James Higginbotham was found dead in a mountainous area outside Kyoto by a volunteer search-and-rescue group, his mother said.

Plan backed by Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary had footprint reduced but concerns remain over its health impacts

Utah residents have teamed up with a progressive non-profit organization to sue over an under-development AI datacenter backed by celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary, claiming the planned Stratos project facility “irrevocably” cuts off citizens’ rights by not allowing sufficient public input.

Filed by the Alliance for a Better Utah and five unnamed residents of the Box Elder county area where the center is being developed, the lawsuit comes as Shark Tank co-host O’Leary agreed to scale back the physical footprint for the project.

U.S. forces shot down Iranian missiles and drones launched toward the strait and neighboring countries.

An upcoming vote in a few weeks on America's cryptocurrency "Clarity Act" is "rattling Wall Street and consumer advocates," reports CNN, with its proposal to regulate the bulk of crypto markets through America's Commodity Futures Trading Commission. "It allows crypto companies to operate, at long last, in compliance with U.S. rules, rather than what they have been doing — essentially running their businesses within a patchwork of state and federal legal gray areas." Even for Jamie Dimon, the banking titan who's not known to mince words, it was a surprising shot across the bow when he described a fellow financier as "full of sh*t." "No one's gonna bow down to this guy or that company," Dimon told Fox Business last week. "This guy" being Brian Armstrong, and "that company" being cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. The Dimon-Armstrong tension isn't new, but it is boiling over publicly as the Senate inches closer to a floor vote on the crypto industry's No. 1 legislative priority, known as the Clarity Act. Dimon, a longtime crypto skeptic, broadly supports crypto regulation but takes issue with a provision in the Clarity Act that would allow companies like Coinbase to "effectively pay interest on deposits... without the protection they should have." The spicy comment about Armstrong came after Dimon rattled off other concerns about the Clarity Act, including what he sees as its insufficient anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer safeguards that banks have had in place for decades... "If (Armstrong) takes deposits like a bank, he should have bank rules," Dimon said in the Fox Business interview... The immediate concern from banks (and many consumer advocates) is that crypto exchanges like Coinbase would, in the grand tradition of Silicon Valley innovation, lure customers in with huge rewards and then phase those benefits out over time. Deposits in a crypto exchange are also not insured by the federal government the way bank deposits are, but that's the kind of fine print that customers tend to overlook until it's too late. JPMorgan Chase spokesperson Trish Wexler underscored that the bank wants the bill to pass, with some "fixes," like prohibiting rewards on stablecoin holdings and strengthening anti-money-laundering guardrails. Coinbase's CEO responded in an interview with Politico: Armstrong pointed to restrictions on rewards paid to idle cryptocurrency balances and disclosures on stablecoins as part of a handful of policies included in the bill to appease the banking industry's requests. "I think it'd be good for the banks," Armstrong said of the bill. "It would be great for crypto companies as well ... Hopefully we can get past the absolutisms and just see if we can get this bill over the finish line." But CNN notes concerns about weaving cryptocurrency — "a historically self-contained financial system prone to stomach-churning booms and busts" — more deeply into America's traditional finance infrastructure: "It's not just a crypto story, it's a broad deregulation of our securities markets story," Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University who specializes in banking and cryptocurrency, said in an interview. And that should concern everyone, Allen says, even if they have no investments at all, because "if we get a financial crisis in this space... no one comes out of that unscathed."

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• Joint-chair of relegated club to tackle ‘false allegations’

• ‘I am not the person the media has decided to paint me as’

The former pornography baron David Sullivan has announced his resignation as a joint-chair and director of West Ham with immediate effect.

Sullivan and his legal representatives said in a statement that the 77-year-old billionaire was stepping down to apply his “full energy and attention” to fighting what he described as “false allegations” concerning his personal conduct, due to be aired as part of a joint investigation by BBC Panorama and the Times on Monday.

The eighth-ranked Andreeva ended the run of 114th-ranked Polish qualifier Maja Chwalinska in the French Open final on Saturday.

• Knicks edge Spurs 105-104 to take 2-0 NBA finals lead

• Wembanyama made costly turnover in final seconds

• No team has won finals after losing first two at home

San Antonio star Victor Wembanyama could barely remember the details of the late-game miscues that cost the Spurs in their agonizing 105-104 loss to the New York Knicks in Game 2 of the NBA finals on Friday.

The Spurs used a 14-0 scoring run to erase a 14-point fourth-quarter deficit and briefly took a one-point lead before it all fell apart.

The daughter of disgraced former president Alberto Fujimori, running again for the presidency, is herself deeply unpopular. So is her opponent.

Dr. Peter Stafford was working with a missionary group in the Congo when he came down with the virus last month.

Sullivan hoped football would legitimise him but claims about historical conduct have led to his resignation from West Ham

• Sullivan steps down at West Ham to fight claims about private life

When David Sullivan was growing up in a council house in Cardiff, he dreamed of becoming a professional footballer. Short and squat, he would never be a player, but later in life the fortune he built through the pornography industry and the property world gave him a route into the sport. The only problem, Sullivan discovered, was finding a club willing to roll out the welcome carpet for him and his business partners, David and Ralph Gold.

They were fans of West Ham United and bought a stake in the east London club in 1991, only to find entry to the boardroom closed. “We had no contact with the board,” the late David Gold wrote in his autobiography. “They simply did not want David Sullivan and the Golds at their football club.”

Spaniards find themselves increasingly divided over issues including immigration, feminism and political corruption.

An official trailer dropped this week for Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis. It's "a full-blown remake of the original 1996 Tomb Raider game," reports Kotaku, "rebuilt from the ground up using Unreal Engine 5." Developed by Flying Wild Hog (with assistance/guidance from longtime Tomb Raider studio Crystal Dynamics), "it will also make some changes to puzzles, combat, platforming..." The game's Steam page acknowledges that AI-assisted tools were used during development "to support some early exploration and temporary development content," but that any AI-assisted assets were "either replaced or refined by humans in order to maintain the creative and artistic vision of the development team." In a statement to Eurogamer, Crystal Dynamics clarifies that they "leverage" AI tools "to help our teams iterate on ideas faster and more efficiently, while ensuring that all finished content in the final product is human-crafted." (But are they considering AI-assisted assets "refined" by humans as "human-crafted"?) Polygon reports that "The early response to the news has been mixed to negative on the Tomb Raider subreddit, ranging from vague hopes that the generative-AI craze will simply go away to grim resignation that this is the future of game development." Beyond labor concerns, art theft worries, and environmental issues, the most straightforward reason AI art has been unpopular is that many players find it hideous. We'll find out for sure whether Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis' use of AI is particularly blatant when it comes out in February 2027. Its release date is February 12, 2027 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch 2, and PC.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former figures at regulator voice disquiet after series of provocative interviews by recently departed chair

Regulators are not generally known for courting controversy. When the day job involves making delicate, legally fraught decisions, they tend to be a circumspect bunch.

However, since stepping down as chair of Ofcom, one of Britain’s most scrutinised watchdogs, the Conservative peer Michael Grade has been doing his best to buck that stereotype. “I’m free of the shackles,” he recently said.

State’s tortoise-like pace is byproduct of system of verifications and opportunities for voters to fix errors

California’s slow vote counting has frustrated political observers eagerly awaiting results, and handed Donald Trump and others an opportunity to claim “election rigging”. But experts say the system is working as designed: to protect against fraud and assure every vote is counted.

Within a day of the polls closing in California’s primary election this week, Trump started accusing Democrats of “trying to steal” the elections for the state’s governor and the mayor of Los Angeles. The justice department sent a federal prosecutor to observe the ballot-counting process in Los Angeles this week.

Increase in complaints about the hazardous eye sore has prompted city to take action to curb irresponsible owners

Kumar Satya has lived in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood since 2017 and said he loves the local parks, how people talk on the street and the sound of children “screaming, playing”.

“It was a very hot day two weeks ago, and you noticed tiny children just offering lemonade to people,” said Satya, a physician who has a 13-year-old son.

Governor issued disaster declaration as agencies move to stop spread of parasite, including release of sterile flies

A second case of the flesh-eating screwworm fly has been confirmed in Texas by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), days after an initial case in a one-year-old calf set off an aggressive response to stop the spread of the parasite in the dominant cattle-producing state.

Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, said on Friday that state officials were working with the federal government to slow the spread of the fly and the infestations caused by larvae that feed on the living flesh of warm-blooded animals and humans.

Robin Pendery died after she fell while climbing on patrol on the mountain known locally as Denali

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A ranger in Alaska died after falling into a crevasse on North America’s tallest mountain, the US National Park Service said.

Robin Pendery fell on Thursday while on climbing patrol on the mountain whose locally given name is Denali. She died despite immediate rescue efforts, the park service said.

Baseus' Bowie MC2 open buds are easily one of the top budget clip-on models, delivering surprisingly good sound and voice-calling performance.

Congressional Democrats say GOP majority is unraveling, but moves may in fact be aimed at retaining power

The wrath of Donald Trump has kept congressional Republicans in line for much of his second term thus far. But as the November midterm elections draw closer, the president’s allies in the Senate and House of Representatives appear increasingly willing to defy a president who appears to have asked lawmakers for too much in some areas and too little in others, all while the public sours on his administration.

In both chambers, small groups of Republicans have in recent weeks joined with Democrats to advance resolutions requiring that Trump receive Congress’s permission before continuing hostilities against Iran. Republican dissidents in the House helped pass another round of aid for Ukraine, as well as an effort to protect Haitians from deportation. In the Senate, a critical mass of Republican senators has given Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, a cold reception.

Karmelo Anthony, who is Black, is accused of stabbing Austin Metcalf, who was white, at track meet in an affluent Dallas suburb

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After a 2025 high school track meet in Frisco, Texas, ended with one student dead and another accused of murder, Karmelo Anthony, then 17, was indicted on first-degree murder in the fatal stabbing of Austin Metcalf, 17. Social media posts about the death divided the case into racial lines, sparking national outrage. Anthony, who is being tried as an adult, is Black; Metcalf was white.

This week marked the beginning of Anthony’s murder trial.

Prediction markets have become a draw for young men in search of quick cash and thrills, experts say. "I had almost $4,600 at one point but squandered that," one man said.

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

Utah residents and a progressive nonprofit are suing officials over Kevin O'Leary's planned Stratos Project AI data center, arguing that the special authority overseeing it gives unelected officials too much control over land use, taxation, public health, and local governance. The lawsuit comes as O'Leary has agreed to shrink the proposed 40,000-acre project by 75% amid mounting political and community pushback. NBC News reports: The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in Utah's 3rd District Court by the Alliance for a Better Utah and the group of anonymous residents. The plaintiffs hope to challenge the constitutionality of the Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA) -- a special entity that oversees the data center's proposal -- and its approval of the project, a spokesperson for the nonprofit said. Attorney David Irvine, who is representing the plaintiffs, alleges that MIDA is exercising powers as an unelected body that "the Utah Constitution never authorized." "Under the Stratos plan, it would hold permanent, irrevocable control over public health, safety, taxation, and land use across tens of thousands of acres of Box Elder County, with no voter recourse," he said in a statement. The lawsuit alleges that allowing MIDA to oversee the data center's development "irrevocably" cuts off Box Elder County citizens' rights by not allowing sufficient public input in the project. "The Stratos Project Area Plan, and actions taken by MIDA and the Commission to enact the same, puts lawmaking power respecting questions of public health, safety, welfare, morals, taxation, zoning, land use, and the like, in relation to a significant swath of county territory in a non-elected MIDA Board," the complaint reads. In addition to MIDA and the Box Elder County Commission, the lawsuit names Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams and state Sen. Jerry Stevenson, who also serve as MIDA board members. Irvine said Adams and Stevenson's presence on the MIDA board as active legislators "appears to violate the prohibition on holding more than one office of public trust simultaneously," and claimed this should render the data center's approval "null and void."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Plus all the details on Monstropolis and the new Muppets-themed roller coaster.

You can remove weird suggestions and help elevate the content you actually want to watch.

It's unclear how close the U.S. and Iran are to striking a deal, as an Iranian official says "the ball is in Trump's court," and Israel-Hezbollah hostilities continue.

On the first papal visit to Spain in 15 years, Leo plans to address political polarization and showcase the Catholic Church as an advocate for migrants and asylum seekers.

The S26 Ultra might seem exciting but the older S25 Ultra is almost as good and costs a lot less.

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

Dr. Sara Whittingham thought she would know if something was wrong. But her minor symptoms had a surprising cause.

Bodies were buried in Happisburgh after HMS Invincible sank in 1801 on way to join Nelson at Battle of Copenhagen

A mass grave for 119 sailors who drowned more than 200 years ago could be exhumed to avoid their remains being exposed by coastal erosion.

HMS Invincible sank off the Norfolk coast in 1801 on its way to join Horatio Nelson’s fleet at the Battle of Copenhagen. The recovered bodies of those who drowned were buried at St Mary’s church in Happisburgh, the nearest village to the shipwreck.

Cold storage and logistics body warns food supplies at risk from fuel shortages, cyber attacks and extreme weather

Ministers have been accused of being complacent about the risks to vital supplies of food into the UK amid concerns over fuel shortages, cyber attacks and extreme weather.

The trade body for cold storage and logistics has urged the government to make potential disruption to the UK’s food system an “immediate national priority”.

CNN anchor Jake Tapper joined a chorus of voices accusing the former first lady of rewriting history and dodging accountability for the 2024 loss

Forget the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fight being held on the White House lawn, if you want to tune in to a far more amusing brawl, may I suggest Hunter Biden v Jake Tapper? The CNN anchor is categorically unimpressed with Jill Biden’s new memoir, View from the East Wing, and has joined a chorus of voices accusing the former first lady of rewriting history and dodging accountability for the 2024 loss. In response, Hunter has accused Tapper of having the wrong priorities.

“So let me get this straight,” Hunter wrote on Twitter/X on Wednesday. “Jake Tapper is focused on attacking my Mom. Jared and Ivanka are building a private island paradise on Albanian protected land. Don Jr married the daughter of Epstein’s banker, and a startup his fund backs just got a record $620M Pentagon loan. Eric is taking an Israeli drone company public for $1.5B in the middle of a war with Iran that nobody wanted. And I know: ‘But what about your paintings, Hunter?’ Please.”

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

Kristen Gonzalez, a state senator who authored the bill, said moratorium would target ‘hyperscale’ datacenters over 20MW

New York moved closer toward becoming the first US state to enact a moratorium on large datacenters this week. On Thursday, the state legislature approved a one-year ban on the facilities powering the AI boom.

The measure now heads to Kathy Hochul, the governor, who will decide whether to sign it into law. The Guardian spoke to a state senator in the wake of the historic vote about authoring the bill and the wider US backlash against datacenters.

The 35-year-old man was spearfishing with family when he was attacked by a shark on Saturday, police said.

The seven-month-old, Sam Fahd Abu Haikal, was in his mother’s arms when soldiers fired on family in Hebron

Israeli troops killed a seven-month-old Palestinian baby in the occupied West Bank and injured one of the child’s parents after opening fire on the family’s car, despite it having complied with an order to stop.

Soldiers opened fire on Friday on a car carrying the infant and his parents in the Tel Rumeida area of Hebron. The seven-month-old, Sam Fahd Abu Haikal, was critically injured, evacuated in critical condition to a hospital, where he later died. His parents were also injured.

Iran attacks American bases in Gulf states after Washington shoots down drones and strikes Iranian radar sites

Bahrain has said Iran fired ballistic missiles and drones at it and Kuwait, hours after the US and Iran exchanged strikes over the Gulf, the latest in a series of flare-ups that threatened to break the fragile ceasefire.

Air raid sirens rang out on Saturday in Bahrain and people were told to move to a safe location and await further instructions. Kuwait’s military said it was intercepting drones and missiles launched at the country.

Total number charged rises to 11 after protests that broke out following sentencing of man for murder of 18-year-old

Six more people have been charged with violent disorder in Southampton after riots broke out following the sentencing of a man for the murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak.

It brings the total number of people charged after disorder in the city to 11. Kevin Reeves, 31, of Portswood Road, Southampton; Andrew Riddett, 38, of Seacombe Green, Southampton; Harry Varney, 34, of Briarswood, Southampton; Taylor Grundy, 22, of Pavillion Way, Gosport; and Dillon Crawford, 29, of Wilton Avenue, Southampton, were charged with violent disorder, Hampshire constabulary said.

The New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, briefly stepped away from City Hall to tackle the ultimate soccer challenge: predicting the entire World Cup bracket In the Guardian's exclusive interactive game. From shocking early exits to his definitive pick for the final, see how Mamdani maps out the world’s biggest tournament

• Bracketology: predict a path to World Cup victory

Sam Fahd Abu Haikal was killed Friday evening, and his parents were wounded, the Palestinian health ministry said.

Here's what Apple is expected to introduce at WWDC 2026 for the next version of its Mac operating system.

Union says collective agreement is just the start of a broader fight to unionize major employers across the country

Canadian warehouse workers have signed the first-ever collective agreement with Walmart, a breakthrough labour organizers are calling a “historic and powerful step”.

But the union says the deal with a corporation long hostile to organized labour is only an opening salvo in a broader fight to unionize major employers across the country.

A long trade war looms. Trump’s scattershot protectionism, chaotic tariffs and belligerence against our natural allies guarantees that US trade policy will remain a hot mess

We are in for a long trade war.

In the months since “Liberation Day” last year, when Donald Trump let loose a volley of tariffs against imports from everywhere, countries have rushed to build new relationships in the hope of maybe circumventing the US to protect the global trading system.

Lepro's lamp wants you to move chatbot prompts over to your lighting. It's surprisingly fun on-demand décor.

Among the many new smartphones we’ve tested, the best cheap phones include the iPhone 17E, the Google Pixel 10A and the Motorola Razr.

After 50 years of searching, astronomers say they have finally found evidence of a long-sought "wind" blowing from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. "Unless a black hole exists in a perfect vacuum, it must blow a wind somehow. And there is no perfect vacuum in the universe," team co-leader and Northwestern University researcher Mark Gorski said in a statement. "With new observations, this is the first time we've had a clean enough view to see the wind's imprint. We looked at the data and said, 'There it is. There is the thing that everybody's been looking for for 50 years.'" Space.com reports: Scientists have been aware for some time that feeding black holes launch powerful outflows of material around them, including jets and winds. Winds are caused when matter falling to the black hole is accelerated to near light-speed, generating pressure that pushes infalling material away. That has been seen with ravenously feeding black holes before, but not the barely feeding Sgr A*. Its sparse consumption of material and the fact it is obscured by the plane of the Milky Way from our vantage point have made tracing this wind difficult. Gorski's Northwestern colleague and team co-leader Lena Murchikova pointed out that the scientists were the first to detect molecular gas very close to Sgr A* feeding the supermassive black hole. That makes Sgr A* reassuringly like other supermassive black holes. "The wind is not powerful, and its direction probably wanders with time. It shows that our black hole is not unique, and our place in the universe is not unique," Murchikova added. "To observe our own black hole, we have to look through the plane of our galaxy. That means we have to peer through gas, dust and ionized structures, and you can't really see through all of that easily." While the team's results confirm that Sgr A* is extremely quiet compared to the supermassive black holes that sit in bright, turbulent regions of other galaxies called active galactic nuclei (AGN), this black hole wind is no slouch. In fact, the scientists think that it has been raging for around 20,000 years. "The majority of other galaxies spend most of their lives in a state where they are not particularly active," Murchikova said. "But we can only see them when they are in a fireworks stage. It is very attractive to study black holes when they are in the fireworks stage, but that's not actually their dominant state. "Sgr A* finally gives us a window into the life of a black hole in this quiet state." The team's research was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I love soccer. But absurd ticket prices and odious politics are keeping me away from the stadiums

Forgive me if I’m not excited for the World Cup. After a heartbreaking loss for my beloved Arsenal in the Champions League Final, I’d love a break from soccer. A respite from the drama and misery of the beautiful game would do a lot of good for my soul right now. But Fifa, the sport’s sprawling governing body, doesn’t have time for me to lick my wounds. They demand my wallet.

With the World Cup coming to North America, I have no chance of escaping the monstrous hype, even if I can’t even imagine affording the exorbitant ticket prices. Thousands of seats remain available for the US’s opening group stage match against Paraguay in Los Angeles, which was an unthinkable result when the competition was awarded to the US, Mexico and Canada.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

This article was corrected on 6 June 2026 to reflect the fact that Bukayo Saka, unlike Marc Guéhi, is not an immigrant

HMS Prince of Wales expected to sail ‘in the coming days’ according to British government spokesperson

A technical issue has been detected on the UK navy’s flagship as it was docked in Norway, after the warship worked with Nato and the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), the government has said.

Earlier this month, the HMS Prince of Wales – one of Britain’s two flagship aircraft carriers built for £6.4bn – set sail for Nordic waters from Loch Long, Argyll and Bute, Scotland, to provide security in the Atlantic and High North regions.

• Kareem’s Daily Quote: Do you trust a reputation built by bragging, or one earned slowly enough that other people tell the story for you?

• Hegseth Strikes Female and Black Navy Officers From Promotion List: A promotion list with zero women and almost no officers of color is not merit at work, it is discrimination pure and simple.

• Treasury Department preps for Trump $250 bill: So why has the Tubman $20 bill taken more than a decade?

• Loan rules would gut aid for thousands of low-paying professions: We’re mistaking narrow accounting for actual human value.

• What I’m Watching: The Christophers has two great actors sparring. I’m all in.

• Jukebox Playlist: Springsteen brings an old labor work song to life.

Kareem’s Daily Quote

“Do you wish people to think well of you? Don’t speak well of yourself.” Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), French mathematician and philosopher

I doubt Donald Trump has ever heard of Blaise Pascal, but he certainly doesn’t subscribe to the wisdom of the above quote. Just last weekend, he referred to himself on Truth [sic] Social as “the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. TRUMP…” I can just imagine poor Blaise smacking his forehead with his palm and shaking his head in disgust.

Pascal was a mathematician first, and you can feel the simple mathematical logic in his brief quote, a proof so tight you could fit it in a fortune cookie. He wrote in fragments, published posthumously as the Pensées, notes full of this kind of compact common sense. The instinct Pascal is pointing at is one most of us recognize, even if we’d rather not. We all want people to think well of us, and some people just can’t resist telling them why they should. The machinery of self-promotion has never been more omnipresent, and yet a 2015 study from Carnegie Mellon confirms what Pascal knew centuries ago: self-promoters consistently overestimate how positively their self-promotion lands. As one of the study’s authors put it, “Bragging is probably just the tip of the iceberg of the self-destructive things we do in the service of self-promotion.” It’s like a lifelong conman and convicted criminal hanging a giant glowering portrait of himself on the façade of the Justice Department. You think that’s going to convince anyone you’re a good guy?

What is it about the announcement of our own worth that makes listeners respond with skepticism rather than admiration? The answer is obvious: we evaluate testimony from interested parties the same way a jury does, with suspicion built in. A reputation is built on the slow accumulation of demonstrated behavior that other people can observe, form judgments about, and share with their friends and neighbors. When Frederick Douglass was rising to national prominence in the 1840s, his reputation spread entirely through the testimony of people who watched him speak and who came away changed. The same was true of Martin Luther King Jr. and, more recently, Barack Obama. The only people who ever said anything nice about Donald Trump (besides Trump himself) were either on his payroll or hoping to be remembered in his will.

Trump may be a master when it comes to getting people’s attention, but it’s the sort of attention that used to be found mainly at carnivals. It’s cheap, loud, and built on promises that were never meant to be kept. Pascal never would have fallen for that kind of nonsense, and neither should we.

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British vehicles will emit extra 17m tonnes of CO2 by 2030 due to loophole allowing sale of more PHEVs, data suggests

Campaigners have urged the government to resist calls to further water down electric car sale rules, as an analysis reveals that vehicles on UK roads will emit an extra 17m tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2030 mostly because of changes last year.

Parts of the car industry have urged ministers to review for a second time the rules that force manufacturers to sell increasing numbers of electric cars each year.

The justice department decision to launch a criminal investigation into Carroll is a troubling, dark turn

Donald Trump is accused of raping E Jean Carroll, the magazine writer, in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store sometime in the mid-1990s. Trump denies this, as he denies all the sexual abuse allegations that have been made against him by more than two dozen women, but he was found to have sexually abused Carroll by a federal jury; later, another jury found that he defamed her when he said that she had lied about it. She didn’t lie.

Trump has vowed to appeal the rulings, but he’s so far been frustrated: a federal court panel declined to hear his appeal of one verdict, and the US supreme court has so far delayed a decision on whether to hear another of his appeals in the matter no fewer than 12 times. She won two judgments from Trump: $5m for sexual abuse and defamation, and more than $83m for defamation. The president has used his office to enrich himself so blatantly that he almost certainly has the money to pay her. But Carroll hasn’t seen a dime; it’s not clear that she ever will.

St Anthony of Padua asks for prayers for survivors after removing Anthony Odiong’s name from list of intentions

A Louisiana Catholic church that solicited prayers for a former pastor recently sentenced to life imprisonment for criminal clerical sexual assault, then backed off having offended his victims, is asking its community to pray for survivors of clergy abuse.

The shift took place in an updated 7 June parochial bulletin published by St Anthony of Padua church in the New Orleans suburb of Luling, Louisiana, where priest Anthony Odiong was pastor from 2015 to late 2023.

Mark, 17, struggled to make it through senior year after his dad was deported to El Salvador. Getting his diploma was bittersweet for the Maryland teen – as his dad watched on a livestream

As Mark was getting ready for his high school graduation, he thought about how his dad would have probably insisted on adjusting his slacks – they were a bit tight – and fixed up his tie. “He would want me to look my best,” he said.

But his dad and namesake, Marco, was 2,000 miles away. He had been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Maryland just before Christmas and deported to El Salvador in March.

The party may reclaim the US House and even Senate, but primary candidates are far from united on how to move forward

Across the country, in front yards and on main streets, at dairy breakfasts and inside breweries, voters are delivering a similar message to Democratic primary candidates: they’re tired of both parties, and sick of being ignored.

The Democratic party brand is bruised after its disastrous 2024 presidential loss. A botched review of the defeat by the Democratic National Committee, and a drawn-out process over releasing the so-called autopsy, created another round of handwringing over the party’s direction.

So many options; so many price hikes. We break it all down to help you pick the best streamer that fits your tastes and budget.

Anthropic’s high-profile spat with the Pentagon gave it a killer marketing advantage, burnishing its public image as a principled AI company that puts values over profits — unlike more mercenary rivals such as OpenAI or Google. But Anthropic’s double standard on authoritarianism suggests the nearly trillion-dollar firm is as calculating and ethically flexible as any of its competitors.

In a recently published policy paper arguing a full-throated embrace of data center nationalism, Anthropic said that “it’s essential that the US and its allies stay ahead of authoritarian governments like the Chinese Communist Party,” lest the world fall into the grips of tech-powered tyranny. Anthropic and its peers, the company claims, will form a bulwark of democratic values, protecting societies at home and abroad from repression.

Left unmentioned in the document — and seldom publicly acknowledged — is the fact a slice of Anthropic is owned by the Emirati dictatorship of Abu Dhabi, a repressive and authoritarian monarchy.

Anthropic’s policy paper, published in May, tours the same Sinophobic territory heavily trod by its chief competitor OpenAI and a wide swath of the tech industry, who know a “race” with China — the finish line never quite defined — is a weighty cudgel against regulation.

Related

OpenAI on Surveillance and Autonomous Killings: You’re Going to Have to Trust Us

Anthropic is aware of which way the wind blows from Washington to Silicon Valley, and it shrewdly casts the development of machine learning models not just as a matter of hardware and software, but of ideology and geopolitics. “Democracies, not authoritarian regimes, must lead in AI development and deployment,” the company says, or else an era of “authoritarian AI” will begin.

“Already, the CCP is using AI to censor speech, repress dissidents, hack governments and corporations across the world, and strengthen the People’s Liberation Army,” Anthropic writes, and to “enforce draconian policies on ethnic minorities” using machine learning-powered methods like biometric collection and facial recognition.

The policy paper isn’t a condemnation of any of these AI uses per se; the United States is already eagerly using these technologies for intelligence, military, and ethnic minority-repression purposes today. Residents of Tehran, which Anthropic has helped bomb since the start of the joint U.S.–Israeli war against Iran, might question the company’s argument that American AI supremacy is a matter of global “safety.”

Though the policy paper focuses on China, the company has long stated it opposes authoritarianism broadly: “AI-powered authoritarianism seems too terrible to contemplate, so democracies need to be able to set the terms by which powerful AI is brought into the world, both to avoid being overpowered by authoritarians and to prevent human rights abuses within authoritarian countries,” CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a 2024 blog post.

This is not merely a battle between the U.S. and China, Anthropic says in the May paper, but a war between democracy and “authoritarian governments” broadly construed.

But Anthropic’s anti-authoritarian fervor seemingly does not extend beyond China to the Middle East, where Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund invested in Anthropic twice this year. In February, Anthropic announced it had raised $30 billion in capital from a group of investors that included MGX, the AI-focused investment vehicle of a Emirati government capital controlled by Abu Dhabi’s royal family. Anthropic’s most recent May 28 $65 billion capital round, bringing its valuation to $965 billion, also included MGX.

Like China, the United Arab Emirates outlaws almost everything associated with democratic society: Political parties, a free press, freedoms to associate and assemble, open elections, due process, and free speech are nonexistent. Political dissidents face torture, and any speech, online or offline, that causes “damage to national unity” risks life imprisonment or the death penalty.

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Emirati authoritarianism isn’t contested by the U.S., Anthropic’s primary governmental customer. The State Department’s 2024 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices assessed the UAE faces “credible reports of: disappearances; arbitrary arrest or detention; transnational repression against individuals in another country; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom, including censorship; and prohibiting independent trade unions or significant or systematic restrictions on workers’ freedom of association.” Freedom House, a State Department-backed think tank, gives the UAE a score of 18 out of 100 on its “Global Freedom” index.

Anthropic declined to comment. MGX did not respond to a request for comment.

Given that MGX bought into Anthropic at its Series G and H investment rounds, relatively late in the venture capital game, it’s likely that the UAE’s stake in the company is relatively small and its influence limited. But Anthropic’s willingness to sell part of itself to an authoritarian monarchy suggests at least that its mission of “ensuring democracies lead” comes with asterisks.

“Like China, the UAE is at the forefront of AI-based authoritarian surveillance,” said Matthew Tokson, a law professor at the University of Utah who focuses on the security implications of artificial intelligence.

Tokson added that while he generally agrees with Anthropic’s calls to restrict processor exports to China and other measures to bolster American AI firms, he doesn’t buy the nationalist rhetoric, which he attributes to the company’s anti-regulatory agenda rather than patriotism. The more Anthropic and its competitors can convince the public that their bottom line is a matter of national security, the more likely Washington is to take a light touch.

“The fact that Anthropic is partly owned by the government of Abu Dhabi, which is similar to China in its extensive use of AI surveillance to support an authoritarian government, suggests that its anti-authoritarian arguments are more based on a cynical policy position than a sincere passion for democracy or antipathy toward authoritarian governments.”

Many of the emirate’s long record of repressive acts and rights violations are connected to MGX via its chair, Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Through his position as the emirate’s national security and intelligence chief and his business portfolio, including chairmanship of the AI firm G42 (itself a founding partner in MGX), Tahnoun has been linked to a bevy of campaigns to surveil and hack into the phones of Emirati dissidents, human rights advocates, and others the monarchy deems an adversary, according to news media reports and scholarly research. A 2020 investigation by Bill Marczak, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab placed “Spy Sheikh” Tahnoun at the center of myriad hacking, espionage, and surveillance operations. A 2025 Wired profile of Tahnoun similarly described him as Abu Dhabi’s “spymaster sheikh,” noting G42’s “special areas of strength in state-sponsored hacking and surveillance tech.”

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In 2019, the New York Times reported a covert Emirati government campaign to conduct surveillance through an instant messaging app called ToTok, an app itself Marczak tied to Tahnoon and through G42 in his 2020 analysis. The Wired profile described Tahnoun’s ambitions to “dominate AI” noted that “an engineer who worked at G42 at the time told me that all of the [ToTok] voice, video, and text chats were analyzed by AI for what the government considered suspicious activity.”

G42 declined to comment, and neither it nor MGX responded to interview requests for Tahnoun.

There is reason to believe G42 and MGX have already deployed Anthropic’s powerful large language models. A review of DNS data — internet records that connect website names to numerical addresses understandable by computers — show both G42 and MGX have both configured their servers to allow personnel to access Anthropic tools like Claude, the company’s flagship large language model.

Anthropic has been more candid in internal communications about its stance on authoritarianism.

“Unfortunately, I think ‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on,” Amodei wrote in a 2025 memo on Gulf State venture capital obtained by Wired. He wrote that such investment would boost “dictators” and conceded that it would give an authoritarian government “some soft power” to wield against the company. Nonetheless, Amodei dismissed the risk of hypocrisy as a “Comms Headache” — a function of “very stupid” commentators “having a poor understanding of substantive issues.”

Principles aside, Amodei explained in plain terms why he was interested in doing business with a repressive Gulf State. “We gain a very large benefit,” he wrote, “from having access to this capital.”

The post Anthropic Says We Must Stop Authoritarian AI. But What About Its Authoritarian Investors? appeared first on The Intercept.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle No. 1,091 for Saturday, June 6.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle No. 621 for Saturday, June 6.

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Lawyer for British women attacks ‘extraordinary spectacle’ of Tate’s arrival in Moscow

British women who have accused Andrew Tate of rape, assault and coercive control have questioned why the self-professed misogynistic influencer has appeared in Russia as UK authorities continue to hold off on seeking his extradition.

Tate admires Vladimir Putin and amplifies Kremlin propaganda online. He arrived in the same week that Russian authorities welcomed US rightwing figures at an annual conference described as Russia’s answer to Davos.

Oil tankers may be stuck behind strait of Hormuz, but holding the Iata AGM in Brazil defies warnings of impending shortages

Nothing says jet fuel crisis, as one prospective attender put it, like flying everyone to Rio de Janeiro. Aviation leaders will converge in Brazil this weekend for the Iata AGM, the annual global airline summit, with the industry still, for the most part, looking resolutely skyward.

The oil tankers may still be stuck behind the strait of Hormuz as the conflict between the US, Israel and Iran flickers on, but for now, airlines continue to defy dire warnings of impending shortages which had stoked fears of a summer of chaos for European holidaymakers.

The Italian Carlo Ancelotti, the most decorated club coach in soccer history, is the first foreigner to lead the most successful nation.

Sea stars almost went extinct along the West Coast a decade ago. Recently, they have been making a comeback.

The homicide rate is falling, but domestic killings are not. For those who track this kind of violence, the deaths are both predictable and preventable.

Conditions that led to bloody prewar protests have been made worse, commentators say

Iran is already preparing for the perilous transition from wartime unity to a fractious peace marked by hyperinflation, a 10% contraction in the economy, power cuts and calls for a triumphalist government to end its unprecedented hunting down of dissent.

With peace not yet secured, the debates within the regime about Iran’s future are only just starting to emerge but its rulers are clearly thinking about how after surviving the war, they can survive the peace.

• Australia midfielder takes aim at ‘rubbish’ from United States pundits

• Former US defender Alexi Lalas called Socceroos an ‘average team’

Socceroos midfielder Connor Metcalfe has heard every barb coming Australia’s way from the United States – and he’s had a gutful of it. Since Australia were drawn in Group D along with the co-hosts in December, the Socceroos have proved the punching bag for pundits based in the USA.

Former striker Landon Donovan labelled Socceroos coach Tony Popovic as “smug” and tipped the Australians to finish fourth behind the US, Turkey and Paraguay and exit in the group stage. “Thanks for coming, Aussies and your smug coach – you can get back on the Qantas airplane and head back home, pal,” he quipped.

Relationship between Vladimir Putin and traditional ally has slowly unravelled under current PM Nikol Pashinyan

The bottling line at the Abovyan cognac factory in Armenia is running at full tilt.

Women in white coats and hairnets work the conveyor with practised speed – labelling, stacking, loading pallets – racing to fill a truck.

The UK’s biggest bird of prey has been compared to a flying barn door. So how can one fitted with a satellite tracker disappear in prime grouse-shooting country?

The six police officers arrived at the Snilesworth estate in two pickup trucks last week, according to one account. They asked to go up on the moors, a source said, and “so off they went”.

A vast expanse of spectacularly undulating lands on the western edge of the North York Moors, Snilesworth is globally renowned for its grouse, partridge and pheasant shooting. It is known locally for attracting “rich people from London in helicopters and blacked-out SUVs”.

Modelling from US CDC shows Ebola spread could be on ‘dangerous trajectory’, but experts warn outbreaks can be very hard to predict

Central Africa’s Ebola outbreak could spread to be similar in scale to the worst outbreak in history, west Africa’s 2014-2016 outbreak that killed more than 11,000 people, according to a new analysis by US health officials.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Friday published a range of scenarios generated by computer models, from 10,000 cases to more than 20,000. In the west Africa outbreak, more than 28,000 cases were reported.

The red-hot Knicks are going home, two wins away from an NBA championship that the capital of the world has been waiting to see for generations.

US embassy in Sarajevo made threat after European states refused to back its preferred High Representative candidate

A deepening US-European rift over the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina has broken open with a dispute over a top administrative post, leading to a US threat to “reconsider” its role in international peacekeeping.

The American embassy in Sarajevo issued the threat after European states refused to back the US preferred candidate to become the new High Representative for the international community. At a meeting this week in Sarajevo of the Peace Implementation Council (PIC) – a multinational group tasked with overseeing the implementation of the 1995 Dayton peace agreement – Washington supported an Italian diplomat, Antonio Zanardi Landi, while the UK, France, Germany and most European states backed France’s envoy to the Western Balkans, René Troccaz.

Roughly 2,000 SoFi Stadium workers overwhelmingly authorized a strike a week before the 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off in Los Angeles.

• Game report: Knicks win thriller that goes down to wire

• Knicks lead series 2-0 as teams head to New York

Knicks 0-3 Spurs, 11:43, 1st quarter: Ball is kicked back out to Vassell for 3 on the game’s first possession.

Matthew Bentham writes: “Even though it’s only game 2, it feels like do or die for the Spurs , no?”

• Brunson leads Knicks to second road finals win

• New York take 2-0 series lead back to Garden

• Spurs face uphill battle after home-court sweep

The white-hot New York Knicks moved within two wins of their first NBA championship in more than half a century on Friday night, edging the San Antonio Spurs 105-104 in a Game 2 thriller to take a commanding 2-0 lead in the NBA finals before the series shifts to Madison Square Garden.

After stealing Game 1 with a furious fourth-quarter comeback, the Knicks once again turned to Jalen Brunson when the game hung in the balance. The All-NBA guard sank the go-ahead free throw with 9.5 seconds remaining after a costly turnover by Spurs star Victor Wembanyama. Moments later, Wembanyama’s clean look from the elbow at the buzzer caromed off the back rim, allowing New York to become only the third team to win the first two games of an NBA finals on the road after the 1993 Chicago Bulls and 1995 Houston Rockets.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Just over a year ago, the Trump Administration issued an executive order meant to accelerate the development of nuclear power in the US. While an entire startup ecosystem has developed around the use of different -- and typically smaller -- reactor designs, only one of them has been fully licensed so far, and there are no plans to actually build any instances of that design. The executive order directed the Department of Energy to have three different reactor designs reach criticality in a bit over a year. On Thursday, a startup called Antares announced that a test reactor it had placed at the Idaho National Laboratory had reached criticality, making it the first new design to cross this threshold. Criticality means that the nuclear reactions inside the hardware had become self sustaining; it does not mean the reactor had started to generate power. [...] At the moment, Antares is just testing what it calls a Mark 0 reactor, which is not connected to the power-generation portion. Instead, it's being used to validate the company's modeling of the physical conditions in its reactors and generate safety data that can be used during licensing applications. Attempts to run the entire system, including electrical generation, are expected to happen next year. While the work was done at a Department of Energy Lab, the company is working with the Department of Defense's Project Pele program for developing a mobile nuclear reactor. The company has also received support from NASA.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 6.

LA city council member pulled closer to reality TV villain in ballots counted Friday, now trailing by just 20,672 votes. This blog is now closed.

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email

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

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

Former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, a Democrat, will advance to the November election in the California governor's race, CBS News projects. A second candidate in the race has not yet been projected to advance.

Trump says Bill Pulte is ‘less shackled’ because he has only been appointed director of national intelligence temporarily. Key US politics stories from 5 June 2026 at a glance

Donald Trump has said that he wants Bill Pulte, his new acting director of national intelligence, to cut the office, which has already been significantly scaled back during the president’s second term.

Trump noted that the size of the office as been “way too high for way too long,” and that “if he cut, I wouldn’t mind”.

Becerra advanced to the general election after emerging from California’s crowded primary field in the race to succeed Gavin Newsom

Xavier Becerra has advanced to the November general election in California’s gubernatorial race, cementing a stunning come-from-behind primary victory in one of California’s most turbulent campaign seasons in recent memory.

Election officials are continuing to count ballots to determine whether he will face fellow Democrat Tom Steyer, the environmental activist who championed progressive policies like universal healthcare and more taxes on billionaires like himself, or Republican Steve Hilton, the former UK political operative turned Fox News personality who was endorsed by Donald Trump, in the fall.

Cloud and Sephiroth will finally clash for the last time.

The five-day, 55-mile Appalachian Trail hike is a 53-year tradition for freshmen at St. Benedict's Preparatory School.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for June 6, No. 1,813.

As President Trump prepares to watch the New York Knicks take on the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden, officials are planning for a heightened security posture, sources said.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro argues the U.S. has chosen to align against his government and back forces he identifies as complicit in the drug trade.

This week, the New York Times reported allegations of Platner's "unsettling" behavior toward women he dated, including one claim that he was physically abusive, which Platner denies.

Don't skip the Emilia Clarke-starring Ponies.

Handy, 81, died after being stabbed, allegedly by Michael Gledhill, whose mother was in relationship with Handy

A man has been charged with murder in the stabbing of Jumanji and Top Gun: Maverick actor James Handy, who was in a relationship with the suspect’s mother.

Michael Gledhill, 44, was charged after police say officers found the 81-year-old Handy stabbed in the chest and unconscious outside his home in Los Angeles on Wednesday. Handy was taken to the hospital and later pronounced dead.

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

August and September are going to be packed with game releases.

Experts warn ballot-counting could drag on in primaries for governor, LA mayor and Congress, as Trump claims ‘rigging’

The US justice department on Friday sent a federal prosecutor to observe ballot processing in Los Angeles, as Donald Trump continues to make baseless claims that California Democrats were “rigging” the results to win primary elections in the nation’s biggest blue state.

State officials have rejected the allegations, but the delay in results immediately fueled misinformation about the integrity of California’s elections, with the president, who has long fanned election-conspiracy theories, repeatedly accusing the state of “cheating”.

This week's guests include Democratic Rep. Jim Himes and Republican Rep. Don Bacon.

The new studio, made up of former Uncharted and The Last of Us developers, reveals its first project -- and all the new tech it hopes will change gaming.

Remedy's follow-up to 2019's Control switches from X-Files government spookshow to a journey of restoring humanity.

If you're not able to watch the Formula One race in person, you can explore the track and layout with Apple's detailed experience in the Maps app.

A security researcher says evidence suggests the U.S. military has been using an obscure GPS message field for nearly 20 years to broadcast encrypted key-distribution data, effectively turning GPS satellites into a global "numbers station." The hidden-looking 176-bit messages appear tied to the Pentagon's Over-the-Air Distribution system for remotely updating cryptographic keys, meaning ordinary GPS receivers may have been receiving the traffic all along without anyone outside the military noticing. The findings have been detailed by Steven Murdoch, an information security expert, in a new article in Inside GNSS. 404 Media reports: [...] From the beginning, he suspected that the subframe field contained encrypted transmissions because the data was so random. "Random data is actually very unusual to get in nature," Murdoch said. "If you see it, either it's been carefully designed to be random -- but then, why is someone sending out random data? -- or it's encrypted data. I thought encrypted data is by far the most likely explanation." He returned to the subframe on and off over the years, and solicited guesses about its content on Stack Exchange in 2023. Ahmed Kamruddin, a master's student at UCL, developed the project further in 2025. Then, this year, Murdoch put the last pieces of the puzzle together over several weeks by analyzing open archive Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) recordings collected since 2007 and kept by GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences. This dataset included more than 12 million observations of Subframe 4, Page 17, yielding 3,994 unique 176-bit messages. Within this corpus, Murdoch pinpointed key-repeating "sentinels" including a pattern that appeared in February 2010 and was broadcast on and off across dozens of satellites for more than a decade. Murdoch discovered that this particular sentinel was transmitted by all 31 operational satellites within a window of a few hours on May 26, 2011, potentially heralding the activation of a new operational system. He confirmed that this timeline coincided with the rollout of the military's Over-the-Air Distribution (OTAD) and the Over-the-Air Rekeying (OTAR) by cross-referencing declassified documents, including a 2015 presentation about the dates of the operation. "There was a perfect match between the timeline and that presentation and the change points that were automatically identified from the data," Murdoch said. "That was the smoking gun that made me think: This is what it's for." These automated systems replaced the cumbersome manual distribution of cryptographic keying material, allowing military GPS receivers around the world to be rekeyed remotely through satellite broadcasts rather than through onsite procedures. For the next 11 years, this expansive rekeying operation was overlooked in public GPS data. In 2022, the system entered a new phase, according to Murdoch's analysis. The shift was characterized by a slowing in the message rotation rate. Later, in December 2023, broadcasts carrying a distinctive "TEXT" prefix emerged then gradually spread across the constellation. Murdoch isn't sure what explains the recent transition, though it could be a possible modernization of the infrastructure or the introduction of a new protocol. But to him, the bigger takeaway is that the signals were always available for anyone willing to take a closer look, a discovery that suggests that there could be more revelations hidden for the cryptographically curious among us. "Every receiver in the world decodes Subframe 4, Page 17," Murdoch said in his new article. "Almost none of them have ever looked at it. The lesson generalizes: There is more to learn from the bytes already arriving at our antennas than from the bytes we wish were specified differently. The data are publicly available. The signal is overhead, twice a day, every day."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The National Park Service said a ranger in Alaska fell into a crevasse and died on North America's tallest mountain.

Case draws nationwide attention amid debate over racial tensions, as defendant is Black and slain student was white

Testimony has been unfolding in the murder trial of a 19-year-old accused of fatally stabbing a fellow high schooler during a track meet in Texas more than a year ago.

The case has drawn nationwide attention amid debate over racial tensions, as defendant Karmelo Anthony is Black and slain 17-year-old Austin Metcalf was white. Prosecutors allege Anthony stabbed Metcalf during a Frisco independent school district track meet at Kuykendall Stadium on 2 April 2025.

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

Emma Barnett killed her one-year-old after a court ruling he be taken away from her

A mother who poisoned her one-year-old son with a lethal cocktail of prescription medications added to milk in a baby bottle has been jailed for life for his murder.

Emma Barnett, 36, killed her son Oakley before he could be taken into care after a family court hearing ordered that he be removed from her.

Americans say it's tough to find a job, but employers just added a surprisingly strong 172,000 new hires in May.

The next Resident Evil remake is coming next year.

The five fired FBI analysits were involved in the creation of a withdrawn internal 2023 intelligence memo on "Radical Traditionalist Catholic" ideology, sources said.

Ahead of its upcoming IPO, SpaceX announced that Google will pay the company $920 million per month for access to roughly 110,000 Nvidia GPUs and related compute infrastructure. Google says the agreement is short-term "bridge capacity" to meet stronger-than-expected demand for Gemini Enterprise, while SpaceX is using deals like this and its Anthropic contract to bolster its pitch for a historic public offering. TechCrunch reports: The deal is similar in length and scope to the one SpaceX announced with Anthropic in late May. As part of that deal, Anthropic agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through 2029 to rent all the available compute from its Colossus 1 data center near Memphis, Tennessee that xAI -- now part of SpaceX -- originally built for its own artificial intelligence efforts. Google's deal appears to be paying for roughly half the amount of compute that Anthropic has access to at Colossus 1. SpaceX didn't say which specific data center Google would be using. CEO Elon Musk has previously suggested his company would reserve the Colossus 2 data center for xAI. Anthropic was significantly limited in its compute capacity prior to its deal with SpaceX, raising usage limits on the same day the deal was announced. Google is in a very different position, with some estimates naming it as the world's largest single owner of AI compute. [...] Also like the Anthropic deal, the agreement with Google includes a cancellation clause. Both SpaceX and Google have the option to terminate the agreement with 90 days notice after December 31, 2026. Google's access to the data center will ramp up "through September at a reduced fee," according to the filing. "If we fail to deliver access to the committed amount of GPUs by September 30, 2026, then following a one-month grace period, Google may immediately terminate the agreement or accept the number of GPUs provided" with a reduction in the monthly fees, it reads.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The company that operated a bus involved in a deadly crash in Virginia last week has ties to a broader network of travel firms, including one shut down by regulators a decade ago, a CBS News investigation has found.

In a pair of legal filings Friday, the Justice Department stated in writing for what appears to be the first time that a controversial $1.7 billion "anti-weaponization fund" will not continue.

Iowa Republican U.S. Senate candidate Ashley Hinson released an ad immediately after the June 2 primary that said her Democratic opponent, state Rep. Josh Turek, supports "sex changes" for minors.

The ad makes two similar but distinct claims. Its narration says Turek "supports kids changing gender without parental consent." But the on-screen text says "sex changes for kids," while video of surgeons in an operating room plays behind an image of Turek. Hinson’s social media post sharing the ad also used the phrase "sex changes for kids."

"Sex change" is not a standard medical term. Gender-affirming care can include a range of approaches to support a person's gender identity including, for minors, using a different name or pronouns. According to medical best practices, gender-affirming treatments are available only to adolescents and can include puberty blockers, hormone therapy and in rare cases, surgeries for older teens. Medical intervention for minors requires parental consent.

The ad distorts Turek’s position. The law cited in the ad as evidence does not mention medical interventions or "sex changes." It has to do with notifying parents when a student expresses a different gender identity at school.

Although the ad showed video of surgeons operating, Hinson campaign spokesperson Addie Lavis said the ad was not referencing gender-affirming surgeries. In an email to PolitiFact, she said the ad was using gender and sex "interchangeably as is the case under Iowa law and nowhere do we mention surgery."

Iowa law addressed school accommodations, not medical treatment

The ad cites Iowa's Senate File 496, a 2023 law that regulated school library books with explicit themes and prohibited instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation. Turek voted against the bill. The Republican-led Legislature passed the bill and Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed it into law. 

The law requires school districts to inform parents if a student requests "an accommodation that is intended to affirm the student's gender identity," including requests that employees "address the student using a name or pronoun" that differs from the school’s records. 

Iowa is one of several states that has enacted laws requiring schools to notify parents if students express a different gender identity at school. Supporters of the new laws say parents have a right to make decisions for their children, while many LGBTQ+ advocacy groups say sharing that information with unsupportive parents could be harmful for the children.   

Hinson campaign spokesperson Lavis also pointed to Turek's vote against the state’s 2025 health and human services budget bill. One of that bill’s provisions blocked Medicaid from paying for gender-affirming hormones or surgeries. That law dealt with reimbursement, not whether minors can receive the procedures or whether parents must be notified. 

Iowa lawmakers had already prohibited medical gender-affirming procedures for minors in 2023. Turek was not present for the vote on that bill, and the Iowa House Journal shows he was granted a leave of absence that day.

Citing the American Medical Association — which said in February that gender-affirming surgeries should "generally be reserved until adulthood"  — Turek campaign spokesperson Hannah Goss said he does not support gender-affirming surgeries for minors.

Dustin Hornbeck, a University of Memphis professor who has written about parental rights in education policy, said it's inaccurate to say the Iowa parental notification rules relate to "sex changes."

"Characterizing a parental notification policy about names and pronouns as involving 'sex changes' conflates two legally and practically distinct categories," he said in an email. "These laws concern how schools communicate with parents about student identity, not medical procedures."

Medical treatment generally happens outside of school with health care providers and, for minors, involves parental consent, Kathryn Watson, an education researcher who wrote about the effects of the Iowa law on school practices, said.

"The only time these would ever overlap is if a student had to take a hormone pill at school," Watson said in an email. "This would require parental consent and be administered by the school nurse."

Our ruling

A Hinson ad said Turek supports "sex changes for kids." The ad's context includes medical treatments and surgery.

Although the ad included video of a surgery, a Hinson campaign spokesperson said the ad was not referencing gender-affirming surgeries.

The ad cites a law’s provision that requires schools to notify parents if a student wants to identify with a different gender. That law did not mention "sex changes" or medical treatment. Turek voted against that bill.

A separate bill the same year banned gender-affirming medical treatments for minors; Turek was absent from the vote. His campaign said he opposes such surgeries for minors.

We rate the claim False.

Ohio voters are witnessing a battle of campaign television ads as each Senate candidate tries to tie the other to Jeffrey Epstein — by way of donations from those with some link to the late convicted sex offender.

Democrat Sherrod Brown’s campaign charges that Republican Sen. Jon Husted “took more money from Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirators than anyone else in Washington, and then voted to keep the Epstein files secret.” The donations total $116,892 over more than 20 years. Husted’s TV spot, meanwhile, calls Brown “a liar,” saying that Husted “voted to release the Epstein files” and that Brown took $100,000 “from Epstein associates.” Those contributions date back to 2005.

Whether the campaign donations are problematic is a matter of opinion that we leave to voters to decide. We’ll lay out who gave the money.

In Husted’s case, the contributions all came from Les Wexner, the founder and former CEO of the retail company L Brands, which included The Limited and Victoria’s Secret and is based in Ohio. Wexner, who knew Epstein and hired him to be his financial manager for many years, was listed in a 2019 FBI document as a “co-conspirator,” hence the description in the Brown ad. But he has never been charged with a crime. In February, after his inclusion in the document became public, Wexner said he “never witnessed nor had any knowledge of Epstein’s criminal activity.”

This year, Husted donated about $34,000 of the more recent Wexner donations to a charity, his campaign said, noting this was “all the funds that were available.”

In Brown’s case, the Husted campaign mined the Epstein files for mentions of Brown donors. A few have a well-known connection to Epstein, such as Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary who announced in February that he would resign from Harvard University after some of his correspondence with Epstein was released. Summers also hasn’t been accused or charged with any crime related to his friendship with Epstein. Some of the others who donated to Brown have a tangential connection to Epstein, or it’s unclear if they knew him, such as being mentioned by Epstein in an email.

As for Husted’s votes on the Epstein files, neither campaign tells the whole story. Husted voted against a Democratic amendment to release them — in a largely party-line vote — and, two months later, supported releasing them — in a unanimous consent vote on standalone legislation.

Brown was a longtime Ohio senator, from 2007 to 2025. Husted was appointed in January 2025 by Gov. Mike DeWine to fill the Senate seat vacated by Vice President JD Vance. The race is rated a toss-up by the Cook Political Report.

Both of the TV ads we examine here started airing in late May, according to AdImpact.

Husted’s Votes

We’ll start with the issue that’s easier to explain: whether Husted “voted to keep the Epstein files secret” or “voted to release the Epstein files,” as the TV ads from each campaign say. The senator essentially did both. The campaigns, though, point only to the vote that supports their position.

On Sept. 10, Husted — and all but two Republican senators — voted to block a Democratic amendment to a defense budget and policy bill. The amendment, proposed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, called for the attorney general to release all unclassified documents related to Epstein, including Department of Justice investigations of him and his associates, and information related to Epstein’s suicide.

In July 2019, federal authorities charged Epstein, a wealthy financier, with sex trafficking of minors, alleging that he “sexually exploited and abused dozens of underage girls by enticing them to engage in sex acts with him in exchange for money” between 2002 and 2005. A month after his arrest, Epstein died in prison. His death was ruled a suicide by the DOJ and the New York City medical examiner.

The Brown campaign has linked Husted’s September vote to a $3,500 contribution from Wexner two months earlier. “Just last year Husted took a maximum donation from Epstein’s co-conspirator and weeks later voted to block the release of the Epstein files. The record is clear,” Patrick Eisenhauer, Brown’s campaign manager, said in an email to us. (That is the maximum amount an individual can give to a candidate committee per election.)

At the time of the September vote, President Donald Trump was opposed to the DOJ releasing its files on Epstein. The two Republicans who voted in favor of releasing the files were Sens. Rand Paul and Josh Hawley.

Asked in a Feb. 18 deposition before a congressional committee whether he lobbied Husted or anyone else to block the release of the Epstein files, Wexner said, “Absolutely not.”

The Husted campaign noted that the September vote wasn’t on the standalone Epstein Files Transparency Act and said that it was “inappropriate” for Schumer to try to add the act as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act. “The NDAA is a bipartisan piece of legislation that covers military pay and benefits, and national security policy. Given that it is completely inappropriate and irresponsible to toy with military benefits and our country’s national defense, the Senate voted to table the amendment,” Amy Natoce, the campaign’s communications director, told us in an email.

Natoce contended that there was “a single recorded vote on releasing the Epstein files” — the Nov. 19 vote on the bill on its own. In a May 29 CNN interview, Brown argued this was “no real vote.” On Nov. 19, the bill passed by unanimous consent, meaning that no senator objected. Husted, therefore, along with the rest of the Senate, supported it.

The bill was signed into law the same day by Trump, who had changed his position and backed the legislation. The House had passed it by a 427-1 vote.

Donations to Husted

The Brown ad says that Husted “took more money from Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirators than anyone else in Washington,” and on screen, it says the contributions were 10 times more than what any other sitting senator got from “co-conspirators.” It doesn’t mention a specific dollar amount. The campaign sent us support for the ad, which details $116,892 in donations from 2001 to 2025 from Wexner.

That total includes $3,500 to Husted’s Senate campaign, $76,400 in donations for Husted’s state campaigns, and $36,992 that went to DeWine’s gubernatorial campaign when Husted was running on the ticket for lieutenant governor or to the DeWine-Husted transition fund.

The Brown campaign lists other “co-conspirators” or potential co-conspirators in FBI documents and then provides figures showing Husted’s total donations from Wexner are 10 times or more than what any other sitting senator received. For this article, we’re not delving into what other senators received. We’ll focus on the donations to Husted. 

The Husted campaign hasn’t disputed the amount received from Wexner. And it’s not surprising that the Ohio-born billionaire would donate money to politicians in his state. Wexner is a well-known figure in the Buckeye State. His name graces three buildings on the campus of Ohio State University.

He also has made some sizeable contributions to Republicans. Wexner gave $250,000 in October to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which works to elect Republicans to the Senate, according to Federal Election Commission data, and $250,000 in 2024 to a super PAC supporting Matt Dolan, who ran (and lost) in the Republican primary for Senate that year.

As for the “co-conspirator” label, it’s true that an August 2019 FBI email listed Wexner among eight Epstein “co-conspirators.” Wexner’s name was unredacted and made public in early February. The email listed him as a “secondary” co-conspirator and said that “[t]here is limited evidence regarding his involvement.” It also said that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York “is currently in contact with his attorneys and a subpoena has been served.”

Wexner’s attorney has said that he cooperated with the Justice Department and was told in 2019 by a federal prosecutor that he wasn’t considered a co-conspirator. He hasn’t been charged with any crime related to his relationship with Epstein, whom he had hired as a financial adviser decades ago.

About a week after Wexner’s inclusion in the August 2019 FBI document came to light, Husted, along with other Ohio lawmakers, said he would donate Wexner’s contributions to charity. The campaign told us he had donated $34,300 to Freedom a la Cart, a nonprofit that helps survivors of sex trafficking. “Those are all the funds that were available because the remainder were received in previous campaign cycles and spent during those cycles,” Natoce said.

In his prepared statement to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Feb. 18, Wexner said: “I was naïve, foolish, and gullible to put any trust in Jeffrey Epstein. He was a con man. And while I was conned, I have done nothing wrong and have nothing to hide.” He said he “never witnessed nor had any knowledge of Epstein’s criminal activity. I was never a participant nor co-conspirator in any of Epstein’s illegal activities.”

Wexner met Epstein in “the mid-to-late 1980s,” he said, and later hired him to manage his personal finances, giving Epstein power of attorney. Wexner claims that Epstein stole “vast sums” of money from his family but later returned a “substantial amount.” Around late 2007, Wexner said, he ended his association with Epstein, who was charged in Florida in 2006 with solicitation of prostitution. He pleaded guilty two years later to that charge and to solicitation of prostitution with a minor. “In light of his eventual guilty plea and deception of our family, we completely severed our relationship with Epstein,” Wexner said in his statement.

Donations to Brown

In pushing back on the Brown campaign’s criticism of the Wexner donations, the Husted campaign has cited contributions to Brown from what it calls “Epstein associates.” The Husted TV ad claims Brown “took a hundred grand” from these associates, citing on screen a March 7 New York Post article that puts the figure at “more than $124,000.” The article says that “Brown and Husted are far from the only politicians who took money from individuals with close ties to Epstein.”

A few of the people on the list the Husted campaign provided to us do have established, close ties to Epstein. But many don’t, and it’s unclear whether some on the list knew him.

The campaign cited 14 people who gave contributions to Brown, including Abigail Wexner, Les Wexner’s wife. She donated $10,200 to Brown’s campaigns from 2011 to 2017, and additional funds to his leadership political action committee from 2017 to 2019. The Husted campaign argues that this counts as also taking money from Les Wexner. “As a married couple, Abigail and Les Wexner share assets,” Natoce told us.

In a press release about the ad, Natoce said, “Brown is literally using Epstein money to run TV ads about Epstein money!”

None of the donors the Husted campaign identified has been charged with a crime related to Epstein, nor has any been identified as a co-conspirator. As we said, many have weak links to the late sex offender. For instance, one donor is mentioned in the Epstein files because Epstein asked an assistant for her email address. Another was invited to a dinner party Epstein was having and said he couldn’t attend. Another was among a list of names Epstein emailed to himself titled “billionaire.”

The campaign also flagged $20,400 in donations from billionaire philanthropist George Soros, citing a September 2019 FBI interview with a person who said he was a victim of Epstein and claimed Soros was present on a yacht with Epstein and several others and witnessed him being sexually abused. The FBI document said the alleged victim’s conversation with the FBI, which occurred after Epstein’s July 2019 arrest, “suggested some degree of possible mental illness or emotional instability.” The document also said this person wasn’t able to provide supporting evidence or “the identities of any witnesses to support his claim of victimization.”

Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021 for helping Epstein to recruit, groom and abuse minors, told the DOJ that she didn’t think Epstein knew Soros.

Some on the Husted campaign’s list either had a documented relationship with Epstein or what appear to be stronger links. Summers, the former Treasury secretary who resigned from his position at Harvard this year, had a friendship with Epstein, who hosted a 60th birthday dinner party for Summers in 2014. The released Epstein documents show Summers had dinner with Epstein in 2018, appeared to get romantic advice from Epstein that year and was corresponding with him in 2019. Epstein was arrested that July by federal law enforcement. Summers has called his relationship with Epstein a “major error in judgement.”

Summers gave $10,300 to Brown’s campaigns in 2024 and 2025.

Two others that the Husted campaign cited, including in the press release about the TV ad, are Casey Wasserman, an entertainment executive, and attorney Brad Karp, who donated $5,400 and $2,000 to Brown’s campaigns, respectively. Wasserman exchanged emails with Maxwell in 2003 in which he said he missed her and asked, “can we book that massage now?” He told the Hollywood Reporter early this year that he regretted the correspondence, which took place “long before her horrific crimes came to light,” adding that he “never had a personal or business relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.”

Karp sent an email to Epstein in 2015 thanking him for an invite to an event at Epstein’s home that Karp called “truly ‘once in a lifetime’ in every way.” Epstein responded that “there are many many nights of unique talents. you will be invited often.” The same year, Epstein asked Karp if it was possible to revoke a woman’s tourist visa, and Karp responded that he would work on it. 

A 2003 email in the files said that media executive Barry Diller “would like to take a hike on the island” and indicated that Epstein had approved it. Diller — who donated $5,400 to Brown — said this year that “I am probably the only one who went to the island to see the architecture rather than the inhabitants.”

Husted’s camp also cited Reid Hoffman, who gave $7,000 to Brown’s campaign in 2025. Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and a well-known Democratic donor, had meetings with Epstein as late as 2018. He said this year that he knew Epstein “because of a fundraising relationship with MIT, which I very much regret.”

In the Husted campaign press release, Husted accuses Brown of “hypocrisy,” saying, “Why won’t he donate the money he received from Epstein associates to charity?”

When asked by CNN about donating contributions from Abigail Wexner or Summers, Brown said that those donations are “not tied in any way the way the co-conspirator” donations are. He said it was “not real reporting to make those comparisons.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post Ohio Senate Candidates Spar Over Donations Tied, Loosely or Not, to Epstein appeared first on FactCheck.org.

The FIFA World Cup is upon us. Find out which teams are playing, where the action is happening, which players to look out for and more.

Vice-president and state department look to push far-right idea that mass migration is causing civilisational decline

• How Britain was rocked by Henry Nowak’s murder – and why the US intervened

In the state department of past administrations, how to respond to an incendiary event such as the murder of the British student Henry Nowak would have required deliberations, memos and meetings. Given how it has roiled the UK and inflamed tensions over migration and race, the cautious diplomats at Foggy Bottom probably would have said nothing at all.

Now they tweet from the hip. “Ideological conditioning and two-tiered policing are glaring symptoms of civilizational decline,” the department’s official account posted on Thursday. “They must be rejected across the West.”

Brendan Banfield convicted of killing Christine Banfield and man lured to couple’s Virginia home as fall guy

A Virginia man who was having an affair with the family’s Brazilian au pair was sentenced on Friday to life in prison without parole for the murder of his wife and a man who was lured to the couple’s home as a fall guy.

Brendan Banfield, a former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) law enforcement officer, claimed he shot Joseph Ryan after he came across Ryan attacking his wife on the morning of 24 February 2023. But prosecutors said Brendan Banfield and au pair Juliana Peres Magalhães set Ryan up in a scheme to kill Christine Banfield, a pediatric intensive care nurse.

Bitcoin briefly fell below $60,000 on Friday, "extending its weekly loss to nearly 20% and threatening to fall below $59,000," reports CoinDesk. Crypto was also hit by a 40%-plus plunge in Zcash after Shielded Labs disclosed a years-old bug that could have allowed undetected counterfeit ZEC creation. From the report: Now, with stocks in plunge mode -- the Nasdaq down nearly 4% on Friday -- bitcoin finds itself perfectly correlated. "Short term, Bitcoin feels like swallowing broken glass," wrote Jeff Swanson Friday. "The chart goes up. It goes down. It makes grown men cry into their Robinhood accounts and CNBC anchors smugly declare the funeral, for the eleventh time." "Here's what uncomfortable people don't understand: the discomfort is the yield. Every paper-handed panic seller is handing their future to someone with a longer time horizon and a colder storage device." [...] Earlier, Shielded Labs, a nonprofit developer on the privacy token system, disclosed a critical vulnerability in Zcash's (ZEC) Orchard privacy pool that could have threatened the integrity of the token's supply. The vulnerability, if exploited, could have allowed an attacker to create an unlimited number of counterfeit ZEC tokens, completely undetected. "Think of it as someone secretly gaining access to the Federal Reserve's dollar printing press, except in this case, even the Fed wouldn't be able to tell these extra dollars were printed," wrote Omkar Godbole. Importantly, the vulnerability was discovered with help from Anthropic's recently released Opus 4.8 AI model, raising difficult questions for the entire crypto industry. More to come on that. ZEC is now down 42% over the past 24 hours. On Wednesday, the Zcash Foundation said: "The vulnerability was caught before any known exploitation occurred. There is no evidence of unauthorized value creation. Zcash's turnstile mechanism (which tracks the total ZEC balance across all value pools) confirmed that the total supply remained intact throughout. User privacy was not affected. Sapling and transparent transactions continued operating normally throughout the incident."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The four SpaceX Crew-12 crew members and NASA astronaut Chris Williams have since returned to work.

After winning Game 1 of the NBA finals, the New York Knicks are one step closer to winning a championship that has eluded them for 53 years. New Yorkers are feeling elated, but the Knicks are going to have to get through 7ft4in Victor Wembanyama of the San Antonio Spurs, who just might be the next face of the league. Kai Wright speaks with the Guardian’s Andrew Lawrence about who exactly these teams are, and why despite all the money flowing through the sport, this is a series for the people

• Read Andrew Lawrence on Knicks billionaire donor James Dolan.

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

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

Despite the positive update on the labor market, US stocks fell sharply by Friday afternoon after a big sell-off of AI chip stocks. The tech-heavy Nasdaq index closed 4% down, the largest single-day drop in over a year. The S&P 500 and and Dow were also down 2.6% and 1.3%, respectively.

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

James "Weston" Higginbotham went missing one week ago while on a family vacation in Japan.

Our gifting experts handpicked a variety of gifts at every price range to please all sorts of dads.

Apple is also expected to introduce a new Siri app across iOS, iPadOS and MacOS.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: Earlier this year Nieman Lab broke the story that major news publishers, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and USA Today Co., had started blocking the Internet Archive for fear that AI companies might scrape the nonprofit's repositories for training data. As one of the last bastions of archival history, that is, in case you're not aware, not very good for the public interest. Four months later and Nieman Lab now notes that the number of news outlets blocking the archive has soared to around 340 organizations: "Our new analysis shows that more than 340 local news sites across the United States are now limiting the Internet Archive's ability to access and preserve their stories. Many sites in our sample are owned by five of the seven largest local news publishers in the country: USA Today Co., McClatchy, Advance Local, MediaNews Group, and Tribune Publishing. The latter two are both subsidiaries of the "vulture hedge fund" Alden Global Capital." [...] Regardless of motivation, hiding whatever local news remains behind paywalls, then blocking it from the Internet Archive, in turn makes it harder for everyone else to do real journalism that relies on the historical record, local journalists tell Nieman Lab: "I cover news within a larger news desert in New York's Rockland, Sullivan, and Rockland counties. This means I need to heavily rely on archival data of old news articles from now deceased, or zombie-fied, media outlets," wrote B.J. Mendelson, the editor of The Monroe Gazette newsletter, in one recent petition signed by over 200 journalists. "Without the Internet Archive, my [work] would be incredibly difficult to do." The Internet Archive says it is listening to the concerns raised by local news outlets, while also partnering with journalism groups to train hundreds of newsrooms on archival preservation: "In December, the Internet Archive partnered with the Poynter Institute and Investigative Reporters and Editors to train a cohort of 33 local and national news outlets on how to develop and implement an archiving strategy. The initiative, funded through a Press Forward grant, aims to train 300 newsrooms in digital preservation and in using the Internet Archive's services by the end of 2027."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ned Jarrett was inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2011 after 50 career wins on the sport's top circuit.

Even though Meta's feature hasn't been enabled, facial recognition on wearables sparks major surveillance concerns.

AI will help you understand your complex biometric data and what to do with it.

Shared high performance computing resources enable work across disciplines and create new opportunities for students and faculty

COLUMBUS, Ohio, June 5, 2026 — At Wright State University, a public university in Dayton, Ohio, faculty and students are using the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) to support hands-on coursework and data-driven research across campus.

Hands-on research and collaboration helps prepare Wright State students for work in modern research computing environments. Image Credit: Wright State University

For Mike VanHorn, Wright State’s Campus Champion for OSC, connecting users with these resources is a central part of his role. As senior computer systems administrator at the College of Engineering and Computer Science, VanHorn works closely with faculty and students while also helping expand awareness of OSC across campus.

“As a Campus Champion, it’s my duty to serve as a local proponent for access and utilization of OSC resources on Wright State’s campuses,” VanHorn said. “In practice, that means I try to direct Wright State’s faculty and students toward OSC whenever I see an opportunity for their work to be done more efficiently.”

In the classroom, OSC gives students access to computing resources at a scale beyond what is available locally. In computer science and engineering courses, students write and submit parallel programs, test their code, and debug their work. Through this, they gain hands-on experience using tools commonly used in research and industry.

While Wright State maintains its own computing resources for instruction, those systems are designed for smaller-scale use. OSC provides access to significantly larger computing power, allowing students to run more complex jobs and work with datasets that would be difficult to handle locally, all within an environment that mirrors real-world research computing.

“Exposing our students to large-scale and leading-edge resources really gives them the perspective they need going forward,” VanHorn said. “It helps them understand the kinds of problems they’ll be able to solve using high performance computing.”

The same resources that support classroom learning are also being used for research across campus. Faculty are using OSC for projects ranging from machine learning and natural language processing to engineering simulations and quantum-based nanomaterials modeling.

In one project, psychology researchers are using machine learning techniques to analyze team communication in training environments, transforming large volumes of text into structured data that can be used to evaluate performance. In another, mechanical and materials engineering researchers are developing deep learning models to simulate complex manufacturing processes, helping reduce the computational demands of modeling multiphysics interactions.

“Performing Finite Element Method (FEM) and machine learning is not even possible without accessing OSC resources due to the sheer size of the simulation domain, the number of coupled differential equations, and the overall size of the required data for deep learning approaches,” said Hamed Attariani, faculty member in mechanical and materials engineering.

Across disciplines, VanHorn sees both the range of users and the variety of workloads as key strengths.

“The two things that jump out at me are the varied groups from Wright State that are using OSC, and the different types of workloads,” he said. “The wide range of applications that OSC can support is amazing.”

VanHorn is also working to build a stronger campus-wide community as more faculty and students begin using OSC. He created an internal user group to connect Wright State’s OSC users and is exploring ways to introduce the technology to a broader audience.

One idea under development is an “OSC Day,” which would bring introductory presentations and hands-on workshops directly to campus.

As Wright State continues to expand its research activity, VanHorn sees increasing awareness of OSC as a key step.

“I think a lot of students and faculty feel that there’s a learning curve with using HPC or are intimidated by the idea of learning a new way of doing things,” VanHorn said. “If we can show how accessible this technology is, it should increase the university’s research footprint and support continued growth in our R2 research activities.”

About OSC

The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) addresses the rising computational demands of academic and industrial research communities by providing a robust shared infrastructure and proven expertise in advanced modeling, simulation, and analysis. OSC empowers scientists with the services essential to making extraordinary discoveries and innovations, partners with businesses and industry to leverage computational science as a competitive force in the global knowledge economy, and leads efforts to equip the workforce with the key technology skills required for 21st-century jobs.

Source: Lexi Biasi, OSC

The post Wright State Expands Research and Teaching Capabilities with Ohio Supercomputer Center appeared first on HPCwire.

June 5, 2026 — Boston University has joined a major National Science Foundation (NSF)–funded effort that’s using artificial intelligence (AI) to unlock new discoveries in physics—potentially bringing fresh insights to research topics that span nature’s smallest particles to the universe’s largest-scale cosmic phenomena.

The NSF AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions (IAIFI) also aims to use physics principles to, in turn, develop new approaches to AI. BU will be a core IAIFI member, teaming up with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, Northeastern University, and Tufts University. The NSF recently gave IAIFI a funding boost, which will support its work for the next five years.

BU’s participation in the institute, which was founded in 2020, will be led by Siddharth Mishra-Sharma, a BU Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences assistant professor of computing and data sciences. Before joining BU last fall, he was a fellow at the institute and a member of the technical staff at AI company Anthropic, where he remains part-time.

“For BU, joining IAIFI means being embedded in a rich interdisciplinary network that spans physics theory, experiment, observation, and foundational AI,” says Mishra-Sharma. “Conversely, IAIFI stands to benefit substantially from BU’s strengths across data science, cosmology, astronomy, condensed matter physics, and biophysics.”

Mishra-Sharma’s research is focused on how AI will reshape scientific practice, and he’s excited by the potential for IAIFI to accelerate projects drawing experts from across BU, including existing efforts to build the next generation of cosmological surveys and to use statistical physics to improve understanding of machine learning. He says being an IAIFI fellow was a key part of his career trajectory and hopes being involved in the institute can have an equally positive effect on his colleagues and their work.

“AI for science is a shining example of convergence, and CDS is increasingly seen as a leader in that space,” says Azer Bestavros, BU’s Warren Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and associate provost for computing and data sciences. “The promise I see in Siddharth’s research is the transition from AI as a tool to AI as a collaborator. He is exploring the limits of automated scientific reasoning, asking how an AI can participate in the entire scientific process, from simulation and modeling to the generation of entirely new physical models.”

According to an IAIFI press release announcing its funding renewal ($4.98 million annually), it’s ready to broaden its ambitions, pushing “deeper into what the institute calls the ‘physics of AI’—using physical reasoning, physical challenges, and physical tools not just to apply AI, but to understand and improve it.”

The institute’s director, Jesse Thaler, an MIT professor of physics, says Mishra-Sharma and BU are exciting partners to help in that mission. “Siddharth has been an important part of IAIFI from the very beginning, not only through his research, but through the energy, generosity, and community spirit he brings to everything he does,” says Thaler. “With Siddharth now at BU, we’re excited to see Boston University play an important role in IAIFI, adding real intellectual strength and reinforcing the collaborative model that has been central to the institute from the start.”

A key pillar of the institute’s mission is to build a community of researchers and to educate the public about physics and AI. In addition to hosting summer workshops, colloquia, and hackathons for scientists, it runs activities targeted at K–12 students. Mishra-Sharma says there will be opportunities for BU students to get involved too.

“A huge part of IAIFI is training the next generation of talent,” he says. “BU students and postdocs will be able to participate fully in the institute’s research, training, and community activities.”

More from HPCwire: NSF Renews IAIFI Funding to Advance AI-Driven Physics Research

Source: Andrew Thurston, BU

The post Boston University Joins NSF-Funded IAIFI to Advance AI and Physics Research appeared first on HPCwire.

Prime minister’s office responds after JD Vance blames British teenager’s death on mass migration

• How Britain was rocked by Henry Nowak’s murder – and why the US intervened

​Keir Starmer has suggested the US is trying to interfere in British democracy after JD Vance, the US vice-president, blamed the murder of the British teenager Henry Nowak on mass migration.

The prime minister’s office responded after the senior Republican politician claimed in a post on X that Nowak would be alive “if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it”.

U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy had lambasted Justice Department lawyers in a decision last month and accused them of misrepresenting and withholding information.

President said he’d like to see intelligence agencies shrink as Senate blocks Fisa extension amid disquiet over nomination of Bill Pulte

Donald Trump has urged a controversial loyalist he installed as the country’s top intelligence official to fire “a lot of people” overseeing intelligence for the US federal government.

The US president said Bill Pulte, who has no previous experience in the intelligence sphere, is “less shackled” because he has only been appointed director of national intelligence temporarily.

Timmy G. Robinson Jr., founder and owner of what was once Kentucky’s largest drug addiction treatment company, was criminally indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury on charges of wire fraud and money laundering.

The indictment, filed in the Eastern District of Kentucky, charges Robinson with fraudulently selling millions of dollars of the same IRS tax credit to two companies. Robinson “devised a scheme” to “unlawfully enrich himself” by selling those tax credits to two parties, the indictment says. Robinson is also charged with two counts of money laundering  for spending the proceeds of the fraudulent sale. 

Robinson has resigned as CEO of ARC, company spokesperson Vanessa Keeton said Thursday. Robinson, 50, founded the company in 2012 after becoming sober and telling people he felt called by God to help people in the state with addiction. 

ARC, which at one point operated more than 40 drug treatment centers around the state, has been under FBI investigation for Medicaid fraud since July 2024. That investigation is ongoing, the FBI confirmed on Friday. The Lexington Herald-Leader, in partnership with ProPublica, reported in April firsthand accounts from former ARC employees and clients who said they were told by ARC to falsely bill Medicaid, or witnessed others billing for services that were not actually provided. The company said at the time that it “has never knowingly or fraudulently billed Medicaid for services, and there is no evidence that the organization encouraged employees to falsify group notes for billing purposes.”

Robinson’s attorney, Kent Wicker, said he and his client were surprised to learn an indictment had been placed over a “dispute with some investors that is now pending in a civil courtroom.”

That dispute escalated earlier this year, when ARC was sued by two companies to which Robinson had sold IRS credits, including the Bahamas-based Angelica Capital Trust. But both companies allege that when ARC received the IRS credits, it illegally kept more than $8 million the companies were owed. They allege ARC was refusing to repay the money in part so it could pay a preliminary $28 million settlement with the Department of Justice over alleged Medicaid fraud. Robinson has said he would make payments to creditors upon the sale of the company, which he described in January as imminent. 

“To be clear, Mr. Robinson did not defraud anyone, did not gain anything from the transaction at issue, and he has done nothing but deliver high quality care for over a decade to thousands of Kentuckians,” Wicker said in an emailed statement to the Herald-Leader and ProPublica. “We look forward to defending this case in court.”

Starting in 2023, ARC applied for two COVID-19-related tax credits, totalling nearly $7 million.

In July 2025, Robinson sold the rights to the first tax credit to a loan company, the indictment says. Under the agreement, the purchaser would pay ARC $2.7 million in exchange for a future repayment of the tax credit once the IRS funds arrived. Robinson signed that agreement, and later that month the buyer wired ARC the agreed amount. 

Read More

They Needed Treatment for Drug Addiction. The Company They Turned to May Have Used Them to Commit Fraud.

Soon after, the indictment says, Robinson “devised a scheme” to sell that same credit amount to a second company and in doing so “falsely represented” that the $2.7 million in initial tax credit was available to purchase. “Robinson concealed the prior transactions” to the new buyer, according to the indictment.

In November, Robinson signed an agreement with the second buyer, who sent a wire transfer that included $2.7 million for the twice-sold tax credit. 

In December, when the IRS paid ARC the COVID-19 tax refunds, “at Robinson’s direction, ARC spent the ERC [Employee Retention Credit] funds on other operational costs and debt obligations,” the indictment reads.

Keeton declined to comment further on the case, citing pending litigation. However, she said ARC continues to operate normally.

“All facilities, programs, and services remain open and fully operational,” Keeton said in an emailed statement. “Our leadership team, employees, and clinical staff remain committed to delivering high-quality care and support to the individuals and families we serve.”

Robinson faces 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, or twice the gain or loss, for the wire fraud count. Each money laundering count carries up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The post Founder of Kentucky Drug Rehab Center Indicted on Fraud and Money Laundering Charges appeared first on ProPublica.

The UK's Government Digital Service is replacing Stripe with Dutch payments provider Adyen for many GOV.UK Pay transactions, including local authorities, police forces, and armed forces units. The three-year deal covers about 1,000 services and is meant to make payments more flexible while keeping the user experience largely unchanged. The Register reports: According to the tender notice published in February 2025, the contract covers around 17 percent of payments made through GOV.UK Pay but more than 70 percent of its organizations and includes the only option allowing users to start taking payments within one working day. At that point the contract had an estimated maximum value of £49 million, although with no guarantees over volume. In a blogpost about the contract award on 2 June, GDS said it will migrate around 1,000 services to the new supplier. "We will make migration as straightforward as possible while complying with Know Your Customer legislation that protects everyone from fraud," wrote Alan Maddrell, senior content designer for the service. "Most importantly, there will be no discernible difference for paying users and no loss in functionality." He added that the change of supplier will help introduce new options including pay by bank, which transfers money directly between bank accounts using open banking services and avoids the need to type in card details. GDS will continue to use WorldPay to process payments for central government, linked organizations and NHS bodies.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Acting director David Venturella rescinds Biden-era policy that required agency to report and investigate such deaths

A memo issued by the acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director, David Venturella, has ordered the federal agency to cease reporting the deaths of newly released detainees, in a change that could obscure the full human cost of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration mass detention policies.

The move, first reported by the Washington Post, rescinds a 2021 policy implemented by the Biden administration that required ICE to report to Congress and investigate deaths of detainees that occur within 30 days of their release.

Attacks on police in Southampton, Russian strikes in Kyiv, the Ebola outbreak and PSG win the Champions League – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Warning: this gallery contains images some readers may find distressing

President Zelenskyy chided Putin in his first public message to the Russian leader, who called it "boorish" on Friday.

Exclusive: Labour’s Makerfield byelection candidate advocates public ownership of water companies as he prepares for potential leadership bid

Thames Water should be nationalised, Andy Burnham has said, revealing public ownership of water companies would “absolutely be an option” under his potential leadership of the Labour party.

Burnham, Labour’s candidate in the Makerfield byelection, has previously called for “greater public control” over the companies. In an interview with the Guardian, he has confirmed this could mean nationalisation.

President Trump told the Wall Street Journal he may even want to terminate the Office of the Director of National Intelligence altogether.

Want to boost your savings with a high-rate account right now? Here are three ways you can do that this month.

Trump administration has asked DC circuit court of appeals to reverse lower court decision which blocked construction of $400m ballroom

No court has the authority to halt construction of Donald Trump’s White House ballroom and a secure underground facility, a Department of Justice lawyer has argued, suggesting only US Congress had the power to stop the project.

The Trump administration has asked the Washington DC circuit court of appeals to reverse a lower court decision which blocked construction of a $400m ballroom on the site of the White House’s demolished East Wing. Construction of a secure bunker for staff underground at the site was allowed to proceed while the dispute between Washington DC preservationists and the White House continues.

Federal judge rules policies unlawfully barred applicants from receiving decisions on asylum, green cards and more

The Trump administration unlawfully barred applicants from 39 travel-ban countries from receiving decisions on asylum, work permits, green cards and citizenship applications, a US federal judge ruled on Friday.

The decision came on the same day that the US Senate voted to pass legislation to fund Donald Trump’s controversial immigration crackdown.

Pouria Zeraati of Iran International TV was stabbed three times outside his London home in attempt to ‘silence’ him

Two men have been found guilty of involvement in a targeted knife attack on an Iranian journalist in London said to have been carried out on behalf of the regime in Tehran.

Pouria Zeraati, a British journalist of Iranian origin, was working for Iran International, a Farsi-language dissident broadcaster, when he was stabbed in the leg outside his west London home in 2024.

Former CIA official David Rush was arrested in May after FBI agents found gold bars worth about $40 million at his home while probing whether he had lied about his educational and military background, according to court records.

Mortgage interest rates may not be ideal, but there are still advantages to buying a home this June. Here are three.

Longtime Slashdot reader Elektroschock writes: The American Business Software Alliance (BSA) does not consider mandatory open-source licensing to be an appropriate indicator of sovereignty. This is among the "pointed messages" they sent to the French government consultation (closed) today. "What protects Europe is the ability to govern, audit, and mitigate risk, not where a company files its corporate papers," said Thomas Boue of BSA. "Criteria of this kind raise costs, reduce access to best-in-class security solutions, and risk conflicting with the EU's international trade commitments."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russian president describes Ukrainian counterpart’s letter as rude and says he sees no point in face-to-face talks

Vladimir Putin has rejected an offer from Volodymyr Zelenskyy to hold a face-to-face meeting, insisting instead that Russia will achieve its war goals in Ukraine, including seizing all of the eastern Donbas region.

Speaking at the St Petersburg economic forum, the Russian president described the open letter from his Ukrainian counterpart containing the offer as rude. He refused to use Zelenskyy’s name, referring to him only as its author. Asked if they could meet to discuss an end to the conflict, Putin replied: “So far I see no point.”

Legislative efforts to make daylight saving time permanent year round got a boost with support from President Donald Trump, who criticized the twice-yearly clock switching as cost-prohibitive.

But there is no strong evidence that Trump’s solution — switching permanently to daylight saving time — would provide the economic boost Trump suggests it would.

The Sunshine Protection Act, which would make daylight saving time permanent year round unless states opt out, was folded into a motor vehicle safety bill that passed out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on May 21 with a 48-1 vote.

Shortly after, Trump posted his support on Truth Social.

“This is so important in that Hundreds of Millions of Dollars are spent every year by people, Cities, and States, being forced to change their Clocks. Many of these Clocks are located in Towers, and the cost of renting, or using, Heavy Equipment to do this twice a year is prohibitive!” Trump wrote.

“I am going to work very hard to see The Sunshine Protection Act signed into Law,” Trump added. “It’s time that people can stop worrying about the ‘Clock,’ not to mention all of the work and money that is spent on this ridiculous, twice yearly production. It will also be a very nice WIN for the Republican Party. Take it! We are going with the far more popular alternative, Saving Daylight, which gives you a longer, brighter Day — And who can be against that — This is an easy one!”

We should note that while Trump framed the legislation as a potential “WIN for the Republican Party,” the bill has bipartisan support (and bipartisan opposition, as well). But it would still need support from the House and then the Senate, plus the president’s signature, in order to pass. Similar past efforts in Congress have stalled.

We could find no credible analysis of the cost of using heavy equipment to physically change municipal clocks located in towers, as the president mentioned. In fact, David Prerau, author of the 2005 book “Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time,” told us that in the decades he has spent researching and speaking publicly about daylight saving time, “no one has mentioned that particular point.” While there may be a cost to changing such municipal clocks, he said, it’s also “very rare” and the cost is negligible in the larger scheme of the topic.

A “back-of-the-envelope” calculation by an economist with the Independent Institute updated in 2013 by the American Enterprise Institute estimated the “opportunity cost” of daylight saving time at about $2 billion per year. The estimate assumed people spent 10 minutes twice a year changing their clocks, and it assigned a lost wages figure to that time. (We would note that many digital clocks nowadays automatically make the time shift, so the lost-time argument has dissipated over time.)

More commonly, though, economists have attempted to estimate the cost of switching back and forth between standard and daylight saving time related to impacts on health, driving and work. (Most of the country moves the clock forward by an hour on the second Sunday in March, and back an hour the first Sunday in November.)

For example, an analysis by Chmura Economics & Analytics, a labor market research firm, updated in 2024, looked at evidence of economic loss from peer-reviewed journals — increased heart attacks, strokes, workplace accidents and traffic accidents attributed to switching times — and concluded daylight saving time costs about $672 million annually in all U.S. metropolitan statistical areas.

Although extending daylight saving time is often touted as an energy-saver, a Department of Energy analysis in 2008 concluded, “The electricity savings are small compared to the national total for the year, representing about 0.03 percent of the total national electricity consumption.” Some other studies have also found a small electricity savings.

But still other studies have found the opposite. Research published in 2011 looked into the effect of daylight saving time in Indiana and concluded that “if anything, the policy seems to have the opposite of its intended effect” and that electricity demand increased about 1%.

Nevertheless, the authors wrote, “there are other arguments made in favor of DST. These range from increased opportunities for leisure, enhanced public health and safety, and economic growth.”

There’s another facet to the daylight saving debate: If you do away with switching back and forth, do you go with standard time or daylight saving time?

Weighing the Options

Trump himself appears to have been conflicted on which route is best.

On Dec. 13, 2024, he posted to Truth Social, “The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t! Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.”

But shortly after taking office for a second term, Trump was asked on March 6, 2025, when he’d be getting rid of daylight saving time.

“This should be the easiest one of all, but it’s a 50/50 issue,” Trump said. “And if something’s a 50/50 issue, it’s hard to get excited about it. I assume people would like to have more light later, but some people want to have more light earlier because they don’t want to take their kids to school in the dark. … But a lot of people like it one way, a lot of people like it the other way. It’s very even. And usually I find when that’s the case, what else do we have to do?”

By the following month, though, Trump seemed to have picked a side.

“The House and Senate should push hard for more Daylight at the end of a day,” Trump posted on Truth Social on April 11, 2025. “Very popular and, most importantly, no more changing of the clocks, a big inconvenience and, for our government, A VERY COSTLY EVENT!!!”

Trump is correct that switching permanently to daylight saving time is the “more popular alternative.” In a 2022 poll by CBS News, 46% of Americans said they’d like daylight saving time all year around, while 33% preferred standard time all year around. Just 21% said they would like to keep switching back and forth. A Monmouth University poll that same year similarly found 44% of Americans favored year-round daylight saving time, while 13% favored year-round standard time and 35% said they’d like to keep changing the clocks twice a year.

Currently, 19 states have enacted legislation to switch to year-round daylight saving time, if Congress votes to allow it, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Two states — Hawaii and most of Arizona — and several U.S. territories already observe permanent standard time.

Effects on Health, Traffic, Work

Dr. Beth Malow, a professor of neurology and pediatrics in the Vanderbilt Sleep Division who testified before the House in 2022 in favor of a permanent switch to standard time, told us via email, “Moving permanently to DST would not be a cost savings and in fact, is associated with decreased productivity” due to disruption of sleep cycles. It also “increases healthcare costs,” she said. And, she noted, energy cost analyses are less relevant now that “energy use with computers etc is 24/7” than “when we were focused on electrical lighting, as we were in the 1900s.”

Groups such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine also prefer switching permanently to standard time.

“Although the chronic effects of remaining year-round in daylight saving time (which shifts daylight hours later in the evening) have not been well studied, sleep experts say that standard time (which shifts daylight hours earlier in the morning) aligns best with human circadian biology,” the AMA wrote in 2022. “Data show that the sudden change from standard time to daylight saving time in March is associated with significant public health and safety risks, including increased risk of adverse cardiovascular events, mood disorders, and motor vehicle crashes. Some studies suggest that the body clock does not adjust to daylight saving time even after a few months.”

“Eliminating the time changes in March and November would be a welcome change. But research shows permanent daylight saving time overlooks potential health risks that can be avoided by establishing permanent standard time instead,” AMA Trustee Alexander Ding said at the time. “Sleep experts are alarmed. Issues other than patient health are driving this debate. It’s time that we wake up to the health implications of clock setting.”

In a 2024 position statement, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine wrote: “[T]he United States should eliminate seasonal time changes in favor of permanent standard time (ST), which aligns best with human circadian biology. Evidence supports the distinct benefits of ST for health and safety, while also underscoring the potential harms that result from seasonal time changes to and from daylight saving time (DST).”

Legislators Weigh In

There is far from a consensus in Congress.

At a House Energy and Commerce Committee markup on May 21, Republican Rep. Gus Bilirakis of Florida lobbied for a permanent switch to daylight saving time.

“Like clockwork twice a year, I hear from my constituents — I know you do too — on their dread of having to change the clocks,” Bilirakis said. “For decades, Americans have long criticized this switch as disruptive to families, businesses, schools, and public health. Studies have also shown that the economic productivity increases with more evening daylight, while reducing traffic accidents and improving overall quality of life.”

Democratic Rep. Nanette Diaz Barragán of California provided the counterpoint.

“Like many Americans, I too am tired of changing our clocks twice a year,” Barragán said. “Parents hate it, workers hate it, our bodies hate it. But making daylight saving time permanent poses health and safety issues. Doctors, neurologists, sleep scientists, and major medical organizations have warned Congress that permanent daylight saving time would hurt public health and public safety. … Why? Because our bodies are built to wake up with morning light. When sunrise gets pushed later into the morning, especially in winter, it turns off our sleep, our mood, our concentration, and even our health, our heart health. Sleep experts have linked the shift to daylight saving time with higher risk of heart attacks, strokes, depression, and car crashes, and for millions of Americans, permanent daylight saving would mean going to school and work in darkness for months. It would put sunrise in many states past 8am for over three months.”

The country tried year-round daylight saving time in the early 1970s, and it didn’t go well.

In 1973, Congress passed — and then President Richard Nixon signed — the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act — which made daylight saving time year-round as a response to the ongoing fuel crisis at the time. It was supposed to last for two years. But just a few months into it, widespread public support for the switch collapsed, and Congress pulled the plug.

“The experiment … ran afoul of public opinion—parents became concerned about traffic accidents involving their children, who were going to school in the predawn darkness on winter mornings,” the New York Times reported at the time.

Republican Sen. Tom Cotton cited that history lesson in an Oct. 28, 2025, speech from the Senate floor, opposing a plan to switch permanently to daylight saving time.

“In January of 1974, millions of Americans traveled to work and school in darkness. Commuter trains were delayed. Schoolchildren carried flashlights. Tragically, some of these kids were struck by cars and killed while walking to school in the dark,” Cotton said. (Indeed, Time reported in February 1974 that eight children died in pre-dawn traffic accidents that winter in Florida alone.)

“It’s said that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” Cotton said. “If permanent daylight savings time becomes the law of the land, it will again make winter a dark and dismal time for millions of Americans.”

In a June 1 article, economist William Shughart, a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and professor at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University, argued for year-round standard time, writing: “Few, if any, general benefits of DST have been identified. But physiologists, sleep medicine specialists, and other experts have emphasized the human costs of springing time forward by an hour in March, only to set it back again eight months later. Misaligning body clocks (circadian rhythms) with sunlight has been associated with brain fog, strokes, heart attacks, and more workplace and road accidents. The adverse effects are especially troublesome for older people, who take longer than their younger compatriots to adjust to the time shocks. … Permanent daylight saving time holds a false promise of energy savings, bustling stores, and enhanced social welfare.”

There is, of course, a third camp in this debate — those who argue to just leave things as they are.

Prerau, the daylight saving time expert, told us that while there are undeniable social benefits to daylight saving time in the spring, summer and fall, the effects are intolerable in the winter. During the summer, sunrise gets pushed an hour from, say, 4:30 a.m. to 5:30 a.m., and so most people don’t even notice it. But in the winter, it can push sunrise until after 8:30 a.m or even 9 a.m. “Everyone gets up in the dark,” he said. “Adults drive to work in the dark. Kids go to school in the dark.” Switching the clocks may be disruptive, Prerau said, but it’s worth that price to enjoy daylight saving for eight months.

“In my opinion, stick with the way it is now,” he said. “Once a year you lose an hour of sleep. But that’s worth the benefit of having daylight saving for eight months out of the year.”

Daylight Saving Time Does Not Provide ‘Longer, Brighter Day’

As for Trump’s statement that switching permanently to daylight saving time “gives you a longer, brighter Day — And who can be against that,” that is, of course, not accurate. The president has more clearly said on other occasions that the switch would mean “more Daylight at the end of a day.”

“Clocks merely advance an hour, shifting sunlight from the morning to the evening,” Shughart wrote. “The length of the day doesn’t change a single nanosecond.”

The term “daylight saving time” is “a misnomer if there ever was one, given that daylight isn’t saved, it’s just moved from morning to evening,” Jon Nese, a teaching professor of meteorology at Penn State University, explained in 2022.

“The length of day (ie, the length of daylight) doesn’t change whether you’re on Daylight Saving Time or Standard Time – it’s just that an hour of daylight is moved from the beginning to end of the day,” Nese told us this week via email.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post Trump’s Push to Make Daylight Saving Time Permanent appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Long-serving presenter talks about diagnosis in investigative documentary to be broadcast on 20 June

The former Channel 4 News anchor Jon Snow has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, the Alzheimer’s Society has said.

Snow, who presented his last news bulletin in December 2021, will take part in a documentary that will be broadcast on Channel 4 and in which he talks about his diagnosis.

Delegation of Chagos refugees visiting Britain says issue has been ‘hijacked within the halls’ of politics

A Chagossian delegation visiting the UK has urged parliamentarians to complete stalled legislation to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, which they say has been “hijacked within the halls” of UK politics.

The six-person contingent from the Chagos Refugees Group expressed their full support for the UK to conclude an agreement after the government was forced to shelve legislation when the US dropped support for the agreement.

A federal judge blocked a series of measures that have prevented officials from granting asylum, green cards and other legal immigration benefits to many immigrants.

Stahl and Whitaker had been wild cards after new CBS News management fired multiple people in recent weeks

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Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim announced on Friday their decision to remain at CBS’s 60 Minutes after the tumultuous firings of several of the show’s senior correspondents and top producers.

The three correspondents issued a joint statement, saying: “We have had a hard time deciding whether to stay … We don’t want to see 60 Minutes die. We have been grieving because this whole mess has wounded and damaged the broadcast.

Interest returns with all three account types will be similar, but they won't be identical. Here's what to know now.

Pixar remains an "artist-driven studio," said the movie's VFX Supervisor Thomas Jordan at SXSW London. AI doesn't yet produce anything that meets its standards, he added.

Anger and distress at the treatment of the stabbed teenager is widely shared. But the online amplification of myths and grievances must be tackled

To learn of the last minutes of Henry Nowak’s life would be shocking and distressing under any circumstances. The stabbed teenager begged officers for help, as they handcuffed him before realising their mistake. To watch those final moments, on the police body-cam footage released this week, is all the more immediate, and unbearable. The outrage is widely shared. But the way it has been weaponised is alarming. His family’s wish is for his legacy to be a renewed effort to reduce knife crime, not increased antagonism along racial and religious lines. Instead, the unscrupulous are using the power of the footage and the speed of social media to spread myths about “two-tier policing” and turn trauma into political mobilisation.

Rightly, Hampshire’s chief constable has apologised. Three of the officers involved are being investigated, while a fourth has left the force. Policies are being reviewed. Vickrum Digwa will serve at least 20 years for murder before being eligible for parole. Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch have met with the victim’s family.

Anthony Head played librarian and mentor Rupert Giles in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and recently appeared in "Ted Lasso."

Brendan Banfield, a former IRS law enforcement officer, claimed he shot Joseph Ryan after he came across Ryan attacking his wife.

Democratic lawmakers in North Carolina introduced a trio of constitutional amendments this week aimed at protecting traditional powers of the state’s governor and reforming oversight of its court system.

The effort was prompted in part by ProPublica’s reporting, including an investigation that found that over nearly a decade, Republican lawmakers had pushed through law after law shrinking the powers of North Carolina’s governor, always a Democrat during that time.

At a press conference on Wednesday, the bills’ sponsors readily acknowledged that the initiatives are unlikely to pass, at least in the current legislative session: Republicans hold majorities in North Carolina’s House and Senate.

But in proposing the measures as changes to the state constitution, the group of eight Democrats said their goal was to make them less vulnerable to the persistent partisan warfare that has engulfed the narrowly divided swing state.

Republicans “won’t always be in the majority,” said Rep. Phil Rubin, the primary sponsor of one bill. “And when they’re not, they’re going to suddenly think these are great rules. So let’s do them now.”

Republican leaders in the House, Senate and court system did not respond to requests for comment on the bills.

Experts have long maintained that Republican power grabs have thwarted the will of North Carolina voters, removing the Democratic governor’s control or partial control over numerous boards, entities and executive prerogatives and leaving him the nation’s weakest. (Republican officials have defended the shifts, pointing out that voters also elected a GOP legislative majority.)

Rubin’s measure would bar the legislature from stripping away additional gubernatorial powers, as well as block majority leaders from what he called “government by ambush” — springing major legislation on the minority and public without notice.

“ProPublica’s reporting shows the perils of not having this law,” Rubin said. Voters should have “the opportunity to secure their constitution, demand absolute transparency in lawmaking and ensure that people, not backroom deals, have the final say.”

The two other constitutional amendments unveiled this week target aspects of the judicial system.

The first, authored by House Rep. Marcia Morey, would make disciplinary hearings and sanctions by the courts’ internal watchdog, the Judicial Standards Commission, public.

GOP rules currently cloak the commission’s work in secrecy. Behind closed doors, ProPublica revealed, the majority-Republican state Supreme Court quashed the commission’s recommendations that two Republican judges who’d admitted to committing egregious conduct violations be publicly reprimanded. (Spokespeople for the North Carolina Supreme Court and the Judicial Standards Commission declined to comment or respond to a detailed list of questions about the matter.)

Morey’s bill would also change who appoints the commission’s members, a step she called critical to preventing the “weaponization” of its work.

Currently, Republican legislative leaders and Paul Newby, the state’s conservative chief justice, appoint a majority of the commission’s members. As ProPublica has reported, in 2023 Newby encouraged the commission to investigate a Black Democratic justice who’d criticized his decision to effectively shut down a racial equity commission. (Newby, as well as spokespeople for the court and the Judicial Standards Commission, declined to comment for the story.)

Morey’s measure would divide commission appointments equally among the chief justice, the governor and the North Carolina State Bar. “Who makes decisions about discipline and who appoints the decision-makers,” she said, are critical to making the system “fair and effective.”

The second bill, sponsored by Rep. Deb Butler, would disqualify state Supreme Court justices from hearing cases in which family members are parties. Justice Phil Berger Jr. has caused controversy by ruling in multiple cases in which his father, the leader of the state Senate, is a defendant in his legislative capacity. (Berger referred recusal requests on these cases to the Republican majority on the Supreme Court, which ruled he could participate.)

Butler’s measure would also compel justices to disclose more information about large stock transactions, outside sources of income and sponsored travel. A ProPublica investigation found Newby didn’t disclose a trip to a luxurious Hawaiian resort, paid for by a conservative judicial education program. Newby and court spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment about his decision not to disclose the trip.

Butler described her bill as an effort to restore public trust. “People deserve complete confidence in the integrity of their court,” she said.

In the unlikely event that the bills pass, the public would then have the chance to vote on them in November. If not, the sponsors said, they’d revive them in the next session, by which time even some Republican strategists think that a blue wave may have flipped the North Carolina House.

“We’re committed to following through on these bills to ensure fairness and impartiality in our courts and legislature,” Morey said. “This should be the norm, not the partisan bias we have now.”

The post North Carolina Democrats Propose Changes to Block GOP Power Transfers and Secrecy appeared first on ProPublica.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: There's been a lot of pushback in recent months around the impact of AI data centers on local communities, with the use of water being a key issue for many. Google, in an expansion of its "water stewardship" programs, is making commitments that include replenishing more water than it uses at its data center sites. AI data centers go through a lot of water use in cooling the hardware used to power models, and Google is no exception. While Google stands by saying that the impact of AI data centers on U.S. water consumption is "small," it also says it is focusing on "protecting local water resources in all aspects of our data center operations." In a post, Google explains five new commitments regarding water use at its data centers in the U.S. These include replenishing more water than is consumed at data centers, helping local utilities to modernize water infrastructure, using air-cooled solutions in areas where watersheds are at risk, "transparently" reporting water use at data centers, and focusing on "alternative and reclaimed" water solutions. [...] In a linked paper (PDF), Google says it will replenish 120% of the water it uses at data center sites by 2030. Google is also committing $17 million to new water stewardship projects in Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, and Texas in addition to 165 other projects already in place throughout the U.S.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Technology secretary promises to support people whose jobs are swept away by automation

Liz Kendall has insisted Labour will make artificial intelligence “work for workers”, and not abandon people whose jobs are swept away by its rapid advance.

With public fears mounting about the impact of AI on employment, particularly for young people, the technology secretary claimed that the government could shape the way it is adopted.

A procedural vote failed in the Senate early Friday, and a provision of the spy powers law is set to expire June 12.

Evergoods' Civic Access Pouch is invaluable for keeping all my cables, chargers and batteries organized on the go (and at home).

June 5, 2026 — Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore have developed a practical, comprehensive noise-modeling framework for a popular class of superconducting quantum processors. Their work, published in the journal PRX Quantum, offers a sevenfold improvement in predictive accuracy over existing approaches.

Quantum bits, or qubits, are intrinsically prone to noise — interference arising from environmental factors such as electrical and magnetic fields or temperature fluctuations — as a result of the extreme sensitivity that makes them so valuable for computing. Developing accurate noise models is key to creating the robust quantum algorithms and resilient error-correction protocols required to build truly fault-tolerant quantum computers.

“To really advance the field, we need models that can predict a wide range of behavior while utilizing a small number of parameters, rather than theoretical models that try to account for all of the fundamental physics at play in quantum interactions,” said project lead Gregory Quiroz, a senior physicist at APL and an associate research professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “The novelty of our approach lies in a unified and experimentally validated framework that connects multiple noise mechanisms and yields a coherent predictive methodology.”

Characterizing Noise in Cloud-Based Quantum Processors

To study quantum noise in real, multi-qubit systems, the team made use of cloud access to 39 qubits across seven superconducting devices. Specifically, they studied transmons, a type of superconducting qubit prized for its reduced sensitivity to noise from electric charge and therefore popular in mainstream quantum computing architectures. Relying on cloud access presented an opportunity but also a challenge, because the team had to work out how to study and characterize noise on the quantum computers without low-level access to the hardware. That lack of access also reflects increasingly common real-world scenarios involving proprietary systems, Quiroz noted.

“Actual quantum computer users won’t have low-level hardware access either — they’ll just be running applications, and they’ll need to be confident that they’re running correctly,” he said. “Our experiments reflect those conditions.”

Yasuo Oda, the paper’s first author and a postdoctoral researcher who was Quiroz’s student at JHU while contributing to the study, said that working around that limitation required a creative approach.

“Fundamentally, we’re trying to drive a transition in a system of qubits from one state to another — in other words, to perform a quantum computation — and study how noise affects the success of that operation,” Oda said. “That sounds simple, but the specific way you actually drive that transition varies widely from platform to platform. Without low-level access, we had limited insight into the characteristics of the hardware.”

Instead of studying a single operation in detail, the team ran repeated computations on the quantum processors in order to drive an accumulation of errors. By studying how often those accumulated errors occurred and how widely they deviated from the expected result, they were able to glean insights into what was happening in the underlying physical system.

A Simple Yet Comprehensive Model

Significantly, the team’s approach enabled them to characterize two fundamentally different types of errors — often referred to as “incoherent” and “coherent” errors — in a single model. Incoherent errors occur when information is irretrievably lost; coherent errors can, for example, represent flaws in control hardware calibration, and are fixable.

“If you have access to data about coherent errors, you have the option of engineering a system to prevent them or fixing them afterward,” Oda said.

While there is extensive literature about both types of errors, they are typically studied in isolation. To the team’s knowledge, no one has created a single predictive framework that brings both types of errors together for superconducting qubit hardware.

“We were able to put a wide variety of errors together into one model, which is simple in terms of parameters but also comprehensive in the types of phenomena it can describe — even predicting the performance of small quantum algorithms,” he said. “That’s our biggest contribution.”

From Characterization to Correction

Now that the team has created this model, the next step will be to apply it to improving hardware performance, Quiroz said.

“Now that we have this low-weight noise model, we have the opportunity to apply it across all levels of the quantum computing stack, from hardware design to algorithm design to error correction,” he said. “The information we can get from the model can inform every level of the quantum computing stack.”

This work is a part of SMART Stack, an APL-led project focused on designing quantum software stack components and principles that make error characterization and management more scalable, modular, adaptive across platforms, reconfigurable, and targeted (hence, SMART) in current and near-future quantum processors. APL’s partners in this endeavor include researchers at the University of Chicago, University of Michigan, Unitary Foundation, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Infleqtion. Funded by a competitive quantum computing award from the Department of Energy, the effort builds on previous successes in quantum error management and is part of APL’s larger quantum computer science portfolio.

“APL is committed to characterizing and mitigating quantum noise and errors at every level of the quantum computing stack, including hardware, software, and hybrid computing systems combining quantum and classical computers,” said Kevin Schultz, assistant program manager for Alternative Computing Paradigms in APL’s Research and Exploratory Development Mission Area and a co-author on the paper. “This noise model represents a significant step toward achieving those goals.”

Source: Ajai Raj, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory

The post Johns Hopkins Team Models Quantum Noise on Superconducting Processors appeared first on HPCwire.

• Pochettino ‘not happy’ with Palace’s injury assessment

• Richards missed Conference League final

• Predict your World Cup bracket | Complete player guide

Chris Richards will not take part in the United States’ final World Cup tune-up friendly against Germany, head coach Mauricio Pochettino said in Friday’s pre-match press conference.

While Pochettino awaits further assessments, the defender’s status for the World Cup is decidedly in doubt.

Settlement over alleged child molestation by school janitors is latest in troubling string of allegations spanning decades

One of the most prominent Catholic high schools in New Orleans has agreed to pay a seven-figure monetary sum to settle a lawsuit claiming child molestation by janitors at the institution decades earlier.

The plaintiff struck the agreement with Jesuit high school ahead of a trial scheduled to start in the Louisiana city’s civil district courthouse on 15 June, roughly six years after he sued under a pseudonym.

Commentary: It's a rough time for game consoles, but Nintendo's Switch sequel now seems like a better proposition than it did in 2025.

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

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

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

• Social media protection service offered by Fifa

• English FA yet to confirm whether it will use service

Fifa will expand the use of AI at the World Cup to reduce the amount of abusive messages that teams and players are exposed to on social media.

World football’s governing body introduced a social media protection service after the 2022 World Cup in Qatar and has offered its moderation element for free to all football associations at the 2026 tournament, which starts next Thursday. The Football Association has not confirmed whether it is taking up the offer.

Valve says its long-awaited Steam Machine and Steam Frame are both "shipping this summer." The company is also expanding its Verified program beyond Steam Deck to cover the new hardware. "Steam Verified is a developer-focused program where game makers ensure that their titles are capable of running on the Deck (meaning they'll run fine under Linux), that the UI elements and text are readable at standard resolutions, and that sensible default graphics settings are used," notes Tom's Hardware. From the report: The news should ease the worries of many an expecting gamer, given today's constant worries about AI servers slurping every RAM and NAND chip on the face of the earth, as well as Valve's own statements about component scarcity delaying the release. Plus, the company always works on its own schedule, so much so that Valve Time is a term. The release of the Machine has been taking flak, given that while Valve was initially hoping for an estimated $600 to $800 price -- in the ballpark of the higher-end consoles -- the rumored pricing is climbing around or over $1000. This fact is somewhat corroborated by a February statement from a Valve executive who, like most anyone in the world, stated the price revision was due to the AI-driven component shortage.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thousands flee including from village hosting at least 2,500 displaced people, one day after Hezbollah rejects ceasefire

Thousands fled their homes after Israel issued forced evacuation orders for nine villages in southern Lebanon before strikes that killed six people on Friday, a day after the Hezbollah militant group rejected a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Lebanon.

Hundreds of families left Anqoun, a village hosting at least 2,500 displaced people, after the Israeli military said it would soon operate against what it said were Hezbollah targets there, ordering residents to leave. The roads leading to Sidon, the closest large city, were choked with cars as families sought shelter.

Prospect of first NBA title since 1999 fuels wave of righteous outrage against Big Apple-based Sesame Street character

The NBA basketball finals between the New York Knicks and San Antonio Spurs has already drawn commentary after Spurs fans earlier this week continued a habit of wearing distracting, candy-colored T-shirts to honor the Texas city’s annual Fiesta festival.

But now the Knicks’ first opportunity to win the title since 1999 – the last time they were in the finals, also against the Spurs, when they lost – has thrown fans in the Big Apple into such a partisan frenzy that some have come for one of their most beloved own.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lucy Hough speaks to US live news editor Chris Michael.

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

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

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

• UK politics live – latest updates

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

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

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

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

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

US firm says it will convene policymakers for discussion of dangers, in post detailing progress of its Claude model

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The whitepaper can be downloaded here.

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

About Alice & Bob

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

Source: Alice & Bob

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LGBTIQ+ rights are a meaningful but increasingly complicated pillar of UK foreign policy. The UK has positioned LGBTIQ+ rights as an integral aspect of its foreign policy, from diplomacy to development and international advocacy.

But UK foreign policy on LGBTIQ+ issues has been shaped by challenges of aid cuts, changing political priorities at home and the wider world order. LGBTIQ+ people in the UK continue to face significant systemic issues, including hate crimes, discrimination, healthcare disparities and transphobia. UK foreign policy also operates in an increasingly contested normative world order, with rising global backlash against LGBTIQ+ rights.

To commemorate Pride Month, Chatham House’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity Working Group has the privilege of convening a panel bringing together leading voices to examine what lies ahead for the UK’s foreign policy approach towards LGBTIQ+ rights.

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

This panel is followed by a drinks reception.

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

• US politics live – latest updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

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

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

About Classiq

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

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

Source: Classiq

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.2.2 final release is now out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our ruling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research Across Physics and AI

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

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

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

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

Training the Next Generation

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

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

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

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

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

A Growing Community

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

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

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

Looking Ahead

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

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

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

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

Source: MIT News

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

• UK politics live – latest updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

• UK politics live – latest updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI Adoption in Strategic Sectors and SMEs

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

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

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

Source: BSC-CNS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TOKYO and SANTA CLARA, Calif., June 5, 2026 — Hitachi, Ltd. and Intel Corporation today announced a strategic collaboration to explore opportunities that advance physical AI, advanced computing, and next-generation digital infrastructure across manufacturing, energy, mobility and other critical industries. Through the collaboration, the companies plan to combine Hitachi’s information technology (IT) expertise, deep operational technology (OT) and product manufacturing knowledge with Intel’s advanced computing capabilities and silicon-based platforms to develop next-generation compute capabilities and industry solutions that help organizations modernize operations, improve efficiency, and build more intelligent, resilient infrastructure systems.

The companies plan to work together across five strategic pillars—foundry tools, quantum computing, energy optimization, custom silicon and edge-AI applications, and factory automation—to create new solutions and optimize existing processes.

In the area of foundry tools, Hitachi gathers high-precision data generated from its market-leading metrology systems, dimension scanning electron microscopes (CD-SEMs), as well as etching systems, on the integrated platform “ExTOPE.” Leveraging physical AI, Hitachi uses that data to enable predictive diagnostics and maintenance optimization, contributing to improved yield, shorter time to market, and enhanced quality in semiconductor manufacturing processes.

For quantum computing, the collaboration will strengthen co-development efforts between R&D teams of Hitachi and Intel, accelerating the advancement of quantum technologies and creating new value. The partnership also aims to focus on energy optimization. Hitachi’s HMAX Energy will be deployed within Intel’s fabs to provide managed services for core power equipment, while Intel plans to supply high-voltage silicon chips to further improve Hitachi’s power systems. In addition, the two companies are exploring opportunities for collaboration in custom silicon, edge-AI applications and factory automation, leveraging their respective cutting-edge technologies.

“Building on more than 40 years of trust with Intel, we are delighted to launch a comprehensive strategic collaboration,” said Toshiaki Tokunaga, President & CEO, Hitachi, Ltd. “As the emergence of Physical AI brings a significant impact on our society, this collaboration will accelerate AI transformation across a wide range of industries that support social infrastructure. By combining Hitachi’s IT, OT, and products with Intel’s advanced computing capabilities, we are well positioned to advance the deployment of AI in mission-critical social infrastructure worldwide. We will also create new value in frontier fields such as quantum computing.”

“The coming wave of physical AI will transform the industrial edge of our economy through new advances in robotics, autonomous machines, and other AI edge devices,” said Lip-Bu Tan, CEO, Intel Corporation. “By combining Intel’s advanced computing and AI capabilities with Hitachi’s deep OT expertise and world class IT capabilities, we are uniquely positioned to help industries capture the enormous opportunity represented by physical AI at industrial scale. Together, we will accelerate the deployment of intelligent, real-world systems and bring the benefits of AI to more businesses and industries around the world.”

About Hitachi, Ltd.

Through its Social Innovation Business (SIB) that brings together IT, OT (Operational Technology) and products, Hitachi aims to be a global leader in continuously transforming social infrastructure through digital, contributing to a harmonized society where the environment, wellbeing, and economic growth are in balance. Hitachi operates worldwide across four sectors – Digital Systems & Services, Energy, Mobility, and Connective Industries – as well as a Strategic SIB Business Unit focused on new growth areas. With Lumada at its core, Hitachi creates value by combining data, technology and domain knowledge to solve customer and social challenges. Revenues for FY2025 (ended March 31, 2026) totaled 10,586.7 billion yen, with 606 consolidated subsidiaries and approximately 290,000 employees worldwide. Visit us at www.hitachi.com.

About Intel

Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) designs and manufactures advanced semiconductors that connect and power the modern world. Every day, our engineers create new technologies that enhance and shape the future of computing to enable new possibilities for every customer we serve. Learn more at intel.com.

Source: Hitachi

The post Hitachi and Intel Expand Partnership Across Physical AI, Quantum Computing and Energy Systems appeared first on HPCwire.

Royal Court, London
Teenage girls discuss the horrors they have seen via their phones as Georgie Dettmer’s reckoning with internet culture is brutally realised by director Jess Edwards

Georgie Dettmer’s gaze is unflinching. Nothing is held back in Are You Watching?, her fury-filled interrogation of our twisted relationship with sex and violence, and the emotional distance we hide behind when we watch them both through a screen. This bluntness can feel unsubtle, but it’s also admirably unafraid.

Two teenage girls (Kosar Ali and Abby McCann) perch on a bunk bed, talking about the worst things they’ve ever seen. Across the rest of the traverse stage, those stories are smashed into sharp, rapid-fire scenes, flicked between as if scrolled through on a phone. Under Jess Edwards’ direction, the depths of the internet are hurled across the stage (by an excellent multi-rolling cast including Lucy McCormick and Maimuna Memon), while the two girls watch from the safety of their duvets.

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

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

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

↫ Chris Siebenmann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Independent Thinking

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

More ways to listen: Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Explore our other Chatham House podcasts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was some truth to that sentiment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fallen Reformers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then, he got some extra support.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Fateful Disconnect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How we got here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reporter Brianna Hill contributed to this story.

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

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

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

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

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

But some experts and residents are skeptical. 

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

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

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

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

Laying out the timeline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rural residents respond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Third spaces fill in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A long-term solution? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

ICE Pepper-Sprayed, Beat Detainees for Protesting “Horrific Conditions” in Delaney Hall Jail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

Trump Is Prosecuting a Congressional Democrat for Doing Her Job. The Media’s Response: No Big Deal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NH: Hell yeah, let’s get into it.

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

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: Thank you for having us.

Andrea Sáenz: Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Break]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ARM: Thank you for having me.

AS: Thank you.

JW: That does it for this episode.

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

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

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

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

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

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

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

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

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

Knicks in four.

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Hurricanes erase two-goal third-period deficit

• Failed Vegas challenge leads to crucial power play

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beijing’s blind spots hinder real reform.

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

This live blog is now closed.

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

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How much has Michigan spent on SOAR?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How many new jobs did SOAR create?

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

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

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

Our ruling

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

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

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

We rate McMorrow’s claim Half True.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy

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

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

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

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

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

Cosmic Noon

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

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

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

Surveying New Galaxies

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

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

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

Supercomputers Ease Discoveries

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

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

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

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

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

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

Levering AI to Analyze Data

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

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

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

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

Source: Jorge Salazar, TACC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Infrastructure for Research and Innovation

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

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

Responsibility and Sustainability in HPC

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

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

From Theory to Practice

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

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

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

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

Source: FHNW

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

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

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

ALIYAH JACKSON
Contributing Reporter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

U.S Aid for Israel War?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Control Plane Across Five Clouds and On-Premises

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

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

One Security Model Across Every Environment

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

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

Availability

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

About CIQ

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

Source: CIQ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Source: NSF)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Source: NSF)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three GOP senators join Democrats as dispute over proposed payouts exposes party divisions

• US politics live – latest updates

Senate Republicans on Thursday narrowly scuttled an attempt by Democrats to stop Donald Trump from creating a $1.8bn fund to pay his allies, even as signs emerged that dissent over the proposal was spreading inside the US president’s own party.

Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer had proposed inserting language barring the payouts into Republican-backed legislation to fund Trump’s mass deportation campaign through the duration of his term.

There's been no word yet on if the Kennedy Center plans to remain open after July 5. It was to be closed for two years for extensive repairs beginning this summer.

Despite flare-ups in Middle East violence, investors remain optimistic that the U.S. and Iran will soon end the war.

Meta has reportedly delayed the developer release of its Muse Spark AI model API multiple times, and as of Tuesday, had no scheduled launch date, according to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled). Reuters reports: A Meta spokesperson told Reuters on Wednesday that the company is already testing the Application Programming Interface (API) with some early partners and is looking forward to releasing it this month. "The muse spark API will be coming soon," Meta AI Chief Alexandr Wang announced in a post on X in April. Meta unveiled Muse Spark in April as the first model built to close the gap with rivals. Muse Spark is the first in a new series of models created by the company's Superintelligence Labs. Earlier on Wednesday, Meta unveiled an AI agent aimed at helping businesses carry out day-to-day operations, hinting at the company's ambitions to compete with rivals such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Alphabet's Google.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sens. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, and Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, said the anti-weaponization fund violates multiple constitutional provisions.

The money will fund new and existing coal plants, as well as an export terminal in Oakland, California.

• Fan ran on to court during NBA finals opener

• Knicks guard appeared upset with fans

• Howard Bryant: Brunson the difference in Game 1

The NBA has banned two fans for life after an incident in which a man ran on to the court to take a selfie with Victor Wembanyama during Game 1 of the finals.

In a separate case, ESPN reports that the league is investigating an incident during Wednesday night’s game when New York Knicks star Jalen Brunson became upset after an interaction with fans during the fourth quarter of his team’s 105-95 victory over the San Antonio Spurs.

The new paid tier adds features like longer stories and deeper metrics as Meta looks to diversify revenue beyond advertising.

Since 2015, fires have undone years of effort to reduce ozone levels, underscoring a growing public health crisis

The highly destructive wildfires that have battered the US and North America in recent years have significantly increased emissions and been linked to tens of thousands of premature deaths, but their impact on air quality is greater than previously known, according to new research.

A study published in Science on Thursday found that, since 2015, wildfires have reversed US progress toward ozone air quality standards, as the worsening pollution caused by wildfire smoke has undone years of efforts to reduce emissions. Ground-level ozone (O3) is created when pollutants from cars, refineries and industrial sources react with sunlight, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

A stock market boom is elevating more Americans into the ranks of the nation's millionaires, a new study finds.

As Israel’s standing in the U.S., and among liberals in particular, continues to crater, the mainstream American media is vaguely taking notice. But when they report on this increasingly potent political dynamic, national publications continue to frame it as a tension among Democratic voters — rather than a tension between Democratic voters and their party leadership. 

“A Democrat’s Dodge on AIPAC Points to the Party’s Tensions Over Israel,” read one recent New York Times headline. “Tensions over pro-Israel lobbying group highlight rifts in Democratic primaries,” read another Reuters headline. “Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza has driven a significant, deeper-than-ever divide among Democrats,” NBC News reported last week. “The U.S.-Israel alliance has rapidly gone from a point of bipartisan consensus to a wedge issue dividing both parties,” opined the Washington Post.

All of those were just last month, but the false equivocation goes back further. “The Democratic primary electorate,” The Hill informed readers in March, “is increasingly divided over Israel.” “Israel tensions threaten Dems’ midterm plans,” Politico announced in a January headline, which continued in the piece: “Just as Democrats are finding their footing by focusing on affordability, their differences on Israel are threatening to tear them apart.” “New York City’s annual Israel Day Parade has long been considered a bipartisan tradition — but this year, the event is becoming a symbol of the growing divide within the Democratic Party over Israel,” Sinclair’s National News Desk reported last week. 

Related

DNC Shoots Down Resolutions Calling Out AIPAC and Limiting Arms to Israel

There’s only one problem with the “tensions,” “divided,” and “wedge issue” framing: It is not supported by any polls. The “divide,” such as it is, is increasingly not among Democrats or even liberals; it is between the supermajority of Democratic Party voters and party leadership. While party leaders such as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and big Democratic donors, are pro-Israel, actual Democratic voters have moved on from Israel with remarkable speed and consistency. Let’s take a look at the polling:

• According to an August 2025 Quinnipiac poll, 77 percent of Democrats think Israel is committing genocide in Gaza versus 11 percent who say it is not.
• According to a May 2026 New York Times/Siena poll, 74 percent of Democrats oppose “providing additional economic and military support to Israel,” while 20 percent support doing so.
• According to a June 2026 Institute for Global Affairs/YouGov poll, 67 percent of Democrats think the U.S. relationship with Israel does more to hurt the U.S. than help it, and only 5 percent think it does more to help than hurt. 
• According to a May 2026 NBC News poll, 67 percent of Democrats now sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis (17 percent). Just 13 percent of Democrats have a positive view of Israel, and 57 percent, a majority, have a negative view.

To contextualize that 13 percent — which is down from 34 percent of Democrats who said they viewed Israel positively back in 2023 — it’s even lower than the number of Democrats who say they support traditional right-wing stances, such as:

• Allowing teachers to lead children in Christian prayers in public schools (18 percent, Pew 2024)
• Making all abortions illegal (14 percent, Pew 2024)
• Not mandating MMR vaccines in schools (14 percent, Pew 2025)

The media justifiably treats all of these issues as Republican or conservative-coded views. Yet support for Israel is still treated as a mainstream, if contested, liberal value.

In reality, it’s simply not: It’s overwhelmingly a Republican, right-wing view not backed by a supermajority of Democrats. So why has this consistently misleading narrative in U.S. media been allowed to persist? 

Related

The Democrats Don’t Know Who They’ll Be in 2028. Michigan May Offer an Answer.

There’s an obvious tension over Israel and the U.S. role in supporting it, which has been writ large in high-profile battles, from Democratic Senate campaigns to debates over the Democrats’ platform. The media has to cover that tension, but describing it more accurately — as a divide between party elites and the rank and file — is an awkward narrative, one that requires a deeper class and material analysis.

So instead, it’s just indexed under the misleading and generic label of “party divisions.” Naturally, Israel is not a 100–0 issue in favor of Palestine among voters, but no issue is that one-sided. A minority of Democrats support all kinds of relatively fringe, right-wing opinions. Here are some of them compared alongside the issue of Israel–Palestine. The percentage of Democrats who: 

• Support sending military aid to Israel: 20 percent
• Believe teachers should be allowed to lead children in Christian prayers in public schools: 18 percent
• Say all abortion should be banned: 14 percent
• Have a positive view of Israel: 13 percent
• Support a ban on same-sex marriage: 11 percent
• Believe Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza: 11 percent
• Believe there is solid evidence of “widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election”: 10 percent

Polls are not a perfect snapshot of political beliefs and can be somewhat contradictory (a profile of the 2 percent of Democrats who think Israel is committing genocide and have a positive view of the country would make an interesting read). But polls over the past three years, and the last few months in particular, show a very clear trend that support for Israel is now an increasingly fringe belief among Democrats. It’s worth emphasizing that the issue of Democratic voters souring on Israel is not particularly sectarian, either, with Jewish Democrats, especially those under the age of 35, steadily abandoning Israel. A Washington Post poll from October found that among Jewish Americans ages 18 to 34, only 36 percent claimed to have an “emotional attached to Israel,” and half agree with the broad liberal consensus that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Related

DNC Autopsy of 2024 Loss Doesn’t Mention Gaza or Israel at all

But if watching how Democratic leadership and the party’s funders continue to back Israel to the hilt was your only barometer, you might assume there’s been no shift in public sentiment at all.

The dynamic is playing out over efforts to push a war powers resolution to end U.S. support for Israel’s bombing and occupation in Lebanon. On Wednesday, Axios, citing “numerous” anonymous “House Democrats” and “aides,” attempted to paint a Rep. Rashida Tlaib-led bill to end U.S. support as a provocation dividing Democrats. “An impending House vote to constrain the Trump administration from joining Israel’s war in Lebanon has some Democrats fuming that one of their own members is forcing them to take an agonizing vote,” reporter Andrew Solender lamented.

But what Solender fails to note is that Tlaib’s bill is overwhelmingly the majoritarian position among Democrats. A recent Arab American Institute commissioned poll found that 62 percent of Democrats “believe the U.S. should take more steps to pressure Israel to stop bombing and leave southern Lebanon,” and only 17 percent disagree. The substance of Tlaib’s bill is the Democratic voter position by almost 4 to 1. The tension in this story, such as it is, is between anonymous “Democratic leadership” and rank-and-file Democrats. And we know this because every single source in the Axios article opposing the war powers resolution had to be anonymous, while everyone supporting it proudly put their name on their quotes. What does this tell us about how popular support for Israel’s boundless violence in the Levant is? 

Meanwhile, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other majority pro-Israel groups are well aware of the existential shift that’s underway and have responded by intervening in primaries at an unprecedented clip. Already in this midterm cycle, as Donald Shaw at Sludge reported, “four major pro-Israel committees — AIPAC’s PAC, its outside spending arm United Democracy Project (UDP), the closely aligned Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) super PAC, and the Republican Jewish Coalition’s Victory Fund — have poured nearly $50 million into congressional races nationwide.” Receiving money from AIPAC has become politically toxic for Democrats, so much so that the lobbying group is deploying an elaborate web of shell organizations to funnel money to their preferred candidates.

Still, AIPAC is heading into the midterms bigger than ever, and its allied super PAC has a staggering war chest of nearly $100 million on hand — up from $35 million in 2022, when AIPAC first began directing funding in congressional campaigns. Since then, it has spent over $221 million, not including the $100 million set aside for the 2026 midterms.

Related

Who’s Spending in Your Congressional Election? We Tracked the Front Groups Fueling the 2026 Midterms.

The two most powerful Democrats in the country, Jeffries and Schumer, are prominent and consistent backers of Israel, despite their party’s sizable shift. Jeffries was the largest recipient of pro-Israel money in the House last election cycle out of 435 voting members. And Schumer, who has explicitly said his “job” is to “keep the left pro-Israel,” spent last weekend marching in a pro-Israel parade in New York City alongside war criminals and self-identified “fascists.” Leadership, like its Big Donor base, is entirely out of sync with the current sentiment within the party.

It’s not just pro-Israel donors driving this “wedge.” Backing Israel and the endless arming of its military has been, and continues to be, a boondoggle for the broader U.S. military–industrial complex that captures the Washington consensus. Of the some $22 billion in military aid that Israel has received since October 7, 2023, roughly 75 percent has gone to U.S. arms companies that themselves employ an army of lobbyists and think tank boosters to promote Israel and its sprawling, seemingly never-ending expansionism and mass violence.

Despite 77 percent of Democratic voters saying Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, only 8.5 percent of Democrats in Congress have. Despite Democratic voters sympathizing more with Palestine than Israel at a ratio of 4 to 1, the number of Democrats in Congress who put the rights of Palestinians ahead of the interests of Israel could likely be counted on one hand. How long will our media continue to act like there is meaningful disagreement among Democrats, as such, when — among the rank and file — it’s an issue as settled as prayer in public schools, abortion, and climate change?

As the gap between the will of Democratic voters and its leadership grows more and more apparent, our media will continue to vaguely acknowledge this “division” without identifying the actual source of it. It’s not between the voters themselves, whose opinions are measurable and consistent, but between the voters and the leaders they elected — in theory — to represent their interests.

The post The Real “Divide” Among Democrats Over Israel Is Between Party Leadership and Voters appeared first on The Intercept.

Policy agreement means trans people will continue to have access to Kenwood Ladies’ and Highgate Men’s ponds in north-west London

The bathing ponds at Hampstead Heath in north-west London will remain trans-inclusive after a public consultation overwhelmingly favoured its existing rules.

There are gender-segregated ponds for men and women, with trans people able to swim in whichever they feel most appropriate, or use the heath’s mixed-gender pond instead.

The U.S. and its Five Eyes intelligence partners issued a joint warning (PDF) that Chinese military intelligence services are using LinkedIn and other professional networking sites to recruit people with access to government, military, foreign policy, or sensitive economic information. "These actors use an aggressive online recruitment strategy whereby intelligence officers or their affiliates pose as employees of private consultancies, think tanks or human resources firms, and place online job advertisements for foreign policy and defense analysts," the agencies said Wednesday. "China's military intelligence services ultimately seek to acquire privileged military, political and economic intelligence that can provide China with a strategic and tactical advantage over the Five Eyes." Bloomberg reports: China was targeting Five Eyes nationals with security clearance, particularly those working in foreign affairs, security and intelligence, and military personnel including people stationed in the Asia-Pacific region, it said. People with more peripheral access to government information, such as academics, journalists and think tank employees, were also being approached. The Chinese embassy in the UK strongly condemned the accusations, calling the allegation of Chinese espionage threats "entirely fabricated" and "malicious slander." The "Five Eyes" members have "engaged in unscrupulous espionage and intelligence-gathering activities around the globe. Their activities are the real threat to peace-loving countries," the embassy said in a statement Thursday. [...] According to the agencies, Chinese spies have commissioned reports to be written by those they've approached, paying them anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars, with payments sometimes made in cryptocurrency. "Military members may be asked about their roles and unit activities, home base or naval vessel," the notice said. "Five Eyes agencies have identified individuals who have undertaken these activities, leading to criminal prosecutions, job losses, and security-clearance revocation," it warned.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ron Wyden tells of ‘grave concerns’ over plan, first revealed by Guardian, to hold families at sprawling Louisiana facility

The ranking member on the US Senate’s influential finance committee has demanded transparency over a proposed “first-of-its-kind” ICE family and child detention center in Alexandria, Louisiana, citing reporting by the Guardian that first revealed the Trump administration’s plans in March.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, has written to the project’s contractors and to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) expressing concerns over conflicts of interest, environmental contamination and “the absence of a public process” in the center’s planning.

In a May 16 Truth Social post, President Donald Trump cited updated climate change scenarios to misleadingly claim that experts had “admitted” prior climate change projections “were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” The regularly scheduled revision reflects in part the progress the world has made on moving away from fossil fuels.

Trump was reacting to a new set of seven scenarios of emissions by the end of the century, proposed in an April 7 paper by an international group of scientists. Over time, the range of plausible scenarios has narrowed. The most pessimistic scenario now shows lower emissions than 15 years ago, when the prior scenarios were developed, and the most optimistic one now shows more.

Trump, however, used the update to cast doubt on the reality and seriousness of global warming. “GOOD RIDDANCE!” he wrote. “After 15 years of Dumocrats promising that ‘Climate Change’ is going to destroy the Planet, the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!”

RCP8.5 was the most pessimistic of four scenarios that were selected in 2007 and described in 2011. The scenarios looked at how much the climate might change by 2100, relative to the industrial revolution.

“RCP8.5 was always this low-probability, high-impact case,” Detlef van Vuuren, a climate researcher at Utrecht University and PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, told us. He helped lead the effort to develop both the new and earlier climate scenarios. As 15 years have passed and the end of the century has gotten closer, it has become clearer what emissions paths are most plausible.

It’s “useful to consider possible outcomes that are less attractive, and it doesn’t mean that you were wrong by considering those if they didn’t come true,” van Vuuren said. “Unfortunately, the overall outcome of all of this is that we are in a situation that is actually leading to quite strong climate impact still.”

Van Vuuren also clarified that Trump is incorrect to call the international group of researchers behind the scenarios “the United Nations TOP Climate Committee.” A U.N. group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, summarizes the existing research on climate change. The scenarios are anticipated to have a “major role” in the group’s next climate assessments, he said, but it did not come up with the new scenarios.

“The paper belongs to the broader body of scientific literature produced by the international research community, under the coordination of the World Climate Research Program, not the IPCC,” the IPCC wrote in a May 20 statement.

We asked the White House if Trump was referring to the IPCC in his post and if he was suggesting that climate change is not a serious problem. In an emailed reply, White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said that “Dumocrats” and others had for years made “bogus ‘climate change’ claims that we would destroy the planet,” leading countries that pursued energy transition policies to be “destroyed” with “blackouts and sky-high prices.”

“The rogue climate activists continue to be ‘Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!’ and President Trump continues to be ‘Right! Right! Right!’” Rogers said.

Why Climate Scenarios Have Narrowed

Experts said that Trump’s comments on climate scenarios misrepresented their purpose.

“Scenarios are not predictions: they are ‘what-if’ pictures of the future,” Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and professor at Texas Tech University, told us via email.

“The highest-emission scenario serves as a basis for exploring the potential consequences of climate change if everything goes wrong,” a post on the new climate scenarios from the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, a Dutch government research institute, explained. “After all, it is important to ensure that we are also prepared for undesirable developments.”

Termed “representative climate pathways,” the older scenarios by design covered a broad range of climate trajectories, with RCP8.5 representing the 90th percentile of baseline scenarios in the literature at the time. (A baseline scenario illustrates a case where people do not take action to mitigate climate change, but there can be a range of baseline scenarios depending on other factors, such as how much fossil fuel use increases.) The most optimistic scenario, by contrast, represented below the 10th percentile of mitigation scenarios in the literature.

Van Vuuren likened the scenarios to a range of possible times a person might arrive at a destination on a drive. Initially, a person might want to consider the possibility of a traffic jam or other misadventures. But as the trip progresses, a traffic jam will or will not emerge, and the range of plausible arrival times will become narrower. In the case of the climate scenarios, the destination is the year 2100, and we are now 15 years closer to it than we were when the previous scenarios were laid out.

In recent years, the world has not followed the trajectory outlined in RCP8.5, van Vuuren said. There are lower emissions and greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere than were laid out in that scenario. This means that a new low-probability, high-impact case will “automatically” be lower than the previous one, he said.

On top of this, renewable energy became more economically competitive, he said. RCP8.5 assumed high use of fossil fuels, especially coal. When RCP8.5 was developed, “emissions had been growing relatively fast in Asia, and based on coal,” van Vuuren said. In the years since, the outlook has improved for the growth of renewables and gotten far worse for coal.

Between 2000 and 2015, “global emissions and temperature change had been reliably tracking” the RCP8.5 scenario, Hayhoe said.

But since 2015, reality diverged from the RCP8.5 scenario, due to “massive advances” in clean energy, she said, as well as climate policies that were enacted following the 2015 Paris Agreement, a major climate treaty that the U.S. has left during each of the two Trump administrations. “And that, in a nutshell, is why the higher of the new scenarios is lower than RCP8.5,” she said.

As time passed, some climate scientists began to critique the plausibility of RCP8.5, van Vuuren and his colleagues acknowledged in the new paper. Some also argued that it never was all that plausible. And some have said that researchers, policymakers and communicators have at times misused RCP8.5 by treating it as a likely outcome of the business-as-usual approach to climate change.

But Trump and his allies have overgeneralized these criticisms. We wrote in 2018, for example, that Trump administration officials had criticized the National Climate Assessment for being based on the “worst” or “most extreme” scenario, when it had used multiple scenarios.

And last year, a Department of Energy report released to justify rescinding the endangerment finding — the underpinning for greenhouse gas regulation in the U.S. — similarly used RCP8.5 in an attempt to discredit climate science. The DOE report “selectively focuses on high-end emissions scenarios, like RCP8.5, portraying them as failed predictions, to argue that the risks of climate change are exaggerated,” a comment submitted to the DOE on behalf of more than 85 scientists said. (The DOE report was written by five researchers who have long propagated contrarian views on climate change. In its final February rule rescinding the endangerment finding, the EPA stated that the agency is no longer relying on the DOE report “in light of concerns raised by some commenters.”)

“A tripling of global CO2 emissions by 2100,” as envisioned in RCP8.5, “may never have been particularly plausible even back in 2011 when RCP8.5 was originally published,” a trio of climate scientists wrote for the Climate Brink blog on May 18 on the retirement of the high-end scenario. “But a 21st century of increasing fossil fuel use leading to a doubling of emissions was within the realm of the possible.” It’s a “sign of progress” that the world is not heading toward a doubling of emissions, the researchers wrote, saying that the retirement of RCP8.5 doesn’t undermine “the edifice of all of climate science as both President Trump and some overly excited internet pundits claim.”

Major Impacts of Climate Change

Trump’s post also incorrectly suggested that climate change is not a serious problem.

“For far too long Climate Activism has been used by Dumocrats to scare Americans, push horrible Energy Polices, and fund BILLIONS into their bogus research programs,” he wrote. “Unlike the Dumocrats, who use Climate Alarmism nonsense to push their GREEN NEW SCAM, my Administration will always be based on TRUTH, SCIENCE, and FACT!”

Hayhoe said that Trump’s claims follow a familiar pattern of climate denial: claiming that climate change isn’t bad or its impacts aren’t serious. But the retirement of RCP8.5 does not change the fact that consequential global warming is occurring and will continue to occur.

Van Vuuren said that “by far the most important news” from the new climate scenarios publication is that the lowest plausible emissions scenario is now higher than before, hitting 1.7 degrees Celsius “or slightly higher” — the equivalent of more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit — before falling to around 1.5 C by 2100. This would mean the world would substantially overshoot the longstanding goal of limiting warming to no more than 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels. The scenario, notably, also relies on a high degree of carbon removal, which as a technology has yet to be deployed at large scale.

“The main message is that because emissions have been increasing instead of decreasing, we have increasingly lost our sight on the climate goals, which were formulated to prevent dangerous climate change,” he said.

Currently, the world is approximately following the medium scenario, van Vuuren said, which would lead to around 2.5 C to 3 C (4.5 F to 5.4 F), of warming by the end of the century. “That will bring quite substantial climate damage,” he said. “It will mean a substantial increase in extreme [weather and climate] events, it will mean sea level rise, it will mean impacts on agricultural yields, and also substantial increase in the risk of tipping points,” or levels of climate change that significantly and often irreversibly alter systems.

The RCP8.5 scenario translated to around 4.5 C of warming by 2100, or around 8 F. The new highest scenario includes expected warming of nearly 3.5 C, or around 6 F, and temperatures would continue to rise after 2100.

The Climate Brink post also explained that for a given level of warming, certain risks have increased. “So, even if the high-end emissions in RCP8.5 won’t materialize, the damages projected in these earlier climate simulations remain very much in play,” the researchers said.

Van Vuuren added that the temperature increases in the new paper are based on a “very simple” climate model but that further climate modeling will be done to understand how conditions will affect the climate system. In the past few years, he said that “we actually saw temperature increase going up much faster than in our scenarios.” The meaning of this is not yet known, but some research has suggested that this indicates the climate system is more sensitive to greenhouse gases, he said, which could mean much higher temperatures from those gases than previously thought. If that’s the case, “the temperature rise could still easily exceed 4°C,” or more than 7 F, the PBL post said.

The positive news, Hayhoe said, is that the scenarios show people can affect the trajectory of climate change. “The most important thing that these scenarios — both the older RCP ones and this newer set — show, without a shadow of a doubt, is that WE are the biggest uncertainty in terms of future impacts.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post Trump Misrepresents Climate Change Scenarios appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Mother demands overhaul of maternity care after settling case over birth at Queen’s hospital in Romford in 2019

The family of a girl left brain-damaged at birth have agreed to accept £28m in damages after the NHS trust involved admitted that its mistakes led to the tragedy.

Barking, Havering and Redbridge university hospitals NHS trust failed to monitor the baby’s heart rate while her mother was in labour or ask an obstetrician to review the case, either of which might have led to the girl being born in a healthy condition.

Exclusive: Greater Lincolnshire mayor walks out on cabinet minister after row over social media role in community tensions

Andrea Jenkyns walked out of a meeting with a cabinet minister and several other metropolitan mayors on Thursday after a heated discussion about the murder of Henry Nowak and the civil unrest that has followed.

The Reform mayor of Greater Lincolnshire walked out of the meeting with the communities secretary, Steve Reed, and other regional leaders after a row over the role social media has played in exacerbating community tensions.

The UK has banned Piker and Cenk Uygur from entry – but the objectionable things they’ve said are not more dangerous than Israel itself

This week, the British government banned Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur, two leftwing US commentators with millions of followers, from entering the country on the grounds that their presence would not be “conducive to the public good”. It did not spell out what it meant by this very broad phrase, but Piker and Uygur have accused the government of denying them entry because of their prolific criticism of Israel. Some critics have accused the pair of antisemitism, which they deny.

A lot has been written about the Piker-Uygur ban, and I don’t think I need to litigate everything they have ever uttered here. They have undeniably said some objectionable things (Piker, for example, said some Orthodox Jews are “inbred”, which he later apologized for). What sort of speech crosses a line that makes you detrimental to the public good, is not clear, however. Conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro, for example, has said that “Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage”. While he later apologized for this, he has repeatedly characterized Arabs as barbarians who “value murder”. The British government has never banned him from speaking in the UK.

Democratic attorney general’s office says it will continue to try to push 2020 presidential election case through courts

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The Arizona supreme court has denied a prosecutor’s appeal of an order that the state’s fake elector case against Donald Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and others over the 2020 presidential election be sent back to a grand jury.

The decision marks another setback for the state’s Democratic attorney general, Kris Mayes, as she struggles to push the sprawling case through the courts. Mayes’s office said it will again present the case in its entirety to a grand jury rather than end the prosecution.

Outcomes in key races for governor and LA mayor remain unsettled as mayoral hopefuls Spencer Pratt and Nithya Raman, as well as gubernatorial candidates Xavier Becerra, Steve Hilton and Tom Steyer await their electoral fates.

Roku, the company that makes TV boxes and sells ad space based on your usage patterns, has released its remote control operating system as open source – and by remote control I don’t mean robot stuff or whatever, but actual remote controls, the thing you use to control your TV or whatever from the couch.

Roku has announced the official availability of Roku LT OS – a lightweight, highly deterministic open-source operating system that is already used in our industry-changing Roku remote controls.

[…]

In addition to high-performance automotive platforms, Roku LT OS is designed to be accessible to the broader developer community. The operating system ships with native support for the ESP32 platform, a highly popular SoC among hobbyists and makers. Because ESP32 development boards are widely available online for just a few dollars, developers can get started with Roku LT OS with minimal hardware investment.

↫ Roku’s developers blog

As far as I can tell, this operating system is entirely new and not based on Linux or something else, but the available documentation is light on details so I can’t make much more out of it. Regardless, it’s nice to have another open source embedded operating system.

Borrowers have a short window to prepare for numerous upcoming student loan changes. Here's where to start.

While huge donations are nothing new in UK politics, some fear electoral finance is distorting democracy itself

Keir Starmer may be relaxed about allowing millions from cryptocurrency billionaires to flow into Reform UK’s coffers but Labour MPs are tearing their hair out every time the quarterly data on electoral finance drops.

“I look at it through my fingers,” says one MP, as the latest figures show a further £7m went to Reform UK from just two men, Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo.

Investors will buy into the market-leading tech and cult of Musk despite a price that is defying gravity

“Our mission,” says the opening sentence of SpaceX’s listing document with a straight face, “is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multi-planetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.”

The last bit has an echo of the laughable WeWork, which was going to “elevate the world’s consciousness” via the medium of shared office spaces. But, yes, if SpaceX could tick off all the items on Elon Musk’s to-do list, one could make a case that the company should be valued at $1.77tn (£1.32tn).

PM says Britons are ‘reasonable, tolerant people’ and backs MP’s legal action against Grok firm over fake sexualised images

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Elon Musk is “interfering in our politics” and attempting to create division, Keir Starmer has said, in a significant toughening of government language about the X owner.

The prime minister’s comments come after weeks of posts by Musk on his social media platform about the murder of Henry Nowak, many of which have used far-right themes and talking points.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration Thursday in upholding the power of federal regulators to enforce data privacy laws on telecommunications companies. The 8-1 decision (PDF) preserved one of the Federal Communications Commission's key tools, though the companies also won a concession from the Republican administration that could shift the regulatory landscape. The appeal from telecommunications giants Verizon and AT&T challenged a combined $100 million in penalties imposed after the agency determined that the companies had failed to safeguard customer location data. The companies argued that the FCC's process was unconstitutional because it gave them little opportunity to tell their side of the story in front of a jury. The administration defended the fines are an essential regulatory tool. But the government also said companies did not have to pay the penalties right away, a regulatory shift in the companies' favor. The Supreme Court agreed, affirming the FCC's power to order fines when challenges are still available. "The orders at issue did not settle the carriers' legal obligations because, stated simply, they did not create an obligation to pay," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. [...] Other agencies use similar enforcement methods, so a sweeping victory for AT&T and Verizon could have had widespread effects, advocates said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Justice department filed charges against Trump’s former adviser in 2025 as part of onslaught against president’s critics

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John Bolton, the former US national security adviser who left Donald Trump’s first administration and became a staunch critic of the US president, has reached a plea agreement in a case criminally charging him with mishandling classified documents, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The agreement, subject to court approval, will allow Bolton to plead guilty to one count of illegal retention of sensitive national security information and requires him to pay a $2.25m fine, the person said, and serve anywhere between no time and five years in prison.

Ministers should end Palantir’s contract before medical confidentiality is sacrificed to Silicon Valley’s appetite for public data

Alarm bells ought to have rung when it emerged last month that Palantir engineers could gain “unlimited access” to identifiable NHS patient data. Such sensitive medical information was only supposed to be available either to someone involved in a patient’s care or with the patient’s informed consent. NHS England’s new position appears to have changed that, extending access to private companies because it may make data processing easier. Convenience is not a basis for undermining medical confidentiality.

Nicola Byrne, the government’s national data guardian, clearly thought the NHS had broken its promise that its £330m deal with Palantir would see “identifiable patient information … limited to NHS staff with a legitimate need”. Patients tell doctors things they may tell no one else. If they think that sensitive details can be disclosed to US tech corporations, trust will suffer – and patients will say less when the truth matters most.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

The president’s image and name are proliferating in Washington and beyond, overturning well-advised democratic taboos on glorifying sitting leaders

One of the surest signs of an authoritarian regime is the ubiquity of its leader. Mussolini’s face was plastered across fascist Italy. In North Korea, pictures of Kim Jong-un have appeared alongside those of his father and grandfather, which are present in every home and public building. The golden statue of Turkmenistan’s leader, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, perching on a marble cliff in the capital is one of a multitude of portrayals.

Thriving democracies spurn such displays, rightly judging it safer to laud leaders once they are out of power. The first US president, George Washington, refused to appear on currency, believing that redolent of European monarchs. The 47th has no such concerns. The administration wants a $250 bill depicting Donald Trump to commemorate the 250th anniversary of independence, though federal law does not currently allow banknotes to depict living people. His signature will soon appear on $100 bills: a first for a US president.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador says Washington is using investigations into governors and propaganda to boost rivals

Mexico’s former president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has accused US officials of trying to weaken the governing party to strengthen the opposition, amid rising tensions between the two countries over Washington’s investigations into several Mexican governors.

“Some US officials are plotting to weaken Morena and strengthen the rightwing opposition in Mexico with the aim of restoring a subservient, corrupt, mafia-like, and cruel government,” López Obrador wrote in a lengthy letter posted on X on Wednesday.

Beluga whales, which Marineland threatened to euthanize in 2025, will be moved to sanctuaries in Spain or across US

Canada and an embattled marine park have reached a tentative deal on the future of 30 beluga whales, ending a saga that has captivated the public and angered animal rights groups.

The federal fisheries ministry announced this week that all of Marineland’s belugas would be shipped to either Spain or one of four locations in the US, ending whale captivity in Canada.

Social Security could reportedly be cut by $500 per month in 2032. Here's how to increase your savings before then.

State election officials continue to sift through uncounted primary ballots, which could take days or even weeks

The California governor’s race remained unsettled Thursday, as state election officials continued to sift through uncounted primary ballots – a process that could take days or even weeks as voters eagerly await the results.

Polls indicated that British-born conservative pundit Steve Hilton was narrowly leading the race, followed by former US health and human services secretary Xavier Becerra. Billionaire Tom Steyer trailed behind the pair. Under California’s primary system, the top two vote-getters will advance to the general election.

Raymond Chen shares some history regarding Windows 8’s development:

During the development of Windows 8, we needed a name for “that thing we’re creating.” Not being a particularly clever bunch when it comes to code names, we just called it “the modern experience,” to distinguish it from what we had in Windows 7, which was called “the classic experience.”

And then, as Microspeak demands, we started abbreviating like mad.

↫ Raymond Chen

Basically, they added “mo” for “modern” in front of everything, so the Metro shell became “MoSh”, the Settings application “MoSet”, and so on. And yes, the code name for the Photos application was exactly what it sounds like.

Three solar flares burst from the sun this week, raising the chances of seeing the northern lights for people across the United States.

Social Security back pay comes with special protections, but unpaid debt can still create risks in some situations.

Even in today's unpredictable economic climate, retirees still have multiple ways to improve their finances.

Hair stylist Frédéric Fekkai and ex-Miami Beach mayor Philip Levine accused in new testimony, lawmakers reveal

Republican lawmakers have asked the Department of Justice to investigate sexual assault allegations involving two men made by Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime assistant.

In a transcribed closed-door interview in late May, as part of a congressional investigation into Epstein, Sarah Kellen, one of the late sex offender’s former aides, told the House oversight and reform committee she was “sexually and psychologically abused” by him during her employment – but also alleged she was sexually assaulted by the French celebrity hairstylist Frédéric Fekkai, and by Philip Levine, the former mayor of Miami Beach, in separate incidents in the early 2000s.

schwit1 shares a report from NJ.com: Samsung is pulling up stakes in New Jersey and heading to Texas, a move that could leave roughly 1,000 Garden State workers facing a stark choice: relocate or risk losing their jobs. The South Korean tech giant confirmed this week that it will move its US headquarters from Englewood Cliffs, NJ, to its existing campus in Plano, Texas, marking a stunning reversal less than a year after it celebrated the opening of a new headquarters in Bergen County. The relocation is expected to be completed by the end of the year, according to company statements. "Samsung Electronics America Inc. is undergoing a business transformation designed to better position our organization for long-term growth and future success. As part of this effort, we are relocating our U.S. headquarters from New Jersey to our existing campus in Plano, Texas, building on our 30-year presence in the state," said Samsung in a statement emailed to NJ.com on Tuesday. "As part of this strategy, we will be optimizing parts of the organization to ensure our roles and functions align to key business priorities. We recognize such adjustments will have an impact on our people and we will be providing support to those affected," it continued.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Country is shaken by the brutal murders of two girls, aged 14 and 17, whose bodies were discovered just days apart

Argentina has reacted with fury after the bodies of two murdered teenage girls were found just two days apart. The latest killings underscore the South American country’s enduring femicide crisis despite years of feminist campaigning, and have prompted alarm over the decision to cut support for victims of gender-based violence under the far-right administration of Javier Milei.

Police found the remains of Agostina Vega, 14, on Saturday, in a field on the outskirts of the city of Córdoba. She had been fatally strangled and her body had been dismembered, according to local media reports.

June 4, 2026 — When most people picture a supercomputer, they imagine endless rows of compute and storage racks, blinking lights and machines thinking faster than humans can conceive. What they don’t visualize is the system quietly working underneath it all — a complicated, choreographed dance that keeps all that processing power from turning into heat, and from heat into failure.

A complex system of cooling towers, chillers, pumps, heat exchangers, sensors and more than 2,000 feet of pipes all work together to remove heat from the liquid-cooled exascale supercomputer El Capitan. Graphic credit: Dan Herchek/LLNL.

At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), the exascale El Capitan supercomputer — capable of over 1.8 quintillion calculations per second on real-world benchmarks — depends on a cooling system so essential that without it, the machine would shut down fast.

If El Capitan is the brain, according to LLNL systems engineer Chris DePrater, the cooling system is the cardiovascular system — moving heat the way blood moves oxygen. And just as importantly, DePrater adds, the controls keeping El Capitan from overheating act like a nervous system, sensing changes and responding instantly to keep everything in balance.

Heat generates fast at exascale. As processors and accelerators work at extraordinary densities, they create energy faster than air can reasonably carry away. Once racks exceed a certain power threshold, air becomes impractical.

To keep El Capitan from overheating like a hiker in the desert summer, its cooling system uses two loops, one with treated water, and the other with a glycol-based liquid (like antifreeze), combining efficient heat transfer with protection against bacterial growth. At El Capitan’s scale, liquid cooling isn’t just a preference; it’s the only way to operate.

“We typically stop using air cooling if the rack goes over about 25 kilowatts (25,000 watts),” DePrater explains. “With the densities on El Capitan being 400 kilowatts a rack, there’s no other option. You cannot cool that dense of a rack in that small of space.” Without liquid cooling, El Capitan simply “wouldn’t function. It would completely stop working within minutes,” he says.

DePrater uses a campfire analogy: Toss an empty plastic bottle into the flames and it melts almost immediately. Fill that same bottle with water and it takes far longer to fail, because water absorbs heat much more effectively than air. El Capitan’s cooling system uses that same principle, circulating water directly to where heat is generated and carrying it away, back to the neighboring Exascale Computing Facility Modernization (ECFM) site, before temperatures can spike.

The system itself isn’t a single machine, but an ensemble — cooling towers, chillers, pumps, heat exchangers, sensors and more than 2,000 feet of pipes all working together to remove heat from El Capitan, through the facility and out to the atmosphere. DePrater compares the coordinated effort to a symphony, with the control system playing the part of the conductor.

“The controls need to conduct the systems to play or sing in harmony with each other, so that way nothing can be out of sync,” he explains.

Those controls matter as much as the plumbing. Sensors constantly monitor temperature, flow rate and pressure, allowing the system to respond to rapid power swings as workloads change. If cooling isn’t perfectly balanced, temperatures rise quickly. Built-in safeguards allow the system to shed load or shut down safely before damage occurs.

Despite the scale — tens of thousands of gallons of water recirculating constantly through pipes large enough for a human to crawl through — the goal is efficiency, not brute force. The water used in El Capitan is warmed to about 85 degrees, rather than chilled, avoiding energy-intensive refrigeration. Heat is removed largely through evaporation at the ECFM cooling tower, one of the most efficient cooling methods available. The result is a system designed not just to support today’s world-class computing machines, but to scale for what comes next. For DePrater, success is defined by invisibility; no news is good news.

“When nobody knows who I am, that’s the best thing, because it means everything has been working fine,” he says with a laugh. Using another analogy, the cooling system is like the drummer in a band, rarely in the spotlight but impossible to replace.

By enabling El Capitan to run reliably at scale, the cooling system supports the Laboratory’s national security mission and stockpile modernization efforts, including high-resolution, 3D simulations that underpin the safety, security and reliability of the nation’s nuclear deterrent.

While the world’s most powerful supercomputer gets the headlines, beneath the floor and behind the scenes, its cooling machines do the quiet work that makes everything else possible. Without it, there is no computation, and no mission-critical science.

Source: LLNL

The post LLNL Highlights the Cooling Network Supporting El Capitan’s Performance appeared first on HPCwire.

Live from San Francisco, we compiled all the biggest news from Microsoft's annual developer conference. This is how Microsoft sees the future of AI computing.

ENSCHEDE, Netherlands, June 4, 2026 — QuiX Quantum has announced the first installation of its Feed-Forward Control Unit (FFCU), a high-performance hardware component developed for the company’s universal photonic quantum computing architecture.

Credit: QuiX Quantum

The FFCU is designed to help the system respond to quantum measurements in real time, an essential requirement for photonic quantum computers that encode and process information in single photons moving through optical circuits at extremely high speeds. This capability, known as feed-forward control, is especially important for reaching universality in measurement-based quantum computing, where computation is carried out through a sequence of measurements and the outcome of one measurement can determine how later operations are performed. The FFCU performs this step at the hardware level by converting single-photon detector signals into control actions on photonic integrated circuits.

The FFCU is part of QuiX Quantum’s broader quantum computing architecture, which brings together photon generation, multiplexing, state generation, measurement, photonic assembly control and feed-forward control into a single photonic quantum computing stack. QuiX Quantum is working on its first-generation single-photon-based universal quantum computer, with the FFCU serving as one of the system-level components needed to support adaptive, programmable photonic quantum operations.

Considered a critical long-term goal by quantum hardware developers, a universal quantum computer will be able to run a broad set of quantum algorithms that can support a wider range of scientific, industrial and commercial applications.

“Universal photonic quantum computing requires more than high-quality photonic chips. It requires a complete system stack that can generate, route, measure and control photons in real time,” said Stefan Hengesbach, CEO of QuiX Quantum. “Our FFCU is a critical step in building that stack. It turns photon measurement outcomes into immediate control actions on photonic integrated circuits.”

QuiX Quantum’s FFCU combines FPGA-based digital processing with a custom analog front-end to support deterministic control of Mach-Zehnder interferometers on integrated photonic circuits. The current rack-mounted system includes two FPGA modules connected by a high-speed, low-latency bus, with 32 inputs, 32 outputs and a reported latency of approximately 150 nanoseconds from detector input signal to settled output voltage.

“Fast feed-forward is a prerequisite for universal photonic quantum computing because measurement-based architectures require the system to detect, decide and reconfigure the optical path in real time,” said Andrew Roos, vice president of R&D for QuiX Quantum. “To put that timing in perspective, in 150 nanoseconds light travels only about 30 meters in telecom fibre. That is the window in which the system has to make a decision and adapt the photonic circuit. This is not conventional control electronics — it is operating close to the physical limits at which information can move.”

The announcement comes as quantum computing gains commercial relevance, with McKinsey’s Quantum Technology Monitor 2026 reporting that more than 300 organizations are actively collaborating with quantum technology companies and estimating that quantum computing could create up to $2.7 trillion in economic value worldwide by 2035.

For that value to materialize, quantum computers must become scalable, reliable and deployable systems that can work alongside classical HPC and AI environments. That places greater emphasis on the broader system layers needed to industrialize quantum machines, including control electronics. QuiX Quantum sees the FFCU as part of this enabling control infrastructure, designed to turn photonic hardware into adaptive, programmable, and scalable quantum computing platforms.

About QuiX Quantum

‍QuiX Quantum is a leading provider of photonic quantum computing hardware driving innovation across Europe in the development of its Universal Quantum Computer. The first system, already sold and contracted for delivery, underscores the impact of QuiX Quantum’s market-leading hardware and renowned quality. Following its expansion across Europe and UK, QuiX Quantum pushes the boundaries of quantum technology and industry, strengthening Europe’s international competitiveness, leveraging a wide network of partners while serving a growing global customer base.

Source: QuiX Quantum

The post QuiX Quantum Installs Real-Time Control Component for Universal Photonic Quantum Computer appeared first on HPCwire.

Andrew Wilson appears in court over killing of Latoya Bulgin at protest over a police shooting days earlier

Authorities in Jamaica have taken the rare step of charging a police officer with murder after he was accused of shooting a 45-year-old woman in a case that prompted violent protests.

According to the Independent Commission of Investigations (Indecom), Constable Andrew Wilson appeared in court on Wednesday and was denied bail. Another hearing is scheduled for mid-June.

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The commander of the Quds Force, the foreign arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), said Hezbollah is demanding Israel retreat to positions it held before the start of the war, according to a statement carried by Iranian media.

“Supporting the resistance in Lebanon is the duty of all of us, and removing Israel from the region is an attainable goal for Muslims,” Esmail Qaani was quoted as saying.

Staff Sergeant Milovan Jovanović, a member of the Serbian Armed Forces who was serving with the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, died this morning as a result of injuries sustained after a projectile impacted the United Nations base where peacekeeping personnel, including a part of the Serbian contingent, are stationed. Following the incident, Sergeant Jovanović received immediate medical assistance at the base hospital and was later transported by helicopter to the University Medical Centre in Beirut, where he passed away at approximately 4.00 a.m. local time.

Interior minister announces review into handling of the cases after body reportedly found in search for 11-year-old

Outrage has erupted in France after it emerged the main suspect in the case of an 11-year-old girl missing since last week had been repeatedly accused of sexually abusing children with no action taken.

A body was discovered on Thursday and formal identification was under way, an informed source said.

Group calls ceasefire a ‘roadmap to annihilate part of the Lebanese people’, throwing regional peace talks into doubt

Hezbollah has rejected a US-brokered ceasefire plan agreed by the Lebanese and Israeli governments, throwing the future of a truce in Lebanon and regional peace negotiations into question.

The group’s leader, Naim Qassem, called the plan a “roadmap to annihilate part of the Lebanese people” in a statement on Thursday.

As Iran war reshapes the Middle East, Turkey’s regional role looks set to expand Expert comment LToremark 4 June 2026

Ankara’s deepening relations with Gulf countries and a potential rerouting of trade are among the factors likely to benefit Turkey.

The Iran war is fundamentally redefining politics in the Middle East and upending the regional status quo. It is also redefining Turkey’s role within the region, which presents both challenges and opportunities for Ankara.

For Turkey, the worst-case scenario was and is that Israel would seek to engineer state collapse in Iran, the fallout of which would consume both Iran and its neighbours for many years to come. It would pave the way for proxy conflicts, a refugee crisis and state fragmentation – and bring the Kurdish dimension of the war to the fore. This outcome would also further embolden Israel – with US backing – to continue its efforts to reshape the region on its own terms. But so far, Iran’s endurance has prevented Turkey’s worst fears from materializing.  

Related work

Why are Middle Eastern governments lobbying against a US attack on Iran?

At this stage, Turkey has two interrelated concerns. One, Turkey wants to prevent a return to war, but it is also worried about what it sees as Iran’s attempt to rewrite the rules of the game in the Gulf. For example, Iran’s new transit rules for the Strait of Hormuz could effectively give Iran significant influence over Gulf states’ security as well as their economy. Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has called for a return to the pre-war status quo in Hormuz, warning the new regulation could become a ‘new source’ of conflict. Plus, Turkey believes that Iran’s actions here will push Gulf states closer to the US and Israel.

However, the war also presents Ankara with opportunities in the shape of an expanded regional role: in defence industry and security partnerships; in regional connectivity and trade route redesign; and through regional alignments.

Defence industry

This war has brought the question of security to the forefront of policy conversations and considerations in the Gulf and the wider region. Although there is not yet an alternative to the US security umbrella, it has failed to provide the security that Gulf states wanted. For many countries in the Middle East – not least those of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – the US is indispensable, but also unreliable and coercive at the same time. However, despite their mixed feelings and discontent, Gulf countries will have no choice but to double down on their relations with the US. This will only be reinforced by Iran’s actions and attempts to rewrite the rules of the game in the Gulf.

At the same time, Gulf states will also gradually seek to diversify their security partnerships and defence industry cooperation, as a hedging strategy against over-dependence on the US in this area. However, they will be cautious about engaging in such partnerships with US adversaries to avoid incurring the wrath of Washington. This is probably good news for Turkey, a country with a growing defence industry – and on good terms with the US and President Donald Trump – to further expand its security and defence industry cooperation with Gulf states. This cooperation is unlikely to be confined to purchases of Turkish weapons or drone systems; it will likely also include joint production agreements, joint investments, and technology and knowledge transfers.

Trade routes and regional connectivity

The Hormuz crisis has brought the question of rerouting trade corridors and redesigning connectivity to the top of regional and international agendas. Turkey is well-positioned to benefit from such shifts. The wider Middle East and beyond have seen an increasing number of connectivity projects aimed at rerouting trade and redesigning supply chains, such as China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) – whose prospects are dimming following the Gaza and Iran wars – and the now-defunct Eastern Mediterranean Pipeline project. Turkey already plays a central role in two such projects: the Iraq Development Road project and the Middle Corridor. These strategic connectivity projects are not only redesigning supply-chains and rerouting trade, but they also redefine the geopolitics of the concerned regions.

Related work

Talk of a Turkish military alliance with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan reflects Ankara’s opportunistic ‘hedging’ strategy

Turkey and its partners should consider ways to further boost the prospects of Ankara-supported connectivity projects. For example, bringing Syria on board with the Iraq Development Road project would provide an even shorter route to the Mediterranean, while bringing Armenia on board with the Middle Corridor would strengthen the ongoing normalization process between Turkey, Azerbaijan and Armenia. In the post-Iran war era, Turkey and regional states are likely to engage in even more dialogue on trade corridors and transport connectivity. For example, the Hejaz Railway project – a prospective land corridor between the Gulf and Europe, which will connect Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, – is already attracting interest.

New regional alignments

The Iran war is also triggering or accelerating the formation of new regional alignments and groupings. The quartet comprising Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt is a case in point, although it is more of a platform than a pact. Ankara wants it to remain open to including more countries to avoid counter-alignment groups from forming, which can lead to more regional rivalries and fragmentation. Although individual members of this group, such as Pakistan and Turkey, have assumed active roles to find a diplomatic settlement to end the war, the quartet itself is primarily designed to address post-war regional geopolitics and security.

The heads of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and more signed an open letter raising concerns about the rising biosecurity risks posed by better AI models.

A federal grand jury indicted John Bolton, former national security adviser to President Trump, on 18 counts last year.

One person died and three others, including a child, were injured in a shooting Wednesday night at a high school graduation in Northern California, officials said.

Federal authorities have busted what they say is a $30 million fraud conspiracy involving billing for children's behavioral health services that were never provided, officials announced.

The races for governor and Los Angeles mayor are among the most closely watched contests yet to be decided in California's primary elections.

Iran says there's been no progress in talks with the U.S. after tit-for-tat strikes, as Hezbollah rejects new Israel-Lebanon ceasefire.

The $100 accessory includes a snap-on battery and large grips, but it makes the Switch 2 a bulky boy.

joshuark shares a report from The Verge: Apple will introduce age verification in the App Store for users in Texas starting on Thursday, June 4th. The move, as spotted by MacRumors, comes just days after a federal appeals court allowed Texas' App Store Accountability Act to go into effect while a lawsuit against it proceeds. People in Texas who are creating a new Apple account will need to verify they're over 18 using a credit card or government ID. Apple may also automatically verify users' age using the age of their account and whether they have a credit card on file. Despite Apple's attempts to push back on app store-level age verification, the company has announced plans to implement age checks to comply with laws in places like Utah, Louisiana, Brazil, Australia, Singapore, and the UK. Google is required to make similar changes to the Play Store and is also introducing age-checking tools for developers. Last December, a judge blocked the App Store Accountability Act (SB 2420) from taking effect, but an appeals court has now reversed this decision -- at least while the court figures out whether the law is constitutional. Even if this law gets struck down in Texas, a federal version with the same name is still making its way through Congress and could impose age verification at the app store nationwide.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Republican-led states growing renewable capabilities at faster rate as Texas emerges as clean-energy leader

Democratic-led states are eroding their climate policies, as red states are scaling up their clean energy deployment.

California on Friday scaled back its cap-and-invest program, offering more than $3bn in free pollution allowances to polluting companies. Earlier the same week, New York weakened its groundbreaking climate law, delaying a plan to regulate carbon from 2024 until 2028 and reducing emissions-slashing targets. Rhode Island’s governor, meanwhile, is attempting to roll back aggressive clean-energy programs.

Climbing support team rescue Hillary Dawa Sherpa almost a week on from when he was last seen

A Nepali guide who was believed to have died on Mount Everest has been found crawling to base camp a week after going missing – and after his funeral rites had begun.

Dawa Sherpa, also known as Hillary Dawa Sherpa after the famous climber Edmund Hillary, was last seen on 29 May but did not reach base camp with other climbing groups.

Can cities and states lead the shift to climate resilience? 24 June 2026 — 17:00 TO 18:00 BST Anonymous (not verified) 4 June 2026 Chatham House and Online

Hear from mayors, governors and regional leaders driving climate action and resilience from the ground up.

Cities, local and regional governments are playing an increasingly decisive role in delivering practical solutions on climate action. Their proximity to communities, infrastructure systems and local economies enables faster, more targeted responses to flooding, heat, energy insecurity and economic disruption.

But subnational leadership is not only about implementation. Local government and regions often control the policy levers, regulatory frameworks and long-term planning needed to scale resilience and accelerate the transition to clean energy systems. Together with cities, they are shaping new models of climate governance that are more connected to economic delivery, public services and regional development.

This event will discuss:

• Why are cities, local government and regions delivering climate action more effectively than national governments?
• What powers and advantages do subnational governments hold?
• What barriers limit climate action in under-resourced jurisdictions, particularly in emerging economies?
• How are subnational leaders balancing immediate resilience needs with long-term transition goals?
• What does effective multilevel governance look like in an era of geopolitical fragmentation and fiscal pressure?

If your wages are garnished, your employer plays a role — but how involved can they actually be in the process?

Summer is the time to enjoy live music, indoors and out. Scroll through our gallery of some of 2026's leading musical acts, featuring images by CBS News photojournalist Jake Barlow and photographers Ed Spinelli and Kirstine Walton.

June 4, 2026 — Scientists envision batteries will play a central role in improving the security and cost-effectiveness of America’s energy systems. But achieving this requires solving numerous technical challenges, such as designing high-performance battery materials and understanding how batteries degrade. This is no easy task.

Batteries are envisioned to play a central role in improving the security of America’s energy systems. AI can help achieve this vision by solving numerous technical challenges with batteries. Image credit: Shutterstock.

Could artificial intelligence (AI) help overcome these challenges? A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has outlined an ambitious technical roadmap to accelerate battery breakthroughs with the use of AI tools known as large language models (LLMs).

The lab is also advancing AI for research through DOE’s Genesis Mission, a historic national effort to transform American science and innovation through the power of AI, strengthening the nation’s technological leadership and global competitiveness.

“Argonne offers a rare combination of leading battery researchers and data scientists working under the same roof,” said Khalil Amine, Argonne Distinguished Fellow and leader of Argonne’s Battery Technology Development group. ​“They have collaborated to conduct a comprehensive review of emerging LLM applications in the battery field. The review presents short- and long-term objectives to harness the enormous potential of LLMs to revolutionize battery research.”

LLM Agents and Self-Driving Laboratories

LLMs are remarkably versatile machine learning tools. They can be trained on large, varied datasets to perform a broad range of tasks. For example, in response to human prompts, they can answer questions, write or summarize articles and translate languages. LLMs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini have already transformed how industries work.

While the use of LLMs in academia, industry and research institutions is growing, their potential is largely untapped in battery research. The Argonne review discusses potential LLM applications, exploring how to expand their use and improve their effectiveness.

A few examples of applications: LLMs could text mine hundreds to millions of battery research papers, extracting critical insights, identifying knowledge gaps and proposing new research directions. They could analyze battery performance datasets to identify failure mechanisms and mitigation strategies. They could even monitor and optimize battery operations in the field and provide personalized training for early-career battery researchers.

The Argonne review articulates a vision of coordinating activities among multiple LLM ​“agents.” These advanced AI systems use LLMs to analyze information, make decisions and employ tools. Agents specializing in different battery subject areas perform various research tasks while collaborating to achieve shared goals.

“LLMs can be integrated with existing battery research tools, such as simulation software and material property databases,” said Guiliang Xu, the review’s corresponding author and an Argonne chemist. ​“This can help scientists create AI-powered, self-driving laboratories that accelerate the research process through automation.”

Self-driving laboratories could have a significant impact on the discovery of new battery materials. Traditionally, this type of research has been performed through trial and error. Scientists manually test one material or synthesis parameter at a time.

A self-driving laboratory could speed this process by continuously executing an iterative experimental cycle. It would review literature, screen databases of material properties and propose promising new battery chemistries. Next, it would direct robotic devices to fabricate and characterize the materials. Then, it would analyze the experimental data and use the results to refine hypotheses, methods and experiments.

The benefits go beyond speed and efficiency. Automating research can also reduce errors and make experiments more reproducible.

Successfully implementing these AI systems will require extensive collaboration among battery researchers and LLM experts.

“Battery researchers can inform LLM experts on the most important research questions while LLM experts can inform battery researchers on the most appropriate models and techniques to address those questions,” Xu said.

Knowledge Bases, Data-Sharing and Adaptability

The paper points to technical challenges that must be addressed before the potential of LLMs can be fully realized. When selecting existing LLMs or developing new ones, researchers need to carefully consider their computational efficiency and adaptability to specific battery research tasks. For critical applications like predicting battery failures, it is important to use LLMs that can explain the step-by-step reasoning behind their conclusions. Protocols must be developed for effective collaboration among LLM agents.

A high-quality knowledge base is needed to train LLMs. This would be built from existing published literature and diverse battery datasets. Significant work is required to standardize the formats of datasets, and consortia are needed to share datasets across industry and research communities.

“Traditionally, researchers only publish data on successful results,” said Huihuo Zheng, one of the review’s authors and a computer scientist at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), a DOE Office of Science user facility. ​“For LLMs to work optimally, they also need to be trained on failure data, such as battery materials with poor experimental performance. Industry and academia need to implement new ways to make this data easily accessible.”

Battery and data scientists will need to regularly evaluate the capabilities, performance and usability of LLMs — and make improvements as needed. This might involve activities such as testing the LLMs’ ability to interpret data and retraining them on newly published literature.

What might battery research look like in the future if these challenges are addressed?

“Soon, most battery scientists will also be AI experts, and LLMs will serve as their smart research assistants,” said Wenhua Zuo, one of the review’s authors and an Argonne postdoctoral researcher. ​“Scientists will spend much less time reading papers, sifting through data and performing experiments. This will allow them to spend more time developing ideas and strategic research planning.”

The review was published in the Aug. 20, 2025, issue of Joule.

Other Argonne contributors to the review include Tanjin He, Venkatram Vishwanath, Maria Chan and Rick Stevens.

The review was supported by DOE’s Transportation Technologies Office through the Advanced Battery Materials Research Program, including the Low-cost Earth-abundant Na-ion Storage Consortium. It used the resources at the ALCF and is based on research supported by the DOE Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research Program.

The work is also funded, in part, by the Energy Storage Research Alliance, an Energy Innovation Hub funded by the DOE Office of Science, Basic Energy Science (BES). Work performed at the Center for Nanoscale Materials, a DOE Office of Science User Facility, was also supported by BES.

Source: Michael Matz, Argonne

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