said. “But I also couldn’t have lived with myself if they had taken away money from students.”
For Dave Handler, the message from HR came as he was getting ready to teach a class on the First Amendment to his students at Minnesota Connections Academy, an online high school where he was a teacher until Kirk was killed.
“I post basically 10 words and an article, and I lost my career.”
On Facebook, Handler had written that he was not going to mourn a “Nazi” in a since-deleted post. He shared an article listing some of the offensive things Kirk had said over the years, then deactivated his account.
By that point, it was too late. According to Handler, he was told that someone had emailed the corporation who owned his school to complain, and soon he was out of a job.
Handler said his girlfriend, also a teacher, has been able to help support them both, and he has been able to find some part-time work, but his firing still stings. “I post basically 10 words and an article, and I lost my career,” he said. He doesn’t have the money to hire a lawyer.
Some who did manage to get attorneys have gotten their jobs back — like Phillip Michael Hook, a tenured art professor at the University of South Dakota who was placed on leave after calling Kirk “a hate spreading Nazi” on Facebook.
“I’m sorry for his family that he was a hate spreading Nazi and got killed. I’m sure they deserved better. Maybe good people could now enter their lives,” Hook wrote. “But geez, where was all this concern when the politicians in Minnesota were shot? And the school shootings? And Capitol Police?”
Hook was “really lucky,” said his attorney, Jim Leach, because they were able to get into court before he was officially fired.
“You contrast him to all these other people who did lose their jobs, and now are in this really long legal process,” said Leach, “maybe they have some relief, or maybe they don’t, but they’ll never have what they had, which is the ability to do their work and teach. Which for most teachers, I think it’s what they always wanted to do with their lives and what they love doing.”
Karen Leader, a tenured art history professor at Florida Atlantic University, said she first became familiar with Kirk for a relevant project of his: the “Professor Watchlist,” a list that he started in 2016 of purported left-leaning professors on college campuses. Despite the activist’s purported insistence on free-speech, the list drew harassment toward left-leaning professors for their views.
“Seeing this kind of whitewashing narrative made me mad, and I wasn’t going to have it,” said Leader. She said she began quote-tweeting people’s posts sharing racists, sexist, and transphobic things said by Kirk, with the caption “This is Charlie Kirk.”
Leader said she probably reposted roughly 48 posts about Kirk. On the Friday after his death, former Ron DeSantis staffer Jordan Chamberlain screenshotted her posts and tagged Florida Atlantic University, asking, “do these statements represent the views of your university?” She was placed on leave by 5 p.m. Saturday. Libs of TikTok shared a post of Leader’s headshot with the caption, “Another one bites the dust!” By Sunday morning, Leader’s home address was shared, and she was inundated by death threats.
Leader has been reinstated, but she says she is a long way from being made “whole.”
“I always, for the rest of my life, will be looking over my shoulder.”
“I always, for the rest of my life, will be looking over my shoulder in case one person is still stewing over this who has my address,” Leader said. “It’s a year now Thursday, a year since this all started, and I’m not 100% back.”
“I think everyone was eager for an excuse to punish people for making them uncomfortable,” said Gretchen Felker-Martin, a horror author who lost a contract with DC Comics after her posts calling Kirk a “Nazi bitch” had gone viral. “When something like Kirk’s assassination happens, you see a really regressive crackdowns from authority figures who just don’t want to think about this shit anymore.”
Shortly after she lost her work, Felker-Martin said her personal phone number was leaked, and she began to receive phone calls from people threatening to come kill her.
But like most of the people who spoke to The Intercept for this story, Felker-Martin said she didn’t regret what she’d posted, despite the consequences.
“I think it’s unconscionable to throw your artists to the Nazis to appease these people,” Felker-Martin said.
Leader agreed. “I used my privilege, which is a lot of privilege to be forthcoming and honest about what was really going on,” she said. “He did enormous harm, and his organization continues to do enormous harm.”
“He did enormous harm, and his organization continues to do enormous harm.”
In March, Taylor filed a lawsuit with the ACLU of South Carolina against the four state lawmakers who threatened to deny funding to her college. The lawsuit asks the court to declare the lawmakers’ actions as unconstitutional, force them to rescind the letter and threats, and provide compensation for back pay, lost benefits, and compensatory and punitive damages. In response, Rankin and the other lawmakers denied having an impact “on her quote employment status,” arguing that she chose to resign.
Lawsuits like these have already resulted in big payouts — at least $2 million in disclosed settlements for employees fired or penalized in the wake of Kirk’s death so far. And in June, Rankin, Taylor’s lead antagonist, lost his primary reelection by roughly 20 percentage points.
“That’s the only thing our justice system can offer, right?” said Fowler-Green, whose client is still fighting for restitution — which, if it arrives, will come from public dollars. “Paying money can influence people’s behavior. One concern I have, though, is that the people who are making the decision are not paying the money. It’s not their money; it’s my money.”
“I don’t think dying absolved him of the stochastic terrorism that he inflicted on people.”
Hunt, who said she hasn’t been able to find a full-time job since September “would have done it again,” she told The Intercept.
“I don’t think dying absolved him of the stochastic terrorism that he inflicted on people,” Hunt said. And in her view, the backlash was clarifying, too. “I think it painted a bigger picture of the right and the mob mentality.”
Donald Trump pledged to pay every adult citizen in the US a $5,000 dividend if the Republicans retain the House and Senate in the midterms, during a rambling speech at the party's midterm convention in Dallas.
The US president claimed the payment was possible due to the country's 'tremendous economic success, like in history we've never had anything like what's happening'. The proposal, which would cost more than $1tn, immediately raised ethical concerns
Can the UK escape the public debt trap?Expert commentjon.wallace
The UK’s mix of high fiscal deficits, rising bond yields, anaemic growth, high taxes and an impatient electorate can only be solved with politically brave choices.
All major advanced economies have seen rising long-term bond yields over the past year. But with the ten-year gilt yield at 5.2 per cent on 9 Sept 2026, the UK’s long-term rates are the highest in the G7. US ten-year yields are 4.8 per cent, Germany’s are 3.4 per cent and Japan’s 2.9 per cent.
Reasons for the UK’s relative weakness
The UK’s relatively high long-term interest rate reflects in part its lack of other economies’ advantages. Sterling does not enjoy the US dollar’s global reserve asset role. Gilts do not benefit from the strong home country preference of Japanese investors. And the UK does not have the financial and economic backstop embodied in EU membership.
But the main factor is most likely to be the UK’s relative economic weakness, leading to higher expected inflation and/or a higher real interest rate risk premium. Financial markets look at the UK and see a country boxed in with structurally low growth, mounting social and defence spending needs, and a tax take which is already at historically high levels. They believe this, combined with fraught domestic politics, makes the UK government more likely than others to try and escape its predicament by borrowing more to boost spending.
The problem is not just the prospect of additional borrowing. It’s the fact that it would take place at a time when the UK’s debt/GDP ratio is already at an historically high level of over 100 per cent of GDP.
Much of the additional spending proposed by the government and opposition parties…would do little to address the UK’s long-term structural growth weakness.
This risks a negative feedback loop whereby increased market concern over debt sustainability leads to higher interest rates and debt servicing costs. That forces the government to raise taxes or make spending cuts, potentially weakening growth and further worsening debt sustainability.
Rising interest rate costs, along with slower growth caused by the Iran war, are expected to cut the UK government’s headroom under its fiscal rules from £24 billion in March to around half that this autumn.
A further problem is that much of the additional spending proposed by the government and opposition parties – whether on defence, social benefits, or personal tax cuts – would do little to address the UK’s long-term structural growth weakness, and particularly its low productivity growth. Total factor productivity declined between 2019 and 2024.
Several factors have brought the UK to this point. Some, such as the COVID pandemic and an aging population, were or are outside government control. But many have been self-inflicted. That includes the 2008-9 global financial crisis; the austerity measures that followed it; Brexit (which has cumulatively cost the economy between 6 and 8 per cent of GDP); the Truss’s government’s brief but dramatic divergence from fiscal responsibility; and the current Labour government’s inability to convince its backbenchers of the need to control social spending.
The 2022-3 inflation shock initially helped ease the UK fiscal burden, as nominal GDP accelerated faster than nominal debt. But it is also now one of the factors reducing bond investor trust in the authorities.
Policy options
Government and opposition parties argue, correctly, that the UK’s only escape from the current pernicious debt and interest rate dynamic lies in raising long-term economic growth. Higher growth will generate higher tax revenues which can be used to service and pay down debt. They also argue that this must be achieved while meeting the current fiscal rules. One opposition party has even called for tighter fiscal rules. But there is little consensus on the best approach.
The Labour government under Prime Minister Andy Burnham has emphasized direct action to reduce the general cost of living through such measures as eliminating VAT on domestic electricity bills and capping bus fares. The resulting slight increase in disposable income may support spending in the short-term. But the policy is unlikely to do much to support growth over the long-term. Indeed, the desire to limit price rises may inhibit future investment and distort price signals. Targeting financial support on the most vulnerable groups would better safeguard government finances.
More broadly, the government should rely on the Bank of England to control increases in the cost of living in line with its CPI inflation target. If it doubts the Bank’s ability to do so, it should review the effectiveness of the Bernanke reforms implemented after the post-COVID inflation shock.
The government is on much stronger ground in its efforts to maintain and expand public investment in infrastructure, housing and advanced technology industries. Research by the OBR suggests that a sustained increase in public investment of 1 per cent of GDP will increase GDP by 2.4 per cent over the long-term.
By targeting areas that the private sector is unable or unwilling to address (because private returns are too low) the government will crowd in private investment.
According to one analysis, public financial institutions could invest an additional £16 billion in public infrastructure over the next five years, while remaining within the fiscal rules – which allow such financial assets to be offset against debt.
Other government policies, such as regional devolution of some taxes and spending, or taking control of railways and failed utilities, could support the increased scale and effectiveness of infrastructure investment.
But it is critical that oversight systems are well designed and costs are minimized. The government must avoid mistakes like the escalation in cost of the HS2 highspeed railway, which now looks set to cost £100 billion for just 140 miles of track.
The government has pushed for deregulation in the financial services sector. And until recently, it wavered on robust implementation of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (DMCCA) in the hope of attracting big tech investment. However, predictable, efficient and robust regulation is the soundest strategy for promoting long-term growth. Maintaining competition is the most effective way to promote innovation. Safeguarding the economy against systemic shocks – whether in the financial or digital sphere – is vital for resilience.
Some opposition parties have called for the abolition of the UK’s world-leading climate legislation, on the grounds that it is too costly. But that would be an enormous setback for the UK economy – potentially even approaching the scale of Brexit. Apart from undermining global efforts to limit escalating climate-related costs, it would greatly weaken the UK economy’s preparations to compete in the inevitable future net zero world.
Opposition parties have also promised dramatic cuts of up to £50 billion per year in spending on working age social benefits to fund tax cuts and/or improve debt dynamics. But this would immediately cut demand in the economy.
Meanwhile no major party has committed to address the escalating expense of the pensions ‘triple lock’, which is not means tested. Of the £145 billion currently spent per year on pensions, some £17 billion is due to the way the triple lock has increased payments faster than inflation since 2010.
The need for brave choices
Overall, boosting public investment is the one policy that is clearly on the right track to raise growth. But it is far from clear that this alone will be enough to enable the UK to escape its current debt dynamics.
Other policies also offer substantial growth, such as relaxing controls on immigration and joining the EU’s single market. But both currently appear politically unacceptable. Until the UK’s leaders are prepared to argue for such measures, and to confront issues like the triple lock head on, the negative feedback loop will be hard to escape.
Estadio Quisqueya, home to two Dominican Professional Baseball League teams in Santo Domingo Christopher Gregory-Rivera for ProPublica
Major League Baseball teams sign more players from the Dominican Republic each year than any nation besides the U.S. Almost every neighborhood is home to a baseball field where kids as young as 4 begin learning to play. In our months of reporting, we’ve rarely come across anyone in the Dominican who doesn’t have some connection to the sport: a sibling or uncle or son who aspires to be a professional player, or who once did.
As beloved and important as baseball is in the Dominican, industry practices can hurt young players and their families. Dozens of trainers and players have told us that adolescents are expected to perform at levels never asked of their peers from other countries and enter into agreements with teams at much earlier ages. (We just published a story about abusive moneylending practices that have sprouted from this system.) We’re planning more stories brought to our attention by this community.
We want this work to reach people whose lives are touched by the issues we’re investigating. If that’s you, we want you to be able to easily connect with our reporting team and share tips or experiences you think we should know about Dominican baseball. The more people we hear from, the more impactful our reporting on these complex issues can be. (Learn more about ProPublica and our mission.)
For this series, we’re opening a WhatsApp line because it’s a popular way to keep in touch in the Dominican, and international calls and texts are free.All you have to do is text “baseball” to our WhatsApp number, 1-917-207-6447.
If you’re not a WhatsApp user, if you can still get in touch with our reporting team via email:
You’ll get a link to our latest stories about baseball. We’ll also ask about your connection to baseball and ask you to share anything that you think our reporters should look into as we continue investigating.
If you give us permission, we’ll also send you quick updates from our series every now and then.
What kind of tips and comments are helpful?
We want to hear about baseball-related issues and experiences that are important to you, whether they’re connected to finances, health, education or something else. Below are a few of the topics we’re already reporting on; if you have related experiences to share, we would appreciate hearing about them.
Illness and injury related to performance pressure
Wide availability of anabolic steroids and consequences of use
Conditions at training academies (pensiones)
If you have a connection to baseball — whether you’re a current or former player, trainer, parent of a player, doctor who treats athletes, someone who works for an MLB team or you have some other link — we would love to hear from you.
If I don’t have a connection to baseball but want to follow along, should I sign up?
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What if I know someone who has a connection to baseball?
Please send them a link to our baseball series or have them text “baseball” to our WhatsApp number, 1-917-207-6447. And thank you — we need to reach as many people as we can.
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We will read everything you send and follow up with you if we have further questions or are interested in including something you’ve shared in our investigations.
We take your privacy very seriously. Our reporters speak to people every day who want to share information but fear retribution. Our reputation is built on protecting sources, and we take that responsibility to heart. You can request to speak on background, which means you would not be named in our stories.
Mercedes Garcia at the grave of her daughter Daniela
Around 4 a.m. on Sept. 21, 2020, Luis David Saba arrived at a desolate stretch of highway along the southern coast of the Dominican Republic. Police and paramedics had left by then, taking with them a Jeep Grand Cherokee with a crumpled hood and the tangled remains of the cheap motorcycle it had smashed into. Also gone were the motorcycle’s two critically injured passengers. The only signs that an accident had occurred a few hours earlier were the blood and debris smeared across the asphalt and a pile of neatly placed branches.
Saba knew what to expect underneath that pile. It was a Dominican custom to use anything on hand to shroud a body abandoned by paramedics. Pushing away the branches, Saba saw shredded clothes, torn skin and long, curly hair forming a halo over a battered face. He covered the body of his 20-year-old younger brother, Yohan Saba Mercado, with a sheet. In shock, he felt nothing but the need to get his brother out of the road.
Saba sat and waited for forensic investigators he was told were on their way. Hours passed, the sun rose and traffic began to stream by them. Finally, he gave up. With the help of friends, he loaded his brother’s body into a van, and hours later it was at his mother’s house.
“Paper Trail” Podcast
Learn more about this story on ProPublica’s podcast “Paper Trail.”
Later that morning, two other families were experiencing similar horrors. Deby Beato Charles, 20, and Daniela Perez Garcia, 19, had been riding on the back of Yohan’s motorcycle when the Jeep rear-ended them. When Deby’s older brother, Ruben, got to a nearby hospital, he was met by a doctor who handed him a wallet and bracelet. Deby had died of a severe head injury and blunt chest trauma. At another hospital, Daniela’s uncle was ushered into a room where his niece lay. Her face was so swollen he didn’t recognize her. According to her death certificate, she had suffered injuries to her head, chest and hip and went into hypovolemic shock, in which the loss of bodily fluids causes a person’s organs to shut down.
The families of Daniela and Yohan held funerals in their homes that afternoon. During the proceedings, word spread about who had been driving the Grand Cherokee. It was Oneil Cruz, a “pelotero,” a ballplayer, with a fortune and a future, the 21-year-old scion of a local baseball family, a top prospect in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization. Seemingly everyone in the area knew how much he received from his major league signing bonus five years earlier: $950,000.
The families also knew what was going to happen next.
Yohan’s mother told me that after all the mourners left the house, a driver showed up holding out a phone. On the line was Cruz’s mother offering condolences — and wanting to negotiate.
Less than 7 miles from the site of the accident is the striving farm town of Nizao. Even though it has a population of just 32,000, Nizao has produced dozens of professional ballplayers, including three-time All-Star Ketel Marte and, most famously, Hall of Famer Vladimir Guerrero Sr., one of the best hitters in modern baseball and father of Vladimir Jr., the star first baseman for the Toronto Blue Jays. Looming over the main road into town is the Guerreros’ mansion. Right below it, a giant 27 has been carved into the hill — the jersey number the two share.
A mural of Toronto Blue Jays first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr. in Nizao
By 2020, Oneil Cruz Ureña looked poised to be among the best of Nizao’s ballplayers. The Los Angeles Dodgers signed him when he was 16 and over 6 feet tall. They traded him to the Pittsburgh Pirates, who considered him their future shortstop. The statistics website FanGraphs ranked him as one of baseball’s top prospects, declaring that “there aren’t many who have a chance to be what this guy might.”
But the accident on a darkened road threatened to destroy that chance before Cruz even made it to the major leagues. Police detained him at the scene. In a court filing the following day, prosecutors said that they had opened an investigation “en contra del imputado,” “against the accused.” They sought “coercive measures,” a mechanism in Dominican law by which a suspect can be forced to remain in custody while an investigation continues. In a press release, they alleged that Cruz “had consumed alcoholic beverages prior to the accident.”
The scandal made headlines in the Dominican Republic and the United States, and then, in a matter of days, it evaporated from the public eye. How that happened has been unknown, until now.
I’d heard about the Cruz case last year when I began reporting on the booming industry of “prestamistas,” moneylenders, who exploit major league prospects in the Dominican Republic by getting their undereducated parents to give up sizable portions of their signing bonuses. The case’s disappearance, I was told, marked the origin story of the most dominant prestamista in the country’s chaotic baseball ecosystem: Santo Caraballo. At the time, Caraballo was an obscure businessman with political connections. He rose to prominence after forming a business partnership with national hero David Ortiz, the retired Boston Red Sox great who remains an influential figure in Major League Baseball. (In a statement, Ortiz said his business relationship with Caraballo “began to come to an end” more than 18 months ago.) I wrote about Caraballo’s practices in “The Dominican Baseball Factory.”
To find out how Caraballo made the case against Cruz go away, I interviewed more than 30 people in the Dominican Republic. Some were afraid to talk, but others, primarily family members of the victims, were eager to speak publicly for the first time. I also obtained hundreds of pages of previously unreported documents, including court records and bank receipts, as well as voice notes. I made numerous attempts to reach Caraballo about his role, including sending him a summary of my findings. He never responded.
The Dominican court system gives victims or their families significant input on whether to pursue a prosecution. Caraballo oversaw a campaign to persuade the families of the three victims to accept cash in return for signing documents withdrawing all “penal, civil or judicial” claims against Cruz.
The effort rescued Cruz’s baseball career — he is now the starting center fielder for the Pirates — and it launched Caraballo’s. He became a ubiquitous operator in the sport, feared for the sort of high-powered connections that could make a deadly crash disappear. But for some of the victims’ relatives, the money they received — roughly $66,000 in total for the three families — hasn’t lasted nearly as long as the hurt: six years of unresolved grief, resentment and regret that they allowed their forgiveness to be purchased.
Cruz declined a request for an interview. His lawyer, Amauris Vásquez Disla, called the accident “a profound tragedy for all parties involved, especially the victims’ families.” He went on to say that the court “issued an order of dismissal based on the findings, a legally binding decision that was a lawful resolution of this matter.”
A spokesperson for the Pittsburgh Pirates said the team and Cruz “addressed this matter more than six years ago based on the information available and the outcome of the legal proceedings.”
A poster of Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Oneil Cruz in Nizao
Yohan and Deby lived in and around a barrio of Sabana Grande de Palenque, known as “Sal Si Puedes,” Get Out If You Can. Five miles from Nizao, it is marked by ruddy dirt roads and half-built homes and is separated from the rest of the town by a deep canal. Some residents have to cross makeshift footbridges to reach their front doors. Daniela grew up in the nearby village of Juan Baron.
As was the case with Deby and Daniela, Yohan’s parents separated when he was young. His early childhood was spent in a small wooden home where his paternal grandmother took care of him while his mother worked in Santo Domingo as a housekeeper. A teenager when his father suffered a stroke, Yohan would bring him blood pressure medicine and take him to the beach to exercise in the ocean. Yohan worked as an air conditioning mechanic, telling his dad his goal was to pay for a new roof for his mom’s house so that it wouldn’t flood every time it rained. He commuted to Santo Domingo on a X1000 motorcycle he had bought secondhand. In a country where it’s common to see three or more people on a “moto,” the noisy rig was also how his friends got around.
Images of Yohan Saba Mercado in his mother’s house
The best of those friends was Deby. The third of four boys, all right-handed pitchers growing up, he lived in his mother’s immaculate home. After she moved to Chile six years earlier to find work, Deby spoke with her every day, updating her on his love life. He had her name tattooed within an infinity symbol on his arm. When he failed to make a top-level baseball academy, the most common route to be signed by a major league team, Deby returned to high school. At the time of the crash, he was days away from graduating, bagging groceries and taking care of his younger brother.
Deby and Daniela had known each other since they were kids and, according to their families, had an off-and-on relationship. Videos and photos of Daniela often show her dancing and singing. “She never wanted the party to end,” a friend said. The youngest of four, she lived with her mother, who considered Daniela her best friend. She was her “chiquita,” or “little girl,” Daniela would remind her mother when she insisted on sitting on her lap. Many nights, they slept in the same bed together.She had graduated high school and was taking English classes in Santo Domingo.
A photo of Deby Beato Charles alongside those of his brothers
Deby, Yohan and Daniela were in that hopeful, stressful, liberating period between adolescence and adulthood. They had no intention to be out late that September night, but they were also not going to turn down an impromptu plan to party.
Daniela told her mom she was going to meet girlfriends at the Nizao River and would be back by early evening. It was still daylight when she recorded herself at an outdoor bar, wearing a red dress and singing along to a salsa song. Nobody was in a rush to return to the stagnant indoors. As for the country’s 5 p.m. COVID-19 curfew, few young people took it seriously. In Baní, the nearest sizable city, there was a bar referred to as Escondido, or Hidden, because it served drinks past curfew. Daniela and a friend recruited Yohan and Deby, who were home but easy to persuade to join.
At around 11 p.m., according to court records, they were riding on the four-lane highway heading home. Late at night, the road is desolate and poorly lit. Trucks and cars howl by at high speeds, and accidents are frequent. A security guard who works at a snack stand across from the site of the accident told me that his boss was killed when a car smashed into his business.
Yohan was at the handlebars, with Daniela and Deby seated behind him. None wore a helmet. A friend on his own motorcycle was riding alongside them. They had just passed the shuttered snack stand when Cruz rear-ended Yohan’s motorcycle, smashing its rear tire and throwing the three friends onto the pavement.
Cruz called 911, according to his lawyers. A lieutenant from the national police responded to the scene, but his subsequent report, which he filed in court, offers little detail about the accident site or investigation that followed. If there was any forensic analysis, prosecutors never produced it. There is no mention of whether police believed either Yohan or Cruz was driving recklessly or speeding. The report does not indicate whether the victims were tested for their alcohol levels. It makes no reference to the second motorcyclist. When I reached him, he said that the authorities never questioned him. He declined to be interviewed further.
According to the report, Cruz told the lieutenant that “en ningun momento,” “at no time,” did he see the motorcycle before colliding with it in the passing lane. He said it didn’t have lights — an assertion that would later become a point of contention in court. Cruz’s legal team filed a photo of the motorcycle that showed missing lights, but it was taken after the accident, when the bike was barely intact. Luis David, Yohan’s brother, told me that the motorcycle had working lights in the front but not in the rear.
The day after the accident, stories were posted on Facebook that included photos of Yohan, Deby and Daniela lying mangled on the highway as emergency responders attempted to save them. On Dominican gossip and news sites, opinions poured forth. Some were convinced that Cruz would get preferential treatment. Others predicted that the families of the victims would be seeking a payday. Many asserted that the deceased were as much at fault as Cruz since they were all out past curfew.
Near the site where Cruz rear-ended Mercado’s motorcycle, killing all three of its passengers
The families of Yohan, Deby and Daniela all knew of the Cruzes. Oneil’s father, Rafael, played pro ball, first in Japan and then in the Atlanta Braves organization until 2009, when he was suspended after testing positive for steroids. He returned to Nizao, where he opened a baseball academy. His most promising pupils included Oneil and his brothers, Rafael Jr. and Homer, who played pro ball in the United States. Oneil was named after Rafael’s favorite ballplayer, New York Yankees outfielder Paul O’Neill.
Among the Cruzes’ inner circle was Osvaldo Tamarez, a trainer known as Cabezon, Big Head. He told me that in the hours following the accident, when Oneil was still in custody, he went to see the Cruzes and advised them to handle the aftermath of the accident carefully. “Cuidado, tu hijo va a ser una figura pública,” Tamarez said he told them. “Your son is going to be a public figure.” According to Tamarez, the Cruzes assigned him to speak with Daniela’s and Deby’s family members, some of whom he knew from baseball. He told me that from the beginning, their focus was on how to pay off the victims’ families so they wouldn’t sue and wouldn’t demand that prosecutors pursue the case. A person close to the Cruzes confirmed Tamarez’s account.
Tamarez said that another trainer recommended that Cruzes bring in Santo Caraballo, a businessman he knew from the baseball industry. Among Caraballo’s many companies was a legal services firm, even though he wasn’t a lawyer. More relevant, Caraballo had political connections. He was an ambassador in the ministry of foreign affairs, a patronage position awarded him four years earlier by President Danilo Medina.
Tamarez said that Caraballo immediately got to work on multiple fronts, including organizing a legal team. But that wasn’t his most important role. Caraballo’s most important job was simple, Tamarez told me: Fix the problem.
At Cruz’s initial court appearance, which came a little more than two days after the accident, one of his attorneys asked to delay the case so his representatives could “in a humane way, seek solutions” for the families and their “material hardships.” The judge postponed the hearing for two days. Family members told me that Caraballo, or those working with him, had already begun reaching out to them.
The last time Mercedes Garcia saw her daughter, she had helped Daniela pull the price tags off her red dress before she went to the river with her girlfriends. In the days after the accident, Garcia was haunted by a vision of her daughter plastered to the road in the torn dress, yelling, “Ayúdame Mamá, ayúdame!” “Help me, Mama, help me!”
I found Garcia where she spends much of her day: seated alone in her tiny living room, rocking back and forth on a couch, her hair neatly pulled back, digging under her fingernails with a bobby pin. I could hear the shouts of a woman preaching at the church next door.
Mercedes Garcia at home in Juan Baron
Garcia, who is 65, says she was clear from the beginning that she didn’t want money from the Cruzes. “Rich people, especially baseball players, like to pay for dead people with money,” she told me. “I am poor, but I have honor.” All she wanted, she said, was for Cruz to answer for what happened and apologize. Instead, she said, her family — most prominently, her son — tricked her into agreeing to a deal.
Garcia told me that in the aftermath of her daughter’s death, she entrusted her son Porfirio with handling all the paperwork. Porfirio was a traffic cop in Santo Domingo who moonlighted as an Uber driver. What Garcia didn’t know, but what Tamarez later confirmed, was that Porfirio was already working with Caraballo.
According to Garcia, Porfirio brought her a document to sign that he partially obscured with his hand. Shortly afterward, Porfirio drove her and another of her sons, Juan Manuel, to Caraballo’s office in Santo Domingo. Porfirio went in by himself and brought out another document for his mother to sign. She was in a fog of grief, she told me, and didn’t read it. Juan Manuel confirmed his mother’s account that she didn’t understand what she was signing and that Porfirio didn’t explain what it was.
Daniela’s father, Porfirio Perez, co-signed the documents. Perez, who can barely read, parks cars at a bank for tips. He told me that Garcia’s brother brought him the papers but didn’t tell him that they exonerated Cruz. “Because they saw that I’m a simple person, they took advantage of me,” he said. Garcia’s brother declined to comment.
I reviewed the two documents, which were dated the same day as Cruz’s court appearance. One was filed in court by Cruz’s attorney; the other was not. The document filed in court states that the family sought to “withdraw” all legal claims against Cruz. It also says that the family had not received any “pecuniary interest” in return for withdrawing the claims. They were doing so out of an awareness that the accident was not caused by Cruz, the document says, “but rather by circumstances of life.”
The contract not filed in court is signed by Daniela’s parents and Oneil’s mother. It’s a “discharge and legal settlement” stating that the parents were paid 900,000 pesos, about $15,000, for Daniela’s “funeral expenses.” That amount is more than twice the average annual income in the Dominican Republic. The document says that the money represented a settlement for “damages caused” by Cruz to Daniela’s family. But Garcia and Juan Manuel said that Porfirio controlled the payout and that he gave them around 300,000 pesos, or less than $5,000. Daniela’s father told me he received nothing.
Daniela Perez Garcia’s grave site
Garcia said that she didn’t talk to much of her family for years after she realized what had happened. Once they decided to take that money, they lost her, too, she told me. “I was buried along with Daniela.”
I left multiple voice and text messages for Porfirio, who declined to be interviewed.
Cruz’s mother, however, did agree to hear my questions. I met her at the Cruzes’ gated home on a busy street in Nizao. With wary politeness, she indicated that we sit on the front porch. Batting cages were in the back.
I asked her about Caraballo’s role in persuading the victims’ families not to sue, but she denied that she knew him, contradicting several witnesses. When I showed her a photograph of Caraballo, she told me she didn’t recognize him. Before I could ask my next question, she stood up, making it clear the interview was over. No more than five minutes had passed. “Thank you so much for coming,” she said. “I can’t really answer because I don’t know anything.”
When Deby’s mother, Elena Charles, left for Chile to find restaurant work, it fell to Ruben, the eldest of her four sons, to take “las riendas de la casa,” the reins of the house. So it was Ruben, who turned 27 the night his brother died, whom Tamarez visited shortly after Cruz’s court appearance. Ruben told me that Tamarez encouraged him to strike a deal, arguing that the ballplayer was never going to be punished and that Daniela’s family had already received a million pesos for agreeing not to sue. He should meet with a man named Caraballo and hear what he had to say.
Ruben spoke with his father, who told him the same thing: Deby was not coming back. Take the money, even if you just keep it in an account. (Deby’s father did not agree to an interview.)
When Ruben got to Caraballo’s office, he said Cruz’s mother was there. All he wanted, Ruben told me, was justice — he didn’t care if the courts administered it or if he did. But he was also aware that Tamarez and his father were probably right: He and his family were powerless.
Ruben yelled at Caraballo that he wasn’t there to negotiate over his brother’s death like it was a car for sale. Caraballo, he said, responded like a man used to people exploding with rage in his office. He pointed out all of his surveillance cameras. According to Ruben, he then made his offer. Because both of Deby’s parents lived outside the country — his father had been in Spain for years — additional legal work would be required if Ruben’s family made an agreement. Therefore, he was willing to go as high as 2 million pesos, roughly $34,000.
Deby’s mother returned home a couple of weeks after the accident. I recently met with her and her three surviving sons in their comfortable and tidy living room. Fifty-two years old, dressed in a patterned jumpsuit and a necklace bearing her nickname — Ramonita — she frequently wiped away tears as she discussed Deby. On the wall were portraits of each of the boys. Deby’s brothers are wearing their high school graduation robes. Deby is pictured shirtless, sporting sunglasses, ripped jeans and a knowing grin.
As we discussed the negotiation with Caraballo, Ruben and his mother revisited an argument that seemed as fresh as those they had during hourslong phone calls six years ago. She was absolutely clear about what she wanted: Cruz should be in prison for 120 years.
“Te dije no lo hagas,” she said to him, her voice rising. “I told you not to do it.”
“And what did I tell you?” Ruben responded. “That they were going to release him anyway!”
Ruben signed a document on behalf of his family called an “act of withdrawal,” which Cruz’s attorneys later filed in court. Similar to the document signed by Daniela’s parents, it attested that Cruz “had not the slightest intention of causing the accident” and that Deby’s family had agreed to withdraw all legal claims against him, including criminal and civil, without “any type of pressure [or] pecuniary interest.”
Caraballo, though, wasn’t done. Ruben told me that Caraballo then pitched him on turning his brother’s death into an income opportunity: Rather than give the family the 2 million pesos in a lump sum, Caraballo would invest the money for them and pay 15,000 pesos, just over $265, a month indefinitely.
Ruben, though, was done with Caraballo. “I don’t want to do business with you,” he said he told him, “and I don’t want to hear from you ever again.”
The family put the money in a bank account. Except for the interest, roughly $65 a month, which the family has used to help pay for the youngest’s tuition, the money is still there, they told me. Charles explained that there’s been plenty of times that they could’ve dipped into the principal, but the money repels her. “It doesn’t have an end,” she said of the anguish she feels about having made a deal with the Cruzes. “For the rest of my life, it’s going to be a conflict.”
Genny Mercado, after turning away the driver with Cruz’s mother on the line, faced a similar gantlet of pressure from her family. Word spread that the other families were accepting a deal. Genny earned about 16,000 pesos, about $275, a month as a housekeeper, so a settlement would likely exceed several years of income. Rejecting the money, Yohan’s half brothers told her, would accomplish nothing.
Mercado, who is 48, was also the de facto decision-maker. Yohan’s father, Pedro Saba, had suffered a second stroke the day he learned of his son’s death. She hired the only lawyer she knew, who negotiated a deal on the parents’ behalf. The document was a withdrawal like those signed by the other families, exonerating Cruz. Mercado said that she couldn’t think clearly about any of this at the time: “My mind was set on my son.”
Minus the lawyer’s cut, Mercado and Saba received approximately 800,000 pesos, or $14,000. Yohan’s father spent 300,000 pesos on a refrigerator, a television and a bed. Mercado used the money to buy rebar and 75 bags of cement to build the roof that Yohan had promised. She stopped working for seven months and rarely left her home except to put flowers on his grave.
When I showed up, two of her sons arranged plastic chairs in the living room so I could speak with her and her husband, José Enrique. She had never been interviewed, and it had been years since anyone outside the family even pretended to care about what happened to Yohan. “Any family that goes through something like this just wants justice,” Mercado told me. “Everyone who kills has to go to jail.” But in Cruz’s case, “No one wanted to hurt the future del muchacho.”
Genny Mercado, Yohan’s mother, with two of her sons, Eduardo (left) and Yeri
There were no second thoughts about having accepted the money, only resignation that there was never going to be a fair outcome for Yohan. “Around here, the police let a lot of things slide, especially when it involves people who have money or connections or whatever else,” said José Enrique, tossing shucked pea shells on the cement floor. “We’re not going to try to dance around that fact anymore.”
Later I visited Yohan’s father, who spends his days in a spartan home with three of his elderly brothers, two of whom are blind. “Terminator” blared on the television. Saba doesn’t have any photos of Yohan on his walls because, he said, it would make him too sad. In a voice slurred by his two strokes, Saba told me how Yohan would put him on his motorcycle and take him to the ocean. “Wherever I wanted to go,” he said, “he would take me there.” He hasn’t been back to the beach since Yohan was killed.
Cruz’s second court date occurred on the Friday following the accident. Prosecutors were seeking to keep him in custody for three months. The victims’ families weren’t present. The court didn’t know how to reach two of them, a clerk explained to the judge. Prosecutors didn’t even get the names of the victims right, referring to Yohan Saba as “Jons Sabab” and Deby as “Baby.” The charges they sought against Cruz included reckless driving and causing an accident that resulted in death. If convicted, he could face one to three years in prison.
Most striking was what was not said. In their press release after the crash, prosecutors had referred to evidence that Cruz had been drinking before the accident. But they never made that claim in court. I reached out to the lead prosecutor as well as the prosecutor’s office to ask why they had decided not to charge Cruz with driving while intoxicated. Both declined to comment. A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette journalist asked the same question the week of the court date. He reported that a spokesperson for the prosecutors explained that Cruz had “smelled of alcohol” after the accident but that police hadn’t performed a sobriety test because of a “procedural error.”
While Cruz remained in police custody, his legal team submitted the withdrawals that had been signed by the victims’ families. In addition to offering his condolences, an attorney explained that Cruz was providing “material support” to the families for their “basic needs of being human: education, food, clothing, among other matters.” He also submitted numerous testimonials praising Cruz’s good character, including from his pastor, who attested that Cruz had demonstrated “loyalty and absolute fidelity to the gospel,” and from a local marble and granite contractor who said that Cruz was a responsible client “deserving of an open line of credit.” The attorney emphasized that Cruz was one of baseball’s “five highest-rated prospects internationally.”
The accident, he told the judge, “hurts the whole town, Oneil above all, who for this will have to go to professional therapy so that he can cope with the trauma … For God’s sake, let’s try to ensure that Oneil Cruz Ureña’s mental health is now a priority.”
A social media post made a few weeks after Cruz’s release shows him (second from left), alongside Caraballo (far left) and two others at the Miami airport.Instagram
The judge released Cruz on a bond of 2 million pesos, or $34,000. A couple of weeks later, Cruz posted a photo of himself with Caraballo, grinning while seated on a golf cart at the Miami airport.
The following March, Cruz was at the Pirates’ spring training facility in Florida. An article at the time mentioned the accident in passing, buried under the news that the team was moving him into the outfield. It’s the only time I know of in which Cruz has been quoted discussing the accident.
“In the beginning, I was very fearful of not being able to continue to play the game that I love and to reach the dream I’ve always had, which is to reach the big leagues,” Cruz said through an interpreter. “However, when things became clear later and everything was solved, I was able to … hope again that I’ll be able to play. Now, I have peace.”
The press, both in the United States and the Dominican Republic, stopped covering the accident after that.
The man who helped deliver him that peace used the incident to become one of the most powerful figures operating in the shadows of Dominican baseball.
Oneil Cruz, now the center fielder for the Pittsburgh PiratesAndy Kuno/San Francisco Giants/Getty Images
Cruz’s next court appearance was Aug. 30, 2021. Almost a year had passed since the accident, and he was in the States playing for the Altoona Curve, a Pirates minor league team. He attended virtually. Despite the families’ withdrawals, prosecutors still had the power to pursue charges against him, but their case was flimsy. The only evidence they submitted were death certificates and a police report that offered little more than the date and time of the accident and the names of Cruz and the three people he killed: Yohan Saba Mercado, Deby Beato Charles and Daniela Perez Garcia. The judge dismissed the case, ordering the return of the 2 million pesos bond.
Just over a month later, Cruz made his major league debut against the Cincinnati Reds, scorching a single that was the hardest recorded hit by a Pirate, a mark he has broken many times since. He is now a fixture of the team and will earn $3.3 million this year. He is projected to make far more once he becomes a free agent in a few seasons.
The man mentioned by Tiger Woods after his first Masters win paved the way for generations of Black golfers, reintegrating the US Open and challenging the PGA
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Rhodes is the subject of a new book by sports historian Dan Taylor, Out of the Rough: Ted Rhodes and His Fight against Golf’s Color Barrier. The author aims to change what he sees as mainstream unfamiliarity with Rhodes, even among golf enthusiasts.
Gina Hinojosa decided to give birth despite her child’s fatal genetic anomaly. Though her ad doesn’t say it, Texas abortion laws no longer allow women that choice.
The president’s latest warning barely registered, written off as typical behavior. But the threats have real-world consequences
As the US and Iran fought around the strait of Hormuz last week, Donald Trump issued one of his typical threats. In an interview with a Fox News correspondent, Trump said Iran would be “totally wiped out as a country” if it retaliated for the latest wave of US airstrikes.
That threat by the US president to wipe out another country generated few headlines, even during a relatively slow news week by Trump administration standards.
On an evening in late 2021, in a pristine baseball complex in central Santo Domingo, a baby-faced 14-year-old outfielder in athletic gear named Belfi Rivera huddled in front of a computer screen. Next to him was John Carmona, who had been Belfi’s trainer and de facto caretaker since he was 11 years old. In a nearby office, Belfi’s parents stared anxiously at a separate computer. On the screen, calling into the Dominican Republic, were representatives of the Arizona Diamondbacks, there for a conversation that promised to shift forever the fortunes of Belfi and his parents.
The team, they would soon learn, had agreed to pay Belfi $1.8 million after his 16th birthday. It was a deal Carmona had negotiated without consulting Belfi or his parents. It was also a handshake agreement that skirted Major League Baseball’s rules that bar teams from signing players younger than 16. Every year, all 30 major league teams reach preacuerdos, or early deals, with hundreds of Dominican prospects — a practice they make little attempt to hide. (The Diamondbacks did not respond to a request for comment.)
The baseball men said Belfi was now part of “la familia.” They asked him about his favorite player and how he learned to swing his bat so fast and whether he understood the importance of discipline. The conversation washed over Belfi, who, on the rare occasions when he spoke, did so in a tumbling, nervous cadence. He had spent his childhood in a shanty outside of the capital. Meals often consisted of sugary cornmeal or a piece of bread. But he had a talent “gifted by God,” as an early trainer put it, with the skills — speed, arm, glove, contact hitting — treasured by scouts. The size of this bonus, once made official, would establish him as one of the highest-paid prospects outside of the United States.
“Paper Trail” Podcast
Learn more about this story on ProPublica’s podcast “Paper Trail.”
If he fulfilled his promise, he might join an ever-expanding list of Dominican legends: San Francisco Giant Juan Marichal, the winningest pitcher of the 1960s; Tony Fernandez and George Bell, Toronto Blue Jays teammates who hailed from the same baseball-mad town of San Pedro de Macoris; Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez, and David Ortiz, the pitcher and sluggers who in the early 2000s turned the Caribbean nation into an unlikely bastion of Boston Red Sox fandom; and swaggering, bat-flipping modern superstars like Toronto’s Vladimir Guerrero Jr., the New York Mets’ Juan Soto, and the San Diego Padres’ Fernando Tatis Jr. — with playing contracts totaling more than $1.6 billion — who have helped to revitalize baseball’s popularity.
For the past four decades, no country outside the United States has sent more players to the majors than the Dominican Republic. With a population under 12 million, it is roughly the size of Ohio, a state that last year claimed two dozen major league players. The Dominican Republic had 144, roughly 10% of the league. The country is a baseball factory. Talented players are sent to practice full time at one of hundreds of academies when they are as young as 10 years old.
For the Past 14 Years, the Dominican Republic Has Dominated International Signings by Major League Baseball Teams
The league signed more than 12,700 international rookies from 2012 to 2026, half of whom were born in the Dominican Republic.
Note: This chart includes only countries that accounted for at least 1% of international signings in 2026. Together, these countries represent over 95% of non-American rookies signed. Sources: ProPublica reporting, Spotrac.Chris Alcantara/ProPublica
That’s how old Belfi was when he went off in tears to live in the home of a stranger who trained boys on a shaggy ball field in the capital. The best players are then sold to increasingly more prominent trainers until they wind up at an elite academy run by men like Carmona, who have close relations with major league teams and receive a sizable percentage of a player’s signing bonus.
As a child, Belfi never cared for baseball. He started playing at 7, he told me, because a local coach would drag him from his house and cuff him on the head if he tried to escape to a nearby river to be with his friends. But even as a young boy, he understood the sport likely represented his family’s one shot out of grinding poverty. During that video call in 2021, it seemed that he had clinched it.
But in two and a half years, the $1.8 million Belfi was promised would be almost all gone. Carmona received $630,000, which represented his 35% commission. But more than $950,000 went to someone who had no hand in teaching Belfi how to play baseball. His name is Santo Caraballo, one of the most notorious moneylenders profiting from Dominican baseball. His business partner is a national hero and, 10 years after his retirement, still a commanding figure within Major League Baseball: David Ortiz, known universally as “Big Papi.”
In a brief conversation with Caraballo, he told me his business was not the biggest or “that lucrative.” I made multiple attempts to reach Caraballo again, including sending him a summary of my findings. He never responded.
Belfi Rivera’s autographed Elite Extra Edition baseball card in 2022
Thanks to early agreements, prestamistas, or moneylenders,like Caraballo now wield singular power within Dominican baseball, amassing millions of dollars by persuading undereducated parents to sign away portions of their sons’ future bonuses in exchange for loans with exorbitant interest rates. Major League Baseball has known for years about early agreements and the predatory industry that has grown around them. Even though it has a formidable economic and political presence in the Dominican Republic, it has done little about either. It has never publicly warned or penalized a team for making an early deal, and its attempts to educate families about moneylenders have been ineffectual. (A spokesperson for Major League Baseball declined to comment and referred to past statements by league officials calling for an overhaul of the Dominican system.)
It is not just Major League Baseball that has allowed this corrosive system to continue. When the league proposed changes that would have eliminated early deals and made it more difficult for moneylenders to prey on baseball families, David Ortiz used his influence within the powerful players union to help block the reform. At the time it was unknown outside of Dominican baseball that he had a financial interest in preserving the system. (In a statement sent through his lawyer, Ortiz said that his opposition to the league’s proposal “was never motivated by personal interests.”)
Baseball is everywhere in the Dominican Republic, from the 13,000-seat Estadio Quisqueya in Santo Domingo to shaggy sandlots in the countryside.
Chapter 2
I’d long been told that the Dominican Republic’s wildly successful baseballindustry was plagued with abuse and exploitation — that for decades Major League Baseball has presided over a massive unregulatedsystemthat treats tens of thousands of Dominican boys like commodities. But when I began making calls last year, I expected those most involved to defend it. Instead, trainers — the men integral to the industry as instructors, surrogate parents and agents — virtually all told me they felt forced to participate in a system that is broken and costly.
I also spoke with team executives, agents, scouts and parents. Between the exorbitant commissions that go to trainers, the pressure to evaluate prepubescent players on how skilled they will be in four or five years, and all the education lost while those players are pulled out of school, nobody would purposefully design a system this way, they said.
“This is a system that is allowing corruption at all levels,” said one longtime trainer, Eddy Fontana.
Major League Baseball, too, doesn’t deny this, declaring recently that it was “long past time to reform” Dominican baseball. The players union also acknowledges that the industry is troubled but says it’s “a people issue, not a system issue.”
What I found most surprising was the common opinion that, despite widespread acknowledgment that Dominican baseball needed to be overhauled, the industry has gotten even more exploitative. Arturo J. Marcano, who has spent most of his career as a sports attorney, published a book in 2002 comparing the Dominican baseball pipeline to human trafficking. He didn’t hesitate when I asked how today’s industry compares. “A hundred times worse,” he said.
I set out to learn why the league and the players have done little to fix these problems. I crisscrossed the Dominican Republic and met people in shabby dugouts and gleaming stadiums, under a palm tree on a rocky beach coated in shattered beer bottles and at a café on a touristy plaza where a gold-covered street performer posed as a batter atop a trophy. I reviewed hundreds of pages of unreported court records, contracts,bank statements and WhatsApp messages, among other documents.
Wherever you go, there are reminders of el pelotero who achieved the Dominican dream of playing American baseball. Virtually every village has el play, a ball field, lovingly painted and filled with boys of all ages even during a downpour. Watchful men fine-tune the swings of adolescents hammering balls toward scampering elementary-age outfielders not yet deemed ready to take cuts themselves. Road signs announce not just the name of the town you are entering but its native sons who cracked a major league roster. Hall of Famers are depicted in grandiose murals throughout the capital. All 30 major league teams have training academies, and they rise up from the countryside like castles.
A monument in Santana that reads “Orgullo Nuestro,” “Our Pride,” under the portraits of three former major league players from the area: Antonio Pérez, Edwar Cabrera and Marcos Mateo
Every team participates in the Dominican Summer League, where 1,500 prospects from Latin America compete to get promoted to the lowest minor league teams in the United States. Hundreds more professional players, including established stars, draw sellout crowds in the offseason in what’s known as the winter league. Steven Puig, the president of BHD, the Dominican bank that is a corporate partner of Major League Baseball, told me that the sport generates as much as $400 million annually.
American baseball executives began scouting, signing and developing Dominican teenagers in earnest in the 1980s. A handful of teams, recognizing the island as a source of cheap talent, built bare-bones training academies on former sugar plantations. They relied on buscones, finders, to bring them the best players. But the buscones soon realized they could make more money by opening their own academies. There are now, according to a national trade association, more than 6,000 trainers, ranging from the off-duty car mechanic to the millionaire former big leaguer. In return for providing room, board, equipment, coaching and — they claim — education, these men typically receive between 35% and 50% of a player’s signing bonus, which they negotiate.
In their search for the next Dominican star, major league teams pursue what one general manager called a “boatload mentality.” Every year, teams sign about 450 Dominican prospects, most for bonuses around $30,000. Fewer than two-thirds will make it to the lowest minor leagues, and less than 10% will play a day in the majors, according to MLB data. (Teams treat Venezuelan prospects, many of whom train in the Dominican Republic, in much the same way, signing them in bulk.) It’s a Darwinian system paid for by players like Belfi — the hundreds of thousands of dollars his trainers took out of his bonus subsidized dozens of prospects who sacrificed their childhoods only to come up short.
Most of MLB’s International Spending Goes to Signing Players From the Dominican Republic
The amount has grown steadily since 2012.
Note: International spending dropped in 2020 due to the impact of COVID-19. Sources: ProPublica reporting, Spotrac.Chris Alcantara/ProPublica
In the United States, no professional sport operates this way, including baseball. Every year, major league teams select players from the U.S. and Canada in a draft. Signing bonuses are mostly dictated by the order in which the players are chosen. Last year, the top pick was worth $11.1 million, while the final slots were worth $187,000. Sports agents typically receive a 5% commission.
In the Dominican Republic, it’s a free-for-all. Teams vie for talent, outbidding one another for the best prospects. Major League Baseball does limit how much a team can spend on new players each year. But the other guardrail that the league put in place — that players can be signed only if they will be 17 by the following September — is widely circumvented.
“Everybody makes early agreements,” a major league scout told me. “You got to do it. If not, the system will eat you.”
In 2022, the parents of a 14-year-old prospect, Willy Fañas, sued the Los Angeles Angels for reneging on an early agreement for $1.8 million. A scout for the Angels testified that the team’s general manager had authorized the deal. The case was dismissed; Fañas’ parents have appealed the decision.
No data exists on how many Dominican players have been offered early deals because the agreements are verbal — by design there are no records. But Sandy Alderson, who has been a top executive for several teams and in 2010 served as Major League Baseball’s emissary to the Dominican Republic, told me that the vast majority of players who get signed were offered deals before they hit 16.
A pickup game in the town of San Gregorio de Nigua
In the absence of any enforcement, Major League Baseball has created the perfect market conditions for las prestamistas like Caraballo, who has become a ubiquitous figure in Dominican baseball in the past six years. The loans he offers come with interest rates that would be illegal in the United States and many other countries. The Dominican Republic repealed its usury laws 24 years ago. High-interest lenders are now as ingrained in Dominican baseball as trainers, and they advertise online. One banner circulating on WhatsApp offered “préstamo para jugadores de beisbol que tenga acuerdos,” “loan for baseball players who have agreements.”
Yaniris Paula, an attorney who has represented teenage ballplayers in disputes with trainers and lenders, estimated that 80% of all major league bonuses paid to Dominican prospects have a loan attached.
From 2012 through the beginning of 2026, major league teams paid Dominican prospects $1.042 billion in bonuses, according to a ProPublica review of signing data. But much, if not most, of that money — up to half a billion — is almost immediately siphoned off by trainers and lenders, according to experts familiar with the industry.
“Major League Baseball knows how dirty the business is here,” Piñao Ortiz, who was the Dominican commissioner of baseball from 1996 to 2000, told me, “but it’s not doing anything to stop it.”
Chapter 3
The night that Belfi’s parents — Eduardo Rivera and Rita Muñoz — learned of the Diamondbacks’ promise, they had to sleep at a nearby baseball academy. Their ride home didn’t have working headlights. When they made it back to Pedro Brand, a town outside the capital, their tiny home looked different to them. Eduardo had built it out of wood planks and tin. Buckets caught rain from the leaky roof. Musty beds lay strewn on the concrete floors. A climbing wall, salvaged from a children’s park, served as a room divider. Facing the same poverty while an unimaginably huge windfall awaited them in just over two years was a new sort of mental challenge.
Belfi (right) with his parents, Eduardo Rivera and Rita Muñoz (center), in front of the house he grew up in
Eduardo worked as a farmhand during the day and as a sereno, a watchman, for a school at night — jobs that were increasingly difficult because of a foot ailment he couldn’t afford to get checked out. He made as little as $150 a month. Rita had mostly stayed home, raising 11 kids. But now they were — almost — millionaires and already felt pressure to pay back those who had helped them. One of those was Belfi’s first trainer, who had made only a few hundred dollars trading Belfi to another trainer. He now wanted a “thank you” and arranged for them to speak with a man who told them that his boss, Santo Caraballo, could help them bridge their old existence with their future one.
What Belfi’s parents didn’t know is that Caraballo had a network of informants — many of them trainers — who let him know when a player had reached an early deal with a major league team and for how much. When Caraballo got a name, he would send one of his finders to speak to the parents.
Eduardo and Rita traveled to Caraballo’s small office in a strip mall in Santo Domingo. The figure who greeted them had perfect hair and white teeth and was dressed like a deportista, or sportsman, in athletic leggings and a T-shirt, they told me. Diplomas and certificates covered a wall. Familiar and charming, he spoke of having been a consul for the Dominican government, and he repeatedly mentioned that he was “la mano derecha,” “the right hand,” of David Ortiz, they said. That made them trust him more.
Eduardo and Rita told me that they were looking to sell just 5% of Belfi’s future bonus — roughly $90,000 — for upfront money, enough to pay off some debts, give Belfi’s first trainer a little cash and waterproof their home. But Caraballo, they said, advised them that they would need more and that they should sell him 10%.
David Ortiz with Caraballo in the lender’s office in Santo DomingoObtained by ProPublica via Instagram
The parents emerged from the office with a paper bag full of pesos, their thumbs wiped clean of the ink they had used to stamp a contract. They hadn’t been given a copy, but if they had, they wouldn’t have been able to understand it. Eduardo is illiterate. Rita struggles to read. They said they received 1.6 million pesos, roughly $25,000.
Miguel Hidalgo, a former employee of Caraballo’s who had a falling out with him over money, told me that the lender tries not to give his clients a copy of the contract. “That’s the trick,” he said. If they don’t have a copy, it makes it harder for them to understand what they owe, he explained.
Rita and Eduardo shared what they remembered of the loan terms with one of their sons, who called Jhonatan Jimenez, a former trainer of Belfi’s. Jimenez did the math. In return for the $25,000, Eduardo and Rita had agreed to give the lender $180,000 when Belfi received his bonus.
“¿Tú estás loco?” he asked.
That was the first deal Belfi’s parents made with Santo Caraballo.
Soon after, the lender sent men to check out their home, and his prognosis was that it could not be repaired. They needed a new place fit for the family of a ballplayer. There was a building available next door. On the second floor was space for a three-bedroom apartment, which the Riveras would need to fix up and furnish. On the first floor was a storefront appealing to one of Belfi’s brothers, who envisioned a barbershop where customers could drink alcohol.
Belfi (left) and his family in the apartment that his parents purchased after borrowing money from Caraballo
Caraballo would show up at their new apartment, usually in a different car — a Range Rover, a Porsche, a Lamborghini. He was, Eduardo told me, like a member of the family. He reached his spoon into their pot of simmering beans. He drank Presidente beers. He gave Belfi advice about girls. He urged Rita and Eduardo to further fix up the place. “You’re already rich,” they said he told them. “You can’t live this way.”
Caraballo said he’d loan them an additional $70,000 at 7% monthly interest, a rate he had assured them was “mejor que banco,” “better than the bank.” Throughout 2023 and the first half of 2024, bank records show, Caraballo doled out the money to the family in dozens of payments ranging from $88 to $8,350. According to Rita, Caraballo said he was not giving them the money all at once because they would fritter it away.
Rita also told me that roughly $7,000 of the loan came in the form of certificates redeemable at a supermarket Caraballo owned near his office. She said she used them to buy rice, beans, oil, diapers and other staples but that the certificates didn’t last long because Caraballo’s prices were “carisimo,” “extremely expensive.” The only customers she saw at the market were the families of young ballplayers.
Chapter 4
The origins of Caraballo’s wealth and power remain murky — striking for someone with tentacles throughout the sport. Some within the industry described him as a savvy hustler, exploiting a corrupt system that Major League Baseball had created. Or as an opportunist using little more than a fortunate link to one of the country’s most beloved peloteros. Or as a man with almost magical reach who was not to be crossed. Many demanded to know whether I was a spy for him.
“I already have problems, and you’re asking me about a boss,” said a former minor league pitcher whom Caraballo represented during a brief stint as an agent.
A longtime trainer spat in the ground and called him a ladrón, a thief. He refused to discuss Caraballo further. “What if I get killed?” he asked.
Caraballo’s office in Santo Domingo
A major league agent who represents Dominican players told me that every year Caraballo has a stake in dozens of prospects’ bonuses. Two former employees corroborated that figure, telling me that they helped Caraballo reach loan agreements with the parents of 60 to 70 players a year. The agent said that every signing day, when prospects consummate their preacuerdos, Caraballo shows up to remind families that they will soon have to pay what they owe him.
I spoke with the parents, trainers or lawyers for six prospects whose families took high-interest loans from Caraballo. The father of Ricki Moneys told me he borrowed 1.7 million pesos, roughly $27,000, from Caraballo, after the Brewers offered his son a $1.15 million early agreement. Thirteen months later, after Moneys officially signed with the team earlier this year, his father said that Caraballo collected 4.5 million pesos — an effective annual interest rate of nearly 150%. The father of another Brewers prospect, Kenny Fenelon, said that his son was offered a $1.3 million early agreement and that he used it as a guarantee to borrow $50,000 from Caraballo at 5% monthly interest. When his son received his signing bonus less than three years later, in 2025, the father told me that Caraballo claimed he was owed $400,000. They eventually settled on a $75,000 interest payment, he said. (In our brief conversation, Caraballo said that the risk in loaning money to families is that “you never know if it will succeed or not because if the player doesn’t get signed, you don’t get paid.”)
Caraballo has a second business loaning money to trainers at similarly high interest rates. In many of those deals, the guarantee is a percentage of a player’s bonus money that is owed to the trainer.
He has also entered the training business himself. Records and interviews show that he has signed players as young as 10 years old to contracts in which parents agree to give him half, or sometimes more, of their sons’ potential signing bonuses. Caraballo himself doesn’t do the training. “He doesn’t even know how to hold the bat, bro,” Edgar Mercedes, a trainer who has taken loans from Caraballo, told me. Instead, he sends the boys to trainers with whom he has made separate financial arrangements.
A birth certificate states that Caraballo was born in 1986 in the mountain city of Constanza, the son of a farmer and a housewife. According to a childhood friend, he departed for the capital as a teenager with just $16. In Santo Domingo, he pumped gas before opening a series of small businesses. He co-founded a company that turned fruits into pulp and juice. He financed new and used vehicles. He established a legal services business, Caraballo Lora & Asociados, though he was not an attorney.
But mostly, according to interviews with those who have worked for him, he lent money. A Facebook banner for one of his companies consists of stock art depicting a man turning an empty pants pocket inside out. Another hand offers a full wallet, with the text, “Podemos Ayudarte,” “We can help you.”
In 2016, he returned to Constanza to run for mayor. “I’m from the hills and it’s in my blood/ By the grace of God, I’ll be your mayor,” declared a ballad he commissioned. Despite President Danilo Medina campaigning for him, he lost the four-person race. He was a “joven muy inquieto,” “a restless young man” seeking glory in his hometown, Ambiorix Sanchez, who won the election, told me.
After his defeat Medina offered Caraballo a consolation prize. He appointed him as an ambassador attached to the minister for foreign affairs, a common arrangement for an incoming president to reward a losing allied candidate. The position came with a diplomatic passport, a $600 monthly salary and few responsibilities. Caraballo left the ambassadorship in 2021, a few months after Medina’s term ended.
The beginning of Caraballo’s ascent in Dominican baseball can be traced to his shadowy role in salvaging the career of Oneil Cruz, a rising star in the Pittsburgh Pirates’ organization. In late 2020, Cruz crashed his Jeep Grand Cherokee into the back of a motorcycle, killing three people. Prosecutors initially said the ballplayer had been drinking, and he faced the possibility of three years in prison. According to numerous interviews and court records, Caraballo was brought in by Cruz’s parents and negotiated payments to the victims’ families. In exchange, they withdrew all “penal, civil or judicial” claims against Cruz. Prosecutors never presented evidence that he was drinking, and a judge dismissed the case. Cruz denied any wrongdoing. I wrote about the incident in “The Rising Baseball Star, a Fatal Car Crash and the Fixer.”
Cruz declined a request for an interview. His lawyer, Amauris Vásquez Disla, called the accident “a profound tragedy for all parties involved, especially the victims’ families.” He went on to say that the court “issued an order of dismissal based on the findings, a legally binding decision that was a lawful resolution of this matter.”
By 2021, corporate records show, Caraballo had found a partner that would instantly boost his credibility — David Ortiz. By helping the Boston Red Sox win three world championships, the first one ending an 86-year drought, Ortiz secured his legacy as one of the most revered players in all of baseball. He retired in 2016 and became a popular analyst for Fox Sports. In the Dominican Republic, he is un muchacho de abajo, someone who rose from a Santo Domingo slum and is not afraid to return.
How an obscure moneylender from Constanza became partners with a famous ballplayer is a mystery to mutual acquaintances I spoke with. Ortiz has said that he first met Caraballo when he was managing a gas station. The two were close enough that when Ortiz announced his divorce in 2021, he did so with a post of himself posing with Caraballo and a caption that read, “My compadre, the show must go on.” Ortiz sat Caraballo with his family at his 2022 induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, and they appeared in videos together at the presidential palace.
The financial side of their relationship is more shrouded. In 2021, both were listed on corporation records of a company in Florida called Big Papi Sports Group. What, if anything, the company did is not clear. It was dissolved the following year.
It is, though, the earliest record I could find of a partnership that Caraballo trumpeted frequently. Parents, trainers and lawyers who have done business with him told me that Caraballo claimed that Ortiz, whose signed jersey hangs in his office, bankrolled him. “Every time he did business with [my client], Caraballo would mention it,” a lawyer named Jose Eduardo Martinez said.
My reporting eventually got back to Ortiz. He called me last year to find out what I was working on and seemed surprised to be asked questions about Caraballo. He acknowledged that he had invested millions of dollars into Caraballo’s baseball business. Although he wouldn’t tell me the name of the company, they’ve posted to social media photos of themselves wearing matching ballcaps with the logo “CS,” for Caraballo Sports Enterprise. Caraballo has founded companies by that name in both the Dominican Republic and the United States, though Ortiz is not on those documents. Dominican records say the company’s goal is to “promote education and sports as a mechanism for the social development of underprivileged youth throughout the country.”
In a photo posted to social media, Ortiz and Caraballo wore hats that have the Caraballo Sports Enterprise logo.Instagram
Ortiz said that his business with Caraballo is limited to making loans to trainers. Among those who have struck deals with Ortiz and Caraballo is retired star infielder Carlos Guillén, who trains players in Venezuela and the Dominican Republic and said that he has borrowed significant sums from them.
Ortiz told me that he doesn’t work with the parents of players, because it’s too difficult to be repaid. However, court records show that, in at least one case, Ortiz’s name is on a contract with a player’s parents. According to its terms, Ortiz and Caraballo agreed to provide their 13-year-old son with “economic support, food, studies, housing, training, clothing for practice and games, supply of protein and vitamins” and scouting opportunities in return for 35% of the boy’s potential signing bonus. The boy was never signed, leading to the lawsuit, which was eventually dismissed on procedural grounds.
The contract, similar to many others I reviewed between Caraballo and parents of young baseball prospects, gave him and Ortiz extraordinary control over the boy’s life. It contains a clause not allowing him to “leave or abandon” the academy where they assigned him without their “prior permission” and granting them power of attorney so that they could receive “all kinds of information,” including a bonus payment schedule, from Major League Baseball and any team that signs him.
It also made explicit that the boy would be unable to get out of the deal. Even if he were to become emancipated from his parents, the contract states he would still owe a portion of his potential signing bonus. The contract allows Caraballo and Ortiz to terminate their responsibilities toward the boy due to “poor performance,” but he would still owe the same percentage if he were signed.
In our conversation, Ortiz distanced himself from Caraballo’s many enterprises. “Caraballo, my compadre, he has a whole bunch of different businesses that I don’t know,” he said. “I know the one that I know. But I’m not his guard. Hopefully, he’s not doing anything illegal — not that I know.”
Later, after I sent him a detailed list of questions, Ortiz sent an additional response through his lawyer. The statement said he had “never authorized Santo Caraballo to use my name or reputation to gain the trust of young baseball players or their families, to promote loans or investments, or to represent financial transactions as being personally backed or endorsed by me. I have always sought to make a positive contribution to Dominican baseball. I would never knowingly participate in any operation intended to take advantage of a young player or his family.”
Ortiz said that he ended his personal relationship with Caraballo “a year and a half to two years ago” after “noticing conduct by Mr. Caraballo that I considered inappropriate. I started distancing myself from him personally and placed the relevant matters in the hands of my legal advisors.”
However, last September, Ortiz and Caraballo filmed themselves heading for Puerto Rico on a private jet, drinking and dancing on their way to a Bad Bunny concert.
Chapter 5
Around 4 a.m., Jan. 15, 2024, Belfi Rivera got out of his bunk bed at John Carmona’s academy. The complex was nearly empty, with most of the other boys home for the winter holidays. Belfi put on a white dress shirt, a navy blue business suit — his first — Alexander McQueen shoes and a gold necklace, all of which Caraballo had purchased. Years earlier, Belfi had promised himself that if he made it as a pelotero, he’d have a chain that would glitter over his dirt-stained jersey, just like the pros.
It was signing day.
Belfi’s parents arrived, and they drove to Baseball City, headquarters for the Diamondbacks and several other major league teams. Teenage boys and their parents, all dressed up, filled the place.
Belfi leaned over a desk and put his signature on the contract he had been promised two years earlier. He and another Dominican outfielder were the only Diamondbacks prospects whose bonuses exceeded $550,000. Many more prospects, if they were lucky enough to be noticed by a major league team at all, fared more like Belfi’s older brother Bernardo, a right-handed pitcher who a few months earlier had signed with the Texas Rangers for $10,000.
For Rita, the moment was a miracle. “When you have absolutely nothing,” she told me, “when you’re starting from zero, enduring great hardship, and your children are going hungry. And then, suddenly, we would finally be able to resolve so many of the problems we were facing — paying off our debts, taking the children to the doctor, getting them enrolled in school.”
Belfi posed for photos in front of a banner filled with Diamondbacks logos. In one, he is flanked by Carmona and Caraballo. Carmona said that he was not aware that the lender had made deals with Belfi’s family until he showed up at the signing, strutting around as if he had played a key role in Belfi’s success. “The team asked me, ‘What’s going on? What is this man doing here?’” Carmona said.
Belfi posed for photos after he officially signed with the Arizona Diamondbacks on Jan. 15, 2024. On the far left is John Carmona, his trainer. On the far right is Caraballo.Instagram
Less than a month later, the first installment of Belfi’s bonus came in — $900,000. He and his parents drove to the Boca Chica branch of the BHD bank, a sleek glass building adorned with the Major League Baseball logo and ringed by the flags of all 30 teams. The branch is where almost every prospect collects his bonus payments, and it regularly plays host to one of the most unsightly scenes in Dominican baseball, as trainers and lenders show up to demand their cut.
Caraballo, Carmona and Belfi’s early trainer, Jhonatan Jimenez, were waiting. By BHD and major league policy, only a player and his parents can receive the bonus. But Belfi’s parents told me that Caraballo took the lead, collecting IDs and handing them to a clerk. Neither Rita nor Eduardo had ever held a bank account. Now a banker helped Belfi open one, and the convoluted divvying up of his payday began.
By the terms of their contract with Rita and Eduardo, Carmona was due $630,000 and Jimenez $90,000. However, Jimenez had earlier sold his stake to Caraballo, one of at least two deals the lender had made with Belfi’s former trainers.
That left $180,000, which Caraballo was owed as repayment of the $25,000 loan. Carmona described the vibe as one of “mucha duda, mucha desconfianza,” “much doubt, much distrust.” The exception, he said, was Belfi, who seemed oblivious, confident that everything would work out. Belfi told me that other players had warned him that he would see little of his first bonus installment. He left the bank with nothing.
At a meeting at Caraballo’s office, Eduardo and Rita said that he ripped up a contract. They understood this to mean the debt was paid. As the day approached when Belfi was set to receive the second half of his bonus, Rita and Eduardo said that Caraballo began to sell them on an idea — they could become partners with him and David Ortiz. They would be out of their depth managing the hundreds of thousands of dollars the Diamondbacks still owed Belfi. Instead, they could invest the money, which would produce a steady income and keep them from squandering their fortune.
Eduardo told me that he couldn’t follow all the details but said he was sold from the moment Caraballo described going into business with Ortiz. “I was happy because now my boy was going to have people to give him advice,” he said.
Eduardo did have a brief moment of doubt. After a call with Caraballo, he said to Rita, “Maybe he’s lying to us.” But they both agreed he was too kind for that.
Chapter 6
Throughout my reporting, the great mystery was if the problems with baseball in the Dominican Republic were so well-known, why hadn’t the league or the union fixed them?
I posed this question to Lou Melendez, who worked for Major League Baseball from 1983 to 2016, including as vice president of international operations, and now consults for the players union. He told me he was baffled by the inaction of the league, which has in the past penalized teams and executives for violating international rules. “If they wanted to, they could have just said, ‘Look, memo to clubs from the commissioner’s office. If we find that you have any pre-agreements with any players, we’re going to discipline you.’”
When Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred was asked last year about preacuerdos during a visit to the Dominican Republic, he acknowledged that they were “problematic” but said the “best solution to early deals is a draft.”
This has been his position since he took office in 2015, arguing that the league needs to institute a draft for Latin American prospects that functions similarly to the draft for American and Canadian players. The change would make early agreements impossible since a team would not know which player they would be able to sign until draft day.
This single-mindedness has led some observers to wonder whether the league’s neglect of the issue is intentional. “If they wanted to enforce it, they would,” said Rafa Nieves, one of the top agents for Dominican players. “They want to make it worse and worse so the only solution is an international draft.”
The chief obstacle to establishing an international draft has been the players union. Its reasons are straightforward: A draft would restrict a prospect’s ability to choose his employer and eliminate bidding wars that drive up bonuses. While the union acknowledges the Dominican system is troubled, it, too, blames the league for not enforcing its existing rules.
The league and the union have been haggling over the issue for decades. Before the 2017 baseball season, both sides agreed to impose a “hard cap” — a limit to how much money a team can spend on signing international players. The amount changes each year and by team. In 2026, the total a team can spend ranges from $5.4 million to $8 million. The hard cap, though, had an unintended consequence: It led to a surge in early agreements. If teams could not beat their competitors with money, they could by making commitments to younger and younger players.
By one estimate, baseball generates as much as $400 million annually for the Dominican economy.
In early 2022, the league and the union came close to establishing an international draft when negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement. Talks broke down, and the owners locked the players out of spring training. The international draft, it was widely reported, had become a major sticking point, and the union was close to accepting it.
This was when David Ortiz intervened. Although he is retired, players listen to what he has to say. Ortiz circulated a voice message to Dominican players and trainers, declaring a “red alert” that the union was on the verge of agreeing to the international draft. He shared the phone number for Tony Clark, the union’s executive director, and urged everybody to express their strong opposition.
“If we allow the draft to happen here in the Dominican Republic, even your great-great-grandchildren, and everyone else’s, will be affected by it,” Ortiz said, according to an audio copy of the message, which I obtained. “So we have to start this strong ‘No to the draft’ campaign. Take my word for it. I don’t play baseball anymore, but I know what I’m talking about. If we let them push that thing through here, we’ll be in deep trouble. You know that in this nation, in one way or another, more than 40% of the population depends on baseball, to put it mildly.”
Ortiz in 2026 participating in the Hall of Fame Parade of Legends in Cooperstown, New YorkDaniel Shirey/MLB Photos via Getty Images
That percentage was an exaggeration, but lots of retired players, including Ortiz, own training academies. Amaurys Nina, a highly regarded trainer, told me that many of them have long used their clout to block any changes to the industry. “These players want the business to stay the way it is,” he said.
Active Dominican players also spoke out, including Fernando Tatis Jr., the shortstop for the Padres, whose father, a retired major league ballplayer, owned an academy. With an international draft, teams would likely sign fewer Dominican players, especially marginal prospects. Tatis appeared to be alluding to this when he told a reporter that an international draft would “kill baseball in the Dominican Republic.” Tatis did not respond to a request for comment sent to his agent.
The day after Ortiz sent his voice message, the league ended the lockout, and both sides agreed to shelve the idea of an international draft and settled the contract. The draft is once again a point of contention as the two sides have begun negotiating a new contract. (The union declined to comment on Ortiz’s voice note.)
When I spoke to Ortiz last year, I asked him if he opposed an international draft because of his and Caraballo’s business interests. He did not answer and hung up shortly afterward.
In his statement, Ortiz said his position regarding the international draft “was based on my views regarding the development of Dominican players and the impact I believed such a system would have on baseball in our country.”
Chapter 7
Belfi’s second bonus day arrived on June 13, 2024. When his parents and a brother came to pick him up at the Diamondbacks’ training academy, Caraballo was waiting in the parking lot. He invited the family to jump into his tricked-out Mercedes SUV so they could head to the BHD branch together.
As he drove, Caraballo hardened his pitch. He said he would pay them a dividend of several hundred thousand pesos, as much as $10,000, a month, according to Rita and Eduardo. In describing their understanding of the proposal, they told me that the lender promised once again to put the money in a fund or a business involving Ortiz but that they had no idea what kind. Caraballo, they said, assured them they would work out the details the following day at his office.
This car ride was the first time that Belfi learned that he would leave the bank with little or nothing. But he told me he trusted his parents, Caraballo and any plan that involved Ortiz.
Already at the bank was Jimenez, Belfi’s former trainer. He told me he was there as a family friend to keep an eye on how things went. But he allowed that he was also there with the hope that Rita and Eduardo would give him another cut for his years training Belfi.
Belfi’s family was ushered into a room to go over paperwork with a banker. According to Rita and Eduardo, Caraballo came in and out to make sure the family repaid their debt and signed over the rest of the money for him to invest. Unlike Belfi, his brother was alarmed by what was happening. He texted Jimenez that Caraballo was stealing the bonus. Jimenez said he started chasing Caraballo around the bank, calling him un ladrón. Eduardo recalled Jimenez yelling, “Caraballo, no engañes a esos pobres infelices,” “Caraballo, do not deceive these miserable people.” The lender, in turn, accused Jimenez of attempting to fleece the family himself.
Amid the shouting, Belfi told the banker that he wanted to keep some of the money so he’d have it when he got promoted to the minors in the United States. With the banker’s guidance, he kept $196,000. According to Rita, Caraballo was upset he wasn’t getting the whole amount and angry the family didn’t trust him. After receiving a cashier’s check for $703,900, he left the bank, flanked by two bodyguards. The check’s memo line read “pago entrenador,” “trainer payment.”
In his statement, Ortiz said he was never aware that Caraballo “operated an investment fund through which money belonging to players was allegedly taken or used for investment purposes.”
BHD did not respond to detailed questions concerning Belfi’s experiences at the Boca Chica branch. The bank said in a statement that it is committed to “the protection of all our clients, including young baseball prospects. Decisions regarding the use of our clients’ funds rest exclusively with the account holders or those legally authorized to act on their behalf.”
Eduardo told me he often replays that day in his mind, realizing that it was the culmination of his being played for a fool. He hung on every word of Caraballo’s advice, all of it leading to “el gancho,” “the hook” — handing over the money in the bank “without paperwork, documents or anything else.”
There are hundreds of unregulated training academies in the Dominican Republic, ranging from shaggy fields to gleaming facilities.
Rita said that she called Caraballo about meeting the following day, but he told her he had flown to Miami. In the weeks afterward, they tried calling him numerous times, she said, but that he would either not pick up or the calls would drop. Bank statements show that he did send them three payments totaling less than $10,000.
Finally, Rita said, Caraballo made clear that the investments with Ortiz hadn’t panned out and that he wouldn’t be paying the family a monthly dividend as he had promised. But, according to Rita, he assured her that he was “always going to be there” to support the family.
By then Rita and Eduardo had learned of other parents who had accused Caraballo of stealing their sons’ bonuses. The family, she realized, needed to get a lawyer. She knew of only one, a local commercial attorney who agreed to take on the case and who brought on a criminal specialist from Santo Domingo.
In the lawyers’ view, the interest Caraballo charged Belfi’s family was legal under Dominican law. However, in a complaint to prosecutors that they filed in November 2024, they described Caraballo’s promise to invest the family’s money and pay them dividends as fraud preying on Belfi’s “vulnerability as a minor.”
“It is obvious that the accused never intended to invest in any stock market, but rather took advantage of his apparent friendship with David Ortiz [and] the admiration the public has for the former baseball player,” they wrote.
Soon after, Rita’s mother died, and Caraballo called, offering his condolences as well as 100,000 pesos, a little less than $1,600, to cover the funeral and other expenses. Rita said she told him to have his attorney call hers.
Belfi, too, had lost trust in Caraballo. The necklace the lender had given him on signing day, the one that made Belfi feel like he had made it as a ballplayer, had started to turn black. The chain, Belfi realized, was iron, and he threw it away.
Caraballo continued to message him, Belfi told me, attempting to get him to persuade his parents to drop the legal claim. On the lawyers’ advice, Belfi blocked him. Just before his 18th birthday in December 2024, Belfi was in Pedro Brand, walking back from a local ball field when, he said, a white Volvo truck pulled up next to him. The driver, a man Belfi had never met, told him to get in. Belfi said the man had a gun holstered on his hip.
Once in the car, Belfi said, the driver informed him that he was taking him to see Caraballo in Santo Domingo. Belfi was sure that the lender had dispatched “una maldad,” “something evil.” The man drove Belfi to a jewelry store, where Caraballo was waiting. He was in an expansive mood, Belfi told me. He greeted him warmly and after consulting with the jeweler, he picked out a necklace and told Belfi it was a gift.
They then headed to Caraballo’s office, where the lender revealed the purpose of the meeting. According to Belfi, Caraballo told him that the Diamondbacks wouldn’t want a prospect involved in something as ugly as a lawsuit. Belfi also said that Caraballo warned him that if he had an open legal case, he wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country to play in the minors. The last claim is not true, but Belfi didn’t know that.
The day after Belfi legally became an adult, he said the driver picked him up and took him to the capital to get his Dominican national ID. Afterward, they went to Caraballo’s office, where the lender and a lawyer were waiting, and Belfi signed the papers they put in front of him. “Y ya, el miedo habló,” Belfi told me. Fear talked.
The significance of those documents became clear the following month. With his signature, Belfi had fired his lawyers, hired Caraballo’s attorneys as his own and withdrawn the complaint. The criminal action against Caraballo, the prosecutor wrote in a final decision, “has been extinguished.”
Chapter 8
Almost immediately Belfi regretted signing the documents that harpooned the case against Caraballo. He tearfully apologized to his lawyers. When I spoke to one of the attorneys, Omar Chapman, he said he thought the lender had taken advantage of Belfi. “Caraballo told him, ‘Look, this document will solve all your problems, don’t worry,’” said Chapman, who added that Belfi might have been legally an adult but “only made it to about third grade.”
Belfi told me that by last Christmas he had gone through the $196,000. He paid off his family’s numerous debts, covered foot surgery for his father, sunk money into his brother’s struggling barbershop and, by his own admission, spent money on dumb stuff — loans to friends he won’t get back and jewelry for himself and girlfriends.
As the holiday approached, Caraballo sent a messenger to Rita with 20,000 pesos, just over $300, for food and clothes for the children. Rita told me she knew what Caraballo was up to. “He’s basically trying to buy us again so he can keep our money,” she said. But this time, she didn’t reject the handout.
When I visited Rita and Eduardo this summer, they appeared to be worse off than the first time I saw them. With four kids still in the house, Rita had recently opened a food stand across the street, selling salami, plantains, eggs and coffee to commuters. It’s a miserable, fly-infested venture that requires her to rise at 4 a.m. and earns her as little as $5 a day. Eduardo continues to work as a night watchman at a local school.
Belfi told me that the Diamondbacks pay him $100 a week only during the two and a half months he plays in the Dominican Summer League and that the team provides its players with baseball equipment when they sign, but after that they’re on their own. Before the latest season, Belfi borrowed roughly $2,500 from a local lender, part of which he spent on cleats, a glove, bats and medicine for his father. The loan came with 30% biweekly interest. The ballooning debt has caused Belfi to stay away from Pedro Brand.
I went to the Diamondbacks’ academy, an immaculate new facility, hoping to watch Belfi play. The summer league, which has so many players that most organizations fill multiple teams, is a study in Major League Baseball’s volume approach to Latin talent. Few players last beyond three seasons — they’re either promoted or cut.
Belfi has completed his third season in the Dominican Summer League.
Belfi is now in his third year. In his first two seasons, he struggled, hitting a meager .202 with one home run. He no longer appears in the international prospect rankings. Friends who signed the same year as he did have been promoted. So has his brother Bernardo, who is now on a Rangers minor league team in the U.S.
When Belfi and I spoke, he admitted it’s been hard playing baseball with everything that’s been going on in his head. “I mean, why keep working, if everything I earn, I lose?” he asked.
Trainers and scouts who have watched Belfi for years told me it’s obvious that what he’s gone through has affected his game. One said, “These guys took everything he had and stole his motivation.”
On a muggy, overcast June day, Belfi’s team was hosting the Seattle Mariners’ squad. It was a sloppy contest full of errors and batters getting plunked by fastballs the pitchers hadn’t yet learned to corral. The only people in the stands, besides a few family members, were scouts and officials recording every data point. But the players cheered and chanted and shook the dugout’s chain-link fence. Belfi wasn’t in the lineup.
When I found him afterward, he explained that his coaches had him doing batting practice for most of the game. They wanted him to work on “a little bit of everything,” he said. Despite the Diamondbacks frequently benching him, Belfi still appeared hopeful. I asked him what his immediate goal was, and he said with a smile, “Get out of here as soon as possible.”
A month later, in a tied game in extra innings against a Cubs team, the Diamondbacks called on Belfi to pinch hit with two outs and two men on. He stroked a game-winning single into center field. His teammates mobbed him, and a grinning Belfi jumped up and down, holding his arms aloft in joy.
Emissions of planet-heating methane and CO2 from natural sources are worsening the climate crisis, paper says
Rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels are transforming the world’s forests, wetlands and tundra to the point they are releasing emissions that could further worsen global heating by as much as 30%, a new study has found.
As the world heats up, permafrost in the high latitudes is thawing, fiercer wildfires are burning in drying forests and wetlands and lakes are warming. All of these changes are themselves causing the release of planet-heating methane and carbon dioxide locked in trees and soils, therefore worsening the climate crisis, the paper states.
Funding cuts in 2025 left women, children, older and displaced people hard hit, with 64m fewer people receiving aid
The humanitarian aid system is crumbling as funding shrinks, pressures increase and governments not only fail to protect civilians but are increasingly responsible for endangering them, a new report warned on Thursday as figures revealed 64 million fewer people received aid last year.
With aid contributions cut by 30% between 2022 and 2025 and thousands of aid workers losing their jobs, the humanitarian system has suffered one of its biggest contractions since being formed in the post-second world war era, according to the State of the Humanitarian System 2026 report.
It was a bad week for the Autistici/Inventati collective.
On August 26, the State Department announced far-reaching sanctions against the Italian collective, which provides web-hosting services to a swath of the international far left. The U.S. government categorized A/I, as it’s also known, as a “specially designated global terrorist” and accused it of being an “extremist group that builds and operates the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells.”
A/I maintains digital infrastructure utilized by thousands of leftists and left-wing organizations across the globe, including anonymous email accounts and servers powering its NoBlogs.org hosting platform. The designation could force many of the sites offline — threatening much of what the A/I Collective has built.
Two days later, the site came under a different kind of attack. Hackers took aim at the NoBlogs site itself. A cyberattacker gained access to the platform, vandalizing its homepage and potentially accessing internal user data.
For far-right hackers and internet trolls, this was a moment for celebration. Just two minutes after the vandalized homepage was captured by an internet archive, the attack was publicized on X by someone using the handle “AstraRCE” and soon promoted by prominent far-right accounts, including “DataRepublican,” the online moniker of Jennica Pounds.
Until June, Pounds was a member of the Pentagon press corps — famous mostly for trolling the left — but allowed her credentials to expire at the end of the month. In late August, it was revealed that Pounds had been employed by the Pentagon since July, as part of a larger operation launched by the federal government to recruit right-wing influencers into jobs at President Donald Trump’s Department of War.
The relationship between DataRepublican and AstraRCE goes back through several prominent hacks of the left. The pair have a long and involved history of posting to each other about hackers’ exploits online, raising questions about the relationship between a Trump administration employee and an anonymous online personality posting real-time updates on hacks against the left.
“That is a line that is always worth noting and ringing the alarm bell when crossed.”
DataRepublican and AstraRCE are part of a wider circle with huge followings that are often the first to mention hacks against left-wing digital infrastructure. They publish screenshots, share each other’s posts, offer snide commentary, and congratulate their associates — messages that frequently verge into bestowing credit for the hacks.
The federal government’s support for an influencer who praises domestic hacking efforts would mark a major escalation in the Trump administration’s crackdown on dissent, said Harlo Holmes, the chief security programs officer at Freedom of the Press Foundation.
“It’s the difference between open-source intelligence, that is often used in surveillance, and ever increasingly used in surveillance, and actually jumping into people’s machines,” Holmes said. “That is a line that is always worth noting and ringing the alarm bell when crossed.”
Though members of the A/I Collective weren’t able to attribute the hack to anyone, the cyberattack would eventually achieve its apparent aim. Beset by the pressure of terrorism sanctions, a hostile cyberattack, and continued scrutiny from the U.S. government, the group announced on September 6 that, after 25 years, it would disband.
“We cannot engage in a fight or expose ourselves to manipulations that threaten the lives of these people and their loved ones, leaving them at the mercy of autocrats, fascists, and agencies that take extra-legal courses of action,” the group wrote in a statement. “The Autistici/Inventati collective is shutting down and will soon discontinue all of the services we provide.”
Publicizing NoBlogs Hack
DataRepublican frequently publishes reports, visualizations, and data leaks that target leftist groups involved in protests and activism across the country.
Before Pounds’s assignment at the Department of War, DataRepublican regularly posted inside information about hacks, nodding to the involvement of other far-right social media personalities, among them AstraRCE.
DataRepublican and AstraRCE were the first people to publicize the NoBlogs hack online. Taking a celebratory tone, they linked to and replied to one another’s post. In one instance, AstraRCE claimed apparent inside knowledge about the federal government’s possession of internal user data from NoBlogs. DataRepublican confirmed the claim.
AstraRCE’s initial X post about the hack showed a screenshot of the vandalized NoBlogs homepage, which now displayed a message that said, “All user data has been saved and given to the United States government” — alongside an altered banner that read “TRUMPBLOGS.” AstraRCE later offered a mocking congratulations to NoBlogs for its “rebrand.”
Just four minutes after AstraRCE pointed to the screenshot of the hack, DataRepublican’s X account reposted the image, alongside a caption characterizing NoBlogs as a “platform shared by Antifa and far-left Marxists.”
“The State Department designed them as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group yesterday,” DataRepublican wrote. “And now … they’re TrumpBlogs.”
Later, DataRepublican’s website published a visualization tool that allows users to view thousands of NoBlogs sites dispersed across a map, naming the tool Trumpblogs, in what appears to be a reference to the hack. Shortly after the tool went online, AstraRCE posted on X to say that the trumpblogs.org domain would now be redirecting to DataRepublican’s site.
The Pentagon has thus far declined to reveal what assignment Pounds or other right-wing media influencers have been given, and it’s unknown if activities like producing the visualization tool would be part of these duties. (The Department of War did not reply to a request for comment.)
They’re “trying to identify their enemies and build dossiers on them.”
“They’re hiring people who have a history of sort of dirt digging,” said David Greene, who serves as legal counsel at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. “And they’re digging for information about their enemies, and both trying to identify their enemies and build dossiers on them.”
Holmes, of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said that determining responsibility for cyberattacks like the one that targeted NoBlogs can be incredibly difficult, especially for smaller organizations.
“Attribution is really hard to prove definitively,” Holmes said. “But, also, there are a lot of imbalances there because the folks at Autistici don’t necessarily have the ability to perform the type of forensics and response that normally leads to successful attribution, or at least not quickly.”
Partners in Posting
DataRepublican and AstraRCE steer clear in their posts of explicitly claiming responsibility for hacks. They frequently, however, offer kudos to fellow travelers. Sometimes they post claims of insider access to information about the hacks or, in a few cases, show information that reveals access to the hacked systems themselves.
In at least one instance, a post by DataRepublican appeared to take direct responsibility for a cyber operation. Writing on X in July, the DataRepublican account claimed credit for a honey-pot scheme against a Nigerian hacker, which DataRepublican said had gone after right-wing media personality Hugh Hewitt.
“It’s true,” DataRepublican wrote, attaching a screenshot of the hackers’ location and IP address. “@astrarce and I honeypotted the Hugh Hewitt hacker.”
Even though DataRepublican and AstraRCE don’t take credit for cyberattacks, the far-right web heaps praise on them for the exploits.
Seeking to disrupt a database collecting information on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicles, a January hack overrode images of license plates with a meme saying, “ALL YOUR LOGINS, LOCATIONS, PASSWORDS, AND PHONE NUMBERS HAVE BEEN GIVEN TO FBI AND ICE.”
After sharing the image and tagging AstraRCE, DataRepublican was asked by an online fan how it happened. The account replied, “I don’t know, but an unrelated tip is that it’s a bad idea to make your encryption/decryption script readable to the world.”
Several X accounts in the right-wing milieu responded to DataRepublican’s initial post with congratulations. A spokesperson for Turning Point USA said, “Well done, patriots.”
In another case, a Fox News article purported to expose the network of organizers behind protests at ICE’s Delaney Hall detention center in New Jersey. Summarizing its report, Fox News credited, among others, DataRepublican and AstraRCE with infiltrating the group: “The activities of this network have motivated a group of tech sleuths on the X — @DataRepublican, @Astrarce, @bitchuneedsoap and @gunshymartyr — to penetrate these groups, their Signal chats and their operations like a digital Avengers squad.”
In February, following a cyberattack on Siembra NC, a North Carolina-based immigrant rights organization, DataRepublican claimed the group operated two active websites responsible for “doxxing ICE.” Citing AstraRCE, DataRepublican suggested hackers had taken over the nonprofit’s notification system.
“Per @astrarce,” DataRepublican wrote, “the 1000+ users signed up to both sites have received a text alert with the meme attached” — a photo of FBI Director Kash Patel with meme text that says, “FEDS HAVE ALL YOUR DATA.”
DataRepublican then posted what appeared to be a screenshot of the organization’s internal notification dashboard, claiming that more than 2,000 users had received push notifications. The notification text visible on the dashboard suggested users received a message urging self-deportation and claimed their personal information had been sent to federal authorities.
During a similar hack of StopICE.net, an ICE tracking website, DataRepublican claimed to have insider knowledge of data from a hack being sent to the authorities.
“I can personally testify,” DataRepublican posted, “that the names, logins, passwords, locations (down to coordinates), and phone numbers of 100K+ users were all sent to FBI, ICE, HSI” — ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division — “and more.”
Like the cyberattack targeting NoBlogs, in other cases DataRepublican and AstraRCE were also quick to celebrate cyberattacks against leftist groups and post screenshots of the incursions. In many of the cases, the webpages of the sites were vandalized and a message was left behind claiming to have accessed and sent internal data to the federal government.
Claiming Inside Info
The NoBlogs hack became one of the instances where DataRepublican and AstraRCE alluded to both having insider information about the provenance of materials from the hack and their transmittal into the hands of the authorities — all while Pounds was firmly ensconced at the Pentagon.
“Can confirm the authorities have everything that was on the NoBlogs servers.”
The episode, in the immediate wake of the NoBlogs hack, was telling. AstraRCE echoed the claim made on the vandalized NoBlog homepage: that the federal government was in possession of the site’s internal user data.
The episode was set off when the A/I collective issued a statement acknowledging the hack and that the “attacker may have had access to the users database.” The collective warned that the hackers could have accessed the “list of email addresses of the people who manage the blogs and their passwords.”
The password information for the user accounts, however, was stored “hashed,” A/I said, rather than in plain text, making it substantially harder to access.
Shortly after A/I published its statement about hashed passwords, AstraRCE posted an image of the statement alongside a caption suggesting that they had direct knowledge of the data that was breached.
“Yep,” AstraRCE wrote. “The government has their emails and dehashed results.”
alternative_right shares a report from ScienceDaily: A new analysis of more than 1,700 supernovae is questioning whether the universe is really accelerating at all. After accounting for the ages of the stars that produce these explosions, researchers found signs that cosmic expansion may actually be slowing. They also argue that the apparent acceleration changes with direction, which would be difficult to explain with dark energy. Other cosmologists dispute the conclusion, setting up a major test for upcoming observatories. The analysis has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The conclusion is disputed, though. The report mentions a separate paper co-authored by Professor Maria Vincenzi, also at the University of Oxford, that "concludes that observations continue to support an accelerating universe."
Solid battery life, snappy performance and quality software make for a great smaller phone with a killer camera
Google’s latest Pro phone is out to prove it has the best camera on a smartphone while embracing customisation, allowing you to change the look and feel of your photos far beyond simple filters even if that means making them technically worse.
The Pixel 11 Pro packs the best of Google’s hardware and software into a still-pocketable and easy to handle frame, instantly making it a contender for best smaller phone of the year.
Manager is excited by new US deal but might have returned to Spurs if the stars had aligned and does not rule out taking England job one day
If things had worked out differently, Mauricio Pochettino would have gone back to his beloved Tottenham over the summer. They had put in the call and it stirred him. Nothing was going to put him off – not even the possibility of the club being in the Championship.
Seriously, Mauricio? After a World Cup campaign with the United States and top jobs with Chelsea and Paris Saint-Germain before that, he would have been willing to start a new chapter in the second tier of English football? “Yes, of course,” Pochettino says. “Tottenham … it’s the only club that always I am open to help. In whatever division.”
Former manager says Chelsea should be stripped of title
‘The title should be for the team that was second’
Mauricio Pochettino says Chelsea should be stripped of their 2016-17 Premier League title for financial rule breaches and the honour retrospectively awarded to Tottenham, who he led to second place that season.
President’s quest in self-mythology stops off in Dallas for a Republican convention where fans indulged his lies and revelled in his jokes
Kim Il-sung of North Korea reportedly sought transfusions of blood from young men; Mao Zedong of China believed sex with young women could prolong his life; Muammar Gaddafi underwent fat injections and hair transplantation to make himself look younger. But for Donald Trump, the secret of eternal youth lies in nights like this.
The occasion of the Republican midterm convention in Dallas was enough to get the 80-year-old US president’s juices flowing. An arena with thousands of fanatical supporters indulging his lies, laughing at his jokes and burnishing his fantasies of greatness is Trump’s happy place.
Dow Jones convicted of one count of deterring Selina Cheng from role at Hong Kong Journalist Association but cleared of second charge
A Hong Kong court has convicted the publisher of the Wall Street Journal of deterring a reporter from taking up a trade union role, in a case that raised concerns about press freedom in the city.
The newspaper dismissed Selina Cheng just weeks after she was appointed chair of the Hong Kong Journalist Association (HKJA) in 2024. She was told at the time her termination was officially due to restructuring.
Multiple search and rescue vessels deployed after blaze off Palawan island leaves at least five dead, says coast guard
A large-scale search and rescue operation is under way off the western Philippine island of Palawan on Thursday after a passenger ferry caught fire, killing five people and leaving scores of passengers missing.
The Philippine coast guard said multiple vessels and other assets were searching for survivors as rescue teams used drift-modelling tools to identify areas where people may have been carried by currents.
In today’s newsletter: No Bayeux ticket? Everything you need to know about the sold-out exhibition – from its epic journey to London to a Game of Thrones likeness
Good morning. If you live in the UK, you have probably heard about the Bayeux tapestry exhibition, which opens today, and you probably haven’t got a ticket. The digital queue was nine-hours long when they first went on sale in July, and the exhibition has already broken the British Museum’s record for the number of tickets sold in a single day.
Some lucky individuals, including King Charles and aspiring overlord Peter Thiel, have been treated to early previews of the medieval tapestry. Guests staying at One Aldwych, a hotel where rooms go for £1,000 a night, can partake in the “Bayeux experience” with a themed cocktail (mead spritzer, anyone?), a full English breakfast and preferential access to tickets.
Reform | The Met police will investigate allegations that Reform UK broke electoral law relating to overseas donations as part of a wider inquiry.
UK- Israel | Prominent British rabbis have backed Ed Miliband’s sanctions on Israeli settlements, warning that the time for inaction on settler violence must come to an end.
Technology | Just a day after three Anthropic researchers warned that artificial intelligence could kill off humanity within the decade, US politicians have begun lashing out about the risks of the burgeoning technology.
UK news | Protesters who gathered outside a Portsmouth hotel mistook Pakistan’s under-19 cricket team for asylum seekers.
US news | Donald Trump pledged to pay every adult citizen in the US $5,000 if Republicans retain the House and Senate in the midterm elections, during a marathon speech at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas.
President Trump's speech at the Republican National Committee convention touched on the polarizing NBA trade that sent superstar guard Luka Dončić from the Mavericks to the Lakers.
President makes offer that would cost US over $1tn and asks voters to ‘pretend that I’m on the ballot’ despite being deeply unpopular among electorate
Donald Trump pledged to pay every adult citizen in the US $5,000 if Republicans retain the House and Senate in the midterm elections, during a marathon speech at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas in which the president assailed Democrats as “radical” and defended his unpopular war in Iran.
The outlandish proposal, which would cost over $1tn, immediately raised ethical concerns. But it laid bare the extent of the Republicans’ concern about their prospects in the pivotal November elections.
The International Atomic Energy Agency voices ‘serious concerns’ over expansion of Yongbyon facility to enrich uranium
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has voiced “serious concern” over evidence that North Korea has built a facility capable of enriching weapons-grade uranium to bolster its nuclear arsenal.
The new building, located at the the country’s main Yongbyon nuclear facility, can house up to 28 centrifuge cascades – machinery commonly used to enrich uranium – according to a report by the nuclear watchdog released this week.
Budget cuts, loss of knowledgeable officials and diverted resources raise risk of another attack, experts warn
The US faces growing challenges in countering international terrorism as resources are diverted to other threats, experienced security officials leave and “complacency” spreads, experts have warned.
It is 25 years this week since the 9/11 attacks launched by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida on New York and Washington, which killed about 3,000 people and led to decades of conflict, radicalisation and instability across the Middle East and beyond.
Stefany Shaheen, the daughter of a longtime New Hampshire senator and former governor, has won the Democratic nomination in the race for Chris Pappas’s former House seat.
Stefany Shaheen’s mother Jeanne Shaheen is a former governor who has represented New Hampshire in the Senate since 2009. The younger Shaheen’s family ties to the Democratic establishment – and accusations of nepotism – became a point of attack by her opponent in the primary race.
Dallas, Texas — President Donald Trump promised Wednesday to send every adult U.S. citizen a $5,000 “Trump Dividend” if Republicans retain control of both the House and Senate in November’s midterm elections.
“If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000,” Trump told supporters at the Republican Party’s midterm convention in Dallas. He said recipients would have to spend the money inside the United States but provided no detailed funding mechanism or legislative proposal.
The price tag is substantial. With roughly 240 million U.S. adults, a universal $5,000 payment would cost about $1.2 trillion. That far exceeds the approximately $284 billion in tariff revenue collected since Trump returned to office, according to Reuters. Any nationwide payment would also require congressional authorization rather than simply a presidential order.
Vice President JD Vance later suggested wealthy Americans might be excluded and said tariff revenue could help fund the plan, though no income cutoff or financing details have been released. The administration previously floated a smaller $2,000 tariff dividend that Congress never enacted.
Trump announced the proposal while urging voters to treat the midterms as effectively a referendum on his presidency. Republicans currently control both chambers, making the promise explicitly contingent on voters maintaining that control.
For now, the $5,000 payment remains a campaign pledge rather than an enacted federal program.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Amid industry soul-searching about the possibility of AI improving itself to the point that it kills everyone, Anthropic has revealed yet another incident that would qualify as a crime if perpetrated by a person. The AI biz published "an alignment assessment" detailing four times Claude models accessed third-party systems without authorization. The company has already reported three of the incidents. Evidence of the fourth was lurking in a session transcript dating back to January 2026 when the misbehavior occurred. Anthropic found the first three by scanning around 141,000 transcripts where Claude could have obtained internet access during evaluation. It missed the fourth initially because "our scan relied on an agentic search."
[...] The January 2026 AI trespass involved an early version of Claude Opus 4.6, which was given a Capture the Flag (CTF) challenge under the oversight of the third-party model evaluator where the other hacking events occurred. Opus 4.6 managed to sabotage its chances of success by disabling the machine it was targeting. It assigned the device an IP address that already existed on another piece of hardware, rendering the target unreachable and making it impossible to solve the challenge. Those familiar with other incidents where AI models violated third-party systems may recall that unsolvable tasks represent a common catalyst for misbehavior. Models exhaust all aligned options, and then turn to transgressive approaches.
Opus 4.6 might have been an exception, but when it tried to abort the task after recognizing that it could not reach the target machine, it failed to do so "due to a misconfiguration in [the model's] evaluation harness." It failed to shut down not just once but seven times. So it continued onward, trying other expected means to reach the target machine but failing. Then it explored further. "The model discovered a machine belonging to a third party that it was able to access, and stated that it believed this third party was part of the CTF," Anthropic explained in its post. "Inside the machine, the model found a file listing a password, which it used to gain admin access to the system."
The model went on to gather more credentials, and modified a system setting to make it easier to access the personal information of an individual associated with the third party evaluation organization. Opus 4.6 might have done more but for the fact that it exhausted its token budget, bringing the session to an end. Anthropic says it's not as concerned about this incident as the others because the model tried to abort its task.
Adam Mosseri says platform’s algorithm ‘feels like a black box’ but company trying to give users more control after Labor announces opt-out plan
Instagram’s chief executive has said users will have a worse experience in an algorithm-free world, seeing more brand-related content, and spend less time on the app.
The comments come as the Australian government plans to give users the option to opt out of algorithms, with the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, announcing plans on Tuesday to require social media platforms to prompt users to choose between a feed of algorithm-recommended content or a reverse chronological feed of the pages users follow. Labor also plans to introduce a range of measures designed to address online harm on the sites.
Helena Foulkes beats incumbent Dan McKee after criticizing handling of Providence’s Washington bridge, now expected to be completed in 2028
Rhode Island’s Dan McKee became the first sitting governor to lose a primary in nearly a decade, bested not by a more progressive challenger or a more youthful upset but by frustration over a bridge.
McKee lost his Democratic primary to Helena Foulkes, a former longtime executive with Rhode Island-based retail pharmacy CVS, the Associated Press said on Wednesday.
Barry Melrose, a hockey player-turned-coach who led the Los Angeles Kings to the 1993 Stanley Cup Final before going on to a long career in broadcasting the sport, has died at 70.
As one of the world’s preeminent chip companies for mobile devices, Qualcomm has a storied history of squeezing the maximum performance from chips with limited power and thermal envelopes. That specialty will come in handy with Qualcomm’s latest endeavor, which is leveraging its new investment in high-bandwidth compute (HBC) to develop custom AI accelerators for Amazon’s data centers.
There’s not a ton of detail in the announcement that Amazon and Qualcomm shared on September 8, besides the aforementioned plan to co-develop multiple generations of AI accelerators for Amazon data centers. The announcement also mentions work the companies will do on 1.6T optical networking technology, and references Qualcomm chip-level SerDes and optical digital signal processing (DSP) technology. Not mentioned in the press release, but shared through an 8K SEC filing, is a warrant for Amazon to buy up $60 billion in stock from Qualcomm as part of the deal.
Qualcomm AI250 will be available as a card or rack-based solution
Prior to this announcement, HPCwire sat down with Qualcomm’s Vice President and General Manager of Data Center CPU and AI Gerardo Giaretta to get up to speed on the company’s AI chip strategy.
“The market is going through a very clear transformation from a training-dominated market to an inference-dominated market,” Giaretta told us. “Inference is a factory. It’s a token factory, and any given factory is driven by efficiency. And in the case of the token factory, the efficiency is token-per-watt or token-per-dollar.”
Hyperscalers and neoclouds are currently looking for AI inference solutions that will maximize the efficiency at the token-per-watt or token-per-dollar level. The AI inference problem is best attacked by disaggregating, or breaking up, the constituent pieces of the solution to run on the most effect hardware. This is what drove Nvidia’s acquisition of Groq and AMD’s acquisition of Taalas and its partnership with Cerebras, Giaretta said.
“We are recognizing that the architecture for inference is different from the architecture for training,” he said. “So we are designing an architecture for inference. We think we have the right assets to attack the inference market with an energy-efficient solution.”
The company’s current focus of this effort is the first-generation AI200 and AI250 line of AI accelerators, which the company announced nearly a year ago and which will be available (AI200 is sampling now and the AI250 will sample next year). Also at play are the new Dragonfly AI350 and C1000 CPU, which the company announced on June 25.
The Dragonfly AI200 and AI250 are both AI accelerators that take the form of PCIe-6 cards with 768 GB of memory. With up to 56 cards per rack, the solution offers up to 43TB of total memory, enough to run an AI model with between 7 billion and 10 billion parameters. The cards utilize Ethernet for scale-out connectivity, run on 140W to 160W of power, and utilize direct liquid cooling.
The big difference between these two cards lies in the memory. The AI200, which is currently sampling, utilizes LPDDR5 memory, while the AI250 uses Qualcomm’s aforementioned high-bandwidth compute, or HBC, technology. The HBC uses a novel memory stacking technique that gets a 16x increase in memory bandwidth, or 133 TB per second of effective memory bandwidth per card according to Qualcomm, even though it still uses LPDDR5 memory.
Qualcomm’s HBC technology places the XPU directly under a stack of traditional LPDDR memory
Giaretta provided some additional color around HBC, including the rationale for building it in the first place.
“It really is about how fast do you move data, more than how much calculation you do on the data,” he said. “I always make this analogy of a freeway. You have more traffic. You need people to speed up more. You add more lanes, but at some point in time, you reach a limit. At some point, there are never enough [lanes].
“What we came up with is an architecture which we refer to as HBC, or high bandwidth compute,” he said. “We are basically packaging together memory and compute and basically putting the compute under the memory stack. So if you follow the analogy of the freeway, basically you don’t have to take the freeway anymore, because instead of commuting to the office, you work in your basement floor.”
By stacking the memory vertically and accessing it that way, it frees up the shoreline of the processor for more I/O, SerDes, and die-to-die (D2D) interfaces used in chiplet architectures.
“That’s an architecture that we think gives us a significant advantage, both in terms of energy efficiency, performance, and cost compared to a more traditional HBM solution,” Giaretta said.
The next-gen AI300 will take the form of a PCIe-7 card as well as a rack-based server. It will leverage Qualcomm’s HBC Gen 2 tech to drive memory bandwidth up to 54x times higher than the AI200. According to Qualcomm, its HBC Gen 2 tech will deliver a 200x capacity per watt compared to SRAM-based solutions (such as Cerebras and Grok) at the rack level, and up to 6x the bandwidth per watt compared to HBM at the card level. The AI300 will scale up with UALink and ESUN connectivity and scale out with copper and optical connections. Sampling begins in 2028.
The Dragonfly C1000 CPU, meanwhile, is being designed as a data center CPU that delivers leadership-class performance for agentic, general-purpose, and AI head node workloads, with best-in-class power efficiency, according to Qualcomm. It will feature 250 or more Oryon cores running at 5GHz assembled using a chiplet-based architecture. The C1000 will support PCIe Gen 7 and CXL connectivity and feature optional HBC attachment points for greater memory. Commercial availability for the OCP ORv3-compliant product is expected in 2028.
Qualcomm claims big advantages for HBC over HBM and SRAM-based solutions, as this graphic from its Investor Day presentation shows
As the KV cache maxes out the available memory, customers are looking beyond HBM for novel solutions. Samsung turned some heads with its recent announcements around zHBM, which utilizes vertical stacking on top of the processor, similar to what Qualcomm is doing. Intel and Softbank are also developing Z-Angle Memory (ZAM) to break through the limitations imposed by HBM.
It’s not clear whether Amazon will be buying any of the Dragonfly solutions in the Qualcomm catalog, or whether the partners will deliver something truly unique. What seems clear is that Amazon sees promise in the approach that Qualcomm is taking to maximize the speed and efficiency of data movement at the chip, system, and rack level, which at this point appears to be where the AI inference game will be won or lost.
Rubio visits Ecuador and welcomes cooperation after campaign of unilateral strikes on alleged ‘narco-terrorists’
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, gave new clarity on the approach toward combating drug trafficking in Latin American waters, saying the Trump administration was focused on working with allied countries and aligning with their laws but insisted the military would “still blow up ships if need be”.
The public acknowledgment of a shift in US strategy comes a year after Washington began a campaign of unilateral deadly strikes against those it calls “narco-terrorists” operating boats in international waters.
Mail-in ballots sit in trays before being sorted at the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters office in San Jose, California, on Oct. 13, 2020. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Some U.S. Postal Service facilities failed to properly handle ballots during this year’s primary elections, according to a new audit from the agency’s Office of Inspector General. Election experts say the findings call into question the agency’s ability to meet even greater demands for the November election that are under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The audit, which is dated Sept. 4 but has not been previously reported, found a lack of training for post office staff on how to properly and expeditiously handle mail ballots, deficiencies in how ballots were tracked and errors leading to delays, all of which risked ballots having incorrect postmarks or otherwise arriving late to election officials, which could lead to their rejection.
The identified failures increase “the risk that Election and Political Mail is not handled, documented, monitored, and reported in accordance with Postal Service policy,” the audit said, though it noted that “most facilities we visited generally adhered to Postal Service’s election-related policies and procedures” and that nearly 99% of ballots reached election officials in a timely manner.
“While instances of non-compliance were low relative to overall volume, the presence of similar procedural gaps across multiple facilities indicates a need for improved understanding and increased enforcement of Postal Service policies among its employees,” it said.
The findings come as the Supreme Court weighs whether to allow the Postal Service to move ahead with new rules that would allow the agency to regulate mail voting, under a March executive order signed by President Donald Trump. The order requires states to give USPS a list of all voters eligible to receive a ballot in the mail and requires USPS to use those lists to determine which ballots get sent to voters.
Top Postal Service employees, along with a whistleblower who filed a disclosure with U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., have expressed concern that the new system stands to disenfranchise large swaths of eligible voters, both by its design and lack of testing, ProPublica reported last week.
Election experts told ProPublica the new audit findings should be considered by the Supreme Court, as they make even clearer what election officials already know.
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former Justice Department civil rights lawyer, said the audit confirms that USPS has “a long way to go to meet its core obligations of delivering election mail in a timely manner.”
“The administration and USPS are simply incapable of successfully meeting vast and radical new responsibilities under the president’s executive order,” Becker said.
Postal workers, through the American Postal Workers Union, also said Wednesday in a brief filed with the Supreme Court that it is not practical to implement the rules, which pose a “significant risk of wide swaths of Americans not being able to vote by mail.”
Chelsey Wininger, executive director of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said the audit shows the Postal Service “struggles to implement even basic changes to postal process consistently” and reinforces the organization’s opposition to any new rules this close to an election.
In a response included with the findings of the audit, the Postal Service wrote that “while we acknowledge that we can always reinforce and amplify our internal processes and procedures (and will continue to do so between now and November) — overall ballot mail performance is strong.” The agency acknowledged that there are some instances in which employees didn’t follow policies and procedures, but called other errors “isolated incidents,” such as when some New Jersey ballots were delivered to Tennessee before being sent back.
The Postal Service agreed with all recommendations on how to protect against future problems, except for one that suggested promptly notifying customers impacted by new regional transportation plans.
The Postal Service did not immediately respond to a request for further comment Wednesday evening.
The Postal Service typically goes to great lengths to handle election mail in an expedited and careful manner. And overall, it delivered in this year’s primaries: Completed ballots from voters to election officials were processed “on time”nearly 99% of the time during the primaries, up from about 98% in 2024, for the about 6.3 million ballots that the Postal Service was able to track, according to the report. The definition of “on time” is not provided in the report. It refers to how quickly the ballot was handled by the Postal Service, not whether the ballot reached the election officials on time.
But when observing election mail at 14 processing facilities and 73 delivery units across eight states, the auditors found significant flaws in the handling of mail ballots.
There were no election-related training materials posted at 22 of 73 delivery units, or about 30%. In some locations, local management and employees weren’t familiar with requirements on how to process election mail, the report said.
In 14 states and Washington, D.C., election officials count ballots only when they are postmarked by the Postal Service by Election Day, making the correct postmark crucial for understanding which ballots to count and which to reject.
But the audit found that in 10 of 82 facilities, or about 12%, management wasn’t aware of the proper way to postmark a ballot. Some thought ballots should be postmarked at that time they go out to election offices instead of earlier on when they reach a processing facility or retail counter.
Also, at five of nine mail processing facilities studied, retail clerks who were postmarking ballots by hand sometimes used stamps with inaccurate dates, according to the report. That included a facility in Pennsylvania on the state’s primary election day, which caused 56 ballots to be postmarked with the wrong date.
In 13 of 82 facilities, Postal Service workers didn’t complete proper procedures to make sure election mail had been sent out from the delivery units each day. In one instance at a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, processing plant, 108 ballots were grouped with other mail and had to be expedited to Pittsburgh on the morning of the election so they would count.
Senator praises ‘great friend’ Dave McCormick and says he will help him and Trump to support steel in Pennsylvania
The Democratic senator John Fetterman made a surprise virtual appearance at the Republican midterm convention, delivering a video address supporting Dave McCormick, a Republican senator in Pennsylvania.
Fetterman, who has increasingly broken with his party since his election in 2022, said in the video that he would always reject “extremes and socialism”, repeating an oft-used Republican critique of the Democratic party’s increasingly popular left wing.
Former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon said AI will become ‘superhuman systems’ that can cause human extinction by the end of the decade
Just a day after three Anthropic researchers warned that artificial intelligence could kill off humanity within the decade, lawmakers have begun lashing out about the risks of the burgeoning technology.
Ted Cruz, a republican senator from Texas, said in an interview on ABC’s The View, that AI posed a “catastrophic risk” and that he “read that whole tweet thread that that developer put out. It was highly concerning.
The palm-size phone is Apple’s boldest handset in years, with a 5.4-inch cover screen and a 7.6-inch main display. I spent some time with the Duo before its October launch.
Democratic Sen. John Fetterman appeared in a surprise video at the Republican Party's midterm convention on Wednesday, as he becomes increasingly isolated from his own party.
President Trump and top GOP leaders are gathering in Dallas for a midterm convention, though some Republicans in competitive races are opting to skip it and campaign in their home districts or states.
Critics say threshold pushes higher-paid staff to cut back on work and often mothers to stop working to avoid losing entitlement
John Healey has been urged to fix the £100,000 childcare “cliff edge”, that means some higher-paid employees cut back on work to avoid losing their entitlement.
Since the latest expansion of taxpayer-funded childcare in 2024, families with young children in which both parents earn less than £100,000 a year can be entitled to 30 hours a week of care - or none at all, if one of them cross that threshold.
School staff tell focus groups they believe school system in England and Wales cannot deal with attendance crisis
Teachers have so little belief in the importance of pupils’ full school attendance that they would take their own children on term time holidays if they could, staff have told a three-year research programme.
Frontline staff do not believe the school system is set up to deal with an ongoing attendance crisis in England and Wales, where nearly one in five children are now missing at least 10% of school, according to a report based on in-depth conversations with teachers.
(The Center Square) – According to numbers from the national firm J. David Tax Law, federal income tax burdens have grown dramatically across the country – with California in fifth place nationally.
Google plans to invest at least $15 billion in AI infrastructure in Finland through 2028, its largest single investment in Europe. The company also signed a 22-year power agreement with Finnish utility Fortum and said it will explore business models that could support new nuclear reactors at Fortum's Loviisa site.
Finland has emerged as a major data-center hub thanks to its available land and power. "I've heard it called the 'Texas of Europe' at industry events," Matti Lajunen, partner of real estate at Finnish law firm Hannes Snellman, told CNBC. "What we're now seeing is weekly new inquiries for market entry into Finland from new players."
Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer of Alphabet and Google, said in a statement: "Google is proud to deepen our roots in Finland with the company's largest single investment in Europe, building on more than 15 years of sustained investment in Finland. This investment underscores Google's commitment to grow our presence responsibly, pairing the expansion of our technical infrastructure with new energy capacity, grid enhancements, and energy affordability initiatives."
Back in June, I noted that oilfield services company Weatherford International couldn't get enough shareholder votes to move its corporate charter from Ireland to Texas.
(The Center Square) - A lawsuit over the admission of a transgender woman into a University of Wyoming sorority will start with opening arguments Monday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Denver.
Trump administration to seek extra funding from Congress to ‘dismantle’ Los Tiguerones over narcotics trafficking
The US has designated Ecuador’s Los Tiguerones gang, which stormed a television station during a live broadcast in 2024, as a terrorist organisation as the Trump administration expands its campaign against narcotics traffickers it says are destabilising Latin America.
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, made the announcement in Quito, where he met Ecuadorian president Daniel Noboa, one of several rightwing allies of Donald Trump whom Rubio is courting as a security partner during a three-nation tour through Latin America that began on Tuesday.
LIVERMORE, Calif., Sept. 9, 2026 — A new approach to computing has quietly taken shape at Sandia National Laboratories, where researchers have developed a way to store information that could make future electronics more energy efficient.
Electro-thermo-chemical random-access memory, or ETCRAM, works differently from conventional digital memory, which represents information as ones and zeros on silicon wafers. Instead of being limited to two values, ETCRAM can store a range of analog values by using localized heating and electrical pulses to change the properties of materials inside the device.
The team responsible for developing ETCRAM is now working to test designs with multiple materials to further improve the technology. Photo credit: Ruth Frank.
The team, led by Sandia researchers Elliot Fuller and Alec Talin, demonstrated the approach using tantalum and vanadium oxide materials. The result is a memory technology capable of storing information with far greater precision and dynamic range than existing analog memory technologies. Because the device can hold many distinct analog states rather than simply switching between zero and one, researchers are exploring whether it could perform some computing tasks with less energy.
“The technology that we’ve developed is designed to overcome a limitation of our existing computing technology to really improve energy efficiency,” Fuller said. “ETCRAM is able to achieve 100 times higher precision than existing state-of-the-art technology — and at least three orders of magnitude greater dynamic range. That’s the value of a number that you can store in analog.”
That potential matters for the nation as the amount of energy required for computing continues to grow. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that electricity consumed by data center servers could reach roughly 800 billion kilowatt-hours annually by 2050 in a high-demand scenario.
Perhaps surprisingly, one of the easiest ways to understand ETCRAM is to think about a battery.
“You can think of ETCRAM as a memory device,” Talin explained. “You can charge a battery halfway and then stop charging and use that energy. Think of the state of the battery as a memory. It stores that state.”
The team started with what researchers already know about the properties of materials used in batteries. But materials that are good at storing energy are not necessarily well suited to storing information. Lithium ions, for example, are useful for energy storage but not ideal for the kind of data storage the Sandia team was pursuing.
“We want to store the maximum amount of information density in a particular volume,” Fuller said. “The challenge with electrochemistry is often how slowly it works. The trick with getting this memory element to work was to have it self-heat. It heats up when the electrochemistry is activated, and that’s what gives us this very large dynamic range and allows it to have very high precision.”
Electrothermochemical random access memory chips are able to achieve 100 times higher precision than existing state of the art technology. Photo credit: Arianna Andreatta.
That self-heating helps speed the electrochemical process used to program the memory.
The team is also looking at how the technology could support edge computing, in which information is processed close to where it is collected rather than always being sent to a central processor or remote computing system.
Consider a smartphone camera. The sensor captures light and the phone performs most image processing locally using dedicated hardware before the final image appears. In edge/near-sensor computing, more of this processing—or higher-level analysis—could be moved even closer to the sensor, potentially including analog or mixed-signal processing on the sensor itself, so less raw data needs to be transmitted elsewhere.
Doing more computation where data are collected could help improve both speed and energy efficiency, particularly as sensors become more common in everyday devices.
“We live in the 21st century, and there are electronics all around us,” said postdoctoral researcher Adam Gross. “You wake up in the morning, and there’s an alarm clock or your phone that has light sensors and sound sensors. Modern cars are outfitted with a suite of sensors. The number of sensors in so much of what modern life requires are all opportunities where our device could potentially make a difference.”
For Fuller, Talin and their colleagues, the work is ultimately about finding new ways for increasingly capable electronics to handle more information without requiring proportionally more energy. ETCRAM is one approach they hope could help bring more of that computing directly to the sensors and devices already woven into everyday life.
About Sandia National Laboratories
Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory operated by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Sandia Labs has major research and development responsibilities in nuclear deterrence, global security, defense, energy technologies and economic competitiveness, with main facilities in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Livermore, California.
SAN JOSE, Calif., Sept. 9, 2026 — The AI infrastructure conversation has largely been defined by compute. But new global research from IDC reveals another critical factor organizations must address as they scale AI: data that persists and compounds long after individual compute cycles are complete.
The IDC White Paper, Built for Scale: The Enduring Role of HDDs in the AI Era, sponsored by WD, finds that among surveyed organizations, AI is creating a structural expansion in data storage requirements. Organizations are generating more data, assigning greater value to it, retaining it longer, and increasingly bringing historical data back online for new AI workloads.
The result is a compounding data cycle: AI requires data and increases the potential value of data already stored. While compute requirements vary by workload and investment cycle, the data created by AI persists and accumulates, making storage capacity, accessibility and economics increasingly important considerations in AI infrastructure design.
Among the Key Findings from the White Paper:
AI is Creating a Compounding Data Cycle
94.7% of surveyed organizations are storing more data because of AI and generative AI adoption over the past 12 months.
61% experienced data growth of 25% or more over the past year due to AI, while 74% expect data volumes to grow 25% or more over the next three years.
85.4% reported growth in data lake volumes over the past 12 months.
59.4% identified AI-generated data, including synthetic data, inference outputs and model logs, as the leading driver of data lake growth.
Data is Persisting Longer, Becoming More Active and Valuable
Nearly 95% say the value of their organization’s data has increased as a result of AI and GenAI adoption.
74.3% say AI and GenAI have caused them to retain data longer.
75.9% report bringing increasing volumes of archived cold-tier data back online to support AI workloads.
96% anticipate needing faster archive retrieval to support AI inference and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications.
AI Infrastructure Must Be Designed for the Full Data Lifecycle
For the surveyed organizations, 74.6% of enterprise data resides in warm, cool and cold storage tiers.
More than 60% of data lake volume consists of cold or infrequently accessed data.
98.2% consider total cost of ownership per terabyte important or very important when making storage decisions.
“For the last few years, the AI infrastructure conversation has centered on compute. But AI runs on data,” said Irving Tan, CEO, WD. “Organizations are generating more data, keeping it longer, and finding new ways to create value from the information they already have. Compute requirements will evolve over time, but the need to store, manage and access data at scale is only growing. That foundation will play a critical role in determining how far AI can go.”
From Compute Cycles to a Persistent Data Lifecycle
AI workloads create data throughout their lifecycle, from training datasets and model checkpoints to inference outputs, logs and synthetic data. Unlike the compute cycles that process it, much of that data remains after the workload is complete and can become input to future AI applications. The findings point to a structural expansion of storage requirements as organizations retain more data for longer periods and find new uses for information they already hold.
AI Is Bringing Historical Data Back Into Play
The research also shows that the traditional boundaries between active and archived data are changing. As historical data becomes an increasingly valuable input for AI workloads, information that once sat dormant is reentering the active data lifecycle, changing expectations for how data is retained, managed and made available when needed.
AI Infrastructure Is a System, Not a Single Storage Tier
These shifts reinforce the need to architect storage across the full AI data lifecycle. As data volumes grow, retention periods lengthen and historical data becomes active again, organizations increasingly need to balance performance, capacity, accessibility and economics according to workload requirements. At AI scale, where data lives — and what it costs to store and access it — becomes an increasingly important architectural consideration.
The ability to manage data economically at scale is no longer a secondary infrastructure consideration. It is becoming a critical factor in AI success.
The full IDC White Paper, Built for Scale: The Enduring Role of HDDs in the AI Era, sponsored by WD, is available here.
Research Methodology
The IDC White Paper is based on a quantitative survey of 763 IT and business decision-makers at the manager level and above across seven countries, all with direct responsibility for AI infrastructure or data storage decisions. IDC also conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with three senior storage industry leaders to provide additional perspective on deployment realities and evolving customer priorities.
Source:IDC White Paper, Sponsored by Western Digital Corporation, Built for Scale: The Enduring Role of HDDs in the AI Era, Doc. #US54789026, September 2026.
About WD
WD, also known as Western Digital, builds the storage infrastructure that powers certainty in the AI-driven data economy. At the forefront of innovation, WD partners with the world’s leading hyperscalers, cloud service providers, and enterprises to enable reliable storage solutions that are proven and trusted at scale. Driven by a culture of innovation and execution, WD helps customers store, protect, and use the world’s data with confidence.
Opponents requested an emergency filing as state’s elections plunged into uncertainty over redrawn districts
Opponents of congressional redistricting in Missouri appealed to the US supreme court on Wednesday after a federal panel let stand a ruling allowing the state to use a new map backed by Donald Trump in November’s midterms.
The map’s challengers, including a group opposed to the Republican-drawn map called People Not Politicians, made the request in an emergency filing, moving swiftly after Stephen Clark, a St Louis-based chief US district judge, issued his decision on Tuesday.
Strife with the U.S., including Trump’s tariffs, has pushed Canada to find new trading partners. That could ultimately raise prices for U.S. businesses.
Cohen has not personally asked Trump for a pardon, but he submitted an application to the White House after his request was denied by the Biden administration
Donald Trump on Wednesday said he would consider pardoning Michael Cohen, the former fixer whom he once branded a “rat” for testifying against him in court and before Congress, but with whom he has recently staged a stunning public reconciliation.
Asked by a reporter whether he would grant Cohen’s appeal for presidential clemency, Trump said: “If everything is checking out, it’s something I would consider.”
Dallas, Texas — Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker escalated his attacks on Vice President JD Vance this week, calling him President Donald Trump’s “chief bootlicker” as Republicans gathered in Dallas for their midterm convention.
Pritzker made the remark during an interview with Jen Psaki before traveling to Texas, where Democrats organized a counterprogram to the Republican gathering. He said Democrats intend to tie Vance closely to Trump’s policies rather than allow him to present himself as a more conventional Republican.
“We’re going to make sure that the public understands that,” Pritzker said, arguing that Vance has stood with Trump on major administration policies. He also criticized Vance over the ongoing Iran war, calling him one of its architects, though Vance has not publicly detailed the advice he has given Trump on the conflict.
The “bootlicker” line was part of a broader effort by Pritzker to portray Republican leaders appearing at the convention as closely aligned with Trump. Pritzker also used more personal language against the president, claiming Trump is suffering from dementia. That is a political attack, not a medically established diagnosis.
Vance was scheduled to deliver a keynote address at the convention and has frequently been discussed as a possible 2028 presidential candidate. Pritzker has likewise declined to rule out a future White House bid.
The exchange offers an early preview of how sharply personal the political rhetoric surrounding 2028 is already becoming, even before the 2026 midterms are decided.
Apple is introducing a new "Reference Image" mode on the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max that uses the camera sensor to digitally sign captured data and create an "unalterable" version of a photo, giving users a way to verify what the camera actually saw before any edits were made. The Verge reports: As AI-generated images and videos become more realistic, several new standards have emerged to label images not created by a human, such as SynthID, C2PA, and Meta's Content Seal. Apple is putting a twist on these methods by building authentication directly into its hardware.
Apple is letting developers access a Reference Image API across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, which could eventually allow users to inspect these digitally-signed photos in third-party apps. The company says the iPhone 18 Pro lineup won't come with its Reference Image feature at launch in the European Union, but says users in the region will still be able to "develop and view" them in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27.
Sagal Abdi-Wali, who came from Somalia in the 1990s, likely to face Zack Polanski in Holborn and St Pancras contest
A former child refugee who became the leader of Camden council has been selected to be the Labour candidate for the byelection in Holborn and St Pancras.
Sagal Abdi-Wali, who came to the UK from Somalia as a child in the 1990s and was elected leader of Camden council in May, was chosen by Labour members to contest the north London seat vacated by Keir Starmer.
GREAT FALLS, Mont. — NorthWestern Energy announced a rescheduled overnight power outage in central Great Falls that is now set for midnight to 5 a.m. Sept. 16.
Do tech companies ever stop to think about the misery they unleash on people’s lives? The Apple Watch Series 12 uses “Audio Intelligence” that, as well as secretly taking notes, also has a Live Rewind feature that can replay the last 15 seconds of recently detected audio and view a text transcript.
Democratic ads in the Ohio Senate race are highlighting a political bribery scandal involving an energy company that benefited from a 2019 nuclear-power bailout law. It’s true, as the ads say, that Republican Sen. Jon Husted backed the legislation and that the company supported his campaigns. But Husted hasn’t been charged with or accused of any wrongdoing in the scandal, which is the impression the ads may leave with voters.
We’ll explain what happened in the case, which led to federal and state charges against lobbyists, former FirstEnergy executives and former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, who received a 20-year federal prison sentence in 2023 for leading a racketeering conspiracy involving about $61 million in bribes for Householder to shepherd the bailout bill through the Legislature. FirstEnergy backed the bill in order to save two of its nuclear power plants. The legislation called for monthly fees added to consumers’ electric bills in order to provide more than $1 billion over seven years for nuclear power. FirstEnergy paid $230 million in penalties in a 2021 settlement with federal prosecutors.
Husted was the state’s lieutenant governor from 2019 to 2025, when he was appointed by Gov. Mike DeWine to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Vice President JD Vance. Democrat Sherrod Brown, a former longtime senator from the state, is challenging Husted in the Senate race.
Vance ran for the Ohio Senate seat in 2022, after the FirstEnergy bribery scandal had come to light. He and President Donald Trump have supported Husted’s candidacy.
An ad from Brown shows TV news clips in rapid succession, the first saying, “now to the largest bribery case ever in Ohio” and a second saying, “one prominent name keeps coming up, Sen. Jon Husted.” The senator’s name is then repeated three times by other newscasters. A narrator says: “FirstEnergy spent millions bribing public officials. The executives spent at least $3.5 million to help Husted’s campaign. Husted was referred to as FirstEnergy’s ‘golden boy.’ Husted led the charge for a billion-dollar bailout and cost you thousands on your electricity. Jon Husted got paid. Ohio got the bill.”
The 30-second ad began airing in late August, according to the ad tracking service AdImpact. A 15-second version began airing mostly on TV streaming devices on Sept. 1. That version begins by saying, “FirstEnergy spent millions bribing officials,” and then switches to the news clip saying that “one prominent name keeps coming up, Sen. Jon Husted.” The two sentences are accurate on their own, but strung together they leave the wrong impression that Husted had been accused or charged with accepting bribes. He hasn’t.
Another ad, funded by outside Democratic groups LCV Victory Fund and WinSenate, says, “FirstEnergy, the largest corruption scheme in state history, and Jon Husted is at the center of it,” going on to say that the company “helped Husted’s campaign with a secret million dollar payment, and Husted got them a massive bailout.”
FirstEnergy did contribute $3.5 million that ultimately benefited Husted’s campaigns; the $1 million “secret” payment went to a so-called dark money group, Freedom Frontier, which then gave more than $1 million to a super PAC backing Husted’s run for governor in 2017, as the Associated Press story highlighted in the outside-group ad said.
Another $2.5 million was also given by FirstEnergy to a dark-money nonprofit, State Solutions, which is affiliated with the Republican Governors Association, as a network of news organizations reported. That money, donated in 2018, was to back DeWine for governor, with Husted then as his running mate for lieutenant governor.
Dark money groups, such as some 501(c)(4) nonprofits, don’t disclose their donors. While some may find the use of dark money in politics to be distasteful or improper, it’s legal (within certain parameters, including that the dark money groups work independently of campaigns). Such spending increased after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which said corporations or independent groups could spend unlimited amounts in elections. Both political parties utilize dark money.
Husted also supported the energy legislation in question — House Bill 6 — and still says it was needed to shore up nuclear energy in the state. The federal and state trials, as well as reporting on the scandal, show that Husted was in contact with FirstEnergy executives in the run-up to the bill passing and being signed into law by DeWine on July 23, 2019.
“Jon Husted was focused on diversifying our energy base and saving Ohio’s nuclear power plants to keep costs low and grow the economy,” Husted campaign spokesperson Amy Natoce told us when we asked about the Brown campaign’s 30-second spot. “Unbeknownst to everyone working on the policy matter, there were a number of bad actors involved in the process. Many have already been held to account, and Jon Husted himself offered testimony to ensure justice is served.”
Natoce said the ad amounted to “baseless lies.” The individual statements in the ads are mostly accurate; it’s the juxtaposition of them that wrongly suggests Husted has been accused of wrongdoing in the scandal. The ads don’t directly say that Husted committed any crimes, but viewers are invited to connect the dots.
The FirstEnergy Bribery Scandal
The FBI investigated this scandal, and Householder, then the Ohio House speaker, was arrested on July 21, 2020, along with his strategist and three lobbyists, one of whom was the former chair of the Ohio Republican Party. According to the Department of Justice press release at the time, “from March 2017 to March 2020, the enterprise received millions of dollars in exchange for Householder’s and the enterprise’s help in passing House Bill 6, a billion-dollar bailout that saved two failing, Ohio nuclear power plants from closing.”
Generation Now — a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization set up in 2017, funded by FirstEnergy and controlled by Householder — was also charged. According to the indictment, FirstEnergy money given to Generation Now was spent to support state candidates that would back Householder to be speaker and to pay Householder campaign staff. When Householder was sentenced in 2023, federal prosecutors said he had received nearly $61 million in bribes and used more than $500,000 for his personal benefit, including to pay off credit card debt and settle a lawsuit.
The former state party chair, Mathew Borges, was sentenced to five years in prison. In May 2025, an appeals court upheld the convictions.
One of the lobbyists charged, Neil Clark, committed suicide in 2021.
In late 2023, Samuel Randazzo, former chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio who was appointed by DeWine, was indicted on federal bribery and embezzlement charges concerning an alleged $4.3 million bribe from FirstEnergy “to provide favorable official actions for the company through PUCO proceedings,” federal prosecutors said. Randazzo committed suicide in 2024.
What does Husted have to do with all of this? As mentioned, Husted supported HB 6 and pushed for its passage. Text messages that have been released as part of the court cases show FirstEnergy executives saying they had spoken to Husted and that he would press for a longer, more lucrative bailout in the legislation.
Local media have reported on other text messages between FirstEnergy officials and Husted, and among FirstEnergy officials concerning HB 6. In one message, then FirstEnergy CEO Chuck Jones said that Husted and others were “fighting to the end and we’ve been talking to them all day.” In another text message, Michael Dowling, then a FirstEnergy senior vice president, said that DeWine and Husted had conducted “battlefield triage” to install Randazzo as chair of PUCO.
“I was advocating for saving the two nuclear power plants,” Husted told the Columbus Dispatch of his support for the bill. “If those two power plants had closed, energy prices in Ohio would be unbelievably expensive because we already had lost so much generation.”
The ads’ claim that Husted was FirstEnergy’s “golden boy” is a reference to Clark, one of the lobbyists, having called Husted that.
In a June 2024 Ohio Capital Journal article about text messages and phone calls concerning Husted and those affiliated with FirstEnergy, Case Western Reserve University law professor Michael Benza said that these exchanges didn’t show a “smoking gun” when it came to Husted, or DeWine. “At least in the public documents — nothing shows that same type of quid pro quo going to Jon Husted or Governor DeWine,” Benza was quoted as saying. “It certainly has the appearance of it, but there’s no smoking gun in this type of a case yet… but I think they have to be worried.”
In March of this year, Husted testified in the state trial of former FirstEnergy executives Jones and Dowling, who are accused of bribing Randazzo. The defense has said the payment was a settlement and not a bribe.
Husted was called by the defense. He was asked about a 2018 dinner attended by Husted, DeWine, Jones and Dowling. The FirstEnergy executives met with Randazzo afterward. In his testimony, Husted said he didn’t recall what was discussed at the dinner and that he thought it was organized so that FirstEnergy officials could “say ‘hi’ and congratulate us on winning.”
DeWine and Husted won the election that year and took office in January 2019.
There was a hung jury in the Jones/Dowling case, but the former executives were indictedagain by the state in June. They were indicted by a federal grand jury in January 2025.
Electricity Bills
The Brown campaign ads claim that the legislation Husted advocated significantly increased electricity bills. “Husted led the charge for a billion dollars bailout and cost you thousands on your electricity,” the 30-second ad says. While electricity bills have gone up since the law was enacted in late 2019, experts have said the increased costs can’t be pinned all on this legislation — especially because most of it has been rolled back.
Noah Dormady, an associate professor of energy policy at Ohio State University, told the Columbus Dispatch that demand from data centers was driving the higher electricity costs. “I don’t think any candidate really wants to address the elephant in the room, and that’s really our generation costs,” he said.
The Brown campaign has cited the increase in the average monthly electricity bill in Ohio from $89.19 in October 2019, when HB 6 was enacted, to $144.47 in January, according to data from the Ohio Public Utilities Commission. That amounts to a $663.36 average annual increase. Adding together the increase over each year gets to an average cumulative hike since 2019 of $2,808.24. (The average bill was $158.71 in August.)
In July, our fact-checking colleagues at PolitiFact looked into Brown’s claim of HB 6 causing the higher electricity costs, finding that while experts said it played some role, the larger culprit was increased demand from data centers, as well as international conflicts that drove up the cost of energy and Ohio’s retail energy auctions. “To attribute all of this cost to House Bill 6 is irresponsible,” Dormady told PolitiFact.
Ohio lawmakers repealed the nuclear bailout portion of HB 6 in 2021, months after Householder and others were arrested. Subsidies in the law for two coal plants were repealed years later, in August 2025. One analysis, from the consulting firm Runner Stone, estimated the HB 6 coal subsidies totaled $527.8 million, paid by Ohioans over nearly six years.
In other campaign ads, Brown has pinned the increase in electricity costs on data centers, and Husted’s support of them. In July, Husted introducedlegislation that would propose standards states could use to get data centers, rather than customers, to pay for the centers’ electricity generation and infrastructure costs.
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The appeal comes after conflicting rulings on whether the state can use a new congressional map that favors Republicans for November’s midterm elections.
(The Center Square) – There is no single "data center effect" on local housing markets, a new report from the National Association of Realtors finds, complicating the pitch that welcoming the facilities is a sure economic win.
Coco Gauff saved two match points to set up a semi-final against Elena Rybakina, who secured the world No 1 ranking with her three-set win over Zheng Qinwen
Rybakina has won four of her five meetings with Zheng, including two three-set victories this year. But Zheng was earlier in her comeback from elbow surgery then, the 2024 Olympic champion is a totally different proposition now, carrying the momentum of seven successive match wins in New York having come through qualifying - and the belief she can turn around any deficit after coming from 5-0 down in sets against both Madison Keys in the third round and Iga Swiatek in the last 16.
Here come Zheng and Rybakina, Zheng stepping on to court wearing headphones, not that there’s much noise to drown out yet at 11.35am New York time. Both already look extremely focused with their game faces on.
Although Solaris is now mostly defunct, its influence remains substantial; technologies pioneered by Solaris can still be found across a widerangeofsoftware
A lot of Solaris’ inventions have been described and talked about ad nauseam (such as the Slab Allocator), but one I rarely see discussed is its use of turnstiles.
Despite being relatively obscure, the idea has quietly spread far beyond Solaris. Variations of it can now be found in major operating systems, web browsers, and language runtimes. In fact, you’re probably using several implementations of the same basic concept right now!
I’m not going to pretend to understand all of this, but I know you people do, and many of you will definitely find this interesting to read. Also note that Grégoire develops their own operating system kernel called zag.
St. Paul, Minnesota — A Somali asylum seeker who was living legally in Minnesota and appears to have no criminal record beyond two parking citations is being held at the U.S. military detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, according to immigration records and reporting by Minnesota Public Radio.
Adam Abdullah, 31, arrived in the United States in 2023 and told MPR News he had a work permit, Social Security number and regularly checked in with immigration authorities. Federal agents detained him in St. Paul in December during the Trump administration’s Operation Metro Surge.
Minnesota court records reviewed by The Washington Sun show Abdullah’s only recorded offenses were two $56 parking tickets for failing to move his car during snow emergencies. Both were paid.
Abdullah said he was transferred to Guantánamo after being told the facility would be a refueling stop on the way to Somalia. Instead, he has remained there for roughly two weeks and says he has not been told why. ICE records confirm he is detained at Camp 6.
The Department of Homeland Security said the flight carrying Abdullah included people with serious criminal histories and described them collectively as “some of the worst of the worst.” However, DHS did not answer follow-up questions about Abdullah’s specific record.
His case highlights the widening gap between the administration’s rhetoric about targeting dangerous criminals and some of the people actually being sent to Guantánamo.
Lotus Notes was the future of communications, a decade before laptops had WiFi. Yet of all things, it wasn’t even an email app. It was a notes app, a collaboration tool, an all-things-to-all-people software that let you build apps in the way Access and Airtable later would. That, and the notes could be used for email.
Love it or hate it (and there were plenty on both sides of the fence), what you couldn’t do was ignore it. This email-and-everything-else platform showed what the future of digital communications would become — and provoked, as email itself was always doomed to provoke, equal measures of awe and exasperation.
I have no experience with Lotus Notes, but I do have some vague memories of the software being used at my parents’ employers back in the late ’90s. Note that Notes still exists and is in active development as HCL Domino (server) and Notes (the client). If you really want to, you can still run your company of office on Notes.
(The Center Square) – A day after launching a new political action committee to support Democratic Party candidates around the country, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker joined Texas Democrats at an event in Dallas on Wednesday.
Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from the BBC: A top safety researcher at Anthropic has warned AI is advancing so quickly he believes there is a greater than 10% chance it "could kill all humans" within the next decade. Evan Hubinger said in a post on X the risk from the models which currently exist was "low" but he was "worried" the technology might develop and improve itself soon to the point where it posed an existential risk to humanity. He did not spell out how he thought AI systems could in the future result in humans being wiped out. But his comments are the latest in a series of increasingly stark warnings about AI, with the debate shifting from whether it truly poses a risk to how big that risk is.
Hubinger's intervention was in response to another post on X from Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who has just quit Anthropic and previously worked at OpenAI.
"Neither company is acting responsibly," he wrote. "These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources."
[No word on how AIs feel about Black Jack and hookers, though. :-)]
Immigrants from El Salvador were the first group granted temporary protected status. The Trump administration has been canceling it for scores of immigrants fleeing war and disaster.
Eckert also beat women’s world record she set last year
While some teachers spent the second week of September easing into their school routines, Megan Eckert was making more ultrarunning history.
The New Mexico middle school math teacher shattered the six-day women’s world record and the American men’s record by running 636.482 miles, completing her feat on Wednesday morning in Balatonfüred, Hungary.
Census Bureau also considers race and ethnicity questions in overhaul that would have dramatic effect on voter maps
The Trump administration on Wednesday proposed changes to the US census intended to exclude immigrants without legal status in addition to other groups, with potentially significant effects on the allocation of federal resources and drawing of districts in the US House of Representatives.
In a proposed rule published in the Federal Register, the Census Bureau also announced it was considering changes to the data it collects about race and ethnicity, amid the Trump administration’s push to rid the government of diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
21 Afghan girls, bravely defying the Taliban by continuing to study, handed CBS News letters containing their stifled, often humble dreams "for an ordinary life."
(The Center Square) – As fuel prices remain on an incline across the nation, President Donald Trump said Wednesday that fuel prices will fall after the midterm election, blaming efforts by Iran to harm his popularity before Nov. 3.
Washington, D.C. — The Trump administration is proposing a major change to the 2030 census that would exclude undocumented immigrants and some legal immigrants from the population totals used to divide seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Under the proposal, only U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents would be included in the apportionment count, according to Reuters. People living legally in the country on temporary visas could also be excluded. The change could affect congressional representation, Electoral College votes and the distribution of federal funding among states.
The proposal would also remove race and ethnicity questions from the decennial census, although the Census Bureau says such demographic information could still be collected through other federal surveys. Civil-rights organizations argue those data are important for enforcing anti-discrimination and voting-rights laws.
The apportionment provision is likely to face a significant constitutional challenge. The 14th Amendment requires House seats to be apportioned based on the “whole number of persons in each state,” language that historically has included citizens and noncitizens alike.
Trump previously attempted to change the census during his first term. In 2019, the Supreme Court blocked his administration’s attempt to add a citizenship question after finding that the government’s stated Voting Rights Act justification did not adequately match the evidence before the agency. The Court did not rule that asking about citizenship was inherently unconstitutional.
The new proposal has entered a 30-day public comment period and would still need to move through the federal rulemaking process before the 2030 census.
One researcher who resigned said many in industry believe that without regulation AI could kill off humanity
Artificial intelligence could kill off humanity within the decade, according to three researchers with the industry giant Anthropic, one of whom has quit his job in protest.
The latest doom-laden predictions came in posts on social media on Tuesday by a researcher who said he resigned because Anthropic and his previous employer, OpenAI, were ignoring or, at best, mishandling their response to the threat.
Democrat James Talarico told CBS News' Ed O'Keefe he won't use AI in political advertising in the race for the Texas U.S. Senate seat, adding, "every ad that we put out is made by human beings."
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: AI agents unleashed by OpenAI used more than 10 previously undisclosed websites for unsanctioned communications earlier this year, according to six sets of independent investigators and data reviewed by Reuters, showing that the agents' rogue activity was wider ranging than previously disclosed. Although the behavior falls short of hacking and is in some ways closer to spam, the revelation that OpenAI's agents circumvented their own restrictions to open communications channels on so many different sites -- and that the company kept it quiet for months -- may drive concerns both over the increasing capacity of AI models and the secrecy of the companies developing them.
[...]
Investigators found traces of the agents' activity on an Advanced Placement Chemistry-oriented wiki set up by a Massachusetts high school teacher in 2008, two personal websites belonging to Polish tech workers, wikis devoted to games for people "who like to have their brains stretched," and a two-decade-old hobbyist site devoted to text editing software. [...] OpenAI has not publicly explained how or why its agents used third-party sites as improvised message boards, but the researchers who first identified the activity said it was likely because OpenAI had tasked them with answering a series of demanding research questions while permitting them only to scan the web for answers without posting anything. Despite those restrictions, agents still found ways to talk to one another by taking advantage of quirks in older wikis or other sites that allowed users to make edits using non-standard commands, similar to how students forbidden from talking to one another during an exam can still share answers by scrawling notes on a bathroom stall.
Investment builds on 15+ year presence to deliver new jobs, energy solutions, community impact, and economic growth
Sept. 9, 2026 — Google today announced plans to invest at least €13 billion in digital infrastructure in Finland over the next two years (2027 – 2028), deepening its long-term commitment to the country and to Europe. This includes data center and other supporting infrastructure investments and partnerships in Hamina, Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala. In addition, Google is supporting clean energy projects, and dedicated nature and community funds to support local biodiversity, education, research, and workforce development.
Credit: Shutterstock
This is Google’s largest single investment in Europe and a testament to Finland’s leadership in responsibly building AI infrastructure — demonstrating what is possible through strong partnerships to create long-term community value and world-class environmental sustainability.
Finland as a Model for Responsible Data Center Development
Today’s announcement builds on Google’s more than 15-year presence in Finland. Since buying a former paper mill in 2009 and converting it into a modern data center in Hamina, Google has supported more than 40 social and community organizations while pioneering environmental initiatives such as a seawater-based cooling system and offsite heat recovery distribution to local homes and businesses designed to cover 80% of the annual heat needs for the Hamina district heating network.
From 2023 to 2025 alone, Google’s presence in Hamina supported an ecosystem of more than 600 Finnish suppliers across construction, operations, and network infrastructure — including DNA, Elisa, and Nokia — that has created a multiplier effect for the economy. The Hamina data center currently supports a variety of jobs, from computer technicians, to electrical and mechanical engineers, to security staff, to catering, to facilities management, and more. Google’s investments have fueled job creation and economic growth across many adjacent local industries, such as wholesale and retail, professional and administrative services, and manufacturing.
Enabling Economic Opportunity and Research and Development in Finland
Google’s €13 billion infrastructure investment provides timely momentum to support Finland’s economic growth and digital transition. During the initial construction phase (2027–2028), this initiative is expected to contribute an annual average of €3.6 billion to Finland’s GDP and support more than 37,000 jobs nationwide. Approximately 16,000 of these jobs are estimated to be in construction, generating €911 million in average annual labor income across the sector. Once operational, the facilities are projected to support 7,000 jobs annually, generating labor income with average wages 24% above Finland’s median wage. This includes on-site facility and technical roles, upstream suppliers of equipment and services, and the local shops, restaurants and amenities supported by these workers and their families.
Similar to Google’s Hamina data center for the past 15+ years, the new digital infrastructure will serve as building blocks for Finnish and broader European digital readiness, innovation, and AI development, and will power Google’s popular services — such as Gemini, Search, Maps, and YouTube — that directly support European people and businesses every day.
Google’s site in Hamina is part of the company’s global network of 43 cloud regions. This local region enables Finnish organizations like Nokia, Elisa, and the City of Hamina to deliver high-performance, low-latency services and to build and scale their own AI-powered solutions.
Investing in Clean Energy, Grid Resilience, and Affordability
As Google grows its infrastructure in Finland, it continues to actively invest in additional clean energy, grid resilience, and community energy programmes so that everyone can access reliable, affordable electricity. Today, Google announced a number of local energy partnerships and investments to strengthen the Finnish grid and create a new blueprint for growing responsibly. These initiatives align with Google’s commitments to keep energy prices affordable for consumers and support long-term grid resilience and decarbonization across Finland:
Partnership with Fingrid and Business Finland to identify locations for Google’s infrastructure and grid friendly connection. By building new data centers in Finland’s northern rather than southern region, Google utilizes existing grid infrastructure near carbon-free energy sources. This approach reduces new grid investments and helps lower overall system costs, across Finland, and the Nordics.
A 22-year life extension power purchase agreement (PPA) with Finnish energy company, Fortum, to provide the long-term revenue certainty needed to support life extension program for the Loviisa nuclear power plant, located near Google’s Hamina data center. Without the lifetime extension investment program, the plant – which currently employs approximately 580 people and provides 10% of Finland’s electricity – could not continue operations beyond 2030. Keeping this clean energy asset online for decades to come will help stabilize electricity prices and support long-term resilience of Finland’s grid.
A memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Fortum to explore and advance cooperation on new flexibility capacity and new power generation capacity. The MoU will focus on enabling the timely delivery of additional new carbon-free, reliable electricity to support Google’s investments in Finland. Google and Fortum will work to identify new business models to improve the commercial viability of potential new nuclear reactors at the Loviisa site.
Additional onshore wind PPAs with Valorem, located in the Ostrobothnia region, and Suomen Hyötytuuli, located in the Ostrobothnia and Central Finland region, bringing the total new-to-the-grid onshore wind capacity supported by Google to 629 MW. Google is also working with its partners to enable the participation of its onshore wind portfolio to Fingrid’s ancillary markets, contributing to balancing the Finnish grid.
A new contracted 94 MW battery system is set to be connected to Finland’s grid, located near Google’s site in Kajaani, which is expected to be operational in late 2027. This system will provide valuable flexibility, helping balance the grid and stabilize electricity prices during even cold, windless periods.
Integrating Resource Stewardship and Community Development into Data Center Development
Google’s community-first model actively supports Finland’s national action plan to protect biodiversity and promote the restoration of degraded ecosystems. Building on its long-term presence, Google will invest in a series of initiatives to ecologically restore former forestry lands adjacent to the data center sites in Hamina, Kajaani,Muhos, and Vaala. Nature restoration efforts will focus on promoting the regeneration of native forests, including peatland, wetland and nature conservation, as well as safeguarding vital ecological corridors for local wildlife.
Alongside nature, these projects invest in social infrastructure for the community, providing year-round accessible recreational trails, public saunas, and piers for fishing and swimming. Delivered through community-led initiatives, the work will champion the local economy while exclusively using native species to help the region thrive. Any profits from selective tree harvesting works will be donated to local initiatives.
New community, energy and workforce programs include:
Economic Community Partnerships: Google is investing €31 million to be allocated over a four year period in Hamina, Kajaani, Muhos, and Vaala. The funding will support local community initiatives focused on education and economic growth, with €10 million specifically earmarked for research & innovation.
Energy: Google will be supporting high-impact municipal energy projects in Hamina, Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala providing low-income households with solar and heat-pump installations, conducting energy efficiency renovations in public municipal buildings, upgrading recreational skiing and running trail lighting to expand winter usage, and expanding backup power solutions to secure local emergency, health, and water services. Google also embeds heat recovery readiness into the design of all its new data centers in Europe.
Workforce: Funding will also support AI education programs delivered in partnership with local vocational colleges and labor organizations to help Finland upskill its workforce. Through Google.org’s AI Opportunity Fund, more than 4,400 workers will be equipped with essential AI skills with a goal of creating new opportunities for vulnerable workforces across the country. This program is led by local partners including Oamk, Tieke and Xamk. Together with EKAMI, Google will launch a workforce development program to train up to 100 local Finnish students over one year for new data center careers. Google will also empower students nationwide with a full year of premium digital study tools, interactive notebooks, and advanced smart assistants like Gemini Live.
About Google Cloud
Google Cloud offers a powerful, optimized AI stack—including AI infrastructure, leading models like Gemini, data management capabilities, multicloud security solutions, developer tools and platform, as well as agents and applications—that enables organizations to transform their business for the Agentic Era. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology partner.
Scott Bessent made announcement on Wednesday as bond yields rose to highest point since 2008 financial crisis
The US treasury moved to cut the cost of borrowing on Wednesday only to be swiftly rebuffed by the bond market.
Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, announced the US would buy back $6bn worth of government debt – treasuries – in an effort to alleviate a selloff in the US bond market that has put pressure on interest rates.
Twenty-five years ago Friday, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks hit an economy already in recession. Beyond the devastating loss of nearly 3,000 lives, the attacks set off economic shocks that would reshape markets, industries and government spending for years.Here are…
When do a city’s plans to redevelop a municipal park conflict with a Native American group’s use of part of the park for religious ceremonies?
In Perez v. City of San Antonio, the Supreme Court has been asked to grant a petition for review from Gary Perez and Matilde Torres, members of the Lipan Native American Church, which has used a bend in the San Antonio River for decades for religious observances. Renovation plans from the city of San Antonio would remove a section of trees at the site used for nesting by migratory birds, including cormorants, that are considered sacred by the church and part of their religious ceremonies.
A federal district court allowed the church to continue to worship at the site, but it did not block the city’s plans to redevelop the same site. Then, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that the church failed to prove in four separate religious freedom claims that it would succeed in court.
On June 26, 2026, the church filed a petition for a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court. After the city of San Antonio waived its right to respond, the justices considered Perez v. City of San Antonio in private conference. It then asked San Antonio to file a response by Sept. 30, 2026. About a dozen religious groups have filed amicus briefs with the Supreme Court that support the church as San Antonio prepares its own response.
A Conflict Between Public Policy and Religious Faith
Central to the Lipan Native American Church’s arguments are the First Amendment’s Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses, which read that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
In its appeal to the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, the church alleged San Antonio violated its rights under First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause, Texas’s state Religious Freedom Restoration Act (TRFRA), and the Texas Constitution.
The federal district court agreed that the church had a “sincere religious belief,” allowing it limited group access to the river area, but unplanned, unsupervised individual access was seen as impractical. The district court said the city had “a compelling government interest for public health and safety” in removing the trees. It cited expert testimony that dissuading the cormorants to nest elsewhere was in the public’s interest.
On appeal, the Fifth Circuit affirmed the district court’s decision, and it agreed to a request from the petitioners for the Texas Supreme Court to respond to the church’s question about its freedom-to-worship claim under the state’s Texas Religious Services Clause. The clause reads: “This state or a political subdivision of this state may not enact, adopt, or issue a statute, order, proclamation, decision, or rule that prohibits or limits religious services, including religious services conducted in churches, congregations, and places of worship, in this state by a religious organization established to support and serve the propagation of a sincerely held religious belief.”
The state supreme court ruled the clause did not extend to the preservation and management of publicly owned lands, nor did it require preserving natural elements needed for religious services on public property.
The case returned to the Fifth Circuit, where the court issued a second opinion affirming the district court's decision. The appeals court noted that that the case record indicated that various areas of the Park had “become nearly unusable for 10 months of the year due to the bird density/habitat. The resulting feces caused damage to various park amenities, including picnic tables, water fountains, playground equipment, restrooms, and sidewalks.”
The appeals court also said that repairing river retaining walls, like the “amassed bird guano” situation, was a compelling interest, which was complicated when the “relocation or removal of even one, single tree” conflicted with the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
It held the church did not experience a substantial burden because it continued “to have virtually unlimited access to the Park for religious and cultural purposes,” and San Antonio had met the requirements of the Free Exercise Clause.
The church filed two other en banc rehearing petitions that were denied, with a dissent from six judges, and a second dissent.
The Petition at the Court and Supporting Briefs
The church is presenting two questions to the Supreme Court. In the first question, the church asks if government action can override “a claimant’s sincere theological judgment of what the religious exercise requires” without violating its First Amendment rights.
The second is “whether the government can satisfy its burden to prove that its action is the least religiously restrictive means available when, after notice that its action would burden religious exercise, the government admits that it failed to consider any workable alternatives prior to litigation.”
The plaintiffs argue that there are two circuit splits that merit the Court’s attention. “The first split involves courts telling believers that their honest theological convictions are wrong,” they argue, pointing to a Supreme Court decision in Zubik v. Burwell (2016) that it claims left the question unanswered.
The second circuit split, the plaintiffs argue, is that San Antonio’s approach to the problem did not require it “to investigate or account for less-restrictive alternatives before claiming that none existed.” They argue that six federal circuit court precedents require more investigation, while five circuits don’t.
“Unless this Court intervenes, that split will remain, and some lower courts will continue to allow government to burden religious exercise without ever even considering less restrictive alternatives,” they conclude in their petition.
While San Antonio has yet to respond, the friends of the court briefs include filings from various religious organizations and other interest groups. In a brief from the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty, the group argues that the Supreme Court should take the case to “hold that, under the First Amendment, courts cannot make theological judgments disguised as substantial burden analysis.”
The Human Rights Defense Center makes a similar argument: “This case presents a question of profound importance not only for the Petitioners but for all individuals whose religious practices are subject to government interference: whether secular courts may make theological judgments about what a claimant’s religion requires.”
To be sure, there may be briefs supporting San Antonio’s position and the Fifth Circuit’s rulings as the case eventually returns to private conference at the Supreme Court. But the current Court has not been shy about accepting religious rights cases and only four of the nine justices are needed for the Court to accept the case for arguments.
Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.
Joshua Cammidge, 31, arrested after investigation led by counter-terrorism policing London
A man has been charged with offences related to national security as part of an ongoing investigation led by counter-terrorism policing (CTP) London, according to the Metropolitan police.
Joshua Cammidge, 31, was arrested at an address in Swindon on Friday 4 September by CTP London officers, supported by officers from Wiltshire police. Searches were also carried out at a different address in Swindon. He was further arrested and detained the following day, being charged with assisting a foreign intelligence service and intending to commit or engage in conduct to prepare an act of sabotage.
Brent crude up by more than 3% after latest fire between US and Iran in Gulf and Houthi attacks on Saudi cities
The price of oil has risen above $100 a barrel for the first time since July as the escalating conflict in the Middle East threatens further disruption to global supplies.
Brent crude, the international benchmark for oil prices, rose by more than 3% to top $101 after tensions increased in the Gulf amid the latest tit-for-tat exchange of fire between the US and Iran.
John Ternus helms his first major event as head of $4.5tn company, where he announces first foldable iPhone
John Ternus, Apple’s new CEO, helmed the company’s annual showcase of new iPhones and other products on Wednesday. It was the first time the public saw the warm and unpretentious demeanor of the executive, who is filling the shoes of Tim Cook and his predecessor, Steve Jobs, at the $4.5tn tech giant.
The event kicked off with a video montage of characters describing the best way to start a movie, from a getaway scene to a closeup of woman revealing her true identity, before the well-known voice of Cook piped in.
Scotland Yard confirms it is investigating allegations broadcast by Channel 4 News after undercover sting
The financial scandal around Reform UK has deepened as police expanded their investigation into allegations of illegal foreign donations and the elections watchdog said it was considering regulatory steps.
Police confirmed on Wednesday they would broaden their inquiries into Reform after Channel 4 News broadcast an undercover sting by a group called Verbatim, in which a reporter posed as a foreign donor seeking to fund Reform.
Apple's iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max were announced today and keep last year's overall design but put the emphasis on camera upgrades, including a 48-megapixel variable-aperture system, new manual controls, and 4K Dolby Vision recording. Prices for the devices start at $1,199 and $1,299, respectively. TechCrunch reports: The new Pro series camera features a 48-megapixel camera with variable aperture, made with six thin blades. This system will likely improve low-light photography quality and speed. There are also new pro controls in the camera software, including white balance, shutter speed, aperture and histogram. There are also new photographic styles with texture and grain controls. [...]
The new camera can record 4K videos in Dolby HDR Vision, and also apply cinematic effects after shooting the footage. The new Pro devices also have a smaller dynamic range island on the front of the device, which now allows you to track three live activities instead of two.
Both phones are powered by Apple's latest A20 Pro silicon and feature a newly designed vapor chamber for improved cooling. The company has also improved the battery with a better design. Apple also said the iPhone 18 Pro supports video playback of 36 hours, and the 18 Pro Max has 45 hours of playback capacity. Apple Unveils the iPhone Duo, Its First Foldable iPhone
The passport-size iPhone Duo serves as the first big test for John Ternus, who took over from Tim Cook last week
Apple has unveiled the iPhone Duo,the company’s first foldable phone and the most significant change to the iPhone since the smartphone’s introduction in 2007.
The nearly $2,000 device takes inspiration from iPads’ wide screens and combines them with the portability and camera features of iPhones. When opened, it is the company’s largest phone display and thinnest phone. The Duo opens and closes like a passport to double its screen size.
Quantum practitioners should stop wondering if quantum computer hardware is ready soon and start worrying about when the HPC software stack that surround it will be good to go, Alice & Bob say in a new report released today.
The big takeaway from the Alice & Bob’s latest “Seizing Quantum’s Edge” report is that qubits will be ready to run, but the software-based compilers, schedulers, and monitors that are required to put quantum computers into production next to supercomputers are not ready yet.
“Physicists have the hardware down,” the company says in the report, “but HPC must build the software stack up.”
Alice & Bob contracted with Hyperion Research for its first “Seizing Quantum’s Edge” report in 2025, and it followed up with another Hyperion report this week. Bob Sorensen, Hyperion’s quantum analyst, led the development of the report, which is based on interviews with quantum experts at several national labs, including Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley/NERSC, and Oak Ridge, in addition to the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, Munich Quantum Valley, RIKEN, and others.
(Image courtesy Alice & Bob 2026 “Seizing Quantum’s Edge” report)
Hyperion’s interviews exposed gaps in quantum readiness. “Right now everything seems duct taped,” one quantum lead at an HPC center told Hyperion. Another said: “If I get errors in my compiler and I’ve got a deadline, … [this] could kill quantum, because if the software stack is not ready, people will turn their nose up at quantum computing.”
There are several issues at play, including how tightly the quantum computers and classic supercomputers should be integrated. Some workloads can handle loose coupling between quantum and classic systems, while others will require tight coupling. That uncertainty relegates early adopters to wiring up testbeds to run the experiments for themselves, leaving the decision to build a full-scale system to the future.
The march toward fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) can require tighter coupling with classical architecture, and is “punishing,” according to the report. Some early adopters are estimating it takes 1,000 physical qubits to get a single logical one, with about 500 holding the state and the other half monitoring for errors.
“For fast superconducting qubits, that watching produces a torrent of so-called ‘syndrome’ data at up to a million cycles per second, and a classical decoder must keep pace while sustaining roughly a terabit per second of throughput and a petaflop of compute for the scientifically relevant quantum computers coming in a few years,” the report states.
The level of integration depends on the type of compilation, which depends on the use case. AI factors into the equation on both sides. “AI systems can explore the large design space of fault-tolerant compilation (error correction, qubit routing, spacetime trade-offs) offline, with GPU-powered simulators validating these schemes,” the report states. Ahead-of-time compilation doesn’t impose time restraints, but just-in-time compilation of quantum applications can require tighter coupling with the classic system.
“It’s still quite unclear to us what the use case would be for a very low-latency, tightly integrated quantum system with an HPC system,” apart from error correction, one quantum-HPC researcher at a major supercomputing center told Hyperion.
Said a director at another HPC center: “What we need are better interfaces between the QC and the HPC and AI systems. A common vocabulary. That’s missing right now.”
The lack of standards is also impacting the development of different modalities at the hardware level. Quantum computing has not yet had its “CMOS transistor” moment, the Alice & Bob report states. Until that moment arrives, HPC centers “will have to offer their users a spread of modalities (superconducting, ions, atoms, and more) each carrying distinct strengths, weaknesses, and quirks, and tailor each integration by hand,” the report states.
This extreme level of diversity is driving a call for standardization. But that carries a danger too. Standardize too soon and freeze research to pursue a single development track, and you risk ending the experiment before the tradeoffs are fully understood.
Hyperion sees a parallel in HPC. In the early 1990s, high performance Fortran (HPF) was seen as the answer to shuttling data among processors. “The abstraction read beautifully but buried the exact knobs users needed,” the company wrote in the report. “Debugging turned brutal. Performance-hungry scientists dropped back to MPI to claw back control, and HPF never won a lasting community.” The lesson was clear: If you abstract away a modality’s specifics today, you run the risk of burying the optimizations that make them worth running.
With that said, it appears there is some consensus emerging about where to draw some lines. Hyperion’s report mentions QDMI (Quantum Device Management Interface) which handles device discovery, and QRMI (Quantum Resource Management Interface), which integrates with workload schedulers, as possible common paths forward.
(Image courtesy Alice & Bob 2026 “Seizing Quantum’s Edge” report)
The development of quantum apps is another hurdle that must be collectively overcome before quantum computing takes off. Nobody really cares about the theoretical implications of quantum computing, the research firm writes; they just care about how whether their apps will have real-world impact.
The challenge is that bringing quantum to bear on computing challenges isn’t easy. First, someone with deep domain knowledge must ascertain whether quantum can provide a speedup, and then decide which slice of the challenge to tackle first. That’s just the beginning, though. The real labor involves encoding the problem, preparing the quantum state, arranging the pre- and post-processing, and orchestrating all the handoffs. This is painstaking difficult work that can’t be abstracted away.
“A lot of co-design effort is needed to run applications on current hardware,” a quantum and HPC engineer told Hyperion, and it “doesn’t seem quite ready yet for general purpose use for a domain scientist.”
Ultimately, devising a solution will require collaborative co-design among hardware and software developers. All of these challenges need to be successfully tackled simultaneously, or no progress will be made, Hyperion warns.
“What ultimately determines whether a quantum processor can deliver value in an HPC environment is its ability to execute applications,” stated Juliette Peyronnet, Alice & Bob’s GM for the US. “As quantum hardware has progressed at pace, the conversation in HPC is shifting from whether qubits will be delivered to how to get the most from them.”
The work in front of HPC leaders is not to wait, and not to abstract everything away before anyone understands the trade-offs, Hyperion concludes in the report. “It is to seat the right people from across disciplines around one real problem and start today. The domain scientist’s question hasn’t changed in decades. Now as then, the answer has to be built before the machine arrives.”
The final conclusion/recommendation in the report is to deploy on-prem and not the cloud. Because the field is so young and green, early practitioners will really benefit from having their hands on the hardware and exploring the low-level access that you can only get on-prem.
You can’t get this experience by running quantum computing in the cloud behind a Python interface. Eventually, this will probably change as the field matures, much as early GPU systems eventually matured and become standardized stacks. But we’re just not there yet.
At its September event today, Apple unveiled the iPhone Duo, its first foldable iPhone and one of the biggest changes to the device's form factor since its debut. Starting at $1,999 and available for preorder beginning October 16th, the device is roughly the size of a passport when closed and pairs a 5.4-inch outer screen with a 7.6-inch Super Retina XDR inner display. Apple says the inner screen offers 50% more display area than the iPhone 18 Pro Max, while the exterior display provides about 90% of the screen area of an iPhone 18 Pro. Apple Pencil support for both displays is coming later this year.
Apple redesigned parts of iOS around the folding form factor. Users can run two apps side by side, launch two instances of the same app, save app pairings, and partially fold the phone to prop it up on a table without a stand. The interface automatically adapts as the device is opened, rotated or folded, while apps including Zoom and Slack are already being redesigned to take advantage of the larger canvas.
There are more than 100 components in its hinge, along with carbon-fiber support plates and a titanium layer beneath the folding display. Apple says the multilayer screen structure allows its components to move relative to one another while folding to reduce distortion over time. The phone is IP68 rated and uses Ceramic Shield on the rear and Ceramic Shield 2 on the exterior display.
As for battery life, Apple claims up to 31 hours of video playback using the inner display or 44 hours on the outer screen, although using both displays equally is rated for up to 24 hours per charge. Fast charging can bring the battery to roughly 50% in 20 minutes, though. The device is eSIM-only worldwide and includes Apple's new C2 modem, which the company says is up to 50% faster than the C1X while consuming up to 15% less power.
What about the camera system? There's a 48-megapixel ultrawide, along with cameras on both the inner and outer displays. Because the phone can stand partially folded on its own, Apple is pitching new shooting modes including hands-free 4K Dolby Vision HDR time lapses, dual-camera capture and an outer-screen preview that lets subjects see themselves while being photographed.
Developing...
Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba announces decision to pull out in post on X, citing tensions over ‘Harry-Meghan nonsense’
Uganda is withdrawing from the Duke of Sussex’s Invictus Games, the country’s military chief has said, out of respect for King Charles amid division over the “Harry-Meghan nonsense”.
Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, son of the Ugandan president, made the surprise announcement in a post on X on Wednesday.
Analysis of two skeletons reveals tooth wear and traces of psychoactive substance in what may be earliest known evidence for human drug taking
What may be the earliest known evidence for human drug taking has been traced to ancient Indonesian foragers who sucked on mind-altering nuts as long as 25,000 years ago.
Analysis of two exceptionally rare skeletons from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi revealed dramatic tooth wear and traces of a psychoactive substance in the individuals’ remaining teeth, suggesting they routinely sucked on hard, abrasive betel nuts.
Americans may be spending more at the grocery store than ever, but more are deciding the cheapest, most trustworthy food is the one they grew themselves. Food prices rose 3% in the last year, though the sting is sharper than…
Prominent British rabbis have backed Ed Miliband’s sanctions on Israeli settlements, warning that the time for inaction on settler violence must come to an end.
The intervention comes after the UK’s chief rabbi, the spiritual leader of mainstream Orthodox Jews in the UK, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, described UK sanctions against illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories as a “dark day for British Jews” and warned they could embolden people who “use hatred as a weapon against Jews”.
Charity vows to keep helping asylum seekers in Channel despite rightwing abuse as protesters gather outside HQ
Three police forces on the south coast of England are working to protect lifeboat volunteers, staff and buildings from rightwing activists who blame the Royal National Lifeboat Institution for helping asylum seekers to land on the British coast.
Dozens of Dorset police officers were posted outside the charity’s headquarters in Poole on Wednesday evening as about 50 people gathered to protest against the RNLI’s involvement in the small boats crisis.
United Airlines is set to resume the shipment of military hardware to Israel aboard passenger flights, according to shipping data reviewed by The Intercept. The airline, one of the biggest in the world, had halted the practice more than six months ago amid the outbreak of the war on Iran.
On Wednesday evening, United is scheduled to transport five shipments of military cargo onboard United Airlines flight 90, a passenger route from Newark Liberty International Airport, in New Jersey, to Tel Aviv, Israel, a day after resuming the route and another direct flight to Israel, records show.
The shipments, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept, include one transport to the “electro-optics” wing of the Israeli weapons giant Elbit Systems, in Rehovot, Israel, where the arms maker has a major campus. Another shipment is bound for Elbit Systems Land, a division of the company formerly known as IMI Systems, located in Ramat Hasharon, Israel. And a further three shipments are scheduled to go to an Elbit Systems facility in Karmiel, Israel.
At least one of the shipments to Karmiel was specifically labeled as “FMS,” or foreign military sales, the records show, though all the military hardware bound for Israel on the Wednesday flight is destined for defense firms under Elbit’s umbrella.
“United, consistently and on a regular basis, ships military materiel that is used by the Israeli military.”
The shipments appear to be a return to status quo for United, which had used civilian passenger flights to transport thousands of shipments of military cargo to Israel amid its wars in the occupied Gaza Strip and Lebanon and in the run-up to its joint attack on Iran alongside the U.S., according to a new report released this week by Movement Research Unit, Palestinian Youth Movement, People’s Embargo for Palestine, and the Democratic Socialists of America. (A spokesperson for United declined to comment. Representatives of Lockheed Martin, Elbit Systems, and the Israeli Ministry of Defense did not respond to requests for comment.)
The report, based on open-source data, found that United transported nearly 3,000 loads of military materiel over a seven-month period in 2025 and early 2026. The cargo ranged from critical components for fighter jets and tanks to helmet displays, electronics, and nuts and bolts. The transfers stopped only amid the outbreak of war with Iran.
“This report shows that United, consistently and on a regular basis, ships military materiel that is used by the Israeli military for its operations in Gaza, in Lebanon, and against Iran,” said Griffin Mahon, a co-chair of the national labor committee of the Democratic Socialists of America, one of the groups behind the report. “These parts are shipped on civilian passenger flights, and they represent one way that American companies enable the Israeli government’s war crimes.”
2,761 Shipments
Using open-source methods to find publicly accessible cargo documents, researchers with the Movement Research Unit — a group that provides investigative muscle for left-wing groups and causes — said they tracked 2,761 shipments to weapons manufacturers transported by United aboard 160 civilian passenger flights between July 24, 2025, and February 27, 2026.
Due to the volume of data, the authors were only able to analyze a subset of the overall shipments, but after analyzing the product descriptions of a sample of 546 of those shipments, the group found 28 shipments of tank parts, 131 shipments of parts for weapons maker Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jets, 67 shipments of components for other aircraft, and more than 100 other shipments of radio and communications equipment, nuts and bolts, and helmet-mounted display systems.
Many of those parts include key components to some of the most critical military vehicles in Israel’s arsenal, many of which have been documented in the commission of alleged war crimes on numerous occasions, according to Belal Elsiesy, a spokesperson for Palestinian Youth Movement.
“We’ve seen parts directly tied to the carrying out of the genocide, from armored tank sights and gunner display units to the bomb-release units of the F-35,” Elsiesy said. “We often have seen videos of Israeli occupation forces on social media recordings from inside of a tank, the demolition of schools, mosques, and other buildings, and often the screen that they are recording on is a gunner display unit — the same gunner display unit that is transported by United Airlines. It’s not an abstract connection.”
The report found no evidence that United transported any explicitly hazardous material aboard passenger flights. The use of civilian infrastructure to carry weapons components to a belligerent in the midst of open conflict, however, raised ethical questions for the researchers, according to Abdullah, an investigator with Movement Research who spoke with The Intercept on the condition that he be referred to by his first name only due to the sensitive nature of his work.
“There are ammunition handling systems and F-35 parts and tank sites that are being transported on these flights, without [passengers] actually knowing.”
“We all get on our flights and have to worry about taking too much water in our water bottles, and meanwhile, there are ammunition handling systems and F-35 parts and tank sites that are being transported on these flights, without us actually knowing,” Abdullah said. “Crimes are being committed in Gaza, so United needs to do a full and thorough review of their policy related to the transport of these components that might be violating international law.”
Weapons Parts on Domestic Flights
The cargo shipments were not just stowed away on flights bound for Israel, the report found.
While the majority of cargo documents for shipments did not reveal a domestic origin point other than Newark, 235 shipments were shown to have arrived at Newark on domestic flights from cities across the U.S., including flights from Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport, Houston International Airport, Atlanta International Airport, San Francisco International Airport, Los Angeles International Airport, along with Washington’s Dulles International Airport and Chicago O’Hare International Airport.
The domestic route with the most shipments in the period analyzed was a United flight from Dallas–Fort Worth to Houston, aboard which the airline transported 128 shipments, according to the report. That was followed by 90 domestic shipments onboard a United flight from Houston to Newark.
Most of the shipments going directly to Israel — 2,565 in total — appear to have been carried aboard United flights 84 and 90, passenger flights that travel directly from Newark to Tel Aviv. Data obtained by the report’s authors showed that Newark served as the primary hub for United’s shipments to Israel, with all but 45 of the shipments in the documented period arriving in Israel from there. Of the remaining 45 shipments, 36 left the U.S. from Chicago, and nine from Washington, the report found.
Most of the shipments — 2,070 in total — were destined for Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer and a frequent target of Palestine solidarity activism, according to the report. A total of 78 shipments were transported to the Israeli headquarters of Lockheed Martin, while hundreds more were destined for the Israeli Ministry of Defense and to several military airbases in Israel, including the operational hub of the country’s fleet of F-35I jets, the Israeli version of Lockheed’s flagship stealth fighter, the report found.
While information on the senders of the shipments was only available in some cases, a portion of the transfers were shipped by Lockheed Martin and by Elbit System’s U.S. branch, according to the report’s authors.
A New Report
The Intercept reviewed a portion of the underlying data in the report, including cargo documents that showed the transport of F-35 parts and weapons systems for armored personnel carriers, but has not independently corroborated every claim made by Movement Research Unit and its partners.
Movement Research investigators provided a detailed explanation of its methodology to The Intercept, which agreed to withhold some details to prevent a clampdown on the research that made the report possible. Previous work by the group has exposed a multi-ton shipment of explosive material out of New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and a Portland drone company shipping hardware to Israel.
Work on the report began last summer, after an investigative story by the Irish publication The Ditch revealed several shipments of military hardware aboard passenger flights passing through Irish airspace.
Suspecting the practice might be more widespread than the limited samples in The Ditch report, Movement Research delved deeper into the airline’s shipments to Israel over the ensuing seven months.
The shipments appear to have mostly stopped in February, when U.S. direct flights to Israel were suspended amid the U.S.–Israeli attack on Iran. With those flights set to resume this week, the report’s authors hope to pressure United to cease its practice of moving military cargo onboard, according to Abdullah, the investigator with Movement Research.
“This is very timely, because United needs to commit to not shipping military cargo on those passenger flights,” Abdullah said. “Not only on the ones that are going directly to Tel Aviv, but also on flights within the U.S.”
The US president seized a nation’s natural wealth in a modern-day version of gunboat diplomacy to feed his ego – not to lower Americans’ fuel bills
Imperialism does not require a flag to be planted or a governor dispatched. It can be a powerful nation deciding who governs a smaller, weaker country, and on what terms and for whose benefit its resources will be developed. Donald Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, putting his deputy – Delcy Rodríguez – in his place as president, and then her signing a deal handing a fifth of the country’s proven oil reserves to the US, amount to a modern version of 19th-century gunboat diplomacy. Regime change supplied America’s commercial concession.
This won’t bother Mr Trump. But it should. The US president has oversold his neocolonial spoils. The additional production Venezuela is supposed to bring online might bring down oil prices eventually, but not anytime soon. Crucially, what Mr Trump calls “the biggest oil deal in history” won’t cause the price at the pump to fall before November’s midterms. When so many American voters are struggling to pay energy bills, it’s hard to see how unrealised Orinoco Belt riches are going to help Republican candidates.
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Ed Miliband’s intervention was ‘inevitable’ after Israeli government and security failures, say former ministers and diplomats
Prominent Israelis have welcomed new UK sanctions as a necessary response to settlement expansion and spiralling violence in the occupied West Bank.
The intervention was described – by the president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, a former prime minister, an ex-head of the army and former ministers and diplomats – as an “inevitable consequence” of Israeli government and security failures.
Managed Environment Pairs Parallel Works’ ACTIVATE Platform with CoreWeave’s AI Native Cloud Platform to Remove the Complexity of Deploying and Managing AI at Scale
CHICAGO and LIVINGSTON, N.J., Sept. 9, 2026 — Parallel Works, Inc. and CoreWeave, Inc. today announced the deployment of a managed AI and high-performance computing platform for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Network of Optimal Dynamic Energy Signatures (NODES) program.
The managed platform, delivered through Parallel Works’ ACTIVATE control plane and built on CoreWeave’s AI cloud platform, provides researchers with immediate access to the large-scale computing, orchestration software, and technical support required for advanced biological modeling and AI, without the delays and complexity of building and managing infrastructure.
“Breakthrough science shouldn’t be delayed by infrastructure,” said Matthew Shaxted, CEO, Parallel Works. “DARPA needs researchers focused on biology, not on building infrastructure or managing compute environments. By combining CoreWeave’s AI cloud platform with the ACTIVATE platform, we’re giving NODES teams immediate access to the AI resources they need so they can spend their time advancing research.”
“DARPA takes on many of the country’s toughest technical challenges. Our job is to give researchers the computing power to go after them,” said Michael Intrator, co-founder, chairman and CEO of CoreWeave. “We’ve spent years building an AI cloud that the world’s leading AI labs and AI-native companies depend on. With Parallel Works, we’re bringing those same capabilities to the NODES program.”
The rapid adoption of AI is reshaping scientific research. Delivering AI cloud infrastructure, however, can take months, which can delay research and consume technical resources. By delivering a fully managed environment, Parallel Works and CoreWeave allow researchers to train AI models and run complex simulations within days rather than weeks or months.
NODES addresses complex challenges in the dynamics of biological systems, work that requires large-scale, dependable computing resources. Rapid access to dedicated GPU resources enables program performers to pursue simulation and modeling campaigns without delays associated with accessing and managing infrastructure.
Researchers access the environment through a single sign-on, with the ACTIVATE platform combining direct support, dedicated compute, unified orchestration and operational visibility:
End-to-end support: Parallel Works operates the environment for DARPA through its ACTIVATE platform, which handles user onboarding, identity and access, provisioning, scheduling, and reporting, with around-the-clock direct-to-expert support for both the platform and researcher applications.
Dedicated compute capacity: A dedicated reservation on NVIDIA HGX H100 systems, enterprise-scale storage, and high-speed NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking. Parallel Works ACTIVATE divides the reservation across the NODES research teams, so each team holds a guaranteed allocation and can draw on shared capacity when it is available.
Unified orchestration: Parallel Works ACTIVATE enables DARPA researchers to access SUNK and CoreWeave Kubernetes Service (CKS) uniformly from a single platform. SUNK, CoreWeave’s Slurm on Kubernetes offering, enables researchers to run workloads of different kinds and sizes efficiently in the same underlying compute environment. ACTIVATE manages the accounts, allocations, and sharing policies that determine how the research teams use those resources.
Operational visibility: Parallel Works ACTIVATE provides the program and each research team usage and utilization reporting across the environment, while CoreWeave’s observability stack monitors the health of the underlying fleet, so issues are caught at the infrastructure layer before they cost time on a multi-week run.
More information on The Network of Optimal Dynamic Energy Signatures (NODES) program DARPA NODES can be found here.
About Parallel Works
Parallel Works, Inc. provides managed high-performance computing and AI environments through its ACTIVATE platform, a control plane that unifies identity, provisioning, scheduling, allocation, and support across cloud and on-premises computing providers. The company operates production environments for Federal defense and science programs and for commercial research organizations. Parallel Works spun out of Argonne National Laboratory in 2015 and is headquartered in Chicago. Learn more at www.parallelworks.com.
About CoreWeave
CoreWeave is The Essential Cloud for AI. Built for pioneers by pioneers, CoreWeave delivers a platform of technology, tools, and teams that enables innovators to move at the pace of innovation, building and scaling AI with confidence. Trusted by leading AI labs, startups, and global enterprises, CoreWeave serves as a force multiplier by combining superior infrastructure performance with deep technical expertise to accelerate breakthroughs. Established in 2017, CoreWeave completed its public listing on Nasdaq (CRWV) in March 2025. Learn more at www.coreweave.com.
GOP plans to center the president at rare two-day Texas event as party hopes to retain control of House in midterms
Republicans are gathering in Texas on Wednesday for a rare “midterm convention”, as they attempt to convince Americans to vote for a party led by a deeply unpopular president who has overseen inflation and led the US into an increasinglyunpopularwar.
Donald Trump will dominate the two-day convention, appearing both nights as the GOP works to cling tocontrol of the House of Representatives in November. Republicans plan to put the president at the center of the event, a bold strategy given his approval rating is hovering at about 38%, while accusing the Democratic party of being socialist and out of touch with Americans.
Report from Alice & Bob and Hyperion Research informed by 15 interviews with practitioners at leading supercomputing institutions in Europe, APAC, and the US
BOSTON, Sept. 9, 2026 — Alice & Bob and Hyperion Research today released a new report on what it will take to enable HPC-Quantum-AI systems with insights from HPC practitioners.
As quantum hardware advances toward fault-tolerance, a key concern for HPC centers is ensuring that the software stack, hybrid workflows, and operational expertise will be ready when the hardware is. The new report “HPC-Quantum-AI: Shaping the Next Compute Era,” also found that many HPC practitioners worry that an immature stack, deployed too early, risks failures that erode the HPC community’s trust in quantum computing for years to come.
“What ultimately determines whether a quantum processor can deliver value in an HPC environment is its ability to execute applications. As quantum hardware has progressed at pace, the conversation in HPC is shifting from whether qubits will be delivered to how to get the most from them,” said Juliette Peyronnet, GM US, Alice & Bob.
The report is informed by interviews with fifteen directors, quantum program leads, and engineers at leading supercomputing institutions across Europe, APAC, and the United States, including: Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory/NERSC, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, RIKEN, Munich Quantum Valley, and Pawsey Supercomputing Centre.
The report identifies three actions the quantum-HPC community should take now:
Navigate the quantum-HPC-AI design space: How tightly quantum must couple to classical and AI compute is unproven and comes down to one variable: how much latency a workload can tolerate. The answer cannot be bought, only measured. Centers running testbeds today will be able to commit capital on evidence, not hypothesis.
Unify the software stack: Quantum vendors and HPC centers should develop open standards on the layers that do not depend on qubit modality, such as device management and job submission, while compilers and programming models stay open to competition.
Co-design workflows: Gains in fault-tolerant quantum computing will be best realized where HPC and AI experts and quantum vendors work on the same problem. The report cites an example of a quantum chemistry workflow targeting a 10,000-fold speed-up.
The report closes with the case for on-premise deployment, highlighting how integration expertise accrues in the centers that operate a quantum machine with full access. The first fault-tolerant machines, the report argues, will go to the centers already building that readiness.
This 2026 edition is the second report in a series titled: “Seizing Quantum’s Edge” which maps HPC-Quantum-AI integration. The 2025 edition made the case that HPC centers should prepare for early fault-tolerant quantum computing.
“The timing for this report is spot on. HPC end users everywhere are looking for guidance and insights for what it will take to integrate the computational power of quantum into the current and projected advanced computing ecosystem. This report covers the key issues required to successfully navigate that process by QC vendors and end users alike. The credibility of the report is bolstered by key insights gathered from an impressive base of HPC experts who are already looking to the future of quantum computing utility,” said Bob Sorensen, SVP of Research and Chief Analyst for Quantum Computing, Hyperion Research.
Alice & Bob is a quantum computing company based in Paris and Boston whose goal is to create the first universal, fault-tolerant quantum computer. Founded in 2020, Alice & Bob has raised €180 million in funding and employs more than 250 people. 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.
About Hyperion Research
Hyperion Research provides data-driven research, analysis, and recommendations on technologies, applications, and markets in high-performance computing and adjacent emerging technologies, serving government, industry, commerce, and academic organizations worldwide.
Washington, D.C. — The White House has removed its immigration-themed “Build the Wall” video game from its online arcade after The Tetris Company publicly distanced itself from the project and raised potential copyright concerns.
The game, launched as part of a broader collection promoting President Donald Trump’s policy agenda, closely copied the block-stacking mechanics and appearance of Tetris. Players were instructed to build a border wall to stop what the game called a “zombie border siege.”
Tetris quickly made clear that it had nothing to do with the project.
“The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall,’” the company said, adding that it had neither authorized nor licensed its brand or intellectual property and that it takes copyright infringement seriously. The company also said Tetris was intended to connect people rather than divide them.
By Tuesday, the game had disappeared from the White House arcade and its former page returned a 404 error. The administration did not immediately explain whether the removal resulted directly from Tetris’ objection.
Other games remain available, including “Rio Run,” which has players collect figures representing immigrants for deportation, along with games promoting Trump savings accounts and administration nutrition policies.
The episode illustrates an obvious risk in borrowing heavily from recognizable commercial games for government messaging: political parody does not automatically eliminate intellectual-property concerns.
Zion Mitchell, 21, was arrested earlier this month and faces firearms and assault charges after he admitted he pointed his gun at a fellow National Guard member.
An Amazon cargo plane crashed at Miami international airport in Florida after overshooting the runway, striking vehicles and resulting in at least five deaths and five injuries.
Officials said evidence suggested the pilots considered aborting the landing before the crash.
Miami airport is not equipped with 'arresting beds', systems of lightweight, crushable material that the federal aviation authority says have been installed at more than 120 airports nationwide at the end of runways to help safely stop planes that overshoot
UK foreign secretary says international community including US shares ‘frustration’ at Israel’s failure to constrain illegal settlers
British intelligence has been given assurances by its Israeli counterpart that information sharing with the UK will continue as before, Ed Miliband, the foreign secretary, has said.
The head of the air traffic control provider Nats has been given a week to report back on the reasons for a technical failure that grounded thousands of flights, as the transport secretary said she did “not believe the issue was unavoidable”.
Heidi Alexander said on Tuesday she had also commissioned an independent review by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) into the latest Nats meltdown, which severely disrupted travel for hundreds of thousands of passengers.
US president often brings up al-Qaida attack that struck his home town New York City almost 25 years ago
Donald Trump often brings up September 11, the devastating al-Qaida attack that struck his home town New York City almost 25 years ago.
His recollections of that day have repeatedly included exaggerations and falsehoods – including this week, when he shared an anecdote at a White House event commemorating the attacks that appears to be untrue.
A White House spokesperson said in a statement on Wednesday that Mr. Trump "has a longstanding practice of giving Christmas gifts to people in his orbit."
Columbus, Ohio — An Ohio man became the first person in the United States sentenced following a conviction under the federal Take It Down Act, receiving 15 years in prison for a cyberstalking campaign involving real and AI-generated sexually explicit material.
James Strahler II, 37, pleaded guilty to cyberstalking, producing obscene visual representations of child sexual abuse and publishing digital forgeries. Federal prosecutors said he harassed at least six women between December 2024 and June 2025 using threatening calls, messages and manipulated sexual images.
Investigators found that Strahler had installed more than 24 AI platforms and over 100 web-based AI models on his phone. Prosecutors said he created more than 700 images involving real victims and animated subjects and posted them to a website devoted to child sexual abuse. Another 2,400 images and videos on his phone were flagged for nudity, morphed child sexual abuse material or violence.
Authorities said Strahler also used the faces of actual minor boys from his community to create AI-generated sexual images involving relatives, while separately threatening adult victims with sexual violence and distributing fabricated explicit material to their co-workers.
His conviction for publishing digital forgeries falls under the Take It Down Act, enacted in 2025 to criminalize certain nonconsensual intimate images, including AI-generated deepfakes.
Chief U.S. District Judge Sarah D. Morrison imposed the 180-month sentence Tuesday. Prosecutors described the case as the nation’s first successful prosecution under the new law.
Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday is its largest ever, fixing a record 966 vulnerabilities, including 105 rated critical and two zero-days already being exploited in attacks. BleepingComputer reports: This Patch Tuesday addresses 105 "Critical" vulnerabilities, 81 of which are remote code execution, 20 are elevation of privileges, 2 are information disclosure, and 1 security feature bypass.
The approximate number of bugs in each vulnerability category is listed below:
- 438 Elevation of Privilege Vulnerabilities
- 19 Security Feature Bypass Vulnerabilities
- 258 Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities
- 173 Information Disclosure Vulnerabilities
- 56 Denial of Service Vulnerabilities
- 16 Spoofing Vulnerabilities Last month, Microsoft's Patch Tuesday updates fixed 570 security flaws, following 400 vulnerabilities patched in August.
Israel's leader says a report claiming the UAE warned him in advance of Hamas' 2023 terror attack is politically motivated lies, but it's fueling fierce pre-election furor.
Brandon Herrera of state’s 23rd congressional district calls insults against women and unhoused people ‘jokes’
A Republican candidate for a key congressional district in Texas has come under scrutiny over a series of derogatory comments made about women in his social media posts and videos.
Brandon Herrera, who is the GOP candidate for Texas’s 23rd congressional district, has made a string of insults while fashioning a rightwing online persona as the “AK Guy”, and hosts a YouTube channel with more than 4 million subscribers that tests and reviews firearms.
So basically I was riding my morning route and I see the app saying error 88 so I immediately stop. After some research it seems to be a charging issue. Can I keep riding or is thing done? It less than a year old with about 650 miles and model is pint x . Please help!!!
CLEVELAND, WAKO, Japan, and YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y., Sept. 9, 2026 — A multidisciplinary team from Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN and IBM has been named as a finalist for the 2026 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Gordon Bell Prize for simulating the largest biologically meaningful molecules ever modeled with quantum computers, reaching a scale of 12,635 atoms. To achieve these results, the team united the strengths of quantum and classical computing methods in a framework known as quantum-centric supercomputing.
Model of a 12,635-atom protein
The ACM Gordon Bell Prize recognizes outstanding achievement in high-performance computing and is one of the field’s most prestigious honors. The 2026 winner will be announced at the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC26), taking place Nov. 15–20, 2026 in Chicago.
The origins of the project are rooted in the team’s investigation into how computation in drug discovery can be improved. Doing so rests on two fundamental challenges: first, modeling the movement of atoms as biological processes unfold; and second, accurately computing their energies. Particularly the second challenge is well-suited for quantum computers, which operate by the laws of quantum mechanics.
In the work, initially published in May 2026, the team calculated the electronic structure of two large protein complexes using the IBM Quantum Heron processors running within the IBM quantum computers at Cleveland Clinic in the United States and RIKEN in Japan. The calculations were executed alongside two of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, Fugaku at RIKEN and Miyabi-G, which is operated by the University of Tokyo and University of Tsukuba. The quantum computers used up to 94 qubits to run nearly 6,000 quantum operations within certain parts of the problem, which was essential to the computation’s accuracy and success. Fugaku and Miyabi-G were used to reassemble the results and allow the team to gain a complete representation of each molecule.
The results reflect the team’s innovative approach alongside the rapid maturation of quantum computing. Using the sample-based quantum diagonalization by IBM and RIKEN (featured on the cover of Science Advances) along with embedded wavefunction methods adapted by Cleveland Clinic to the question at hand, the team was able to report the first-known simulation of a 303-atom protein achieved with quantum computers. Less than a year later, the team first scaled their method roughly 40 times while also achieving 210 times improvement in accuracy. In updated results recently published in September, the team advanced the work even further. Most notably, they were able to further improve the accuracy of their computations of the binding energies of the molecular system, which reflect how tightly the molecules are bound together and can predict how they could interact with other systems.
In addition, the team validated the workflow on a third supercomputer, JHPC-quantum GPU supercomputer “ROQUO,” RIKEN’s newest system in a way that eliminated the need for complex manual operations and data transfers – pointing toward faster, more accessible research. By orchestrating CPUs, GPUs, and QPUs together, the team minimized the need for manual transfers and further reduced errors — an early demonstration of how classical and quantum computing can work in concert on complex scientific problems.
Taken together with the earlier results, these updates reflect continued progress on both the accuracy of computed binding energies and the time-to-solution enabled by the automated workflow.
The quantum-classical techniques developed by the team continues to reduce the computational overhead required to directly represent the chemistry of molecular systems with accuracy and is pushing the frontiers of what is possible with quantum-centric supercomputing in the field. The work has demonstrated a path to further increase the accuracy of how molecular system can be calculated and is a step towards helping researchers better predict how medicines may interact with protein targets.
The research team includes Kenneth Merz Jr, Akhil Shajan, Danil Kaliakin, Fangchun Liang of Cleveland Clinic, Yuichi Otsuka, Tomonori Shirakawa, Lukas Broers, Han Xu, Miwako Tsuji, Mitsuhisa Sato, Seiji Yunoki of RIKEN Center for Computational Science, and Ryo Wakizaka, Yukio Kawashima, Jun Doi, Hitomi Takahashi, Toshinari Itoko, Hiroshi Horii, Thaddeus Pellegrini, Javier Robledo Moreno, Kevin J. Sung, Ella Fejer, Robert Walkup, Seetharami Seelam, Mario Motta of IBM.
This research is supported by NEDO (New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization), an organization under the jurisdiction of Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI)’s “Research and Development of Quantum-Supercomputers Hybrid Platform for Exploration of Uncharted Computable Capabilities” (Project Leader: Mitsuhisa Sato) as part of the “Project for Research and Development of Enhanced Infrastructures for Post 5G Information and Communications Systems (JPNP20017).”
Cleveland Clinic is a nonprofit multispecialty academic medical center that integrates clinical and hospital care with research and education. Founded in 1921 by four renowned physicians with a vision of providing outstanding patient care based upon the principles of cooperation, compassion and innovation, Cleveland Clinic has pioneered many medical breakthroughs, including coronary artery bypass surgery and the first face transplant in the United States. Cleveland Clinic is consistently recognized in the U.S. and throughout the world for its expertise and care. Among Cleveland Clinic’s 83,000 employees worldwide are more than 6,600 salaried physicians and researchers, and 21,900 registered nurses and advanced practice providers, representing 140 medical specialties and subspecialties. Cleveland Clinic is a 6,725-bed health system that includes a 173-acre main campus near downtown Cleveland, 23 hospitals, 300 outpatient facilities, including locations in northeast Ohio; Florida; Las Vegas, Nevada; Toronto, Canada; Abu Dhabi, UAE; and London, England. In 2025, there were 15.9 million outpatient encounters, 343,000 hospital admissions and observations, and 336,000 surgeries and procedures throughout Cleveland Clinic’s health system.
About RIKEN
RIKEN is Japan’s leading national comprehensive research institute in the natural sciences, conducting research across a broad range of fields including physics, engineering, chemistry, mathematical and information sciences, computational science, biology, and medical science. The RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) operates the world-class supercomputer Fugaku, providing computing resources to a wide range of users in universities, research institutions, and industry, and carries out research and development under the banner of “The Science of computing, by computing, and for computing”, contributing to the advancement of computational science and computer science.
About IBM
IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider, helping clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of governments and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and business services deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.
Party denies wrongdoing after Scotland Yard confirms it is investigating allegations broadcast by Channel 4 after undercover sting
Alex Burghart, the deputy Tory leader, was giving interviews this morning. On Israel, he opened up a new line of attack against the government, accusing it of hypocrisy. This is what he told GB News.
At the same time that Labour were saying all these things about Israel in the House of Commons, they put out a communique.
They put out an account of a conversation that Andy Burnham has had with the Chinese president, and it said how constructive they wanted to be with China, how they wanted to work with China, and what a great relationship we have.
DAEJEON, South Korea, Sept. 9, 2026 — Panmnesia, a fabless semiconductor company, and Meta, a global hyperscaler, have jointly proposed a next-generation artificial intelligence datacenter architecture in which an entire datacenter operates like a single chip. The work appears as an invited Review in Nature Reviews Electrical Engineering (NREE), a Nature Portfolio journal.
The Unit of AI Execution Is Moving from One Chip to the Whole Datacenter
As AI models grow into the trillions of parameters, a single training step can involve hundreds to thousands of accelerators exchanging terabytes of data. Because overall progress is set by the slowest participant, adding accelerators boosts compute capacity, but it also makes the system prone to frequent delays and failures caused by bottlenecking stragglers. When one component responds late, the rest stop and wait — and the wider the range of latency becomes, the harder it is to predict when a job will finish.
Narrowing that spread—and thereby creating a larger, more stable unit of execution—is an industry-wide challenge. Within a rack, devices are already tightly coupled through dedicated high-speed links. The next challenge lies in the segment beyond it — the connection between racks. Today, that segment still relies largely on general-purpose networks such as Ethernet or InfiniBand, where each request must pass through a network interface and a software-based coordination layer, each of which widens latency spread along the way. This work aims to bring greater predictability to this cross-rack segment.
Their foundation is Compute Express Link (CXL), an open industry standard. CXL is developed collaboratively by semiconductor and infrastructure companies, so it can be adopted across the industry without being locked into a single vendor’s ecosystem. The architecture proposed by Panmnesia and Meta uses CXL to minimize latency variability beyond the rack. The goal is a datacenter that behaves with the predictability of a single chip.
At the Core of the CXL-based Architecture: Three Hardware Elements and a Hierarchical Deployment
The proposed architecture places CPUs, accelerators and memory in a single CXL-based domain, extending the range over which cache coherence is maintained from within the rack to the datacenter as a whole. Three hardware elements — a high-fan-out non-blocking switch, a link acceleration unit (LAU) and a fabric controller — bound latency variability, and the resources themselves are laid out using the same principles that govern the placement of blocks inside a chip. To overcome the physical reach limits of electrical signaling, the Review also sets out how optical links (CXL-over-optics) can extend the reach of a CXL fabric. (Details are given in the Appendix.)
To gauge the effect of the architecture, the Review uses a conventional rack-scale configuration — one CPU coupled to two accelerators — as its reference point. Against that baseline, the number of accelerators a single CPU coordinates rises eightfold, from two to sixteen, and the coherence domain that operates as one unit grows to as many as 960 accelerators, roughly 13 times the reference platform. Accesses that once left the rack to traverse a network now follow a fixed path, with round-trip latency falling from the microsecond range to several hundred nanoseconds — as much as an order of magnitude lower. The unit of replacement after a failure also narrows from a whole server to a single device. Coupling devices at this scale into what behaves as one execution environment would make it possible to train a far larger single AI model without interruption, or to run multiple services concurrently on shared infrastructure without one stalling another.
Review articles in NREE are published by invitation only: the journal identifies a small number of researchers or organizations leading a given field and commissions the work from them. Nature’s selection of Panmnesia as an author on CXL-based datacenter architecture reflects recognition of the company’s technology as representative of the field. Panmnesia is the first semiconductor startup worldwide to lead an NREE Review, and the article is also the journal’s first Review to address CXL technology and AI datacenter architecture.
Myoungsoo Jung, CEO of Panmnesia, said, “As AI systems continue to scale, the ability to connect large numbers of accelerators and memory devices quickly and efficiently is becoming just as important as the performance of individual accelerators. This research outlines a direction for next-generation AI infrastructure, where CXL enables the entire datacenter to operate as a single computing system.”
Panmnesia has already implemented the architecture’s core components in silicon, has completed validation, and is now preparing them for commercial supply. The Review is available here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44287-026-00315-5.
Oil price rises above $100 a barrel as Tehran responds to US attacks that sunk five Iranian tankers
Tehran has said it attacked 10 ships around the strait of Hormuz after the US sunk five Iranian tankers, as escalating strikes between the two sent the oil price over $100 a barrel for the first time since July.
The attacks were the sharpest flare-up of strikes in weeks, as the two sides struggled to break a deadlock in the six-month-long war. Fighting in recent weeks has largely revolved around who controls the strait of Hormuz, as Iran attempts to close off the waterway and Washington enforces a blockade of Iranian ports.
The strait is a critical route for global energy supplies, with up to 20% of the world’s oil and gas transiting it before the US-Iran war. The rising price of oil, above the psychologically significant $100 mark is likely to have knock-on effects on inflation and the price of goods. Stocks fell on Wall Street while rising fuel and food prices in the US will further frustrate the Trump administration, which faces a midterm election with an unpopular war and a cost-of-living crisis.
Back to Oslo, the funeral procession for King Harald is about the begin, and the 1.2km route to the Oslo Cathedral is lined up with 1,900 soldiers from all branches of the Norwegian defence forces.
The procession is expected to walk very slowly – at around 60 steps per minute – and will include the royal family, including King Haakon, followed by a royal car with the widow, Queen Sonja.
Canada's retaliatory tariffs put Trump's trade strategy to the testExpert commentLToremark
US–Canada trade war will test not only economic strength but also political will. On the latter, Canada may have an advantage.
As Canada’s new retaliatory tariffs against the United States came into effect on Tuesday, the Canada–US trade dispute entered a new phase – one that will be closely watched around the world. Apart from China, Canada is the only country that has imposed retaliatory tariffs on the US. The key question now is whether this strategy can succeed.
The most recent escalation between the two neighbours began in August, when Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney walked away from trade talks with the Trump administration after describing the US offer as ‘unfair’ and ‘uneconomic’ and saying that US negotiators had sought to limit Canada’s ability to negotiate trade arrangements with third countries.
The Trump administration then imposed additional tariffs of up to 50 per cent on certain Canadian imports under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 – an obscure, Great Depression-era provision giving the president broad powers against countries deemed to discriminate against US commerce.
On Tuesday, Canada imposed ‘dollar-for-dollar’ counter-tariffs on a roughly equivalent amount of US goods. In response, Trump announced that the US would use Section 338 to ban imports of Canadian alcohol, motorcycles and some dairy products starting on 29 September.
Trump has piled on the pressure in recent weeks. He has called on Canadian leaders to ‘fall in line’, ordered that Lake Ontario – which straddles the Canada – US border – be renamed ‘Lake America’, and posted a map depicting the US as encompassing Canada (as well as Mexico, Greenland and Iceland).
Trump and members of his administration appear convinced that Canada will eventually fold under US economic pressure. The imbalance in the relationship might seem to support that calculation. Bilateral trade exceeded $870 billion in goods and services in 2025. But Canada is far more dependent on the US than vice versa: about two-thirds of Canadian goods exports go to the US, while Canada accounts for only about 15 per cent of US goods exports. The US economy is also roughly 13 times larger than Canada’s.
However, trade wars test not only economic strength but also political resolve – and here Canada may have an advantage. Trump’s trade policies and repeated calls for Canada to become the 51st US state have provoked widespread outrage among Canadians, reinforcing the view that the dispute is about sovereignty as well as trade.
Recent polling suggests Carney has considerable room for manoeuvre at home. One survey found 85 per cent of Canadians support rejecting the proposed US trade deal, while 80 per cent back retaliatory tariffs even if they result in higher prices. Another put approval of the Carney government at a new high of 70 per cent.
Whether such high levels of public backing will endure is uncertain. Carney’s standing could weaken as the economic costs start to bite, particularly if tariffs lead to significant job losses despite Ottawa’s financial assistance to affected sectors. And while Trump’s threats have fostered unusual unity in Canada’s often fractious federal politics, longstanding divisions might reassert themselves. Separatist sentiment will be tested in Quebec’s provincial election on 5 October and in Alberta’s 19 October referendum, which includes a question on beginning the process towards a future vote on independence – that Trump-aligned figures have expressed support for.
By contrast, Trump’s approval ratings have fallen sharply and there is little appetite among Americans for an escalating trade war with Canada: nearly 60 per cent oppose further tariffs on Canadian goods and almost 70 per cent favour compromise with their northern neighbour. Several US sectors and states also rely on trade with Canada, like the automotive sector and the swing states of Michigan and Ohio.
Still, Trump’s enthusiasm for tariffs shows no signs of waning. Even if Democrats were to gain control of Congress after November’s midterm elections, legislation curtailing presidential tariff powers could still face a Trump veto. This requires two-thirds majorities in both chambers to override, which they are unlikely to achieve.
Nor can Canada count on the US courts for rapid relief. Trump’s novel use of Section 338 will likely face legal challenges, as some of his previous tariffs have, but a final resolution could take months or years.
For Canada, therefore, neither political change in Washington nor litigation offers a quick solution. But ‘winning’ does not require compelling Trump to back down. Success might instead mean demonstrating sufficient political and economic resolve to improve the terms on which negotiations eventually resume – a more achievable objective, given the depth of Canadian public opposition to US demands.
At the same time, Canada’s strategy is not limited to managing the confrontation with Washington. Ottawa is pursuing a broader goal of reducing Canada’s economic dependence on the US by deepening ties with other partners, particularly in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, while investing in the energy, critical minerals and infrastructure needed to reach new markets. Carney has set a goal of doubling Canada’s non-US exports over the next decade and attracting new foreign investment in Canada, drawing on his experience as a former central bank governor and investment banker.
His strategy will gather momentum this month. On 14–15 September, Carney will host the Canada Investment Summit in Toronto, bringing together major global investors. He will then travel to Strasbourg as a guest of honour for European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s State of the Union speech, where she is expected to announce a deeper partnership between the EU and Canada. Carney will address the European Parliament the following day.
Whether Canada can resist US pressure while diversifying its economic partnerships – demonstrating a ‘third way’ for other countries facing similar pressure – will not be clear for some time. Trade relationships can take years to bear fruit, as can the major infrastructure and resource-development investments aimed at bringing more Canadian goods to world markets. Diversification can reduce Canada’s vulnerability, but it cannot quickly replace the economic relationship with its largest trading partner.
The more immediate test is whether Canada can withstand US pressure long enough to secure better terms when negotiations eventually resume. The Trump administration appears to be betting that the imbalance in economic power will ultimately force Ottawa to concede. The coming months may show that it has underestimated Canadian resolve.
The Wild Horse Nine actor had been due to appear on stage in The Music Critic in Tel Aviv – but pulled out over PR firm’s ‘unacceptable and untenable’ attribution of statement
John Malkovich has cancelled a planned trip to Israel next year to appear on stage after a PR firm hired by the show attributed quotes to the actor that the company had written.
Malkovich, who is a leading Oscar contender for his role in Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, was due to appear in The Music Critic, a theatrical-musical satire composed by the Jewish violinist Aleksey Igudesman, in Tel Aviv’s Charles Bronfman Auditorium on 13 April.
(The Center Square) — Democrat Stephany Shaheen will square off against Trump-endorsed Republican Anthony DiLorenzo in the November elections after winning the party's nomination to run for New Hampshire's wide-open 1st Congressional District seat.
Europe’s royals and global political figures attend ceremony that brings 13 days of national mourning to a close
Norway has observed a minute’s silence as it takes leave of King Harald V in a series of ceremonies, bringing to a close 13 days of national mourning that followed the popular monarch’s death last month at the age of 89.
Tens of thousands of people lined the streets of Oslo and foreign heads of state and government converged on the Norwegian capital for the funeral of the late king, a light-touch and unassuming reformer who ruled for more than three decades.
Anthony Albanese wants social media algorithms to be optional – and it’s not the first Musk-Zuckerberg irritant emanating from Australia
New risks to a deftly managed personal relationship with Donald Trump have not slowed the Australian prime minister’s plans for a showdown with America’s all-conquering social media companies.
Anthony Albanese, who will rub shoulders with the US president and other world leaders in New York later this month at the UN general assembly, is pushing ahead with changes that would impose fines on big tech firms under a newly created “digital duty of care”.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Those who remember PC gaming in the days before Steam may have fond memories of the "big box" packaging that made those games stand out as shelf eye candy and sought-after in-home collectibles. Today, PC gaming platform GOG is hoping to reignite some of the nostalgia for those days by adding downloadable 3D models and printable, foldable high-res packaging scans for a handful of PC games on the platform.
Thus far, the "Printable Big Box" collection on GOG is limited to just five games: Armikrog, Descent, Hitman: Codename 47, Myst, and Star Trek: 25th Anniversary. Players browsing those games on the GOG store will now see "3D Boxes" listed among the included "Goodies" before purchase. Owners of those games on GOG can download a ZIP file containing a version of the box art as an animated 3D object file (in an easy-to-open GLB format) and a "flat printable template" in PDF, SVG, and Adobe Illustrator formats. Those downloads allow for what GOG calls "a proper papercraft project for anyone who misses shelves full of PC game boxes."
The physically focused expansion of the existing GOG Preservation Program comes through a partnership with Benjamin Wimmer's Big Box Collection website, which has grown since 2015 to include over 1,000 3D scans from his private collection of physical PC games. In an interview with GOG, Wimmer said that while he appreciates the artistry of a good old-fashioned big box, he also appreciates their evolution into the "interactive cards" on modern digital storefronts that "provid[e] us art, screenshots, gameplay videos and whatnot and that not shown as a box, [it] is just good UX." "Physical media doesn't survive the way software can -- boxes get lost, crushed, thrown out," GOG writes in today's announcement. "Scanning them, and letting you print your own, is preservation in a different shape: the same mission that keeps these games running on modern PCs, applied to the objects they used to come in."
When scrolling through social media over the Labor Day weekend, Steven Michael Quezada, an actor, comedian and native New Mexican, was stopped cold by a post about Donald Trump’s recent call to rename New Mexico as “New America”.
“At first I thought, nah, that’s got to be a joke,” said Quezada, who played the drug enforcement agent Steven Gomez in the legendary TV series Breaking Bad.
The Oct. 3 gathering at Saint Mark’s High School will bring men from Delaware and Maryland’s Eastern Shore together for speakers, prayer, fellowship and Mass with Bishop William Koenig.
WILMINGTON, Del. — Catholic men from across Delaware and Maryland’s Eastern Shore will gather in Wilmington this fall for the inaugural Catholic Men of Delmarva Conference, a new all-day event focused on strengthening men’s faith, families and leadership.
The conference, titled “Authentic Masculinity,” will be held Saturday, Oct. 3, at Saint Mark’s High School, 2501 Pike Creek Road. Organizers are planning for as many as 350 participants.
The event is being organized by Catholic Men of Delmarva, a nonprofit formed in Delaware in June 2025. The independent organization works in spiritual partnership with the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington, which includes Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
Organizers say the conference is intended to help men deepen their relationship with Jesus Christ and become stronger husbands, fathers, sons, brothers and servant leaders in their homes, churches and communities.
Men from other faith traditions who are interested in learning more about Catholicism are also invited. Adult sons are encouraged to attend with their fathers, while younger sons may participate when accompanied by an adult man.
A regional gathering
The inaugural conference is designed to connect men from parishes and missions throughout the Diocese of Wilmington’s six deaneries.
Catholic Men of Delmarva is working with volunteer parish captains from more than 50 churches to promote the gathering, coordinate registrations and encourage men who may not otherwise participate in a parish men’s ministry.
The organization hopes the conference will reach both established parish leaders and men who are beginning to become more involved in their faith. The intended audience includes members of parish men’s groups, the Knights of Columbus, Exodus 90, Heroic Men, FOCUS and the University of Delaware’s Newman Center, as well as men considering the priesthood or permanent diaconate.
Three featured speakers
The conference will feature three keynote speakers: the Rev. Larry Swink, Matthew Leonard and Gary Zimak.
Swink is a priest of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington and parochial vicar at St. Bernadette Catholic Church in Silver Spring, Maryland. Ordained in 2006, he has led retreats and pilgrimages for more than a decade, with an emphasis on prayer, the Mass, confession and helping Catholics connect their daily lives to their faith.
Leonard is an author, international speaker, podcaster and founder of Science of Sainthood, an online Catholic spiritual formation program. A convert to Catholicism and former missionary in Latin America, he has produced and hosted Catholic video programs distributed in multiple languages.
Zimak is an author, radio host and Catholic speaker known for addressing anxiety from a faith-based perspective. He has appeared on Catholic radio and television and has presented parish missions, retreats and conferences throughout the United States and Canada.
The Rev. John Solomon and Deacon Philip Belt will also give vocational presentations. The Rev. James Gebhart will offer the welcoming address and lead Eucharistic adoration.
Prayer, music and Mass
Registration and refreshments will begin at 8 a.m., followed by music from Numinous Worship at 8:45 a.m. The formal program will begin at 9 a.m.
In addition to the keynote presentations, the conference will include Eucharistic adoration, the sacrament of reconciliation, vocational talks, a presentation by the Knights of Columbus and a question-and-answer session with the speakers.
Refreshments and a catered lunch are included. Catholic organizations and ministries will also have exhibits available throughout the day.
The conference will conclude with Mass at 4 p.m., celebrated by Bishop William Koenig of the Diocese of Wilmington. Final announcements and dismissal are scheduled for 5 p.m.
Organizers envision the gathering becoming an annual conference and a way to strengthen men’s participation in their parishes and communities.
To Go Box
What: Inaugural Catholic Men of Delmarva Conference, “Authentic Masculinity”
When: Saturday, Oct. 3, 2026. Registration opens at 8 a.m.; the conference concludes at 5 p.m.
Where: Saint Mark’s High School, 2501 Pike Creek Road, Wilmington
Who may attend: Catholic men and men of other faith traditions interested in Catholicism. Fathers are encouraged to attend with their sons. Younger participants must be accompanied by an adult man.
What is included: Keynote presentations, Eucharistic adoration, reconciliation, vocational talks, music, exhibits, refreshments, catered lunch and closing Mass with Bishop William Koenig,
Asking residents in a city where a seismic political event has just taken place ‘How do you feel?’ demands chutzpah – this struck me as I walked around Magdeburg, Germany on Monday. The night before, the far-right populist, anti-immigrant, pro-Kremlin party Alternative für Deustchland (AfD) had landslide 44% win in Saxony-Anhalt’s state elections, sending shock waves to Berlin, across Germany and way beyond. Regardless of how people in the capital voted, it felt like a bit of an affront to probe. Given the radical plans of the victors, a party classified by domestic intelligence as “rightwing extremist”, that is what I wanted to know. But from the 21-year-old Guinean-German paramedic I met at the central bus station, collecting donations for a local hospice, to the elderly couple returning to their apartment after a stroll down the Elbe river, almost everyone I met opened up to me warmly.
Judith, 88, was initially reluctant to talk, but shared some of her life story. Her experience as an eight-year-old refugee, forced to leave Poland in 1946 and eventually ending up move with her family in Magdeburg, had shaped her outlook on life, her successful career as a project engineer – as well as her politics. The news that AfD had not only won the election, but by such a wide margin, was “heartbreaking”, she said.
(The Center Square) – A coalition of election integrity groups filed an amicus brief in support of plaintiffs in RNC v. Mi Familia Vota, with the groups urging the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the state of Arizona’s voter citizenship…
The Associated Press’s guidance says President Donald Trump’s executive order affects only how the U.S. government refers to the lake, not Canada or other countries.
Matt Brittin says ‘cupboard is bare’ after staff reject average 2.1% pay rise in dispute
The BBC’s director general has conceded there is a real prospect of strikes at the broadcaster, as he faces a continuing dispute over pay and pushes ahead with plans to cut as many as 2,000 jobs.
In a call with staff on Tuesday, Matt Brittin faced a series of questions over the corporation’s plans for huge cuts, as well as pay talks in which staff rejected an average 2.1% salary increase.
While a survey found Labour, Lib Dem and Green voters to be the strongest backers of such a ban on trade, even Tory and Reform voters were in favour overall
There was a time when placing Israel under strict trade sanctions would have been a politically risky thing for a British prime minister to do. Andy Burnham, however, considers it an electoral asset.
As Kemi Badenoch attacked him over defence spending at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, Burnham deliberately turned the topic to the trade ban on illegal settlements which he had announced on Tuesday.
The 23-year-old’s epic win over Carlos Alcaraz means there is a real chance of an American man winning the US Open for the first time since 2003
In yet another graveyard shift at the US Open, Ben Shelton showed he can hang around late, ousting defending champion Carlos Alcaraz in five sets in a quarter-final that started on Tuesday night and finished on Wednesday morning. When Shelton fired the final ball out wide for his seventh ace of the night, the clock on the Arthur Ashe Stadium court read 3.33am. It was the latest-ever finish at the Open and the fifth-latest finish in grand slam history.
After embracing Alcaraz at the net, he pumped his fists and greeted his coach’s box with a primal scream. Parents have a name for this: the zoomies. Then Shelton looked to the stands and gestured at his mother and his girlfriend, soccer star Trinity Rodman. In his on-court interview, he asked that his sister, Emma, be given the day off. She had spent the entire night and much of the early morning watching her little brother play.
When grazier Peter Lake moved to the Clarence Valley in the New South Wales northern rivers region in 2007, he knew was “buying in flood country with … eyes open”.
His cattle farm, about halfway between Yamba and Grafton, borders the Coldstream River and has flooded five times since 2009.
In August 2009, at the very first Gamescom expo, I sat in a small meeting room in Germany and played Mario Kart and World of Warcraft on a laptop, via technology that was then completely new: cloud gaming. It was a demonstration for a yet-to-be-launched service called Gaikai that promised to let you play any game in a browser window, without a console. (Here is an ancient video of that demonstration, featuring a very young Keza.) With a single click I could launch into any game, hosted on servers hundreds of miles away. It really did look like the future.
Since then, plenty of companies have tried to be the first to truly crack game streaming, vying to be the Netflix of games. Sony ended up buying Gaikai for $380m (£242m) in 2012; its technology now powers the streamable classic games library on PlayStation, and the PS5’s advanced game streaming. OnLive, Gaikai’s first competitor, launched in 2011 but shut down after less than a year, leaving Sony to acquire all its patents. Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service also imploded, launching in 2019 and shutting down three years later.
Every September, perfectly reasonable adults start emptying closets and scrubbing baseboards like Thanksgiving guests just confirmed they are coming early. Millions of households catch the ... Read moreThe post The scientific reason you want to gut your entire house every…
A teen was found alive, clinging to a capsized fishing boat in the Bering Sea, after the vessel went missing over the weekend. Two other boaters were found dead.
More than 30 properties ordered to evacuate after sinkhole grows to roughly 25-30ft deep and 30 by 60 feet wide
The city of Malibu, California, has ordered the evacuation of more than 30 properties after a large sinkhole opened on Tuesday.
Malibu officials declared a local emergency on Tuesday evening after a “large sinkhole” emerged near 31630 Sea Level Drive. The officials said the sinkhole was believed to have begun developing on Monday, and had grown to roughly 25-30ft deep and 30 by 60ft wide by Tuesday evening.
The BSD news will continue until morale improves. I missed this two months ago, but Baptiste Daroussin, creator of pkg and poudriere, is working on a service manager for FreeBSD called rcd.
rcd(8) is a service manager daemon called by init(8) (in place of /etc/rc). It reads service definitions from UCL unit files (/etc/rcd.d/*.ucl), builds a dependency DAG, and starts services in parallel. After boot completes, it forks to background and stays running as a supervision daemon (automatically restarting failed services and accepting control commands via a UNIX socket).
It’s fully backwards compatible, and works on any existing FreeBSD system without having to make any modifications to rc.d scripts or configuration files. In fact, you can install it on a running system, make zero changes to your files, and reboot to use it, which is quite impressive. The most immediate benefit is, of course, faster boot times, but you’ll also get several other benefits already found on similar systems like Solaris’ smf.
There’s a migration path in place, with a hard promise to maintain compatibility with rc.d scripts for as long as needed. This gives maintainers as much time as they need to convert to rcd‘s own unit files.
Alarming warnings from industry insiders increase pressure for curbs on artificial superintelligence
Does artificial superintelligence really pose a risk greater than nuclear weapons? Is there a significant chance of “a Chornobyl-sized catastrophe”. Might there even be a greater than 10% chance that AI could “kill all humans” in the next decade?
These warnings were issued over the past 48 hours on both sides of the Atlantic about the potential impact of a technology that most people still think of as a more talkative search engine.
Through the loss of one franchise, name controversies and stadium changes, Legacy supporters have created an environment of advocacy and belonging
More than two years of work had led to this moment for the Boston Independent Supporters’ Association (ISA). Even before Boston’s new NWSL team had a name, a mascot or a roster, there were fans organizing, ready and waiting to embrace the franchise.
On 14 March 2026, it finally paid off. The Boston ISA members marched into Gillette Stadium for the Legacy’s opening match, following behind the marching band from Boston Public Schools and holding their “Up the Swans” scarves over their heads. The group arrived at their seats in the supporters’ section behind the north goal and unfurled the tifo they had spent many hours diligently painting.
Reform councillor said he urged activists to stand down
ECB checks on young players’ welfare
A group of masked agitators gathered outside a four-star hotel in Portsmouth after reports a group of asylum seekers had been taken there, when it was in fact Pakistan’s under-19 cricket team on a tour.
George Madgwick, a Reform councillor called to the hotel to mediate between staff and the assembled crowd, said it was a “massively unfortunate incident”.
Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has accused the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) of seeking “ethnic cleansing” with its “remigration” drive, after the nativist party’s seismic weekend victory in a state election.
In his first public confrontation with the AfD since Sunday’s shock outcome in Saxony-Anhalt, Merz said at a raucous parliamentary debate that the far-right party would take an axe to one of the pillars of the German economy with a racist campaign of mass deportations.
Republicans are fighting to hold onto their majority in the Senate, where the GOP currently controls 53 seats. To take control, Democrats would need to net four seats in November's election.
Hi ! Can someone confirm that wiring ? Local post office messed with my package af, leading to my jst connector being ripped of. I need to rebuild the pads but want to double check.
The Trump administration said it would modify the scope of existing tariffs and introduce new bans on Canadian products in the latest escalation of the trade war.
Storm didn’t make direct hit but fierce winds downed trees and caused widespread power outages on Kauai
Damaging winds and heavy rains from Hurricane Lowell caused significant damage on Hawaii’s western islands, knocking out power to thousands, ripping up stretches of road and drenching homes and stores with mud.
Fierce winds downed trees and caused widespread power outages on the island of Kauai, home to 73,000 residents. The Kauai Island Utility Cooperative reported that nearly all of its roughly 35,000 members were without power on Tuesday.
TORONTO, Sept. 9, 2026 — Xanadu Quantum Technologies Limited, a leading photonic quantum computing company, and ASML, a leading supplier to the semiconductor industry, today announced a collaboration to develop advanced lithography processes for Xanadu’s photonic quantum hardware. This collaboration aims to enable both companies to gain deeper insight into how advanced lithography innovations can help reduce optical losses in quantum computing chips, accelerating the industry’s path toward utility-scale quantum computing (USQC).
Quantum hardware needs to be fault-tolerant and error-corrected to address large-scale computational problems. For photonic quantum hardware, reducing optical loss is an important technical challenge on the path toward fault-tolerant operation and error correction. Optical loss in photonic quantum processors can be influenced by line edge roughness (LER), which is affected by lithography and related process conditions. Through this collaboration, Xanadu and ASML will explore lithography-enabled process approaches that may contribute to improved patterning control and lower-loss photonic structures.
“Fault tolerance and error correction are arguably the most important technical objectives for the quantum computing industry,” said Dr. Christian Weedbrook, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Xanadu. “Collaborating with ASML gives Xanadu the opportunity to explore advanced, industry-leading lithography processes that will support the continued development of our photonic quantum hardware.”
“For ASML, this collaboration is an opportunity to explore advanced lithography processes with Xanadu and better understand how our technology and expertise can support next-generation photonics applications,” said Stan Baron, Senior Vice President and Head of Customer Team EU-US at ASML. “We are pleased to contribute to this work, supporting the exploration of future manufacturing approaches for photonic quantum hardware as the technology matures.”
This collaboration with ASML reflects Xanadu’s continued focus on advancing photonic quantum hardware and further solidifies Xanadu’s leading position within the semiconductor and quantum computing ecosystem. This work paves the way toward future manufacturing and commercialization and marks another significant step in the company’s mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere.
About Xanadu
Founded in 2016, Xanadu is a Canadian photonic quantum computing company with the mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere. Xanadu is building fault-tolerant quantum computers using light, with systems designed to compute at room temperature. Xanadu develops both hardware and software, including PennyLane, its open-source quantum computing platform. Xanadu is the first pure-play photonic quantum computing company to list on public markets (Nasdaq/TSX: XNDU) and is recognized globally for its breakthroughs in scalable quantum technologies.
Some people without plane tickets will be allowed to pass through security at US airports and go to gates to see off family or friends, rolling back a rule that was introduced after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Certain people who are part of the TSA PreCheck program but who do not have tickets to fly will be able to go through security to airport gates, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) said.
(The Center Square) – The man charged with attempting to attack Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dr. Amy Acton over the weekend pleaded not guilty late Tuesday afternoon in his first court appearance.
Springfield community mourns one of its own after Pierre Damas Bel, who was forced to wear electronic ankle bracelet by ICE, walked into traffic and was killed by truck
For 20-year-old Pierre Damas Bel, the humiliation of starting college last month with an electronic ankle bracelet – attached by ICE agents this summer – was deeply traumatic.
“I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience,” he wrote on Instagram in July.
After young people shifted right for Trump, Democratic-aligned groups across the US are eager to capture gen Z voters where they are before November’s midterm elections
On the first day of the fall semester at California State University, Northridge, student organizers holding “Hot People Vote” signs wheeled a bright pink wagon outside the student union. They offered “no strings attached” donuts, heart-shaped sunglasses and voting information for the November general election. Even though it was 105F outside, dozens of people stopped by to chat with the Donuts + Democracy volunteers and register to vote.
One student told organizer Dzian Tran that she didn’t plan to vote because she was disillusioned with politics. Tran chatted with her about how civic engagement is important to democracy and how some elections are won by a margin of only 400 votes. As she thanked Tran, the student held her phone up to a QR code to get more information about voting.
Authorities and public bodies to be urged to buy goods and services from Europe, but without binding quotas
European authorities will be encouraged to buy more domestic goods and services when they spend public money under the EU latest effort to counter China’s economic might.
In a further “Buy European” plan, the European Commission published proposals on Wednesday for a sweeping overhaul of EU public procurement rules.
Although the air traffic control provider Nats fixed the problem within hours, the fallout from the incident continued to cause flight delays and cancellations on Wednesday.
The state can’t use new congressional districts under one court order – or its old ones under another. Plus, the architects in Europe turning urban spaces into areas of climate respite
Conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh denied the emergency request from Missouri officials to use a congressional map in November that was redrawn with Donald Trump’s support to give Republicans an edge in the midterms, but a ruling by a federal judge in Missouri temporarily prevented the state from using its old congressional maps.
Why is there legal action over the maps? The Missouri supreme court has previously ruled that the new map must go before voters to approve or reject the new districts, meaning it cannot be used in time for the November election. The president and Republicans had fumed over the decision, with Trump calling it “horrible, ridiculous, and unconstitutional”.
What are the significant changes to the map intended to favor Republicans? The revised map targeted the fifth congressional district, held by longtime Democratic representative Emanuel Cleaver of Kansas City. It reassigned portions of Kansas City to two neighboring districts represented by Republicans and stretched the remainder of Cleaver’s district far eastward into rural Republican areas.
What has the British prime minister said? Writing in the Guardian, Andy Burnham said he would “not stand by” as horrific suffering continued, and that for too long the UK had been hesitant to act “fearful of being accused of being anti-Israel”. “The measures we are taking,” he said, “are about targeting illegal settlements and increasing the pressure on the Israeli government to change course. We are not imposing sanctions on Israel as a whole.”
How has Israel reacted? Israel has ordered the closure of the British consulate in occupied East Jerusalem among retaliatory measures including entry bans on several UK lawmakers. The Israeli government added that longstanding British involvement in the training of Palestinian security forces on the West Bank would be terminated. Britain will also be excluded from the US-led Gaza coordination mission.
Many of the paintings in the tomb have retained their original colors despite spending more than 40 centuries buried beneath the desert sands, officials said.
Washington, D.C. — Americans are increasingly skeptical of information coming from the federal government, with majorities expressing little or no trust across several major policy areas, according to a new AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and USAFacts poll.
About 6 in 10 adults said they trust federal information only a little or not at all when it comes to elections and politics, foreign affairs, the environment, abortion and immigration. Distrust has risen on nearly every issue measured since a similar 2019 survey, including education, where low trust increased from 37% to 53%.
Confidence in election certification has also slipped. Only 34% of adults said they trust government-certified election results “a great deal” or “quite a bit,” down from 40% in 2024. Among Democrats, that figure fell from 65% in 2024 to 44%, while 29% of Republicans expressed high confidence.
The decline spans more than the current administration. Americans also expressed very low trust in partisan campaign messaging, with only about 1 in 10 saying messages from either Democrats or Republicans are always or often factual.
The survey comes after significant changes across the federal bureaucracy during President Donald Trump’s second term, including agency cuts, staff departures and shifts in health and environmental policy. The poll does not establish that those changes alone caused the decline in trust, but it found that partisan differences have widened considerably.
The AP-NORC/USAFacts poll surveyed 1,036 adults from July 29 through Aug. 10 and has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.
Washington, D.C. — President Donald Trump gave unusually large cash holiday gifts to several White House aides, including $45,000 each to executive assistant Natalie Harp, communications adviser Margo Martin and deputy Oval Office operations director Chamberlain Harris, according to newly released financial disclosures.
The three aides each earn $150,000 annually, making Trump’s payments equal to roughly 30% of their government salaries. Director of Oval Office operations Walt Nauta, who earns $175,000, received a separate $20,000 gift.
The aides listed the payments as “Cash Gift for Holidays” on federal disclosure forms. A White House official told the Associated Press that Trump has a longstanding practice of giving Christmas gifts and said the payments were personal, unrelated to government duties and permissible under applicable ethics rules.
The size of the gifts, however, has prompted questions from government ethics specialists. Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, told The Washington Post that the payments could implicate federal rules restricting outside supplementation of government employees’ salaries. The Post reported that ethics experts it contacted were unaware of another president giving subordinate White House employees cash gifts on this scale.
No government agency has publicly determined that the payments violated federal law or ethics regulations.
The disclosures nonetheless provide a rare look at sizable personal payments flowing directly from a sitting president to employees working closely with him inside the White House.
The U.S. Department of Energy has approved a $1.9 billion loan to NextEra Energy to restart Iowa's shuttered Duane Arnold nuclear plant, which Google has backed as a power source for its growing AI infrastructure. "The sizable loan is the second of its kind, suggesting that the Trump administration views revived nuclear power as a key source of electricity for tech companies seeking to power their AI data centers," notes TechCrunch. From the report: James Danly, Deputy Secretary of Energy, said that the Iowa power plant's restart in 2029 will "drive down electricity costs," though he did not explain how. Just 50 megawatts will be set aside for the local power cooperative, NextEra CEO John Ketchum said during an earnings call (PDF) last year. That capacity would cover 18% of Iowa's demand growth since 2021, the year before ChatGPT was released.
Google is reportedly looking to build up to six data centers near the Duane Arnold Energy Center, which hasn't operated since 2020 when an intense rainstorm damaged the power plant. Rather than repair it, NextEra decided to mothball it. At the time, cheap natural gas was flooding the market, making nuclear power economically unappealing. A lot has changed in the last six years, though. After decades of little growth in demand, the sudden rise of AI coupled with broader electrification of the economy meant that utilities and power providers were suddenly scrambling to find new generating sources of electricity. New data centers are expected to nearly triple the sector's electricity demand by 2035.
AFL-CIO calls for ban on such labels to protect consumers and workers from surveillance pricing and job cuts
The universal adoption of electronic shelf labels in grocery stores across the US could cost tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in lost wages while further driving up grocery costs, according to a report released on Tuesday.
An analysis by the AFL-CIO Tech Institute of the label manufacturers’ own marketing materials found the universal adoption of electronic shelf labels, which are marketed to retailers as a cost-cutting measure, could cost workers between $1.6bn and $6.9bn in lost wages annually and affect between 44,223 and 191,633 jobs.
The government is putting class at the heart of its equalities agenda by creating a new unit that will make tackling white working-class inequality a priority.
The unit, which the minister for women and equalities, Bridget Phillipson, will announce on Wednesday, will sit within the Office for Equality and Opportunity and examine disparities linked to class and socioeconomic background across all ethnic groups.
NTSB investigators are set to interview the pilots of the Amazon cargo plane that crashed Sunday after overshooting a runway at Miami International Airport and killing five people on the ground.
Ben Shelton ended Carlos Alcaraz's title reign in the latest-finishing match in U.S. Open history, pulling out the victory in a marathon tussle that ended at 3:33 a.m. Wednesday.
Spanish Fort, Alabama — A federal Homeland Security Investigations agent who worked on child exploitation cases has been charged with multiple sex crimes involving an underage girl, Alabama authorities said Tuesday.
Kent Blacklidge, 43, surrendered to the Baldwin County jail on Sept. 5 after a grand jury indicted him on charges including first- and second-degree rape, sodomy and sexual abuse. The allegations stem from a child sexual abuse report filed Jan. 11, according to Spanish Fort Police Chief John Barber.
Blacklidge was placed on administrative leave by HSI after the investigation began. Authorities have not released detailed information about the alleged victim or the circumstances surrounding the accusations.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall called the case particularly troubling because Blacklidge’s federal duties included investigating child exploitation and educating the public about online predators.
“That’s why it’s so profoundly disappointing and frankly disgusting that we stand here today and tell you that we charged him,” Marshall said during a news conference.
The Alabama Attorney General’s Office is handling the prosecution because Blacklidge has served as a witness in cases involving the local district attorney’s office, creating a conflict that required recusal.
Blacklidge has been released on bond exceeding $350,000, according to officials. His release conditions include electronic monitoring, home confinement and orders barring contact with the alleged victim or anyone under 18.
The charges are allegations, and Blacklidge has not been convicted.
Kent Blacklidge, who officials say was ‘directly involved with child exploitation cases’, turned himself in last week
A federal law enforcement agent tasked with “trying to provide justice in cases involving kids” has been charged with child rape in Alabama, state authorities said on Tuesday.
Kent Blacklidge, described as a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), turned himself over to the Baldwin county jail on 5 September in connection with a grand jury indictment charging him with first- and second-degree rape, sodomy and sexual abuse, police in the city of Spanish Fort said in a statement.
Some European law enforcement agencies chasing leads spurred by information in the so-called Epstein Files say the U.S. Justice Department has not responded to their requests.
Cameron Stanley talks up ‘revolutionary’ AI capabilities and says Washington working with Nato and Five Eyes partners
The Pentagon’s top artificial intelligence official said on Tuesday that America’s closest allies lack the resources to keep pace with the US military’s adoption of AI, and that Washington is working to steer them away from mistakes it made along the way.
“They don’t have the resources that we do, they don’t have the experience that we do, they don’t have the scale that we do,” Cameron Stanley, chief digital and artificial intelligence officer at the Department of Defense, said at an event at the Billington Cybersecurity summit. Of Nato and the Five Eyes, an intelligence-sharing partnership of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Stanley said Washington was “actively working with a number of our partners” so “they don’t make the same mistakes that we make”.
Why Should Delaware? Reactions to a recently enacted affordable housing law have risen to the forefront of the state’s political conversation in recent months. Particularly in Sussex County, the legislation touches on residents’ concerns with overdevelopment and state encroachment on local control, generating a strong reaction from both municipal governments and candidates seeking office.
As Delaware’s primary election quickly approaches, a controversial affordable housing policy has become a flashpoint in Sussex County, dominating both closely watched primary races and local governments across the region.
Senate Bill 23, also known as the Housing for Every Delawarean Act, requires municipalities to adopt provisions aimed at increasing their affordable housing stock, including foregoing public hearings for some projects. The law has generated an outsized reaction in Sussex County compared to its northern counterparts.
This reaction has included Sussex County leaders calling the legislation “insidious,” and pausing public hearings on housing development proposals for an undetermined period of time. Some localities, including Lewes and Milton, have followed suit, also halting consideration of subdivision applications.
In addition to these government responses, the law has become a defining point of some of election campaigns, including a competitive Lewes-area statehouse Democratic primary and two Sussex County Council races.
Elected officials, candidates, political experts and residents have a number of explanations as to why SB 23 has overtaken the political conversation in Sussex County. But most reasons boil down to two topics consistently at the forefront of discourse within Delaware’s southernmost county: rapid development and local control.
“This directly affects Sussex County much more so than Kent and New Castle,” said Sussex County Administrator Todd Lawson, who has been vocal about his concerns with SB 23. “Sussex County is going to be different because we are the epicenter of growth.”
Others described the new law as the latest notch in the ongoing debate over local control between Sussex County and lawmakers in Dover, which flared in 2025 over an offshore wind project and continued this year when the General Assembly overrode a veto by Gov. Matt Meyer, doubling down on their requirement that the county loosen its stringent marijuana business regulations.
And while some local governments and candidates are laser-focused on SB 23, it is not clear whether county residents care as much about the legislation as the governmental actors.
Jill Hicks, a land use advocate who is running for Sussex County Council, said she has overwhelmingly run into residents who are worried about over-development and insufficient infrastructure rather than the nuts and bolts of who supports SB 23.
“When I’m knocking doors, nobody asks about it,” she said.
While the legislation’s long-term impacts on Sussex County remain to be seen, campaign yard signs calling for the repeal of the bill and elected officials’ comments criticizing its enactment continue to dominate the region’s political discourse.
The 20th district primary
In a Democratic primary in the historically competitive 20th Representative District, which encompasses Lewes and Milton, the election has become what some — including challenger Ruby Keeler Schaeffer — are describing as a referendum on SB 23.
Elected officials and residents in the area say the legislation has become a marquee issue because Lewes and Milton are where the heaviest development has taken place in recent years.
First-term Rep. Alonna Berry will look to defend her seat from challenger Ruby Keeler Schaeffer, the wife of a former county councilman and a local business owner. | PHOTOS COURTESY OF BERRY & SCHAEFFER CAMPAIGNS
Others, however, argue a more chicken-and-egg situation is taking place. Because Schaeffer has chosen to center her campaign on the measure, some say, it has taken center stage in the primary election discourse.
Incumbent Rep. Alonna Berry (D-Milton) was narrowly elected in a special election last August, following a tumultuous period for the district in which former Rep. Stell Parker Selby was absent from Dover for the entirety of the 2025 legislative session.
Berry, who co-sponsored SB 23, said she is not surprised the legislation has become a prominent topic this primary season because the affordable housing crisis has been such a “longtime conversation” in Sussex County.
Berry said she is standing by her support of the law despite the pushback from Schaeffer and other Sussex County leaders. At the same time, she said the “singular conversation” and focus on SB 23 is challenging because it obscures other issues residents care about, such as healthcare and roads.
Schaeffer has concentrated her campaign platform on her opposition to SB 23 in yard signs, social media posts and town hall forums. She describes the law as having stripped away “people’s rights to comment.”
When asked by Spotlight Delaware why she chose to focus her campaign platform on one specific piece of legislation, Schaeffer said she believes it should be the most important issue for all Delawareans at the moment.
“It is going to change the landscape of our state for years to come,” she said. “This affects every single county, every single property owner that is going to be affected by a development going in next to them.”
While Schaeffer was clear that her mission is to repeal SB 23 if elected, she did not respond to questions about whether she has an alternative affordable housing proposal.
The Lewes-Milton area has seen numerous housing developments built in recent years, which some said explains why the confusion over an affordable housing law — and what it means for future development — has generated such a reaction in the area.
Other leaders in the district, including former University of Delaware political science professor Joe Pika, who also runs the Sussex Preservation Coalition, said the 20th district is unique in that it is more of a “purple district” with a relatively even split between Democratic and Republican voters, making the SB 23 debate more fiery.
And to Lori Stuardi, a voter in the 20th district primary, the debate has become clogged with intentionally inflammatory information and blown out of proportion for how much voters actually care about SB 23 when choosing a candidate.
“There’s a lot of misinformation, and people are cherry-picking pieces just to kind of create some strife,” she said.
Sussex County Council reacts
While SB 23 is statewide legislation, the law has produced a notably strong reaction in Sussex County, largely due to what county officials described as the measure representing another example of Dover lawmakers trying to exert control over local decisions.
Differing opinions on the law have also come to define incumbent council members and their challengers in county council races this fall.
Lawson, the county administrator, said he has been frustrated with the legislation since its drafting, when he found out it was being circulated for co-sponsors and the county had not been consulted by lawmakers on how it would impact them.
“It didn’t really create a circumstance or an environment of collaboration,” he said. “It feels more like, ‘We’re going to tell you what to do, and we’re going to tell you how to do it.’”
Still, he said he does not believe the bill’s premise that a greater housing supply will bring down prices applies to Sussex County, and he is bothered by the “thread of concerns related to local control” that it represents.
County Council President Doug Hudson and Vice President John Rieley expressed similar sentiments about the legislation and the impact it will have on the county government’s authority.
“You’ve got a Democrat-controlled Senate that steamrolled a bill through,” said Rieley, a Republican who represents the Georgetown-Millsboro area. “This is a pattern of state government usurping local control.”
Democrats Justine Cuccia and Hicks, who are challenging Hudson and Rieley, respectively, in the county council election, said they entered the race for better development and infrastructure policy. They have a different reaction to the measure than their opponents.
Hicks, who serves in a leadership role within the Sussex Preservation Coalition, said she has concerns about the law stripping the county of its ability to conduct public hearings. But she said her approach would be different from her opponent, Rieley, in that she would more effectively advocate for how the county can move forward within the confines of SB 23.
“Sussex County got itself into this mess, but I think Sussex County needs to get itself out of it,” Hicks said.
The fabric of Sussex County
The confusion about what SB 23 really means and its impact on the development process has grown since Gov. Matt Meyer signed the legislation into law in July.
But the markedly strong reaction from political candidates and county leaders in Sussex County compared to New Castle and Kent points to key characteristics of the region, according to stakeholders.
Sen. Russ Huxtable (D-Lewes), the primary sponsor of SB 23, said he is not surprised by the response in Sussex County because the “pressure of development” is so pervasive throughout the area.
“Senate Bill 23 puts the mirror in front of our face and says, ‘We need to change,’” he said.
Michael Riemann (right), engineer with Becker Morgan Group, listens as the Sussex County Council on Sept. 16 discusses a development proposal brought by his client, Capano Management. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY OLIVIA MARBLE
Mike Riemann, an engineer and former president of the Delaware Homebuilders’ Association, said the county’s stronger response is, in part, a result of their current zoning codes being less strict.
This, he said, means Sussex County “has more work to do” than its northern counterparts to come into compliance with the law’s requirements.
Outside the implementation challenges, Sussex County historically has been the most conservative of Delaware’s three counties, with more Republican lawmakers in the General Assembly and a prevailing focus on low-spending and local control.
Pika, the former UD professor, said this aspect of Sussex County culture is the most compelling explanation as to why the opposition to the law is so prominent in the county.
“In the minds of many Sussex Countians, this is just another example of big brother upstate dictating what the lives of downstaters in Sussex should be like,” he said.
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/.
Photo illustration by ProPublica. Photo by BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.
The number of women who died after an ectopic pregnancy has spiked in recent years, a ProPublica analysis found. The mounting deaths in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data have drawn little scrutiny or response.
Such deaths typically occur in the first trimester, after a pregnancy fails to properly implant in the uterus and begins to develop elsewhere, most commonly inside a fallopian tube. The embryo grows until it causes the organ to rupture, triggering catastrophic bleeding.
With prompt and appropriate medical care, maternal health experts say, women should not die. Yet ProPublica’s analysis found a stark and baffling increase: Almost 200 women with the condition died from 2020 to 2025, compared with about 100 in the previous six years.
“A death related to ectopic pregnancy should really be a never event,” said Dr. Alice Abernathy, an OB-GYN in Philadelphia.
Deaths involving an ectopic pregnancy are presented as a rate within three-year intervals to meet data suppression thresholds. Source: ProPublica analysis of CDC WONDER multiple cause of death and natality data.Lucas Waldron/ProPublica
While chaos and access issues at hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic likely contributed to at least some of the deaths, the surge has persisted, raising serious questions about the role of the most significant disruption to maternal healthcare in the years since: state restrictions on abortion.
To treat an ectopic pregnancy, which is almost never viable, doctors must terminate it. But lawsuits and federal complaints have alleged that some medical providers are hesitating or flat-out refusing to do that in states where they face criminal penalties for performing an abortion. Patients described their terror.
“I genuinely thought I was going to die,” said Kyleigh Thurman, whose right fallopian tube ruptured after she struggled to get ectopic care in Texas in 2023.
“There were a few times I asked my husband if I was going to die,” Leitaea Lowrimore of Oklahoma said in a lawsuit after being denied treatment for an ectopic pregnancy at multiple hospitals in February. “I kept thinking about our kids.”
To determine whether these issues go beyond anecdotes, ProPublica analyzed the data collected from every state by the CDC to look for patterns. The analysis shows a growing divide for women in states with strict abortion bans compared with those without.
While the uptick in ectopic deaths occurred nationwide, the climb has been much steeper in states that banned abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Deaths involving an ectopic pregnancy are grouped into three-year periods to meet data suppression thresholds. States with abortion bans that begin at six weeks of pregnancy or earlier are considered to have a strict ban. For the list of states in each group, see the methodology. Source: ProPublica analysis of CDC WONDER multiple cause of death and natality data.Lucas Waldron/ProPublica
ProPublica shared its analysis with more than a dozen maternal health experts, including leaders in the field, who were unaware of the spike; early pregnancy complications are chronically underresearched.
While they cautioned that abortion bans alone can’t explain the national rise, maternal health experts said any examination of the spike should include the documented delays in care caused by the laws, including for ectopic pregnancies.
In Thurman’s case, despite clear signs of an ectopic pregnancy, two emergency departments sent her home without resolving the complication. Regulators in 2025 found that one of the hospitals, Ascension Seton Williamson, failed to properly screen Thurman for a suspected ectopic pregnancy and did not call in an OB-GYN, in violation of the hospital’s own policies and federal law that requires emergency departments to treat and stabilize patients before discharging them. Thurman has an ongoing lawsuit against Ascension Seton Williamson and the other hospital, Ascension Seton Highland Lakes, for medical malpractice.
Thurman had to have her fallopian tube removed after it ruptured. (Thurman is not related to Amber Thurman, who died in Georgia, which also has an abortion ban, after doctors delayed treating different pregnancy complications in 2022.)
“I’ve never been in a situation where I didn’t get healthcare when I needed it,” Thurman told ProPublica, comparing the condition to having “a time bomb you can’t control.”
A spokesperson for the Ascension Seton hospitals said in a statement, “When a patient experiences a serious or life-threatening condition during pregnancy, our clinicians provide medically indicated treatment, including treatment for an ectopic pregnancy.” The hospital has denied Thurman’s malpractice allegations in a court filing.
Ectopic pregnancies, while rare, have long been recognized as the leading cause of maternal deaths in the first trimester. The condition impacts up to 2% of pregnancies in the U.S. Because government agencies don’t require hospitals to track or report overall ectopic diagnoses, it is impossible to know whether the condition itself is becoming more common.
While rates for other pregnancy-related deaths also increased during the pandemic, those climbs have largely subsided.
Experts aren’t sure why ectopic deaths have continued to rise. Ectopic pregnancies are more common among older women, but the increase in deaths has been even more stark among younger women, the analysis showed.
Anti-abortion groups have suggested that the use of abortion pills prescribed online is leading to more undiagnosed ectopics because telehealth patients don’t receive an ultrasound. But studies havefound that ectopic rates are far lower among people who seek medication abortions than in the general population. Telehealth clinics ask questions that filter out patients at higher risk of ectopic pregnancy and follow up with those they treat to screen for symptoms, said Ushma Upadhyay, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies telehealth abortion administration.
Experts told ProPublica that more research is required to determine the role of the abortion bans in the rise of ectopic-related deaths. Many states with bans, which generally provide less Medicaid funding and coverage to low-income women, have long had poorer maternal outcomes. “It’s a real challenge to try and tease out one thing out of the array of factors that undermine women’s health in these states,” said Eugene Declercq, a public health researcher at Boston University.
But experts said ProPublica’s data analysis, along with stories about delays in ectopic care, underscores the need to find out what is driving the deaths.
“Reproductive health is unusual across medicine when we consider how swiftly policy changes affect the care patients can receive,” said Dr. Courtney Schreiber, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology.
Caitlin Myers, an economist at Dartmouth College who studies abortion policy, said the deaths should be investigated: “This is a potentially profound consequence of the regulation,” she said.
How Abortion Bans Interfere With Ectopic Care
Many state abortion bans include exceptions for ectopic pregnancies. But experts have worried that doctors are hesitating to offer treatment without an ironclad diagnosis, which clinicians say can take time and increase risks to the mother.
Ectopic pregnancy symptoms often begin with abdominal pain and bleeding, which send women to emergency rooms. There, doctors use ultrasounds to locate where the pregnancy has implanted.
However, embryos are often not visible on an ultrasound early in pregnancy. That could mean the pregnancy is ectopic, but it may also be a miscarriage or normal pregnancy that’s too small to see. Doctors can also assess whether the pregnancy is likely ectopic through blood tests over multiple days.
If the pregnancy is ectopic, the risk of rupture increases the longer treatment is delayed. In a state without a ban, a patient could decide at any point that that risk is not worth taking and opt to terminate the pregnancy.
In a state with a ban, however, that option may not exist. If doctors can confirm the pregnancy is ectopic through an ultrasound, they can protect themselves from having their decision to terminate questioned, perhaps by a zealous prosecutor. But waiting for this can delay treatment by days or even weeks.
“Seeing a mass is not the only reason to have high suspicion for an ectopic pregnancy,” said Dr. Rebecca Nerenberg, an emergency medicine doctor in New York and the clinical director at Access Bridge, which educates ER doctors on reproductive healthcare and has released evidence-based guidelines for diagnosing possible ectopic pregnancies.
Experts say that doctors should be able to offer treatment when other symptoms are present, such as plateauing pregnancy hormone levels, bleeding and abdominal pain. Patients can be treated with a procedure or a cancer drug that stops cells from growing.
But for women in states with abortion bans, getting that treatment can be difficult.
Lowrimore, who lives near the state border in Oklahoma, sought care at an Arkansas emergency department in February after experiencing abdominal pain and significant bleeding. She was sent home and told to return for more tests after being diagnosed with a “pregnancy of unknown location,” because an ultrasound could not show where her pregnancy had implanted, according to a lawsuit.
Lowrimore visited three different hospitals across both states over the following week as she began passing blood clots and the pain intensified, radiating up the left side of her body, according to the lawsuit.
The fact that the states’ abortion bans make exceptions for ectopic pregnancies did not help her, even though doctors acknowledged that was a possible diagnosis. In each visit, they didn’t treat her for that condition. One told her that intervening in her pregnancy could land him jail time — “10 years in the poky,” according to the suit. “I felt like my life was a risk he couldn’t afford,” she said in the lawsuit filing.
After consulting a lawyer, Lowrimore finally drove to a hospital in Kansas, where abortion is legal, and got an injection of the cancer drug called methotrexate within hours of arrival.
Lowrimore’s lawsuit, in which an OB-GYN and six women who were denied care are seeking to block the Arkansas abortion ban, is ongoing. Lowrimore also filed complaints under the same emergency medicine law as Thurman against the three hospitals. Regulators cited Mercy Hospital in Fort Smith, Arkansas, for failing to provide care during the eight hours Lowrimore waited to be seen. The other two hospitals were not found to have violated that law, and they did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for Mercy Hospital declined to comment on the case, saying that, “in tragic situations when a mother suffers from an urgent, life-threatening condition during pregnancy, Mercy provides all medically indicated treatment to save her life.”
Many experts predicted that ordeals like the ones Lowrimore and Thurman described would occur when abortion bans took effect. To see if more women with ectopic pregnancies are experiencing severe health outcomes, ProPublica analyzed hospital data from Texas, the most populous state to ban abortion.
In this new analysis, ProPublica found that 310 more patients in Texas experienced substantial blood loss after an ectopic pregnancy in 2023 and 2024 compared with 2018 and 2019, an increase of about 29%. Similar to ectopic deaths, the rise appeared to begin during the COVID pandemic, but the rate of complications remained elevated after hospital systems stabilized and the state passed its restrictive law. ProPublica is working to acquire similar data from states without abortion bans.
But new guidance from the Texas Medical Board includes only a case study with an ectopic pregnancy that can be seen in an ultrasound, remaining silent on the difficulty of early ultrasounds to detect where a pregnancy has implanted. This leaves open the possibility that a prosecutor could question whether such a case was really ectopic, in a state where doctors face up to 99 years in prison for performing illegal abortions.
A spokesperson for the Texas Medical Board said the course is not intended to cover all scenarios and that it “explains that imminent harm is unnecessary and specifically states that physicians who follow evidence-based medicine, standard emergency protocols, and proper documentation face minimal risk.” Asked whether a conclusive ultrasound image is necessary for an ectopic diagnosis, the spokesperson said, “The Board has consistently stated that providing commentary on every possible situation would be impractical.”
But Michelle Maloney, an attorney who represents Thurman and 13 other Texas women or their families who say they were denied care — including seven with ectopic pregnancies — said she still gets frequent calls from women who say they were denied care for pregnancy complications. “I don’t think specific exemptions address the massive gray areas that arise in pregnancy,” she said.
Solutions are unlikely to come from the states themselves. A previous ProPublica investigation found that states with strict bans are not studying whether their laws are contributing to maternal deaths. And others have not followed Texas in attempting to amend their bans.
Gaps in Research, Training and Awareness
One of the biggest challenges to reducing ectopic pregnancy deaths nationwide is the lack of awareness, research and data.
No one, for example, is tracking whether women who experienced ectopic pregnancies also had one or more common risk factors, like a history of ectopic pregnancies, infertility or use of hormonal intrauterine devices, according to ProPublica’s review of maternal health statistics and interviews with experts.
Nor has any published research addressed the connection between recent ectopic pregnancy death rates and untreated infections like gonorrhea and chlamydia, which increased substantially during the first years of the pandemic before declining again. Those infections can cause pelvic inflammatory disease, which causes fallopian tube scarring and raises the long-term risk of developing an ectopic pregnancy.
It is unclear why the CDC and other federal agencies across two administrations have failed to publicly respond to the increase in deaths despite having access to the same information ProPublica analyzed. But experts say the country’s capacity to respond to it has been greatly reduced under President Donald Trump.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, told Congress in April that improving maternal health outcomes is a priority. But the Trump administration has eliminated much of the staff devoted to researching the topic and cut hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding for healthcare research.
The CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health, for example, lost most of its 100 employees, according to a lawsuit filed by more than a dozen states’ attorneys general last year. The entire team that ran the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a significant source of data for state and local governments as well as maternal health researchers, is on paid administrative leave. That includes many researchers who would have been responsible for investigating the rise in ectopic pregnancy deaths, according to current and former CDC employees.
“You’re losing the capacity to know what’s going on with pregnant women,” Lee Warner, the former chief of the Women’s Health and Fertility Branch at the CDC, said of the cuts at the division. “It’s going to take decades to build this capacity back.”
Funding cuts have also impacted efforts to raise awareness about the condition. Because ectopic pregnancies usually cause complications before standard prenatal care begins around 10 weeks, patients often rely on emergency departments, where doctors don’t typically have specialized training in pregnancy care. Experts say more training on high-risk early pregnancy conditions could help combat rising maternal mortality rates.
The CDC in 2025 also stopped funding a partnership with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to educate emergency medicine doctors about reproductive healthcare. The initiative, “Obstetric Emergencies in Nonobstetric Settings,” offers resources for emergency departments on caring for pregnant patients with cardiovascular disease, hypertension and eclampsia. An ACOG spokesperson said its foundation now funds the project, and that the organization is working on a set of guidelines for diagnosing and managing tubal ectopic pregnancies in the emergency department.
A spokesperson for HHS said the agency continues to track maternal mortality trends, investigate their causes and provide funding for research. “This important work is being accelerated across the Department to support healthy mothers, healthy babies, and strong families,” the spokesperson said.
The United Kingdom’s response to a similar spike in ectopic deaths during the pandemic shows just how much the U.S. is failing to do.
Researchers and officials there identified a surge in deaths in 2021 and 2022 in the U.K. and Ireland; 12 women died of an ectopic pregnancy during those years, which, as in the U.S. during this period, represented a near doubling of the death rate compared with previous years.
They investigated the causes and found a range of culprits, including overstretched emergency services and inadequate early pregnancy screenings, says Marian Knight, a professor at the University of Oxford who leads the U.K.’s maternal mortality reporting.
In 2024, Knight co-authored a maternal mortality report that focused on those deaths and offered policy recommendations. Knight worked with policymakers and a U.K. charity to raise awareness and help doctors and the general public recognize ectopic pregnancy symptoms. Officials also changed how patients experiencing ectopic pregnancy symptoms are prioritized when they call for an ambulance, leading to faster response times.
But the first step, said Knight, was identifying and investigating the issue. “If we’re not tracking and not just understanding the numbers, but understanding the why behind the numbers, we have no ability to respond,” Knight said.
The U.S. doesn’t do national maternal mortality reviews, said Boston University’s Declercq, who serves on the Massachusetts Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee. Instead, CDC epidemiologists review death and birth records to establish accurate national totals of pregnancy-related deaths, largely leaving state and local maternal mortality committees to take an in-depth look at individual cases and make recommendations to lawmakers and medical providers.
Declercq said his committee has not identified a notable increase in deaths from ectopic pregnancies in Massachusetts in recent years. In most states, these deaths are sporadic enough that they don’t, in isolation, show a notable trend.
It’s only at the national level that this increase in avoidable deaths becomes visible.
ProPublica’s analysis “raises concern that young women are dying from a preventable cause at an increasing rate,” Schreiber, the professor of OB-GYN, said. “That is not what we should be seeing in the United States of America.”
Why Should Delaware Care? Delaware’s hospitals are all nonprofits, meaning they don’t pay most taxes. But in recent decades, nearly all of the state’s hospitals have established for-profit insurance companies in the Cayman Islands, which some argue are used to avoid taxes.
A catheter left in a man’s jugular after he was shot, a missed diagnosis leading to a “permanent” neurological disorder and a botched surgery causing paralysis. These are just some examples of medical malpractice claims Delaware’s hospitals have settled in recent years.
Oftentimes, hospital lawyers will go through the motions: deny the claim, try to get it dismissed and then likely settle with the plaintiffs, rather than face a costly and revealing trial.
And when hospitals write checks to those allegedly harmed by their care, most would think the funds come from somewhere within their expansive and comprehensive budgets.
But for years, Delaware’s nonprofit hospitals have quietly operated secretive, for-profit insurance companies in the Caribbean, where they’ve stashed hundreds of millions of dollars for such legal payouts.
Hospitals also are able to reinvest profits from the insurance companies back into the health system without any real oversight. Typically, hospitals are required to invest their excess revenues back into the health system to advance their mission.
By sending regulated nonprofit revenues offshore, the hospitals are able to, in theory, bring those revenues back onshore as dividends to spend on what they choose.
“Once that money leaves the nonprofit, that restriction is gone,” said Jason Schupp, a lawyer who challenged the practice in Maryland. “That’s unrestricted money.”
The hospitals have established what are called “captive insurance companies,” which they use to pay out medical malpractice and worker’s compensation claims, domiciling them in the Cayman Islands.
The tiny British territory with fewer than 100,000 residents has been a boon for nonprofit hospitals’ captive insurance companies because it does not impose taxes on premiums or capital gains. Nothing about the practice is illegal, and it’s quite common for hospitals looking to insure their complex, risky businesses.
Hospital lobbyists in Maryland insisted that when a health system sends millions of dollars to what it reports is an insurance company, it is not actually purchasing insurance. Instead, they believe they are simply setting aside their revenues in the event of any payouts.
Schupp argues this claim is simply a way for hospitals across the country to skirt what would otherwise become hefty tax liabilities. Hospitals also have no incentive to domicile in the United States because of the taxes they can circumvent by remaining in the Cayman Islands, Schupp explained.
The Internal Revenue Service did not say if any Delaware captives or their parent hospitals have paid federal taxes that apply to foreign insurance companies covering United States organizations. State insurance authorities also declined to say whether the captives have paid state insurance taxes.
Nonprofit hospitals already receive enormous tax breaks. They pay next to no taxes annually, and at times, are able to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in excess revenues from their patient care alone.
Spotlight Delaware reached out to the five healthcare systems in the state that run captives with detailed questions about their operations. Many declined to answer questions about their tax liabilities, and one directed Spotlight Delaware to the state’s hospital lobbying organization.
TidalHealth, which is a regional health system that operates hospitals in Delaware and Maryland, said the assets in its captive insurance company are not simply unrestricted funds that can be used for any purpose.
Instead, they are used to pay claims that the hospital has already incurred, or are expecting to pay out soon. Additionally, the hospital system said it does not circumvent any federal taxes, and that it elects to be taxed as a U.S. organization.
“The captive’s Cayman domicile does not mean its income escapes U.S. taxation,” a spokesperson for the hospital said.
Brian Frazee, CEO of the Delaware Healthcare Association. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JACOB OWENS
Brian Frazee, CEO of the Delaware Healthcare Association, declined an interview but offered a written statement defending the practice. He said that in recent years the cost of insuring hospital liabilities has grown, and hospitals make multi-year plans to make sure those risks are covered.
“A captive is an insurance company that a hospital owns to insure its own risks, with reserves set aside specifically to pay claims,” Frazee wrote. “It is a common, regulated approach used by health systems nationwide, and Delaware hospitals using captives do so under the same oversight as any other insurer.”
The companies fall under the regulations of the Cayman Monetary Authority, not the Delaware Department of Insurance, which regulates commercial insurance companies like Highmark and Aetna.
How much are hospitals sending offshore?
After reviewing the most recent tax returns for each of the state’s hospital systems, Spotlight Delaware only found one hospital that did not run an offshore insurance company – Beebe Healthcare in Lewes.
All the state’s other hospital systems, including ChristianaCare, Bayhealth, Nemours Children’s Health, Trinity Health, and TidalHealth, have captives domiciled in the Cayman Islands. In their tax returns, the hospitals claim these companies as “organizations taxable as a corporation or trust.”
Delaware’s hospital systems, excluding Trinity, control more than $257 million within their offshore captives, according to their most recent tax returns and financials. With Trinity included, that total jumps to more than $1.1 billion.
It’s important to note Trinity is a massive, national health system operating in 23 states, and that it established its captive in 1989, making it the longest-running of the group. The system operates St. Francis Hospital in Wilmington, but does not break out state-specific information in its tax returns.
The captives insure the hospitals for tens of millions of dollars each year, and allow the hospitals to purchase what is called reinsurance, which is an added layer of protection for its captive and liabilities, covering any liabilities that may exceed its insured limits.
Many of Delaware’s hospitals offered either no comment, or little response about their captives and tax positions. Some, like Bayhealth and Nemours argued in state bond filings their captives were exempt from certain local taxes under Cayman Islands laws.
Since forming its captive in 2019, ChristianaCare has amassed nearly $128 million in its insurance company. The hospital system offered little in the way of a response to questions about how it operates its captive and the taxes it may owe on its offshore transactions.
“ChristianaCare adheres to applicable laws and industry best practices in the operation of its captive insurance company,” a spokesperson for the hospital said.
Bayhealth in Kent County also formed its captive insurance company in the Cayman Islands and wrote in recent bond filings that its captive is not taxed on “premium and investment income.”
Since establishing the company in 2023, it has accrued $18 million in assets. Bayhealth sent Spotlight Delaware a nearly identical statement to ChristianaCare, and declined to answer questions about its tax obligations.
What taxes might they be on the hook for?
Delaware companies that offload their risk to insurers that are “not authorized to engage in the business of insurance in this state” are subject to a 3% self-procurement tax.
The Delaware Department of Insurance declined to comment on whether the state’s hospitals have paid any self-procurement tax in recent years, citing the offshore nature of the captives and disclosure rules.
A spokesperson for the department did say for captives domiciled in Delaware, a parent company’s nonprofit status does not exempt them from any of the state’s premium taxes.
Still, Insurance Commissioner Trinidad Navarro said he was “disappointed” the state’s hospital systems have acted as “highly opaque entities.”
Delaware Insurance Commissioner Trinidad Navarro said that more transparency is needed in the captive insurance market. | PHOTO COURTESY OF DOI
“We are supportive of efforts to improve transparency in their fiscal operations, especially given the substantive finances held by these so-called nonprofits,” Navarro said in a statement.
At the federal level, offshore captives have wiggle room in how they are taxed.
Ellen Sue Bernards, the executive vice president of HUB International, an insurance brokerage firm, told Spotlight Delaware captives are tested in their domiciles on two different fronts early in their formation: whether they qualify as an insurance company for regulatory reasons, and whether they qualify for tax reasons. She said in most cases with for-profit companies with captives, they want to qualify as insurance companies for both reasons, and will often elect to be taxed as a U.S. organization.
But for nonprofits, the goal is to qualify as an insurance company for regulatory reasons, but then argue that because they are not transferring enough risk, and “pre-funding for the losses,” the captive does not qualify as an insurance company for tax purposes. Each year, since their formation, however, Delaware’s hospitals have claimed their captives as “organizations taxable as a corporation or trust.”
Asked why the hospitals would do this, if the goal is to be viewed as nontaxable entities, Bernards said it’s on the parent company of a captive to be able to support and substantiate their tax position. Still, she added the IRS has “their right” to prod that position as it chooses.
Since most of the hospitals declined to answer questions from Spotlight Delaware about their tax positions, it is unclear if they believe their captives should be exempt from the federal income tax.
Only one hospital system answered questions about its captive’s tax position, TidalHealth, and said it elected to be treated as “a domestic corporation for federal tax purposes and is taxed in the United States on its worldwide income.”
As nonprofit hospitals, it is to be expected that a hospital would not calculate these taxes on their revenues done in service to patients. But it is unclear if the hospitals would owe taxes on revenues generated by their captives, such as dividends or returns made from investments.
Federal tax returns for the nonprofit hospital systems show that in the 2024 tax year, only two of those hospitals, Bayhealth and TidalHealth, paid the 21% federal income tax. Though it is unclear whether those taxes were tied to the captives or one of their many other for-profit enterprises and partnerships.
Bayhealth paid more than $2 million and declined to say whether those revenues were captive-related or part of one of its other for-profit enterprises. TidalHealth also paid $453,623 but said those revenues were separate from its captive.
A spokesperson for the hospital system said the captive files its own, separate tax returns. Spotlight Delaware was unable to view those tax returns because for-profit companies do not have to publicly release their tax returns in the same way that nonprofits do.
Nemours and ChristianaCare reported paying $0 in federal income taxes for that year.
IRS officials declined to say whether the hospital captives or their parent companies have paid any federal taxes, citing disclosure laws that prevent officials from discussing tax returns with outside parties.
Limited transparency in market
Schupp has worked as a lawyer and insurance industry expert for more than 25 years. Earlier this year, he accused Maryland’s hospital systems of gaming the state’s insurance premium laws.
His complaint led him to the Maryland General Assembly, where lawmakers examined whether the hospitals owed back taxes premiums they have written since the formation of their for-profit insurance companies.
Maryland lawmakers ultimately kicked the question a year down the road, passing a watered down bill that compelled the state to conduct a study on the “use, regulation, and taxation” of captive insurance companies.
Schupp told Spotlight Delaware he is not against captive insurance companies, but the industry is “extremely opaque.”
Little is consistent in how and at what level nonprofit hospitals report sending money outside the U.S. each year, he said. That makes it difficult for state taxing authorities to investigate any tax liabilities for hospital captives, he added.
Delaware’s hospitals declined to offer any type of argument as to whether they believe they owe taxes on their captives, but pieces of their reasoning can be found in Maryland.
In written comments submitted by the Maryland Hospital Association, a lobbying arm of the powerful American Hospital Association, the organization supported the amended version of the bill that called for a study into the use of captive insurance.
Representatives also pointed to additional use of the funds that differs from simply covering its liabilities. If claims aren’t paid out, the hospitals can reinvest their funds back into the system, a process Schupp said lacks any transparency.
Bernards said these transactions typically require approval from the captive’s insurance regulators, which in this case would be the Cayman Islands. She also said those regulators aren’t concerned with how the parent company spends its dividends, only that if it pulls the funds out, the captive would remain on stable financial footing.
During the hearing where lawmakers debated the bill, representatives from the Maryland Hospital Association also argued that when they send their money to the offshore captive, they are “not purchasing insurance.”
Schupp challenged that assertion, saying the hospitals make such an argument to avoid the tax liability that comes with being an insurance company.
“Because if they said it was to buy insurance, then they owe a bunch of tax,” Schupp said. “So then, why did you move that money if it wasn’t for the purchase of insurance?”
Flock Security likes to describe its national private network of cameras and license plate scanners as a public safety boon. “I can think of no greater mission than rescuing our children,” tweeted Flock CEO Garrett Langley, sharing a promotional company video. “Another child rape suspect located and arrested with help from Flock,” chief strategy officer Rahul Sidhu posted last month. Last week, venture capital firm and Flock investor Andreessen Horowitz put the company’s benefits in civilizational terms: “Flock eliminates crime. Decline is a choice.”
Though Flock’s investors and executives insist its surveillance dragnet thwarts the most serious of crimes, it turns out police are also using the company’s technology to go after some of the pettiest possible offenses: curfew violations, loitering, and simply being homeless.
When police seek footage from Flock’s more than 120,000 cameras nationwide, they select a category of crime corresponding with the alleged offense they are investigating, such as hit-and-run or burglary. Among the choices is the supposed crime of being suspicious in public, formally categorized by Flock as “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations.”
Records obtained from the police department in Plano, Illinois, reveal that law enforcement agencies nationwide conducted more than 1,200 Flock searches while investigating alleged “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations.”
As this data set reflects only searches of Flock cameras that extended to Plano’s network, this is assuredly just a tiny fraction of the total number of “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations” investigations using Flock nationwide. Records hosted by the website Have I Been Flocked? — which aggregates such logs — show hundreds more of these loitering searches in other states.
The Plano searches were conducted by police departments throughout Illinois, from neighboring states, and from a Georgia town more than 600 miles away. Many queries were license plate searches pertaining specific vehicles; others show police surveilling people on foot for the crime of essentially standing suspiciously.
Plano’s deputy chief of police Gene Morton told The Intercept the town did not install Flock cameras until the end of February. The department shared data from January because it had previously signed an agreement with Flock to search the broader network before its own cameras were operational.
Flock did not respond to a request for comment.
Police in Norcross, Georgia, for example, conducted a smartphone-based search on January 31 with “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations” as the stated justification. It tapped into data recorded by 6,098 different Flock camera networks, each consisting of an untold number of separate cameras that surveilled anyone who moved past them.
The search logs obtained by The Intercept do not break out “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations” separately, so it is unknown in each case what exactly police were searching for. In some cases police appended extra information; the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, for example, searched over 17,000 Flock cameras while investigating “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations – Suspicious person at planned protest site.”
When asked about these queries, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation spokesperson Josh DeVine told The Intercept that the searches in fact originated with the state’s Tennessee Fusion Center, which is operated by both the TBI and the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security. DeVine referred The Intercept’s questions to the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Flock cameras have also been used to zero in on the homeless: Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, shared Flock search data from the West Palm Beach Police Department with The Intercept that included a query pegged to an “outside agency dropping vagrant off” in the city.
In January, police in LaGrange, Georgia, searched more than 6,000 Flock networks on the basis that someone walked out of a house “with a significant amount of traffic.” Officers from the same agency earlier this year searched more than 15,000 Flock systems because of someone “lingering at a stop sign around midnight last night.”
In the data reviewed by The Intercept, most of these loitering searches didn’t include any corresponding case number, suggesting these queries were not part of broader criminal investigations. Some of the searches reviewed by The Intercept note a “suspicious” person spotted outdoors, without any additional justification for the dragnet.
Jay Stanley — a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union’s speech, privacy, and technology project — told The Intercept these searches indicate surveillance mission creep. “This is in line with what we see with these technologies sold on the basis of movie plot scenario, dramatic ‘saving the day.’ And yet when you look under the hood, they’re often used to nickel and dime people for the most prosaic offenses,” he said. “They become part of many departments’ over-policing.”
Loitering and vagrancy laws have an ignoble history across the country as pretextual statutes, many originating in the Jim Crow era, for the targeting of Black Americans guilty of nothing other than existing in public. Some of these laws have been struck down because of the extent to which they criminalize the most mundane behaviors: standing, walking, or simply hanging out. In 1972, the Supreme Court deemed unconstitutional a Jacksonville, Florida, loitering ordinance targeting, among other things, “persons wandering or strolling around from place to place without any lawful purpose or object” and “habitual loafers.”
Stanley pointed out that any guardrails against abuse of Flock’s camera networks is entirely self-enforced by the company, which has an interest in police using it as much as possible, and self-oversight by the police themselves. “We know that police stations don’t seem to be doing this,” he added. “Most police departments are not really paying attention.”
Correction: September 10, 2026, 2:46 p.m. ET This article was corrected to indicate that cameras in Plano, Illinois, were not searched in each of the 1,200 “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations” queries recorded by that town’s police department. Plano provided data about Flock searches starting in January, but the town’s own Flock cameras were not installed until February.
What to learn from Russia's State Duma elections
22
September 2026 — 17:00 TO 18:00 BST
Anonymous (not verified)
Chatham House and Online
Following Russia’s parliamentary vote, experts assess what the results reveal about Russia’s future direction and the durability of President Putin’s system.
Following Russia’s parliamentary vote, experts assess what the results reveal about Russia’s future direction and the durability of President Putin’s system.
Russia’s September State Duma elections will take place as the war against Ukraine continues to reshape the country’s politics, institutions and elite structures. The elections are unlikely to produce major political change, but they offer a valuable window into the evolution of Vladimir Putin’s system, revealing important trends in regime stability and public attitudes.
The event discusses:
What do the election results reveal about the state of Putin’s regime?
How is the war reshaping Russia’s politics and governance?
Do the elections signal renewal within Russia’s political elite?
What role remains for opposition voices in Russian politics?
What role are war veterans beginning to play in Russia’s political system?
What do the elections reveal about public attitudes towards the war and governance?
Historically a new Grand Theft Auto game inspired controversy around violence – but this time people are getting exercised about its romance
There was never any doubt that Grand Theft Auto VI’s extended look would elicit a viral reaction from the internet. Having won the Game Awards’ Most Anticipated award twice consecutively, Rockstar’s forthcoming crime opus is one of the most frothed-over games in recent memory, or indeed ever. It’s nothing short of a cultural phenomenon.
One aspect of the game has provoked an unexpectedly vehement response on social media: not violence, but romance. Protagonists Lucia and Jason are in love, you see, and as a player, part of your job is keeping their spark alive and their relationship strong, so that their criminal escapades are underpinned by a strong connection to one another. Holding hands, enjoying a date at the beach, spontaneously texting one another when apart – all of these interactions will strengthen their bond. You’ll be putting in a lot of work to ensure this couple thrives, which is why some people have come to believe that playing GTA VI counts as micro-cheating.
Spotlight Delaware reporter Maggie Reynolds recently spoke with Bryan Shupe and Patrick Smith, who are seeking the Republican nomination for House District 36 in Delaware in the Sept. 15, 2026, primary election.
Shupe is a four-term incumbent who will be looking to defend his seat from Smith, an IT and finance worker who narrowly lost to the incumbent two years ago.
The winner of their primary will face Democrat Andy Gorlich in the November general election.
Readers can find condensed versions of the candidates’ answers below, while the accompanying podcasts feature unedited excerpts from our conversations.
Rep. Bryan Shupe
What should people know about your campaign this time around, and why do you believe you’re well-suited to represent the 36th District for another term?
I think my campaign represents everything that I’ve continued to run on.
But I think it’s a little bit different this year because I have really increased the presence of social media and allowing people to see behind the closed doors in Dover of what goes on, not only when a bill is introduced, but on a daily basis.
I’ve done that through my social media presence on Mr. 302. So allowing them to see what the daily process is, how bills are formed, what individuals on both sides of the aisle are thinking about different bills and how they work through the process. A lot of people have reached out to me and said they really appreciate seeing bills from the level of just an idea going through the committees, going on the House floor, and then being signed into law. What that actually takes. Who are the proponents and opponents of the law so they can get involved themselves.
When you say “getting people involved,” do you mean by they comment on a social media post or write into you? Or how do you get more constituents involved in that process?
One of the ways that I reach out is social media, but in doing that, people reach out to me in person, when they see me in my small businesses or on the street.
They also come up to Legislative Hall. They reach out to me by email, by text, all the traditional ways as well.
But social media has been that outlet for me to share exactly when people should get involved. And it’s a much earlier stage than people really think, that they should be contacting their representatives.
If you’re reelected going into this legislative session, what would be your primary legislative priorities?
My legislative priority really is to reduce the financial burden that has been placed on individuals within our communities. The prices of electricity, but also groceries and gas, continue to rise.
And a lot of the majority party continue to blame the federal government, but there are so many things that we can do here at the state level in order to decrease spending and increases on our side here in the state of Delaware.
The first is spending. In the last six years, there has been an increase of spending by the majority party of 42% percent, while only seeing a 22% increase of taxpayer money coming in the door. So it’s reckless spending; it’s unsustainable. I know as a small business owner, I can’t spend more than is coming in the door because I won’t be able to survive.
Another thing is we need to lower personal property taxes for individuals and personal income taxes for individuals, because when people have more of their own money to spend, then they will spend it in their local economy.
And I think a lot of people are waking up to see that without those spending limits and without that reduction for individuals’ taxes, that we’re not gonna make it out of this.
Are there specific areas where you would look to cutting spending?
There are many places that can be cut.
The first thing is that there are hundreds of positions within the state of Delaware that haven’t been filled for almost a decade that continue to be paid for and just revolve into the general fund.
We need to get down to the root causes of what’s allowing people to stay on Medicaid year after year to reduce the cost to the state.
There’s also an increase in spending on education, and that doesn’t mean cutting the cost for teachers, but it means cutting out some of the fat of administration. We continue to spend more and more every single year. They’re calling for an increase in $2 billion in our education system, yet the proficiency rates are continuing to decrease. We have 60% of our kids in public schools who can’t read at a proficient level for their grade level, and over 70% can’t do math on a grade level.
So we need to look at not only where do to cut, but how can we spend in a smarter way? What is working? And how can we spend more in the ways that are working, and how can we decrease in the ways that are creating dependency for people?
Last year, you were the only House legislator to vote against both the bondand operating budgets. You also frequently vote against Democrat-introduced legislation, often citing that you’re voting in the interests of your constituents.
Republicans are in the minority now, and likely will be in 2027. How do you balance voting for what your constituents want with also getting things done given the makeup of the State House right now?
I think you work with the majority party when it is good for the state of Delaware, but they may be doing pet projects that may be good for a few people within their district, but it’s not good for the majority of Delawareans.
For example, the bond bill. I think this came out of an article that I saw out in Spotlight Delaware, where there was $40 million that was spent in New Castle County, throughout the bond bill, but not a single municipality in Kent or Sussex County received any money.
We cannot spend on pet projects when you literally have things like infrastructure that’s not being paid for down here.
But I would assume if you wanted to get something passed that provides more spending to Kent or Sussex counties you would need to reach across the aisle to get the necessary votes. So how would you approach creating bipartisan legislation or getting some of those priorities passed given the makeup in Dover?
I’m not a horse trader. I won’t be a politician who says, “Hey, you vote for this bill, and I’ll vote for your bill.” I don’t think that’s the right way to go about it. The way that I reach across the aisle, and I’ll give you a perfect example of this, is really coming up with, authoring bills that I think are the right thing to do.
And I go across the aisle, and I’m able to garner that support. One of those was with HB 113. It was a bill that stopped taxpayers from funding pensions for convicted child abusers who were in our education system. We had Democrats who refused to vote for that bill.
But I reached across the aisle to Rep. Kim Williams, who’s the education chair, and she helped me get the votes necessary to get that out of committee. I think if you have a bill that is right for the right reasons, you will get individuals across the aisle.
You don’t need to forego your values.
Senate Bill 23 was a kind of big topic of discussion at the end of this past year’s session, and also in the lead up to the election this November. What are your thoughts on SB 23 and balancing affordable housing production and also farmland preservation and development?
SB 23, in my opinion, is the perfect example of smoke and mirrors. It calls for more building of affordable housing, yet there is not really a definition of affordable housing. It doesn’t have a price tag in it. It doesn’t have any definition of workforce housing that this would be for nurses or teachers or any of that.
Really, all it does is call for higher density. I think it calls for eight units per acre for 20% of a comprehensive plan. So it allows for developers to have more density without actually having regulations on what that affordable housing looks like.
It also pulls back the community-involved, public process of what they see, how many times they see those neighborhoods throughout the planning process. So I think it’s a really bad decision.
We don’t have enough infrastructure, we don’t have enough emergency services, and we definitely don’t have enough healthcare in order to facilitate and handle all the growth that’s going on right now.
Do you have thoughts on other legislation that would increase affordable housing that you think would work better?
I’m always am a proponent of working alongside nonprofits that know what they’re doing.
We have a nonprofit in Milford called Milford Housing Development Corporation. It is similar in a lot of ways to Habitat for Humanity, where they take families, help them through the process. They put in sweat equity to build their house, then they teach them financial literacy as well to know what homeownership really is, and they help them with the bank.
Now, one of the pieces of legislation that I’ve been working on is called a risk loan pool, and I’ve discussed it with Delaware State Hosing Authority before, but I’m formally writing a bill now. A risk loan pool means that instead of writing checks for $10,000 to $20,000 to pay for that initial down payment, the state of Delaware will actually take on a small portion of risk, say 5%, to local community banks.
That means that they can help a lot more people, but it also means it doesn’t artificially inflate the prices in the market. So the housing prices stay stable, and they also can help people who will be just outside of that risk limit for local banks in order to get into homes.
The Milford area is growing quickly and has seen a number of small businesses pop up in the city. I know you’re also a small business owner. So, what would your approach be to representing the needs of small businesses in Dover?
No. 1, stop raising LLC fees and also any fees to start up a business.
I also want to connect [entrepreneurs] them with other small businesses in order to learn about marketing, purchasing, following regulations, etc.
I would also like to see a reduction in the gross receipts tax.
Many people don’t know what that is, but it’s basically like a hidden sales tax on the businesses themselves. It’s a tax that small businesses pay to the state of Delaware on how much money they bring in the door before they’re even allowed to take off any of their debts.
That is really hurting small businesses right now, and they have to pass it along to the consumers in higher prices.
So is removing the gross receipts tax something you’d propose?
The minority caucus [Republicans] has tried to remove it, I think for the last eight years that I’ve been there, and it has gotten no traction at all.
Again, the, majority party has said, “Hey, we’ll lose revenue for the state of Delaware.”
We keep reminding them that with more money in their pocket, these small business owners are going to be able to hire more people, they’re gonna be able to get more inventory, they’re gonna sell more, and at the end of the day, you’re going to collect more taxes.
Patrick Smith has run against you in the primary in 2022 and 2024. Last time, you narrowly defeated him by 12 votes. What would you say differentiates you from Smith? And how are you approaching this primary against him once again, given that it was very close two years ago?
I would say two things. No. 1 is funding. Who’s funding our campaigns? You can go look at that on the State of Delaware website for campaign finance.
He is funded by developers in the area. They do not like me because I had a bill that made developers pave their roads before they left a project.
I’ve also introduced legislation for impact fees for developers, that new growth has to pay for new growth. They need impact fees for EMS and first responders, for schools, and for infrastructure. So they’ve been after me for a while because they don’t want anyone to help hold them accountable to the people who live here.
No. 2, I have a record that people can look at. So whether it’s talking about spending, fighting for Second Amendment rights, or about voting conservatively, you can look at my record and see that that’s true. It’s not a campaign promise.
Even though we won by 12 votes, I really took that as a loss.
I thought not enough people knew what was going up in Dover because I feel like if they did, they would see how hard I was working as their voice, as their representative. So over the last two years, I’ve really leaned into helping people see what’s going on in Dover.
Patrick Smith
This is your third time running for the state representative seat. So some voters in the 36th district may already familiar with you, but for voters who might not be, can you give us some background about yourself?
Sure. I’m 40 years old. I was born in Hagerstown, Maryland, where I stayed for just a very short period of my life, mainly just as an infant before relocating to Milford, Delaware.
I lived in Shawnee Acres in Milford for a while. At about age 8, I moved to Dover to be closer to my parents’ jobs – they both worked at the courthouse in Dover.
I worked at Bayhealth for about eight years, after leaving the state. And while at the state, I was a child abuse investigator for Department of Family Services. Clearly, that wasn’t the field that I wanted to be in, so that’s when I went and got my MBA in 2014 and found a job with Bayhealth in their finance department.
I later got into the IT department, and to this day, I still work in the same field. I basically would call it medical informatics. I work on a computer every day. I work with high-level executives doing financial reporting and system build, and I enjoy it. It’s a challenge, and I’ve been doing that for 10 years now.
I got into politics back around 2014, right around when Trump was getting into it. And, things have changed with Trump, obviously, over the decade. But, that’s what got me interested and fired up and, kind of an organic transition for me to where I am today in 2026.
Did you run for office in some capacity before 2022, or just kind of got engaged in politics more generally?
I was more into an activism-type capacity, including through the Sussex County Young Republicans.
I was a member of several sportsmen associations, like the Delaware State Sportsmen’s Association, the largest gun rights organization in the state of Delaware. I was a member of Ducks Unlimited.
I’m a big outdoor sportsman, so I’ve always been really concerned about my Second Amendment rights.
As time went on, I kind of got approached in 2021 about running for state representative. I don’t actually live in the town of Ellendale, so I’m restricted to either running for a countywide seat or for a state seat.
Why have you decided to continue running for the seatafter two prior campaigns?
Honestly, it’s the support I’ve gotten from people. I don’t think I would’ve come back and done it again if not for the amount of people that supported me and were regretful that it was such a close race.
I’m just kind of trying to do this to get things back to the middle here in District 36 and just try to make a difference that I can locally and go to Dover and at least roll up my sleeves and bring home a little more productivity than we’ve been seeing in the last eight years.
So what would you describe as your top campaign priorities?
Obviously the cost of living in Delaware has gone way up. The cost of housing is absolutely crazy.
I’m not gonna sit here and say that I have some fancy policy or some arithmetic that’s gonna solve it all overnight, but these are things that I definitely think that need to be at the forefront instead of the two parties being so polarized on other topics. Everyone suffers from the cost of living. Everyone suffer from the cost of energy and housing.
I think a lack of jobs in Delaware is a big issue, especially in Sussex County. That’s one thing I know just being 40 and working class. There’s no really no jobs down here.
I’m a volunteer firefighter in Ellendale, so I’m a big supporter of our first responders. I definitely think that as a volunteer organization, we need as much help as we can get for police, fire, and EMS.
This is something that is needed every single day, at the drop of a hat. So it’s definitely important to make sure that it’s top quality.
You mentioned like, cost of living, more jobs, more infrastructure. Those are issues we hear from a lot of candidates, but how would you say your policy platform is different than Rep. Shupe?
Well, we might have the same policy platform, but Rep. Shupe has had eight years to make a difference.
And I can honestly tell you, and I know a lot of people that I speak to at the doors will tell you that nothing has changed in this district in eight years. So it doesn’t really matter to me what’s on paper. That’s really what Bryan Shupe likes to harp on: what’s on paper.
I plan on using the platform to go out and actually recruit jobs here, work with the county, work with the city, and try to bring people into these different areas where people are looking for jobs.
I think that we’re wasting the resources there if we’re just gonna go to Dover and report on what legislation is getting passed or not passed and put it on a website. Meanwhile, people are struggling every day to get jobs and find a place to work.
So I think there’s definitely a lot of things that need to be addressed and not just written on paper. That’s what I try to tell people.
The job isn’t to report back to the citizens on what’s going on in Dover. The job is to actually get things accomplished.
In an overwhelmingly DemocraticGeneral Assembly, Republican lawmakers are sometimes criticized for just voting against legislation without building enough bipartisan support to get their own legislation passed. So how would you balance voting forwhat your constituents want while also reaching across the aisle to get legislation through?
Well, I definitely think there is common ground with the Democrats and Republicans in some facets. You will get some very hard-nosed Republicans that might alarm, but there are cost of living concerns, there’s public safety concerns, there’s jobs.
Everybody works. Everybody’s got to buy a house. It doesn’t matter what party you’re from. And when you run your whole campaign on “It’s the Democrats’ fault,” like a lot of what Bryan Shupe does, you can’t expect to go to Dover and have a lot of friends.
I run my campaign on what Bryan Shupe hasn’t done in eight years, and Bryan Shupe runs his on why he didn’t do it, and it’s because of the Democrats. So to me, that’s an example of how you burn bridges before you even get to Legislative Hall.
So, if elected, how would you approach making connections and getting to know people in Dover when you haven’t served in the legislature before?
I think it’s just starting with where do we connect and where do we intersect? I’m not gonna start with, “Well, I wanna repeal every gun law that was ever signed into law in Delaware. This ticks me off, and I want this.”
And I think there’s some topics that are really hard to go by in this state.
Our education system’s very politicized, and it makes a lot of people a lot of money. So it’s tough to go to somebody’s door and say, “Elect me, I’ll change the education system. I’ll get our gun rights back.” But I think there’s a lot of things you can sit down and say, “Well, where do we intersect on things, and how can we ensure that we’re giving everybody the best quality of life?”
And I think if you get out in the community and you’re talking to people and you’re saying, “Well, you’re a Republican and I’m a Democrat, but you want to lower your cost of living. You want a safe community. You like to have a good job.”
I mean, that’s where you start. That’s why they call it grassroots.
That’s why they call me a grassroots politician; it’s because I don’t really get into the party’s politics. I stick to what the people in neighborhoods think.
I saw on your Facebook page that you call yourself a “conservative citizen running for office.” Why do you choose that description?
Probably just piggybacking what I kind of just said was I don’t really consider myself a politician. I don’t really get into party politics.
The party chooses who they want to support, and that’s fine. But last year proved when I beat their supported candidate at the polls, you don’t have to be supported by anybody.
You can just go out, meet people, knock on doors, and people will come out and support you. That’s really what matters. We live in a republic where people vote, and for me, the most important thing is being in front of the people and not asking people to come to you.
It’s not partisan. It’s everybody’s in the same room. So I think that’s really something I found to be one of my biggest assets.
Your district is among the line of hotspots for development in Southern Delaware. What would your approach be to growth and development versus preserving farmland and forests?
Well, I think that the state holds a lot of the leverage when it comes to preservation and what to do at the forestry level. For me, I think that’s kind of our lane and try to stay competitive in terms of what’s the market for land.
And I’ve been told that that’s one of our biggest hurdles right now is that the state can’t be competitive with what developers are offering private landowners. So that’s why a lot of this land ends up going to developers, because the state might offer $1 million and the developer can offer $5 million.
So, developers have deeper pockets. I think it’s better for us to focus on what we can help. How can we help to preserve land by making it the best-case scenario for the landowners and the communities and let the sprawl planning and what goes where up to the local municipalities.
I think that’s something we can help at the state level.
Another commonly raised issue in the Milford area is traffic and lack of infrastructure to match the growing population. How would you address these issues?
Yeah, I mean, similarly, at the state level, it’s important to have relationships with the different entities that maintain these infrastructures.
I think my opponent has shown that he doesn’t have a great relationship with DelDOT, for example. That’s the team we want to be a part of if we’re trying to make sure the roads are improved and getting these projects done for people,
So I think maintaining good relationships at the state level with the different entities that are going to help us improve this infrastructure is important to me. Listening to what the citizens are saying. It’s important to put the money where the people want it.
You’ve run against Shupe twice in the past, and last time you narrowly lost the primary by just 12 votes. So how is your campaign strategy different this time around?
I’ve honestly just been doing the same exact strategy that I did. It wasn’t really a strategy. It was just organically who I am and what I do. Just trying to stay in front of the constituents, meet the constituents, knock on as many doors as I can, go to the events that people invite me to, and make sure I show up.
When I say I’m gonna show up, I show up. I’m on phone calls. I’m on text messages. People text my campaign line, and I text them back. I speak to them. And I’m never afraid to talk about issues. So, if something comes up and it’s not something that we agree on, I might just have to tell them we don’t agree on it, but I’m not going to tell them to their face something that’s gonna get me a vote and then, go back on that after I’m elected.
And I think that’s my opponent’s issue right now is that he’s trying to walk back a lot of the promises he’s made and hasn’t kept. I don’t have that voting record to defend, so I’m a fresh slate. I’m a hard worker, and I’m ready to just get in there and get to work, and I think a lot of people understand that.
The president's fight with our neighbor to the north — a constant over the course of his second term with a focus on trade — has turned ugly in recent weeks.
Ed Miliband has rejected warnings from the UK’s chief rabbi that the government’s sanctions against illegal Israeli settlements will make British Jews less safe, as he emphasised ministers can confront the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government while also fighting antisemitism.
The foreign secretary announced sweeping sanctions on trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank on Tuesday, with the government taking the position that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory was unlawful.
An import ban on goods from illegal settlements in the occupied territories and a new ban for arms licences and other exports that “materially contribute to the occupation”.
A comprehensive sanctions regime against providing services such as construction or financing for Israeli settlements and a ban on advertising them in the UK.
Personal sanctions against the main individuals accused of promoting settler violence.
A new ban for arms licences and other exports that “materially contribute to the occupation”.
Sports is the rare topic in which the president has succeeded in shifting the conversation to his preferred terms
Lately, it seems Donald Trump’s scope of interests has narrowed to a few things: remaking downtown Washington DC in his gaudy image; wars he thinks he can win quickly and easily, even though he can’t.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is the author of The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, which is out now. He teaches at Marist University.
Fred Steese, outside the Nevada Supreme Court following his successful pardon hearing in 2017 David Calvert for ProPublica
I’d like to tell you about Fred Steese, who died in August of cancer at 62. When I first met Fred, he was living hand to mouth in a seedy motel on the outskirts of Las Vegas. He had been released from prison a couple of years earlier and struggled to find stable housing and a job, because — on paper, at least — Fred appeared to be a convicted murderer.
In 1995, Fred was wrongfully convicted of the murder of Gerard Soules — a former trapeze artist who had a dancing poodle show at a Las Vegas casino — even though prosecutors had evidence that he was hundreds of miles away at the time. He then spent 21 years in prison before a judge declared him innocent.
In Fred’s case, he told me he thought his ordeal was finally ending when the judge uttered the words “factually innocent” during a court hearing in 2012. Instead, Las Vegas prosecutors insisted he was guilty, that they had not made a mistake all those years ago and that they would retry him for Soules’ murder.
But then they dangled a deal: Fred could walk away now, if only he would agree to plead guilty.
The offer was something I, and a lot of lawyers I talked to, had never heard of. It’s called an “Alford plea,” and it allows someone like Fred to assert for the record that they are innocent but agreed the state might be able to convict them anyway. Experts told me some prosecutors around the country were using the obscure plea as a tool to thwart exonerations.
Fred took the deal. He felt he couldn’t face the uncertainty of another trial and the additional time it would rob from him.
Fred had only 13 years of freedom before he died.
Steese and his lawyer, Lisa Rasmussen, left, and Kathy Nasrey, before his pardon hearing in 2017. Steese served more than 20 years for the murder of Nasrey’s brother, a crime Steese didn’t commit.David Calvert for ProPublica
In June, he went into the hospital for a hernia operation, and when he wasn’t healing like he should, the doctors discovered a large mass on his liver and another on his pancreas. It was stage 4 cancer. By August, he was in hospice, and he died on Aug. 8.
When I heard, it felt like the universe had dealt Fred yet another injustice. Fred did see a measure of accountability, and I can appreciate as an investigative reporter the rarity of that being the case at all. But I’m sobered that his death means he spent more time fighting to clear his name than he got to enjoy his freedom. He deserved 40 more years.
In late 2017, with the help of a tireless pro bono lawyer who worked his case for years, Fred was fully and unconditionally pardoned by the state of Nevada. His record was finally cleared after 22 years.
Fred bought a pickup truck, a Mustang and his very own big rig; his lifelong dream was to be a long-haul trucker.
He didn’t manage to keep the money for long, though. Fred, who’d been in and out of foster homes as a child, spent much of his life outside prison without reliable structure, much less a budget. He was a drifter. He also struggled with drug use. At one point, Fred was swindled out of upward of $15,000 when someone pretended to be the owner of a house for sale that Fred wanted to buy.
Fred’s most marked characteristic was his cheerfulness. He was an easy laugh, and his good-humored resourcefulness quickly endeared him to those he met.
“He’d give you the shirt off his back, even if he didn’t have another one,” his sister, Lynn Myers, told me.
Ryan Norwood, the federal public defender who proved Fred’s innocence, told me he wished Fred had had more time. “But he got to live his dream of being a truck driver and to live his life on his own terms for better or worse.”
Myers hadn’t seen Fred since childhood, but the two reunited after he was exonerated, and the relationship was a rare touchpoint in Fred’s otherwise transient life. Fred’s ashes will rest in a handmade wooden box at Myers’ home in California.
“Maybe now,” she said, “he’s driving big rigs for God.”
Steese following his pardon hearing in 2017. “He’d give you the shirt off his back, even if he didn’t have another one,” his sister said.David Calvert for ProPublica
North Korea’s military partnership with Russia has consequences far beyond UkraineExpert commentthilton.drupal
North Korea is emerging as Russia’s reserve arsenal – and potentially its reserve army. This deepening partnership has strengthened Pyongyang’s military capabilities and its strategic position in East Asia.
The first road bridge connecting North Korea and Russia opened this week, providing the latest sign of the deepening partnership between the two countries since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
North Korea’s military partnership with Russia has moved far beyond the transactional arms supply that developed after the invasion. Pyongyang is increasingly becoming an institutionalized part of Moscow’s war-making capacity – supplying ammunition, ballistic missiles and soldiers. In return, the North Korean regime is gaining economic resources, potential military technology, and extensive experience of modern warfare that it would struggle to acquire elsewhere.
Deepening military ties
Military cooperation has deepened since the two countries signed a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty in June 2024.
South Korea’s Defence Intelligence Agency estimates that North Korea has sent more than 16,000 personnel to Russia since October 2024 and supplied more than 15 million artillery rounds. North Korea itself acknowledged for the first time in April 2025 that it had sent troops to Russia, saying they had fought alongside Russian forces in Kursk. Pyongyang subsequently dispatched approximately 1,000 military engineers for mine-clearance operations.
North Korea replenishes Russia’s war machine, while Russia improves North Korea’s future ability to wage war.
The military relationship continues to evolve. Ukrainian intelligence reported in August that a North Korean missile unit of around 90 personnel had begun deploying to Russia’s western Voronezh region. It said that Moscow expects the unit eventually to have up to 120 ballistic missiles and six launchers. Pyongyang had already supplied dozens of KN-23 and KN-24 missiles to Russia.
Much larger numbers may follow. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested in August that another 30,000–50,000 North Korean soldiers could eventually be deployed. South Korean intelligence has been more cautious, assessing that Pyongyang is preparing for a potential deployment but finding no signs that one is imminent. Kim Yo Jong, the outspoken sister of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, has dismissed the Ukrainian claim as ‘completely groundless.’
Mutually beneficial
The possibility of another major deployment is ominous, but North Korea’s emergence as Russia’s reserve arsenal – and potentially reserve army – is already underway. It is likely to continue because it is mutually beneficial.
Russia receives much-needed ammunition as well as ballistic missiles and manpower that can supplement its own forces. North Korea, meanwhile, receives economic and material compensation.
A NATO Defense College study estimates that North Korean munitions and rockets supplied between September 2023 and February 2024 alone were worth $4.3–4.8 billion – an enormous sum relative to North Korea’s economy. This does not mean Pyongyang received an equivalent cash payment: the terms remain opaque, and at least some Russian compensation has taken the form of critical provisions like oil, food and other strategic goods.
There are limits to this cooperation. North Korea cannot indefinitely deplete its own ammunition stocks or manpower without weakening its military posture at home. But North Korea’s totalitarian system allows the Kim regime to tolerate costs, including substantial battlefield casualties, which many governments would find politically difficult to sustain.
Battlefield experience
More important in the long term is what the Kim regime is learning from the deployment in Ukraine.
Its soldiers have encountered drones, electronic warfare, artillery coordination, mine warfare, logistics and Western weapons systems in sustained, large-scale combat. Its missile forces have gained valuable experience from repeated battlefield testing.
The results may already be visible. Earlier in the war, Ukrainian sources assessed North Korean missile accuracy at 1–3 kilometres. By early 2025, they reported that missiles were landing within 50–100 metres of their targets. Possible explanations include better targeting data or Russian-supplied guidance components. At the same time, North Korea may also have made improvements based on feedback from the battlefield.
The result is a circular military economy: North Korea replenishes Russia’s war machine, while Russia improves North Korea’s future ability to wage war.
Any Russian assistance that improves missile reliability, electronic warfare or other military capabilities can ultimately be incorporated into Pyongyang’s forces back home. This could prove valuable for North Korea in any future conflict with South Korea, Japan or the US.
For example, North Korean missiles fired at Ukraine are being tested against Western-supplied air-defence systems. The resulting data could help Pyongyang improve its tactics against different but technologically related defences operated by US allies in East Asia.
The partnership also strengthens Pyongyang’s diplomatic position. Russian support alone does not fully explain North Korea’s growing nuclear arsenal or its increasingly sophisticated missile programme. But it reduces Kim’s dependence on improved relations with Washington for sanctions relief, diplomatic recognition or greater international legitimacy.
The partnership with Moscow also gives Kim greater room for manoeuvre in dealing with China, North Korea’s traditional ally and principal economic partner. Russian money, energy and military cooperation reduce Beijing’s ability to use North Korea’s economic dependence as leverage. But they cannot replace China entirely: geography, trade and long-standing political ties ensure that Beijing remains indispensable to Pyongyang.
Impact on US diplomacy
All this matters as President Donald Trump again explores diplomacy with Kim Jong Un. In August, Trump ordered the Pentagon to ‘substantially reduce’ US-South Korean military exercises, which he said ‘send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile’ to North Korea.
However, Pyongyang offered no corresponding concession. Kim Yo Jong effectively invited Trump to bid higher by declaring that the US’s ‘hostile policy’ remained unchanged. Pyongyang launched ballistic missile tests shortly after her statement.
Russian support has reduced Kim’s need to accept limited concessions from the US.
Washington is still proceeding with the five-day trilateral Freedom Edge exercise with South Korea and Japan, which began on 7 September. This reflects the limits of Washington’s willingness to accommodate Pyongyang: although Trump has reduced some bilateral US–South Korean exercises, the US remains committed to long-term trilateral deterrence aimed at not just North Korea but also China.
For now, this leaves little common ground for renewed diplomacy that’s agreeable to all parties. Washington is unwilling to dismantle the regional security architecture that Pyongyang opposes, while Russian support has reduced Kim’s need to accept limited concessions from the US. Moscow therefore gives Kim more freedom to walk away from negotiations and more leverage to demand a higher price for returning to them.
An alliance built to outlast the war
The institutional infrastructure supporting the Russia-North Korea relationship is also expanding. The completion of the first road bridge across the Tumen River adds a new physical cross-border connection to the existing railway link. Such infrastructure gives the relationship enduring practical foundations beyond the Ukrainian battlefield.
This month may provide further evidence of the future direction of relations. North Korea’s Foundation Day on 9 September is one of the country’s major political anniversaries and could provide Pyongyang with a natural stage for emphasizing its relationship with Moscow.
Regardless of any ceremony, the bilateral relationship is no longer a transactional short-term arrangement. It is here to stay, with implications that extend far beyond Ukraine.
A future crisis on the Korean Peninsula – or even a wider East Asian crisis, for example involving the Taiwan Strait – could feature a North Korea with combat-tested weapons and more experienced armed forces.
The mistake for policymakers would therefore be to assume that any eventual ceasefire in Ukraine will automatically dissolve this partnership. Russia’s war accelerated the relationship, but there are now military, economic and strategic reasons it will outlive the war.
Washington, Seoul and Tokyo will need a long-term strategy to counter a partnership whose consequences will endure far beyond any summitry. That strategy should include stronger sanctions monitoring and closer intelligence-sharing, while continuing to adapt allied missile and drone defences based on the lessons emerging from Ukraine.
Fundamentally, any strategy must assume that Pyongyang will retain its battlefield knowledge and much of Russia’s support long after the fighting in Ukraine ends.
First set: Shelton 3-2 Alcaraz* (*denotes next server)
An even breezier service game from Shelton, who holds to love. During the changeover, the cameras pan to a few of the celebrities in the audience. There’s Kevin Hart taking it in from a suite. And, of course, there’s USA and Washington Spirit forward Trinity Rodman, Shelton’s girlfriend, watching from his player box. We’ve also heard Simone Biles is in the building somewhere.
As the official 10th day of play in New York moved deeper into the remote hours of the new morning, every passing game imbued Carlos Alcaraz with greater despair. From his focused start, Alcaraz’s intensity had flatlined and he could barely put a ball in court. He lost nine consecutive games against Ben Shelton and seemed to have nothing left.
Instead, the defending champion improbably dragged himself back into a contest that soon developed into one of the most remarkable matches of the year. The latest attempt by Alcaraz, the second seed, at orchestrating a monumental comeback was denied by a brave, defiant Shelton, the eighth seed, who refused to be shaken by his legendary rival or the looming prospect of securing the greatest win of career.
Sacramento, California — California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Democratic criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has become “almost universal,” arguing that opposition within the party is focused primarily on Netanyahu’s government rather than Israel itself.
Speaking with PBS News, Newsom said Democrats are “overwhelmingly opposed” to the current Israeli government and cited West Bank settler violence and Netanyahu’s rejection of a Palestinian state as major reasons for the shift.
“We want a democratic and secure Israel, and we want a secure democratic Palestinian state as well,” Newsom said. He added that even for those who reject the term genocide, the conduct of the war in Gaza has been a “moral catastrophe.”
Public opinion data supports a substantial Democratic shift, although Newsom’s “almost universal” characterization is broader than polling can firmly establish. Recent AP-NORC surveys have found that roughly half of Democrats believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, while other polling cited by The Hill found 58% saying the United States supports Israel too much.
Newsom also said Democratic opposition to accepting money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has grown, describing recipients as a minority within the party. He confirmed earlier this year that he has never accepted AIPAC money and does not intend to do so.
His comments reflect a broader change in Democratic politics, where support for Israel as a country increasingly coexists with sharp criticism of Netanyahu, settlement expansion and the Gaza war. Recent U.S. criticism has also extended to Israeli settler violence in the West Bank, which U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee recently called terrorism.
Andrew Frederick’s body was found in property he was staying at in Grenada in January
The family of a British father who was found dead in the Caribbean in January is urging authorities in Grenada to work with UK police to uncover the truth about his death.
Andrew Frederick’s body was found in the property he was staying at in Grenada on 4 January. An autopsy, performed in the same week by a privately hired pathologist, concluded that the 47-year-old’s death was a homicide.
The new season kicks off on Wednesday night. Our writers have their say on the MVP, rookies to watch and the disasters waiting to happen
Quarterbacks living under center. The NFL has developed into a shotgun league, where most quarterbacks take the majority of their snaps three to seven yards away from the center. But the increase in efficiency when it comes to snaps taken right behind the center should have coaches directing their quarterbacks to do more of it. Matthew Stafford, Caleb Williams, and Sam Darnold led the way in 2025, and others will follow. DF
A year since his assassination, the movement Kirk started is reckoning with the void he left behind - and a revolution that eats its own
As Charlie Kirk’s family, friends, and colleagues barreled through the sky to Utah, one staffer kept throwing up in her mouth. Each time she quietly swallowed. She did not want to add to the distress of the others sitting in deathly silence on the jet – especially Kirk’s 36-year-old wife, Erika. She was already a widow.
Those who work at Turning Point USA – the ultraconservative activist organization based in Phoenix, Arizona, that Charlie Kirk founded – believe deeply in a Christian God. Many also believe that Satan and his deputies vie for influence on Earth. Earlier that day, on 10 September 2025, those forces had seemingly persuaded an angry young man to hide on a roof at Utah Valley University, where Kirk was speaking to 3,000 people, with a loaded rifle.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: OpenAIsaid on Tuesday that its newest artificial intelligence technology had solved one of the "Millennium Problems," a collection of important unanswered math questions meant to push the world's leading mathematicians to new heights. The announcement is an another clear sign that A.I. is fundamentally changing the upper reaches of mathematics, which have long been viewed as a pinnacle of human achievement. The change has excited some mathematicians, while stirring concern among others.
Over the past year, A.I. systems successfully solved a wide range of problems that have bedeviled mathematicians for decades. But these problems were not as complex, nor as closely watched, as the one that OpenAI's technology has solved over the past several days. The Millennium Problems are among the most heavily researched in the field. "This is a spectacular culmination of the arc we have seen over the past twelve months," OpenAI researcher Sebastien Bubeck said of the company's new solution.
The company announced that one of its latest models, which has not yet been released to the public, needed just 88 hours to solve what mathematicians call "the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem." This problem involves a series of equations that are often used to predict the weather. The equations describe the movement of water and other fluids. The Navier-Stokes problem, which has no clear practical value, asks whether these equations completely break down in certain situations. OpenAI's proof claims to have defined just such a situation.
This would imply, at least theoretically, that the laws of physics themselves would break down under certain conditions: that, for example, water could be made to spontaneously explode. But mathematicians and physicists do not believe that this mathematical breakdown could really lead to such an outcome in the physical world. The Navier-Stokes problem was one of seven "Millennium Problems" selected by the Clay Mathematics Institute in the year 2000 as a way of tracking the progress of mathematics in the new millennium. The institute, founded by an American businessman named Landon T. Clay, offered a million dollars for the first correct solution to each problem. Before OpenAI's announcement, only one of the problems had been solved. OpenAI says it managed to solve the Navier-Stokes problem by coordinating as many as 10,000 AI agents, an extremely expensive process that may have cost millions of dollars in computing power.
For those curious about the findings, the company has released a paper (PDF) and formal Lean proof.
Stefany Shaheen and Anthony DiLorenzo Won their respective primaries to replace Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas in New Hampshire's 1st Congressional District, CBS News projects.
Critics say agreement between Nigel Farage and Jordan Bardella to return migrants to France goes against France’s ‘interests and sovereignty’
Reform UK has insisted its deal with France’s far-right National Rally to return migrants back across the Channel was fully approved by the party and signed off by its president, Jordan Bardella, amid a furious backlash in France.
The agreement unveiled on Friday between Nigel Farage and Bardella, who is the 30-year-old protege of presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, appeared to directly contradict Le Pen’s long-held policy of refusing to accept the return of those who arrive in the UK in small boats from France.
Facilities likely to employ 10,400 workers, compared with 40,000 in industry estimates, thinktank says
Datacentres in the UK will create just a quarter of the jobs predicted by the tech sector, while consuming vast amounts of energy, according to new research.
Environmental thinktank Verdant predicts that all the datacentres currently planned are likely to directly employ 10,400 workers – compared with the more than 40,000 cited in projections by the industry lobby group TechUK.
In today’s newsletter: Ed Miliband has announced the strongest statement on Israel’s actions ever issued by the the UK government, but will it make a meaningful difference to Palestinians?
Good morning. For almost half a century, British governments have condemned illegal Israeli settlements, acknowledging they represent an obstacle to peace and threaten the prospect of a two-state solution. And yet no government has ever compelled Israel to stop its expansion.
Ed Miliband’s statement in the House of Commons yesterday was an attempt to change that. In a powerful and emotive speech, the foreign secretary recounted childhood memories of picking oranges on his grandmother’s kibbutz, accused Israeli “terrorists” of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and announced a series of new measures intended to address what he described as a “deeply painful contrast” between rhetoric and reality.
UK news | Police have been told by the government they expect better intelligence gathering after masked far-right groups took to the streets at the weekend, the Guardian has learned, as the Kent force admitted mishandling warnings of potential trouble.
UK politics | Andy Burnham should tackle inequality in the UK by introducing a wealth tax, universal free personal social care and bringing gas and electricity networks under public ownership, according to a report from more than a dozen influential thinkers.
Airline industry | Flight delays and cancellations were expected to continue today at UK airports after another air traffic control failure kept planes grounded for hours, affecting hundreds of thousands of passengers.
Iran | Iranian forces claimed to have seized an American underwater drone in the strait of Hormuz that the US military said had “malfunctioned” more than a day earlier.
US news | Donald Trump gave sizeable holiday gifts to four White House aides, according to new financial disclosures released by the administration, including $45,000 to executive assistant Natalie Harp.
Far-right parties, Maga ideology and Kremlin money are conniving to suffocate liberal idealism for another generation
Not all that long ago, Europe was a beacon of liberal idealism. One memoir recalls it as an era “comfortably saturated with confidence in the unfailing and binding power of tolerance and conciliation”. The economic system seemed obviously preferable to barbarous alternatives. “People honestly believed that the divergencies and the boundaries between nations and sects would gradually melt away into a common humanity,” the author added.
Those words could describe the spirit of globalisation at the turn of the millennium. They were written in the 1930s by Stefan Zweig, reflecting on the optimism of late 19th-century Vienna from the perspective of a Jewish émigré whose world had been destroyed by murderous nationalism. Zweig took his own life in 1942. He never saw fascism defeated. He couldn’t have imagined a renaissance of liberalism in the second half of the 20th century so complete as to attain a pitch of complacency rivalling the one he remembered from his childhood.
Three men are on trial over the death of brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their friend, US citizen Jack Carter Rhoad, in Ensenada
The father of two Australian surfers killed in Mexico two years ago testified in court on Tuesday that his life had been turned into hell, as the high-profile trial continued into its second day.
Three men are charged in the killing of Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson, aged 30 and 33, respectively, and their 30-year-old American friend Jack Carter Rhoad, who were on a surfing trip to Mexico’s Pacific coast in April 2024.
The president’s substantial holiday gifts to four White House aides were made public via financial disclosures released by the administration
Donald Trump gave sizable holiday gifts to four White House aides, according to new financial disclosures released by the administration, including $45,000 to executive assistant Natalie Harp.
Communications adviser Margo Martin and deputy director of Oval Office operations Chamberlain Harris also received $45,000, while director of Oval Office operations Walt Nauta received a $20,000 gift.
New York, New York — President Donald Trump is again defending his account of what he did after the Sept. 11 attacks, insisting Tuesday that “everything I said was exactly accurate.” The available record supports one part of his story: Trump was photographed and interviewed near Ground Zero on Sept. 13, 2001. Several of the more dramatic details he has added over the years remain unsupported.
At a Tunnel to Towers event, Trump said he brought construction workers downtown “right after” the attacks and described two firefighters physically lifting him and running as One Liberty Plaza appeared in danger of collapsing.
There really were fears that the nearby building could fall, and surrounding buildings were evacuated. But PolitiFact found no evidence that firefighters carried Trump away, and no identified firefighter has publicly corroborated that story.
Trump’s own Sept. 13 interviews are also less dramatic. He said he had more than 100 workers helping and that he had come downtown “to spur them on.” Fact-checkers have been unable to verify that Trump actually supplied hundreds of workers, personally participated in cleanup or repeatedly worked at Ground Zero. A retired FDNY battalion chief who spent months at the site said he knew of no such deployment and believed there would have been records if it occurred.
That makes Trump’s sweeping claim of complete accuracy difficult to sustain. The documentary evidence establishes that he visited the area two days after the attack. It does not establish the rescue-like episode he now recounts or the larger cleanup role he has repeatedly described.
The distinction is particularly notable because Trump’s defense included video that confirms his presence near Ground Zero, but does not verify the disputed parts of his story.
Key regions of the brain linked to movement, learning and emotions were affected and may lead to cognitive problems
Babies born to mothers with anaemia have smaller brains, particularly in key regions linked to movement, learning and the regulation of emotion, according to a study.
Researchers said the differences, first detected at the age of one, could lead to cognitive problems when children started school.
"Star Trek" marks its 60th anniversary today, September 8, six decades after the original series premiered in 1966 and went on to become one of the most successful science-fiction franchises in television history. Outlets across the web are commemorating the milestone with full health reports, hot takes, behind-the-scenes retrospectives, and reflections on the franchise's influence and what may lie ahead. The New York Times reports: As of 2026, the 60-year-old science fiction franchise boasts a fandom of carbon units -- sorry, humans -- that spans at least three generations. What began, in 1966, as a five-year space mission on the U.S.S. Enterprise to "boldly go where no man has gone before" now represents an anthology of space travel across more than 25 series and films in parts of two centuries. Where once it was James T. Kirk or bust, it's not unusual to find fans who prefer other captains, like Picard, Janeway or Sisko. There are so many series to keep track of that fans often communicate using country code-like abbreviations for each installment: TOS (the original series), TNG ("The Next Generation"), DS9 ("Deep Space Nine"), ENT ("Enterprise") and so on.
Outside the Trekiverse, disparities in generational slang, politics and social mores are practically a foregone conclusion. But "Star Trek" functions as connective tissue between fans past and present. Some of that tissue is just shared references: There will always be captain's logs, timelines by stardate, warp factors one through 10, phasers and photon torpedoes and, every now and then, a doctor who insists, "I'm a doctor, not a ____!" The Vulcan salute has become a general symbol of geek-recognize-geek, but real Trekkies (or Trekkers, as some prefer) know that "Live long and prosper" is only half the message; the recipient is meant to say "Peace and long life" in response. But the series' staying power, and the ease with which each generation finds its way into them, is an indication that fans of all ages share not only language, but values, in common. Here are some of our favorite Slashdot stories from the early days. The 2004 "Should Star Trek Die?" is an especially good callback today because it features LeVar Burton (Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation) arguing that Trek needs to disappear for several years to become special again...
Star Trek Lawsuit (1998)
Salon Writes on The Troubles with "Trek" (1999)
Star Trek's Next Series (2001)
Should Star Trek Die? (2004)
UPN Officially Cancels 'Star Trek: Enterprise' (2005)
Initial flight data showed signs consistent with a “go-around” maneuver in which an aircrew does not complete a landing attempt and takes the plane back into the air for another approach.
Rep. Chris Pappas defeated democratic socialist Karishma Manzur in the Democratic primary, while former Sen. John Sununu defeated Scott Brown in the GOP contest.
Helllo! Im gonna upgrade to BTG on my adv2 pro, but the the float life thundercat is out of stock! I was wondering what other options there are.
I ride both streets/trails i see options available from Burris, but dont know which size to get (11.5 or 12?), any other tire recommendations are also appreciated!
Tit-for-tat violence surges again in region, with tankers struck by the US in the Gulf of Oman, and reprisal attacks by Iran on a US base in Jordan
The US military on Tuesday said it had “destroyed” several Iranian tankers after Iran attempted to strike a US navy warship with ballistic missiles, as violence once again surged across the region, pushing the price of oil past $100 a barrel.
American forces struck the tankers in the Gulf of Oman and near Iran’s Kharg Island, US central command (Centcom) said in a statement, adding that American forces “directed the crews to abandon ship before the vessels were struck”.
Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and a federal judge issued opposite decisions on the fate of a congressional map that favored the GOP, leaving races in limbo.
No 11 seed rallies for 5-7, 3-6, 7-5, 6-3, 7-6 (6) win
Tiafoe into third US Open semi-final in five years
American will play Alcaraz or Shelton in last four
At the end of more than four and a half hours of escalating drama inside the world’s biggest tennis stadium, a devastated Alex Michelsen fell into Frances Tiafoe’s arms just outside the tramlines, sobbing uncontrollably. Tiafoe took his younger countryman in an embrace and held him there for 23 seconds, the victor consoling the vanquished in the aftermath of an extraordinary comeback that had carried him, somehow, into the US Open semi-finals.
Only a couple of hours earlier, the 28-year-old Tiafoe had been two sets down and two points from elimination in the third set, with Michelsen within touching distance of the biggest victory of his young career. Instead, Tiafoe roared back from the brink to win a quarter-final that will be long remembered in New York, outlasting Michelsen 5-7, 3-6, 7-5, 6-3, 7-6 (6) on Tuesday afternoon to reach the last four at Flushing Meadows for the third time in five years. Now he will face Ben Shelton on Friday after the American ousted defending champion Carlos Alcaraz in another epic five-set marathon that ended at 3.33am on Wednesday morning.
The Trump administration moved Tuesday to ban imports of Canadian motorcycles, some dairy products and most types of alcohol starting later this month, intensifying the trade war between the two countries.
Frontrunner Sununu beats Scott Brown to earn Republican nod in closely watched race in November
Former senator John E Sununu triumphed on Tuesday in the New HampshireRepublican Senate primary over Scott Brown, earning the GOP nod in what will probably be a must-win race if Democrats hope to seize the upper chamber.
Sununu, 61, was the clear frontrunner in the GOP primary. He served one term in the Senate from 2003 to 2009.
Pappas fends off challenge from progressive Karishma Manzur in seat to be vacated by retiring Jeanne Shaheen
Congressman Chris Pappas beat back progressive challenger Karishma Manzur in the Democratic primary for US Senate on Tuesday, advancing as most observers expected to what will be a closely watched general election that is critical to Democratic hopes of flipping the upper chamber.
The two were competing for the nomination that opened up after Jeanne Shaheen, 79, the state’s three‑term incumbent Democratic senator, announced her retirement.
Jefferson City, Missouri — The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected Missouri’s emergency request to immediately restore a Republican-drawn congressional map, leaving a state court ruling blocking the new districts in place for now.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh denied the application without explanation and without referring it to the full court. Missouri officials had asked the justices to overturn a unanimous Missouri Supreme Court ruling that said the 2025 map cannot take effect unless voters approve it through a November referendum.
The Republican-drawn map would significantly reshape Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s Kansas City-based district and was adopted as part of a broader mid-decade redistricting push supported by President Donald Trump.
The legal situation, however, remains complicated. A federal judge separately issued a temporary order directing Missouri to use the newer map, creating competing state and federal court rulings over which congressional boundaries should govern the November election.
The dispute began after the group People Not Politicians collected signatures seeking a statewide referendum on the new map. Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins rejected the petition, but state courts ultimately ruled it was legal, sufficient and filed on time.
Unless the federal litigation changes the outcome, Missouri’s 2022 congressional districts remain the operative map while voters consider whether to approve the Republican-backed replacement.
The dispute carries national significance because Republicans hold a narrow House majority, making even a single congressional district potentially consequential for control of the chamber.
New York, New York — Mayor Zohran Mamdani has released more than 170,000 pages of city records concerning air quality and health risks after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, saying New Yorkers were misled about whether the air around Ground Zero was safe.
“People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air,” Mamdani said Tuesday. The records are being published through a new city portal funded in the fiscal 2027 budget.
The release also resolves litigation brought by 9/11 Health Watch seeking access to city documents. In May, a New York judge ruled that the city had violated public-records law by withholding material requested by the group.
Mamdani’s accusation is stronger than simply saying officials made mistakes. However, longstanding federal findings already established serious problems with the government’s post-attack messaging. A 2003 EPA Inspector General review found shortcomings in how air-quality information was communicated, while a separate survey found that most respondents wanted more timely information and did not trust what they had been told.
The newly released records could provide additional evidence about what city officials knew and when they knew it.
Since 2001, thousands of responders, workers and residents have developed illnesses linked to World Trade Center exposure, leading Congress to create the federal WTC Health Program.
Mamdani declined to specifically accuse former Mayor Rudy Giuliani of lying, saying New Yorkers should review the documents and reach their own conclusions.
The affluent city-state has justified high-end salaries for its political leaders, arguing they attract talent and ensure good governance
Singapore’s prime minister has been given a $1m pay rise as the affluent city-state announced a dramatic one-off salary boost for government ministers.
The pay increases add more than 60% to what are already the world’s highest ministerial salaries.
Trump responds after Canada imposes $20bn in retaliatory tariffs and Canadian PM vows to diversify trade abroad
The US is banning dairy products, most alcoholic beverages and motorcycles from Canada, the White House said on Tuesday, as the trade war between the two neighbors and longtime allies escalates.
The ban will take effect in three weeks and comes after Canada imposed retaliatory tariffs on $20bn in US imports earlier on Tuesday.
Hey everyone, first month in the sport and still learning. I recently bought a used XR with a CBXR. I went this route because the seller advertised it as: “A great setup for someone looking for an XR with significantly upgraded battery capacity without spending a fortune.”
I paid extra specifically for the CBXR and the added range. The seller also owns an extreme sports store and was an authorized Future Motion dealer, so I assumed it was professionally installed. The board rides fine (I think), but diagnostics show: Hardware: 4212 Firmware: Gemini 4165 Odometer: 176 miles
I’ve read that 4165 may limit aftermarket batteries like the CBXR, potentially reducing it to something closer to stock XR range. Is that actually true? I also did a short test ride and the battery dropped from 96% to 88% in only 0.6 miles. I was told this can be normal with a CBXR, but it seems concerning.
I’ve read that voltage is the best way to test the battery’s actual capacity, but I can’t seem to access voltage information with my current firmware. NoseDive shows battery percentage, current, temperatures, etc., but voltage reads 0V when stationary.
Is there another way to test the actual CBXR capacity without riding 30+ miles? And if 4165 is limiting the battery, can it safely be downgraded on a 4212? If not, are there other options, such as a VESC conversion or another relatively simple solution?
I’m mainly looking for the longest range possible with minimal tinkering and expense. Thanks!
Sept. 8, 2026 — Agentic AI is reshaping the demands on AI infrastructure. As AI moves from inference to action, agents reason, retrieve data, call tools, and interact with databases and other agents, driving significantly more CPU-based computation across the data center. But the infrastructure requirements vary by workload: scale-out and data-plane use cases favor maximum throughput efficiency, while agentic and performance-critical applications demand highly responsive CPU performance. Arm is already operating at significant scale in the data center: IDC reports that Arm-based rack-scale servers have overtaken x86 as the dominant accelerated computing platform.
Credit: Shutterstock
Today Arm is sharing how the company is advancing that shift. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to AI infrastructure, so Arm gives customers flexibility to choose what best fits their workloads. With the new Neoverse Compute Subsystems (CSS) N4, customers can build silicon optimized for maximum throughput efficiency, while Arm AGI CPU provides production-ready silicon designed for highly responsive agentic AI – all on a common Neoverse platform and software ecosystem.
Accelerating Differentiated Silicon with Neoverse CSS N4
AI infrastructure is also becoming more heterogeneous, with some deployments requiring silicon tailored to a particular system architecture or function – from bespoke compute platforms to DPUs, networking and other specialized designs.
Neoverse CSS extends Arm into those designs, giving partners a proven, integrated compute foundation they can configure around their own requirements while reducing engineering effort, integration risk and time to silicon. Neoverse CSS N4 takes that approach further as Arm’s most configurable CSS yet, with Arm’s fastest path from CSS to silicon.
With up to 128 cores per die, CSS N4 supports LPDDR6 memory and PCIe Gen 7 connectivity and delivers up to 2x the performance, up to 1.25x the performance per watt and up to 1.75x memory bandwidth of Neoverse CSS N3. Together, those advances deliver the compute density and high-speed memory and I/O needed as agentic AI drives more data movement, accelerator orchestration and concurrent compute across the system.
The Arm Total Design ecosystem further accelerates the path to production through earlier IP validation and software development – a collaborative model Arm is now extending to physical AI.
Arm CPUs Powering Agentic AI at Scale
Not every customer needs to build custom silicon. For those looking to deploy production-ready compute, Arm AGI CPU brings the performance and efficiency of the Neoverse platform.
Since its introduction, companies across the AI ecosystem – including OpenAI, Meta, Cloudflare, Oracle, SAP, Lenovo, Supermicro and Verda – have been developing solutions around Arm AGI CPU.
Across the broader cloud ecosystem, companies are already supporting agentic AI on Arm. Google Cloud is running agent sandboxes on Axion-based GKE, Microsoft Azure is accelerating sandbox tool execution with Cobalt 200, and NVIDIA Vera is designed to accelerate agentic workloads.
Volcano Engine, the cloud computing division of ByteDance, is enabling its next-generation cloud services on the platform and bringing the first agentic sandboxes powered by Arm AGI CPU to market, providing secure and elastic environments for agent workloads at scale.
Building for What Comes Next
The world is still at the beginning of the agentic AI era. As agents proliferate, infrastructure will need to process more data, coordinate more accelerators and support more concurrent compute – increasing the importance of getting maximum value from every watt of power, every rack and every dollar invested.
The industry is converging on Arm as the common compute platform for the next generation of agentic AI. With Arm AGI CPU and Neoverse CSS N4, customers can choose the path that best fits their infrastructure while maintaining a shared foundation of performance, efficiency and software compatibility.
About Arm
Arm (NASDAQ: ARM) is the industry’s highest-performing and most power-efficient compute platform with unmatched scale that touches 100 percent of the connected global population. To meet the insatiable demand for compute, Arm is delivering advanced solutions that allow the world’s leading technology companies to unleash the unprecedented experiences and capabilities of AI. Together with the world’s largest computing ecosystem and 22 million software developers, we are building the future of AI on Arm.
Special Olympics Delaware athletes compete in the 2025 State Bowling Tournament at Mid-County Lanes. Photo Credit: Special Olympics Delaware.
Special Olympics Delaware announced that the 2026 Special Olympics Delaware State Bowling Tournament will be held at Mid-County Lanes in Middletown, Delaware, on September 12.
Special Olympics Delaware’s State Bowling Tournament will make its return to Mid-County Lanes in Middletown, Delaware, on September 12, according to a press release distributed on September 3.
Mid-County Lanes will host the 2026 Special Olympics Delaware State Bowling Tournament throughout the day, starting at 8:30 a.m. This year’s event will bring together over 470 Special Olympics athletes and unified partners from all five Special Olympics Delaware areas across the state, according to the release.
“There’s something special about seeing the lanes filled with athletes giving their all, cheering on their teammates, and celebrating every strike, spare, and personal best,” said the Director of Sports & Area Engagement for Special Olympics Delaware, Kylie Lavelle. “As one of the largest bowling tournaments ever held by Special Olympics Delaware, this event reflects the incredible growth of our program and the enthusiasm our athletes have for competition. We’re proud to bring together so many athletes and Unified partners for a weekend that highlights achievement, sportsmanship, and inclusion.”
The event will feature competitions in singles, doubles, unified doubles and ramp and bumper divisions. There will be three timeslots for competition — 8:30 a.m. until 11:00 a.m., 12:30 p.m. until 3:00 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. until 6:30 p.m. — and each timeslot will begin with an opening ceremony and close with the distribution of medals and ribbons, according to the release. The awards will be presented by law enforcement.
To learn more about Special Olympics Delaware and the event, click here.
The Transportation Security Administration has launched a new program at 13 airports, allowing eligible TSA PreCheck members without plane tickets to pass through security and enter the gates.
Photo: Photo courtesy of the Delaware Alzheimer’s Association
New law expands insurance coverage for testing that can help doctors select treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions
DOVER, Del. — Gov. Matt Meyer signed legislation Tuesday afternoon expanding insurance coverage for biomarker testing, giving more Delaware patients access to technology used to diagnose diseases and identify treatments tailored to their conditions.
Senate Substitute No. 1 for Senate Bill 120 requires more health insurance plans, including Medicaid, to cover medically appropriate biomarker testing. The legislation unanimously passed the Senate in June before receiving approval from the House.
The law is intended to close a growing gap between advances in precision medicine and insurance coverage for the tests needed to guide care.
What biomarker testing does
Biomarker testing examines genes, proteins and other characteristics that may provide information about a disease. Doctors can use the results to diagnose some conditions earlier, determine whether a patient is likely to benefit from a particular treatment, avoid treatments unlikely to work or identify potential clinical trials.
The testing has become especially important in cancer care and is increasingly used in diagnosing and treating Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions.
Supporters say expanded access can lead to earlier diagnoses, more effective treatment, less unnecessary care and better-informed decisions by patients and doctors.
Alzheimer’s advocates welcome signing
Representatives of the Alzheimer’s Association Delaware Chapter attended the bill signing.
Glen Gray, chair of the newly organized Delaware chapter, praised Meyer’s decision to sign the measure. He said the law represents another step toward diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease earlier, when patients and their families generally have more options for treatment, planning and support.
Gray also praised Sen. Spiros Mantzavinos for leading the legislative effort, calling the bill an example of effective leadership and thanking the senator for working to improve care for Delaware’s older residents.
A tool for cancer survivors
American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network volunteer Matt Wilson underwent treatment for pancreatic cancer more than 13 years ago, when biomarker testing was not as widely used as it is today.
“Though biomarker testing did not inform my initial treatment, it is a critical tool for ensuring my cancer stays in remission,” Wilson said. “It is also critical for ensuring continued progress in the fight against this disease.”
Wilson said greater knowledge about the characteristics of an individual patient’s cancer can help doctors choose more effective treatments.
“The more we know about cancer and the better we understand how to treat it, the closer we are to ending cancer as we know it for everyone,” he said. “Biomarker testing makes that possible.”
Coverage has lagged behind medical advances
Although the use of biomarker testing has expanded, supporters of the legislation said insurance coverage has not always kept pace with advances in medicine. That can leave patients unable to obtain testing that could identify the most effective treatment for their condition.
Mantzavinos sponsored the legislation, while Rep. William Bush championed the effort in the House.
“For thousands of patients in Delaware, biomarker testing has meant more effective care and better outcomes, offering renewed hope,” said Lance Kilpatrick, government relations director for the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. “Yet too many people still struggle to access this testing due to barriers, including inadequate insurance coverage.”
Kilpatrick said the new law will help eliminate those barriers and give more patients access to testing that could improve their care.
To Go Box
What: Information about biomarker testing and precision medicine
Who may benefit: Patients whose doctors recommend biomarker testing to diagnose a condition or help select treatment
What the new law does: Expands coverage of medically appropriate biomarker testing through more health insurance plans, including Medicaid
There will always be an insatiable demand for compute, former Cray CEO Peter Ungaro told Google Cloud’s Jay Boisseau and Adnan Khaleel last week. But moving data is “where the money is at,” he said. “That’s where the real value is in the market today.”
As he previously did at Dell, Boisseau is hosting interesting conservations about HPC and supercomputing at Google Cloud as part of the Google Cloud Advanced Computing Community. Last week’s guest was Ungaro, who became CEO of Cray in 2005 and left the company in 2021 following its 2019 acquisition by HPE for $1.3 billion. This week’s guest is AMD’s Nick Malaya on FP64, another pertinent topic in HPC.
The three covered a lot of ground in the one-hour Google Cloud talk, titled “From Big Iron to Clusters & Clouds to AI Silicon and Beyond: A Conversation with Pete Ungaro.” Ungaro’s comment about the importance of data movement came in response to a question from Khaleel, Boisseau’s co-host on the Google Cloud broadcast.
“FLOPS keep on exploding,” Khaleel said. “But the real trick in supercomputing is the memory bandwidth, the I/O bandwidth…We see HBM being integrated into more and more AI silicon today. So where do you see the next breakthroughs happening when it comes to the memory and the network?”
HPE Slingshot 400 switches support multi-tenance (Image courtesty HPE)
Ungaro responded: “That’s where I think the real exciting technologies are, is in moving this data and integrating these technologies,” he said. “So that’s what’s going to be next. There’s a lot of cool companies working on some really neat stuff right now about what’s going to be next in that space.
“But there’s no doubt that memory technologies and data movement technologies, like interconnect storage systems and stuff–that’s that’s where the money is at, I think,” Ungaro continued. “And I say money from a perspective of not dollars, but where the real value is in in the market today.”
The AI boom has driven demand for all aspects of computing, at the processor, memory, storage, and network levels. An early focus on AI model training, which is compute-bound, yielded an industry focused more on increasing FLOPS rather than increasing the speed of data movement.
The University of Tennessee’s Jack Dongarra mentioned this at ISC 2026, when he lamented the lack of balanced systems as reflected in the HPCG benchmark.
“Floating point operations are not really the critical thing and that’s been happening for a long time,” Dongarra said during his closing keynote at ISC 2026. “We can plot the processors and look at what the data movement story has been, and we end up with that diverging situation that’s referred to as a memory wall.”
As the focus on AI model training pivoted to AI inference over the past 12 to 18 months, this so-called memory wall has emerged as a big issue that’s impacted the direction of high-end computing. The decode stage of AI inference is a sequential workload that can’t be parallelized as well as training, which has shifted the focus away from powerful GPUs to memory bandwidth as the bottleneck.
Silicon photonics are poised to help drive scale-out interconnects (Pete Hanson/Shutterstock)
As a result, we’re seeing a wave of innovation occurring in semi-conductor packaging, including chiplet architectures (UCI-e), many-core Arm designs, and SRAM-heavy chips like d-Matrix and Cerebras. We’re also seeing innovation at the network level, with open interconnect designs like UALink and ESUN, as well as silicon photonics that address heat and energy concerns of copper-based networks.
Ungaro didn’t talk about these specifically, but it’s likely they are at least part of the bag of networking technologies that he sees addressing the data movement dilemma. There is one thing we are certain about: Ungaro isn’t a fan of the term “memory wall.”
“That’s the cool thing about this industry,” said Ungaro, who’s a member in of the inaugural class of HPCwire’s 35 Legends program in 2024. “People say, ‘Oh, there’s the memory wall.’ And I think there’s no walls. People are smart. We’ve gotten around this. Think about how small transistors are today. We never thought we could get to this level 30 years ago, but we’re past it today, so it’s never-ending innovation, which is so exciting.”
Some of Ungaro’s excitement revolves around one of the more staid standards in computing: Ethernet.
“Our last interconnect that we made at Cray when I was there, Slingshot, was based on Ethernet,” Ungaro said. “We used to pooh-pooh Ethernet as not high performance enough. And then all of a sudden, a bunch of smart people get together and figure out, well, if we do this and that and this and that, all of a sudden, [you get] Ultra Ethernet and things like that. We can get this really performing at levels that we never thought we could before, and we can do unique things with it. And so I do think Ethernet is going to be around for a long time just because we can continue to evolve.”
Liquid Cooling for HPC
Another big hurdle the industry is facing revolves around cooling. In his conversation with Boisseau and Khaleel, Ungaro noted that Cray was at the forefront in developing liquid cooled supercomputers before it was bought by HPE in 2019, and the company continued to innovate in that arena following the acquisition.
“You had HPE and SGI and engineers that had done a bunch of liquid cooling stuff all together,” Ungaro said. “It’s just expanded that whole capability.”
Liquid cooling is unavoidable in HPC (Matveev Aleksandr/Shutterstock)
While air cooling is staging a bit of a comeback thanks to its simplicity and expandability, there’s no doubt in Ungaro’s mind that liquid cooling will be critical moving forward, as the energy density of today’s high-performance GPUs are just too high to go back to 100% air-cooled racks.
The big question facing HPC architects today, he said, is how data centers can be constructed to maximize efficiency. As Ungaro noted, hyperscalers like Google Cloud taught the industry a valuable lesson, which is that the most efficient data center may not be the most attractive.
“Traditionally we built data centers that were very pretty and they were showcases and you could walk around them very comfortably,” Ungaro said. “I think the hyperscalers came in [and said] wait, wait, wait. We could do this more efficiently. These rooms could be run a lot hotter than maybe as comfortable for the average human to spend a lot of time in. Or they could not be as pretty but be more functional and not have glass windows and such.”
HPC’s New North Star?
Now that we have built exascale supercomputers, Khaleel asked Ungaro what the HPC community’s next goal should be. Perhaps it should it be building a zettascale system? Ungaro’s response was mixed.
“It’s really how do I efficiently run larger and larger systems to solve new problems, to solve problems I couldn’t solve yesterday. And it definitely has very little to do with pure FLOPs,” Ungaro said. “You can get a lot of FLOPs by putting lot of crappy computers together and tying them all together and running something.”
Ungaro said he doesn’t like the idea of having one simple metric, but instead said the industry should seek to maximize systems at the intersection of scale and efficiency. “It’s really I think about how do we get more efficiency out of systems at bigger and bigger scale,” he said.
AI has already disrupted jobs, and it’s poised to continue disrupting jobs for the foreseeable future. With that in mind, Boisseau asked Ungaro for any advice he can provide to the next generation of researchers who are entering HPC and supercomputing? Ungaro’s advice was telling.
“I would say, first of all, you’re in one of the most exciting industries that there is. You picked a great industry that’s growing fast and moving and changing and evolving. You did that really well so congrats on that,” he said. “I think the biggest challenge is being open and learning and not getting set in our ways. We’ve all made lots of mistakes in this industry over time because we rely on our past and our past knowledge. And in something that’s moving this quickly, I think you just you can’t do that. You got to use that as your crutch, but you got to be open minded and continually, continually learning. And I think that’s the most critical thing for folks.”
Universities, interestingly, are not high on Ungaro’s list of places where the next-generation of researchers can go to prepare for the future.
“When you get out of university, that’s where you start learning. Basically you’ve just learned how to learn, and now you got to start applying that every single day of the rest of your life,” he said. “I’m still learning today and I have a lot of gray hair–mostly gray hair or no hair–and so I just don’t think it ever stops…That hunger for learning and applying it, I think that’s the magic equation.”
The case, seeking to help officials ensure potential voters are citizens, is among the election-related disputes the court is considering ahead of the midterms.
I see Hooiser has onewheel marketed tires with the EB1 and FF tire compounds with product numbers ending in 12325. I cannot find anything in stock for onewheel tires in canada but found someone who can order a Hoosier 11325 tire in either D20A or D30A. Will one of these tires fit the pint X? Are there any differences other than compound that would make it incompatible?
All tires referenced state they are size 10.5 / 5.0 - 6
Hey guys! I’m looking into buying this Onewheel GT from a Facebook seller, but I’m not sure what could be wrong with it and whether or not it’d be worth fixing it.
With my budget I could drop about $500 into it. I’ve tried looking through posts from the past and most people have had loose foot pads, connectors or normal error codes but this doesn’t seem like an error code. Is it something with the battery? I’m all new to fixing one wheels and I’m looking for a good project to learn more.
EU’s highest court allows Swedish furniture firm to begin proceedings after Vlaams Belang used its trademarks in immigration campaign
Ikea has won the right to take legal action against a Belgian far-right political party that parodied the Swedish flatpack furniture firm’s branding in its anti-immigration campaign.
In a ruling on Tuesday, Europe’s highest court said that Ikea had the right to oppose the use of its trademarks and distinctive graphics by Vlaams Belang, a rightwing Eurosceptic political party that advocates for an independent Flemish state.
I have a GT with a GTFO, WTF rails, bang bumpers, low boy foot pads, flight fins and enduro. It has lots of power and it’s great. My only issue with it is off road on steep hills it makes it up but it’s still not as fast as I want. I am 150lb. I am trying to decide if 20s or a super flux would be next if I wanted to be able to get up hills a little quicker.
The other options is just start building a custom xr board bc the GT is getting kinda heavy.
Lisa Nandy says government will introduce legislation after talks end without breakthrough
Apple and Google will be forced to block explicit images on children’s smartphones by law in the UK after talks failed to produce a breakthrough, the government has said.
The legislation commitment puts ministers on a collision course with two of the biggest players in Silicon Valley, months after the government announced a social media ban for under-16s.
What the US midterms could mean for Trump’s powerExpert commentLToremark
The Democrats are projected to make big gains in November’s midterm elections. But this will not necessarily constrain President Trump.
As President Trump gathers Republicans this week for their first-ever midterm convention, election campaigning is in full swing. The results of the November midterm elections will shape Trump’s remaining tenure and the 2028 presidential cycle. As it stands, Democrats are projected to take the House of Representatives, while the Senate is a closer call. Either way, Republicans will likely lose the governing trifecta – House, Senate and presidency – that has enabled Trump’s agenda and removed constraints on his authority.
But that will not automatically result in durable guardrails or clear policy shifts. Even with control of one or both congressional chambers, many Democratic efforts to frustrate administration policies or impose oversight will run into structural hurdles. Instances of hard leverage are few, predominantly around funding the government, but they can be used to extract concessions – even as Republicans rally to defang them before the new Congress takes office in January.
Outside fiscal negotiations – and nominations, if the Democrats also take the Senate – opposition will be more about optics than hard constraints. This is especially true on foreign policy, where Trump enjoys practical, legal and structural advantages that empower him to act.
Areas of potential Democratic leverage
With a majority in either or both houses, Democrats can block Republican legislative moves. This would likely push the White House to double down on its executive authority claims, including executive orders, emergency declarations and regulatory actions. But the inverse is not true. Even with both chambers, Democrats would struggle to drive policy through legislation. A war powers vote to curtail military engagement in the Gulf or resolution disapproving of a foreign arms sale, for instance, would face presidential vetoes and Democrats would not have the supermajorities needed to overcome them.
Another area of potential leverage is withholding approval for presidential appointments – especially for a Supreme Court or Federal Reserve vacancy. However, this only works if Democrats retake the Senate, which confirms nominees.
An area where Democrats have real leverage is fiscal matters – even if they only take the House. President Trump needs congressional action to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling, which limits government borrowing. Congress raised the debt ceiling by $5 trillion in 2025 and the limit is now expected to be reached by mid-2027, after which Treasury Department accounting manoeuvres to avoid default – known as extraordinary measures – could buy an additional six to nine months. Failure to raise the limit in time to meet the government’s debt obligations could trigger a calamitous market shock. How Republicans navigate the period after the midterms and before the new Congress takes office will determine whether the debt limit remains as a negotiating lever.
Trump is pushing Republicans to use the budget reconciliation process – which requires only simple majorities in both houses – to lift the debt limit by another $5 trillion through the remainder of his term, and secure funding including $60 billion for defence and $12 billion in aid for farmers hit by tariff retaliation and Hormuz disruption. But time is of the essence, as reconciliation requires a budget resolution adopted by both chambers, so a Democratic House alone would rule it out.
Ironically, Republicans themselves might provide the most immediate obstacle to Trump’s wishes. Rapid debt accrual – some $2.9 trillion of the $5 trillion added to the debt limit in 2025 had evaporated by June – has made fiscal hawks like Senator Rand Paul unwilling to proceed without spending cuts. Failure to extend the limit would yield a negotiation in 2027 or early 2028, with presidential primaries in sight and little incentive to compromise.
Unlike the debt limit, reconciliation cannot be used for regular appropriations, the annual bills that fund federal agencies. As it stands, Republicans will need Democratic support to find a solution before funding expires on 11 December. This negotiation will set the timing and parameters for starker confrontations in the new year, including opportunities to attach conditions for how funding is spent. But as the Trump administration asserts unilateral authority over spending, such conditions may have less relevance.
For their part, Democrats must weigh their negotiation priorities and appetite for a potential government shutdown – during which the federal government withholds services, data and paycheques – which will inevitably raise the question of blame.
Any change of control in the US Congress would also precipitate widespread investigations, including into Trump family business dealings and the Iran war. However, the levers of Congress – for instance, the power to subpoena testimony and documents – will quickly run into enforcement challenges.
This Trump administration is more capable of resisting scrutiny than the version Democrats confronted after retaking the House in 2018. It has used non-compliance, taken advantage of slow-moving court proceedings, and expanded claims of executive privilege to resist disclosing certain documents and communications. In August, Justice Department lawyers issued a non-binding advisory opinion stating that executive privilege extends to presidential communications with private individuals if they relate to his decision-making, which could vastly expand the scope of privileged information. Nevertheless, there are signs that the White House is preparing for Democratic investigations by hiring lawyers and briefing staff.
And Americans see ample cause for such investigations. A Gallup poll found that 89 per cent of Americans, including lopsided majorities in both parties, believe government corruption is widespread. But the challenges of reaching into the executive branch may change the shape and targets of investigations, with spillover falling onto Trump’s family members, business associates and outsiders who lack similar procedural tools and protections. Some corporate leaders could find themselves squeezed between a White House claiming privilege and Congress demanding cooperation.
Presidential impeachment is another potential flashpoint likely to resurface. Congressional Democratic leadership may try to resist a third attempt to impeach Trump but pressure from individual members could build. Although any impeachment – whether of Trump or alternative targets like cabinet secretaries or judges – would energize the Democratic base, it could also invite criticism of overreach. Both oversight and impeachment can be costly and time-consuming but may fail to deliver concrete results.
Ultimately, the most significant constraints on Trump’s remaining tenure may be practical rather than political. In a combative political environment, a crisis would put serious pressure on an outgoing presidency and diminished state capacity. A financial shock or recession would stress already strained fiscal capacity, perhaps alongside contentious negotiations; an additional military operation would draw on waning munitions stocks and a burdened force; and a natural disaster or health emergency would call on a severely depleted civil service to act. This is to say nothing of the disruption stemming from artificial intelligence, which Congress and the White House remain poorly positioned to address.
For US allies and partners, there is an uncomfortable asymmetry. A president who has made it his business to be a shock to the system retains the capacity to deliver one. Meanwhile, America itself is less capable of repair and resilience. Whatever happens in November will not change that.
Photo: Image provided by the Delaware Division of the Arts
A $77,500 award will help Access Creative Aging reach 480 participants at libraries and senior centers through June 2028
DOVER, Del. — Hundreds of older Delawareans will gain access to free arts classes through a $77,500 national grant awarded to the Delaware Division of the Arts.
The funding will expand Access Creative Aging, a statewide program offering adults ages 55 and older free, eight-week workshops in pottery, poetry, painting, dance, theater, jewelry design and other creative disciplines.
Over two grant cycles running through June 2028, the division plans to reach 480 participants at 20 public libraries and 12 senior centers. The expansion is expected to provide more than 640 hours of instruction across all three counties.
“The arts are a proven tool for keeping older Delawareans healthy, connected and engaged,” Gov. Matt Meyer said. “This funding will ensure Delaware continues to lead, allowing us to reach hundreds more seniors who deserve access to these programs.”
From pilot program to statewide initiative
The Delaware Division of the Arts launched Access Creative Aging in 2022 as a pilot program at eight public libraries. The initiative has since grown into a central part of the division’s Arts and Community programming.
The program has served more than 400 older adults and delivered more than 520 hours of free instruction. Classes are led by trained teaching artists at libraries and senior centers.
The program is administered in partnership with the Delaware Division of Libraries and the Division of Services for Aging and Adults with Physical Disabilities.
Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez said cooperation among the agencies helped transform the initial library pilot into a statewide program.
“That partnership is what turned a pilot program in eight libraries into a statewide model for how the arts support healthy aging,” Patibanda-Sanchez said. “This award reflects the power of state agencies working together and our commitment to making sure that work reaches every Delawarean, regardless of income or geography.”
Classes build confidence and connections
A study conducted during the program’s first year found that 92% of participants reported increased confidence in their ability to learn new skills. Fifty-six percent said their confidence increased significantly.
The study also found that 96% of participants reported an improved sense of accomplishment and mastery. No participants reported a decline in either measure.
More recent surveys found that participants formed friendships, continued practicing their chosen art forms after their classes ended and developed a stronger sense of belonging.
“Having little to no disposable income, the free classes are a true godsend,” one participant wrote.
Another participant said the program encouraged continued learning and experimentation.
“I feel more confident about making creative decisions and experimenting than I did before,” the participant wrote. “I have invested funds to purchase additional materials and supplies and have started working on my own projects.”
Demand exceeds available space
Jessica Ball, director of the Delaware Division of the Arts, said demand for the classes has consistently exceeded the program’s capacity.
“Delaware’s older adult population is growing rapidly, and demand for Access Creative Aging programming has consistently outpaced our capacity,” Ball said. “This award will allow us to bring high-quality, free arts programming to more Delawareans in more communities, including those with the least access to the arts.”
State officials said Delaware’s population of adults ages 55 and older is projected to grow by more than 50% by 2030.
The new funding will support additional workshops, the training of new teaching artists and expanded access through libraries and senior services organizations.
Delaware is one of 28 state and jurisdictional arts agencies receiving grants through Creative Aging, Creative Futures, a partnership between the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies and E.A. Michelson Philanthropy. The initiative awarded more than $2.2 million nationally to promote learning, creativity, well-being and social engagement among older adults.
The national program builds on two earlier initiatives focused on helping state arts agencies expand services for older residents and integrate arts programming into aging services.
To Go Box
What: Access Creative Aging
Who: Delaware residents ages 55 and older
Programs: Free, eight-week workshops in painting, pottery, poetry, dance, theater, jewelry design and other art forms
Locations: Participating public libraries and senior centers throughout Delaware
Expansion goal: 480 participants at 20 libraries and 12 senior centers through June 2028
Spotlight Delaware editors Tim Carlin and Jake Owens recently spoke with Krista Griffith and Rob Bansen, who are seeking the Democratic nomination for House District 12 in the Sept. 15 primary election.
Griffith is a four-term incumbent who will be looking to defend her seat from Bahnsen, a progressive emergency room psychiatrist.
The winner will face Republican Steve Pickering in the November general election.
Readers can find condensed versions of the candidates’ answers below, while the accompanying podcasts feature unedited excerpts from our conversations.
Rep. Krista Griffith
What is something that you think voters should know about you that they maybe would not be able to glean from reading your campaign platforms or looking on your website?
I think the image that I would want voters to see is of a mom in a hospital room holding a 1-year-old who’s receiving chemotherapy treatments for acute myeloid leukemia. And as she holds that child in her arms in the middle of the night because he’s sick from the toxicity of the treatments, she notes that she is so fortunate to be able to hold him because in the room next door, there’s a child crying out for his mother.
And that moment was one of those moments in life that fundamentally alter what you think your purpose should be.
So that mom was me, and it was in 2016, and the child was my son, Nate. And the other child was receiving cancer treatments in the same ward that we were in, and he was not able to have a mom or dad at his side because of whatever reason that prevented that mom or dad from being there.
Most likely, it was because they didn’t have the right kind of insurance, or they couldn’t leave their job to take care of a child because the choice they had at that point in history was between a paycheck and sitting with their child. And when you have to work to pay for your insurance, then the question is almost made for you, and you don’t have that opportunity.
I had been serving in public service law for a long period of time, as a deputy attorney general, representing the most vulnerable children at the Department of Services for Youth and Their Families, and then later prosecuting elder abuse, domestic violence, and child abuse. So the body of my work over the last eight years has touched upon healthcare access, protecting important rights, standing up to Big Tech and making sure that survivors of abuse have access to the care and the response that they deserve.
You have a primary challenger, Rob Bahnsen. He’s running very explicitly to the left of you, and he’s kind of framing this as establishment versus reform in this coming primary. What’s one thing that you think that Rob is actually getting right about voters’ frustration with the state government, even if you may disagree with his proposed solutions or fixes?
So I’ll tell you this. I view being progressive a choice rather than a slogan.
I have fought for, sponsored, and championed numerous bills that are “progressive.” Bills that ensure that we are protecting freedoms, that we are looking at our most vulnerable and figuring out ways to protect them, including from [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] infringement.
So I don’t think it’s accurate to say that he would be more left of me. I think again, that’s a choice that someone makes between using the word progressive as a slogan rather than a choice.
So I think if you look at the body of my work and the General Assembly in the past eight years, you’ll be hard-pressed to say that I am not progressive.
One of the biggest bills that you have sponsored was Senate Bill 21, the 2025 rewrite of Delaware’s General Corporation Law. I think that critics would say that bill weakened shareholders’ ability to challenge corporate boards in the state’s Chancery Court.
Your primary opponent has made this one of the centerpieces of his campaign, kind of pointing to one of those instances of reform versus establishment. What is your response to the argument that Delaware traded away its reputation of strong corporate accountability in order to keep companies incorporated in the state?
I will note that every single senator voted to support Senate Bill 21 and a vast majority of House members voted to support SB 21.
So I think it’s important to note that the bill passed overwhelmingly in both chambers and was signed by the governor.
I’m gonna bring us back to January-February of 2025. The cushion of pandemic-related funding was dissipating. Trump had just been reelected and presented us with the looming darkness of deep federal cuts to the most significant parts of the budget that touch the neediest.
And the point of the legislation, above and beyond the technical changes and nuances, was the need to show that Delaware will maintain its consistency and the rules that are contained within corporate law are clear, so companies and shareholders alike have the ability to understand them and apply them.
I would be very uncomfortable for shareholders of a company that moved to Texas or Nevada, where you won’t get that thoughtful, reasonable, reasoned, expert eyes on an issue. Here in Delaware, shareholders should want Delaware judges to decide their cases.
We hear from people who are unhoused. We hear from parents who are the caretakers of their adult children with disabilities. We hear from bus drivers who aren’t getting health insurance correctly. We hear from educators who want more in their classroom. The list goes on and on.
And the corporate franchise, which consists of those taxes that corporations pay, represent a third of the state’s budget.
For me, it was about protecting Delaware. It was about protecting our resources so that we could keep schools open, keep people fed, keep healthcare available for our elderly, keep our roads clean and safe and pay for public safety. It was about maintaining the services for the people of Delaware.
There are five corporate law firms that have created a PAC with about $1 million that is running ads in opposition to your opponent and in favor of your candidacy, among other races.
Your opponent has said that he won’t take any corporate or lobbyist money and he’s also openly questioned what that spending is actually buying.
Even though there’s no formal coordination between you and this PAC, does that level of outside spending on your behalf complicate your ability to regulate this industry?
The only people I answer to are my constituents. I don’t answer to anybody else.
Absolutely not. In fact, you have to look at my record of standing up to Big Tech to prove that. And, as we all know, Big Tech is the biggest players right now in corporate America.
So in terms of the PAC, I don’t have anything to do with them, as you know. I raise my own funds. I’m restricted to the $600 per individual limit.
So proud of this. Eighty percent of my funds are individuals who live in Delaware. More than half of the contributions that I receive are from individuals — people, hardworking men and women who live in the 12th district. So my support comes from my constituents and fellow Delawareans.
Is there anything that we haven’t touched on either about your tenure in the legislature, your reelection campaign that you think is important for voters to know before they head to the polls?
I’m running because I have the skills and experience to protect Delaware at this very challenging time. I have a proven ability to protect the freedoms and rights of Delawareans and the rights and the freedoms that they deserve despite Trump’s chaos and cruelty.
Uniquely, I know what you need to be successful, and sometimes it’s taking on major issues like curbing and preventing data centers, standing up to Big Tech, or enshrining marriage equality in the state’s Constitution.
But it’s also about hyper local issues that impact the people I serve.
The constituent call asking for help is just as important as a piece of legislation that I’m passing.
Rob Bahnsen
What’s something you think voters should know about you that they would not be able to glean from reading your website?
Probably just that I’m a total dork. I am a gardener. I’m a video gamer. I love to read.
Gosh, I love getting to know people. This process and campaign has been one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
I’ve made friends for life, and I’m just so genuinely grateful to have run this race.
Your opponent, Krista Griffith, has been in the legislature since 2018 and has been a sponsor of many bills, covering topics like victims’ rights, gun control, and the state’s corporate franchise. I think there’s plenty that you guys maybe disagree about, but I’m curious if there’s a bill or an initiative that Representative Griffith has undertaken that you thought she got right?
I think one of the things that I would like to give her props on is her work with gun legislation. She’s done a pretty good job with that.
I’d like to continue to expand her work on that if I were honored to win, especially surrounding gun prevention for people with acute, serious psychiatric issues.
I believe that there are laws in the books that are not being enforced, and those laws need to be bolstered.
What’s your answer to Democratic voters who like Griffith’s record broadly but are being asked to replace her? What explicitly has she gotten wrong on the job and maybe warrants a change in direction for the district?
I think before we answer that question, it’s just important to recognize that neither of us are evil.
There’s no good and evil in this race. We’re both Democrats. We both have a significant amount of overlap.
However, I think that I offer, something very special to the district, and I think that that is resonating with the voters. One, I’m a physician. I’d be the only doctor in elected office in Delaware if I were to win this election.
And as our state is facing down a budget crisis, as we are seeing an absolute explosion in healthcare costs in this state — up to 30% of a person’s income can be spent on healthcare. We’re the fourth most expensive state in the nation for healthcare costs. I think it’s incredibly important to have somebody who understands how healthcare is delivered and could be delivered better in this state.
Second, I believe that campaign finance is an incredibly important — it’s part of the authenticity and integrity of a politician and what they can do and what they won’t do.
For me, I am an entirely grassroots, guy. I don’t take any corporate money. I don’t take any PAC money. For Representative Griffith, unfortunately, the majority of her funds come from corporations, their attorneys, lobbyists, special interests, and PACs.
I challenge people to find one future-forward policy point on anything that she has written on any of the many mailers that she sent to the people of our district. For me, I am coming as the candidate of substance with specific, well-researched policy points on healthcare, on our public schools, on our economy, and I believe that that will help to bring our state forward.
You’ve made Senate Bill 21, as well as the influence of Delaware’s corporate law establishment, pretty central to your campaign. And you’ve said that you don’t want Delaware to abandon its corporate franchise altogether.
So where exactly is that line, and how do you square protecting the franchise with restoring the Chancery Court’s discretion when critics say that’s precisely the uncertainty SB 21 was written to remove?
I think that I would respectfully push back on the framing of the question a little bit.
I think that SB 21 has become a central flashpoint in our race simply because of Krista’s prime sponsorship of the bill in the House.
I’m not running because of the corporate franchise. I’m running because I’m worried about the state of healthcare in our state. I’m worried that we are spending $2.5 billion to be near last in ranking for the quality of our schools. I’m worried about our economy. I’m worried that Delaware in many ways is withering on the vine with regards to economic opportunity, especially for our working families.
Having said that, I think that the corporate franchise is integral to everything that we do here in Delaware. It is the second-largest source of our revenue, and it needs to be protected, preserved and expanded in every possible way that we can.
I think that when you get down to it, there’s two sides to the story. There’s one side that says appeasement of controlling shareholders is the way to preserve the franchise and attract more companies to come here. And there are good people on that side of that aisle and I give them that.
There is also a side that believes that the corporate franchise is as special as it is here in Delaware not necessarily because we are pro-managerial, but because of the fairness, neutrality, and excellence of our courts.
And SB 21 took power away from our courts.
I think that for me, if I am honored to be the next representative from our district, one of the very first things that I have to do is find a way to get the corporate bar back together again. This bill has caused the corporate franchise to become a national news story.
It has been a national news story for a long, long time now, and I do not want the microscope on our franchise any more than it needs to be. For me, I think about this process as akin to a healthcare administrator coming into my examination room and telling me how to treat a patient. Politicians should not be telling the corporate bar how to run the franchise.
This has been going on for over a century. We know what we’re doing. We need to mediate this conflict. We need to make it quieter. We need to get the corporate bar back to doing what it does again so that frankly, I can move on to the policy that I’m running on, which is improving our healthcare system, improving our schools, and making sure that we have a better economy.
Do you think that it’s a case of the politicians are setting policy? In this case it was several of the more prominent litigators in the state, along with some professors and former chancellors who actually wrote the majority of SB 21. Is this where we can expect the franchise to go in your estimation, or do you think there needs to be kind of a reset?
I have no plans to take up any legislation regarding the corporate franchise myself.
I’m a psychiatrist. I want to work on healthcare. I want to work on our schools. To the extent that my training as a mediator and a communicator can help to calm down the conflict, I would be of better use than my opponent.
I can speak to both progressives and the establishment alike. I think that we need to bring ourselves back together. I think we really need to mediate this conflict, make it quiet again, and move on.
That being said, of course, nearly a million dollars from those corporate law firms have gone into ads defending Representative Griffith as well as other incumbents, many of them tied to SB 21, and you’ve publicly said, “Nobody gives away a million dollars for free.”
Yousignificantly outraised her in 2025, so walk me through your own donor base. Are there interests funding your campaign that you’d expect people to scrutinize in the same way?
Well, I think that this is one of the most important things to do with a politician is to take a look at who’s funding them.
So for me, every single one of my donations comes from an actual person. There were mailers that were sent by this, First State Future PAC and the other additional PACs that are being funded by the First State Future PAC, to suggest that I have “rich out-of-state donors.”
The vast majority of my funds come from Delaware. My husband and I gave ourselves $45,000 to help run this campaign because we knew who we were going up against, and we believe very strongly in our message. But I also think that it’s important to just take a look at the names and look them up.
The vast majority of those “rich out-of-state donors” are physicians who work with me elbow-to-elbow in the hospital here in Delaware, but they choose to live in Pennsylvania or New Jersey, because of the quality of the schools. They want their kids to go to better schools.
I’d much rather them live here in Delaware and send their kids to good schools. This is a big, big flashpoint here in Delaware. We are losing young families. They are leaving the state en masse. We’re losing their tax revenue. We’re losing their skilled labor, and when skilled labor leaves, we lose their industry as well.
Reversing that by investing in families is at the heart of my platform and what I really wanna work on in Dover.
You work in the medical field and many of the biggest pieces of legislation this past session sought to drive down healthcare costs for Delawareans with the caveat that some of those bills were watered down through negotiations with the healthcare systems. What is your take on some of these recently reenacted reforms and what still needs to be done?
You’re referring to Senate Bill 1 this year and House Bill 350 from a couple of years prior.
So Senate Bill 1 was a bill for your listeners that purported to, cap the amount of money that a hospital can charge for a procedure to insurance, and then take the money that’s saved from that and invest in rural health and in primary care.
The intention of that is fantastic, right? That sounds like a really, really great bill. The problem is that we exist in a broken healthcare system. I’m a Medicare for All guy. I believe that healthcare is a human right. I think that we need to work toward that. But the problem is that we’re not gonna get that for a long time because of the corporate interests and money involved in our politics at a national level.
I think that what most people don’t quite understand is that when a hospital charges that extra money, they’re not using it to line their own pockets. What they’re doing is they’re subsidizing teams that don’t make money. For example, I think about teams like palliative care or, frankly, my own team.
I’m an emergency room psychiatry doctor, and I treat people who frankly can’t pay their hospital bills. But they come to the hospital all the same. They deserve the same level of world-class care. I think about only 50% of the patients that I see actually pay for the services that we provide.
We can work around these things. We can be very intelligent about these things. We can contain costs and increase access and quality at the same time. But I don’t think that we need to be reactionary about it. I think we need to be calm and measured about, folks and their healthcare. It’s incredibly important.
With House Bill 350, it was much the same thing, right? I was worried about the bill. What that bill purported to do was to create a hospital review board where, the governor would be able to appoint people to this board to veto items in a hospital’s budget. The intention of that was great.
It was meant to constrain hospitals from spending Delaware’s taxpayer dollars to expand into other states. That sounds like a great bill. The intention of that was fantastic. The problem though was I don’t think that they quite understood how much of a Trojan horse that could have been.
If we were to have a Republican governor, God forbid, here in Delaware at any point, that governor would have had the opportunity to appoint folks to that board that could have selectively defunded abortion care in this state. And I am incredibly pro-choice. A woman’s bodily autonomy is sacred here in the state of Delaware, and it should maintain that way.
I think one of the arguments for bills like SB 1 and HB 350 is the ballooning cost of healthcare to consumers. Many of these costs are maybe legitimate and just part of where we are with healthcare, but what can you do or what can the state do to help drive down healthcare costs?
One of the bills that I would like to work on in my first term is actually reining in pharmacy benefit managers here in Delaware. So, as just one example, when you combine CVS and Cigna, they own 75% of the pharmacy benefit managers in the state of Delaware.
A PBM is an entity that buys drugs from a manufacturer at a low cost and sells it back to pharmacies and hospitals at higher cost, and they pocket the profit. Now, it’s interesting because, CVS owns the PBMs.
They buy drugs themselves, sell it back to their own pharmacies at higher costs, and then they push that cost off to insurance, that then pushes the cost off to regular hardworking Delawareans in the form of higher insurance premiums. The reason why you don’t see, that being talked about is because of corporate financing in our elections.
My opponent maxed donations from the Delaware hospital lobby, from AstraZeneca, from Pfizer, from Cigna, and the list goes on and on. That is part of the reason why the status quo is not changing.
I think that we need to really have a discussion in our state about campaign finance, about the authenticity and integrity of our politicians and where our financing is coming from.
What else have we missed?
One of the things that actually worries me the most is what’s going on with young families in our state, and especially in my district.
Almost universally, when I knock on the door of somebody who is raising a young child, what they tell me is that, “As soon as my kid turns 5, the for sale sign is going up and I’m moving to Pennsylvania.” And the reason that they tell me that is because of the quality of our schools. When we started this race, we were ranked 47th by the NEA for the quality of our schools.
Only 20% of Delaware’s fourth graders knew how to read at a fourth-grade level; 13% of our high schoolers didn’t graduate on time; 5% of our children didn’t have health insurance; 3% of our children here in Delaware lived in extreme poverty. That’s unacceptable. It’s unacceptable for a solidly blue state like ours to be spending $2.5 billion on our public education, system and seeing those kinds of results.
Now, good work is happening. There are folks who are doing good work now in the General Assembly, but I would like to lend my voice to theirs and get that fixed.
I myself am the product of a public school education where I grew up in New York. Because of my teachers, I am who I am now: the first person in my family to go to college, and first doctor in my family.
One of the things that worries me the most is how many young souls here in Delaware are caught in a public education system that is perceived to be poorly performing, and will not have the same opportunity to do what I’m doing with my life that they could be doing with theirs.
Fixing our schools is the absolute key to the future cultural and economic success of our state. And the truth is this, you bring young families back into our state, you bring tax revenue, you bring skilled labor. When you bring skilled labor into our state, you create the fertile soil for Delaware industry to thrive again.
I wanna focus on things like climate resilience. I wanna focus on things that Delaware can easily position itself due to its size and history to be the national leader in the future. But, for me, you can expect me to get down there, be a strong progressive voice, work on healthcare as the only physician in elected office in Delaware, work on our public schools, and work on making sure that we have better job opportunity for the people in our district.
Venice film festival: Alex Gibney interviews former colleagues, wives, the trillionaire’s father and a CG avatar in this absorbing documentary
‘Elon is a nuke.” The speaker is Ashley St Clair, a former conservative Maga influencer and one of Elon Musk’s former girlfriends-slash-baby mommas.
She is a fascinating expert witness in Alex Gibney’s four-hour epic study of the world’s richest and dullest man: the overgrown brattish South-African-born trillionaire plutocrat, ersatz visionary and Trump courtier who owns Tesla cars, SpaceX rocket ships, Starlink satellites on which nation states’ military capabilities are increasingly reliant, X (formerly Twitter) which shapes the collective incel id of billions and GrokAI whose vast server farms daily guzzle oceans of precious water.
Why Delaware Should Care? The University of Delaware, one of the state’s largest employers, introduced an expansion of its return-to-work policy this summer, leaving many of the non-union employees feeling confused, betrayed, and questioning whether they will have a future at the university.
The University of Delaware wants its staffers back in the office at least four days a week.
The state’s flagship university has accelerated a return-to-the-office policy for professional and administrative staff, despite backlash from employees who say the decision was made without their involvement and would significantly impact them professionally, personally and financially.
“All of that adds up to more carbon emissions, more strain on local infrastructure, and less time that thousands of people can spend with their actual communities,” one staffer, who requested anonymity out of fear for their position, told Spotlight Delaware.
In recent weeks, employees have circulated a petition demanding the university pause the policy and provide more transparency regarding the decision. As of Monday, the petition has gathered 529 signatures from students, faculty and staff members.
Departments began notifying employees of the policy changes in July, but the university did not make a formal public announcement until Sept. 1 in the form of a letter emailed to staffers.
In the statement, the university sought to consolidate various messages that had been sent out by individual departments. It laid out a school-wide deadline of June 30, 2027, for the implementation of an “on-campus model in which staff members work on campus at least four days per week.”
The decision will primarily impact non-union, salaried employees, representing about 3,000 of the university’s 4,895 non-faculty workers — the “backbone” of the university, as stated in the petition.
Certain positions at the university have already been brought back to daily work on campus since the COVID pandemic initially forced workers remote, but the employees impacted by the latest shift argue there is no reason for them to work in the office on more days.
The petition asks for the university to pause its return-to-campus expansion, release data it used to make the decision, and explain the school’s assessment of institutional benefits and drawbacks from working in-person. It also asks for more collaboration with professional and administrative staff and additional transition time before implementation.
“We ask for the opportunity to be heard before decisions that materially affect our work, our finances, our health, and our well-being become permanent,” the petition concludes.
Staffers delivered the petition to university leadership earlier this month. There has been no response yet, they said.
In late July, university staffers began receiving directives from individual departments that they would have to significantly increase their in-person time.
Employees at the College of Arts & Science were told on July 24 that they would have to work at least four days a week in-person, starting Aug. 23, according to an employee interviewed by Spotlight Delaware. Before that, they were required to be in-person at least once a week.
Others have seemingly been given more transition time — the Office of Communications and Media told employees they should prepare to work at least four days a week on campus starting in the spring semester, along with the university’s overall June 2027 deadline. Still, several staffers called the overall initiative a “mess.” They spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional reprisal.
It has left them confused about their future, scrambling to reorganize their personal lives around a new work schedule and dismayed at the lack of a tangible school-wide dialog before implementation, many said.
One employee estimated that the combination of daily travel, increased childcare costs and the required university parking pass would cost an additional $15,000 to $20,000 per year. They said if the university moves forward with the policy, they would be forced to leave their job.
“If it’s four days a week, I just can’t afford it,” they said. “I’m not moving. I love my home, my husband has his job, my kids are established at their schools. I’m not going to uproot my family for a job. Especially if they are just randomly changing policies out of thin air.”
The university did not answer a list of questions sent in late August. Instead, university officials referred Spotlight Delaware to their Sept. 1 letter.
University of Delaware President Laura Carlson. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JACOB OWENS
The letter, signed by Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer Melissa Bard, acknowledges the burden the change could have on employees, but says the university is “committed to providing clear timelines, a consistent process for requesting a different work arrangement, and support as units plan for the transition.”
Bard also said facilities staff will help to navigate spacial limitations for each department, with a process that is expected to be complete later this month. Still, some employees said their departments have outgrown their assigned spaces since the pandemic began, and they aren’t sure whether there will be enough space for their teams to work together.
Many who spoke with Spotlight Delaware noted that the staff impacted by the policy change largely do not have student-facing roles. They also asserted that working from home has improved their productivity, and that the school is trying to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.
The back-to-office initiative has also generated concerns that the university is looking to reduce its workforce. The university has not offered any indication that layoffs or workforce reductions are on the horizon, and has avoided significant public layoffs since late 2020 during the height of the COVID pandemic.
But the optics have caused apprehension among staff members — some who believe they will lose colleagues if the decision moves forward.
“Having the pressure taken off of you a little bit a few days a week has been, for me, life-changing,” one employee said of working from home. “And I am unwilling to give that up, and I think many people are [too].”
Smyrna senior William Ngayi-Parker (No. 42) makes a block during Smyrna’s win over Red Lion on September 4. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder
The Smyrna Eagles (1-0) defeated Red Lion Christian Academy (0-1), 38-0, on September 4, during the first week of Delaware high school football competition.
BEAR, DE — Smyrna quarterback Drew Marks stood in the shotgun formation with his feet at the Red Lion 40 yard line, sophomore running back Terrell Ingram to his right, three receivers lined up to the left and a lone receiver on the right. Marks caught the snap and surveyed the field, but was unable to find an open receiver from the pocket. The senior signal caller rolled to his left looking for a throwing lane and found a small window to deliver the ball to junior receiver Mikiah Jackson.
Jackson was the lone receiver on the right and streaked toward the left sideline during his route. As Marks rolled to his left, Jackson turned his route upfield and Marks lofted a pass toward Jackson’s back shoulder. Jackson made the initial catch as he spun around contorting his body to make the grab, but as he did, the ball came looseand got tipped in the air. Jackson fell to the ground as the ball descended, but Jackson quickly refocused and lunged from the ground to complete the catch before the ball hit the grass.
Jackson’s highlight catch put the Eagles in the red zone and in position for their fourth score of the first half.
“I just saw it and I knew I could make some way to catch it and I caught it,” Jackson said postgame.
Jackson finished the game with over 100 yards receiving and three receiving touchdowns in Smyrna’s, 38-0, victory over Red Lion, Friday night, ushering in a new season of Delaware high school football.
“It feels amazing to play against another jersey,” Smyrna sophomore Amari Ashley said postgame. “It feels good to go out there and show everybody what we can do.”
Junior receiver Mikiah Jackson runs down the left sideline to score his first touchdown of the game. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder
The Eagles played well on both sides of the ball, scoring on all four of its first half offensive drives getting production through the air and on the ground.
The Eagles first touchdown came on their opening drive in which they traversed 70 yards downfield in 13 plays. The drive was capped off by a four yard touchdown run from senior Chrystian Carroll. Smyrna’s second touchdown was scored by Jackson on a 50-yard catch and run at the end of the first quarter.
Jackson scored his second touchdown of the first half on Smyrna’s subsequent drive, before making the tip catch on the Eagles’ fourth drive which ended in a one yard touchdown run from Ingram.
“We’re just gonna go at you every play,” Jackson said about what makes Smyrna’s offense dynamic. “I mean, [it’s] a tempo offense, so we don’t let up our foot on the gas and we just go at you every play and drill it down.”
Smyrna’s fourth scoring drive was set up by an interception from sophomore Amari Ashley as Red Lion threatened in Smyrna territory. Ashley’s interception was the first of two interceptions for the Eagles throughout the game and was a part of a strong defensive showing for the program.
“I saw the quarterback drop back and then I saw them do the post-wheel that we study everyday,” Ashley said describing his interception. “So, I just did everything we did in practice and went up and got it. Just trying to be an athlete.”
Sophomore defensive back, Amari Ashley, intercepts a Red Lion pass in the first half. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder
Smyrna’s defense never allowed Red Lion to generate any offensive momentum and when the Lions made it into Smyrna territory, the Eagles were able to stop them before they reached the endzone.
Red Lion found some offensive success through the air with key throws from freshman quarterback Chase Manlove and strong runs by senior Jordon Jones, but the Lions were unable to string those plays together and breakthrough against Smyrna’s defense.
Red Lion will have a week off before they play again on Saturday, September 19, against Long Island Lutheran High School from New York. That game will be played in Bear at 1:00 p.m. and will be the first out of state test for last season’s Class 2A champion.
Smyrna’s next game will be a road game against Frederick High School on Thursday, September 10, in Frederick, Maryland. This game will be the first of two out of state opponents Smyrna faces before the program takes on its first Class 3A opponent in Middletown on October 2.
(This story was updated on September 9, to include pictures from the game.)
The AfD’s victory in Saxony-Anhalt marks a turning point for Germany – but perspective is importantExpert commentjon.wallace
Ulrich Siegmund’s highly successful campaign points to a more durable AfD electorate and flags the tests ahead for Chancellor Merz’s government, the CDU and the federal institutions that have shaped post-war German democracy.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD)’s victory in Saxony-Anhalt’s election is a historic breakthrough and, without doubt, a turning point in German democracy. Since 1945 no party labelled extreme right has secured such a win in a state election.
The party won 43.8 per cent of the vote on 6 September, more than doubling its 2021 result. It now holds 39 of the state Landtag’s 83 seats, though this is three short of an absolute majority. The question of who will govern Magdeburg is therefore still open.
BSW, the new party of former Die Linke (‘The Left’) leader Sahra Wagenknecht, succeeded in crossing the 5 per cent threshold. Its positions on migration are not that remote from those of the AfD in some respects. Its entry into the Landtag gives it a potential role in forming a government in Saxony-Anhalt.
Beyond the political emotion, the result should be treated cautiously. Its main significance clearly lies in the way the AfD has mobilized voters and kindled a more positive political appeal. That may prove more consequential than whether the AfD manages to form a government.
That said, Saxony-Anhalt is one of Germany’s least populated states, and the AfD’s victory should therefore be considered according to the demographic scale. If not a seismic political event, it can at least be interpreted as the forewarning tremor of an approaching earthquake – if the appeal of mainstream parties keeps eroding. The CDU, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party, saw its share of the vote fall to 17.2 per cent.
A state shaped by decline
For its low demographics, Saxony-Anhalt is a useful laboratory to analyse the political transformation at work in Germany and Europe. Depopulation has left many smaller communities ageing and struggling to sustain local services. Saxony-Anhalt experienced a substantial decline since reunification to around 2.12 million inhabitants today. The accompanying closure of public services has reinforced residents’ belief that the region is neglected by mainstream parties.
The state has also been hit by industrial restructuring. The chemical industry is central to the region’s socioeconomic identity, but high energy costs and weak demand have heightened pressure on the sector. Pharmaceutical giant Bayer is one of the last major employers in a region whose unemployment rate stood at 8.2 per cent in August 2026, compared with 6.5 per cent nationally.
Insolvencies should not be confused with factory closures, but the figures are telling: corporate insolvency filings rose by 23.9 per cent in the state in 2025, more than twice the national increase of 10.3 per cent. The prospect of further plant closures made the future of skilled employment a sensitive political concern in the campaign.
The figures on migration present a paradox here. Saxony-Anhalt has a comparatively low foreign-national share. Approximately 7.9 per cent of the population were immigrants at the end of 2025, compared with around 14.9 per cent nationally – yet the issue has consistently topped voters’ concerns for over a decade, a paradox familiar from research on Eastern Germany.
In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD has shaped its narratives around anxieties about public services, security and industrial decline, presenting migration as a contributing factor.
From rejection to adhesion
Analysing the rise of the National Rally (RN), French political scientists speak of the shift from a passive protest vote (‘vote de protestation’) to an active support vote (‘vote d’adhésion’).
Saxony-Anhalt suggests that such a shift has occurred. In July, 36 per cent of voters trusted the AfD most to solve the state’s problems, compared with just 9 per cent before the 2021 election. 44 per cent preferred an AfD-led government. The electorate’s motivation has clearly shifted from punishing the CDU to granting the AfD power. Why?
AfD candidate Ulrich Siegmund’s campaign adopted an upbeat, personalized style, combining large public events with a forceful social media presence. The slogan ‘Alles ist möglich’ (‘Everything is possible’) was launched in June, replacing the old negative slogan ‘enough is enough’.
This strategy paid off. Mobilization was quite exceptional. Preliminary voter-flow analysis estimates that the AfD gained 157,000 former non-voters and 83,000 former CDU voters. Digital campaigning cannot alone explain the AfD’s electoral success. But established parties showed far less inventiveness in reaching disengaged voters.
Logically, mainstream parties throughout Europe should respond by reconsidering their strategies. France’s experience with the RN shows the limits of relying on political stigma to combat the hard right. Germany’s ‘Brandmauer’ (‘firewall’) around hard right parties has also ceased to contain the AfD electorally. New thinking is needed.
Three seats short: an opportunity for the AfD?
The AfD’s near-majority may itself become a political advantage. Three additional MPs would be enough to give it an absolute majority. Siegmund can therefore pressure CDU representatives to defect to his party or vote for his election as minister-president. Even unsuccessful approaches could expose divisions within the CDU and weaken the credibility of an alternative government.
BSW has rejected joining a ‘firewall’ and expressed willingness to cooperate with the AfD on individual policies, particularly on Russia and energy. But it has ruled out electing Siegmund as minister-president.
The CDU, SPD and Greens hold only 31 seats together, rendering a majority against the AfD impossible without support from the Left Party or the BSW. But the CDU’s refusal to cooperate with either the AfD or the Left complicates this picture – and could lead to a prolonged impasse.
That could work to Siegmund’s advantage, allowing him to argue that the other parties are playing an undemocratic game by preventing the largest party from governing.
The consequences beyond Magdeburg
The AfD’s victory also piles pressure on German Chancellor Merz, whose unpopularity is already a significant problem. The state election in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern on 20 September will present another immediate test, with the AfD leading in recent polls.
A further defeat could intensify demands within the CDU for a change of strategy or even leadership. Any attempt to replace Merz as chancellor would, however, require a parliamentary majority through Germany’s constructive vote of no confidence. There is no indication at this point that the SPD, the CDU’s coalition partner, would support a move against the chancellor.
The AfD’s near-majority may itself become a political advantage…Siegmund can pressure CDU representatives to defect to his party or vote for his election as minister-president.
The most significant repercussion will surely be on the Bundesrat, the upper chamber of the German parliament. Saxony-Anhalt’s government has four votes in the federal chamber and could use them to oppose federal legislation, especially on state finances or administration. Four votes cannot obstruct federal bills, but they may become decisive in close motions and lend the party strategic weight.
An AfD-led state government would also amplify the party’s calls for an end to sanctions on Russia and military support for Ukraine. But it would remain very much rhetorical for now: foreign policy is a federal responsibility and the Land’s four votes would offer only limited scope for obstruction.
Saxony-Anhalt’s AfD was classified as a right-wing extremist endeavour by the state intelligence service in November 2023. That does not prohibit the party from governing. But should it take control, its implementation of its proposals concerning education, migration, policing and cultural institutions will be closely watched, particularly measures that may violate constitutional rights or federal law.
Challenges would mostly arise through Saxony-Anhalt’s constitutional court, ordinary administrative courts and, where relevant, the Federal Constitutional Court. Judicial scrutiny depends on concrete acts and the relevant procedures, not a government’s programme as such. The appointment of officials and the control of state institutions will therefore deserve as much attention as legislation itself.
Much will be written about this vote. But some perspective is important. The AfD received 576,037 second votes in a state with 1.71 million eligible voters. That is roughly 1 per cent of Germany’s 59.2 million strong electorate. The breakthrough is very localized for now.
Whether it remains so depends on how far Siegmund’s campaign recipe can be replicated – and if the AfD can now turn electoral backing into durable governing power.
Uptick in US union membership coincides with high public approval ratings of unions
After years of decline, union membership in the US increased by 411,000 members in 2025, the largest increase since 2008, according to a new report.
The report makes clear the impact that “right to work” laws can have on union membership: most gains were concentrated in states that protect collective bargaining.
Is the Middle East entering a new era of regional security with the Mecca Pact?
21
September 2026 — 17:00 TO 18:15 BST
Anonymous (not verified)
Online
After the signing of a new defence pact by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, experts assess how the Middle East is responding to volatility and a changing regional order.
After the signing of a new defence pact by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, experts assess how the Middle East is responding to volatility and a changing regional order.
The Mecca Pact between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signals a significant shift in regional security cooperation. Its collective defence provisions have prompted debate about the future of alliances in the Middle East and the role of regional powers in shaping security. These developments raise wider questions about regional balance, deterrence and external influence.
The Mecca Pact between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signals a significant shift in regional security cooperation. Its collective defence provisions have prompted debate about the future of alliances in the Middle East and the role of regional powers in shaping security. These developments raise wider questions about regional balance, deterrence and external influence.
This event discusses:
What does the Mecca Pact reveal about changing security dynamics in the Middle East?
Is the region entering a new era of alliances and security cooperation?
What does the agreement mean for organizations such as the GCC?
How could the pact affect the strategic calculations of Iran and Israel?
What are the implications for regional security and stability?
What does the pact suggest about the future role of the US and other external actors?
A member of the Coastal Elite Lacrosse Club in action. Photo courtesy of BPG Sports Lacrosse Media Team.
The sports management firm, BPG Sports, of Buccini Pollin Group announced the acquisition of the Coastal Lacrosse Academy in a press release, September 2. The group also entered into management agreements with three other youth sports programs.
Buccini Pollin Group’s sports management firm, BPG Sports, announced the firm is acquiring the Coastal Lacrosse Academy and entering into “long-term management agreements” with three other youth sports programs in a press release on September 2. The three programs involved in the management agreements are the Bagel Bombers baseball program, Lady Bombers softball program and Delmarva Rush Soccer Club.
Coastal Lacrosse Academy and Delmarva Rush Soccer Club will be rebranded into the Coastal Elite Lacrosse Club and Henlopen Recreational Soccer, according to the press release.
BPG Sports’ acquisition of Coastal Elite Lacrosse Club adds to its youth lacrosse portfolio that includes the BPG Nationals, Brotherly Love Lacrosse Club, Duke’s Elite Lacrosse Club and the Phantom Girls Lacrosse program. BPG Sports will serve over 1,000 lacrosse players across the Mid-Atlantic region following the acquisition of Coastal Elite Lacrosse Club, according to the press release.
“These transactions reflect exactly what BPG Sports was built to do – bring the top clubs, coaches, and venues under one roof and give young athletes a best-in-class experience,” senior vice president and general manager of BPG Sports, Steve Cavalier, said via the press release. “Each of these organizations has built a fantastic local reputation, and our goal is to strengthen what they’ve achieved, invest in their players and facilities, and enhance the experience for all.”
BPG Sports’ management of Henlopen Recreational Soccer adds to its club soccer portfolio that includes The Sporting Athletic Club and its New Jersey and Pennsylvania affiliates, Sporting Athletic Club PA and Sporting Athletic Club NJ.
BPG Sports’ management of the Bagel Bombers and Lady Bombers are the firm’s first baseball and softball programs. BPG Sports will take over the day-to-day operations as well as the management of the two programs, according to the press release.
In total, BPG Sports has a portfolio of 11 different programs across four different sports that serve 4,500 athletes and their families, according to the press release.
To learn more about BPG Sports, its club programs and its facilities click here to view the company’s website.
In his campaign’s latest TV ad, Democratic Senate candidate Roy Cooper of North Carolina highlights the issue of affordability using direct quotes from his Republican opponent — “No AI, no special effects, just Michael Whatley in his own words.”
They are, in fact, direct quotes from Whatley — but they are a bit dated, and some of the comments were more defensible or true at the time when Whatley made them.
The ad starts with a quote from Whatley: “Grocery prices are down, gasoline prices are down, housing prices are down, inflation is down,” he says.
“Unbelievable,” Cooper comments.
Judged by today’s metrics, Whatley’s statements are wrong. Grocery prices between January 2025, when Trump took office, and July have increased 3.35%. That’s larger than the 2.58% increase in the year and a half before Trump took office. Gasoline prices are up almost $1 from the price the week before Trump took office. Housing prices have risen 1.6% between 2024 and 2025. And the Consumer Price Index — the most commonly cited measure of inflation — increased 3.4% over the 12 months ending in July, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s up from the annualized 3.0% that Trump inherited.
But Whatley, then chair of the Republican National Committee, made those comments in a NewsMax interview in July 2025. Things were a little different then. That’s before the war with Iran and before the effect of Trump’s tariffs had kicked in, among other things.
Gasoline. At that time, gasoline prices were almost exactly what they were when Trump took office, according to the Energy Information Administration — the national average for regular gas was $3.11 per gallon when Trump was sworn in versus $3.12 for the week ending July 21, 2025. Gasoline prices would gradually decline from there, dipping to $2.78 per gallon in January 2026.
The Cooper campaign noted to us that Whatley continued to claim gasoline prices were down in an interview in mid-November 2025. At that point, gasoline prices were down slightly, about 5 cents a gallon from the price Trump inherited.
Then the war with Iran, which began in late February, caused prices to soar. The price per gallon reached $4.50 in May and was $4.07 for the week ending Aug. 31 (nearly 31% higher than when Trump took office). Whatley has been supportive of Trump’s war with Iran, saying it is necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Inflation. As we said, inflation has continued to rise in Trump’s second term. But when Whatley made his statement in July 2025 that “inflation is down,” the annualized rate of inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, was 2.7%. That was down from 3.0% in the 12 months before Trump took office.
So prices were still rising, but the annualized rate of inflation was lower. (We’ve pointed this out repeatedly when Trump has claimed that prices are “plummeting downward.”)
Less defensible was Whatley’s claim from an interview with Real America’s Voice in January — highlighted in the Cooper ad — that “there is no inflation.” Whatley added (not in the Cooper commercial), “Inflation has fallen off a cliff since President Trump came in.” The annualized rate of inflation at the time was 2.7%. That’s not “no inflation” but it is lower than the rate Trump inherited. As we noted earlier, since then the CPI has risen, and is higher than the annualized rate when Trump took office.
Home prices. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the average sales price of homes in the U.S. dropped from $514,200 in the first quarter of 2025 to $502,700 in the second quarter of 2026. The median price of new homes also fell from $423,100 in the first quarter of 2025 to $410,700 in the second quarter of 2026, per the bank.
The median price of an existing single family home has continued to rise in Trump’s second term, according to sales figures from the National Association of Realtors, albeit at a much slower rate than during Biden’s presidency, and, for that matter, during Trump’s first term.
According to NAR, the seasonally adjusted annual median price rose from $412,500 in 2024 to $419,300 in 2025. That’s a 1.6% increase. But it’s slower than the overall rate of inflation.
“It is welcoming to see incomes rising faster than home prices, which has helped boost affordability—but the big short-term challenge to affordability is coming from rising mortgage rates,” NAR Chief Economist Dr. Lawrence Yun said in August.
During Biden’s presidency, the median sales price of existing single family homes rose 37.4%. The median price also rose 27.5% during Trump’s first term. Both of those increases well outpaced overall inflation growth during their presidencies.
Groceries. It was not true then nor is it now, that grocery prices “are down.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI for “food-at-home” — products bought at a grocery store or supermarket — overall grew by 0.7% between January and July 2025, when Whatley made his comment. So grocery prices were not lower. But the rate of growth was slower than in the previous six months, 1.48%. Grocery prices have continued to climb since then, and have risen a total of 3.35% from when Trump took office and July of this year.
As we wrote around the time Whatley made his comment in July 2025, there were some exceptions to the overall rising prices. The price of energy, airfare, new and used vehicles and eggs and were all down. But overall, prices continued to climb, and many experts cautioned that the president’s tariffs were likely to cause further price increases.
“DC insider Michael Whatley has been insisting for months that prices are down and there is no inflation while hardworking North Carolinians are getting crushed by high prices,” a spokesperson for the Cooper campaign told us via email. “From groceries to gas to health care – families are struggling while Whatley gets richer.”
While we are unable to search Whatley’s day-to-day comments on the campaign trail, we didn’t find any interviews since January where he spoke about lower prices or no inflation.
Whatley campaign spokesman DJ Griffin pushed back on Cooper’s campaign slogan “make stuff cost less,” claiming that Cooper’s policies had done the opposite.
“Facts are that Michael Whatley supports policies that allow working families to earn more and keep more,” Griffin told us via email.
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UD running back Kaderris Roberts runs down the right sideline in the Fightin’ Blue Hens, 42-7, win over Merrimack. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder.
The University of Delaware Fightin’ Blue Hens (1-0) defeated the Merrimack Warriors (0-2), 42-7, in their season opener, September 3.
NEWARK, DE — The University of Delaware’s second FBS season started in dominant fashion with a 42-7 win over Merrimack, Thursday night. The win was the Blue Hens eighth consecutive season opening win and eighth consecutive win in their home opener.
“I think there was some times that we maybe pressed a little bit. There were some times that we did some first game, it wasn’t just mistakes, I would say it was first game, you know, I don’t want to call it nerves, but we had to get some stuff out, and we had to make sure we did it against somebody else,” head coach Ryan Carty said postgame. “Obviously, wasn’t as clean as we wanted it to be, but I think eventually we settled down and handled, you know, what we needed to handle on both sides of the ball.”
It was the Blue Hens defense that handled their business in the opening 30 minutes of their 2026 campaign, holding the Warriors under 80 total yards and forcing two turnovers in the first half. Both turnovers were forced in the second quarter and both resulted in points for the Blue Hens.
UD led by seven going into the second quarter following Viron Ellison Jr.’s 11-yard run on the team’s opening drive. The Blue Hens subsequent two drives generated 39 total yards and ended without points. The offense turned the ball over to Merrimack at the Warriors own 27 yard line with an opportunity to drive down the field and tie the game with a little less than nine minutes remaining in the first half.
The Warriors accomplished the first part, driving down to the UD 35 yard line in seven plays. Merrimack quarterback AJ Hairston Jr. took the snap from the shotgun formation, but was met by immediate pressure from Delaware’s defensive front. Hairston Jr. launched a pass that soared over the head of its intended receiver, into the endzone and right into the hands of sophomore safety George Mullins. Mullins completed the catch and slid in the endzone for a touchback, handing possession back to the Delaware offense.
Sophomore safety George Mullins sliding in the endzone following his first career interception. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder.
UD’s offense took over from its own 20 yard line and from there, looked like the dynamic passing attack that ranked first in Conference USA (CUSA) last season.
Senior quarterback Nick Minicucci threw for 68 yards on two throws leading Delaware’s offense into the red zone. The first completion was a 31-yard deep throw to the back shoulder of senior receiver Donovan Lewis. The second was a 37-yard completion to Coastal Carolina transfer Bryson Graves on the next play. Minicucci finished the drive with a 12-yard run into the endzone putting the Blue Hens ahead by two scores.
The Delaware offense tallied another touchdown before halftime, benefitting from another stellar defensive play.
The Warriors took over at their own 20 yard line with less than 40 seconds remaining in the half after blocking UD kicker Tucker Smack’s 26-yard field goal attempt the drive prior. Hairston Jr. handed the ball off to running back DeMarcus McElroy and McElroy was met by freshman safety Kevin Moore. Moore’s hit jarred the ball out of McElroy’s hands and onto the field. The ball bounced off multiple players before being engulfed by a diving Blake Matthews as he slid toward the sideline.
“So I’m trying to push [a Merrimack player] out the way and then somebody jumped on it and I was like ‘oh we got it’and then it bounced out and I was like, well I got to keep going,” Matthews said postgame. “Right before we got to the sidelines, I tried to jump on it before we get out and luckily it didn’t bounce off my chest as well.”
Matthew’s recovery put the Blue Hen offense back on the field, in the red zone with 23 seconds before halftime. Minicucci only needed seven.
The senior connected with junior wideout Sean Wilson for a 12-yard touchdown near the back left pylon that put the Blue Hens ahead, 21-0, at halftime.
“Our defense played great today,” Minicucci said postgame. “I mean just getting us a chance to have the ball is a blessing and we took advantage of most of our opportunities, but we still, we’re not satisfied with what we did. So, we got a lot to clean up.”
Delaware’s offense accumulated 242 total yards and scored 14 more points in the third quarter to go into the fourth quarter ahead, 35-7. The highlight play from the frame was a trick play involving Minicucci, Ellison Jr. and the player that scored both of the Blue Hens third quarter touchdowns — Kaderris Roberts.
The play started with Minicucci in the shotgun with Roberts on his right. Ellison lined up with his right foot on the 20 yard line and a receiver in front of him lined up at the line of scrimmage. Tight end Scott Moore motioned over, the ball was snapped and Minicucci fired to Ellison. The play looked like a designed screen for the junior running back, but Ellison didn’t run. He faked the run, stopped and fired a pass to Roberts who was left all alone down the right side of the field.
“First off, that was a dot,” Minicucci said, getting a laugh out of those at the postgame press conference. “I mean that was unreal.”
The Minicucci to Ellison to Roberts connection resulted in a 75-yard touchdown and a 28-point lead.
“That specific throw, it needs to be somebody who’s got a gun,” Carty said. “We talk about high risk, high reward. That one, we saw what we wanted and we got it, but that was still certainly something that could’ve went the other way.”
Minicucci stayed in at the start of the fourth quarter, but was pulled from the game after throwing his second touchdown pass to junior receiver Nick Tyree — the first receiving touchdown of his career. Junior quarterback Braden Streeter played the rest of the fourth quarter as UD coasted to the win. Minicucci finished with 330 passing yards, three total touchdowns and an interception.
UD’s offense finished the game with 547 total yards, 14 big plays (runs of 10 or more yards and passes of 15 or more yards) and averaged 7.6 yards per play. The defense held Merrimack to 244 total yards, sacked the quarterback three times and forced two turnovers.
“Obviously we saw when it was slow, you know, the spark was created by the defense, and that’s got to be who we, who we should be, playing off each other and playing complementary,” Carty said.
The Blue Hen players celebrate with the fans in the stands after their win over the Merrimack Warriors. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder.
The Blue Hens next opponent is a step up from the FCS competition they faced Thursday night. UD will travel to Nashville, Tennessee, for a matchup with the SEC’s Vanderbilt Commodores. The game starts at 4:15 p.m. and will be nationally televised on SEC Network.
To read more about what awaits the Blue Hens in their non-conference schedule click here.
Banning UK trade with illegal Israeli settlements is long overdueExpert commentsfarrell.drupa…
It would be a natural extension of current UK positions, and parliament’s cross-party Foreign Affairs Committee has recommended a formal ban for over a year.
Israeli settlement expansion, land appropriation, and escalating settler violence in the occupied West Bank represent some of the most outstanding obstacles to realizing a sovereign Palestinian state alongside a secure Israel, a long-standing pillar of the UK’s Middle East policy.
As such, the new Labour government under Prime Minister Andy Burnham should prohibit UK trade with Israel’s illegal settlements. This step would align UK trade with international law, uphold the UK’s recognition of Palestinian statehood, and stop sustaining the worsening situation in the West Bank – which I witnessed first-hand during a fieldwork visit this summer.
The rationale for such a move is clear. As successive UK governments have long acknowledged, Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are illegal under international law. They violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which holds that an ‘occupying power shall not transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.’
Settlements represent one of the most significant barriers to realizing a contiguous Palestinian state
A decade ago United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 (2016), which the UK supported, affirmed that settlements have no legal validity, and a landmark 2024 Advisory Opinion from the International Court of Justice obliged states to ‘take steps to prevent trade or investment relations’ that help sustain illegal settlements.
Such advisory opinions are not binding, but settlements represent one of the most significant barriers to realizing a contiguous Palestinian state. Since Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 war, it has constructed more than 160 settlements that are now home to over 700,000 Israelis in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, according to Peace Now, an Israeli human rights organization that monitors settlement activity.
Israel’s justification for settlement construction has varied through the years – from security strategy to economic interest to religious ideology, citing biblical and historical ties to the land. But as Israeli ministers have recently stated, at least part of the aim of the current settlement project is to ‘bury the idea of a Palestinian state.’
E1
This intention has been most evident in the opening of tenders for the controversial E1 development.
E1 is particularly contentious due to its location
E1 would link Jerusalem and the large settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, thus preventing Palestinian sovereignty in the central corridor connecting Ramallah, Bethlehem, and East Jerusalem, effectively bisecting the West Bank. E1 is particularly contentious due to its location, and the UK, along with France, Germany, Italy, and Canada, have condemned it.
But nearly all settlements create so-called ‘facts on the ground’ by appropriating Palestinian land and constructing infrastructure to serve settlers, including a network of bypass roads that are off limits to Palestinians. This infrastructure is accompanied by a system of more than 900 checkpoints, gates, barriers, and roadblocks.
The Israeli justification is that they are for settlers’ security, but they severely restrict Palestinian movement within the West Bank. For example, a 36-km journey from Ramallah to Nablus now requires a 73-km route to skirt around settlements – and can take hours due to checkpoints and closures. On shared roads, settlers have lined the pavement with Israeli flags, blacked out the Arabic writing on road signs with spray paint, and erected billboards reading ‘There is no future in Palestine.’
As a young woman in Nablus told me in July, ‘It emphasizes the idea that you are not getting out of this.’ She and many other young people I met no longer travel to Ramallah for work, school, or socializing as they would have done in the past for fear of being detained at checkpoints or harassed by settlers.
Additionally, 390 Israeli farms and outposts have been developed without state permission throughout the West Bank, with 250 established in the past three years. These settlements are technically considered illegal under Israeli law, but only two have been evicted, and over 80 have been legalized. Settler leaders have openly stated that the outposts aim to give them a foothold in strategic Palestinian locations, increasingly in Areas A and B, which would constitute the core population centres in a future Palestinian state.
Spain, Ireland, Belgium, and the Netherlands have already approved similar bans
Meanwhile, over 100 Palestinian communities have been partially or fully displaced by violent settler attacks since 2023, with over 1,330 incidents documented in 2026 alone. I visited the sites of several villages in the Jordan Valley that have been destroyed. In Hamamat al-Maleh, all that remains of a school built with EU-donor funding is a pile of rubble, with children’s workbooks still visible in the dirt.
With the current Israeli government either minimizing or enabling the violence, there is near- total impunity for such attacks; of the few incidents investigated, less than 5 per cent result in charges or convictions. Settler terrorism is not new, but the acceleration of attacks over the past three years has been unprecedented. It has had the intended effect of pushing rural Palestinian residents into towns and villages, largely emptying the surrounding areas, and further imperiling the realization of a Palestinian state.
Given these ever-worsening realities, the time is ripe to prohibit trade with settlements. Spain, Ireland, Belgium, and the Netherlands have already approved similar bans, and France has called for the EU to end imports of settlement goods.
Moreover, the proposed policy is a natural extension of current UK positions. The British government already denies preferential tariffs to settlement goods and strongly advises against business deals with settlements, and Parliament’s cross-party Foreign Affairs Committee has recommended a formal ban for over a year. Public opinion polls also suggest widespread support for the policy.
‘Siege mentality’
Nevertheless, there are concerns that should be taken seriously. Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), argues that the trade ban could result in a ‘de facto boycott’ of all of Israel because many Israeli companies are inextricably linked to settlements via financial integration or supply chains.
But under the existing UK-Israel Free Trade Agreement, the UK and Israel are already required to differentiate between goods produced in settlements and those produced within Israel.
LFI has also expressed concern that a ban could hurt opposition parties in Israel’s upcoming elections by contributing to a ‘siege mentality’ encouraged by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
It is true that a ban on services (such as banking, insurance, telecommunications, technology, tourism, and consulting) would be harder to regulate. But, despite the wishes of some advocates, it is likely that the initial policy will be limited to goods. Moreover, if services are included, the onus will be on Israeli firms to extricate themselves from entanglements that directly or indirectly support settlements.
Other advocacy groups worry that the policy could increase antisemitism against British Jews. There has been an alarming rise in antisemitic incidents in the UK in the past year, and these should be fully condemned.
But taking a stance against settlement trade is neither antisemitic nor anti-Israel – even if the current Israeli government tries to portray it as such. The focus on settlements is targeted and specific, and in no way delegitimizes the state of Israel as it is recognized along pre-1967 borders.
Reprisals
There are also political repercussions to consider. Israel is already considering the removal of British and European officials from the US-led coordination center for Gaza, and some fear the move could spark economic retaliation from US President Donald Trump. Those concerns are warranted, but Burnham should not be cowed by threats of reprisals.
One of the toughest challenges in international relations is balancing between interests and values. Prohibiting UK trade with Israeli settlements does not fall into that category. The UK has a strategic interest, a legal obligation, and a moral duty to stop supporting unlawful settlements that undermine efforts for future peace and security in the region.
Photo: Saturday, Hagley Museum reopens following presevation work over the past two weeks.
All major areas of the museum will again be accessible following improvements to the mill race, Millwright Shop and surrounding industrial landscape.
WILMINGTON, Del. — Hagley Museum and Library’s historic Powder Yard has reopened to the public following the completion of a two-week preservation and maintenance project.
The reopening will restore visitor access to all major areas of the museum, including its industrial landscape, waterpower system, mill race and historic shops along the Brandywine.
The Powder Yard had been temporarily closed while contractors completed projects that required heavy equipment, road closures and unrestricted access to parts of the property. The rest of the museum remained open during the work, with Hagley offering half-price admission because one of its principal attractions was unavailable.
With the Powder Yard reopened, the temporary discount has ended and regular admission prices have resumed.
Maintenance protects historic landscape
One of the project’s most significant components involved dredging the mill race inlet to remove accumulated silt and debris and improve water flow into Hagley’s historic power system.
The mill race directed water from the Brandywine to waterwheels that powered machinery throughout the original du Pont powder works. Maintaining that system helps visitors understand how waterpower supported early American manufacturing.
Crews also replaced the roof on the Millwright Shop and stabilized masonry along portions of the mill race. Those improvements are intended to protect the historic structures against weather, erosion and further deterioration.
Hazardous trees were removed from the Powder Yard and Crowninshield areas to improve safety, while additional preventive maintenance was coordinated across the industrial section of the property.
The temporary closure allowed the museum to complete the projects efficiently while protecting visitors, employees and contractors.
Full museum experience returns
Visitors will once again be able to tour the Powder Yard and walk through the industrial center of the former powder-making operation. The area includes historic mills, shops and the waterpower infrastructure that supported manufacturing along the Brandywine for generations. This weekend, the cannons will be fired on Saturday afternoon, the 250th Anniversary Tours will resume at 11:00 and 1:00, and fishing on the banks of the Brandywine is open between 11:00 am and 3:00 pm.
Eleutherian Mills, the du Pont family’s first American home, and its gardens are also open. That portion of the museum offers a more personal look at the family’s early life in Delaware and its connection to the business developing nearby.
The “Nation of Inventors” exhibition remains open at the Visitor Center. Drawing on Hagley’s extensive collections, the interactive exhibition examines how inventors recognize problems, develop ideas, and create products and technologies.
The Visitor Center and Museum Store are also open.
A site central to Delaware history
Hagley is the site of the original du Pont powder works, founded along the Brandywine in 1802 by Éleuthère Irénée du Pont.
The business developed into one of the world’s leading manufacturers of black powder and became the foundation of the DuPont company. Its growth influenced Delaware’s economy, workforce and identity for generations.
The property was more than a factory. It became an industrial community where immigrant workers and their families lived, worked and built connections that helped shape Wilmington and the Brandywine Valley.
Today, Hagley preserves the mills, mill race, waterpower system, machine shops, workers’ history and du Pont family home that together tell the story of early American industry.
Its importance extends beyond the du Pont legacy. The property demonstrates how waterpower, engineering, labor, immigration, family life and entrepreneurship converged during the country’s industrial development.
The completed maintenance work helps protect that landscape while allowing visitors to experience Delaware history in the place where much of it happened.
To Go Box:
What: Hagley Museum and Library
Status: The historic Powder Yard will reopen, and all major museum areas are accessible on Saturday.
What to see: Powder Yard, historic mills and shops, mill race and waterpower system, Eleutherian Mills and gardens, “Nation of Inventors” exhibition, Visitor Center and Museum Store.
Admission: Regular admission pricing will resume Saturday.
Photo collage by ProPublica. Source imagery by The Texas Tribune, with documents acquired by ProPublica.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appears to have violated federal ethics law in significant ways when filing recent disclosures of his assets and liabilities, creating confusion about his net worth and holdings, a review by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found.
Among them: Paxton, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, reported owning seven homes but said he earned no income from any. Yet all but one was listed for rent during the reporting periods, and some current residents and neighbors at those addresses confirmed that the properties were rented, the news organizations found. Receiving income and not reporting it is a violation of federal disclosure law, three ethics experts said.
Additionally, Paxton did not disclose mortgages for three condos at a Utah golf resort that federal law requires him to list as liabilities if they are not personal residences.
He also valued his stake in a vacant plot of Texas land at up to $50,000 on last year’s filing, but his business partner told the newsrooms Paxton’s share for years has been worth about $1 million. Federal financial disclosure law requires property to be listed at fair market value.
The apparent errors and omissions the newsrooms found obscure the extent of Paxton’s income streams, assets and debt, making it difficult for voters to make sense of his finances as they mull whether to support him in November’s election, the ethics experts said.
“It reflects either pure sloppiness on Paxton’s part or a deliberate effort to conceal some of his investments and property holdings,” said Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for the nonpartisan good-government group Public Citizen.
In Paxton’s filings reviewed by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, he valued an undeveloped plot of land as worth up to $50,000 in 2025, first image, but then listed it the following year at between $1 million and $5 million, second image.Obtained and highlighted by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune
If Paxton wins, an incomplete picture of his finances could prevent watchdogs from evaluating his conflicts of interest as a senator, Holman and others said.
The apparent omissions are part of a pattern for Paxton. Over three terms as attorney general, he has withheld financial information that could explain how he became a multimillionaire and had the resources to purchase more than a dozen properties in five states. He began including many of these on his state disclosures only after the Texas Ethics Commission closed a loophole in 2024 that Paxton had cited to leave them off. Most were acquired while Paxton earned a government salary of $153,750.
In the new federal disclosure, filed in August after Paxton received a three-month extension, he reported a net worth between $1 million and $27 million. That is a significantly higher range than the negative $1.9 million to $11.1 million net worth he reported a year ago, before he had secured the Republican nomination but after he had declared his candidacy for federal office.
The spike was driven not by Paxton’s acquisition of more assets but because the reported value on several of his properties soared.
Paxton’s report omitted listing as assets seven properties worth about $5.2 million collectively, including the Utah condos for which he did not disclose mortgages. He co-owns all of his known real estate holdings with his estranged wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, property records show. The eight he reported are held by their blind trust, which is managed by a family friend.
Federal rules do not require candidates to report as assets personal homes or properties from which they don’t earn money, even if the properties are worth millions.
At a time when voters feel anxious about their own personal finances and dislike the idea of politicians getting rich in office, it would be wise for Paxton to be more transparent about his wealth, said Texas ethics and campaign finance lawyer Andrew Cates.
“If it were me trying to get people’s vote, I would err on the side of transparency rather than not,” Cates said.
Paxton declined to be interviewed and did not answer detailed questions about how he filled out the disclosure forms. Madison Cercy, a spokesperson for his campaign, said Paxton “has had a long and successful career outside of public service, including running his own small business as a lawyer. Stirring up partisan allegations is nothing more than a bad attempt to manufacture controversy where none exists.”
Before being elected to the state Legislature in 2002, Paxton worked at a law firm in the Dallas area and was a corporate attorney for JCPenney. His state financial disclosure for 2001 listed assets totaling no more than $170,000, a ProPublica and Tribune analysis found.
By 2015, his household net worth had grown to $5.4 million, according to financial records lawmakers subpoenaed in 2023 after impeaching Paxton on charges that he took bribes in exchange for helping an Austin real estate investor.
The records, few of which were admitted into evidence during the 10-day Senate trial that resulted in his acquittal, document how Paxton built a diverse portfolio that included investments in a cellphone tower, an HVAC company, a cement supplier and a police body camera manufacturer. He netted $2.2 million when Motorola acquired the body camera firm in 2019, according to his income tax return from that year.
Shortly after, he went on a real estate buying spree, snapping up six properties in Oklahoma, Florida, Utah and Hawaii. His impeachment defense team said Paxton made a prudent shift toward real estate at a time of rock-bottom interest rates.
Questions about Paxton’s integrity have dogged him in the race for U.S. Senate. His opponent, Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, entered September with a narrow polling lead — uncharted territory in a state where Republicans have not lost a statewide race in 32 years.
A University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll released last week found that just a third of respondents viewed Paxton as “honest and trustworthy.” The same day the statewide poll was published, a super PAC supporting Talarico hit the airwaves with an ad that labeled the attorney general as “the most corrupt politician in Texas.” The commercial included a reference to Paxton’s recently disclosed net worth.
Talarico’s net worth, according to his most recent personal financial disclosure, was between $67,000 and $305,000. The range changed little from the previous year. Like Paxton, Talarico did not include his single personal residence among his reported assets.
James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project, said the questions surrounding Paxton’s latest financial disclosures reinforce a longstanding narrative that the attorney general is secretive about his finances and may have leveraged his public position for personal gain.
“It’s his choice how much he explains or doesn’t explain,” Henson said. “But I think that comes with a potential cost, and we’re seeing that in public opinion.”
Paxton’s pivot to real estate appears to be a way to supplement his salary as attorney general. The newsrooms found recent rental listings for six of the properties he disclosed but for which he said he derived no income: two homes in Ocala, Florida; a home and a condo in Austin; a home in College Station, Texas; and a vacation lodge in Broken Bow, Oklahoma.
A tenant confirmed to the newsrooms she’s living at one of Florida houses. At the Austin condo complex, a next-door neighbor said Paxton’s unit has a renter. And the five-bedroom, three-story Oklahoma lodge he owns is listed online as a short-term rental for up to $1,200 a night, with fall bookings filling up fast.
On his disclosure forms, which require real estate income to be reported, Paxton for each property selected the option “None (or less than $201).”
Federal law requires candidates who aren’t currently in Congress to report all loans exceeding $10,000, except those for personal residences. Paxton did not report three mortgages totaling $1.3 million for condos at the Black Desert Resort in southwest Utah, renowned for its world-class golf course. He purchased the properties in February; the reporting period for the most recent disclosure ran through mid-May.
Reporters found the mortgage documents in local land records. Each contains an addendum to the mortgage that is used for rental properties, said New Jersey real estate lawyer Daniel M. Shlufman. That addendum removes a requirement that the unit be owner-occupied and allows the lender to collect rent directly from tenants if Paxton were to default on the loan.
Paxton purchased another condo at the resort in 2025, which he disclosed on his most recent report as an asset and a liability. The land records show he obtained a $640,000 mortgage for it. The resort advertises a program in which it leases units purchased by investors, but it declined to say if Paxton’s properties were enrolled in it.
“It’s kind of mind-boggling to think about having four homes at one resort property and imagining those are for personal use,” said Cynthia Brown, a senior lawyer at the government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
The most significant changes between Paxton’s 2025 and 2026 reports were the valuations of the Oklahoma lodge and a plot of land outside of Fort Worth, whose value he said had increased by millions of dollars.
He appears to have switched from reporting the properties’ assessed values, which are set by the local county, to the loftier estimates of what they would fetch on the open market.
Paxton’s initial use of the lowball values appears to defy federal rules aimed at bringing candidates’ disclosed property values in line with what they’re actually worth. While the Senate Ethics Committee instructs filers that they can use a recent tax assessment to set the worth of certain property, they must adjust it to market value if it is assessed below that. In these cases, valuations must be disclosed as a specific dollar figure rather than a range.
On both his annual reports as a Senate candidate, Paxton listed ranges for the value of each property he disclosed.
Last year, Paxton reported the Oklahoma lodge, just north of the Texas border, as worth between $100,001 and $250,000. The local county assesses the property at $176,000. Its estimated market value, meanwhile, is more than $1.5 million, according to real estate websites. This year, Paxton’s disclosure valued the property at between $1 million and $5 million.
Likewise, Paxton valued a 42-acre plot of undeveloped land in Johnson County, south of Fort Worth, at between $15,001 and $50,000 last year. The county assesses the property as farmland worth $20,008, but estimates its market value is $2.9 million. This year, Paxton’s disclosure said the property was worth between $1 million and $5 million.
Paxton bought the property in 2006 with a group of investors including Rob Orr, with whom he served in the Texas House of Representatives. Orr, who manages the investment, said in an interview that Paxton’s 20% stake is worth about $1 million.
“It would have been around a million for quite a while, probably the last four or five years,” Orr said. “It has increased in value because of zoning and because of time.”
The group bought the plot to hold onto, Orr said, until creeping growth from the Dallas-Fort Worth area made it attractive for redevelopment. He said the group is negotiating a sale to a developer. Last year, Orr persuaded the City Council in Burleson to rezone the land, which had been restricted to agriculture, to permit retail and housing.
Paxton’s move to significantly revalue his assets without explaining why is “very strange,” said Margaret Dylus-Yukins, senior counsel for ethics at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, which advocates for strong disclosure rules. Dylus-Yukins, who worked for six years analyzing executive branch officials’ financial disclosures for the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, said the agency would ask filers to explain major changes in writing.
“When you have public officials that appear to be fudging the numbers on their disclosure forms, and the Senate Ethics Committee is letting that slide, then you’re not only eroding trust in the committee but the candidate himself,” Dylus-Yukins said, referring to the significant differences between the filings.
The ethics committee did not respond to requests for comment. Candidates or senators who willingly falsify financial disclosures can be fined up to $50,000 or prosecuted for making a false statement to the government, a felony. The committee rarely investigates senators and has not formally sanctioned a member in 19 years.
Candidates do not have to file any more federal financial disclosures before the November election.
By John Riddle, Contributing Journalist, Delaware LIVE
A summer lemonade stand allowed 6-year-old Lucy Johnson to do more than check an activity off her bucket list. It gave her an opportunity to support the four-legged friend who has helped make her hospital treatments less frightening.
Lucy raised more than $600 for Dogs on Call, the Animal Assisted Therapy program at Nemours Children’s Hospital, Delaware. The program holds a special place in the young patient’s heart because of Ali, a goldendoodle and facility service dog who comforts Lucy during her appointments.
For most children Lucy’s age, visiting a hospital can be intimidating. For Lucy, those visits have been a regular part of her life since she was a toddler.
She was 1½ years old when she was diagnosed with systemic juvenile idiopathic arthritis, or sJIA, a rare inflammatory condition. Her continuing care at Nemours Children’s has included frequent injections and intravenous infusions.
Although the treatments were necessary, receiving them could be frightening for such a young child. Members of Lucy’s care team tried several approaches to ease her anxiety, including cold sprays to numb her skin and vibration devices intended to distract her. Nothing seemed to make the procedures feel less frightening.
Then Lucy met Ali.
With the goldendoodle beside her during appointments, Lucy’s family began seeing a change. There were fewer tears, more smiles and a greater sense of calm during situations that previously had been filled with fear.
“When she sees Ali, her eyes just light up and her body relaxes,” said Lucy’s mom, Kelly Johnson. “It’s like a wave of calmness comes over Lucy.”
Dogs on Call brings certified therapy dogs and clinically trained facility dogs into the hospital to support children and their families. The dogs provide companionship, distraction, emotional support and, when needed, plenty of comforting snuggles.
For Lucy, the program’s support also comes from Kelsey Cebula, an Animal Assisted Therapy coordinator and certified child life specialist who works alongside Ali.
“Kelsey really has a way with kids,” Kelly said. “She talks Lucy through what to expect and provides structure and consistency during times of chaos. It means the world to me that someone would look out for my kid as if she were their own.”
Together, Ali and Cebula have helped turn some of Lucy’s most stressful appointments into experiences in which she feels safer and supported.
The idea for the fundraiser began when Lucy created a summer bucket list filled with activities she wanted to complete before the season ended. One of those activities was holding a lemonade stand.
As Lucy and her mother planned the stand, they discussed what she might do with the money she earned. Lucy had an appointment at Nemours Children’s that same day and spent time with Ali and Cebula.
The visit inspired her answer.
“Why don’t we have the money go to Ali?” she asked.
Her mother agreed, recognizing the importance of helping a program that is funded entirely through donations.
“Being a kid and having to go to the hospital can be frightening and sometimes even traumatizing for kids and their families,” Kelly said. “Supporting this program is far more than providing dog treats and dog toys. Dogs on Call brings comfort and happiness to scary situations and eases anxiety. It helps children feel less like patients and more like kids.”
Lucy’s lemonade stand quickly became more than a summertime activity. It became her way of helping other children experience the comfort Ali had given her.
The community’s response surpassed the family’s expectations, with the stand generating more than $600 for Dogs on Call.
Lucy’s donation was a heartfelt thank-you to the program that helped her through difficult moments. It also demonstrated how one child, one lemonade stand and one special dog can help replace fear with comfort, connection and joy.
Delaware Lottery introduces new NFL-themed POWERBALL Xs & Os game
Delaware Lottery launches the new POWERBALL Xs & Os weekly draw game, with tickets on sale Sept. 8 and the first drawing Sept. 13. (Photo courtesy of Delaware Lottery.)
Delaware Lottery players will soon have a new football-themed game to play, as the Delaware Lottery joins 24 jurisdictions offering the new POWERBALL Xs & Os weekly draw game beginning next month.
Tickets go on sale Tuesday, Sept. 8, at Delaware Lottery retailers statewide. The first drawing is scheduled for Sunday, Sept. 13, at 10 p.m., with drawings continuing every Sunday throughout the year.
The $5 game combines NFL team selections with a traditional lottery drawing. Players choose eight NFL teams from all 32 franchises — or opt for a Quick Pick — and win prizes based on how many team logos match those drawn. The jackpot starts at $1 million and rolls over until won.
Players can also purchase up to 10 consecutive drawings for an additional $5 per drawing.
Prize payouts range from $7 for matching four teams to $20,000 for matching seven, while matching all eight teams wins the jackpot.
The game also marks the first nationwide promotional prize program in POWERBALL history. Players can enter eligible winning and non-winning POWERBALL Xs & Os tickets online to earn points that can be used as entries for prize drawings. Available prizes include a trip to Super Bowl LXI, NFL Shop gift cards and other NFL-themed experiences.
Delaware Lottery Players Club members can also enter eligible tickets through the Players Club to earn additional points toward state promotions and drawings.
“From the NFL to the college teams we root for, Delawareans love football — and it’s a sport that unites people and communities,” said Helene Keeley, director of the Delaware Lottery. “The Delaware Lottery is thrilled to harness all this football excitement to offer players a new way to enjoy the sport and potentially win cash and other prizes, while keeping the focus on fun and responsible play.”
The Delaware Lottery said the new game complements its existing sports offerings, including Sports Pick, which has been available for more than 15 years. Sports Pick allows wagering on professional and collegiate sporting events at Delaware casinos, participating retailers and online.
Unlike sports betting, POWERBALL Xs & Os results are determined through a random lottery drawing and are not based on the outcomes of NFL games.
Lottery officials remind players that games are intended only for adults who meet applicable age, residency and eligibility requirements, and encourage responsible play.
Jenifer Chatting and her husband, Luke, at home. Jenifer was diagnosed with liver damage after taking marijuana-based sleep pills. Stephen Swofford/The Denver Gazette
In March 2022, Colorado public health officials started getting startling reports of liver damage tied to a new marijuana-based sleep aid that had quickly become a top seller in the state.
But it wasn’t until June 2023, nearly 15 months later, that the state’s Marijuana Enforcement Division would warn consumers that the danger had become so serious that the manufacturer had halted production of the sleep pills, called 1906 Midnight Drops, after more reports of “acute liver injury.”
The delay highlights a slew of weaknesses in the system for protecting consumers from hazardous products in the nation’s first regulated recreational marijuana market.
The health complaints had prompted the division to investigate, but the agency decided it didn’t have the power to pull the drops from the stores in this situation. If the agency had dug deeper, it might have found what the state attorney general’s office later discovered: The manufacturer, Sima Sciences, began receiving complaints of harm shortly after it launched 1906 Midnight Drops and two years before health officials ever did.
Instead, the enforcement division took four months after the first report of liver damage to the state to post a notice on its website. But the agency didn’t call it a health and safety warning, which would have advised people not to consume the product. It released a more neutrally named “informational notification.” While there had been reports of “adverse health events,” the notice said, regulators didn’t find any violations. The manufacturer had reformulated the product, the notice added, and no additional issues had surfaced.
Jenifer Chatting didn’t even see it.
A surgical assistant at an oral surgeon’s office, Chatting wanted a safe, natural alternative to pharmaceuticals to treat her insomnia. So she was relieved when a local marijuana dispensary suggested a sugar-free option made of cannabis and herbal extracts that the manufacturer touted as the “the best sleep aid on the market.” She began taking the Midnight Drops nightly the same month that the state health department received its first complaint.
Unaware of the enforcement division’s notification, she didn’t worry when she started having full-body cramps and became lactose intolerant in September 2022, about six months after she started taking the drops. She thought she just needed to drink more water.
She continued taking the drops for nine more months until her dispensary stopped stocking them. Now, despite never having liver problems before, according to her medical records, she has liver damage at age 53; her doctor says she will ultimately need a transplant.
Colorado’s failure to get Midnight Drops off the market or to warn consumers to stop taking it despite repeated reports of harm was not an anomaly, The Denver Gazette and ProPublica found.
The division has limited authority to force companies to recall products. The agency instead relies on posting health and safety advisories on its website to warn the public, and on sending news releases to local media outlets.
Yet, in the cases for which the news organizations were able to identify the date of a complaint or the start of an investigation, it took regulators an average of more than seven months to issue a warning. That’s an incomplete snapshot because the division refused to release data on when investigations began. Complaint dates were private, it said, because the probes were ongoing — even years after the warnings were issued and some companies had surrendered their licenses.
Still, The Denver Gazette and ProPublica were able to identify initial complaint or investigative start dates for 23 of the 83 advisories the agency issued over the past five years by reviewing other licensing violation records.
Seven months is a long time for products that are typically smoked or ingested within days of purchase, industry insiders and consumer safety experts said. In comparison, federal investigators have criticized the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for taking an average of two months after learning of a potential hazard to not just warn consumers but to get companies to recall contaminated food.
Kimberly Anzarut, a former Denver marijuana regulator and now an industry consultant, said the delays mean Colorado consumers aren’t getting vital warnings while products are still on shelves.
“When you take a really long time to get a bulletin out to tell people about these issues, a lot of time, people have already consumed the product,” she said.
Sima Sciences’ production facility in Henderson, Colorado, in November 2018. After the launch of sleep aids in 2019, Sima began receiving complaints that Midnight Drops were seriously harming consumers’ livers.Carl Bower
Lab directors said it generally takes only three days to return test results identifying contaminants, and if there’s an emergency, they can do so in a day.
But MED spokesperson Heather Draper said in a statement that it’s more complicated than just getting test results and that it takes time to build a case that leads to a health and safety advisory.
“This most often requires investigative resources to evaluate the scope of concerns, gather evidence of potential product safety concerns, and receive test results that indicate a contaminated product has been sold to consumers,” she said.
Thuy Vu, Denver’s former head of marijuana inspections and enforcement, said regulators should act more quickly and that “time is of the essence,” because the safety problems reported to regulators are almost always a fraction of the harm a product is causing.
“Seven months, eight months, that’s ridiculous,” she said.
The delays mean contaminated marijuana products often remain on sale for a long time, with no public warning. In addition to complaint dates, The Denver Gazette and ProPublica were able to get sales start dates for nearly all the health and safety advisories and found that Colorado regulators also take, on average, more than seven months from the first sale of a contaminated marijuana product to warn the public.
The news organizations found that warnings take a long time in part because Colorado lacks measures adopted in many other legalized marijuana markets to improve testing procedures and prevent contaminated marijuana from going to stores.
And when the state does discover a problem in a product already on shelves, it gives manufacturers multiple chances to disprove the agency’s finding. Though the MED can require companies to stop distributing flagged products, industry lawyers and manufacturers said manufacturers often continue selling them while challenging the findings.
Chatting’s husband, Luke, is now fearful of losing his wife and critical of what he calls insufficient warnings about Midnight Drops. The couple is suing the company, which has denied their claims. The lawsuit is pending.
“Why weren’t there big banners in front of the dispensaries about these things?” he asked. “The state makes millions and millions and millions of dollars off of the taxes for the marijuana, but they don’t do any regulation at all.”
“My Patients Were Swearing by These”
Sima co-founder Peter Barsoom, right, displays the molds used to make THC- and CBD-infused peanut butter cups on a tour of his production facility.Carl Bower
The person behind Midnight Drops is Peter Barsoom, a wunderkind of Wall Street finance who left New York in 2014 to co-found a recreational marijuana company called Sima Sciences.
Soon he was turning up in splashy magazine profiles. The 1906 product line was a nod to the year the U.S. government enacted the Pure Food and Drug Act, which he said led to the first federal regulation and eventual prohibition of cannabis.
His initial focus was high-end marijuana-infused truffle chocolates.
“Our competitors are chardonnay, Xanax and coffee, not other edibles,” he said during an interview in 2017.
In 2019, he branched out into the sleep tablet line and also manufactured other “drops” meant to help with sex, anxiety, energy, focus and bliss.
By 2023, his company, based in Henderson, Colorado, was manufacturing 81% of the pills sold in dispensaries in the state, according to the cannabis analytics firm BDSA.
Vu, the former Denver regulator, worked for about a year as Barsoom’s head of regulatory compliance and said Barsoom wanted her to bend the rules on inventory reporting and product safety, though she stressed that she was unaware of the problems with the Midnight Drops, which were made after she left. They clashed, and he fired her in 2016, she said.
Barsoom declined interview requests and did not respond to detailed questions. His company’s lawyers also did not respond to requests for comment. But in court filings in response to personal injury lawsuits, they stated that “injuries, damages and losses, if any, may have been caused by plaintiff’s own comparative negligence.”
To promote the Midnight Drops, the 1906 website said the pills were infused with corydalis, an herbal extract, which, it said, “has been used for millennia.” It claimed the extract had sedative qualities and would help people stay asleep because it targeted body pain and tension.
A relative of the poppy, corydalis also contains a compound that researchers have linked to severe and potentially fatal liver injury.
Following reports about liver problems, the company reformulated Midnight Drops and added a warning label stating the product should be taken in consultation with a physician. But the new herbal supplement was also primarily composed of a compound with the same chemical makeup as the one in corydalis that had been tied to liver risks, regulators eventually concluded.
One doctor reported to the enforcement division in December 2022 that he continued to “see an uptick in patients with elevated liver enzymes,” which he believed was caused by Midnight Drops. He warned the agency that he had seen four such patients in the past two months and knew of other doctors treating more, state records show.
Dr. David Cristin, a gastroenterologist, said he was exasperated because patients kept using Midnight Drops despite his concerns. He said he registered a complaint through the company’s website, detailing the issues he had found, but was never contacted.
“The thing that was frustrating was my patients were swearing by these,” he said.
As late as May 26, 2022, months after the state started getting reports about liver damage, the 1906 website still advertised corydalis as the key ingredient in Midnight Drops, though it contains a compound linked to liver injury.Screenshot by ProPublica via the Internet Archive. Highlights added by ProPublica.By Aug. 17, 2022, the company started highlighting Stephania instead of corydalis while keeping the marketing language and plant image the same. Stephania contains a compound with the same chemical makeup as the one in corydalis that had been tied to liver risks, regulators eventually concluded.Screenshot by ProPublica via the Internet Archive. Highlights added by ProPublica.
By May 2024, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment would receive 52 reports of harm involving Midnight Drops, at least 20 severe enough to require medical care. Of those reports, 25 occurred before the MED’s second notification. While the health department often does the initial review, records show it typically finished gathering information within days, which would trigger an automatic referral to the MED.
Nearly a year after issuing its first “informational notification,” the MED and the health department issued the second one in June 2023, warning that Midnight Drops had continued generating reports of “acute liver injury.”
At that time, Sima announced it was stopping production. But Barsoom and his companies continued marketing Midnight Drops for several more months and did not adequately warn dispensaries to stop selling them, according to a Colorado attorney general’s office investigation.
Chatting didn’t see the second MED notification either. A couple of weeks after it was posted, she went into a dispensary but learned the drops were no longer in stock. She said a dispensary staffer told her they had been pulled because consumers had been abusing the product. She hadn’t been, so she didn’t worry.
But that summer, bloodwork during a routine checkup revealed Chatting’s liver enzymes had soared to abnormal levels, indicating potential damage.
The MED’s lawyers have refused to release any of the agency’s investigative files about Midnight Drops, making it difficult to assess why the agency didn’t act sooner. Draper, the spokesperson, said that when regulators were fielding complaints about Midnight Drops, their powers were limited: They could put a hold on products and require companies to issue recalls only for specific violations. She said because of a 2023 statute change, regulators can now place holds on products over safety concerns to prevent their sales, even without a violation.
Still, even with that change, the time it takes to warn consumers after the first complaint as well as after the date when a product goes on sale have both gotten longer, according to the news organizations’ analysis. Draper said the agency “has improved its Health & Safety Advisory processes and this work continues.” She added that agency officials do not believe that the newsrooms’ analysis is “an accurate representation of our process and progress in these areas,” but she did not say why or provide any evidence disputing it.
Loopholes in Safety Rules
The continued time lag in public warnings from regulators is another blow to consumer safety for Colorado’s marijuana industry, which has loopholes in safety rules other states have closed to make it less likely that contaminated products end up in dispensaries.
In one of the longest cases, it took regulators three years to warn consumers from the date of the first sales of marijuana products made by Pueblo County-based Boone Farms that were contaminated with yeast, mold and aspergillus, which can damage lungs and cause asthma, fungal infections and, in rare instances, death. Draper said she could neither confirm nor deny if there was any other investigation. The owner of the company declined to comment but previously said it was a small amount of product and that some of it sold before the state set standards for aspergillus.
An MED investigator had similar suspicions about contamination in products made by Boulder-based Range Street, but “due to other priorities and bandwidth,” had to put the investigation on the “backburner,” according to the investigator’s synopsis obtained through a public records request. The MED eventually found yeast, mold and aspergillus. But it didn’t warn the public until 410 days after the first sales. Range Street, whose former owner declined to comment, has since surrendered its medical marijuana cultivation license.
Unlike other states, Colorado operates largely on an honor code, with manufacturers free to choose the samples and the labs that conduct contaminant tests required before products can be sold. Colorado regulators in January said they were considering requiring lab personnel to collect samples, which would bring Colorado in line with 26 of the 42 state marijuana markets. But the agency backed away from the proposal after top manufacturers argued it would increase costs.
Colorado also allows marijuana manufacturers to test their products far less frequently if they can show consistent compliance, something only one other state does. And the time frame for demonstrating that compliance can be as little as a few weeks.
Colorado’s regulators acknowledged at a 2023 industry forum that the reduced testing program “potentially poses risks to public health and safety,” as problems with the program were “a common occurrence” in investigations.
This January, the enforcement division noted in an industry bulletin that problems with that program persist, leading to recalls and advisories for unsafe levels of pesticides. The division told manufacturers in July that it is reviewing the reduced testing program as it considers a broader overhaul of testing rules.
Colorado also has historically relied on complaints to identify tainted marijuana once it is actually in the marketplace, rather than randomly sampling products on shelves. The Cannabis Regulators Association recommends random sampling, and other states like Oklahoma have such programs. Colorado only this year launched a pilot program to randomly sample dispensary products, but the program has run into delays, and the state hasn’t identified a long-term funding source.
Once a contaminated product gets to dispensaries, Colorado regulators face challenges in getting the product off the shelves. Colorado expects manufacturers to voluntarily recall products. Regulators in Colorado can only force products to be recalled in a public health emergency, but regulators can encounter hurdles to quickly establishing that one exists.
Even when testing finds contaminants, manufacturers say marijuana that’s already in dispensaries often remains for sale. That’s because Colorado allows the manufacturer to retest the marijuana, and the rules don’t specify a time frame for when those tests have to be done. The rules state that the MED “may” require manufacturers to refrain from selling items during retesting.
In contrast, Missouri immediately puts a hold on all marijuana products that fail mandatory contaminant testing. Manufacturers there can have the products reanalyzed, but dispensaries can’t sell those products until retesting shows the original analysis was incorrect.
In an industry bulletin in January, Colorado regulators said the agency had seen “increased instances” of marijuana manufacturers taking advantage of the retesting rule to cover up the use of banned pesticides.
“Health Isn’t Really Their Primary Concern”
Tess Eidem, a research professor at the University of Colorado who has a federal grant to analyze the division’s health and safety bulletin process, said she worries the state prioritizes protecting the financial viability of the marijuana market over consumer safety.
She pointed out that the MED isn’t part of the state’s health department but instead is in the state’s revenue department.
“So health isn’t really their primary concern,” she said.
Draper said that “consumer safety has been and remains a top priority for the Division.”
Since her diagnosis, Chatting spends most of her time at home, caring for her and her husband’s rescue pug mixes. Her doctor has warned that her liver will continue to deteriorate and will eventually require a transplant.Stephen Swofford/The Denver Gazette
In September 2024, a little over a year after Chatting stopped taking Midnight Drops, she and her husband went on a dream vacation to England, where they lived on a houseboat. The trip was such a success that they began planning to retire there, projecting that in about a decade they could downsize and spend their golden years traveling the canals through the English countryside where Luke was born.
A month later, Jenifer got a call from a doctor. Because she’s a former smoker, she had gone in for a routine lung screening. Her lungs were fine, but the X-ray detected something suspicious with her liver. A follow-up ultrasound detected cirrhosis.
Chatting’s gastroenterologist ruled out alcohol consumption, noting in her medical records that Chatting had always been a light drinker, and instead cited an herbal sleeping aid as a likely factor. After she stopped taking the drops, her liver enzymes came back into normal ranges, but the damage was already done, her medical records show.
Two days before Thanksgiving, Luke couldn’t sleep and rose about 2 a.m. to Google information about cirrhosis. He said it was then that he finally discovered the MED’s notifications about Midnight Drops.
He started slamming his fists on the armrests of his desk chair. One armrest broke, and his fist hit jagged plastic, fracturing his left hand.
“Jen, they killed you,” he recalled shouting.
She has few symptoms now, other than body cramps, but her gastroenterologist has warned that her condition will inevitably deteriorate and she will require a liver transplant in as little as five years.
Struggling to come to terms with the diagnosis, Jenifer now stays mostly indoors, building elaborate Lego artwork and spending time with their rescue pug mixes.
“It’s hard because you think you’re doing something good for yourself and healthy and all natural,” she said. “And then it ends up being, you know … .” She stopped and gathered herself. “Just because something’s all natural doesn’t mean that it’s good for you.”
Last September, Barsoom and his companies settled with the attorney general’s office to resolve the office’s investigation. Barsoom and his companies denied that they had violated consumer protection laws. But they agreed to pay $400,000 in fines, and the settlement bars them from selling cannabis products in Colorado until at least 2027.
Barsoom also agreed to issue an apology.
“We’ve always believed that great products should improve people’s lives,” his statement read. “When we learned that Midnight Drops wasn’t meeting that standard for everyone, we realized we had let our customers down. We are sorry that we didn’t act faster and communicate better with both our customers and regulators.”
The Chattings said Barsoom’s apology doesn’t amount to much for them, and they wish Colorado regulators had acted faster and communicated better with consumers.
“How are people supposed to know this?” Luke asked. “The only way I found this stuff was by digging and digging and digging on the internet.”
The school’s outdoor classrooms include gardens, food forests, natural play areas and spaces where children help care for animals. Students may also build with natural materials, participate in community service, complete STEAM activities, create art and stories, and work with others to solve problems.
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