Successful AI deployments require a solid infrastructure underneath. For Hewlett Packard Enterprise, this infrastructure is delivered via its Greenlake hybrid cloud product suite, which it upgraded with a range of new capabilities today, including enhancements to its Alletra Storage MP X10000.
HPE launched Greenlake back in 2017 as a hybrid cloud platform that offers a “cloud-like” experience directly on customer’s on-prem gear or edge location. HPE has enhanced the product over the years, including the new capabilities that it unveiled today.
For starters, HPE is updating Private Cloud, its on-prem server runtime for Greenlake customers. In its four generation, HPE Private Cloud, which is based on HPE ProLiant Compute Gen12, now offers Kubernetes for unified management of virtual machines (VMs) and containers on a single platform.
The company also upgraded the Alletra Storage MP X10000, which HPE launched in November 2024 as its first disaggregated, all-flash, scale-out storage system. The X10000 now scales to 16 nodes and 23PB of raw capacity of file and object storage.
More importantly, the storage array is supporting RMDA-accelerated connections to file storage, which builds on its previous support for RDMA for S3. HPE says these capabilities will simplify how customers store and access data across AI training, inference, and KV cache workloads.
In a video, HPE claims the X10000 delivers 20 times faster time-to-first-token and 17 times higher effective throughout. It’s also the first object storage solution to claim Nvidia-Certified Storage validation at the foundation level.
HPE also upgraded the Alletra Storage MP B10000, which is a software-defined storage platform that supports file, block, object data access for enterprise workloads. The company has increased the number of controller nodes from four to six, which it says will boost performance by 50% and provide better fault tolerance. The B10000 also gets a new agentic support mechanism that HPE says can autonomously detect, analyze, and resolve storage issues.
HPE has updated its Data Fabric Software to provide new policy-based data placement and movement capabilities, which it says will help customers prepare for running AI workloads in a hybrid environment. HPE says it enhanced the metadata integration capability with support for Apache Polaris, which will improve data visibility, classification, and lineage processes in support of governance and compliance goals. Finally, it added a conversational interface and an agentic AI assistant that simplifies reporting across the namespace.
HPE CTO Fidelma Russo, who is also the EVP and GM of hybrid cloud, says these new capabilities will help customers that are rapidly modernizing for AI and cloud-native runtime. “With these innovations, we’re helping organizations adopt a unified operating model that brings together private cloud, data, and protection, simplifies migration from legacy platforms, strengthens resilience, and delivers superior TCO to operate at scale,” she said.
The post HPE Preps Customers for AI Inference with Greenlake, Storage Updates appeared first on HPCwire.
Jason Collins, the NBA's first openly gay player, who went on to become a pioneer for inclusion and an ambassador for the league, has died, his family announced Tuesday.
A Chinese manufacturing giant tells CBS News how its sprawling factory runs with a fraction of the human workforce previously required.
President Trump said Americans' financial situation isn't motivating him to make a deal, "Not even a little bit," and that he is only focused on preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons.
U.S. consumer prices rose in April, fueled by a spike in energy prices caused by the Iran war.
Pete Hegseth and other officials appear before House to face grilling on Iran war expenditure and military operations
Iran has expanded its definition of the strait of Hormuz into a “vast operational area” far wider than before the war, according to a senior officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy in comments likely to anger the US.
The strait is no longer viewed as a narrow stretch around a handful of islands but instead has been greatly enlarged in scope and military significance, according to Mohammad Akbarzadeh, deputy political director of the IRGC Navy, the state-affiliated Fars news agency reported this morning.
Continue reading...FBI director also dismisses allegations of unexplained absences as Democrats challenge him over Atlantic report
Embattled FBI director Kash Patel has denied under oath recent allegations of excessive drinking and unexplained absences on the job, dismissing them as “baseless” during a fiery congressional hearing.
Democrats challenged him over the “extremely alarming” reports, first reported in the Atlantic mid-April, which they argued would a mount to a “gross dereliction” of duty. The FBI director has sued the magazine, and the author of a story it published, filing a defamation lawsuit in US district court for the District of Columbia that seeks $250m in damages.
Continue reading...Patel and Chris Van Hollen, ranking member of the Senate appropriations subcommittee, trade accusations in heated budget hearing
The Pentagon revealed on 29 April that the US war on Iran had cost about $25bn for roughly two months of spending. Today, when asked if there are any updated costs associated with the war, Jules Hurst III, chief financial official for the Pentagon, said:
“At the time of testimony … it was $25bn dollars. But the joint staff team and the comptroller are constantly looking at estimates and now we think it is closer to 29.”
Continue reading...The Trump administration plans to name longtime immigration official David Venturella as the interim head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, replacing acting director Todd Lyons, a spokesperson and two U.S. officials said.
Collins, a pioneer for inclusion and an ambassador for the NBA, died after eight-month battle with glioblastoma
Jason Collins, the NBA’s first openly gay player, who went on to become a pioneer for inclusion and an ambassador for the league, has died after an eight-month battle with an aggressive form of a brain tumor, his family announced on Tuesday.
Collins spent 13 years as a player in the league for six different franchises, including the Boston Celtics and the New Jersey Nets. He revealed in 2013 that he was gay, an announcement that came toward the end of his playing career.
Continue reading...Party held out prospect of act while in opposition but plan did not make it into election manifesto
Ministers should bring forward a new clean air act that would ban wood burning, clear diesel vehicles from the roads and force councils to cut pollution, a group of more than 60 charities have urged before the king’s speech on Wednesday.
Labour held out the prospect of a clean air act while in opposition in 2023, but this was dropped from the final election manifesto, and the government has made no move to reinstate it.
Continue reading...Despite concerns super-rich are leaving due to tax burdens, 88% of those surveyed were proud to live in UK and would pay more to fund public services
Nine in 10 UK millionaires are proud to live in Britain and three-quarters would be willing to pay more tax to ensure public assets get the funding they need, according to research.
Despite widely reported concerns that the wealthy are choosing to leave the country owing to higher taxes, the survey found millionaires were much more concerned about medical workers moving away than wealthy people emigrating.
Continue reading...Researchers find 50+ hours a week can be detrimental to health but lighter responsibilities have positive effect
The stresses and strains of caring for someone for 50 hours or more a week leads to “accelerated cognitive decline” in middle-aged and older people, research shows.
However, providing care for only five to nine hours a week has the opposite effect, boosting brain health so much that the benefits last until older age.
Continue reading...The behavioural cue of ‘flexible self-protection’ is a way to establish whether an animal feels pain, scientists say
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Do insects feel pain? Crickets certainly seem to, according to new research which finds they stroke and groom a sore antenna in much the same way as a dog nurses its hurt paw.
Associate Prof Thomas White, an entomologist from the University of Sydney, said the experience of pain was a “longer, drawn-out, ouchy feeling”, that differed from a hardwired nerve response.
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Continue reading...South Korea's presidential policy chief is calling for a "citizen dividend" that would return some AI-driven profits and tax revenue to the public. The Straits Times. From the report: Presidential policy chief Kim Yong-beom said in a Facebook post that a portion of the profits and tax revenue derived from the artificial intelligence boom "should be structurally returned to all citizens." That is because, Mr Kim argued, the economic gains from AI are based at least partly on industrial infrastructure built by the country over five decades. Mr Kim's comments come after tens of thousands of people gathered outside Samsung's main chip hub in April to demand employees get a greater share of AI profits. The company's labour union wants 15 per cent of operating profit handed to chip-division employees. The union has threatened an 18-day strike starting May 21. Workers have pointed to rising payouts at SK Hynix, which in 2025 agreed to allocate 10 per cent of its annual operating profit to a performance bonus pool, as evidence they deserve more pay. "Excess profits in the AI era are, by nature, concentrated," Mr Kim wrote. Memory companies, core engineers and asset holders are highly likely to receive substantial benefits, while much of the middle class may experience only indirect effects.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
He was the first active, openly gay player in the league’s history. In December, he announced that he had a deadly form of brain cancer.
 | XR model. Just noticed it today [link] [comments] |
Michael Mott, 41, jumped the fence at Denver international airport and had reached the runway when he was struck
The man who was fatally struck on Friday by a departing Frontier Airlines flight on the runway of Denver international airport died by suicide, the city’s medical examiner said on Tuesday at a news conference.
On Friday evening, the man, identified as 41-year-old Michael Mott, jumped an 8ft fence with barbed wire on to the runway, according to Phillip Washington, the airport’s chief executive. Roughly two minutes lapsed between Mott’s breach of the runway and when he was hit by the Frontier aircraft.
Continue reading...Research on weight limits of elevators made in UK and Europe 1972-2004 raises concerns over safety and equity
Lifts are no longer big enough to fit the UK’s larger citizens, according to researchers.
A study of maximum capacity in elevators in the UK and mainland Europe found lifts have not kept up with increasing obesity levels, raising concerns about safety and equity.
Continue reading...Instructure, the company behind the widely used Canvas learning platform, says it reached an agreement with the hackers who stole 3.5 terabytes of student and university data. The company says it received "digital confirmation" that the information was destroyed and that affected schools and students would not be extorted. The BBC reports: Paying cyber criminals goes against the advice of law enforcement agencies around the world, as it can fuel further attacks and offers no guarantee the data has been deleted. In previous cases, criminals have accepted ransom payments but lied about destroying stolen data, instead keeping it for resale. For example, when the notorious LockBit ransomware group was hacked by the National Crime Agency, police found stolen data had not been deleted even after payments had been made. Instructure said in a statement on its website that protecting students' and education staff data was its primary motivation. "While there is never complete certainty when dealing with cyber criminals, we believe it was important to take every step within our control to give customers additional peace of mind, to the extent possible," the company said. Instructure did not set out the terms of the agreement but said that it meant that: - the data was returned to the company - it received "digital confirmation of data destruction" - it had been informed that no Instructure customers would be extorted as a result of the incident - the agreement covers all affected customers, with no need for individuals to engage with the hackers
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
May 12, 2026 — The Department of Energy is seeking experts in science, technology, and artificial intelligence (AI) to serve as reviewers for the “Genesis Mission: Transforming Science and Energy with AI” Request for Application (RFA).
Applications address the Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges to accelerate scientific discovery and research and development workflows using novel AI models and frameworks. Anyone who applied as a principal investigator (PI) or senior/key personnel on an application to the RFA has a conflict of interest and may not serve as a reviewer. Please share this invitation with your network.
“The Genesis Mission has caught the imagination of our scientific and engineering communities to tackle national challenges in the age of AI,” said Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil and Genesis Mission Director. “With these investments we seek breakthrough ideas and novel collaborations leveraging the scientific prowess of our National Laboratories, the private sector, universities, and science philanthropies.”
The RFA is open to interdisciplinary teams from DOE National Laboratories, U.S. industry, and academia. Phase I awards will range from $500,000 to $750,000 and will support a nine month project period. Phase II awards will range from $6 million to $15 million over a three year project period.
For more information about the RFA, see the press release.
Individuals interested in serving as reviewers should complete the form here by May 18, 2026.
More from HPCwire: DOE Announces $293M Funding Opportunity as Genesis Mission Moves Toward Operational Phase
Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy
The post DOE Seeks Researchers to Review Genesis Mission AI Proposals appeared first on HPCwire.
Your Rivian can now manage your calendar, warm your passengers' seats and text your ETA -- all without even looking at the screen.
Request is one of the justice department’s latest attempts to track and regulate gender-affirming care for minors
A Texas federal prosecutor has subpoenaed NYU Langone Health (NYULH), a major hospital network in New York City, for information about minor patients who received gender-affirming care between 2020 to 2026.
The US attorney’s office in the northern district of Texas’s subpoena, which was sent on 7 May, also requested the names of medical providers and others who provided such medical treatment during that period. NYULH was one of several institutions that were issued a subpoena, according to a statement on its website.
Continue reading...Republican leader acknowledges ‘likely consequences’ for resisting US president’s demands to redraw map
South Carolina state senators on Tuesday defied pressure from Donald Trump to approve plans to redraw the state’s congressional map after the US supreme court effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act.
As Republicans scramble to redraw key districts after the US supreme court rendered ineffective a major section of the civil rights law that prevented racial discrimination, Shane Massey, the Republican majority leader in South Carolina’s senate, argued in an extraordinary address that doing so would be against the interest of his state.
Continue reading...Amazon Now launched Tuesday in dozens of cities including Seattle, Philadelphia, Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta.
Comedian will host the 99th Oscars in 2027 after viewership dipped this year despite rise in social media engagement
Conan O’Brien’s era as Oscars host is becoming a trilogy. The Emmy-winning comedian will be back to host the 99th Academy awards in 2027, leaders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science said on Tuesday.
O’Brien hosted the last two Oscar ceremonies to positive reviews. Earlier this year, in his opening monologue, he said he was “honored to be the last human host of the Academy Awards … Next year it’s going to be a Waymo in a tux.”
Continue reading...Planned legislation includes housing, immigration and energy measures, and comes amid awkwardness with the palace over Charles’s role
Keir Starmer will attempt to regain the political initiative on Wednesday as his government announces a package of 35 bills for the next parliamentary session, covering everything from housing to immigration.
The embattled prime minister will release details of dozens of bills that he intends to pass over the next 12 months, even as his own MPs line up to demand his resignation.
Additional reporting by Caroline Davies
Continue reading...The closure comes amid escalating operating costs for the facility, which are now estimated to total nearly $1 billion.
The California case involving a 19-year-old's death last year specifically calls for new safeguards around AI models' discussion of drug use.
Kyle Diamantas, a top official at the agency, will replace Makary and serve as acting FDA commissioner
Marty Makary resigned from his position as commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Tuesday, concluding a 13-month tenure at the regulatory agency that frequently drew the ire of the White House, Congress, industry and the public, Donald Trump confirmed on Tuesday.
Kyle Diamantas, who previously worked as the top food official at the agency setting the strategic direction and operations for food policy in the US, will be Makary’s acting replacement. Trump called Diamantas a “very talented person” in a Truth Social post confirming he’d be Makary’s temporary replacement.
Continue reading..."I'd been checking the status feverishly to see if anything was in my bank account," one small business owner said.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times (via Ars Technica): Amazon employees are using an internal AI tool to automate non-essential tasks in a bid to show managers they are using the technology more frequently. The Seattle-based group has started to widely deploy its in-house "MeshClaw" product in recent weeks, allowing employees to create AI agents that can connect to workplace software and carry out tasks on a user's behalf, according to three people familiar with the matter. Some employees said colleagues were using the software to automate additional, unnecessary AI activity to increase their consumption of tokens -- units of data processed by models. They said the move reflected pressure to adopt the technology after Amazon introduced targets for more than 80 percent of developers to use AI each week, and earlier this year began tracking AI token consumption on internal leader boards. "There is just so much pressure to use these tools," one Amazon employee told the FT. "Some people are just using MeshClaw to maximize their token usage." Amazon has told employees that the AI token statistics would not be used in performance evaluations. But several staff members said they believed managers were monitoring the data. "Managers are looking at it," said another current employee. "When they track usage it creates perverse incentives and some people are very competitive about it."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
At HPCwire we have covered how the race to deploy agentic AI is already heavily contested. However, the real question is whether enterprise data infrastructure is ready for it. It appears it is struggling to keep pace.
Fivetran’s 2026 Agentic AI Readiness Index found that while 41% of organizations are already using agentic AI in production, only 15% believe they are fully prepared to support it with the necessary data foundation. What can enterprises do about this?
To get to that, let’s understand the key issues. That AI readiness gap becomes more important as AI systems move beyond generating recommendations and begin operating autonomously across enterprise workflows. Agentic AI systems increasingly rely on access to trusted and governed data in order to trigger actions and make operational decisions in real time.
The report argues that the next major enterprise AI challenge is whether organizations can build interoperable and reliable data environments capable of supporting autonomous AI at scale.
Enterprises are entering a more difficult phase of AI adoption – one where deployment speed by itself is not an issue, but it is beginning to outpace operational maturity. Organizations seem to steam ahead as they continue investing aggressively. Nearly 60% report multimillion dollar commitments toward agentic AI initiatives. Meanwhile, many others are still in the phase of evaluation and pilots before broader rollout.
What complicates that transition is the condition of the underlying data environment itself. Many enterprises continue operating with brittle integrations. They face siloed systems, inconsistent governance standards, and limited visibility into how operational data moves across the organization. Those weaknesses matter as more AI systems operate autonomously.
Simply getting AI into production is not enough anymore. It is equally if not more important to make sure the surrounding infrastructure can support autonomous systems safely and consistently once they arrive there.
According to the report, organizations further ahead on readiness are approaching data movement differently, and this could offer you a clue on what you can do. These organizations are prioritizing continuously refreshed pipelines instead of periodic updates and improving observability across systems. They are also consolidating trusted data into centralized warehouse and lakehouse environments.
The report emphasizes that scaling autonomous AI requires scaling reliable infrastructure first. That takes us to our next finding that the biggest obstacles to scaling agentic AI are no longer centered around model performance.
Fivetran’s report reveals that the most common blockers are data quality and lineage issues (42%), followed closely by regulatory compliance and sovereignty concerns (39%), which is tied with security and privacy risks (39%).
We’ve seen these challenges as part of a broader shift happening across enterprise AI. For years, most organizations focused on experimentation, proof of concepts, and access to increasingly capable models. Agentic AI changes the equation because these systems are expected to operate inside real business environments, often with the ability to trigger actions automatically.
In that environment, poor governance is not a technical inconvenience – it becomes an operational problem. An autonomous AI system operating on incomplete or poorly governed data does not gradually improve over time. It simply scales mistakes faster and across more systems.
(Bishop Iuliia/Shutterstock)
That concern is already shaping enterprise purchasing decisions. The report found that 65% of organizations would either heavily restrict or completely reject vendors unable to meet governance and sovereignty requirements, including 25% that would reject those vendors outright.
The report recommends that organizations should start treating governance as production infrastructure. Many still think of it as compliance paperwork. What they need to do is to build stricter access controls around what AI agents can see or modify and improve end to end lineage and auditability. They should also work on enforcing regional sovereignty controls. It would help to clearly define which systems agents are allowed to interact with before deployment.
Interoperability is highlighted by the report as a growing strategic priority for enterprises deploying agentic AI – especially for those deploying at scale. An overwhelming majority (86%) of organizations consider platform interoperability and extensibility important or critical, while many increasingly worry about becoming locked into rigid data integration ecosystems. In fact, respondents ranked data integration platforms as a larger vendor lock-in concern than cloud providers or enterprise applications.
That concern becomes understandable once agentic AI moves beyond isolated pilots. Autonomous systems increasingly require access across warehouses, operational environments, analytics platforms, and enterprise software – all at the same time. If those environments remain disconnected, the AI systems operating on top of them become harder to scale consistently.
The report argues enterprises should focus on flexibility now before infrastructure complexity becomes harder to unwind later.
One of the recommended approaches is to include adopting vendor neutral integration layers, centralizing governed data access, and building around open formats such as Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake can also help. These would enable organizations to move across tools and platforms more easily over time.
Enterprises are also being encouraged to design infrastructure in ways that allow models and AI services to evolve without repeatedly rebuilding core pipelines underneath them.
It is becoming increasingly evident that the next phase of the enterprise AI race may depend heavily on which organizations can build infrastructure that can actually support autonomous systems across what appears to be increasingly complex environments. The recommendations in the report could be a good starting point for organizations to overcome these challenges.
Editor’s note: A version of this story first appeared in BigDATAwire.
The post What Can You Do to Prepare Better for Agentic AI? appeared first on HPCwire.
A few weeks ago, we talked about a project within KDE to revive two of their classic themes, Oxygen and Air, and polish them up to make them usable on the current versions of KDE. The developers and designers working on this project say they’ve been utterly surprised by just how popular this news has proven to be, and Filip Fila published a blog post with some thoughts on this unexpected popularity. Why are people yearning so strongly for user interfaces from the past?
That’s the real story underneath the retro-yearning. It isn’t a simply story of people wanting their childhood from the 2000s back. It’s that a lot of ‘the new’ we’ve been offering doesn’t satisfy. It doesn’t have personality. It doesn’t feel warm. It doesn’t feel like it was made with the idea of being anything more than a clean product that gets the job done. The escapism towards the past is a symptom. A symptom of unmet needs, not mere sentimentality.
↫ Filip Fila
Fila uses modern architecture as an example, and I think it’s an apt one. While monumental modern architecture can easily be beautiful and striking, it’s the mundane buildings all around us that just don’t seem to elicit any positive emotions, no sense of belonging or safety. As Fila also notes, the decades-long swing to minimalism in both architecture and UI design isn’t merely because of a preference among designers, but also because minimalism is a hell of a lot cheaper to produce. A building with very little ornamentation and basic, straight lines is much easier, and thus cheaper, to design, construct, and maintain. The same applies to graphical user interface design.
There are some signs that the pendulum is starting to swing back towards more instead of less, in all aspects of design. More and more people are loudly demanding buildings to adopt more classical elements, and as we can all attest to here on OSNews, the longing for aspects of UI design from the ’90s and early 2000s to make a return is strong. And not just among us deep in the weeds, either; I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen normal people utterly confounded by modern UI design.
Anyway, bring back beveled edges.
IBM used its Red Hat Summit conference that’s taking place this week in Atlanta, Georgia as the location for the launch of Red Hat AI 3.4, a new release of its overarching product suite for building and deploying AI. Among the items in this new suite is a new service called Red Hat AI Inference on IBM Cloud, new AI developer tools, better security, Red Hat Hardened Images, and a new Dev Spaces framework, among other enhancements.
In the early years of the AI boom, most of the focus was on using big data to train large language models (LLMs) and other foundation models. But things have changed, and today it’s all about running AI against real world data, or AI inference.
AI inference has different requirements than AI training. There are real-time performance and latency requirements. There are a large number of AI agents to manage. Users also demand that each AI sessions is secure and that the AI models are well-governed.
These are all factors that IBM is taking into account with its Red Hat AI Inference Server, a shrink-wrapped offering that is based on a pair of open source libraries, including vLLM, which includes an AI inference server and AI inference engine, as well as llm-d, a Kubernetes-based framework for running LLMs in a distributed and disaggregated manner.
Red Hat says its AI Inference Server is “optimized for high throughput and low latency” of AI applications and agents. Its model catalog ships with IBM Granite 4.0 H Small, Mistral-Small-3.2-24B-Instruct, Llama 3.3 70B Instruct, GPT-OSS-120B, and Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-FP8, with more open models and custom models on the way.
With the launch of Red Hat AI Inference on IBM Cloud, IBM is making it easy for IBM Cloud customers to get up and running with the Red Hat AI Inference stack, according to Jason McGee, CTO of IBM Cloud.
Red Hat CEO and President Matt Hicks delivers the keynote address at Summit 2026
“Enterprises are eager to operationalize AI, but the gap between pilot and production may hold them back,” McGee stated. “With Red Hat AI Inference on IBM Cloud, we’re giving clients a managed platform that is built for real workloads, not just experiments. At the same time, our new virtualization offering on IBM Cloud is enabling enterprises to migrate to a resilient and security-focused virtualization environment while giving them the flexibility to adopt Red Hat OpenShift at their own pace for future AI workloads and containerization.”
The new service is in limited release, with general availability expected next month.
IBM also announced that Red Hat AI Inference can now run on other flavors of Kubernetes besides Red Hat OpenShift, including Kubernetes distributions hosted by CoreWeave and Microsoft Azure. This will give customers another option if they don’t want to run on IBM Cloud.
Red Hat AI 3.4 also includes several other new and enhanced capabilities, including:
IBM is also improving tools for AI developers. Included in the new release of Red Hat Desktop is a build of Podman Desktop, which provides a foundation for developing containerized AI apps. IBM/Red Hat is also giving developers new tools for building isolated AI agent sandboxes, which will help developers test and iterate in a safe manner.
The updated Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite brings access to Red Hat Trusted Libraries, as well as security services aimed at preventing AI-driven exploits. IBM/Red Hat says it’s using AI “to determine if known vulnerabilities in generated code are relevant to a specific application runtime, allowing developers to prioritize remediation based on actual risk.”
“The transition to agentic AI expands the requirements for modern application development,” said James Labocki, senior director, product management, Red Hat. “We’re helping developers accelerate and own their AI strategy with the same rigor they apply to their core IT applications.”
Also announced is an update to Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces, which it describes as “an extensible framework that allows developers to integrate preferred AI-driven tools directly into their cloud-based IDE.” With this release, IBM/Red Hat is now incorporating the AWS Kiro coding assistant to go along with existing integrations for Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic Claude CLI, Cline, Continue, Roo, and others.
The company aims to bolster security via Red Hat Hardened Images, which is a collection of secure components for deploying AI. IBM/Red Hat says the Hardened Images are developed using its “trusted software pipeline” and are secure out of the box. It’s part of IBM/Red Hat’s strategy for developing a “Zero-CVE” environment, referring to the US Government’s Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure database.
“Our goal is to cut through the security noise and give developers a foundation where they can build and scale without having to patch or manage software that their applications do not actually need,” stated Gunnar Hellekson, vice president and general manager of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The post Red Hat Learns New AI Tricks appeared first on HPCwire.
Commentary: Google assumes I'm wealthy and sexy. It shouldn't.
Instructure says ShinyHunters has destroyed stolen user data after the group targeted more than 9,000 schools.
CPI gas price index has surged 28% from a year ago, while overall energy costs are up nearly 18%, new inflation data shows.
Memphis Grizzlies forward Brandon Clarke has died at the age of 29, the team announced.
FDA Commissioner Marty Makary resigned his position, stepping aside amid a swirl of reports that his tenure was coming to an end.
The news that Google is working to move Chrome OS to the Android technology stack, and that it wants to start putting Android on laptops, is not exactly news, as the company has been talking about it for years. At an Android event today, the company finally unveiled the culmination of all this work: Googlebooks.
We’re bringing together the best of Android, which comes with powerful apps on Google Play and a modern OS that’s designed for Intelligence, and ChromeOS, which comes with the world’s most popular browser. The result is Googlebook: a new category of laptops built with Gemini’s helpfulness at its core, designed to work seamlessly with the devices in your life and powered by premium hardware. We’re sharing a sneak peek into the Googlebook experience today and will have a lot more to share later this year.
↫ Alex Kuscher at The Keyword, a Google blog apparently
The approach here seems very similar to Chromebooks, with Googlebooks being designed and built by various OEMs, but instead of Chrome OS they run Android in desktop mode. Of course, “AI” has been creamed all over these things, to the point where not even the venerable mouse cursor is safe: if you wiggle your cursor, it will turn into “Magic Pointer”, which will highlight various “AI” actions as you hover over stuff on your screen. Google also showed off an “AI”-based feature to create widgets, as well as the ability to access files on your phone right from a Googlebook.
That’s about all we know as far as functionality and features goes. They’re supposed to go on sale later this year, with models coming from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo.
Google is teasing a new line of "Googlebook" laptops for this fall, powered by a new Android-and-ChromeOS-derived operating system that will run Chrome, Android apps, phone-connected apps and files, and deeply integrated Gemini features. The company says Chromebooks will continue "after the launch of Googlebook" and "...all Chromebooks will continue to receive support through their device's existing date commitment." The Verge reports: "We'll have more to share on the exact OS branding later this year," Peter Du of Google's global communications team tells The Verge. [...] Googlebooks will have a Magic Pointer feature that offers contextual suggestions whenever you shake your cursor and point it at something on the screen. Google's examples include setting up a meeting by pointing at a date in an email or selecting images of furniture and a living space to visualize them together. Beyond your mouse pointer, Googlebooks will also feature the custom AI-created widgets that Google is also debuting today for Android phones and Wear OS smartwatches. I don't know what kind of horrors people will be able to make into widgets, but Google gives the example of making one to organize your flights, hotel information, restaurant reservations, and another for creating a countdown timer for an upcoming family reunion. (It's always flights, hotels, and restaurants, isn't it?) While there are many outstanding questions to be answered about Googlebooks, the biggest and most obvious ones are what will these laptops look like, what chips will be in them, and what will they cost? We've got none of that so far. Google only has some initial renders of a mysterious Googlebook and the promise that it's working with Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo to make the first models. There are no model names. No specs. Nada. Google isn't even saying if the laptop in its renders is made by a partner or a tease of some first-party Pixel-like Googlebook to come or is just a cool mockup. The one distinct hardware feature shown, the bar of glowing Google-colored light, will be a signature of all Googlebooks. (Sure, bring on the RGB. Why not?)
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Congresswoman says she did not condone radio host’s language about Hakeem Jeffries, the top House Democrat
Jen Kiggans, a Republican congresswoman, is facing calls from Democrats to resign for agreeing with a radio host after he said the top US House Democrat, Hakeem Jeffries, should get his “cotton-picking hands off of Virginia”.
Kiggans, who represents a swing district in southeastern Virginia, has said she was agreeing with the host that Jeffries – who is the first Black American to lead a party in Congress – should stay out of the state’s politics. She also said she did not condone the host’s language, which multiple Democrats criticized as racist.
Continue reading...Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for May 13, No. 1,789.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for May 13, No. 1,067.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for May 13, No. 801.
The wrong cooking oil can sabotage dinner. Here's a guide to using high-, low- and medium-heat oils.
A number of Streeting’s allies resigned from their ministerial posts on Tuesday and called for Keir Starmer to quit
Here are some pictures from No 10 this morning.
Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the PM, is now being interviewed on the Today programme. Nick Robinson, the presenter, is asking him if he knows whether Keir Starmer has decided how to respond to the pressure on him to resign. Jones is avoiding the question, as he did on Sky News earlier. (See 7.43am.)
Continue reading...Downing Street insiders suggest health secretary does not yet have the support for a leadership push
Keir Starmer was increasingly confident that he had seen off the immediate threat to his job on Tuesday after a challenge from Wes Streeting failed to materialise despite several of the prime minister’s allies quitting the government.
Downing Street insiders suggested that the health secretary did not yet have the required support from the 81 MPs he needed to formally launch a leadership bid after Starmer issued a ‘put up or shut up’ ultimatum to his cabinet.
Continue reading...It wasn't a matter of if it would happen, only a matter of when.
May 12, 2026 — In 2018, an artificial intelligence (AI) program called AlphaFold achieved a major breakthrough by placing first in the critical assessment of structure prediction, a competition for predicting the three-dimensional structures of proteins. It scored close to 90 on a 100-point scale for moderately difficult targets, marking a turning point in the use of AI for understanding protein structure and highlighting its potential applications. While predicting protein structures was a major step forward, proteins in living systems are not fixed. They constantly move, change shape, and interact with other molecules, and AI is now being tasked with helping with this.
DeepAFM is a deep learning-based method that analyzes high-speed atomic force microscopy images of proteins. It removes noise and identifies protein shapes, enabling accurate detection of transitions between closed and wide-open states during protein function.
Conventionally, determining the different shapes a protein takes involves fitting a known three-dimensional structure to two-dimensional high-speed atomic force microscopy (HS-AFM) images, which capture proteins in action at the single-molecule level. However, HS-AFM images are often noisy and can be distorted due to the line-by-line scanning process, where each part of the image is recorded at slightly different times. This temporal lag, along with background noise, makes it difficult to determine the exact shape of a protein at any given moment.
Associate Professor Takaharu Mori from the Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Tokyo University of Science (TUS), Japan, explains the problem with current approaches: “Because of the noise present in the images, these methods can lead to overfitting, where the models may capture artefacts or false details caused by the noise rather than true structural features of the protein.”
To address this challenge, his team has developed a deep learning-based method called DeepAFM, designed to both reduce noise in HS-AFM images and accurately estimate the different shapes that proteins adopt as they move and function.
The team included Mr. Katsuki Sato of TUS, who completed the Master’s course in 2025, along with Dr. Takayuki Uchihashi and Dr. Yui Kanaoka from Nagoya University, Japan; and Dr. Tomoya Tsukazaki of Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan. The study was made available online in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling on April 4, 2026, and published in Volume 66, Issue 8 on April 27, 2026.
In this approach, the team creates a dataset of synthetic HS-AFM images representing different protein shapes from molecular dynamics simulations, where each image is labeled according to the corresponding protein conformation. These simulated images include both ideal, noise-free versions and more realistic ones that incorporate experimental effects, such as background noise, scanning distortions, and Brownian motion.
The researchers trained DeepAFM on a protein called SecA, which can switch between closed and wide-open states. Using molecular dynamics simulations, they generated a wide range of possible protein shapes and used them to create millions of synthetic HS-AFM images. This dataset was then used to train a deep learning model that can both remove noise from HS-AFM images and identify the underlying protein shape.
When tested, the method produced denoised images that closely matched the ground truth, with errors as low as around 0.1 nm. In addition to improving image quality, the AI was able to accurately classify the protein’s conformational state. Across 0.8 million test images, the model correctly identified the exact state out of 19 possible conformations with an accuracy of 93.4%, which increased further when allowing for small tolerances. Importantly, when applied to experimental HS-AFM images, the AI inferred protein conformational states consistent with independent experimental measurements, demonstrating its practical applicability.
“DeepAFM provides a new deep learning-assisted strategy for analyzing noisy HS-AFM data and facilitates studies of protein dynamics,” said Assoc. Prof. Mori.
The team further demonstrated that the method can be extended to other protein systems using transfer learning, where knowledge gained from one system is applied to another. This suggests that DeepAFM could become a broadly useful tool for studying a wide range of biological molecules.
This work is part of a broader effort to advance AI-driven research in preparation for next-generation computing platforms such as Fugaku NEXT, being developed by the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in collaboration with Fujitsu and NVIDIA, with operations expected to begin around 2030.
Reference
About The Tokyo University of Science
Tokyo University of Science (TUS) is a well-known and respected university, and the largest science-specialized private research university in Japan, with four campuses in central Tokyo and its suburbs and in Hokkaido. Established in 1881, the university has continually contributed to Japan’s development in science through inculcating the love for science in researchers, technicians, and educators.
With a mission of “Creating science and technology for the harmonious development of nature, human beings, and society,” TUS has undertaken a wide range of research from basic to applied science. TUS has embraced a multidisciplinary approach to research and undertaken intensive study in some of today’s most vital fields. TUS is a meritocracy where the best in science is recognized and nurtured. It is the only private university in Japan that has produced a Nobel Prize winner and the only private university in Asia to produce Nobel Prize winners within the natural sciences field.
Source: TUS
The post Tokyo University of Science Develops ‘DeepAFM’ AI Method for Protein Motion Analysis appeared first on HPCwire.
A recently released FBI file shines new light on the days immediately leading up to the arrest of then-Columbia University student and Palestinian rights activist Mahmoud Khalil.
On March 6 of last year, two days before unidentified officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement abducted and arrested Khalil at his home, the FBI received an anonymous tip claiming that Khalil, listed incorrectly as a 22-year-old, had called for “violence on behalf of Hamas.”
According to the heavily redacted documents, as of March 19, 2025, the FBI had closed an investigation into the tip and determined that Khalil “does not warrant further FBI investigation.” But by then, ICE had already secretly taken Khalil, now 31, thousands of miles away to a detention center in Louisiana. Despite the FBI’s decision to close the tip, the Trump administration continued to paint Khalil as a “Hamas supporter” and a threat to national security.
It’s unclear if the FBI tip was directly related to Khalil’s ICE arrest, and the FBI did not respond to The Intercept’s question about whether the tip was shared with ICE. But Hamid Bendaas, a spokesperson at the Institute for Middle East Understanding, which has worked with Khalil since his arrest, said the timing reflects “a threat to us all.”
Though the FBI document says Khalil did not warrant further investigation, “that didn’t stop ICE from holding him in a detention center and separating him from his wife and newborn son for months,” Bendaas said.
The document comes to light as the Trump administration has fast-tracked Khalil’s deportation case, which Khalil’s legal team argues is a form of retaliation against his protected political speech in support of Palestine. Khalil’s team received the FBI document, which has not been previously reported, via a lawsuit over a public records request and shared it exclusively with The Intercept.
Khalil was the first of thousands of students the Trump administration targeted for deportation over First Amendment-protected speech in support of Palestine or criticizing Israel. The Trump administration exploited an obscure provision in immigration law to claim that Khalil and other students, including Mohsen Mahdawi and Rümeysa Öztürk, presented a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who ordered Khalil to be deported, has repeatedly claimed that he sympathized with terrorists, echoing claims from far-right doxing groups that had targeted Khalil in the months leading up to his arrest. Trump’s unprecedented crackdown came after years of similar attacks on pro-Palestine students that gained speed under former President Joe Biden.
“Under Trump’s rogue presidency being led by extremists and conspiracy theorists,” Bendaas said, “any of us can be kidnapped by federal agents in the middle of the night simply for speaking against U.S. support for Israel’s genocide, no matter what the facts or Constitution says.”
The Center for Constitutional Rights, part of Khalil’s legal team, submitted a request for public documents related to his arrest nearly a year ago, on May 29, 2025. After denials and delays, CCR filed a lawsuit on November 20 claiming that federal agencies, including the FBI, had improperly withheld the records. CCR said it has since received other documents from the Department of Justice and is expecting more from other agencies in the coming months.
“Despite the FBI closing its investigation with no findings to support the accusation, the Trump administration continued to label Mr. Khalil a supporter of Hamas in public comments,” said CCR staff attorney Samah Sisay. “This document further supports our argument that the Trump administration had no legitimate reason to target Mr. Khalil besides his free speech in support of Palestine.”
In a statement to The Intercept, an FBI spokesperson said, “We let documents obtained through the FOIA process speak for themselves and decline to comment further.”
Reacting to the FBI file, an attorney at Palestine Legal condemned the Trump administration’s approach but called it “representative of the tactics used more broadly against Palestine activists.”
“Revelations that false reports were made against Mahmoud prior to his government sanctioned kidnapping, and that the administration continued to make false claims that Mahmoud posed a danger, even though the FBI found these claims to be unsubstantiated, are highly representative of this administration’s broader approach of acting first and making up justifications later, with no regard for truth or the findings of the administration’s own experts,” said Zoha Khalili, a senior managing attorney at Palestine Legal. “Around the world, people who demand freedom, equality, liberation, and the basic necessities of life for Palestinians have been smeared, silenced, investigated, and even imprisoned for their advocacy.”
Khalil’s team also plans to appeal the Board of Immigration Appeals order rejecting Khalil’s appeal to terminate his deportation proceedings. He is still fighting a separate federal habeas corpus case and cannot be deported while the case proceeds.
Update: May 12, 2026, 4:06 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with a comment from an attorney at Palestine Legal sent after publication.
The post FBI Quietly Closed a Probe Into Mahmoud Khalil While He Was in ICE Detention appeared first on The Intercept.
BOISE, Idaho, May 12, 2026 — Micron Technology, Inc. today announced it has sampled 256GB DDR5 registered dual in-line memory modules (RDIMM) to key server ecosystem enablers. The module is built on the company’s leading-edge 1-gamma technology, which is capable of speeds up to 9,200 megatransfers per second (MT/s), greater than 40% faster than modules in volume production today.
Micron’s module employs advanced packaging techniques, 3D stacking (3DS) multiple memory dies connected by through-silicon vias (TSVs). Combined with Micron’s 1-gamma DRAM, these innovations provide the capacity, speed and power efficiency required to scale next-generation AI systems. A single 256GB module can reduce operating power by more than 40% versus two 128GB modules, enabling greater efficiency for modern AI data centers.
Ecosystem Partner Validation
Micron is collaborating with key ecosystem enablers to validate the 256GB 1-gamma DDR5 RDIMM across their respective current and next-generation server platforms. This co-validation ensures broad platform compatibility and accelerates the path to production deployment for data center customers building AI and HPC infrastructure at scale.
“Capacity, bandwidth, and power are the defining drivers of AI efficiency. With our 256GB DDR5 RDIMM, Micron is enabling servers to deliver significantly higher performance,” said Raj Narasimhan, senior vice president and general manager of the Cloud Memory Business Unit at Micron. “Built on our 1-gamma DRAM using advanced 3DS and TSV packaging, this solution delivers industry-leading speed and power efficiency, helping data center architects scale AI infrastructure more efficiently.”
Meeting the Memory Demands of the AI Era
The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs), agentic AI, real-time inference and high-core-count CPU workloads is driving an urgent need for greater enterprise server memory capacity, higher bandwidth and improved power efficiency. Micron’s 256GB DDR5 RDIMM addresses these growing requirements head-on, enabling server architects, hyperscale operators and platform partners to maximize memory capacity per socket while operating within the thermal and power boundaries of modern data center infrastructure.
Sampling and Availability
Micron’s 1 gamma-based 256GB DDR5 RDIMM is currently sampling to key server ecosystem enablers for platform validation. For more information on Micron’s data center solutions, visit the Micron data center memory webpage.
About Micron Technology, Inc.
Micron Technology, Inc., is an industry leader in innovative memory and storage solutions, transforming how the world uses information to enrich life for all. With a relentless focus on our customers, technology leadership, and manufacturing and operational excellence, Micron delivers a rich portfolio of high-performance DRAM, NAND and NOR memory and storage products. Every day, the innovations that our people create fuel the data economy, enabling advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and compute-intensive applications that unleash opportunities — from the data center to the intelligent edge and across the client and mobile user experience.
Source: Micron
The post Micron Samples 256GB DDR5 RDIMM Built on 1-Gamma DRAM for AI Servers appeared first on HPCwire.
Health officials in Paris say French woman who contracted disease on MV Hondius is on ventilator in intensive care
The head of the World Health Organization has told countries to prepare for more hantavirus cases as authorities in Paris said a French woman who contracted the virus onboard the MV Hondius had the most severe form of the disease and had been put on a ventilator.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus thanked Spain for the “compassion and solidarity” it had shown by taking in the stricken cruise ship and urged authorities to follow the WHO’s advice and recommendations, which include a 42-day quarantine and constant monitoring of high-risk contacts.
Continue reading...Microsoft and G42's planned $1 billion AI data center in Kenya has stalled amid disagreements over power commitments, with President William Ruto saying the country would need to "switch off half the country" to support the project at full scale. Tom's Hardware reports: The project, announced in May 2024 during Ruto's visit to Washington, was supposed to bring a geothermal-powered data center to the Olkaria region in Kenya's Rift Valley. G42 was to lead construction, with the facility running Microsoft Azure in a new East Africa cloud region. The first phase targeted 100 megawatts of capacity and was expected to be operational by this year, with a long-term goal of scaling to 1 gigawatt. President Ruto isn't exaggerating about shutting off half the country's power. Kenya's total installed electricity capacity sits between 3,000 and 3,200 megawatts, and peak demand reached a record 2,444 megawatts in January, according to data from KenGen, the country's government-owned electricity producer. The full 1 gigawatt build would therefore have consumed roughly a third of the country's total capacity, and even the first 100 megawatts would have required a significant share of the Olkaria geothermal complex's output, which currently generates around 950MW across all its plants. John Tanui, principal secretary at Kenya's Ministry of Information, told Bloomberg that the project hasn't been withdrawn and that talks are continuing, adding that the "scale of the data center they [Microsoft] wanted to do still requires some structuring." A separate 60-megawatt project with local developer EcoCloud is also still under discussion. [...] Microsoft is spending $190 billion on capex in 2026, and the company adds approximately 1 gigawatt of data center capacity every three months globally. But power constraints are proving to be a universal bottleneck: nearly half of planned U.S. data center builds this year have been delayed or canceled due to shortages of electrical infrastructure.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
PM accused of dragging heels on forcing tech firms to block transmission of nude photos on children’s phones
Internet safety and children’s rights campaigners say they have been frustrated for months by Keir Starmer’s lack of leadership on blocking child abuse images on children’s phones, speaking out after Jess Phillips resigned from the government saying she was tired of seeing “opportunities for progress stalled and delayed”.
The influential Labour politician was one of four ministers who quit on Tuesday and joined more than 80 MPs to have called for the prime minister to go.
Continue reading...New high-performance OoO superscalar vector processor IP, ideal for area- and power-constrained consumer applications
SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 12, 2026 — SiFive, Inc., the gold standard for RISC-V computing, today announced the launch of the SiFive Performance P570 Gen 3, the most powerful and efficient out-of-order processor core in its class. Purpose-built for demanding edge AI, high-end consumer, and commercial IoT applications, the P570 Gen 3 delivers a large leap in performance compared to the popular P550 Gen 1, and also provides the most modern RVA23 ISA profile support.
This versatile IP can be used as the control processor in embedded IoT devices, running a full networking stack, or can be used as the main applications processor in consumer devices, running rich OSs, such as Android or enterprise-grade Linux. The high-performance vector unit supports running AI models and inference on edge devices.
“The P570 Gen 3 is built to meet the demands for today’s most demanding consumer and commercial applications,” said Krste Asanovic, SiFive co-Founder and Chief Architect. “With world-class RVA23 capabilities, the new P570 IP will meet next-generation customer requirements for high performance with leading area and power efficiency. This enables tremendous new possibilities coupled with the capability to work most of the major operating systems.”
Industry-Leading Performance and Efficiency
The P570 Gen 3 introduces significant architectural improvements, featuring a 3-wide, 13-stage fully out-of-order superscalar execution pipeline and an upgraded vector engine.
More Than Just the Core
SiFive also provides a complete solution around the P570 core including system IP, such as the RISC-V standard-compliant advanced interrupt architecture (AIA), WorldGuard to support trusted execution environments on secure SoCs, and a second-generation RISC-V standard-compliant IOMMU. P570 Gen 3 is also scalable up to 16 cores in a compute subsystem.
A New Baseline for RISC-V Standardization
The P570 Gen 3 is fully compliant with the RVA23 profile (backed by major ecosystem players, including Google, Red Hat, and Canonical), providing software developers with a stable, consistent set of instructions and ensuring the P570 is ready for mainstream application development. As well as supporting all the RVA23 mandatory requirements, including the Hypervisor (H) and Vector (V) extensions, the P570 includes optional extensions for enhanced security and management, and support for FP16 and BF16 to accelerate modern AI workloads. The additional security features include secure branch prediction and RISC-V standard Vector Crypto (both NIST and SM) and Enhanced Protected Memory (smepmp) extensions.
The P570 is available today and we are working with customers in several market segments.
The P570 is ideal for use cases requiring high-performance and power efficiency in a small area budget. For customers with very strict area constraints who don’t require vectors, the updated P550 Gen 3 provides a highly efficient RVB23-compatible core.
Learn more in our video featuring Krste Asanovic here.
Download the product brief here.
For more information on the SiFive Performance P570 Gen 3, please visit SiFive.com.
More from HPCwire: SiFive Raises $400M Series G to Advance RISC-V Architecture for AI Infrastructure
About SiFive
As the pioneers who founded RISC-V, SiFive is transforming the future of computing by bringing the power and flexibility of RISC-V to the world. SiFive’s market-leading IP provides the blueprint for high-performance, customizable, and energy-efficient processor cores across the entire computing spectrum, from the intelligent edge to the most advanced AI data centers. SiFive achieved record growth in 2025 and its IP is featured in more than 500 designs, with over 10 billion cores shipped to date, SiFive is the trusted IP partner for the world’s most innovative technology companies.
Source: SiFive
The post SiFive Sets New Bar for High-Performance RISC-V with 3rd Gen Performance P550 and P570 IP appeared first on HPCwire.
The Inter Miami and LAFC stars are the highest-paid players in the league by a distance, while other new arrivals’ numbers are revealed for the first time
Lionel Messi is receiving even more on his second MLS contract, as unveiled in the MLS Players Association’s latest drop of player salary information. The union drops offer a fascinating lens into MLS squad construction, a chance to play sporting director and give pass/fail verdicts on roster construction across the 30-team circuit.
The Argentinian – whose take-home figure does not include additional amounts earned via Apple streaming subscriptions or jersey sales through Adidas and Fanatics – remains far and away MLS’s top earner, receiving $28.3m in his fourth season with Inter Miami. Son Heung-min ranks second, with Los Angeles FC paying the Tottenham icon $11.2m, while Rodrigo De Paul joins Messi on the podium not as his bodyguard but as the earner of a $9.7m income.
Continue reading...Russia tested a new long-range missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads, months after the last treaty with the U.S. expired.
SAN DIEGO, May 12, 2026 — AIwire, the leading publication covering scientific and technical AI news, today unveiled its AIwire People to Watch for 2026. This feature highlights key AI community members who are poised to drive the industry forward in the coming year.
The AIwire editorial team searched for AI professionals who are driving the next wave of innovation and bridging academic breakthroughs and real-world deployment through deep technical insight, and carefully selected six remarkable individuals within our vast and dynamic community.
“I’m happy to present the 2026 AIwire People to Watch,” said TCI Media Editorial Director Alex Woodie. “AI is changing rapidly at the moment, and our 2026 AIwire People to Watch are at the forefront of these trends. I’m pleased to honor such a distinguished group of people during such an incredible period in the history of computing.”
We are at a remarkable point in history, thanks to the tremendous growth in the field of artificial intelligence. From reasoning models that surpass PhD-level capabilities to AI agents transforming workflows in enterprise, science ,and engineering, the pace of change is incredible. Trillions of dollars are being invested in massive data centers based on the potential of AI, and quantum computing promises even more disruption to come.
Our intent is to showcase the profound impact of these individuals’ contributions to our industry, reshaping how AI will power science, enterprise, and society. This feature offers our readers the opportunity to learn who they are and why they were chosen as the best and brightest that our community has to offer in 2026.
The 2026 AIwire People to Watch selections are:
Daniela Amodei
President & Co-Founder, Anthropic
Andrew Feldman
Founder & CEO, Cerebras Systems
Ranjay Krishna
Assistant Professor, Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington
Adam Lewis
Head of AISim Innovation, SandboxAQ
Fei-Fei Li
Sequoia Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University, and Denning Co-Director of Stanford HAI
Lisa Su
Chair & CEO, AMD
To read exclusive interviews with each Person to Watch, please visit: https://www.aiwire.net/people-to-watch-2026.
About AIwire
AIwire, the successor to 12-year-old “EnterpriseAI,” continues as the trusted global news site for scientific and technical AI. As the role of artificial intelligence in scientific computing intensifies, AIwire’s reporting explores use cases illustrating its dramatic impact across scientific and technical disciplines and industries. As a news portal and weekly newsletter, AIwire covers ground-breaking developments in machine and deep learning, LLM training, and the GenAI ecosystem, showcasing how leading organizations and global community initiatives combine both HPC and AI to accelerate the utilization of AI for scientific discovery and innovation. Subscribe now at www.aiwire.net.
About TCI Media
TCI Media (formerly Tabor Communications Inc.) is the home of the Wire publications: AIwire, HPCwire, BigDATAwire, and QCwire, which broadly cover Advanced Scale technologies for scientific and technical computing. The Wire publications closely follow the convergence of AI, HPC, and Big Data, and the evolution of Quantum Computing. Together, they unify the IT communities that we serve, providing news, analysis, and information to educate and engage users and decision-makers seeking high performance and advanced scale computing solutions for scientific and technical workloads across AI, HPC, Big Data, and Quantum Computing. More information can be found at www.tci-media.com.
The post AIwire Unveils 2026 People to Watch appeared first on HPCwire.
HOUSTON, May 12, 2026 — HPE today announced new GreenLake innovations across private cloud, storage and data protection that reshape how enterprises modernize infrastructure and accelerate AI data readiness. GreenLake delivers a cohesive approach that enables organizations to modernize virtualized and cloud-native workloads without forcing customers into fragmented, multi-vendor tools or risky migrations.
“Enterprises are rapidly modernizing for AI and cloud-native runtimes and this transformation is placing new demands on how environments are managed, protected, and scaled,” said Fidelma Russo, EVP & GM, Hybrid Cloud & CTO at HPE. “With these innovations, we’re helping organizations adopt a unified operating model that brings together private cloud, data, and protection, simplifies migration from legacy platforms, strengthens resilience, and delivers superior TCO to operate at scale.”
Next-Generation Private Cloud Unifies Cloud-Native and Virtualized Workloads
HPE Private Cloud is now in its fourth generation and delivers a flexible experience for organizations modernizing infrastructure beyond traditional virtualization environments. HPE Private Cloud now offers Kubernetes for unified management of virtual machines (VMs) and containers on a single platform, with independent scaling for cloud-native workloads. HPE also offers a seamless path for current HPE Private Cloud Business Edition customers to upgrade their software to manage both VMs and Kubernetes using their existing infrastructure.
By offering unified infrastructure, operations, and data in an integrated, single-vendor solution, HPE Private Cloud gives customers control and consistent operations, helping them reduce cost and manage risk.
For hyperconverged infrastructure in edge and distributed use cases, HPE SimpliVity now supports HPE Morpheus VM Essentials and extended resilience and backup with HPE StoreOnce Gen5 systems. Native StoreOnce integration gives customers seamless, secure and space-efficient backup for their data. These capabilities help standardize operations, improve resilience, and simplify data protection for virtualized workloads.
HPE Advances Unified Data Platform for AI and Modern Workloads
HPE is expanding its unified data layer with new native file storage, additional scale-out block storage, and agentic AI management. These new innovations enable organizations to accelerate AI data pipelines with intelligent data and transform how data is managed, protected, and activated across the enterprise.
Customer and Partner Perspectives
“At the Dallas Cowboys, we operate as a global, technology-driven sports and entertainment enterprise, where delivering a seamless, high-performance experience across AT&T Stadium is critical to our success,” said Matt Messick, CIO at the Dallas Cowboys. “HPE’s unified approach to private cloud platforms allows us to modernize our infrastructure while maintaining the flexibility and resilience we need to support everything from real-time fan engagement to large-scale event operations.”
“Veeam’s partnership with HPE is focused on helping organizations simplify and strengthen data and AI trust as they modernize their infrastructure,” said Dave Russell, SVP and Head of Strategy at Veeam. “By integrating Veeam Data Platform with HPE Private Cloud, we’re enabling organizations to protect their environments with greater speed, resilience, and flexibility, while also ensuring they can recover quickly, confidently and intelligently from any disruption.”
Availability
About HPE
HPE (NYSE: HPE) is a leader in essential enterprise technology, bringing together the power of AI, cloud, and networking to help organizations achieve more. As pioneers of possibility, our innovation and expertise advance the way people live and work. We empower our customers across industries to optimize operational performance, transform data into foresight, and maximize their impact. Unlock your boldest ambitions with HPE. Discover more at www.hpe.com.
Source: HPE
The post HPE Delivers Unified Private Clouds and Data Platforms to Accelerate Enterprise Modernization and AI Data Readiness appeared first on HPCwire.
It's not every day you can take more than $200 off one of Apple's most high-performing laptops.
ST. PAUL, Minn., May 12, 2026 — 3M today announced it has joined a group of leading technology companies to establish a new multi-source agreement (MSA) focused on advancing open, interoperable specifications for expanded beam optical (EBO) connectivity in AI infrastructure. Expanded beam optical technology is increasingly seen as a critical enabler for AI infrastructure, offering advantages in reliability, ease of maintenance, and performance in high-density environments. As hyperscale and enterprise AI deployments grow, standardized approaches to optical connectivity are expected to play a key role in reducing complexity and accelerating time to deployment.
Credit: Shutterstock
The MSA brings together industry leaders including 3M, Accelink, Aperion, AMD, Amphenol, Arista Networks, Cisco, Meta, Molex, Nexthop-ai, Oracle, Senko, Source Photonics, Sumitomo, TE Connectivity, viaPhoton, and Xscape Photonics to collaboratively develop standardized specifications for a range of EBO connector solutions. The effort is designed to accelerate deployment of high-performance optical interconnects required to support the rapid scaling of AI data centers.
“As AI workloads scale, the physical layer of data centers is being pushed to new limits — requiring optical connectivity solutions that are not only high-performance, but also interoperable and scalable across a growing ecosystem,” said Alex An, vice president, 3M data center vertical. “By participating in this MSA, 3M is helping enable an open, standards-based approach that can accelerate adoption, improve reliability, and support the next generation of AI infrastructure.”
The MSA will provide a collaborative framework for members to contribute to a shared specification covering multiple EBO connector configurations.
“The increasing bandwidth density and scale of AI networks are driving the need for a highly resilient Layer 1, which today relies on multi-fiber physical contact connectors,” said Rajagopal Subramaniyan, senior vice president, OCI networking, Oracle. “Strict connector hygiene requirements slow network builds and add operational overhead for ongoing link triage. Expanded beam technology can overcome these bottlenecks, enabling more resilient cluster topologies and future rack-scale optical architectures. Reflecting Oracle’s commitment to innovation and industry leadership, we are pleased to serve as co-chair in the formation of the EBO MSA, which is essential to establishing a diverse supplier ecosystem for hyperscale cloud and AI operators.”
3M’s participation in the MSA builds on its broader commitment to advancing data center innovation through materials science — including solutions that help enable reliable connectivity, manage heat and power, and support resilient infrastructure at scale. As momentum builds across the ecosystem, additional contributors to the MSA are underscoring the importance of open, standardized approaches to expanded beam connectivity.
“As optical data networks scale and evolve rapidly, the industry faces increasing demand for solutions that deliver not only high performance, but also reliability and ease of deployment and operation,” said Jim Hasegawa, president of the Optical Communications Division at SENKO Advanced Components, Inc. “Expanded beam optical technology directly addresses these needs, especially as the industry moves toward open, consistent standards that enable seamless integration across transceivers, backplanes, and cable assemblies.”
The MSA is open to additional members across the data center and networking ecosystem. The initial technical working group has begun development of the first connector specification. More information can be found at www.ebomsa.org, or by contacting the EBO MSA administrator and co-chair, Richard Ward, at admin@ebomsa.org.
About 3M
3M (NYSE: MMM) is focused on transforming industries around the world by applying science and creating innovative, customer-focused solutions. Our multi-disciplinary team is working to solve tough customer problems by leveraging diverse technology platforms, differentiated capabilities, global footprint, and operational excellence.
Source: 3M
The post 3M Joins Multi-Vendor Expanded Beam Optical Standards Group for AI Interconnects appeared first on HPCwire.
Player’s agency confirms death on Tuesday
Clarke was named to NBA All-Rookie team in 2020
Memphis Grizzlies forward Brandon Clarke has died at the age of 29, his sports agency has confirmed. A cause of death was not announced.
“We are beyond devastated by the passing of Brandon Clarke,” Priority Sports said. “He was so loved by all of us here, and everyone whose life he touched. He was the gentlest soul who was the first to be there for all of his friends and family. Our hearts are so broken as we think about his mom, Whitney, his entire family and all of his friends. From high school to San Jose State to Gonzaga to the Grizzlies, Brandon impacted everyone who was part of his life.”
Continue reading...
Spotlight Delaware has been named a 2025 News Organization of the Year by the Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Association, thanks to a strong showing in regional journalism awards announced this month.
Spotlight shares the award with the Baltimore Beat in Division D after the two publications won the most first- and second-place prizes in the annual contest honoring excellence in local coverage.
Spotlight Delaware’s nonprofit newsroom also won three first-place awards in the Delaware Press Association’s 2026 Communications Contest, marking an especially rewarding spring for the startup that launched just over two years ago.
“These awards confirm something that more and more people in Delaware already know – that Spotlight Delaware is seen as a must-read source of free, fair local news,” said Spotlight’s founder, CEO and Publisher Allison Taylor Levine.
The MDDC contest judges also named Spotlight reporter Nick Stonesifer as “Rookie of the Year,” for his “well-researched, well-written and important work.” The judges praised Stonesifer’s impressive hand with Freedom of Information Act requests, as well as his “focused work ethic.”
“He was holding institutions and their leadership accountable,” the judges said. “The health care stories were looking out for segments of his communities that often don’t have a voice, or aren’t heard. And the story about the suicide rate among farmers was an eye-opener.
“He has a bright future in the business.”
Spotlight Editor-in-Chief Jacob Owens agreed. “Nick has become a backbone for editorial coverage in our newsroom, as his ability to fact-find and create story ideas independently has led to coverage not otherwise being provided in the state and not being generated by an editor,” Owens said.
In total, Spotlight’s entire staff earned awards in the MDDC or DPA contests.
In particular, MDDC judges also awarded former Spotlight reporter José Ignacio Castañeda Perez the second-place prize in a new category, the A-Mark Prize for Investigative Journalism.
Judges praised his work on a series of articles that “blends FOIA information with consistent follow-up reporting on how local police departments responded to ICE outreach, placing these proposed partnerships in the context of the broader national and state debate over whether they should be encouraged or even allowed.”
Other MDDC Division D awards included:
In the Delaware Press Association contest, three Spotlight reporters won first-place awards for coverage in specialty categories:
Other DPA prizes included:
For more information, reach out to Spotlight Delaware COO Matt Sullivan at msullivan@spotlightdelaware.org.
ABOUT SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE
Spotlight Delaware is on a mission to engage, empower and connect Delawareans with local news and information. We envision a Delaware where all neighbors have access to the local news and information they need to thrive on a daily basis, participate in local democracy and engage with their communities. Sign up for our free newsletter at spotlightdelaware.org/newsletters, and donate at spotlightdelaware.org/support.
The post Spotlight Delaware named News Organization of the Year for 2025 appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Buying a board from these guys. I have owned one other Onewheel and never heard of it this happening. I am literally just asking because I am curious to know Since i am completely switching brands.
Oversight panel Democrats hold event at ‘the scene of the crime’ in Florida and ask Trump to not pardon Maxwell
Democrats tore into government’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein abuse scandal on Tuesday – revealing new details of the scale of his international sex trafficking ring, and warning Donald Trump not to grant a presidential pardon to the late sex offender’s sidekick Ghislaine Maxwell.
Several survivors of Epstein’s abuse also gave tearful testimony at a congressional field hearing in Florida of their experiences as teenagers in s orbit. Some spoke of being retraumatized after they were “outed” by the justice department’s failure to redact their names from the so-called Epstein files.
Continue reading...A larger COLA would boost monthly checks for retirees, but also strain Social Security's already depleted trust funds.
Commentary: Between Android 17 and the new Googlebooks, Gemini is the new Google.
IDAHO FALLS, Idaho, May 12, 2026 — Oklo Inc., an advanced nuclear technology company, today announced a Strategic Partnership Project (SPP) with Battelle Energy Alliance (BEA), the management and operating contractor for Idaho National Laboratory (INL), to use AI technologies to accelerate advanced reactor and fuel-system design work.
Strategic Partnership Project to apply INL’s Prometheus AI platform to accelerate reactor and fuel-system design workflows in support of the federal government’s Genesis Mission, including work related to Oklo’s Pluto reactor.
The National Nuclear Security Administration SPP, which gives partners access to specialized national-lab expertise and facilities, aims to bolster conceptual design work for an Oklo reactor system through the use of AI-enabled engineering workflows, modeling, simulation, and technical documentation. Under the project, Oklo and INL will integrate the Prometheus AI platform with Oklo’s Multiphysics design and analysis infrastructure to streamline engineering workflows and support development of Pluto, Oklo’s reactor system designed to use plutonium-bearing fuels. The Pluto reactor is a part of DOE’s Reactor Pilot Program.
“This work brings together advanced reactor design, AI-enabled engineering tools, and INL’s deep technical expertise,” said Jacob DeWitte, co-founder and CEO of Oklo. “Applying AI to reactor design workflows can accelerate development, improve engineering efficiency, and support progress on advanced systems, including on Oklo’s Pluto reactor.”
The project scope includes the development and application of technical guidance on model setup, benchmarking and validation strategies, and AI agents to accelerate existing workflows.
“Collaborations like this are critical for driving innovation in advanced nuclear systems,” said Rian Bahran, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Reactors at the U.S. Department of Energy. “By leveraging AI-enabled technologies, national laboratory expertise, and industry collaboration, we are accelerating the development of next-generation reactors to support our nation’s energy goals.”
Project tasks include enabling an agent to interact with Oklo’s existing multiphysics workflows, execute and monitor design pipelines, process results, and generate compliant documentation, all while keeping a human operator in the loop for oversight, review, and decision-making.
This work will progress the Genesis Mission, a national initiative to unleash a new age of AI-accelerated innovation and discovery, and reflects Oklo’s broader focus on advancing both reactor design capabilities and fuel-related work through collaboration with leading national laboratory partners.
About Idaho National Laboratory
Battelle Energy Alliance manages INL for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy. INL is the nation’s center for nuclear energy research and development, and also performs research in each of DOE’s strategic goal areas: energy, national security, science and the environment.
About Oklo Inc.
Oklo Inc. is developing fast fission power plants to deliver clean, reliable, affordable energy at global scale; establishing a domestic supply chain for critical isotopes; and advancing nuclear fuel recycling to convert used nuclear fuel into clean energy. Oklo was the first to receive a site use permit from the U.S. Department of Energy for a commercial advanced fission plant, was awarded fuel from Idaho National Laboratory, and submitted the first custom combined license application for an advanced reactor to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Oklo is also developing advanced fuel recycling technologies in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. National Laboratories.
Source: Oklo
The post Oklo and Idaho National Laboratory to Employ AI-Enabled Reactor Design for Advanced Nuclear Systems appeared first on HPCwire.
Hi I’ve looked around the Reddit but couldn’t find the info I’m looking for.
Today I heard and felt Haptic Buzz (I think ?) at very low speed on my XR. Both times I was pushing a bit on the nose, going up/down a bumpy sidewalk. Can’t remember if it was when starting from a complete stop or just slowing down as I approached the bump.
Battery at around 70%, no strong wind, around 80kg rider, low PSI tire.
1/ is it normal ? Maybe I’m getting too confident and pushing the nose too hard and riding on places I used to avoid ? Bought the board about 2 month ago. Went from 1k8 miles to 2k1, I’m using it daily to commute to work.
2/ my worst nightmare would be the battery getting old. I’ve been told it could go to 5k with no problem. Previous owner seemed to be an honest dude, passionate about OW, who took great care of the board.
3/ can I do anything to get more info about board health ? If it’s a skill issue, how can I improve ?
Thx 🙏
SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 12, 2026 — Applied Materials, Inc. has announced that Arizona State University (ASU), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and Stanford University will join the company’s EPIC Center in Silicon Valley as inaugural research partners. Through close collaboration with Applied’s scientists and engineers, university teams will engage in high-velocity research programs across advanced materials, novel process and device technologies, and chip architecture inflections – leveraging the synergy of academia and industry to accelerate energy-efficient innovations for next-generation AI chips.
“The EPIC Center is designed to bring together the best minds from industry and academia in a high-velocity, manufacturing-relevant environment to dramatically accelerate the development and commercialization of next-generation semiconductor technologies that are foundational to AI computing,” said Gary Dickerson, President and CEO of Applied Materials. “Welcoming ASU, RPI and Stanford as research partners at EPIC strengthens the U.S. lab-to-fab innovation pipeline and creates a powerful platform for developing future semiconductor talent.”
Research universities, which produce valuable ideas for future semiconductor materials and processes, benefit dramatically from access to leading-edge equipment and the ability to test whether new materials can be successfully integrated with others used by leading global manufacturers. Applied’s EPIC Center offers university researchers a rare opportunity to pursue manufacturing-relevant research in an industry-scale environment, enabling rapid iteration, faster validation, and smoother transition from discovery to deployment. Working alongside Applied scientists and engineers, academic teams gain access to cutting-edge equipment and process integration that can shave years off the traditional new materials development cycle. Building on decades of collaboration with top engineering schools, these new partnerships aim to advance high-velocity innovation while equipping students with the practical experience and systems-level perspective needed to strengthen the future semiconductor workforce.
“Applied Materials has a long history of working closely with the world’s top universities, and we are excited to take our collaborations to the next level with the EPIC Center,” said Dr. Prabu Raja, President of the Semiconductor Products Group at Applied Materials. “We are thrilled to have ASU, RPI and Stanford as inaugural research partners at EPIC, and we look forward to bringing the best of industry and academia together in a shared environment to accelerate the discovery and commercialization of technology breakthroughs for the semiconductor industry.”
“With the largest engineering school in the country, ASU is driven by our commitment to be of service to industry and to create partnerships that accelerate defining breakthroughs for future semiconductor technology,” said Arizona State University President Michael Crow. “We value our strong working relationship with Applied Materials and are excited to be among its inaugural university research partners of EPIC Center. Being a part of a high-velocity, high-creativity environment with the brightest minds in the industry builds upon the work we do with Applied Materials in our shared Materials-to-Fab Center at ASU, creating a seamless network for driving semiconductor excellence in America.”
“The EPIC Center gives our students and researchers the opportunity to move beyond traditional academic research and contribute directly to industry-scale innovation,” said Martin Schmidt, President of RPI. “Collaborating with Applied Materials and its ecosystem partners enables faster lab-to-fab breakthroughs in semiconductor materials, devices, and 3D integration, while preparing students with hands-on, manufacturing-relevant experience to contribute immediately and lead future advances in the industry. This builds upon our long history of working with many industry partners across the U.S. to drive materials development for the semiconductor industry.”
“The explosive growth of AI is pushing semiconductor technology researchers to discover new materials and invent new devices, demanding faster cycles of innovation and closer collaboration across the ecosystem,” said H.S. Philip Wong, Willard R. and Inez Kerr Bell Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University and founding faculty co-director of the Stanford SystemX Alliance. “The EPIC Center enables our students and researchers to engage directly with industry-scale tools and experts, accelerating discovery while gaining the industry-relevant experience needed to lead future advances in semiconductor manufacturing.”
Applied’s new EPIC (Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization) Center in Silicon Valley represents the largest-ever U.S. investment in advanced semiconductor equipment R&D. The center is designed from the ground up to dramatically reduce the time it takes to commercialize breakthrough technologies from early-stage research to full-scale manufacturing. The facility is on track to become operational in 2026.
More from HPCwire: Applied Materials and TSMC Partner at the EPIC Center to Accelerate AI Scaling
About Applied Materials
Applied Materials, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMAT) is the leader in materials engineering solutions that are at the foundation of virtually every new semiconductor and advanced display in the world. The technology we create is essential to advancing AI and accelerating the commercialization of next-generation chips. At Applied, we push the boundaries of science and engineering to deliver material innovation that changes the world. Learn more at www.appliedmaterials.com.
Source: Applied Materials
The post Applied Materials Announces ASU, RPI and Stanford to Join EPIC Center appeared first on HPCwire.
There are rumors of a foldable iPhone, but new designs aren't on most people's list of upgrade must-haves.
The EU plans to target "addictive design" features on TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms, including endless scrolling, autoplay, push notifications, and recommendation loops that can steer children toward harmful content. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said new regulation could arrive later this year, alongside an EU age-verification app meant to make child-safety rules easier to enforce. CNBC reports: "We are taking action against TikTok and its addictive design -- endless scrolling, autoplay, and push notifications. The same applies to Meta, because we believe Instagram and Facebook are failing to enforce their own minimum age of 13," Von der Leyen said. "We are investigating platforms that allow children to go down 'rabbit holes' of harmful content -- such as videos that promote eating disorders or self-harm," she added. The EU's executive arm has also developed its own age verification app, which has the "highest privacy standards in the world," according to Von der Leyen. Member states will soon be able to integrate it into their digital wallets, and it can easily be enforced by online platforms. "No more excuses -- the technology for age-verification is available," the EU chief said. The EU Commission could have a legal proposal prepared as soon as the summer, as it awaits the advice and findings of its 'Special Panel of experts on Child Safety Online.'
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Tepid cabinet support and a blunted No 10 operation are making it harder for the prime minister to face down critics
The last time Keir Starmer faced a threat to his leadership, his core team assembled in the cabinet room and persuaded ministers to fire off a succession of supportive tweets in an attempt to keep him in office. This time has been different.
As the number of MPs calling for the prime minister to resign has grown over the last 48 hours, much of the cabinet has remained quiet.
Continue reading...President posted more than 50 times in three hours, attacking on Obama, NY Times and supreme court
Donald Trump unleashed a late-night social media tirade against his political enemies, attacking predecessors including Barack Obama with false accusations and amplifying calls for his Democratic rivals to be prosecuted.
Just hours before a high-stakes trip to China for talks with Xi Jinping, the US president posted more than 50 times in a three-hour spree from Monday evening into the early hours of Tuesday. Posts included doctored images of himself on the $100 bill and demands that political opponents be arrested.
Continue reading...Albrecht Weinberg spent years teaching students about Nazi atrocities after being imprisoned at Auschwitz and Belsen
Albrecht Weinberg, who survived a series of Nazi concentration and death camps and lost most of his family in the Holocaust before returning to Germany in his 80s, has died.
Weinberg died in Leer, north-western Germany, weeks after his 101st birthday and the premiere of a film about his life, Es Ist Immer in Meinem Kopf (It Is Always in My Head).
Continue reading...SAN FRANCISCO, May 12, 2026 — Rescale today announced the launch of agentic digital engineering alongside significant platform advances in AI physics and compute economics, giving engineering and R&D organizations across aerospace, automotive, energy, life sciences, defense, semiconductor, and manufacturing a more complete environment for AI-first product development.
Engineering organizations face mounting pressure to bring better products to market faster, yet most R&D teams still operate with simulation, data, and AI tools that exist in disconnected silos. Rescale’s release addresses this gap directly, unifying those capabilities in a single platform built for the shift to AI-first engineering.
Rescale’s agentic digital engineering capabilities introduce simulation-native AI agents that automate critical workflows across the product development lifecycle, including input validation, troubleshooting, report generation, and hardware selection. Engineers maintain human-in-the-loop control while deploying prebuilt agents through an agent library, agent deployment framework, and workflow builder. Organizations deploying agentic digital engineering report significant reductions in simulation errors and elimination of wasted compute, with engineers spending less time on manual setup and troubleshooting across product development cycles.
Building on its early lead in AI-based simulation, Rescale has expanded its AI physics operating system into a complete end-to-end environment for turning simulation data into production-ready surrogate models. The platform now provides a unified path from data structuring through model training, validation, and deployment. By complementing traditional solvers with near real-time AI predictions trained on the customer’s own simulation data, engineering teams can explore an exponentially larger design space, evaluating thousands of potential iterations rather than being limited to a few dozen manual studies.
Surrogate models can also be deployed directly into third-party design tools, bringing AI-accelerated predictions into the environments engineers already use, including production manufacturing settings. Organizations using these enhanced capabilities have achieved a 1,000x increase in simulation speed and a 90% reduction in full-stack simulation costs, compressing studies that previously took months into days.
New compute economics capabilities give engineering and IT leaders granular controls to balance speed, throughput, and cost. Curated hardware configurations optimized for cost-performance, paired with policy controls, reduce computing spend and increase simulation utilization across teams, eliminating time spent on manual hardware benchmarking.
Daikin Industries, one of the world’s largest and most innovative HVAC and industrial manufacturers, is building toward an AI-first R&D ecosystem on the Rescale platform. After deploying Rescale for cloud CAE and data intelligence across R&D sites, Daikin significantly reduced manual simulation data-management efforts and is now advancing toward broader agentic digital engineering capabilities across its global R&D organization.
“We have a vision for what AI-driven CAE engineering excellence looks like as we advance our global R&D capabilities. What excites us about this moment is how directly Rescale’s new capabilities align with where we are headed. We are already seeing productivity gains today, with a roadmap that matches our ambition for what comes next,” said Satoru Takanezawa, Senior Engineer and Group Leader, Digital Engineering Group, Technology and Innovation Center, Daikin Industries.
“Engineering teams have spent decades building simulation expertise, but that knowledge has been trapped in disconnected tools, siloed data, and manual processes,” said Joris Poort, CEO of Rescale. “Today we are giving those teams a platform to turn their institutional knowledge into compounding intelligence through agentic digital engineering. Rescale’s platform integrates computational engineering, data intelligence, and AI into a single environment where every workflow builds on the last, continuously turning R&D expertise into organizational intelligence. This is just the beginning of what AI-first engineering can deliver, and we are just getting started.”
Rescale’s latest platform expansion is available now. For more information, visit https://rescale.com/lp/spring-26-release.
About Rescale
Rescale is the digital engineering platform built for the AI era. The Rescale platform integrates intelligent HPC, advanced modeling and simulation, agentic digital engineering, and AI physics to create compounding value that accelerates product development and empowers digital transformation. The Rescale platform delivers the world’s largest network of engineering and R&D applications, intelligent automation, and computing infrastructure to enterprises across aerospace, automotive, energy, life sciences, semiconductor, manufacturing, and the public sector. Rescale is backed by leading investors such as NVIDIA, Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Samsung, Hitachi, University of Michigan, and others. Rescale has a global customer base that includes Applied Materials, General Motors Motorsports, Samsung, SLB, and the U.S. Department of Defense. For more information, visit https://rescale.com.
Source: Rescale
The post Rescale Introduces Agentic Digital Engineering to Accelerate AI-First Product Development appeared first on HPCwire.
If current precarious ceasefire between US and Iran ends, Emirates are more likely to be targeted by Tehran
The risk of some Gulf states becoming embroiled in a direct war with Iran has risen after it was reported the United Arab Emirates had secretly launched a major attack on Iran during the conflict.
In addition, Kuwait has said that at least four members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had been captured trying to carry out “terrorist attacks” on the Kuwaiti-owned Bubiyan Island, the largest island in the Kuwaiti coastal chain.
Continue reading...Bond yields soar and pound falls against dollar as investors brace for potential Labour leadership change
Long-term UK borrowing costs soared to the highest level in almost three decades on Tuesday as fears about a change of Labour leadership triggered investor jitters and warnings of further bond market turmoil.
With investors worried about potential changes to Labour’s tax and spending plans, the yield – in effect the interest rate – on 30-year government bonds, or gilts, hit a high on Tuesday of 5.81%, a rise of 14 basis points and the highest since 1998.
Continue reading...Jamie Dimon says US banking giant could rethink Canary Wharf tower if a future Labour leader targets lenders
The boss of JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon, has warned he could scrap plans to build a new £3bn UK headquarters in London if Keir Starmer is replaced by a new Labour prime minister who is hostile to banks.
JP Morgan revealed plans last November to build the tower in Canary Wharf, hours after lenders were spared tax hikes in Rachel Reeves’s autumn budget following strong lobbying by the banking sector.
Continue reading...Anil Kochhar hopes textile graduates of North Carolina State can leave with ‘greater freedom to pursue goals’
Anil Kochhar, a North Carolina State University donor, gave graduates of the school’s Wilson College of Textiles a lot more than just words of wisdom when he delivered their keynote commencement address recently.
The Indian American entrepreneur also announced that he would pay off any student loans taken out by the college’s graduating pupils during their senior year.
Continue reading...Despite a ceasefire that has been in effect for more than a month, the cost of the U.S. war with Iran keeps spiking higher, a senior Pentagon official said on Tuesday.
Two weeks ago, the Pentagon claimed the war had cost $25 billion, a figure that analysts said was likely a gross undercount. In testimony before the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, the Department of War’s comptroller, Jay Hurst, said the cost of the war has risen “closer” to $29 billion because of the “repair and replacement of equipment” and “general operational costs” of keeping troops in the Middle East.
Experts also expressed skepticism at this revised count.
“The costs of this war are still growing, and the Pentagon is still not being straight with taxpayers or lawmakers about the numbers. If the numbers being thrown around in committee hearings were complete, why would the Pentagon continue withholding a comprehensive, itemized cost assessment from Congress?” said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for an end to wasteful spending. “Taxpayers deserve answers, and lawmakers need them in order to craft a responsible budget.”
“If they can’t defend the nation with a trillion dollars, they’re doing it wrong.”
Hurst, War Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are on Capitol Hill to discuss the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion budget request for 2027 before House and Senate appropriations subcommittees on Tuesday. Hegseth said the massive sum — the largest request in history — “reflects the urgency of the moment” and would address both the “deferment of long-standing problems as well as position our forces for the current and future fight.”
Murphy called the dramatic 45 percent increase a negotiating tactic. “They’re seeking $350 billion through reconciliation and $1.15 trillion in the base budget, but they know reconciliation is a long shot. It’s all about trying to make a $1.15 trillion Pentagon budget seem reasonable in comparison,” said Murphy. “But there’s nothing reasonable about it. It’s a roughly $150 billion increase over last year.”
Americans, Murphy said, deserve an explanation for the runaway military budget. “If they can’t defend the nation with a trillion dollars, they’re doing it wrong.”
President Donald Trump said Monday that the ceasefire with Iran — which went into effect on April 8 — is “on life support” after Iran’s response to the latest U.S. peace proposal. Reuters, citing Iranian state media, reported that Iran’s proposal included war reparations from the United States, lifting sanctions on Tehran, and recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. Trump rejected Iran’s reply as “totally unacceptable” and called it a “piece of garbage.”
Hegseth said the Pentagon was prepared to reignite hostilities with Iran. “We have a plan to escalate, if necessary; we have a plan to retrograde if necessary. We have a plan to shift assets,” the secretary testified, declining to say more in the public hearing.
An analysis by The Intercept found that Trump has embroiled the U.S. in more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and wars during his five-plus years in the White House. The expenses of this wide-ranging war on the world are rising across the globe.
The Intercept was, for example, the first outlet to reveal that the U.S. military’s intervention in Venezuela and attacks on boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific — Operations Absolute Resolve and Operation Southern Spear, respectively — have already cost taxpayers at least $4.7 billion, according to an exceptionally cautious estimate from Brown University’s Costs of War Project.
The ultimate price tag of Americas wars in Latin America will further balloon in the decades ahead, saddling future Americans with soaring costs, according to the report. “War is financed by debt, adding interest costs to the public budget,” wrote authors Hanna Homestead, a research analyst with the National Priorities Project, and Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a nonpartisan research group. “Furthermore, the federal government undertakes an obligation to pay veterans benefits for decades into the future.”
Recently, Linda Bilmes, a former assistant secretary and chief financial officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce and currently a public policy professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, told The Intercept that the already-excessive expense of the Iran war would likely be pushed into the trillions of dollars by such long-term costs like veterans benefits and interest on the debt to pay for the war.
The post Hegseth Asks for More Money as Iran War Costs Skyrocket appeared first on The Intercept.
REDWOOD CITY, Calif., May 12, 2026 — MinIO today announced MemKV, a context memory store that delivers microsecond context retrieval at petabyte scale for agentic AI inference workloads. MemKV joins AIStor as the second pillar of MinIO’s product portfolio, extending the company’s data foundation, which began with AIStor, into the memory tier where inference runs. The new MinIO MemKV product delivers persistent, shared context across GPU clusters at a scale that existing memory and storage tiers cannot.
As AI moves from answering simple questions to performing complex, multi-step tasks, the underlying systems must remember what they have already done. That memory is called context, and today it is routinely lost because the infrastructure closest to the GPU cannot hold enough of it. When context is lost, the GPU repeats work it has already completed. The result is a recompute tax: more time, more compute, more energy, and a higher cost for work the system has already completed.
Eliminate Context Loss. Maximize Token Throughput.
MemKV dramatically reduces the recompute tax for AI inference workloads. On representative benchmarks, MemKV delivered a substantial improvement in time-to-first-token at production concurrency. Furthermore, for a typical enterprise deployment with 128 GPUs and a 128K-token context length, MemKV increased GPU utilization from ~50% to over 90%, resulting in $2 million in annual compute savings.
“The industry has been papering over context loss for years because at small scale you may be able to absorb the recompute tax and move on. At the GPU density hyperscalers and neoclouds are building toward, that is no longer true. A GPU recomputing context it has already generated is burning power without return, and at a thousand GPUs that is not inefficiency, it is structural drag,” said AB Periasamy, co-founder and CEO, MinIO. “Yield economics at this scale demand something purpose-built for the inference data path. MemKV was designed for exactly this.”
Breaking the Speed-Scale Tradeoff Holding Agentic AI Back
Until now, AI infrastructure has forced a choice: high-speed memory tiers like GPU HBM and DRAM that deliver microsecond access but quickly hit capacity limits, or general-purpose storage systems that scale but introduce millisecond-level latency. Neither supports the long-context reasoning that agentic AI demands.
MemKV breaks that tradeoff. Designed to run on NVIDIA BlueField-4 STX architecture and with native support for NVIDIA Dynamo and NVIDIA NIXL. MemKV gives enterprises, cloud providers, and AI platforms a shared memory tier that combines microsecond responsiveness with petabyte-scale capacity. For the first time, an entire GPU cluster can access a common pool of context at speeds that keep pace with inference, rather than waiting on storage.
Purpose-Built for Inference at Scale
Designed exclusively for AI inference and built from the ground up for the G3.5 layer of the GPU memory hierarchy, MemKV delivers petabytes of shared context memory at SSD economics, replacing the cost and capacity constraints of GPU HBM and DRAM with a tier that scales independently of the compute cluster.
Unlike approaches that retrofit file-storage architectures into the inference data path. Data moves directly from NVMe to the AI data path via end-to-end RDMA transport, with no HTTP overhead, no file system translation, and no storage servers between the GPU and its context.
“The AI conversation has moved from raw model performance to token economics and the cost of operating AI at scale,” said Don Gentile, Analyst at HyperFRAME Research. “That is driving new focus on how systems retain and share context during inference. MinIO’s MemKV addresses a costly inefficiency: rerunning prior calculations when context cannot be shared across GPUs. Eliminating that friction improves utilization and lowers the cost of enterprise AI.”
The architecture incorporates how GPUs actually consume data at inference time:
Availability
MinIO MemKV is available today. Click here for access.
About MinIO
MinIO is the data foundation for enterprise AI and analytics. Built for exascale performance and limitless scale, AIStor and MemKV cover every layer of the AI data stack from Objects to Tables to inference context, spanning the edge, core, and cloud. With widespread adoption across the Fortune 100 and 500, MinIO is redefining how organizations and government agencies store, manage, and mobilize their data in the AI era. MinIO is backed by Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures, Dell Technologies, General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Intel Capital, Softbank Vision Fund 2, and others.
Source: MinIO
The post MinIO Announces MemKV, Purpose-Built Context Memory Store for AI Inference appeared first on HPCwire.
Despite a fifth of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer's fellow Labour Party lawmakers calling on him to step down, he says he'll "get on with governing."
The overhaul -- including the biggest Google Maps update in a decade -- brings a full UI refresh and new Gemini capabilities to more than 250 million vehicles.
Google taps even further into AI with some truly useful new features on deck. Here's the latest from The Android Show.
The latest Android update gives Gemini more control over your apps and tasks. It could be the start of a wider shift in how we use our phones.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the $1.5 trillion the Pentagon is seeking is "admittedly a historic budget."
While Apple's MacBook Neo might have shocked the budget PC market, Googlebooks could take a bite out of the premium laptop competition.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: EBay on Tuesday rejected a $56 billion takeover bid from the much smaller GameStop over financing doubts, calling the proposal "neither credible nor attractive." EBay, which has roughly four times GameStop's market value, also underscored that its turnaround efforts under CEO Jamie Iannone have boosted growth, with its stock returning 201% since Iannone took the position six years ago. "We have concluded that your proposal is neither credible nor attractive," eBay Chairman Paul Pressler said in a statement. "eBay's Board is confident the company, under its current management team, is well-positioned to continue to drive sustainable growth." He also pointed to concerns with GameStop's bid, including its financing, its impact on eBay's long-term growth and the leadership structure of a potentially combined company. Last week, GameStop's CEO Ryan Cohen delivered one of the most memorable CNBC interviews in recent memory... initially disinterested, then increasingly hostile, with little eye contact, few real answers to basic questions, and repeated robotic deflections to "check the website." It's worth a watch if you have a few extra minutes.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The ‘meme stock’ company is remembered for Reddit traders sending its share price into orbit but its move on the auction site looks less likely to take off
“Neither credible nor attractive.” No, not a line from a junior minister’s resignation letter on Tuesday. It was eBay’s succinct appraisal of the bizarre $55.5bn (£41bn) takeover offer from video games retailer GameStop, an affair that offers light distraction from the sight of UK 10-year gilt yields at 5%-plus.
To recap: GameStop is the “meme stock” company that became famous a few years ago when amateur traders on a Reddit forum piled in furiously in an attempt to burn the short-sellers who were betting on the struggling retailer’s demise. Surprisingly, the Redditers succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The squeeze drove up GameStop’s share price hundredfold, inflicting hell on serious hedge funds and making the company’s chief executive, Ryan Cohen, an anti-establishment hero.
Continue reading...These are the best laptops my colleagues and I have tested and reviewed in recent months, from budget models to high-powered gaming systems and everything in between.
Candidates jostle to represent the second congressional district, and a Republican’s Senate seat looks ripe to flip
Nebraska Democrats are bullish about Republican losses in the right-leaning Plains state – but their prospects depend on today’s Democratic primaries, which include accusations of planted candidates and inadvertently depriving Democrats of power.
A crowded Democratic primary in the state’s second congressional district, referred to as its “blue dot”, has focused around concerns that if a state senator wins, the Republican governor will replace him with a Republican who would help overturn Nebraska’s divided electoral college vote system.
Continue reading...Christian Schmidt, who is resigning post, says multi-ethnic nation may fall apart amid pressure from US and Russia
The UN high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina has warned about the possible destruction of the multi-ethnic state after he was forced to resign in a policy clash with the US, seemingly complicated by the commercial interests of a firm linked to Donald Trump Jr that is seeking to make investments in the region.
The German Christian Democrat politician Christian Schmidt spoke at a scheduled meeting with the UN security council in New York on Tuesday, where he warned about the fragility of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He has made clear he believes his post should be maintained, saying he will stay on until his successor is appointed.
Continue reading...A Texas couple is filing a lawsuit accusing the AI company of guiding their teenage son in using drugs, resulting in a fatal overdose.
The Senate has confirmed Kevin Warsh to the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors, a crucial step in President Trump's push to make Warsh the central bank's leader, replacing Jerome Powell.
The inquiry came after the Guardian revealed Israel used company technology to support mass surveillance of Palestinian phone calls
The head of Microsoft’s Israeli subsidiary will step down in the wake of an inquiry that has scrutinised its business dealings with the Israeli military.
Microsoft ordered the inquiry last year in response to a Guardian investigation revealing the military had used the company’s technology to operate a powerful surveillance system that collected Palestinian civilian phone calls on a mass scale.
Continue reading...University of Toronto researchers say cellphone data shows a major drop not only in Canadian tourists visiting the U.S., "but also in business-related travel."
The automaker's new Ford Energy unit says it will build shipping-container-sized batteries for utilities, data centers and large industry customers in the US.
The operator of the Dali, a container ship that lost power and slammed into Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge in 2024, killing six people, is facing federal charges.
The FCC has softened its ban on foreign-made consumer routers, allowing vendors to keep issuing broader software and firmware updates for devices already in use in the U.S. through at least January 2029. Dark Reading reports: Under the original FCC ruling, foreign manufacturers were permitted to provide only limited maintenance and security patches to US customers through March 2027. In a public note (PDF) on May 8, the FCC extended that deadline to at least January 2029 and also expanded the scope of permissible updates. The FCC will now allow foreign manufacturers to provide not just minor security fixes and changes, but also more major software and firmware updates that could affect router functionality, which previously required additional FCC review. The agency described the revisions as intended to ensure the continued safety of already deployed foreign-made consumer routers in the US. "The FCC likely issued this revision in response to the operational realities of network security and the slow pace of equipment replacement," says Jason Soroko, senior fellow at Sectigo. "Replacing millions of embedded devices across national infrastructure requires immense time and capital, and abandoning existing systems to a completely unpatched state would create an immediate vulnerability." "This waiver significantly alleviates the most pressing fears tied to the initial ban by preventing a sudden and dangerous security vacuum," added Soroko.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
James Shirah struck groomsman Terry Taylor Jr with SUV after they had an argument at wedding afterparty in 2024
A man from Michigan has been ordered to spend at least 30 years imprisoned after killing his own groomsman on his wedding day.
James Shirah, 24, from Flint, was sentenced on Monday in Genesee county court for the death of his best friend, Terry Taylor Jr, who he ran over with a sport-utility vehicle during an argument on 30 August 2024.
Continue reading...The Justice Department defended itself after the Wall Street Journal revealed it has received subpoenas in connection with a leak investigation.
Appointment confirmed by plenary vote in Senedd after party ended 100 years of Labour rule in last week’s election
Rhun ap Iorwerth has been voted first minister of Wales after Plaid Cymru’s Senedd electoral victory ended 100 years of Labour hegemony and held off Reform UK.
Ap Iorwerth was confirmed after a plenary vote on Tuesday with the support of the 43 members of his party in the Senedd and the two Greens, while Welsh Labour and the sole Liberal Democrat in the Siambr, the debating chamber, abstained.
Continue reading...At least one person killed as Moscow launches drone strikes on energy facilities and apartments
European culture editor
It was meant to be the crowning moment of a seemingly never-ending success story: the 70th anniversary of the world’s biggest and ever-expanding live music event, held in a city steeped in history both dramatic and musical.
Continue reading...Trump’s treatment of US allies has weakened his negotiating position with Xi Expert comment jon.wallace
The president has alienated partners that once acted as force multipliers. But there are still opportunities to create a united front on common points of tension with Beijing.
President Donald Trump travels to Beijing this week with the US’s alliance structure under enormous strain. Washington has fewer partners at its side, and a weaker hand to play.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Alone, the US has leverage against Beijing, through controlling access to its advanced chips, sanctions on Chinese purchases of Iranian oil, and a consumer market Beijing can’t ignore.
But Washington’s allies and partners provided strength that China has struggled to compete with – acting as force multipliers, aligning with the US on shared vulnerabilities.
The Trump administration’s dismissal of such countries has created justified resentment. Many of America’s closest partners, buffeted by threats to NATO and tariffs, have concluded that US commitment may be a relic of the past. That is leading them to forge independent approaches to China, beginning with commercial ties.
Beijing today benefits from greater economic connectivity with US partners and allies, fewer multilateral structures to bind its behaviour, and little political will on either side of the Atlantic to advance common projects.
Yes, allied cohesion on China has always been aspirational, limited by different risk perceptions and economic pressures. But US and allied approaches have increasingly diverged since January 2025. And the current situation weakens the US negotiating position, even on President Trump’s ‘America First’ terms.
Greater alignment by the US with its traditional partners on China policy – covering issues like critical minerals, semiconductors, synthetic drugs and beyond – is still possible and of benefit to both Washington and allied capitals. It shouldn’t be cast aside.
Today, the floor has fallen out of the US alliance structure, as relations with partners and allies has deteriorated.
The US has retreated from multilateral organizations, questioned the role of NATO, divided the G7 over tariffs, further hollowed out the WTO, launched UN-alternative structures like the Board of Peace, and gone to war with Iran.
This has pushed allies to chart independent paths, leaving China to take advantage. While the US spent the winter focused on Venezuela, Greenland and Iran, Beijing focused on commercial diplomacy.
In January, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung announced a ‘full scale restoration of ties’ between Seoul and Beijing, backed by new agreements on economic and trade cooperation, science and technology and the digital economy.
Two weeks later, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a comprehensive ‘strategic partnership’ with Beijing covering energy, agriculture, and Chinese electric vehicles, amounting to CAD$3 billion in new export orders for Canada.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s subsequent visit netted £2.2 billion in export deals and around £2.3 billion in market access.
In February, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, though citing ‘difficult issues’ in trade relations, agreed to strengthen Germany’s ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’ with Beijing through 17 bilateral cooperation agreements.
Trump will also seek bilateral deals – on products like American soybeans and Boeing aircraft, on top of the NVIDIA chips he recently approved for sale to China, despite national security concerns.
Benefits are therefore rapidly accruing to Beijing. If the US and its traditional allies cannot develop a collective bargaining strategy, grouping their economies along similar red lines, China will only extend its run.
The floor of the US alliance structure cannot be rebuilt overnight, and its foundations were always imperfect. But two significant agreements indicate the Trump administration has realized that – in discrete instances – Trump’s ‘I alone can fix it’ instincts don’t work.
Pax Silica, launched by the US in December 2025, aims to shore up silicon supply chains for semiconductor manufacturing and AI development. With 14 partners and counting, the initiative sees ‘allies and trusted partners’ like Australia, Finland, Greece, Japan, Norway, South Korea, and the UK align to reduce dependency on critical technology from China. Its viability will take time to evaluate, but this novel grouping addresses a common concern, and will only become more effective as it expands.
Meanwhile, to break dependencies on China’s critical minerals, the US launched the new Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement (FORGE), alongside co-chair Japan. They and 52 other partners now belong to a preferential trade-and-investment zone for critical minerals, guaranteeing price floors.
Like Pax Silica, it’s still early days. And shifting White House attention risks limiting full implementation. But both are encouraging datapoints that the Trump administration is slowly realizing that American unilateralism undercuts American power in certain instances.
Washington, European capitals, and Indo-Pacific allies should build on such initiatives, identifying areas where working with allies is clearly to the advantage of all.
This can take a few forms. First, groupings like Pax Silica and FORGE should be bolstered by renewed efforts to bring in new country signatories and investments. Strengthening these groups will both improve members’ hands with Xi and promise material benefits to all its participants.
Laurel and Max Yoeli, Senior Research Fellow, discuss the coming summit from the US perspective.
Establishing or reviving other groupings, for instance on synthetic drug interdiction, is another obvious area for close US cooperation with allies. Fentanyl is a continuing source of American overdose deaths, with the US claiming that many of the chemicals used in its production originate in China.
But the Trump administration chose not to extend US leadership of a nearly 160 country coalition to counter production and distribution of illicit substances.
Revitalizing this network should be a priority. Both Biden and Trump hammered Xi on fentanyl, and US overdose deaths have fallen since 2023, possibly due in part to US diplomacy. But without a wider grouping of concerned partners, success may be limited or short-lived.
It is also crucial that trade talks by the US, Canada and Mexico starting in July are a success and deliver real constraints on China’s investments in North American manufacturing. Allowing internal divisions to prevent a protective arrangement would be an own goal and play into China’s strategy.
Finally, US allies and partners must identify shared red lines for bilateral cooperation with China that will be upheld independent of Washington. Most countries have national China strategies, and all have identified red lines for bilateral cooperation. But internal limits are not the same as a shared approach.
The logic of greater allied alignment remains sound even where US commitment is uncertain. If allies can establish common approaches on China policy in other areas, it may manage Washington’s frustration with their hedging.
And finding agreement may also prove useful for the future: the US may become more cooperative on some issues after President Trump leaves office. And the US’s structural rivalry with China looks likely to endure through successive administrations for some time to come.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, May 12, 2026 — Photonic Inc., a global leader in distributed quantum computing, today announced the final close of over $200 million USD ($275 million CAD) in investment, giving the company a $2B USD ($2.7 billion CAD) post-money valuation. The round, led by Planet First Partners, a UK-based sustainable technology growth equity firm, brings total capital raised by Photonic to over $350 million USD ($475 million CAD). This round adds new investors Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), Export Development Canada (EDC), Bell Ventures, Firgun Ventures, InBC Investment Corp. and existing investor Mubadala Capital.
The round’s first close, announced in January 2026, attracted strategic investors Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) and TELUS, alongside returning investors British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (BCI) and Microsoft. The breadth of investors demonstrates strong support across Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Middle East.
Photonic is accelerating the path to fault-tolerant quantum computing through its Entanglement First Architecture, a unique approach combining silicon-based qubits and native photonic connectivity that enables seamless scaling across existing global telecom infrastructure.
“This financing unites government, strategic partners, and international investors around a shared conviction: that commercial-scale quantum computing is within reach – and that its economic impact will be transformative,” said Don Mattrick, CEO, Photonic Inc. “We would particularly like to recognize the meaningful contributions from the Government of Canada via both BDC and EDC. Photonic is already delivering on commitments to customers, including as part of the Canadian Quantum Champions Program and Stage B of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative. We will use this funding to continue to hit key milestones, grow our team, and deepen the partnerships that will take us there.”
“Distributed architectures will be an important way to scale quantum technology, and Photonic is an important partner in advancing that future,” said Zulfi Alam, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Quantum. “Their design allows quantum systems to operate over today’s fiber infrastructure, offering a practical and scalable path toward the large‑scale systems that transformative applications will demand. We’re pleased to continue our partnership as they take this next step.”
“We’re pleased to welcome Photonic to Bell Ventures’ portfolio to collaborate with Bell’s team on advancing sovereign, scalable quantum computing capabilities in Canada,” said Martin Cossette, Head of Bell Ventures. “This investment reflects our ongoing commitment to supporting home-grown innovation across the technology ecosystem.”
Evercore acted as sole placement agent to Photonic on the capital raise.
More from HPCwire: Photonic Raises $180M CAD to Accelerate Quantum Computing and Networking
About Photonic Inc.
Photonic Inc. is a leading quantum technology company developing commercial-scale quantum computers and quantum networks to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges in materials science, drug discovery, climate change, and security. The company’s approach unlocks performance at scale through unmatched distributed quantum computing capabilities. Photonic’s high-connectivity Entanglement First architecture leverages a unique qubit modality, optically-linked silicon spin qubits, to enable powerful computation, efficient error correction, and seamless integration with existing data center and telecom environments. Headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, with operations in the United States and United Kingdom, Photonic’s team of 160+ experts is advancing quantum technologies alongside leading investors, partners, and customers worldwide. Learn more at photonic.com.
Source: Photonic Inc.
The post Photonic Inc. Announces Final Close of $200M Funding Round at $2B Valuation appeared first on HPCwire.
Juliette Binoche joins 600 leading figures to warn against a ‘fascist takeover of the collective imagination’
More than 600 cinema figures have said the growing influence of the far right on French cinema production risks turning into a “fascist takeover of the collective imagination”.
In an open letter published in the newspaper Libération to coincide with the opening of the Cannes film festival, they said the billionaire Vincent Bolloré’s dominant position in French film production and distribution threatened the independence of the industry.
Continue reading...Workers told to be realistic about outcome of union talks as corporation aims to make savings with job cuts
BBC staff have been told their bosses will forgo a pay rise this year but fear the freeze will lead to a meagre increase for the rank and file, who have been urged to be realistic about the outcome of union negotiations.
Employees have been told that the corporation’s executive committee – its 12 highest-paid bosses including the director general, who were paid almost £5m in total last year – will have their pay frozen this year amid a £600m cost-cutting drive.
Continue reading...Prices rose 3.8% over the last year, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, highest jump since 2023
US inflation jumped to 3.8% in April as the war in the Middle East continued to drive energy prices and everyday costs for Americans.
Prices rose 3.8% over the last year, according to the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the highest jump since 2023.
Continue reading...Deborah Turness, who resigned last year, says traditional news in danger of being replaced by personality-led content
Broadcasters must urgently adapt to an existential threat from “creator journalism” that is causing audiences to shun traditional television news, the former boss of BBC News has said.
Deborah Turness, who resigned from the BBC alongside the then director general, Tim Davie, last year, said consumption was “collapsing” for traditional television news, which was facing “a profound moment of disruption”.
Continue reading...No wonder they are upset by the slogan ‘tax the rich’. Despite their wealth increasing 81% since 2020, they need our emotional support now more than ever
Won’t anyone think of the poor, poor, billionaires? Their endless money can buy them political power, but it can’t buy them love. Instead of being worshipped by the hoi polloi, titans of industry are denounced! Despised! Disrespected! Insert another D-word of your own!
Thankfully, class solidarity is strong among the super-rich. Steve Roth bravely brought attention to the plight of his fellow billionaires during a recent earnings call. “I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich’ … spit out with anger and contempt by politicians … to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs,” the Vornado Realty Trust CEO said.
Continue reading...Supporters of PM say it shows he has majority backing after more than 80 MPs call on him to quit
More than 100 Labour MPs have signed a statement saying this is “no time for a leadership contest”, as Keir Starmer told his cabinet he would not stand down while a formal leadership contest had not been triggered.
The letter, coordinated by backbenchers, has been signed by 103 MPs, including parliamentary private secretaries. Organisers say it did not come from No 10, though MPs said it had been circulated by government whips.
Continue reading...The $117.5 million Xfinity settlement is open for claims. Here's how to file before the August 14 deadline.
Researchers at Columbia demonstrated the first real-time brain-controlled hearing system that can identify which speaker a listener is focusing on in a noisy environment and automatically amplify that voice while suppressing others. "This breakthrough addresses the 'cocktail party effect,' a major limitation of conventional hearing aids, which often struggle to distinguish between overlapping conversations in noisy settings," reports Neuroscience News. From the report: In the new study, Columbia researchers teamed up with surgeons and their epilepsy patients who were undergoing brain surgery to better pinpoint the sources of their seizures. The hospital patients, who volunteered to be part of this study, already had electrodes implanted in their brains. [senior author Nima Mesgarani's] system used the electrodes to measure the brain activity of the patients as they focused on one of two overlapping conversations played simultaneously. The system then automatically detected which conversation a patient was paying attention to and adjusted the volume in real time, turning up that conversation while quieting the other. For one volunteer, the experience of controlling the system with her brain was literally unbelievable. She accused the researchers of secretly adjusting the volumes. Others told stories about friends and family with hearing impairments who could benefit from such a technology. One person said: "It seems like science fiction." [...] The scientists developed real-time machine-learning algorithms that could examine the brainwaves and identify which conversation the patients were paying attention to. Once deployed, their system could rapidly deduce which conversation each listener was paying attention to and make it easier for them to hear it. This happened both when the researchers guided the subjects toward a particular conversation, and when the subjects chose freely, as would be necessary in a real-world conversation. "For this to work in real time, the system has to be very fast, accurate and stable for the experience to feel pleasant for the listener," Dr. Mesgarani said. The scientists found their new system correctly identified which conversation the volunteers paid attention to. This dramatically improved the intelligibility of the speech the volunteers focused on, reduced listening effort, and was consistently preferred by the volunteers when compared to conversations the system did not provide assistance with. One volunteer recalled her uncle, who had hearing problems. "Can you imagine if this technology existed in a world [where] ... he could access it? He might actually live a much more peaceful... life." The research has been published in Nature Neuroscience.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In the midst of a court battle over whether to continue to allow access by mail to the medication abortion pill mifepristone, Republican lawmakers have claimed that 10% or more of women who take the drug have serious side effects. A 2025 report from an anti-abortion group that put forward the figure has been criticized by reproductive health researchers for methodological issues and a lack of transparency about its data source.
Peer-reviewed studies show a far lower rate of serious problems.
Republicans cited the statistic last week while discussing court rulings on medication abortion. The Louisiana-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals halted access to mifepristone by mail on May 1, but the Supreme Court temporarily restored access on May 4 for a week. On May 11, the court extended its order through May 14.
“Mifepristone sends 1 in 10 women who use it to the emergency room with life threatening conditions,” Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri wrote in a May 4 post on X, calling on Congress to ban the drug when used for abortion.
Rep. Riley Moore of West Virginia in an X post that same day called the drug “extremely dangerous” while referring to a thread from a year prior that claimed “1 in 10 women had dangerous complications like sepsis or hemorrhaging,” based on an April 2025 report from the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative nonprofit that opposes abortion.
“Eleven percent of these women will have side effects so bad within the first 45 days that you can cause sepsis or internal bleeding, hemorrhage, things like that,” Rep. Diana Harshbarger from Tennessee said during a May 6 interview with Tony Perkins, who is president of the Family Research Council, a Christian think tank that also opposes abortion. Harshbarger shared a clip of the interview on X.
Harshbarger’s communications director, Max Mallhi, confirmed to us that Harshbarger was talking about the EPPC report. Hawley’s office did not reply to an email asking for the source of the senator’s similar statistic.
The 2025 report, which was also cited by plaintiffs in the case now before the Supreme Court, claimed that 10.93% of women prescribed mifepristone abortions went on to have serious adverse events within 45 days, based on a review of health insurance claims data on more than 865,000 women from an undisclosed source.
Adverse events are health issues that arise after using a drug, but they aren’t necessarily caused by the drug. Serious adverse events are those that are life-threatening or lead to hospitalization, permanent damage or death.
A May 6 amicus brief from 360 reproductive health researchers filed with the Supreme Court said that the EPPC report, which was not published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, was “riddled with methodological flaws that render its conclusions unreliable.” This conclusion echoed an August 2025 letter by an overlapping group of researchers.
The EPPC report authors “clearly misconstrued and used deceptive methods to erroneously inflate the rate of serious adverse events after an abortion,” Ushma Upadhyay, a public health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, and an author on both the 2025 letter and the amicus brief, told us last fall.
Mifepristone is approved by the Food and Drug Administration for medication abortion through week 10 of pregnancy and is given alongside another drug, misoprostol. During the pandemic, the FDA eased enforcement of requirements that the drug be dispensed in person and in 2023 formally allowed it to be prescribed via virtual telehealth appointments and sent by mail. That year, 63% of abortions in the U.S. were medication abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports reproductive rights.
The case currently being considered by the Supreme Court was brought by the state of Louisiana, which said the FDA’s 2023 decision violated law on proper administrative procedures and was illegal under an 1873 anti-obscenity law. Louisiana claimed the FDA’s actions had injured the state in various ways, such as by interfering with its sovereign ability to ban abortion and costing it Medicaid dollars for treatment for those who had used the drug.
The May 6 amicus brief from reproductive health researchers said that EPPC had failed to disclose key information on where the claims data underlying the study came from or how it was analyzed. We explained before that it is standard when doing research using health insurance claims data to disclose these details, and that researchers experienced in using such data said they had not heard of a dataset that matched EPPC’s description.
“This fundamental lack of transparency precludes any independent verification or reproducibility—fatal deficiencies for any scientific analysis,” the reproductive health researchers wrote in the amicus brief.
In a Feb. 12 amicus brief, EPPC said that it had “entered into a confidentiality agreement with the particular vendor of the database that it is using, in order to protect the vendor from political backlash,” adding that “substantially similar databases are widely available.” The brief also said the report “was internally reviewed and adjudicated by a panel of board-certified obstetricians and gynecologists, who carefully evaluated the clinical classifications, coding, and outcome assessments to ensure medical accuracy and consistency.”
The EPPC report incorrectly counted situations in which someone needed further treatment to complete the abortion as serious adverse events, the reproductive researchers’ amicus brief said, and otherwise “inflated its serious adverse event figures.” For example, the researchers wrote, the EPPC report “inadequately” defined hemorrhage. “Because a successful medication abortion always involves bleeding, EPPC more likely than not misclassified cases of normal, expected bleeding as serious adverse events,” they continued.
Multiple other sources of data on the safety of mifepristone show a far lower rate of serious adverse events. The rate of serious adverse events shown on the drug’s label from the FDA is less than 0.5%, based on data from 10 clinical trials.
Mallhi, the spokesperson for Harshbarger, said the EPPC report’s strength was in using claims data instead.
“FDA’s current label claims are based largely on controlled clinical trials,” Mallhi said in an email. “This study uses real-world claims data, and that is precisely why it matters. When findings this significant emerge, they should be treated as a serious safety signal warranting transparency, full adverse-event reporting, and a thorough FDA review.”
However, published studies using real-world data have corroborated the low rate of serious adverse events reported on the FDA label. For example, one study of Medicaid claims data identified a serious adverse event rate of 0.23%.
(Mallhi went on to say that an FDA review “is especially urgent because, in 2016, the Obama FDA stopped requiring prescribers to report all serious adverse health events associated with chemical abortion pills, leaving deaths as the only adverse-event reporting requirement.” As we’ve written before, in 2016 the FDA relaxed extra reporting requirements for physicians for mifepristone. The standard reporting expected for FDA-approved drugs remained, such as having manufacturers report adverse events, Greer Donley, an abortion law expert at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, told us.)
Studies of telehealth abortions have not found a safety difference when drugs are dispensed by mail versus in person. In deciding to allow mail access to mifepristone, the FDA consulted relevant peer-reviewed studies and reviews of FDA adverse events monitoring data from the period when in-person requirements were initially relaxed.
In contrast, the EPPC report was not able to shed light on the safety of medication abortion via mail specifically because it did not break down its data by mail versus in-person dispensing, the reproductive researchers who wrote the May 6 amicus brief said.
In its Feb. 12 amicus brief, EPPC referred to a new analysis the group performed, which compared serious adverse events before and after the in-person dispensing requirements were first relaxed in 2020. The analysis, also released in a March 10 fact sheet, claimed that serious adverse events rose from affecting 10.15% of users between 2017 and mid-2020 to 11.5% from mid-2020 through 2023. However, EPPC noted that the group lacked “firm data” on the proportion of prescriptions that were dispensed by mail.
The May 6 amicus brief from the reproductive health researchers said that few by-mail instances were likely included in EPPC’s insurance claims data, because during this period the “vast majority” of medication abortion prescriptions by telehealth were not covered by insurance. “Telehealth is likely not the cause of any such increase,” the researchers wrote.
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The post Republicans Repeat Problematic Estimate of Medication Abortion Harms appeared first on FactCheck.org.
The RX300A and RX500A receivers sport 4k/120Hz compatibility and start at $400.
Decades-long campaign powered by patient perspectives results in switch from PCOS – a name that caused confusion and undue suffering – to PMOS
• What is PCOS, what are the symptoms and treatment, and why is it being renamed PMOS?
• ‘I still want to scream’: the loneliness and confusion of living with PMOS
After more than a decade of global consultation, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) – a condition that affects one in eight women – has been renamed.
The hormonal disorder, estimated to affect 170 million women worldwide, will now be known as polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS).
Continue reading...A recent survey by the Alzheimer's Association found most adults think maintaining brain health is very important, but they don't know what steps to take. (Sponsored by the Alzheimer's Association.)
A hacking group named ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the Canvas breach and threatened to leak data involving 275 million individuals if schools did not pay a ransom.
Managed the dissemble pretty well and cracking the tire off with some quick clamps. Getting the new tire on took some time figuring out how to get the edges together and into the groove on the hub. Then my foot sensor wouldn't work. After some desperate googling, I found a comment 6 years ago on this subreddit that I probably swapped two of the connectors putting it back together because they're identical and color coded for idiots. Once I swapped those, it was working great again. Was a little nervous inflating it and getting the beads to pop, I didn't know if it was going to jump or bounce or anything. Inflated it to 50 psi before the second bead popped, then let a bunch of air out. Thanks for the advice everyone gave two weeks ago about the tire size. I got the GOAT tire from flight fins because, honestly, because it was one of the only XR tires available that wasn't a soft tire from flightfins or floatlife.
CBS News California Investigates found that accounts for companies such as Uber, Lyft and DoorDash can be bought or rented online without needing to provide identification.
The former TV anchor’s tenure leading US global media agency ends after court ruled appointment unlawful
Donald Trump has nominated Kari Lake, a longtime ally and former TV anchor who ran unsuccessfully for Arizona governor, to serve as the next US ambassador to Jamaica.
If confirmed by the Senate, it would end Lake’s tenure as the key official responsible for Voice of America (VOA), the global media organization created in 1942.
Continue reading...Employees are now whispering to AI voice dictation tools rather than clacking the keys. Will ‘voicepilling’ make everyone more productive – or just more annoying?
Name: Voicepilled.
Age: Reid Hoffman first declared himself “voicepilled” in the autumn of last year.
Continue reading...Tim Miller’s teen daughter disappeared in 1984, tied to a series of deaths in the Texas ‘killing fields’. After decades, he received a tip that unlocked everything
Tim Miller is good at finding missing people – or rather, their bodies. Four years ago, a stranger called him and left a rambling message claiming that he had important information about an unsolved murder case.
Miller, who lives in Texas and runs a non-profit search-and-recovery organization called EquuSearch, did not treat the message as a high priority. The caller sounded as if he might have been drunk or on drugs. Although tips are vital to EquuSearch’s work, the tip line brings a certain number of hoaxes, cranks and innuendo. Some of the people who leave messages, Miller told me, “probably ought to get their medication checked”.
Continue reading...South Florida fires that burnt through 45 sq km (11,000 acres) of land over the weekend spread on Monday as emergency crews worked to contain them.
Florida Forest Service said 'the growing fires were producing smoky conditions with reduced visibility'. No serious injuries or property damage have been reported.
Dry conditions have led to wildfires in other parts the country, including fires that destroyed dozens of homes in southern Georgia last month
Continue reading...National broadcaster RTÉ accused of antisemitism for decision to screen satirical 1996 Eurovision episode in boycott of contest
It is considered one of the funniest episodes of a beloved sitcom, but the Father Ted storyline about Eurovision has been dragged into the row over Israel’s participation in this week’s song contest.
Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTÉ, which is boycotting the competition in protest against Israel’s inclusion, will instead broadcast the 1996 episode A Song for Europe, in which the characters Father Ted and Father Dougal perform their song My Lovely Horse and earn nul points.
Continue reading...Former world champion stopped Paul in December fight
Injuries from bout are still being monitored by doctors
Jake Paul has admitted the broken jaw he suffered during his loss to Anthony Joshua in December may have ended his boxing career.
The YouTuber turned boxer was stopped during December’s fight after a brutal shot from former world champion Joshua. Paul said the injury is still being monitored five months later.
Continue reading...PARIS, May 12, 2026 – This evening, over a hundred high-level representatives from French and German industry, policy, start-up and investment sectors will gather for a reception hosted by the German Ambassador to France, His Excellency Mr. Stefan Steinlein, with the support of the French Embassy in Germany. This event reflects the growing importance of quantum technologies for Europe’s technological and industrial sovereignty, building on the French-German agenda agreed in August 2025. France and Germany are home to some of the world’s leading players in this field.
At the heart of this dialogue lies a clear ambition: to strengthen ties and coordination between French and German industry, policymaking, funding, innovation and research. By connecting key players across borders and across the value chain, the initiative aims to help Europe accelerate the development and adoption of sovereign, competitive and market-ready quantum technologies.
With the same spirit, on the margins of today’s event, a group of leading industry and research organizations will sign a Joint Declaration of Intent to strengthen cooperation in quantum technologies and support the development of a competitive European quantum ecosystem.
Signed by CEA, Fraunhofer, CNRS, Inria, Le Lab Quantique, Quandela, QUTAC and the European Champions Alliance, this Declaration of Intent solidifies the stakeholders’ commitment to deepening and accelerating exchanges, partnerships and synergies.
Their cooperation will focus on four objectives:
The signatories also reaffirm their commitment to an open and collaborative approach, inviting additional stakeholders to join and contribute to these efforts.
About CEA
The CEA is a public research organization whose mission is to contribute to the scientific, technological and industrial sovereignty of France and Europe in four key areas: low-carbon energy, digital technology, future medicine, and defense and security, by drawing on excellence in fundamental research. For more information: www.cea.fr.
About CNRS
A major player in basic research worldwide, the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) is the only French organization active in all scientific fields. Its unique position as a multi-specialist enables it to bring together all of the scientific disciplines in order to shed light on and understand the challenges of today’s world, in connection with public and socio-economic stakeholders. Together, the different sciences contribute to sustainable progress that benefits society as a whole.
About European Champions Alliance
The European Champion Alliance (ECA) promotes European technology, European values and works to strengthen through a conscious business-related interdependence between European companies and all participants of the European economic ecosystem. To achieve this goal, the ECA builds bridges between national ecosystems, SMEs, companies, start-ups and other supporters of the tech ecosystem in Europe. The ECA harnesses the power of smart collaboration and accelerate the growth of Europe’s digital champions.
About Fraunhofer
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, headquartered in Germany, is the world’s leading applied research organization. With its focus on developing key technologies that are vital for the future and enabling the commercial exploitation of this work by business and industry, Fraunhofer plays a central role in the innovation process. As a pioneer and catalyst for ground-breaking developments and scientific excellence, Fraunhofer helps shape society now and in the future. Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft currently operates more than 70 institutes and research institutions throughout Germany.
About Inria
Inria, the French national institute for research in digital science and technology, supports the French government in national research and innovation strategies in the digital field, acting as Digital Programs Agency. Inria leads over 300 research and innovation projects with its 3,500 scientists, engineers, and support staff, in partnership with universities and the digital ecosystem (businesses, entrepreneurs, and public stakeholders). Together, we explore strategic fields such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, quantum computing, cloud technologies, digital transformation in healthcare, digital twins, and digital technologies for defense. We develop practical solutions such as software, tech startups, partnerships with national companies, and cutting-edge training programs. Our goal is to drive scientific, technological, and industrial excellence to ensure France’s digital sovereignty.
About Le Lab Quantique
Le Lab Quantique is a French not-for-profit organization created in 2018 to support the emergence of the global quantum ecosystem, gathering more than 50 members and partners and organizing more than 20 workshops per year. Its mission is to foster the emergence of talent capable of addressing the major challenges of quantum physics, while also guiding the development of entrepreneurial and industrial projects towards the market launch of new products and services.
About Quandela
Quandela is a global leader in quantum computing, designing, building, and delivering cutting-edge quantum solutions for research and industry. Its offerings include the most energy-efficient quantum computers for data centers, full-stack quantum computing solutions accessible via the cloud, and algorithm access services for academic and industrial customers. Following a pragmatic, step-by-step roadmap, Quandela has been deploying industrial-grade systems since 2023 while developing future generations of fault-tolerant quantum computers capable of scaling through the integration of thousands of photonic components. Quandela is committed to making quantum computing accessible to all in order to address the most complex industrial and societal challenges. Learn more at: https://www.quandela.com.
About QUTAC
QUTAC (Quantum Technology & Application Consortium) is a consortium of internationally active German companies from various sectors and potential users of quantum computing technology. It intends to promote the politically desired digital sovereignty of Germany and Europe and to establish an economically successful, independent ecosystem of quantum computing technology in Germany and for Europe. To this end, the members of the consortium want to identify, develop, test and make available use cases for quantum computing technology both for their own sectors and across sectors. Learn more at www.qutac.de.
Source: Quandela
The post French and German Partners Strengthen Cooperation on Quantum Tech appeared first on HPCwire.
ESPOO, Finland, May 12, 2026 — IQM Quantum Computers today launched HPC Integration Service, a turnkey solution that enables its IQM Radiance quantum computers to operate as a Slurm node inside high-performance computing (HPC) environment.
Credit: IQM
Using this widely adopted HPC workflow, IQM aims at accelerating adoption of hybrid quantum-classical computing across enterprises and research institutions. Slurm is the open-source workload manager used by most of the world’s leading supercomputing centers for its scalability and flexibility.
The integration service makes quantum a scheduled resource alongside central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs), removing the integration work that has slowed adoption.
In addition, the service is built on IQM´s Quantum Device Management Interface (QDMI), an open-source standardization layer that simplifies the vendor-specific software interfaces that have fragmented quantum integration to date.
The new HPC Integration Service has been demonstrated in a paper on arXiv co-authored with researchers at the Munich Quantum Software Company (MQSC) and is already running in production at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Germany, where IQM has installed four quantum computers.
“We have been hearing about an integration bottleneck from HPC customers for years,” said Jan Goetz, CEO and Co-founder of IQM Quantum Computers. “HPC integration is important work and by removing the complexity, end-users can focus on running quantum workloads instead on spending time on programming new routines. This is what production quantum means to us. Quantum you own, operate, and build value on. Real infrastructure inside real environments, doing real work.”
Quantum computers have been deployed at customer sites for several years, but once installed, most of them have operated next to the HPC software stack rather than inside them. Every deployment required custom integration work that the next deployment could not reuse. The new HPC Integration Service unifies the software stack, allowing customers to focus on use-case execution.
The HPC Integration Service closes the gap by enabling users to submit quantum jobs through the same interface and scheduler they use for CPUs and GPUs. Researchers can run benchmarks across systems using tools they already know, while system teams keep their existing operating model.
“Our vision has always been the seamless integration of quantum computing into existing HPC environments, where users can run applications without concern for the underlying hardware. The Quantum Device Management Interface, as part of the Munich Quantum Software Stack, is a key step toward this goal. We are proud to see innovations developed within Munich Quantum Valley now being adopted by IQM as a key player in the quantum world to enable hybrid quantum-HPC workloads in real environments,” said Prof Dieter Kranzlmüller, Chairman of the Board of Directors, Leibniz Supercomputing Centre.
IQM has on-premises systems operating at four of the world’s top 10 supercomputing centres and has sold more quantum systems than any other manufacturer. The company’s ambition is to be the foundation that customers build their quantum capability on.
In February, IQM announced plans to go public through a business combination with Real Asset Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: RAAQ). Following the close of the transaction, the company is expected to list on a major U.S. stock exchange, with a dual listing on the Helsinki Stock Exchange under consideration.
More from HPCwire
About IQM Quantum Computers
IQM Quantum Computers is a global leader in superconducting quantum computers, delivering full-stack quantum systems and cloud platform access to research institutions, universities, high-performance computing centers, and national laboratories worldwide. IQM’s on-premises deployment model gives customers direct ownership and control of their quantum infrastructure. Founded in 2018, headquartered in Finland, it has over 350 employees. IQM operates across Europe, Asia, and North America. IQM has announced its plans to become the first publicly listed European quantum company on a major U.S. stock exchange by merging with Real Asset Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: RAAQ); with a dual listing on the Helsinki Stock Exchange also under consideration.
Source: IQM Quantum Computers
The post IQM Launches HPC Integration Service to Accelerate Hybrid Quantum-HPC Adoption appeared first on HPCwire.
Online marketplace takes into account uncertainty around US video game retailer’s financing proposal
The board of eBay has rejected the US video games retailer GameStop’s surprise $55.5bn bid (£41bn) for the online marketplace, describing the proposal as “neither credible nor attractive”.
Earlier this month, GameStop made an unsolicited bid for eBay, publishing a letter on its website outlining a half-cash, half-stock proposal.
Continue reading...A Guardian show trying to make sense of it all
Award-winning journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman serve as co-hosts of the Guardian’s US video podcast
Kai Wright is a Peabody award-winning host, editor, and writer whose work explores the intersection of history, power, and the evolving American identity. He previously hosted WNYC’s Notes From America with Kai Wright, a live call-in show that aired on public radio stations around the country. Kai has also led several acclaimed limited-run podcasts for WNYC Studios, including Blindspot Season 3: The Plague in the Shadows, which documents the early years of the Aids epidemic in the US; Caught: The Lives of Juvenile Justice, honored with an Alfred I duPont-Columbia University award; and The United States of Anxiety, which chronicled the rise of the Maga movement and its impact on our political culture over four seasons of original reporting. Kai is the author of Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York, as well as two surveys of Black American history, and a contributor to the best-selling collection Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America.
Continue reading...A Guardian show trying to make sense of it all
Award-winning journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman serve as co-hosts of the Guardian’s new US video podcast
Stateside with Kai and Carter is the Guardian’s flagship video podcast in the US. Hosted by Peabody award-winning host and journalist Kai Wright and Emmy-nominated Guardian journalist and author Carter Sherman, the show is a conversation-driven series designed to help audiences better understand the news and the forces shaping our world.
With new episodes three times a week, the show brings the Guardian’s global perspective and unique lens on America to life through lively conversations spanning politics, civil rights, the climate crisis, gender and reproductive freedom, corporate power, resistance movements, and the media during this critical moment in history. We also make room for the Guardian’s lighter obsessions, including culture, wellness and soccer. The show features newsmakers, journalists, and other cultural voices.
Continue reading...Seventh body found near railroad tracks thought to be connected to what authorities call ‘potential human smuggling event’
Federal agents are investigating the deaths of at least six people thought to be immigrants found inside a shipping container at a Union Pacific rail yard near the border with Mexico in Laredo, Texas, on Sunday as a “potential human smuggling event”.
Officials reportedly have also said the death of a seventh person whose body was found near railroad tracks outside San Antonio, Texas – 150 miles (241km) to the north – may be connected to the case.
Guardian staff contributed reporting
Continue reading...GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen had argued that his company's retail locations would help eBay build a "national network."
Google's virtual Android event is kicking off in just a few hours, one week before I/O 2026, where the company is expected to spotlight Android, Gemini and its broader AI push.
Spotify 20: Party of the Year lets you share listening stats from the day you joined, even if it was 20 years ago.
Ken Paxton accuses streamer of designing addictive platform and falsely representing data collection practices
Texas sued Netflix on Monday, accusing the streaming company of spying on children and designing its platform to be addictive.
Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, said Netflix has for years falsely represented to consumers that it did not collect or share user data, when it actually tracked and sold viewers’ habits and preferences to commercial data brokers and advertising technology companies, making billions of dollars a year.
Continue reading...Voters are going to the polls in Nebraska and West Virginia on Tuesday, with Democrats vying for the chance to run in an open seat in Nebraska that the party has long been eyeing.
A deal is taking shape for the U.S. and Ukraine to jointly develop and build weapons that have been at the forefront of the wars in both Ukraine and Iran.
Iran warns any new U.S. attacks will bring a "bad result," as President Trump acknowledges the ceasefire is faltering and violence flares in Lebanon.
Health officials have identified at least 11 confirmed or suspected cases of hantavirus tied to an outbreak on the M/V Hondius cruise ship.
Since the Citizens United decision of 2010, the justices have dismantled Americans’ voices. The only solution is at the ballot box
Writing in 1943, the historian Henry Steele Commager delivered both a stern history lesson and a warning about the United States supreme court. The court, he said, had never been a friend to US democracy, and it never would be. For anyone committed to the advancement of majority rule, he added, judicial review “is wrong in theory and dangerous in practice”.
The danger that Commager noted was on full display on 29 April 2026, when the supreme court eviscerated section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As the Department of Justice explains, section 2 “prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups … or procedure that results in the denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group”.
Continue reading...Photoshop has a lot of AI tools. These are the best ones for beginners and anyone who is AI curious.
Delivering much information about the scale of what’s coming, documentary also follows Gawdat’s campaign to get the programs with empathy
Another day, another warning about AI; vis-a-vis the reality we all know, this has roughly the same reassuring effect as a plane fuselage ripping off mid-flight. Starting off with familiar criticisms, such as putting the world out of work and handing over power to tech barons, Alex Holmes and Lina Zilinskaite’s film blasts an concentrated stream of AI concerns in its 83-minute runtime. By the time it is talking about current efforts to create computers out of human brain cells, potentially integrable into our own craniums, and implying this might be a good thing, it is (ironically) hard to know how to process all of this.
The Cassandra at the film’s centre is Mo Gawdat, former chief business officer at Google X, now a touring cautionary voice trying to get the world to listen about the perils of AI. Once overseeing advanced projects for the tech giants, his biggest moonshot lies ahead: to introduce a moral dimension into a tech race that looks increasingly like the frenzied season finale of late capitalism. He talks about feeling parental pride in watching Google’s AI-driven robotic arms learn to grasp objects, as children do. And he feels that humanity’s capacity for benevolence is exactly the training resource needed by neural networks in order to prevent the technology ushering in catastrophe.
Continue reading...Samhsa said funding cannot be used to purchase or distribute fentanyl test strips or other drug test kits
The Trump administration’s decision to restrict use of federal funds for fentanyl test strips, in what officials described as a “clear shift away from harm reduction”, could have fatal consequences, experts and critics have warned.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (Samhsa) issued an open letter in April ordering an end to the use of its funding for all substance testing strips, including fentanyl, xylazine and medetomidine, the latest novel street drug to wreak havoc across the US.
Continue reading...Letter follows a Guardian investigation into irregular ways the Trump administration was transporting detainees. Plus, top World Cup tickets to retail at almost $33,000
Good morning.
A group of 40 House Democrats have described “grave concerns” over the Trump administration’s secretive program of deportation flights and demanded that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) address allegations of mistreatment and inhumane conditions on ICE charter jets.
By how much have deportation flights increased under Donald Trump? The number of ICE flights during 2025 has surged by 84% compared with 2024, according to monitoring by human rights groups.
What has Tehran said? Trump’s latest comments came after oil prices jumped again when Iran said there would be no further talks about ending the blockade unless he accepted its terms.
Follow the latest updates on our liveblog.
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Why Should Delaware Care?
For months, local residents have railed against Georgetown leaders as homelessness in the area has burgeoned. A slate of candidates backed by a local citizens group swept in municipal elections this weekend.
Georgetown residents elected a new mayor and town council member by wide margins this weekend, a manifestation of the growing disillusion with the current council’s ability to manage homelessness in the Sussex County seat.
Angie Townsend came out on top of a crowded race, securing 75% of the vote to become Georgetown’s mayor. Michael Briggs unseated incumbent Councilman Eric Evans, winning the race to represent Georgetown’s third ward. An additional town council member, Penuel Barrett, ran unopposed, holding onto his seat.
All three candidates were backed by a citizens’ Facebook group known as “Make Georgetown Great Again.” The group has established a political foothold in recent months, largely in response to growing resident frustrations about town leaders’ response to homelessness.
Group members had repeatedly made posts promising to unseat officials they viewed as ineffective, using the phrase “May is on the way,” to reference last Saturday’s municipal elections.
Unofficial election results from both contested elections, where MGGA-backed candidates each won with at least 75% of the vote, suggest the group was successful in fulfilling its promise.
Townsend will succeed longtime Mayor Bill West, who announced he would retire earlier this year. She previously served on the town council and failed to unseat West in 2024. But Townsend garnered hundreds more votes on Saturday than her nearest competitor, Itzel Hernandez, a 37-year-old Latina artist seeking elected office for the first time.
Townsend did not return a phone call on Monday from Spotlight Delaware to discuss her agenda.
Hernandez told Spotlight Delaware she was honored to have run in the race, and that she is keeping her options open for future elections. She added that following the defeat, she still plans to be active in the community and makes sure Townsend “keeps her promises.”
Asked about the wide margin of defeat, she said she wasn’t bothered by the number, and that as she spends more time in the community she hopes more people would support her in the future.
“I think that once they see me being active in the community, it’s going to make people more interested in being involved,” Hernandez said. “So honestly, that number really doesn’t affect me.”
Michael Briggs secured a landslide town council victory in the third ward, which, according to the town’s website, encompasses “north of the center line of West Market Street and West of the center line of North Bedford Street.”
Briggs runs a propane company and has been a part of the town volunteer fire department for nearly three decades. He also has served on the Georgetown planning commission for the past two years.
Eric Evans, who claimed Townsend’s seat in 2024 after she stepped down to run against West, only secured 20% of the vote on Saturday.
Briggs did not return a phone call on Monday to discuss his agenda.
At the center of the victories this weekend were endorsements from the local citizens’ Facebook group Make Georgetown Great Again. Tyler Scott, who started the group in October 2025, told Spotlight Delaware he was excited by the victories and the group’s ability to mobilize for candidates.
“We have drastically changed the political landscape of Georgetown in one election,” Scott said on Monday.
The group of nearly 6,000 people had for months pressed the local town council on its response to homelessness in the area, and what Scott on Monday called “fragmented service providers” in Georgetown.
Now that the group’s candidates have been elected, he said he hopes leaders will sit down with local nonprofits providing homelessness services in the town to implement more programs that are faith-based and focused on accountability.
“We really want to help people with their mental health, addiction and permanent housing,” Scott said. “We don’t just want to keep people at rock bottom.”
Scott also said he hopes to replicate this weekend’s success in future town council elections in the first and second wards. Additionally, he said his goal is to keep “Sussex County red” in upcoming legislative races as longtime lawmakers begin to retire.
In a graphic posted to her Facebook account in April, Townsend wrote that her campaign priorities are to strengthen government relationships with local businesses and residents, engage in conversations with nonprofit organizations about the best ways to serve the town’s homeless population, and “ensure that future economic development and land use decisions are consistent with recommendations from the Planning Commission.”
Her third recommendation seems to reference the Little Living development, which generated controversy when the town council voted to approve the tiny homes project in early February, after the planning commission recommended to deny the proposal in late 2025.
In an interview with Kevin Andrade, host of the prominent Delmarva Spanish-speaking radio station Maxima 95.3 FM, Townsend said homelessness is “the most fearful” issue in town. She said she does not want The Shepherd’s Office – a day center that provides daily meals and church services in town – to continue operating, because it attracts homeless people from other towns.
“I don’t want to enable the homeless,” she said. “I would love to see the town of Georgetown take a stand that it’s illegal to live in a tent in the woods.”
Townsend, along with Penuel Barrett, who ran uncontested this weekend for town council and former council member Sue Barlow were also the subject of controversy in 2022. The three, all serving on town council at the time, voted to continue funding the Georgetown Historical Society, which hosts a monument dedicated to those who served the Confederacy in the Civil War and was flying a Confederate flag at its museum.
In the La Maxima interview, Townsend said her stance in support of the museum has not changed.
“To me, [the Confederate flag] represents individuals – young men, old men – that gave their lives to fight for a cause they believed in,” Townsend said. “Whatever somebody makes of the flag is their opinion.”
According to Georgetown’s charter, candidates must be inaugurated within two town council meetings of their election, meaning Townsend, Biggs and Barrett will likely be sworn in at the council’s May 26 meeting.
Maggie Reynolds contributed to this report.
The post Georgetown elects new mayor, councilman after months of frustration appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Greater protections for endangered emperor penguins and how to manage growing tourism are topping the agenda at talks on Antarctica in Japan.
Thunder beat Lakers 4-0 in Western Conference semis
41-year-old just finished his 23rd NBA season
Cavaliers even series with Pistons at 2-2
LeBron James isn’t ready to make a decision about his NBA future in the wake of the Los Angeles Lakers’ season-ending loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder on Monday.
The visiting Thunder prevailed 115-110 to sweep the teams’ Western Conference semi-final series despite James registering 24 points and a game-high 12 rebounds.
Continue reading...Assurances being sought that Greater Manchester mayor could stand for byelection, though MP Marie Rimmer says she will not stand aside
Allies of Andy Burnham have warned against a “coronation” for Wes Streeting as the next prime minister and called on Labour’s ruling body to allow the mayor to stand for the leadership.
As Keir Starmer attempted to face down mounting calls for his resignation on Tuesday, sources close to Burnham demanded immediate assurances from Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) that he would not be blocked from contesting a parliamentary byelection.
Continue reading...  | Will this foot sensor replacement work for my stock one wheel xr? [link] [comments] |
Rajiv Menon KC was accused of breaching judge’s directions with his closing speech at trial of six activists
A leading human rights barrister has won an appeal against his referral for contempt of court over his closing speech during a trial of Palestine Action activists.
Rajiv Menon KC was accused of breaching the judge’s directions in the trial of six people for a 2024 direct action protest at an arms factory of the Israeli subsidiary Elbit Systems UK in Filton, near Bristol.
Continue reading...Knesset approves plan for livestreamed trials in military court, drawing comparisons to 1962 Adolf Eichmann trial
Israeli lawmakers have approved setting up a livestreamed special tribunal with the power to sentence to death Palestinians convicted of taking part in the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 that triggered the war in Gaza.
The measure was passed by 93 votes to none in the 120-seat Knesset, Israel’s parliament, reflecting widespread support among Israel’s Jewish majority for punishing those found responsible for the deadliest single attack in Israel’s history. The remaining 27 lawmakers were absent or abstained from voting.
Continue reading...The US men’s national team have high expectations at the 2026 World Cup. To me, that signals miraculous progress
The mere notion that the United States men’s national team will enter this World Cup with a plausible chance of going on a deep run represents something of a sporting miracle.
Consider that after the USMNT placed third at the 1930 World Cup – as one of just 13 countries to turn up, mind you – they were almost totally absent from the global stage for six decades. They kicked around the 1934 edition of the tournament just long enough to get smashed 7-1 by the hosts Italy in the first round. And they were there in 1950, stunning England 1-0 in the group stage, an all-time upset wedged around 3-1 and 5-2 losses to Spain and Chile, respectively.
Leander Schaerlaeckens’ book on the United States men’s national soccer team, The Long Game, is out on Tuesday. You can buy it here. He teaches at Marist University.
Continue reading...Ministers rally around embattled leader, who says he will ‘get on with governing’ unless process for challenge is triggered
Keir Starmer has told his cabinet he will fight on as prime minister, saying the threshold for a leadership challenge has not been met, as ministers began to rally around the embattled leader.
The Guardian understands Starmer did not give cabinet critics time to respond, before moving the conversation on to the Middle East, and none called directly on him to resign during Tuesday’s meeting.
Continue reading...After weeks of testing Dyson’s first personal fan, the HushJet Mini Cool, here's how it compares to the competition.
The new Forerunner 70 and 170 get advanced training tools, brighter screens and a $50 price hike.
If you want a cardio machine that's easy on the joints, look no further than an elliptical.
HELOCs and home equity loans both offer viable ways for homeowners to borrow equity. Here's which one is cheaper now.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Singing, painting or visiting a gallery or museum helps people age more slowly, according to the latest study to link taking an active interest in art and culture with improved health. The findings are the first to show that both participating in arts activities and attending events, such as viewing an exhibition, lead to people staying biologically younger. "These results demonstrate the health impact of the arts at a biological level. They provide evidence for arts and cultural engagement to be recognized as a health-promoting behavior in a similar way to exercise," said Prof Daisy Fancourt, the lead author of the research and the head of the social biobehavioral research group at University College London. However, slower aging does not necessarily mean someone will live longer. The "epigenetic clocks" used in the study to assess biological ageing are predictive of future morbidity and mortality, and previous studies have suggested a link between arts engagement and longer lifespan, but much more research would be needed to establish potential causal effects on longevity. Those who take part in artistic pursuits the most often slow the pace of their biological aging the most. Under one of the study's methods of assessment, those who did so at least weekly slowed their aging process by 4%, while monthly engagement led to it slowing by 3%. Similarly, another of the tests showed that those who undertook an arts activity at least once a week were on average a year younger biologically than those who rarely engaged in such pursuits. Those who exercised once a week were only six months younger by that measure. The benefit the arts confer on the pace at which people age is so dramatic that it is comparable to the difference between smokers and those who have given up smoking, the researchers say. The results, published in the journal Innovation in Aging, are based on blood test and survey response data from 3,556 adults taking part in the UK Household Longitudinal Study. It uses blood samples to estimate people's biological age and the pace at which they are ageing.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Exclusive: Council of Europe to meet in Moldova on Friday, with human rights body expected to stress countries’ right to control borders
European ministers will this week discuss plans to send thousands of rejected asylum seekers to third-country hubs, the head of the continent’s human rights body has told the Guardian.
Alain Berset, the secretary general of the Council of Europe, said discussions about the removal of people who arrived in Europe by irregular routes would take place “at a multilateral level” at a meeting in Moldova on Friday.
Continue reading...Requirement to upload documents for the purpose of ‘age verification’ is coming to platforms near you
Want to Google your symptoms, join an ICE watch group on Facebook or scroll Reddit? You might need to show ID. Age verification is coming to platforms near you. Worse, it’ll come at the expense of your rights.
More than 25 states, and multiple countries, have enacted laws requiring mixed-audience websites to verify users’ ages to prevent access by children. Some of these laws target adult content providers explicitly while others apply these requirements to a wide array of websites, from Google search to Coursera to the New York Times.
Continue reading...Nine out of 10 workers express support for policies on artificial intelligence that labor unions may fight for
US workers overwhelmingly support pro-worker policies on artificial intelligence (AI) and view labor unions as the most reliable protectors of workers from the effects of AI, according to a new poll released by the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US.
More than nine out of 10 workers surveyed expressed support for policies on artificial intelligence that labor unions may fight for, including 95% supporting a requirement that a human be the final decision maker on any issues affecting individual workers and their employment.
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Why Should Delaware Care?
In recent years, the unhoused community in Wilmington has grown in size. In response, Mayor John Carney introduced a plan to convert an Eastside park into the only city-sanctioned encampment. Last month, pushback to city mandates at the encampment sparked protests and criticism against Carney’s oversight of the park. Now, officials have decided to close down the encampment.
Wilmington Mayor John Carney’s office notified residents of the city’s only sanctioned homeless encampment Monday that they will no longer be able to live at the Christina Park location after June 15.
The abrupt decision comes a month after the city spent nearly $60,000 to install large pallets and new tents for unhoused residents at the park.
It also ends a months-long initiative by the Carney administration to direct homeless people and their encampments to a single location in the city. Recently, the program drew criticism that the city had not provided promised services, and that it had imposed burdensome rules.
Beyond the notice to park residents, the mayor’s office also announced the encampment’s imminent closure in a press release that cited several reasons for the decision, including that the encampment was intended to be temporary, and that neighbors told officials they wanted the park returned to its previous state.
“We will continue aiming to strike a balance that supports the unhoused, meets the expectations of Wilmington taxpayers, and remains within the financial means of City government,” the statement read.
Following the closure next month, park residents will have to either move to shelter beds or find a place to camp that is not located in a park. In its notice to residents, the Carney administration emphasized that “camping and staying overnight in Wilmington city parks is prohibited.”
Asked where encampment residents could go after the park closes, if they have not secured stable housing, Carney spokeswoman Caroline Klinger said officials will offer opportunities for people to take advantage of housing resources.
She said city officials decided it made “better sense” to move forward with the June closure “and increase our ongoing efforts to transition people to suitable housing/treatment centers.”
When asked whether there are enough shelter beds to accommodate people currently living at the park, Klinger did not provide a direct answer.
Instead, she said the city is discussing with state officials and shelter organizations how service providers “can best meet the evolving needs of this community.”
In response to the news, Kim Eppehimer – executive director of the Friendship House, which provides resources to encampment residents – called the city’s plan an “unfortunate displacement of folks who are essentially already displaced.”
The city’s decision comes about seven months after Carney announced that Wilmington would restrict legal homeless encampments to Christina Park.
It also follows officials’ decision last month to reorganize the encampment by moving its residents out of their personal tents and into government-issued ones.
To do so, the city purchased uniform, green tents and set them atop pallets along a designated grid at the park. At the time, Carney’s chief of staff, Cerron Cade, said the move was out of concern for the park’s appearance, and to make it easier for paramedic crews to respond to emergencies in the community.
But the plan immediately faced scrutiny and sparked a chaotic scene as Wilmington officials attempted to move residents into new tents amid protests from housing advocates, who feared the changes could threaten residents’ property and disrupt the community.
The protests added to city persistent criticism of city officials that they had not provided services, such as daily meals and security at the park.
Carney has previously said the encampment was meant to serve as an “interim plan,” while his administration worked on longer-term solutions. But, with those solutions still unclear, park residents and housing advocates are asking why the city is moving now to close the park.
On Monday, park resident Ron “Philly” Simmons questioned why the city would decide to close the encampment after it spent time and resources to move scores of residents there, and after recently setting up new tents on large wooden pallets.
“You kicked us out from under the bridge, even police brought people here,” Simmons said.
He also insisted that few people would opt to stay in a nearby shelter, claiming it was an unsanitary place.
City officials noted that the police service organization, Partners in Care, will expand hours to assist those at the park. The Friendship House, which has been under contract since January to manage the encampment, will also continue to provide services and work on transitioning people to stable housing until their contract ends on June 30.
But Friendship House officials say the timeframe won’t be enough time to get everyone in the park transitioned to stable housing and other resources. Eppehimer said the timeline can vary for residents, especially as new people continuously come to the park to stay.
She had hoped to have at least 18 months to two years to help park residents access to resources they need for stable housing. Eppehimer also noted two snowstorms earlier this year delayed help for park residents.
To date, a total of 24 people have been transitioned out of the park to stable housing, Eppehimer said. That can include substance recovery programs, low-income housing, or finding space at the New Castle County Hope Center.
“I think it just shows how much potential there is in unifying resources, getting people to a point they feel that they have a little bit of stability, even if it is in an encampment,” Eppehimer said.
Eppehimer said park residents will continue to have access to mobile showers and laundry units until the encampment closes.
The mayor’s office said it continues to review recommendations from a recent homelessness taskforce final report. Among several proposals, it outlined the plan to temporarily allow a tent community in Christina Park until a village of tiny homes could be built to replace the tents.
The mayor’s office statement on Monday said officials are working with the Springboard Collaborative, which runs the palette village community in Georgetown, to “explore low-barrier shelter site options” in the city.
In its paper notice to park residents, the city said tents must be returned unless residents receive permission to keep them. It also said residents may store belongings for 10 days at a Wilmington Housing Authority building on 4th Street.
Meme Sebelist, a housing advocate with the nonprofit organization Food Not Bombs, said encampment residents have contacted her in the past day stressing they will have nowhere to go after the park closes next month. She asserted that nearby shelters are overcrowded and truly affordable housing programs have been deprioritized in the city.
“If sleeping outside everywhere else is criminalized … where are they going to go?” she said.
The post Mayor Carney to shut down Wilmington homeless encampment appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Chefs are all about the basics, but these eight gadgets might be worthy of a spot in your kitchen.
As human rights advocate is treated in Tehran hospital after transfer from Zanjan prison, prize winners demand her freedom
More than 110 Nobel laureates have called for the immediate and unconditional release of Narges Mohammadi, the imprisoned Iranian human rights activist and Nobel peace prize laureate, after she was transferred to hospital amid concerns over her rapidly deteriorating health.
In a statement released on Tuesday, 112 Nobel laureates urged the Iranian authorities and the international community to act “without delay” to secure Mohammadi’s release and ensure her continued access to medical treatment.
Continue reading...Horses seized and several people questioned after animal rights activist shares video of race along country roads
A video showing an illegal horse race in Sicily, with spectators firing pistols into the air and brandishing Kalashnikov rifles, has prompted a police investigation that has led to the seizure of the animals.
The clip, reportedly filmed last Friday, shows two jockeys driving horse-drawn carts at breakneck speed along country roads in the town of Palagonia, near Catania, in eastern Sicily. Behind them, dozens of people follow on scooters, firing shots into the air. The footage was posted on social media by an animal rights activist named Enrico Rizzi.
Continue reading...The head of the World Health Organization says "our work is not over" to contain hantavirus after evacuations from a cruise ship hit by a deadly outbreak of the illness.
Since the start of the war, Iran has ramped up executions, particularly in cases involving alleged espionage or security-related charges.
Trade, Taiwan and tensions with Iran are surefire topics for President Trump's meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
A gunman who opened fire at cars on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Monday afternoon was shot by a responding State Police trooper and a civilian.
American climber Shelley Johannesen died in an avalanche on Mount Makalu, officials said Tuesday, as fatalities mount early in Nepal's busy spring climbing season.
Kareem’s Daily Quote: All the things I want to say but can’t.
The Empty Box: What happens when “Disclosure” reveals absolutely nothing.
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Lutnick Makes Up His Own Numbers: The retail reality of the Gold Card.
What I’m Watching: Hacks
Jukebox Playlist: “Lover Man”
“What could be lonelier than trying to communicate?” Denis Johnson
Writer Denis Johnson understood the geography of the human soul better than almost anyone. He had this way of looking at our most basic impulses and finding how they tend to bend towards tragedy. He once wrote, “What could be lonelier than trying to communicate?”
That quote is something I feel deeply, even though I know that, at first, it seems it can’t possibly be true. After all, isn’t communication a cure for loneliness? Don’t we believe, to our very core, that if we can just find the right words—if we can put them together in the perfect way, at the perfect moment—the person whom we are trying to reach (verbally speaking) will finally “get” it? Will finally “get” us?
And we will at long last have bridged the gap between our internal world and someone else’s.
But whenever you try to take a complex, messy feeling and use something as limiting as language to communicate it, you realize how much is lost in translation. And if you’re paying attention, that’s when it becomes painfully clear that you can never fully be known. Worse still, you can’t be fully known even to yourself. Because most utterances, no matter how rehearsed or heartfelt, aren’t what you meant to say at all. Which leads you to wonder, who is this “I” who’s communicating itself so shabbily?
I’ve felt this when being interviewed. I’ve felt it scribbling notes for a book or an article at three in the morning. I’ve felt it re-reading the words I just wrote. It’s this “thing” inside you, wanting to come out…but the second you try to hand it to someone else, it becomes diminished, less than. The “loneliness” Johnson was talking about is the space between what we mean and what is heard.
But here’s the silver lining: when we stop pretending that it’s easy, we start listening for the things that aren’t being said. We start looking for the “wires and pulleys” behind the performance, whether it’s ours or someone else’s. And we realize, too, that much of our communication is nonverbal, especially with people who are close to us, or who see us every day. Because we can talk 'til we’re blue in the face, but if our words contradict what someone knows of us based on our actions, all our fancy talk starts sounding like the grownups in a Peanuts cartoon: just a bunch of “wah-wah-wah.”
So, whatever it takes, let’s keep trying. Because ultimately, in spite of how much I like this quote by Denis Johnson, I do know what’s lonelier than trying to communicate—and that’s giving up on communication altogether.
The final season of The Boys is near its end.
Hack and slash your way through these epic fantasy shows on Netflix.
The company will start paying iPhone owners to settle a lawsuit over delayed and missing AI features.
The two-time major champion has mused about life as a full-time streamer. But sport should be more than just a platform to grow an athlete’s brand
Golf: a feeder sport for aspiring YouTubers? When Bryson DeChambeau, faced with the expiry of his LIV Golf contract at the end of this year and the implosion, possibly even sooner, of the now Saudi-less LIV Golf, mused last week that he might give up life on tour to focus on his YouTube channel, most professional golf watchers scoffed. This was just a bluff, a move to gain leverage as DeChambeau, like every other LIV player, contemplates an uncertain future and negotiates the fraught path back to the PGA Tour.
“I think, from my perspective, I’d love to grow my YouTube channel three times, maybe even more,” DeChambeau said. “I’d love to do a bunch of dubbing in different languages, giving the world more reason to watch YouTube. And then I’d love to play tournaments that want me.”
Continue reading...The USMNT head coach has played 61 different players in his 24 games in charge – the trends among them could determine who makes the cut
In exactly two weeks, Mauricio Pochettino will determine which 26 players will represent the United States at this summer’s World Cup. The decision may be even harder than you’d expect
Across 24 games as US boss, Pochettino has deployed 61 different players for first-hand assessment, and his tenure so far has provided scant evidence of a crystalized core.
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You'll need these credentials if you want to buy a new Apple device.
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A strand of DNA. An eerie doorbell video. The investigation into Nancy Guthrie's disappearance reaches 100th day with no sign of a breakthrough.
The Food and Drug Administration commissioned the research and received the answer, but is not releasing it
Last week, the New York Times and the Washington Post reported yet another troubling case of data suppression at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Studies of millions of vaccine recipients were completed by career scientists, peer-reviewed and accepted by working pharmacovigilance journals; after political appointees declined to sign off, they were withdrawn. The agency commissioned the work and received the answer, but is not releasing it.
In October, FDA scientists were directed to withdraw two Covid-19 vaccine safety studies that had already been accepted by the journals Drug Safety and Vaccine. In February, top officials declined to sign off on submitting Shingrix safety abstracts to a major drug-safety conference. The Covid studies were not small. One examined the records of 7.5 million Medicare beneficiaries for 14 pre-specified adverse outcomes after 2023–2024 Covid-19 vaccination, using a self-controlled case-series design with follow-up of up to 90 days. Only one signal – anaphylaxis at roughly one per million Pfizer-BioNTech doses – exceeded statistical noise. A second examined 4.2 million recipients aged six months to 64 years for more than a dozen outcomes; it identified the rare febrile-seizure and myocarditis signals already on the label. The Shingrix safety analysis confirmed the elevated but low Guillain-Barré risk that has been on the package insert for years.
Robert B Shpiner is a clinical professor of medicine (pulmonary and critical care) and associate professor of neurosurgery (neurocritical care) at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, where he has practiced critical care for more than 40 years
Continue reading...hello, wanted to see what you guys would go for out of these two choices ?
GT with a GTV kit, WTF rails, 5 inch MTE hub some treaded tyre that fits LOL with fender and some accessories.
GTS with the performance treaded tyre, low boy foot pads and everything else stock (6.5 inch hub and standard GTs rails) + FTL drop top fender.
Wanted to see what would you guys would lean towards to, let me know your choice between these two.
Thanks in advance.
Now that the usually $13 train ticket has been hiked up to $105 for the World Cup, a lot of fans have been wondering whether it's possible to walk to MetLife Stadium from New York City.
To find out, we sent the intrepid Mark McPartland on a scenic hike to New Jersey to see if America’s pedestrian infrastructure is up to the task.
What he found was a challenging but occasionally scenic 4.5 hour walk that ended with blocked off pedestrian routes that would stop even the most adventurous European hiker from getting to the stadium during the World Cup
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Continue reading...Rising cost of living such as high gas prices also a concern in election that will have record number of voters
Voters in the Bahamas head to the polls on Tuesday in a hotly contested general election featuring high-profile candidates such as the former basketball champion Rick Fox.
Voters in the Caribbean archipelago are divided over concerns about immigration, especially from neighbouring Haiti, and the rising cost of living, with significant spikes in gas prices caused by war in the Middle East.
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Jason Agan was impossible to miss at Angelo Rodriguez High School. The San Francisco Bay Area teacher was loud and gregarious, a fixture on campus since the Fairfield school opened in 2001. He ran the student government and called himself the man behind the curtain, organizing pep rallies and prom. He taught AP calculus, so advanced math students ended up in his classroom, jostling for his approval and letters of recommendation. Some considered him a mentor who inspired a love of math — and even a second father.
But for years students also whispered about Agan’s behavior, according to interviews with 14 Rodriguez High graduates, most of whom he had taught. He touched some of them in public in ways that made them uncomfortable, they said, including hugging students and massaging their shoulders. And he seemed fixated on enforcing the dress code, calling out girls whose shorts were too short.
Nearly two decades into Agan’s tenure, and on the heels of the #MeToo movement, students had enough. At least 11 students and one parent submitted written complaints about his behavior to school administrators in 2018, drawing at least two warnings to stop, a KQED and ProPublica investigation found. By January 2019, the Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District had taken steps to fire him, suspending him without pay.
Agan pushed back, and nearly a year later an independent panel convened by the state to hear his case deemed him “unfit to teach.” The panel’s decision meant that the popular educator was officially out of the job where he had spent his entire teaching career.
But the panel’s review only addressed his employment at this one school district, and its finding was not shared publicly. It would be up to the state’s teacher licensing agency to determine whether additional discipline would be imposed, including whether Agan could keep teaching in California public schools.
Over the next three years, Agan was hired at a second school and then a third. During that period, the state issued a one-week suspension of his teaching license for his behavior at his first school. Then, Agan faced another accusation of unwanted touching — this time, by an eighth grader at his second school, according to school records. The state’s teaching credentialing agency did not inform the other schools or the parents of students in Agan’s classes of the full extent of what went on at Rodriguez High.
Agan, now 47, did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, and someone at his address hung up when a reporter rang his apartment buzzer and identified herself. Nor did he respond to questions sent via email or certified mail to his home about students’ accusations and his job history. He previously denied any sexual motivation in touching students, telling the independent panel that he was simply offering students support and encouragement — not massaging them, according to records obtained by the news outlets.
A broad look at California’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing by KQED and ProPublica shows a pattern of delays and inaction, combined with a lack of transparency, that have allowed educators to continue teaching after school districts reported them to the state for sexual harassment or other misconduct of a sexual nature. Agan’s case is one of at least 67 in which the state has not revoked the professional licenses of educators after school districts determined they had sexually harassed students or committed other types of sexual misconduct, according to a review of available records from 2019 through 2025 obtained by the news outlets. At least 14 of those educators were rehired by other schools, and of those, at least 12, including Agan, still work in education, according to a review of school websites and employment records provided by schools.
Anita Fitzhugh, a spokesperson for the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, said the state automatically revokes teachers’ credentials when they are convicted of sexual criminal offenses, but not necessarily when a district determines they have committed sexual misconduct. She said the state Legislature — not the licensing agency — determines the type of misconduct that results in automatic revocation.
The agency appoints a committee to assess noncriminal cases of misconduct, she said. Agan has not been accused of a crime.
“The Commission’s authority balances protecting students as well as the legal rights of educators who have been accused but not convicted of specific crimes,” Fitzhugh said in a written statement.
“If our job as teachers is to keep children safe, we have to be held accountable for things we do that could harm them.”
Alicia DeRollo, former commissioner on California’s teacher licensing agency
The agency’s disciplinary process is unique among licensing bodies in California in how much is kept secret, Fitzhugh said. The fact that a teacher has been disciplined is noted on a state website of credentialed educators, but the database does not explain why.
In contrast, the licensing bodies governing dozens of other professions in California, including doctors, nurses, police officers and lawyers, make the reasons that disciplinary actions were imposed easily accessible on their websites. And at least 12 states, including Oregon, Washington and Florida, do the same for teachers.
“If our job as teachers is to keep children safe, we have to be held accountable for things we do that could harm them,” said Alicia DeRollo, a longtime teacher who served as one of 19 commissioners on California’s teacher licensing agency from 2011 to 2020.
Amid this gap in oversight, Agan found two new jobs and remains in the classroom.
For 17 years, Agan taught at Rodriguez High, a sprawling open-air campus nestled alongside rolling hills where cows graze. The school serves the racially diverse commuter town of Fairfield, halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento.
Then in 2018, several sophomores in his accelerated math class reported him to school administrators.
One girl alleged that he took her phone out of her back pocket while she was sitting down taking a test and that he would massage girls’ shoulders in class, according to school records. Assistant principal Gary Hiner cautioned Agan to be careful, sharing that students had told him they were uncomfortable when the teacher walked around class and touched them, according to a summary Hiner wrote about the spoken warning.
In March 2018, a father emailed another administrator after Agan wore a shirt to school that used the Pi symbol to spell out “Pimp.” The father wrote that a teacher should not be wearing a shirt making light of someone who “sexually exploits people for profit.”
This time, assistant principal Allison Klein emailed Agan, reminding him that school was not the place for “physically touching students, inappropriate innuendo, or jokes in poor taste.”
But the next school year, more students complained, records show. In October 2018, a student told her school counselor and then Hiner that Agan had come up behind her and started massaging her neck beneath her long hair. The student said she felt violated and froze, unsure of what to do, records show. She talked to her peers about Agan to see if others had similar experiences, and told Hiner those classmates said he also made inappropriate comments and touched students in his leadership class.
The student was so distraught she asked to transfer out of the math class and had a panic attack two days later in the school psychologist’s office, school records show. Neither Hiner nor Klein agreed to be interviewed.
Within weeks, at least nine more students submitted written complaints, alleging that Agan had massaged their shoulders and singled out female students for what they wore.
“This was a case of someone overstepping boundaries, and we’re not afraid to call this person out,” said Julia Steed, who was a 15-year-old sophomore when she wrote to school administrators alleging that Agan “had tendencies to touch students,” including palming her head during class. “We were like, ‘Oh no, we’re not dealing with this.’”
Steed, now 23, told KQED and ProPublica that she and her classmates were emboldened by the #MeToo movement to speak out as teenagers across the country were gaining more awareness of boundaries and consent. By the end of 2018, the Fairfield-Suisun school board approved the superintendent’s recommendation to fire Agan.
Agan objected and demanded a hearing, something tenured California public school teachers facing termination are entitled to. His case would be evaluated by an independent panel, which would decide whether to uphold the district’s recommendation.
School districts rarely fire tenured teachers because losing a case is expensive and the teacher can wind up back in the job. Instead, many districts negotiate settlements that allow teachers to resign.
But in Agan’s case, Kris Corey, the Fairfield-Suisun superintendent at the time, said she and the school board believed they had a strong case for termination.
“The board said, ‘We don’t care how much this costs. We are going to a hearing,’” Corey said. “It’s the principle of the matter. This is not OK.”
For eight days in the Fairfield-Suisun district office beginning in July 2019, the three-member panel, including a teacher selected by Agan, heard testimony from students, teachers and administrators.
“This was a case of someone overstepping boundaries, and we’re not afraid to call this person out.”
Julia Steed, Rodriguez High graduate
Seven students, three administrators, a former guidance counselor and a parent spoke against Agan. Six of the students told the panel that Agan made them uncomfortable by touching them or commenting on their clothing, including calling one girl “short shorts.” Four of them, including Steed, said they did not feel comfortable going to Agan for extra help with math because they did not want to be alone with him. Several also said they refrained from speaking in class to avoid attracting his attention.
Four former students, three teachers and a staff member spoke on Agan’s behalf. The former students described Agan as a supportive mentor and caring teacher and said they felt at home in his classroom. All four students said he squeezed, rubbed or touched their shoulders, but that his actions did not make them uncomfortable.
One of those students told KQED and ProPublica that her opinion about the teacher’s behavior has changed in recent years. She said she had considered his physical contact normal while in high school. But her perspective shifted as she got older, she said.
“I went to college and talked to people and realized it wasn’t normal,” said the former student, now in her 20s. “Looking back at it, I would have jumped to the other side, to be quite honest.”
During the hearing, Agan testified that he would have stopped touching students’ shoulders if he had been clearly warned, according to a summary included in the panel’s decision. He said he became comfortable with his leadership students, and his actions carried over to math students even though he wasn’t as close with them. He denied massaging students’ shoulders and said students misinterpreted “squeezes or shakes” as massages. He said he did not intend to make students feel uncomfortable and regretted that some students did not feel safe in his class.
One of the administrators, former director of human resources Mike Minahen, told the panel that the details students shared with him during his investigation “weighed heavy” on him. He said it was unusual for high school students to “break the code” and come forward to make a complaint about a teacher, “especially a leadership teacher who has influence over student activities throughout the entire school.” Minahen, who has retired, declined to comment.
In November 2019, the panel unanimously decided Agan should lose his job. Even the teacher chosen by Agan agreed.
“The likelihood of recurrence is high,” the panel wrote in its decision. “Over time he has shown that he cannot or will not exercise good judgment.”
One of the panelists told KQED and ProPublica that she voted to terminate Agan’s employment in part because his alleged behavior continued even after administrators issued warnings.
“His actions were making students, particularly young women, want to not take advanced math classes. They didn’t want to be touched,” said the panelist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize her job in education. “All that directly impacts their access to good colleges because he was a calculus teacher.”
In December 2019, school district officials sent documentation of Agan’s firing, along with details of their investigation, to the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, California’s educator licensing agency, as state law requires for public school teachers who resign or are fired for misconduct. The educator licensing agency would decide whether Agan would be disciplined further, such as receiving a public warning, facing a suspension or losing his license to teach in a California public school.
The disciplinary process typically takes one year, according to the agency.
It would take the state licensing board nearly 500 days to decide what to do in Agan’s case.
As the state considered the matter, Agan applied for a job at a Sacramento middle school about an hour away from Rodriguez High in May 2020. It was a time of heightened teacher shortages, especially in subjects like math, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Agan provided stellar letters of recommendation from former teaching colleagues in his application, which school representatives provided to KQED and ProPublica in response to a public records request.
“Math is a difficult subject for many and my actions were meant as a means of encouragement.”
Jason Agan in a job application
Any school searching Agan’s name on California’s credentialing database would have seen a clean record and valid credentials indicating he was legally fit to teach. That’s because while the state licensing agency knew Agan had been fired for what the district described as sexually harassing students, California law prevented the agency from disclosing information about the case. Nowhere in the online public records did it say that Agan remained under investigation by the agency — let alone any details of his employment record.
In his application for the middle school job, Agan acknowledged that he had been fired after being “accused of inappropriately touching students on the shoulders during class.” He wrote that he disagreed with the dismissal and explained that he would often place his hands on students’ shoulders while helping them.
“Math is a difficult subject for many and my actions were meant as a means of encouragement; a way to say, ‘It’s ok that you’re having trouble, keep trying,’” Agan wrote, adding that he recognized his actions “made some students feel uncomfortable.”
Agan started teaching at Ephraim Williams College Prep Middle School that fall. The 175-person school is part of the Fortune network of charter schools. Administrators at Ephraim Williams at the time of Agan’s hiring did not respond to questions about how the school vetted him.
Former Fortune human resources consultant Rick Rubino, who helped the middle school recruit, interview and hire candidates at the time Agan was applying, said the school was not aware that Agan’s former employer concluded that he had sexually harassed multiple students. “Do you think any reasonable school district or principal would hire that person?” Rubino said. “No. So clearly, Fortune School did not get that information.”
Rubino said he “would guarantee that somebody at Fortune called the principal at the school where Jason Agan was teaching in Fairfield and got a good report.” He said he does not remember making that call himself.
The former principal at Rodriguez High did not respond to questions about a reference check. But a Fortune School spokesperson, Tiffany Moffatt, said school officials follow “all state guidelines and regulations and conduct thorough vetting, making decisions based on the information available to us.”
It wasn’t until near the end of Agan’s first school year at Ephraim Williams that the state licensing agency issued its decision regarding his actions at his first school. In May 2021, the state suspended Agan’s license for seven days; two of those days fell on a weekend. The sanction — along with a red flag icon — appeared in the state’s public database of credentialed educators. This would be the only visible clue schools would have of anything amiss in Agan’s work history.
Corey, the former superintendent of Fairfield-Suisun Unified, told KQED and ProPublica that she was “flabbergasted” that he had only been suspended for seven days.
“It was a real mismatch of what happened,” Corey said. “What a disservice it was to those girls.”
Steed, one of Agan’s accusers, said students had done the right thing and shared their concerns about Agan with their school, only for adults at the state level to give him the opportunity to teach elsewhere.
“What’s even the point of going through this whole process?” she said.
In September 2021, a month after Fortune students returned to in-person learning, an eighth grader at Agan’s second school complained about his conduct.
The student told her doctor during a routine physical that Agan had touched her lower back, according to a summary of the complaint.
The girl’s mother told KQED and ProPublica that she reported the incident to the principal, who connected mother and daughter with Rubino, Fortune’s human resources consultant. The mother told Rubino that Agan was giving her daughter a disproportionate amount of attention.
The girl, who is now 17, spoke to KQED and ProPublica on the condition that only her middle name, Sherelle, be used because she is a minor. Leslie, the student’s mother, is also being identified by her middle name to protect her daughter’s identity.
In that same meeting, Sherelle told Rubino that Agan removed his hand from her lower back after she asked him to stop, and he returned to the front of the classroom. But he came back moments later and placed his hand on her shoulder, according to a letter of warning Rubino wrote to Agan after interviewing the girl.
“I felt disrespected. I felt uncomfortable. I felt mad,” Sherelle told the news outlets about the incident. “I felt like even speaking up didn’t matter.”
In his letter, Rubino directed Agan to stop touching students and “dial back” his praise for the girl. Rubino also cautioned that failure to comply could result in further disciplinary action, up to suspension or termination.
Agan denied the allegations in a written response to Rubino obtained by KQED and ProPublica. “I would like to be on record that I dispute it being listed as a ‘fact’ that I touched [the student] on the lower back,” Agan wrote. “I have been extremely diligent in avoiding personal contact with scholars due to my previous experience.”
Leslie had texted Rubino expressing concern about how Agan was vetted for the job after she said she saw online posts by students at his former school alleging that he had touched them inappropriately.
“Actually, I was the one who investigated the matter in the Fairfield Suisun School District when Mr. Agan was a candidate,” Rubino texted back that same day in messages reviewed by KQED and ProPublica. “I also checked social media and Google to see if I could find any information about the incident in Fairfield, but I did not find anything.”
Rubino did not answer subsequent questions about the details of his investigation or how much he knew about Agan’s conduct at the teacher’s previous school.
After the state licensing agency recommends educators be disciplined, California law allows it to release its findings, which include a summary of the case, to current supervisors and prospective employers who request it within five years. Fortune appears never to have asked for such findings, according to the logs of these requests between 2020 and 2024 provided by the agency to KQED and ProPublica. A Fortune spokesperson did not say why the charter school did not ask for the information.
“The whole education system would rather protect him.”
Leslie, the mother of a student who complained about Agan’s conduct
Leslie said her daughter’s experience at Ephraim Williams only worsened after she reported Agan. Math has always been Sherelle’s favorite subject. But as the school year went on, her grades in Agan’s class plummeted. She needed help but said Agan ignored her.
With just weeks left in the school year, Leslie pulled her daughter out of Ephraim Williams to finish eighth grade at another school.
She only learned about Agan’s disciplinary history when KQED and ProPublica contacted her in January. “The whole education system would rather protect him,” Leslie said. “You let him loose on all these kids.”
Fitzhugh, spokesperson for the teacher licensing agency, said the commission is “committed to keeping all students and schools safe” but is bound by the law in how it disciplines teachers. “The Commission stands ready to implement any additional public protections that the Legislature authorizes,” she said.
Starting the following year, in 2022, records show that Fortune offered Agan a role supporting new teachers rather than assigning him his own classroom. Fortune administrators did not respond to questions about why he was offered the position, which he declined because he had received another job offer in the Bay Area.
“Thank you for the last two years,” Agan wrote, resigning from the school. “It has meant more to me than you could ever know.”
By August 2022, Agan would begin teaching at Clifford School, which serves students in pre-K through eighth grade in Redwood City. He received tenure in 2024.
Wendy Kelly, deputy superintendent at the Redwood City School District, declined to answer questions about Agan’s hiring or say whether the school district was aware he had been accused of misconduct at two previous schools. She told KQED and ProPublica that the district, when hiring, typically calls candidates’ immediate supervisors and checks the database of licensed educators.
She said school districts rely on decisions by the Commission on Teacher Credentialing to “put the best people in the classroom.”
“I was pleased to see that the suspension was only seven days,” Kelly said of Agan’s discipline. “I have to trust that when the CTC reinstates the teacher that the issue has been either resolved, learned from, there’s been consequences in place, which is why they’re employable to the next organization.”
KQED and ProPublica obtained detailed teacher disciplinary records from school districts after filing public records requests with the 300 largest districts in California. We asked for records of sexual misconduct complaints from 2019 through 2025, including any reports to the Commission on Teacher Credentialing. More than 150 districts provided records. If the district determined that an educator had committed misconduct that it characterized as sexual, including sexual harassment by unwanted touching, sending sexual electronic messages and making sexual remarks, we checked the state licensing database to see whether the state had revoked the teacher’s license or imposed other discipline.
If you have experience with the state’s opaque teacher disciplinary process, KQED and ProPublica want to hear from you.
The post He Was Fired for Sexually Harassing Students. California Allowed Him to Keep Teaching Anyway. appeared first on ProPublica.
The climatic phenomenon is expected to return this year, but a lot has changed since what might have been the worst environmental disaster in human history.
In another shift, nearly 2 in 3 of those removed since January 2025 do not have criminal records.
Ask anyone who has followed news about Gaza with even a smidgen of critical thinking, and they will tell you: Media organizations are biased against Palestinians — and systematically favor Israel.
It’s easy to say but harder to prove. Doing empirical analysis that shows these biases is time-consuming and complex, full of pitfalls and nuances that can muddy the picture. Yet the double standards are everywhere — and there are ways to do sober, qualitative work that elucidates not only the differences in how Israeli and Palestinian life are covered, but also also in how other recent conflicts are covered.
For my new book “How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza,” I attempt to demonstrate, beyond a reasonable doubt, that U.S. media coverage of the war on Gaza was one-sided, racist, dehumanizing, and often veered into outright incitement.
I examined over 12,000 articles from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN.com, Politico, Axios, USA Today, and The Associated Press, along with 5,000 TV segments that aired on CNN and MSNBC. The focus is on center-left media outlets influential with the Biden administration during the first year of the conflict — with an emphasis on the first few months, when Israel firmly established its narrative justifying the genocide, rendering mass death inevitable.
Here are seven statistical findings that prove the U.S. media’s bias against Palestinians.
The media’s penchant for invoking a nation’s “right to defend itself,” typically followed by the rationalization of mass civilian killing, was reserved almost exclusively for Israel. On CNN and MSNBC, guests, anchors, and reporters mentioned the right to self-defense for Israel 94 times more than they did for Palestinians. In print media, Israel was afforded this right over 100 times more frequently than Palestinians in Gaza.
Watch a supercut below of the phrase being repeated on TV news.
News outlets frequently apply the term “human shields” to any instance where a guerrilla force operates near civilian infrastructure — a definition rejected by human rights groups, but used by partisans to explain away civilian deaths. That didn’t stop media outlets from invoking the term hundreds of times about civilians near Palestinian fighters, implicitly justifying their deaths in Israeli attacks. On the other hand, my analysis of TV news showed no mention at all of the Israeli military’s use of “human shields” — despite documented cases where Israel’s tactics meet the legal definition.
Cable networks and print media outlets consistently applied a double standard in favor of Israel when using the terms “massacre,” “barbaric,” “savage,” and “slaughter” to describe the killing of civilians. Over a 100-day period that saw roughly 24,000 Palestinians killed, the use of these emotive words in the print media I surveyed was entirely in favor of Israel. (I only included instances when the words appeared in outlets’ own editorial voices, not when they quoted commentators or officials.)
Watch supercuts below of U.S. news personalities using the phrase “savage.”
After the October 17 bombing of Gaza’s al-Ahli Arab hospital by Israel, media outlets almost uniformly adopted pro-Israel pressure groups’ pejorative qualifiers “Hamas-run” or “Hamas-controlled” to describe Palestinian death counts, thereby discrediting them. Neither CNN nor MSNBC used the term between October 7 and October 17, 2023, but it quickly skyrocketed in usage as the body count in Gaza grew — with the use of a related phrase becoming an official policy at CNN. This, despite the U.S. State Department, World Health Organization, Human Rights Watch, and others’ long use of Gaza Health Ministry figures.
Victims of Israel’s attack on Gaza who could be expected to elicit sympathy from audiences — like journalists and children — received little coverage during the first 100 days of Israel’s assault, compared to their counterparts in Ukraine.
While incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia were on the rise in the months after October 7, coverage focused almost entirely on antisemitism with little or no regard for anti-Muslim bigotry or how the mass killing in Gaza impacted Palestinians stateside. This was especially true on college campuses, where students protesting Israel’s war were tarred as antisemites in the mainstream press, while Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian students who faced discrimination barely received any attention.
For a poignant example of how Palestinians are dehumanized, consider the media’s treatment of former Harvard University President Claudine Gay in comparison to their coverage, or lack thereof, of the killing of Hind Rajab. Not long after Gay resigned under pressure from Congress amid a monthslong fixation on allegations of antisemitism on college campuses and allegations of plagiarism by Gay over 20 years prior, the Israeli military opened fire on a car carrying Rajab and her family and left the 5-year-old Palestinian girl to die. On the New York Times homepage, stories about Gay appeared in 15 of the 31-day period covering the height of the scandal, whereas Rajab didn’t appear once in the month that followed her death.
The post We Analyzed Thousands of News Articles: Here’s the Proof of Pro-Israel Bias in Mainstream Media appeared first on The Intercept.
KQED has teamed up with ProPublica to report on how California handles cases of alleged teacher misconduct.
The state’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing releases few details about cases, leaving the public largely in the dark. From our interviews with former commission members and students, as well as a review of records, we found dozens of cases in which the state did not revoke teachers’ licenses after findings of sexual misconduct.
We know there are other issues with this system, and we need your help to get a full picture. We want to hear about your experience with the disciplinary process, whether you’re a student, parent, teacher, administrator or credentialing commission member, or you have other insight. Your perspective will help guide our reporting, ensuring we understand the issues from all sides.
You can fill out a brief form or contact KQED reporter Holly McDede on Signal at hollymcdede.68 or via email at hmcdede@kqed.org.
We take your privacy seriously and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story.
We’re gathering these stories for our reporting, which can take several weeks or months. We may not be able to follow up with everyone, but we will read everything you submit and it will help guide our project. With your permission, we may share your response with a partner newsroom interested in following up.
As journalists, our role is to write about issues. We cannot provide legal advice or other support. However, there are resources available. We know these cases can stem from painful experiences, and mental health support is available if you need it:
If you would like to reach out about a case outside of California, you can contact ProPublica engagement reporter Asia Fields.
The post Help Us Report on Teacher Misconduct in California appeared first on ProPublica.
President Trump is expected to encourage China to pressure Iran to make a deal to end the war when he visits Beijing this week and meets with President Xi Jinping.
Former police chief Ronald dela Rosa spends night at senate office after another Duterte ally offers protective custody
The unusual pursuit was captured on CCTV cameras inside the Philippine senate. Ronald dela Rosa, a longtime ally of the former president Rodrigo Duterte, raced along the hallways of the upper house complex, stumbling on the staircase, as he fled government agents.
“They want to forcibly bring me to The Hague, to surrender me there,” Dela Rosa said later on a Facebook livestream, pleading for public support.
Continue reading...The 32.3m surpasses those caused by disasters for the first time, as 82.2m people displaced in total around world
The number of internal displacements triggered by conflict or violence around the world reached a record high in 2025, surpassing the number of disaster-driven internal displacements for the first time.
A report published by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) shows that by the end of 2025 there were 32.3m conflict-driven internal displacements. That is 60% higher than those recorded the previous year, and – for the first time since data collection began in 2008 – above displacements driven by natural disasters, which reached 29.9m in 2025.
Continue reading...Country with a population of just 2.5m credits investment in young athletes for its rise but this progress is under threat
It was a fairytale ending to the World Athletics Relays in Gaborone. In the final strait, Collen Kebinatshipi surged past South Africa’s Zakithi Nene to win the men’s 4x400m relay for Botswana. The home crowd, a sea of light blue, went wild.
“It means so many things to us,” Letsile Tebogo, 22, the reigning 200m Olympic champion, who ran the second leg, told reporters afterwards. “Not just the team … but for the people that always cheer for us behind the TV. Now they had that experience to see first-hand how much effort, how much pressure, how much we give for them.”
Continue reading...Premium editions of Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! cost up to $250 but some say signatures are unnaturally identical
Liza Minnelli fans who bought signed copies of her memoir are seeking refunds because they believe her signature is fake.
Copies of Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! by the American 80-year-old singer were marketed around the world as “hand-signed collectibles”, with premium editions costing up to $250 (£185).
Continue reading...Tim Cook and Elon Musk, among other tech CEOS, will accompany the US president on a trip to China
Donald Trump is heading to China this week. If his guest list is any clue, he wants to discuss technology with Xi Jinping, though perhaps after the war in Iran.
On Monday, news broke that outgoing Apple CEO, Tim Cook, as well as SpaceX and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, would join the US president. Other guests from the tech sphere include Meta’s recently appointed president, Dina Powell McCormick; Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO of computer memory maker Micron; Chuck Robbins, CEO of longtime telecom giant Cisco; and Cristiano Amon, CEO of semiconductor maker Qualcomm, according to a White House official.
Continue reading...The Musk v. Altman trial entered its third week Monday, with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and former OpenAI co-founder and renowned AI researcher Ilya Sutskever taking the stand. Nadella testified that Elon Musk never raised concerns to him that Microsoft's investments in OpenAI violated any special commitments, and said he viewed the partnership as clearly commercial from the start. He also described OpenAI's 2023 board crisis as "amateur city." Meanwhile, Sutskever testified that he had raised concerns about Sam Altman because he feared OpenAI could be "destroyed." He expressed concerns about Altman's behavior to the board, in part because he said he felt "a great deal of ownership" over the startup. "I simply cared for it, and I didn't want it to be destroyed," Sutskever said. CNBC reports: Nadella said he was "very proud" that Microsoft took the risk to invest in OpenAI when "no one else was willing" to bet on the fledgling lab. Musk, who testified late last month, said Microsoft's $10 billion investment was the key tipping point that made him believe OpenAI was violating its nonprofit mission. He testified that the scale of the investment bothered him, and it prompted him to open a legal investigation into OpenAI. "I was concerned they were really trying to steal the charity," Musk said from the stand. Nadella said he did not believe Microsoft's investments in OpenAI were donations, and that there was a clear commercial element to their partnership from the outset. He said during the partnership's early years, Microsoft gave OpenAI sharp discounts on computing resources, and Microsoft believed it would reap marketing benefits from doing so. During a separate video deposition that was played on Monday morning, Michael Wetter, a corporate development executive at Microsoft, said the company has recognized approximately $9.5 billion in revenue to date through its partnership with OpenAI as of March 2025. [...] Nadella said he was "pretty surprised" by the board's decision [to fire Altman in November 2023], and that his priority was to try and figure out how to maintain continuity for Microsoft customers. Immediately after Altman was removed, Nadella said he made an effort to learn more about what happened, adding that he suspected jealousy and poor communication was at play. During conversations with OpenAI board members after the firing, Nadella said he was simply trying to understand the language in the OpenAI's statement about Altman being "not consistently candid" while communicating with the board. That language, Nadella said, "just didn't sort of suffice, because this is the CEO of a company that we are invested in and we're deeply partnered with, and so I felt that they could have explained to me what are the incidents or what is the detail behind it." There must have been instances of jealousy or miscommunication that could have justified pushing out Altman, Nadella said. He wanted more depth from the board members after the remark about candor, but no such information was available, he said. "It was sort of amateur city, as far as I'm concerned," Nadella testified. [...] Musk testified that he is not entirely against OpenAI having a for-profit unit, but he said it became "the tail wagging the dog." He repeatedly accused Altman and Brockman of enriching themselves from a charity while also reaping the positive associations that come from running a nonprofit. "Microsoft has their own motivations, and that would be different from the motivations of the charity," Musk said from the stand. "All due respect to Microsoft, do you really want Microsoft controlling digital superintelligence?" During a videotaped deposition shown in court last week, former OpenAI director Tasha McCauley recalled a discussion with Nadella and her fellow board members after the 2023 decision to dismiss Altman as OpenAI's CEO. "To the best of my recollection, Satya wanted to restore things to as they had been," McCauley said. The board members didn't think that was the right move, she said. But as a court witness on Monday, Nadella said he never demanded that the board reinstate Altman as OpenAI CEO. Recap: Sam Altman Had a Bad Day In Court (Day Eight) Sam Altman's Management Style Comes Under the Microscope At OpenAI Trial (Day Seven) Brockman Rebuts Musk's Take On Startup's History, Recounts Secret Work For Tesla (Day Six) OpenAI President Discloses His Stake In the Company Is Worth $30 Billion (Day Five) Musk Concludes Testimony At OpenAI Trial (Day Four) Elon Musk Says OpenAI Betrayed Him, Clashes With Company's Attorney (Day Three) Musk Testifies OpenAI Was Created As Nonprofit To Counter Google (Day Two) Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court (Day One)
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Not sure if the Pint S performance tire is too narrow or the XR classic tire is too wide for the stock old school XR hub
Calbee to switch its brightly coloured packaging to black and white because war has disrupted supply of certain raw materials used in ink
Japan’s biggest snack maker has been forced to use black-and-white packaging for some flagship products because of ink ingredient shortages caused by the strait of Hormuz blockade.
Calbee, whose potato chip brands in particular are known for brightly coloured bag designs, said 14 of its products would switch to monochrome branding by the end of May.
Continue reading...Since the start of the current conflict, more than 20,500 Ukrainian children have been taken by Russia
It looks like a typical teenager’s bedroom: football shirts on the wall, crumpled clothes on the floor, exercise books open on the desk. But it is a work of political art, intended to evoke the empty rooms of more than 20,500 Ukrainian children unlawfully taken to Russia.
The work was on display on Monday at the headquarters of the European Commission in Brussels, as delegates from 63 countries and international organisations gathered to discuss how to bring Ukraine’s children home. “It’s essentially a way for someone to step into Ukraine without having to actually travel there,” Isaac Yeung, a co-creator of the installation, said.
Continue reading...Friedrich Merz’s criticism of the US president was not a solo run. It was born of the realisation that US leverage has slipped
Friedrich Merz’s criticism of Donald Trump last month reflected more than a moment of personal candour or a split between Berlin and the White House. It pointed to a broader shift under way among European leaders. Increasingly they are willing to publicly confront the Trump administration on issues ranging from Iran to Ukraine and European sovereignty.
The Trump administration’s ever-more erratic policies and the belief that they necessitate a more forceful response partly explains this shift.
Mujtaba Rahman is the managing director for Europe at Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting firm
Continue reading...A smarter war on drugs begins with selective punishment.
Washington has more demands—and Tehran has more leverage.
Why Beijing has failed to exploit Trump’s missteps,
I mean the massive drop-down works I guess but wouldn’t it make more sense to just have a HEX or 0-255(for each channel) input?
Just kind of posting as “one for the books”
I planned to go out for my 1.5-hour night ride, where I take out my GT-V for a 45-minute ride. The battery is usually around 40–50%, where I’m feeling the voltage sag of the stock battery more and I hit 80% duty cycle warning more often.
So I stop home and swap boards out for my GT-S as usual. But when I came back this time, I walked outside and mounted the GT-S, and it engaged late. Kinda did a false mount and then a burnout until I hopped off. When I was off the board the light bar was fully blue, like both footpad zones were engaged, but the board was not moving.
Instead of checking the app, like someone with a brain, I just shut the board off and hoped it would turn on and be all good. But it hasn’t turned on.
The board had about 830 miles total, consisting if of decently aggressive trail and street riding. Looks like I’ll be shipping it to FM, since it’s under 2 years old and I’ve never really taken apart the board. But if it’s not warrantied, then it’s GTSFO for me.
Right now I’ve got my GT-V on the hypercharger so I can go out for another 45-minute ride tonight and get my itch scratched. FOMF
A Georgia data center developed by QTS used nearly 30 million gallons of water through two unaccounted-for connections before residents complained about low water pressure and the county utility discovered the issue. "All told, the developer, Quality Technology Services, owed nearly $150,000 for using more than 29 million gallons of unaccounted-for water," reports Politico. "That is equivalent to 44 Olympic-size swimming pools and far exceeds the peak limit agreed to during the data center planning process." From the report: The details were revealed in a May 15, 2025 letter from the Fayette County water system to Quality Technology Services, which outlined the retroactive charge of $147,474. The letter did not specify how many months the unpaid bill covered, but when asked about it Wednesday, Vanessa Tigert, the Fayette County water system director, said it was likely about four months. A QTS spokesperson said the timeframe was 9-15 months. Once the data center was notified, it paid all retroactive charges, a QTS spokesperson said in an email, noting the unmetered water consumption occurred while the county converted its system to smart meters. The Fayette County water system confirmed the data center's meters are now fully integrated and tracked. Tigert, the water system director, blamed the issue on a procedural mix-up. "Fayette County is a suburb, it's mostly residential, and we don't have much commercial meters in our system anyway," she said. "And so we didn't realize our connection point wasn't working." The incident became public last week when a county resident obtained the 2025 letter to QTS through a public records request and posted it on Facebook, prompting outrage from residents concerned about the data center's water consumption. [...] Tigert, who sent the 2025 letter to QTS, said the utility didn't know about the water hookups because the connection process "got mixed up" as the county transitioned to a cloud-based system while also trying to accommodate an industrial customer. Tigert also said her staff is small and at capacity. "Just like any water system, we don't have enough staff. We can't keep staff," she said. "I've got one person that's doing inspections and plan review, and so he's spread pretty thin." She said it's possible her staff did know about hookups but that she hadn't been able to locate the inspection report. "I may have hit 'send' too soon," she said about the 2025 letter to QTS. While the utility charged the data center a higher construction rate for the unapproved water consumption, Tigert confirmed the utility did not penalize or fine the data center. For what it's worth, the Blackstone-owned company says its data centers use a closed-loop cooling system that does not consume water for cooling. The reason for last year's high water use, according to QTS, was the temporary construction work such as concrete, dust control, and site preparation. Once the campus is fully operational, it should only use a small amount of water for things like bathrooms and kitchens. But that point could still be years away, as construction and expansion in Fayetteville may continue for another three to five years.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 | Help! Installed TFL Varials and SP2 tire on my XR this weekend, now the pwr light just slow and steady blinks when turning on. Thought it was a sensor connection issue so I unplugged and re-plugged that bad boy about 10 times. Re-tore down board, checked all connections, still blinking. Am I cursed? Is there an easy solve that I’m missing? [link] [comments] |
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for May 12.
This live blog is now closed.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump reiterated that Iran’s peace proposal was “just unacceptable”.
The president went on to insist that he had a “very simple plan”, and maintained that Tehran could not have a nuclear weapon, without elaborating on the next negotiating steps.
Continue reading...Eileen Wang, 58, mayor of Arcadia, agreed to plead guilty over the felony count brought by the US justice department
Eileen Wang, the mayor of a southern California city, resigned suddenly on Monday after the US Department of Justice (DoJ) announced she had been charged with acting as an illegal foreign agent of China.
Wang, 58, agreed to plead guilty to the felony count and could face a sentence of 10 years in prison.
Continue reading...  | I have one wheel xr + and when i turn it on it feeds me this message i attached photo below. I took the foot sensor off and unplugged it, then turned board on, then pluged sensor back in and the board worked but when i turn the board off and then turn it back on again it stops working and gives me the same message. Any suggestions? [link] [comments] |
Did you use an Android phone with a mobile service plan in the last nine years? You could receive up to $100.
Ceasefire on ‘life support’, Trump says as he considers restarting US navy military escorts of ships through the strait of Hormuz – key US politics stories from 11 May 2026 at a glance
Donald Trump has dismissed Iran’s latest peace proposals as stupid and denied he was under any domestic pressure to reach a deal.
Referring to the ceasefire in force since 7 April, Trump said: “I would call it the weakest, right now, after reading that piece of garbage they sent us – I didn’t even finish reading it.
Continue reading...This blog is now closed. See full report: Trump calls Iran’s response to peace plan ‘totally unacceptable’ as ceasefire frays
Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, will visit Qatar later today for talks on the war, its impact on the region and efforts to ensure navigational safety in the strait of Hormuz is resumed, a Turkish diplomatic source told the Reuters news agency.
Turkey, which neighbours Iran, has been in close contact with the US, Iran and mediator Pakistan since the start of the conflict. It condemnded the US and Israel for launching the war, widely seen to have been done illegally, but also criticised Iran’s counter strikes on Gulf states.
Continue reading...Move comes as administration seeks to boost drilling, logging, mining and grazing on taxpayer-owned land
The interior department is canceling a rule that put conservation on equal footing with development, as Donald Trump’s administration eases restrictions on industries and seeks to boost drilling, logging, mining and grazing on taxpayer-owned land.
The 2024 rule adopted under Joe Biden was meant to refocus the interior department’s Bureau of Land Management, which oversees about 10% of land in the US. It allowed public property to be leased for restoration in the same way that oil companies lease land for drilling.
Continue reading...  | Hi! I’m building a from scratch XR VESC, and none of the hardware that came with the Kush Lo or the Varials seem to be correct for these holes. Top left is my assembled tail and next to it is one of the unassembled rails from the nose just to show the holes. The holes on both the footpads and the rails are countersunk which is even more confusing. Is there a correct answer for this and if not, what have people been doing? Thanks! [link] [comments] |
Violet and Xaden are coming to a TV screen near you.
May 11, 2026 — Scale AI has formalize its partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) through a Memorandum of Understanding in support of the Genesis Mission, a national effort to unlock scientific discovery through advanced AI and computing.
The Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission is an ambitious initiative to create an integrated platform capable of harnessing the federal government’s vast datasets for scientific discovery and innovation. This MOU creates a framework for collaboration on topics across AI and advanced computing, including information sharing and future joint projects in support of Genesis. Scale has also engaged on the Genesis Mission through responses to Requests for Information from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and DOE.
While Genesis marks a major step toward strengthening energy independence and accelerating innovation for national security, a critical objective in the initiative, apart from compute and models, is making its vast scientific datasets usable, trusted, and accessible at scale. That’s where Scale is ready to step in.
A Bottleneck to Innovation
The massive amounts of data generated across America’s 17 National Labs represents a strategic resource that, if utilized properly, can unlock transformative advances in U.S. scientific leadership.
Today, however, much of this data remains fragmented across systems, inconsistently labeled, and difficult for researchers and AI systems to use in production workflows. This is the “data bottleneck,” not a lack of data, but the gap between data that exists and data that is actually usable for AI-driven discovery.
When data is scattered, incomplete, or inconsistent, it becomes a barrier rather than a driver of discovery. The Department of Energy recently released its initial set of Genesis Mission use cases, outlining high-impact scientific and operational priorities the platform is intended to support. These use cases provide early clarity on where integrated data, advanced computing, and AI-driven tools can deliver the greatest returns for national security, energy resilience, and scientific leadership. Success isn’t about gathering more inputs; it’s about getting the right data to the right people in a way that drives decisions and real world results.
Unlocking the “Right Data”
The execution of the Genesis Mission will depend on preparing the data in ways that effectively address the mission’s core goals. That means making sure the data from U.S. National Labs is:
Getting these fundamentals right is what turns data infrastructure into scientific advantage.
Creating Standards That Enable Innovation
Alongside the Department of Energy’s efforts to modernize and structure its databases, the Genesis Mission will need to develop a strategic framework to guide the creation of high-quality evaluation benchmarks and determine the most high impact use-cases to prioritize. The recently announced Genesis Mission Consortium is a promising step in this direction, with one of its core working groups dedicated specifically to Data Integration and Standards.
Through this MOU, Scale will work with DOE to explore contributions across AI-ready data infrastructure, evaluation systems, and advanced model applications, with a pathway to deeper collaboration through future projects and pilots.
The Role of Commercial Partners
Scale’s experience in high-stakes, mission-critical AI projects shows that disciplined, ongoing data expertise is often what separates ambitious initiatives from those slowed by fragmented or inconsistent information. As Genesis evolves, trusted partnerships that can operate across complex, distributed data environments will remain key to building AI systems that can support meaningful scientific discovery while preventing new bottlenecks from emerging.
Signing this MOU is an important step in getting the data layer right in this mission. It allows Scale to engage more directly with DOE, align on shared priorities, and discuss how AI is applied across some of the most important scientific challenges facing the country. Scale is proud to contribute its perspective to this national effort, as Scale works alongside the White House and the U.S. Department of Energy to advance AI-assisted innovation that strengthens American leadership and accelerates discovery at the forefront of energy, security, and scientific priorities.
About Scale AI
Scale accelerates the development of AI within organizations of any size to deliver critical business insights and operational efficiency. Its data-centric infrastructure platform leverages RLHF (Reinforced Learning with Human Feedback) to help organizations build the strongest AI models, enabling any company to deploy algorithms that supercharge their business. Scale is trusted by the most ambitious AI companies across industries including Meta, Microsoft, U.S. Army, DoD’s Defense Innovation Unit, Open AI, Cohere, Anthropic, Stability AI, General Motors, Toyota Research Institute, Brex, Instacart and Flexport.
Source: Scale AI
The post Scale AI Signs MOU with DOE to Advance the Genesis Mission appeared first on HPCwire.
Brett Goldstein stars as an escort in one show, and Hannah Waddingham is a professional killer in another.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for May 12, No. 1,788.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for May 12, No. 1,066.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for May 12, No. 800.
Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for May 12, No. 596.
The Supreme Court set aside lower court decisions that had blocked the state from using a congressional map drawn by Republicans in 2023 that contained one majority-Black district.
The KV cache has emerged as the key linchpin in the quest to build AI systems that deliver the deep reasoning capabilities with large context windows that people need to do real work. Nvidia has fleshed out its vision for breaking through the so-called “GPU memory wall” with its Context Memory Storage (CMX) architecture, which it unveiled in January and which will start trickling into customers’ data centers later this year. But there’s plenty of room for innovation at multiple levels of the stack to grow and get the most out of the KV cache.
As the short-term memory for AI inference sessions, the key-value cache (KV cache) serves a critical role in making sure that an AI inference service delivers a useful experience for users, particularly those who demand very large context windows for AI reasoning workloads. The KV cache does this by essentially storing pre-computed answers to common agentic queries, which reduces the time to retrieve the answer the next time it’s requested.
Values computed from prefill stage are stored in KV cache for later use (Image courtesy Nvidia blog post “Optimizing Inference for Long Context and Large Batch Sizes with NVFP4 KV Cache”)
Technically, the KV cache is storing the results of the prefill stage of AI inference, or the read stage, which is heavily reliant on the GPU or AI accelerator. Once the attention states have been computed for each attention layer as part of the AI input, the answer is generated from the attention states one token at a time during the decode stage (or the write stage). By storing the most common keys and values of the attention states, the KV cache eliminates the need for the GPU to re-compute these answers from scratch, speeding up token generation and reducing latency for the user.
Ideally, the entire KV cache is stored on High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) sitting right next to the GPU or other processor. That minimizes the physical distance the data has to travel, keeping latencies low and throughput high. However, HBM is simply not big enough to contain the massive context windows that users are demanding, while simultaneously handling the other memory tasks required to keep the AI model running.
According to James Coomer, the senior vice president of products at DDN, the neural network typically will take up about 30% of the HBM’s capacity, while another 30% is consumed by working bits and pieces. “And 30% is available for this KV cache,” he said, “and you run out almost immediately.”
One common solution to this HBM capacity problem is to spill the KV cache into other available memory or storage. First up is DRAM. When that fills up, the KV cache spills over into high-speed storage, preferably NVMe connected over a speedy network. While solid state disk is fast, it’s significantly slower than HBM and introduces more latency. But with current technologies and AI demands, there’s really no feasible workaround.
This is what Nvidia’s CMX architecture does: provide a mechanism to spill KV cache onto external storage. The CMX blueprint that Nvidia unveiled in January is providing to its storage partners leans on BlueField-4 data processing units (DPUs) to provide the RDMA-goosed data connection from the complex of processors powering AI inference (its Vera Rubin Platform, which spans Rubin GPUs, Vera CPUs, and Grok LPUs) into the high-speed storage provided by the likes of DDN and others.
Nvidia’s CMX platform will utilize Bluefield-4 DPUs
CMX is still under development, and DDN and its competitors are working with Nvidia to build their own solutions based on Nvidia’s CMX blueprint. It will be interesting to see how the various storage vendors position their CMX solutions. But that will come later in 2026.
In the meantime, customers are still building AI inference setups, and that requires ensuring that customers are aware of the significance of the KV cache and the various architectural decisions that can impact it. “It’s very important,” Coomer said. “We’re spending a lot of time sort of level-setting and making sure that we can really understand what a customer is going to experience with KV cache acceleration.”
There are several factors that can impact KV cache performance and the experience of end users. Having a fast network connection and fast storage media certainly helps. Parallel file systems will play a role here, as will other techniques for speeding up the S3-based object systems that are expected to form the storage layer for CMX and KV cache solutions.
Other factors, limitations, and expectations will impact KV cache usage, including:
Every new AI inference service will start out with a KV cache at zero, which means that every new query will require the GPUs or AI accelerators to create the attention states (the keys and value) from scratch. Over time, as users query the service, the KV cache will get bigger, and the number of “cache misses” will decline. According to Coomer, an 85% cache hit rate is not uncommon for DDN customers.
The amount of HBM/DRAM and the amount of storage will obviously impact the performance of a distributed KV cache system. Coomer says it’s reasonable for a customer to have 1,000 times more storage than memory. So if a customer had an Nvidia NVL72 system with about 13TB of HBM, perhaps they might need a storage system with 13PB. Again, a lot depends on the other factors at play.
A KV cache hit leads to re-used KV tensors and less GPU load, whereas a cache miss leads to recomputation of key values and more GPU load (Image courtesy Nvidia blog post “Optimizing Inference for Long Context and Large Batch Sizes with NVFP4 KV Cache”)
Compression is another factor to keep in mind. Google recently published a paper on a new compression technique dubbed TurboQuant that could dramatically increase the scale of vector quantization, thereby lowering storage and memory requirements for KV caches as well as vector databases.
Other variables in AI stack can also impact KV cache, including the processor, the AI model, inference framework, and inference engine. Nvidia’s CMX platform obviously will support its hardware and software, but Google has its own approach for managing KV cache spillover cloud Lustre environments, among others.
According to this March blog post, Nvidia’s CMX platform spans multiple components, including its open source distributed inference framework, called Dynamo; an intelligent router dubbed DOCA Memos; and an open source library for accelerating point-to-point data transfers in AI inference frameworks called Nvidia Inference Transfer Library (NIXL). “DOCA Memos provides KV-aware services and I/O control on BlueField-4, while NVIDIA Dynamo and NIXL integrate context placement and reuse into the inference serving layer,” the company states in a product brief.
DDN is working to sort all this out, along with storage vendors like Vast Data, WEKA, Everpure (formerly Pure Storage), Vdura, NetApp, and others who are competing to deliver CMX solutions that conform to Nvidia’s STX rack design.
“Nvidia is doing an excellent job as well in trying to build a proper, well-defined playing field for this to go and take place,” Coomer said. “Right now, it’s maybe a little bit Wild West. Everybody’s trying it out and doing all sorts of different things. They may not be talking about it too loudly now, but everybody’s working out how to build these KV cache environments.”
Coomer is an active AI user who sees the potential that it could have, but he’s not quite happy with AI’s current level of knowledge retention. In particular, he’s frustrated with the AI’s “lost in the middle” problem, where it remembers the first and last things it’s told, but forgets everything in the middle.
“Of course it’s amazing how good it’s become. But also I get frustrated with AI within about five minutes every day because it doesn’t have enough attention,” he said. “It’s still got serious flaws around being able to pay attention to enough things at once when it’s answering you. One of the critical pieces is cracking this attention problem, expanding the amount of attention an AI can have when it’s responding to a large context query.”
Trillions of dollars are being invested building massive data centers and outfitting them with gobs of GPUs and TPUs, enough HBM to tile the island of Manhattan, and all of the data collected throughout human history. Could it be that expanding humble KV cache to allow AI to hold more thoughts in its head is the secret to unlocking AI potential?
It very well could be, said Coomer. “Whoever cracks this one, wins.”
The post Why The Race to Expand KV Cache Is Critical for AI Inference Success appeared first on HPCwire.
A multiple-year time jump sets the third season in the middle of the war between Sauron and the elves.
The body of a seventh person was located Monday nearly 150 miles north of a Union Pacific rail yard in Laredo, where six bodies were discovered on Sunday afternoon.
 | Objective: Bonding, Building, and Probably Breaking Things The goal here is simple: a fun venture for my son and me. My Grandfather and Uncle helped me wrench on farm equipment when I was a kid; now I’m passing the torch, except instead of oily cylinders, we’re dealing with high-voltage EV "magic." My son is 10 and has already built some RC cars, so he’s basically the Lead Engineer. I’m just the guy with the credit card and the "Buy It For Life" obsession. A Huge Thank You This Reddit community feels like the old school motorsport forums of 15 years ago being responsive, detailed, and full of people explaining the "why" behind the "don’t do that, you’ll explode." Shout out to the Fungineers and Vescify Discords for late night entertainment and assisting on one off questions. The "Why": From XR+ to DIY High-Voltage We’ve been riding for 5 years. I’m on an XR+ and my son is on a Pint. We’ve kept them mostly stock with limited bolt-ons, tires, sonnywheel and fenders. We’ve never cracked a controller case. Future Motion did us solid on durability, but as a 6’0", 220lb "Clydesdale" with a 10-year-old who is already 5’6" and 130lbs (send food rations help, he’s going to be a giant), we need more headroom. We looked at the Rally XL, but the smaller battery and "closed" ecosystem didn't sit right. We want a board that lasts 5 years and is infinitely repairable. Plus, I have a daughter coming of age to ride the pint and a wife who might take my XR provided I "change its color" (standard marital negotiations).
The Build Specs: "Buy Once, Cry Once" Edition The Foundation (Frame & Power)
The Contact Points
The "Extra" Stuff
The Learning Curve I’ve downloaded VESC Tool, Float Control, Floaty, and Float Hub. I am currently in the "humbled and overwhelmed" phase of learning. I may get to a place where I’m stuck and will need to phone a friend. I’m certain there's a few Vesc builders in the bay area, where I'd be happy to have someone over or take our boards to admitting defeat. Growth never comes easy, but my son and I are here for the challenge. I’ll be updating this as parts arrive and as we inevitably realize we put something on backward. [link] [comments] |
Taiwan, tariffs and the strait of Hormuz are on the meeting’s agenda for Beijing – but will the US president be forced to ask for help in ending his war with Iran?
On 20 February, a White House official confirmed that US president Donald Trump would be travelling to Beijing the following month to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Top of the agenda: the US-China trade war.
One week later, Trump approved joint strikes with Israel against Iran, starting a new war in the Middle East. Its ramifications have spread far beyond the region and caused alarm in Beijing. The presidential summit was postponed.
Continue reading...Every single software product is dealing with the question about what to do with “AI”-generated code, but the question is particularly difficult to answer for open source operating systems like Linux distributions and the various BSDs, which often consist of a wide variety of software packages from hundreds to thousands of different developers. On top of that, they also have to ask the “AI” question for every layer of their offering, from the base install, to the official repositories, to community-run ones.
As users, we, too, are asking these same questions, wondering just how much “AI” taint we’re willing to spread across our computers. I understand the difficult position Linux distributions are in with regard to “AI”. I mean, when even the Linux kernel itself is tainted by “AI”, a no-“AI” policy is basically an empty gesture for them at this point. Personally, I find a policy of “we don’t do ‘AI’ in our work, but we don’t have control over the thousands of components we consist of” to be an entirely reasonable, if deeply unsatisfying, position to take. What else are they going to do? You can’t really be a Linux distribution without, you know, the Linux kernel, which is, as I’ve already said, utterly tainted by “AI” at this point.
Still, in the back of my mind, I always had a trump card: if all else fails, we’ll always have OpenBSD. Its project leader Theo de Raadt is deeply principled, every OpenBSD user and contributor I know hates “AI” deeply, and the project routinely sticks to their principles even when it’s difficult or inconvenient. Yes, this makes OpenBSD not the most ideal desktop operating system, but I’d rather use that than something that embraces the multitude of ethical, environmental, quality, and legal concerns regarding “AI” code completely.
Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that OpenBSD already contains slopcode in its base installation, with the project’s leaders and developers remaining oddly silent about it. My friend and OSNews regular Morgan posted this on Fedi a few days ago:
Nearly six weeks later, and the question of whether “AI” generated code in tmux — not tool-assisted bug finding, not refactoring, actual LLM-generated slop with questionable license(1) — that was consequently merged into OpenBSD base, is considered acceptable by the lead devs, remains unanswered. Despite Theo de Raadt’s concrete stance against any code of questionable license origin polluting the project — and the tmux merge was indeed questionable — it seems this is being swept under the rug. This makes me extremely uncomfortable; it’s like seeing a fox in the henhouse but the farmers are all looking the other way and no one can convince them to admit they can see it and root it out.
I really don’t know what to do being just a user; I feel like even if I tried to chime in on the mailing list I would just be ignored like the others trying to raise the alarm. I hope, as they do, that this is being discussed internally, away from the public list, and that a positive outcome is near. Maybe they are waiting for the 7.9 release before setting anything in stone.
Or maybe the “AI” disease has infected one of the last pure operating system projects we have left and there’s no going back.
↫ Morgan on Fedi
I obviously share Morgan’s concerns, and like him, I’m also afraid that opening the door to a few drops of slop in base will quickly grow into a torrent of slop as time goes by. Yes, it’s just a patch to tmux, but it’s in base, and the “base” of a BSD is almost a sacred concept, and entirely the last place where you want to see code that raises ethical, environmental, quality, and legal concerns. For all we know, this patch of slop or the next one contains a bunch of GPL code because it just so happens that’s where the ball tumbling down the developer’s pachinko machine ended up.
GPL code that would then be in the base of a BSD.
I echo the call for the OpenBSD project to address this problem, and to set clear boundaries and guidelines regarding “AI” code, so users and developers alike know what level of quality and integrity we can expect from OpenBSD and its base installation going forward.
More than 100 figures sign open letter criticising closure, just months after MA was launched
More than 100 academics, writers and activists from around the world have signed an open letter condemning plans to close an MA in Black studies and global justice at Birmingham City University (BCU), just months after it was first launched.
The move follows the controversial closure of BCU’s undergraduate course in Black studies in 2024, and has prompted warnings that Black studies are being erased from UK higher education.
Continue reading...Dip in credit card spending in April, particularly on travel, suggests Britons preparing for harder times amid Iran war fallout
Households cut back on their spending in April at the fastest pace in 18 months, as the conflict in the Middle East provoked fears of another cost of living crisis, a report from one of the UK’s biggest banks has suggested.
Barclays, which processes nearly 40% of the UK’s credit and debit card transactions, said its data showed there had been a 0.1% fall in card spending last month compared with a year earlier. This was the first year-on-year fall since November 2024.
Continue reading...Research from UCL suggests visiting art galleries or museums, singing and painting can help improve health outcomes
Singing, painting or visiting a gallery or museum helps people age more slowly, according to the latest study to link taking an active interest in art and culture with improved health.
The findings are the first to show that both participating in arts activities and attending events, such as viewing an exhibition, lead to people staying biologically younger.
Continue reading...Digg is relaunching again, this time as an AI-focused news aggregator rather than the Reddit-style community site it recently abandoned. TechCrunch reports: On Friday evening, the founder previewed a link to the newly redesigned Digg, which now looks nothing like a Reddit clone and more like the news aggregator it once was. This time around, the site is focused on ranking news -- specifically, AI news to start. In an email to beta testers, the company said the site's goal is to "track the most influential voices in a space" and to surface the news that's actually worth "paying attention to." AI is the area it's testing this idea with, but if successful, Digg will expand to include other topics. The email warned that the site was still raw and "buggy," and was designed more to give users a first look than to serve as its public debut. On the current homepage, Digg showcases four main stories at the top: the most viewed story, a story seeing rising discussion, the fastest-climbing story, and one "In case you missed it" headline. Below that is a ranked list of top stories for the day, complete with engagement metrics like views, comments, likes, and saves. But the twist is that these metrics aren't the ones generated on Digg itself. Instead, Digg is ingesting content from X in real-time to determine what's being discussed, while also performing sentiment analysis, clustering, and signal detection to determine what matters most. [...] The site also ranks the top 1,000 people involved in AI, as well as the top companies and the top politicians focused on AI issues.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Santa Clara County is seeking restitution, damages and policy changes.
Allen, a media entrepreneur, to replace founder Jonah Peretti as chief executive with ‘significant’ cost cuts to come
BuzzFeed, the digital media pioneer that was once valued as high as $1.7bn amid a private equity-funded wave of interest in websites that generated massive amounts of online traffic in the 2010s, has finally changed hands for $120m.
On Monday, the company announced that a controlling stake in the company has been sold to media entrepreneur Byron Allen. Allen, who often makes large, sometimes unsolicited bids for media companies, is also an on-screen personality in addition to controlling his Allen Media Group conglomerate, which owns networks including The Weather Channel. Allen’s show, Comics Unleashed, will replace the Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS’s schedule starting later this month.
Continue reading...An ethics watchdog found that a Trump administration-appointed former U.S. attorney committed professional misconduct in response to allegations that included retaliating against a newspaper for negative coverage. But details about John Sarcone’s case have been deemed “private and confidential” — and aren’t being released to the public.
One of New York state’s grievance committees, disciplinary panels that determines penalties for violations of legal ethics, notified nonprofit groups last week of its finding against Sarcone, Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again U.S. attorney in Albany.
The committee is keeping mum on the exact nature of its findings, and in a letter to a press freedom group last week, it even tried to claim that the foundation could not disclose the very fact that it found “there was sufficient basis for a finding of professional misconduct.”
“No complainant, but especially a press freedom organization, should be told to keep quiet about something so plainly newsworthy and important to New Yorkers and Americans.”
The letter from the Attorney Grievance Committee for the Appellate Division, Third Department, was dated April 1 and sent via email on May 8. The committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment on when the finding was reached.
The committee’s actions fit in a larger pattern of New York shrouding prosecutorial misconduct investigations in secret. One of the groups that filed a complaint, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said it was time for the state’s legal ethics cops to stop insisting on silence.
“Sarcone is a high-ranking prosecutor who is at the center of national news as we speak and who the New York Grievance Committee found had engaged in professional misconduct after he retaliated against a news outlet,” said Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the foundation. “No complainant, but especially a press freedom organization, should be told to keep quiet about something so plainly newsworthy and important to New Yorkers and Americans.”
Sarcone and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In an emailed statement, the grievance committee said it was following state laws. Under that law, chief committee attorney Monica Duffy said, “until such time as charges of professional misconduct are sustained against an attorney in a public order of the New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division, all papers, documents and records concerning this Committee’s investigation and disposition of any grievance complaint concerning the conduct of that attorney are sealed and deemed private and confidential.”
Sarcone had no prosecutorial experience when the Trump administration tapped him to lead the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of New York last year. Since then, he has been involved in a long-running saga over whether he can even run the office.
Sarcone has never been confirmed by the U.S. Senate. After his temporary appointment to the post expired, judges appointed a veteran prosecutor to fill the post. That replacement was fired within hours. Sarcone has continued to oversee the office as state Attorney General Letitia James and Justice Department lawyers argue in court over whether he lawfully holds the office.
The administration has a major incentive to keep the Trump loyalist in charge: The Albany prosecutor’s office has jurisdiction over New York state politicians who have drawn the president’s ire, including James.
In addition to the question of whether he can hold the office, Sarcone has faced criticism for booting the Albany newspaper off his office’s press list after it reported that he had attempted to claim a boarded-up apartment building in the district as his home to satisfy residency requirements.
That action was a violation of the First Amendment, the Freedom of the Press Foundation argued in the August 11 complaint it filed with the grievance committee, along with Reinvent Albany and the Demand Progress Education Fund. The complaint alleged that Sarcone may have violated at least four of the state’s rules of professional conduct.
In the response to the complaint sent last week, the committee said that “after deliberation, the Committee determined there was a sufficient basis for a finding of professional misconduct and took appropriate action.”
The case was now closed, the committee said. In the letter dated April 1, the committee said that it had reached its conclusion at a “recent” meeting.
What “appropriate action” the committee took is unclear. There are no records of public discipline in Sarcone’s entry on the state attorney directory. The committee has a range of actions it can take short of public discipline, including private letters of reprimand.
Another group that filed a similar complaint against Sarcone, Campaign for Accountability, received a near-identical letter from the grievance committee. In a statement, that group noted that Sarcone remains in charge of the U.S. attorney’s office with a title of first assistant.
“A secret slap on the wrist is insufficient.”
“While we’re pleased the New York Attorney Grievance Committee recognized that Mr. Sarcone, who remains First Assistant in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, engaged in professional misconduct, a secret slap on the wrist is insufficient. Mr. Sarcone’s pattern of conduct reflects on his credibility as an officer of the court, so any court in which he appears — along with the public — deserves to know what he was sanctioned for and why,” said Campaign for Accountability’s executive director, Michelle Kuppersmith.
The letters to both complainants including a heading indicating that they were “confidential.” Stern said that attempting to force people who filed complaints to remain silent about the letters they receive in response would be unconstitutional.
One state grievance committee previously tried to clamp down on law professors who shared details about the complaints they had filed against local prosecutors accused of failing to turn over exculpatory evidence or lying in court. The professors sued and won a federal district court ruling in their favor.
The post A Trump U.S. Attorney’s Professional Misconduct Must Be Kept “Private and Confidential” appeared first on The Intercept.
The measures will target Israeli settlers and organizations and Hamas members, the bloc’s chief diplomat said.
After testing over 20 electric toothbrushes, one model stood out thanks to its affordable price and effective features.
Home secretary Shabana Mahmood reported to be among those who have told the PM to consider his position.
Botterill says voters she spoke to during the campaign felt the country does not work for them. She is a working-class Yorkshire woman, she says. She knows that the opportunities she has enjoyed would not be there if if had not been for the achievements of Labour government.
She says Labour is one of the best vehicles for changing the lives of working people that this county has ever known.
Continue reading...The British political strategist drew swift criticism in a state where tacos are practically the official dish
Polls have shown California voters have been largely disengaged from the upcoming election for governor, but over the weekend one candidate managed to capture the public’s attention – and ire.
Steve Hilton, the British political strategist seeking the state’s top office, drew derision after posting a video outside a southern California location of the fast food chain Del Taco while holding the hard-shell tortilla concoction that he referred to as a “street taco”.
Continue reading...A second season of The Paper premieres in September.
Audi's upcoming full-size flagship SUV inches closer to its July world premiere. I got an early look at its luxurious cabin.
The trial has exposed even more details about OpenAI’s fractious corporate past than previously documented
OpenAI, despite its name, is usually extremely secretive about its operations. It promotes a carefully crafted image to the world. Over the course of Elon Musk’s case against the startup and its CEO Sam Altman, however, the artificial intelligence firm has been forced to publicly contend with some of the messiest parts of its rise to power in public.
The Musk v OpenAI trial, which on Monday entered its third week, has featured a who’s who of Silicon Valley testifying about OpenAI’s past and its CEO’s contentious leadership. Musk’s attorneys have used former executives, private text messages, diary entries and internal email exchanges to portray Altman as untrustworthy. Altman, who denies Musk’s allegations, will take the stand in the coming days. OpenAI has likewise issued denials.
Continue reading...In a rare public appearance, Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams warned of ‘networks of powerful elites’ using wealth and influence to silence dissenting voices
Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams and the late Virginia Giuffre have jointly won the Freedom to Publish prize at this year’s British book awards, marking the first time the award has been shared.
Wynn-Williams, a former Facebook executive, was recognised for Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism, her bestselling memoir about her years inside Meta, formerly Facebook. The book makes allegations about the company’s internal culture and practices, including its approach to political influence, China and the wellbeing of teenagers. Meta has disputed the claims.
Continue reading...We tested Dreame's pet-focused air purifiers to see if they live up to their promises.
Nvidia's real AI moat isn't "a piece of hardware," writes Wired's Sheon Han. It's CUDA: a mature, deeply optimized software ecosystem that keeps machine-learning workloads tied to Nvidia GPUs. An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: What sounds like a chemical compound banned by the FDA may be the one true moat in AI. CUDA technically stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture, but much like laser or scuba, no one bothers to expand the acronym; we just say "KOO-duh." So what is this all-important treasure good for? If forced to give a one-word answer: parallelization. Here's a simple example. Let's say we task a machine with filling out a 9x9 multiplication table. Using a computer with a single core, all 81 operations are executed dutifully one by one. But a GPU with nine cores can assign tasks so that each core takes a different column -- one from 1x1 to 1x9, another from 2x1 to 2x9, and so on -- for a ninefold speed gain. Modern GPUs can be even cleverer. For example, if programmed to recognize commutativity -- 7x9 = 9x7 -- they can avoid duplicate work, reducing 81 operations to 45, nearly halving the workload. When a single training run costs a hundred million dollars, every optimization counts. Nvidia's GPUs were originally built to render graphics for video games. In the early 2000s, a Stanford PhD student named Ian Buck, who first got into GPUs as a gamer, realized their architecture could be repurposed for general high-performance computing. He created a programming language called Brook, was hired by Nvidia, and, with John Nickolls, led the development of CUDA. If AI ushers in the age of a permanent white-collar underclass and autonomous weapons, just know that it would all be because someone somewhere playing Doom thought a demon's scrotum should jiggle at 60 frames per second. CUDA is not a programming language in itself but a "platform." I use that weasel word because, not unlike how The New York Times is a newspaper that's also a gaming company, CUDA has, over the years, become a nested bundle of software libraries for AI. Each function shaves nanoseconds off single mathematical operations -- added up, they make GPUs, in industry parlance, go brrr. A modern graphics card is not just a circuit board crammed with chips and memory and fans. It's an elaborate confection of cache hierarchies and specialized units called "tensor cores" and "streaming multiprocessors." In that sense, what chip companies sell is like a professional kitchen, and more cores are akin to more grilling stations. But even a kitchen with 30 grilling stations won't run any faster without a capable head chef deftly assigning tasks -- as CUDA does for GPU cores. To extend the metaphor, hand-tuned CUDA libraries optimized for one matrix operation are the equivalent of kitchen tools designed for a single job and nothing more -- a cherry pitter, a shrimp deveiner -- which are indulgences for home cooks but not if you have 10,000 shrimp guts to yank out. Which brings us back to DeepSeek. Its engineers went below this already deep layer of abstraction to work directly in PTX, a kind of assembly language for Nvidia GPUs. Let's say the task is peeling garlic. An unoptimized GPU would go: "Peel the skin with your fingernails." CUDA can instruct: "Smash the clove with the flat of a knife." PTX lets you dictate every sub-instruction: "Lift the blade 2.35 inches above the cutting board, make it parallel to the clove's equator, and strike downward with your palm at a force of 36.2 newtons." "You can begin to see why CUDA is so valuable to Nvidia -- and so hard for anyone else to touch," writes Han. "Tuning GPU performance is a gnarly problem. You can't just conscript some tender-footed undergrad on Market Street, hand them a Claude Max plan, and expect them to hack GPU kernels. Writing at this level is a grindsome enterprise -- unless you're a cracker-jack programmer at DeepSeek..." Han goes on to argue that rivals like AMD and Intel offer competitive specs on paper, but their software stacks have struggled with bugs, compatibility issues, and weak adoption. As a result, Nvidia has built an Apple-like moat around AI computing, leaving the industry dependent on its expensive hardware.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Stellar eclipses may hold the key to finding new hidden worlds in binary star systems.
Google is launching the Research Program at the Intersection of Life Sciences & Quantum AI (REPLIQA), an initiative committing $10 million to five universities to apply advanced quantum science and AI to the life sciences, to improve human outcomes.
May 11, 2026 — Understanding human biology and health at the molecular level is one of science’s greatest challenges. To help tackle this, Google is launching the Research Program at the Intersection of the Life Sciences and Quantum AI (REPLIQA).
Credit: Google
REPLIQA is an effort by Google Quantum AI and Google.org to apply advanced quantum science and AI to the life sciences field. Part of this effort is a commitment of $10 million from Google.org to advance research at five leading academic institutions.
The Quantum Advantage in Biology
Biological processes, like how a protein folds or how a cell reacts to a new drug, involve incredibly complex interactions at the atomic level. Classical computers often struggle to accurately simulate these interactions. Quantum technologies, however, operate using the very same quantum mechanics that govern these molecules.
For example, quantum sensors can now observe biological processes with unprecedented precision. Recent experiments even suggest that quantum spin — the way subatomic particles rotate — might play a role in how cells function. Furthermore, quantum computers have the potential to drastically accelerate simulations of complex molecular interactions, like the behavior of the P450 enzyme, which is critical for drug development.
As quantum computing technology continues to mature, there is now an opportunity to combine it with AI and biological science to unlock new discoveries and improve human outcomes.
A Scientific Ecosystem
Tackling problems of this scale requires a shared vision across the scientific community. Google is proud to commit funding to Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California San Diego, University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Arizona, institutions that are already pioneering in this space.
Foundational Research for Future Breakthroughs
Google sees immense potential in this emerging field. However, REPLIQA is a foundational research effort. There won’t be results overnight. Instead, Google is working to build the essential tools, such as quantum sensors or quantum-enhanced AI algorithms, needed to make those future breakthroughs possible. By laying this groundwork today, the company hopes to spark the next generation of discoveries.
Source: Hartmut Neven, Google Quantum AI
The post Google Commits $10M to REPLIQA Initiative Linking Quantum AI and Life Sciences appeared first on HPCwire.
Hamilton was fired as acting administrator last year after he opposed plans to abolish the agency at a House hearing
Donald Trump has once again nominated Cameron Hamilton to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) after Hamilton was previously fired for publicly opposing plans to abolish the agency.
Hamilton was dismissed last year from his role as acting administrator of the disaster relief agency after testifying before a House appropriations subcommittee. During the hearing, he said: “I do not believe it is in the best interests of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”
Continue reading...Jay Bhattacharya, the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CBS News that the hantavirus outbreak should be treated differently from COVID.
WASHINGTON, May 11, 2026 — A total of 75 PhD students from 55 universities and 27 home states have been selected for the prestigious Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program.
SCGSR prepares doctoral candidates for careers of critical importance to the Office of Science’s mission of transforming our understanding of nature and advancing the energy, economic, and national security of the United States. Participants receive world-class training and access to state-of-the-art facilities, expertise, and resources at DOE’s National Laboratories.
“We are incredibly proud to offer students the opportunity to conduct their cutting-edge thesis research at our world-class national laboratories through the SCGSR program,” said DOE Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil. “This experience will undoubtedly equip them with the skills and knowledge to become future leaders in critical scientific fields.”
Awardees were selected from a wide pool of graduate applicants. Selections were based on scientific merit review by external experts.
SCGSR awardees work on research projects to address critical energy challenges at national and international scales. Projects in this cohort span seven Office of Science research programs, including research in artificial intelligence, quantum information science, fusion energy, and accelerator science. Awards were made through the SCGSR program’s second of two annual solicitation cycles for Fiscal Year 2025.
Graduate students currently pursuing PhD degrees in areas of physics, chemistry, material sciences, biology (non-medical), geology, planetary sciences, mathematics, engineering, computer or computational sciences that are aligned with the mission of the Office of Science are eligible to apply to the SCGSR program. Research projects will advance the graduate awardees’ overall doctoral research and training by providing access to the expertise, resources, and capabilities available at the DOE National Laboratories.
Find out more about applying for the next cycle at the SCGSR How to Apply | U.S. DOE Office of Science (SC) page.
Since 2014, the SCGSR program has provided over 1,400 U.S. graduate awardees from 173 universities with supplemental funds to conduct part of their thesis research at DOE national laboratories in collaboration with DOE National Laboratory scientists.
A list of the 75 awardees for this selection, their institutions, host DOE Laboratory/facility, and priority research areas of projects can be found at the SCGSR Awards and Publications page.
Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy Office of Science
The post DOE Selects 75 PhD Students for SCGSR National Lab Research Program appeared first on HPCwire.
Microsoft is currently testing a brand new performance-enhancing feature in Windows 11.
Microsoft, too, is introducing something to Windows 11 called “low latency profile” and it this will work irrespective of the processor, be it AMD64 CPUs like Intel or AMD or ARM64 ones like from Qualcomm. Essentially what this new tech will do is apply a maximum available clock frequency boost for a very small span of time, like for one to three seconds, when a user launches any app. The idea is that the app launch time will reduce while the quick clock burst should not impact the overall efficiency of the system by much.
↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin
Unsurprisingly, boosting the processor’s clock speed to its maximum for a few seconds will make a menu or application open a little faster. I’m not entirely sure why anyone seems surprised by this, but here we are. Yes, the Start menu will load faster and applications will be ready quicker if you boost the processor to its full potential, but that does raise the question of why Windows 11 would need to do that just to open a menu or load an application in the first place.
According to Microsoft’s Scott Henselmann, who defended Microsoft’s approach (weirdly enough he did so on a nazi platform called “Twitter” that I’m obviously not linking to), every other modern operating system does the exact same thing, pointing specifically to macOS and GNOME and KDE on Linux. He also pointed out that the Start menu today does a lot more than the same Start menu back in Windows 95, including making network requests and rendering everything in HiDPI.
I just want a cascading menu of stuff I can run and don’t want my launcher to make network requests, but alas, I guess I’m old.
Anyway, I don’t know enough about the intricacies of how modern processors work to make any statements about how this affects battery life, but instinctively, you’d think this would not exactly be conducive to that. I also wonder if this will trigger a lot of laptops to spin up their fans whenever you open the Start menu, because the few seconds your processor goes full tilt raises its temperature just enough to make that happen. Once this new feature comes out of testing and is generally available, I’d be quite interested in seeing battery tests, as well comparisons to other operating systems to see how it fares.
The company has diverted resources away from producing the next mixed-reality headset.
May 11, 2026 — You might be surprised to find out that most profound breakthroughs in modern astrophysics no longer happen solely at the lens of a telescope, but within the world’s most powerful supercomputers. With the help of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Center for AstroPhysical Surveys (CAPS), we have entered a new era of discovery where the practical impact of space science is measured by our ability to transform petabytes of raw data into actionable knowledge. Today, in addition to looking at the stars through massively powerful telescopes, research is also about the computational resources required to decode the data collected from these observations.
Rubin Observatory in March 2024. Credit: Rubin Observatory/NSF/AURA/A. Pizarro D.
At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U. of I.), this shift is driven by NCSA and CAPS. In many ways, the universe is the ultimate big data challenge. Through a partnership that has yielded numerous breakthroughs, NCSA and CAPS prove that studying the furthest reaches of space drives the very hardware and AI innovations that define our technological future. “This is literally a new era in astronomy,” said Joaquin Vieira, director of Astronomy and CAPS.
The power of these partnerships is showcased in events like the annual AstroFest conference. Hosted at NCSA, the conference brings together researchers from around campus to discuss their progress and achievements. This year, one of the presenters was Britt Lundgren, a U. of I alumnus (Ph.D. Astronomy 2009) and Philip G. Carson Distinguished Professor in the Sciences at the University of North Carolina Asheville (UNC Asheville). Lundgren is also notable for being a member of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee (AAAC). The committee recently presented its annual report to Congress, U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) leadership, NASA and the Department of Energy. The report assesses the federal astronomy and astrophysics research portfolio and progress toward the priorities outlined in the Astro2020 decadal survey, a blueprint for federal investment in space science, that highlights NCSA and CAPS as key contributors to the nation’s progress in handling massive survey datasets. Specifically, the AAAC report identifies the processing of massive survey datasets, like those from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and the South Pole Telescope (SPT), as a critical achievement in the nation’s progress toward understanding the fundamental laws of the universe.
“We’re currently experiencing a golden age for astronomy, in which large surveys like SDSS and Rubin/LSST are producing vast datasets that enable astronomers to answer big questions with new precision and also discover and pursue rare objects and phenomena,” said Lundgren. “What excites me the most about the current moment is the relatively new paradigm of making these large, science-ready datasets publicly accessible through the web – a transition that has truly democratized exploration and discovery in our field. Data from these massive surveys can be accessed and visualized by anyone with a web browser, enabling students and the public to explore cutting-edge professional astronomy data while building transferrable skills in coding, big data analysis and visualization. Federal investment has been critical to developing this modern survey technology and data infrastructure, which directly supports the education of the next generation of astronomers and the development of the STEM workforce more broadly.”
The following three projects serve as evidence of this computational revolution, demonstrating how high-performance computing (HPC) is powering the next wave of astrophysical breakthroughs.
Dark Energy Survey
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is a U.S.-led international project that has mapped large portions of the sky at optical wavelengths, surveying everything from galaxies to supernovae. The main goal of the project is to better understand dark energy and why it seems to accelerate cosmic expansion. In the first six years of operation, the DES recorded information about 550 million galaxies, giving researchers an unprecedented amount of data to study. NCSA, along with Fermilab and NOIRLab, is a founding partner of the DES project. The DES project is funded by the NSF and DOE.
DES recently published results that combine all six years of data collected from weak lensing and galaxy clustering probes – a first for the international collaboration that is mapping hundreds of millions of galaxies, detecting thousands of supernovae and analyzing patterns of cosmic structure that could reveal what is accelerating the expansion of the universe.
NCSA led end-to-end data processing and archival for DES using the DES Data Management System. NCSA operated the data management and computing infrastructure that processed, quality-controlled and served the full DES imaging and catalog data set, enabling the creation of science-ready sky maps and cosmological measurements.
“Dark energy and the universe’s accelerating expansion sit at the boundary between what we can measure precisely and what we can explain,” said Vieira. “Pinning down what is driving that acceleration would reshape our understanding of the universe’s fate and force revisions to the deepest laws that describe space, time and matter.”
Rubin Partnership
There are many trillions of objects in observable space. The NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory began tracking a sampling of these trillions of objects last year and released its first images in June, 2025. The AAAC report highlights the Rubin Observatory as a top national priority for the coming decade. NCSA has been a partner in the Rubin project since its inception, ensuring the infrastructure is ready for this massive influx of data.
The Rubin Observatory project aims to conduct a 10-year optical survey of the visible sky. Such an enormous undertaking requires decades of research and work. This spring, after meticulous planning, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera was installed on the Simonyi Survey Telescope at Rubin. The camera is the world’s largest digital camera, and it’s expected to capture 500 petabytes of image data over the course of the project.
Stephen Pietrowicz, a principal research software engineer at NCSA, is part of the CAPS team, and his recent work has been with the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science.
Stephen Pietrowicz and Gregory Daues at AstroFest 2026.
He’s now part of the middleware team for Vera C. Rubin’s Data Management group. The NCSA team’s work encompasses many different parts of the project’s data management. They’re responsible for gathering data used to construct the images, data movement between sites and orchestration of image processing campaigns. Pietrowicz manages several different tasks, including the Observatory Operations Data Service, or OODS. “I wrote the OODS, which handles images sent by the Simonyi Survey Telescope. My software quickly ingests those images at the summit in Chile, so they can immediately be used by scientists.”
Support from NCSA has helped Rubin make such breakthroughs as their recent First Alert system, a “near-real-time alert system” that will “enable scientists around the world to coordinate follow-up observations like never before,” according to the recent First Alerts press release posted by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
“These projects are large and complex,” said Vieira. “They require sustained partnerships and coordination among national laboratories, researchers, and institutions such as NCSA. CAPS plays a crucial role on campus by enabling the University of Illinois to act as more than a collection of individual faculty. It allows us to operate as a peer institution with national labs and to contribute meaningfully to major big-science efforts, including large cosmological surveys that cost nearly a billion dollars and span more than a decade.”
SkAI Institute
Funded by a five-year, $20 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Simons Foundation, in 2024, NCSA partnered with other academic institutions and federal laboratories in the Midwest to develop new artificial intelligence (AI) tools to advance astrophysics research and exploration of the universe.
Led by Northwestern University, the collaboration established the NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky or SkAI (pronounced “sky”), one of two AI research centers that will help astronomers better understand the cosmos. This move directly aligns with the AAAC’s emphasis on the ‘computational revolution’ in astronomy, where AI is no longer just a tool but a foundational infrastructure for interpreting the next generation of celestial data.
“Our mission at the Center for AstroPhysical Surveys (CAPS) in NCSA has been to bring together innovative software and cutting-edge hardware to tackle the most pressing questions in the universe,” said SkAI co-principal investigator and CAPS Deputy Director Gautham Narayan. “We’re very excited to have our students, postdocs, faculty and staff deepen our involvement with our colleagues at Northwestern and U of Chicago, provide the entire SkAI community access to NSF’s Delta and DeltaAI supercomputers here at NCSA and build tools and services that lead to AI methods becoming more interpretable and reliable. Our goal is to democratize AI and make it more trustworthy – not just for astrophysics and cosmology, or our campus, but for everyone. This is a big leap forward, and Illinois will lead the way.”A number of CAPS personnel hold leadership positions within the SkAI Institute Project, and several SkAI-funded projects led by CAPS members are underway.
Source: Megan Meave Johnson, NCSA
The post NCSA and CAPS Highlight HPC’s Role in Processing Next-Gen Astronomy Data appeared first on HPCwire.
New voting maps flipped four Republican-held seats to give Democrats an edge in redistricting race sparked by Trump
Virginia Democrats asked the US supreme court on Monday to revive a congressional map designed to boost their party’s chances in November’s midterm elections, turning to the court as Republicans – including allies of Donald Trump – seek to preserve narrow control of Congress.
The case thrusts Virginia into an unusual, mid-decade redistricting showdown, as courts weigh whether lawmakers can remake House districts outside the normal post-census cycle – with control of a narrowly divided Congress potentially hanging in the balance.
Continue reading...Recent consumer alert on ebike safety laws says some vehicles should be classified as mopeds or motorcycles
Amazon said it plans to stop selling certain high-speed electric bicycles in California after a string of high-profile incidents and a consumer alert that the state attorney general issued last month.
In April an 81-year-old man in Orange county died after a teenager illegally riding an e-motorcycle struck him. The teen’s mother, Tommi Jo Mejer, has since been charged with involuntary manslaughter in Ed Ashman’s death as officials say she was warned it was illegal for her son to operate the vehicle.
Continue reading...cURL creator Daniel Stenberg says Anthropic's hyped Mythos bug-hunting model found only one confirmed low-severity vulnerability in cURL, plus a few non-security bugs, after he expected a much longer list. He argues Mythos may be useful, but not meaningfully beyond other modern AI code-analysis tools. "My personal conclusion can however not end up with anything else than that the big hype around this model so far was primarily marketing," Stenberg said a blog post. "I see no evidence that this setup finds issues to any particular higher or more advanced degree than the other tools have done before Mythos." He went on to call Mythos "an amazingly successful marketing stunt for sure." The Register reports: Stenberg explained in a Monday blog post that he was promised access to Anthropic's Mythos model - sort of - through the AI biz's Project Glasswing program. Part of Glasswing involves giving high-profile open source projects access via the Linux Foundation, but while Stenberg signed up to try Mythos, he said he never actually received direct access to the model. Instead, someone else with access ran Mythos against curl's codebase and later sent him a report. "It's not that I would have a lot of time to explore lots of different prompts and doing deep dive adventures anyway," Stenberg explained. "Getting the tool to generate a first proper scan and analysis would be great, whoever did it." That scan, which analyzed curl's git repository at a recent master-branch commit, was sent back to him earlier this month, and it found just five things that it claimed were "confirmed security vulnerabilities" in cURL. Saying he had expected an extensive list of vulnerabilities, Stenberg wrote that the report "felt like nothing," and that feeling was further validated by a review of Mythos' findings. "Once my curl security team fellows and I had poked on this short list for a number of hours and dug into the details, we had trimmed the list down and were left with one confirmed vulnerability," Stenberg said, bringing us back to the aforementioned number. As for the other four, three turned out to be false positives that pointed out cURL shortcomings already noted in API documentation, while the team deemed the fourth to be just a simple bug. "The single confirmed vulnerability is going to end up a severity low CVE planned to get published in sync with our pending next curl release 8.21.0 in late June," the cURL meister noted. "The flaw is not going to make anyone grasp for breath."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Texas Attorney General alleges that Netflix has designed its platform to be addictive and plans to sell data "for a handsome profit."
Palestinian activist is awaiting another legal decision on a separate track in a narrowing effort to stay in the US
A lawyer for Mahmoud Khalil, the first noncitizen activist arrested in the Trump administration crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech, called his client’s immigration proceedings “preordained and a complete sham” after it was revealed that the case was prioritized to be fast-tracked.
“These revelations make clear that this case has been controlled from day one by higher-ups in the administration,” said Marc Van Der Hout, an attorney on Khalil’s legal team, in a statement. “The immigration judge was hand-picked and the Board of Immigration Appeals decision was predetermined. We will continue to fight for Mahmoud in every court we can.”
Continue reading...Virginia Democrats asked the Supreme Court to restore its congressional map that aimed to give Democrats an edge in the midterms, days after it was blocked by the state's highest court.
Grab two of your smartest word-nerd friends. Wordle is looking for teams of contestants.
Microsoft acquired GitHub and applied their unique brand of enshittification. Amongst their achievements was the spawning of the Copilot circle of hell. Now they’re effectively DDoSing themselves with slop. I won’t dwell on what else went wrong. I don’t know and I don’t care. GitHub is impressively bad now. It’s embarrassing. Shameful.
↫ David Bushell
Luckily, there’s really very little in the form of lock-in with GitHub, unless you really value your stars or whatever. There are countless alternatives, and if you’re a programmer, it’s probably absolutely trivial for you to run your own instance of any of the various available forges. If you’re still on GitHub, you should really be thinking about, and planning for, leaving, as it seems it’s circling the drain.
Elon Musk, Tim Cook and other high-powered business leaders have been invited to be a part of the U.S. delegation traveling to China this week.
New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul has recently promoted her policies on expanding affordable child care.
Hochul has twice increased funding for the state’s runaway and homeless youth services. At a March 5 event, Hochul joined Christine Quinn, president and chief executive officer of Women in Need — a privately run group that is the largest provider of family shelter and supportive housing in New York City — to discuss connections between homelessness and child care shortages.
Quinn — a former New York City Council speaker — said in a press release about the event, "Today, there are more children sleeping in New York City’s homeless shelters than there are seats in Yankee Stadium and 3,600 children sleeping in Win shelters each night — that is a tragedy."
Quinn’s comparison is inaccurate.
Yankee Stadium, the Bronx home of Major League Baseball’s New York Yankees, seats 46,543, making it the league’s fifth-largest.
The New York City Department of Homeless Services regularly publishes data on how many people are living in the city’s homeless shelters at a point in time. On May 8, the data showed about 28,600 children in shelters that night. A sampling of other dates in March and April show similar numbers, always below 30,000.
A spokesperson for Women in Need — which operates shelters in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens — offered no information to support Quinn’s statement. The organization’s website says, "More than 32,300 children will go to bed in a City shelter tonight."
Children account for a fraction of the city’s homeless shelter population.
On typical recent days, the total shelter population — including adults and children — ranged from 82,000 to 86,000.
In addition, people living or sleeping in New York City’s homeless shelters are a fraction of the total homeless population.
Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group, says more than 250,000 New Yorkers are living in doubled-up housing, which means they are temporarily sharing space with another family after losing their own home. And according to Advocates for Children of New York, more than 154,000 New York City public school students experienced homelessness at some point during the 2024-25 school year.
Quinn said, "Today, there are more children sleeping in New York City’s homeless shelters than there are seats in Yankee Stadium."
Recent New York City government statistics show that the total shelter population, adults and children, on any given night is between 82,000 and 86,000. The number of children counted is consistently around 28,000, and the website of Quinn’s group puts the number at around 32,000. That’s less than Yankee Stadium’s 46,543 seating capacity.
We rate the statement False.
Leaked images purport to show a portable wireless mouse that folds in half for easy packing.
A controversial real estate expo that advertises properties for sale in the occupied Palestinian territories returned to New York City on Monday, less than a week after a previous event drew dueling protests on the Upper East Side.
The “Great Israeli Real Estate Event” took place Monday evening at Young Israel of Midwood, an Orthodox synagogue in southern Brooklyn. Event organizers confirmed the location in an automated response to The Intercept’s request for comment, but they did not comment on the event itself.
The roving expo is co-sponsored by several real estate companies with ties to Israel, and it is typically held at synagogues and other centers of Jewish life. At the event held last week at Park East Synagogue, The Intercept saw at least one table advertising land sales in Kfar Eldad, Karnei Shomron, and other Israeli settlements in the occupied territories — sales considered illegal under international law.
The event presented a test for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has caught flak from the pro-Israel side for condemning the illegal land sales, and from pro-Palestine groups and free speech advocates for allowing the NYPD to maintain “buffer zones” that keep protesters away from houses of worship.
Compounding the mayor’s entanglement is the fact that Young Israel of Midwood, the synagogue where Monday’s event took place, is home to a city-funded senior center called Young Israel Senior Services. The senior center received more than $800,000 from the Department for the Aging in 2024, according to a city budget document.
A spokesperson for Mamdani, who campaigned on his pro-Palestine bona fides, declined to comment on the latest real estate event, pointing instead to comments about last week’s expo.
“Mayor Mamdani is deeply opposed to the real estate expo this evening that includes the promotion of the sale of land in settlements in the Occupied West Bank,” spokesperson Sam Raskin told The Intercept last week.
The mayor has also affirmed attendees’ rights to go to and from synagogues without interference, in line with a controversial “buffer zone” bill the New York City Council passed last month. The new law, sponsored by the council’s moderate speaker, requires the New York Police Department to address physical obstructions and interference at houses of worship — which opponents see as a means to crack down on protests.
By late afternoon on Monday, the NYPD had blocked off the street for a block in each direction from the synagogue, but allowed protesters to congregate within sight of the building.
Groups of pro-Palestine demonstrators marched through the neighborhood on side streets, followed by a swarm of pro-Israel counter-protesters. Among the pro-Israel demonstrators, a large number of young men on scooters hurled slurs at the pro-Palestine protesters and at times almost came to blows as police struggled to keep them apart. Members of the pro-Israel crowd threw eggs, and one protester told The Intercept a pro-Israel counter-protester had pepper-sprayed him.
Police appeared to make at least one arrest. A spokesperson for the NYPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Last week’s event, held Tuesday at Park East Synagogue on the Upper East Side, prompted heated protests from Pal-Awda and other pro-Palestine activists, which in turn drew a counter-protest from pro-Israel groups including members of the extremist group Betar U.S. The NYPD kept the groups separate and kept protesters, members of the media, and members of the public alike away from the synagogue with a tight cordon of security barriers that impeded movement along numerous city blocks in the vicinity of the synagogue.
After last week’s event, Mamdani praised the NYPD’s handling of the crowd at an unrelated press conference on Wednesday.
“We in this city believe in the sacrosanct nature of the right to protest and also are committed to ensuring that any New Yorker can safely enter or exit from a house of worship and that access never be in question while we also protect the First Amendment, and I do believe that the police ensured that yesterday,” he said. “I think that critique of the policies of a government is very much separate from bigotry toward the people of a specific religious faith. And there is no tolerance for antisemitism.”
The New York Civil Liberties Union, by contrast, offered a rebuke for the police force, calling the NYPD’s barricaded area a “no-speech zone.”
“When politicians use Freedom of Religion as a pretext to impose severe restrictions on speech, they undermine all New Yorkers’ rights,” said Donna Lieberman, the NYCLU’s executive director, in a statement released Wednesday. “The subject of last [week’s] protests was not a religious service but a private, politically-charged real estate event held at a synagogue.”
Correction: May 11, 2026, 4:59 p.m. ET
Due to an editing error, this story previously stated that Mamdani signed the City Council’s new “buffer zone” law. The bill passed with a veto-proof majority, and Mamdani allowed it to become law without his signature.
Update: May 11, 9:31 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with details about the protest outside Monday’s event.
The post Israeli Real Estate Expo Advertising West Bank Settlements Returns to NYC appeared first on The Intercept.
Exclusive: In a letter 40 lawmakers demand the FAA address allegations of mistreatment of immigrants and the ‘urgent need for transparency’
A group of 40 House Democrats have described “grave concerns” over the Trump administration’s secretive program of deportation flights and demanded the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) address allegations of mistreatment and inhumane conditions on ICE charter jets.
In a letter shared with the Guardian and addressed to the FAA administrator, Bryan Bedford, the lawmakers describe the “urgent need for transparency” over ICE’s expanded use of commercial airliners to transfer detained immigrants and its “inappropriate and dangerous” efforts to shield these flights from public scrutiny.
Continue reading...The effort potentially shielded Iranian aircraft from American airstrikes, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.
Most of the Americans who were on a cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak were taken to specialized facilities at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
Police confirmed that there were six people dead, five men and one woman.
Infectious disease experts have sought to reassure people that the hantavirus cruise ship outbreak poses very low risks to the wider public.
Suspending the federal gas tax would have a modest impact on fuel prices, while also requiring congressional approval.
The popstar appeared on the boxes used to sell Samsung TVs -- but she says she owns the rights to the image.
Seeking support from Americans worried about the economy, elected Republicans have been touting a spike in tax refunds — the first refund season following the 2025 enactment of President Donald Trump’s signature tax and spending legislation.
"The average IRS tax refund is up 11% compared to last year thanks to the Working Families Tax Cut that expanded the standard deduction and child tax credit, eliminated taxes on overtime, tips and Social Security...and more," wrote Rep. Nick Langworthy, R-N.Y., in a March 31 X post.
PolitiFact has previously written that Trump’s tax legislation did not eliminate taxes on Social Security but rather reduced taxes for older Americans, many of whom do collect Social Security; this earned his campaign promise a Compromise. His pledge to eliminate taxes on overtime also received a Compromise, while his promise to end taxes on tips earned a Promise Kept.
But what about tax refunds? Are they up by 11%, as Langworthy said?
When we reached out to Langworthy’s office, a spokesperson told PolitiFact New York that the 11% figure came directly from the IRS.
IRS statistics for the week ending March 27, shortly before Langworthy’s post, showed an 11.1% increase in average refunds, from $3,170 in 2025 to $3,521 in 2026. IRS data released in subsequent weeks shows that the 11% figure has remained steady, varying by small fractions of a percent.
Garrett Watson, director of policy analysis at the Tax Foundation, cautioned that filing season averages can fluctuate as more returns are processed, but tax changes such as expanded deductions and credits largely boosted refunds.
Watson told PolitiFact in December that if taxpayers maintained their existing withholding rates, then instead of gradually receiving the benefits of the tax cuts through higher take-home pay during the year, taxpayers would receive it all at once when they filed their returns.
Langworthy said, "The average IRS tax refund is up 11% compared to last year."
Official IRS statistics show that by late March, average refunds were about 11.1% higher than they were in 2025, a number that has remained steady in the weeks since. Tax experts agree that the 2025 tax bill is the main reason, as taxpayers reap the rewards of tax reductions they had not planned for in their withholding.
We rate the statement True.
GM is laying off about 500 to 600 salaried IT workers, mainly in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan, as it restructures its technology organization and trims costs. "GM is transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future. As part of that work, we have made the difficult decision to eliminate certain roles globally. We are grateful for the contributions of the employees affected and are committed to supporting them through this transition," the automaker said in an emailed statement. CNBC reports: GM reported employing about 68,000 salaried workers globally as of the end of last year, including 47,000 white-collar employees in the U.S. Despite Monday's cuts, GM still is still hiring IT workers. The company has 82 open IT positions that include positions working in artificial intelligence, motorsports and autonomous vehicles, according to the automaker's careers website.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Justice Samuel Alito extended an administrative stay that maintained access to mifepristone through the mail.
‘It’s going to be really hard … but how fun would that be?’
Bradley is in field for this week’s PGA Championship
Keegan Bradley still reflects on the pain of captaining the United States to a home Ryder Cup defeat last year but says he would love to make the 2027 team as a player.
Bradley took full responsibility as his USA side endured a chastening first two days at Bethpage Black last September, slipping to a record 11.5-4.5 deficit, before a valiant fightback fell short.
Continue reading...The post 🎮 Mega May Cyber Deals — Level up & save up to 65%! appeared first on Linux.com.
The rumored Low Latency Profile mode supposedly boosts your system's processor to maximum frequency for high-priority tasks, like opening new apps.
The Cultural Landscape Foundation seeks to block the replacement of pool’s ‘gray stone’ appearance
A historic preservation group on Monday filed a lawsuit seeking to halt Donald Trump’s ongoing renovation to the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool, the latest in a string of court challenges to efforts to remake Washington DC landmarks from the US president and former real estate developer.
The lawsuit, filed by the Cultural Landscape Foundation, alleged the renovation violates the National Historic Preservation Act, a law passed by Congress in 1996 that outlines procedures for changes to historic properties.
Guardian staff contributed
Continue reading...A growing number of Labour MPs are in no mood to heed calls from the PM’s allies to keep faith with their leader
“Has Keir done enough to survive?” was the question anxious Labour MPs were asking each other throughout Monday, after the speech regarded by many as crucial to Starmer’s chances of political survival.
But the anxiety for many of them – badly bruised by Thursday’s election crushing – did not stem from concern the prime minister might be ousted. But that he would not.
Continue reading...The Sixers’ season ended in a humiliating sweep at the hands of the Knicks. There are reasons to believe the franchise can recover though
“You guys wanna see a dead body?”
Old heads remember that scene in Stand By Me, four boys hike through the Oregon wilderness to find the body of a dead boy. They walk for miles for the morbid prize of seeing something that can’t be unseen. When they finally arrive and stand over the body, nobody says a word. There’s nothing left to say.
Continue reading...As AI and HPC workloads drive unprecedented demands on data infrastructure, the concept of the “parallel file system” (PFS) has re-emerged as a critical architectural foundation. However, it remains widely misunderstood and often misrepresented. Originating in the late 1980s and early 1990s alongside massively parallel processing systems, true parallel file systems were designed to eliminate storage bottlenecks by enabling concurrent access to data across distributed nodes.
Across HPC, AI, and large-scale analytics, practitioners share a common understanding of what constitutes a parallel file system – a distributed storage architecture in which many clients access data directly and in parallel across multiple storage nodes, based on metadata delivered out of band, within a single shared namespace.
Direct client-to-storage communication is a foundational requirement. In a true parallel file system, clients do not communicate through front-end controllers, NAS heads, or proxy gateways. Rather, they establish parallel data paths to many storage nodes simultaneously, enabling performance to scale linearly and predictably as more compute nodes or storage nodes are added. If data flows through controllers, proxies, or gateways, the architecture is not truly parallel.
This principle is not limited to legacy HPC systems; it’s used in modern standards-based designs such as Parallel NFS (pNFS), especially pNFSv4.2, which is included in all major Linux distributions. With pNFSv4.2, clients receive layout information from a metadata server and then communicate directly with the appropriate storage nodes. The metadata server coordinates the layout state and access but never proxies data flows, a hallmark of true parallelism in practice.
AI workloads require massive data movement
Separating metadata from the data path is the most essential characteristic of a parallel file system. In a real PFS, metadata is architected so it doesn’t become a serialized bottleneck. Instead, metadata operations are distributed, delegated to clients, cached, or orchestrated in parallel.
In architectures where metadata and data traffic are intermingled or where metadata operations pass through controller nodes, concurrency is fundamentally constrained, regardless of how much backend capacity is added. In contrast, modern PFS designs allow metadata to flow independently from the data, enabling the system to scale horizontally without sacrificing performance. Protocols like pNFS reinforce this by providing layouts out of band while leaving data movement entirely to distributed parallel paths.
Parallel file systems also distribute data across many storage nodes, allowing clients to access different parts of files concurrently. Whether accomplished through explicit striping, negotiated layouts, or client-driven placement, the result is the same: a system optimized for multi-node, multi-stream I/O at scale.
This parallelism arises from direct multi-node access rather than from aggregating performance behind front-end controllers, as is common in scale-out NAS architectures. In a parallel file system, scalability is an inherent property of the data path architecture itself. Adding more controllers to a NAS system may increase aggregate capacity or throughput to a point, but it does not eliminate the architectural limitations imposed by controller-mediated I/O, which remain the limiting factor at scale.
Another distinguishing feature of true PFS architectures is that performance scales directly with the number of clients and storage nodes. Adding GPU servers and/or storage nodes, aggregate throughput and concurrency increase naturally.
Architectures that funnel I/O through controllers, however, cannot offer this type of scalability. No matter how many backend storage devices they manage, their front-end controllers remain fixed chokepoints. In high-concurrency environments, such as those powering modern AI pipelines, this limitation becomes apparent very quickly. These bottlenecks do not disappear with scale; they become more pronounced.
Metadata design is often reduced to overly simple labels like “centralized” or “distributed,” but effective AI and HPC performance requires much more nuance. At scale, metadata must support high concurrency, serve namespace operations in parallel, and enable delegation or client-side metadata caching. To power modern AI workloads, it must preserve locality across multi-site and multi-cloud environments and ingest metadata from external storage systems into a unified global context.
These capabilities matter because AI workloads increasingly span datasets stored across silos, protocols, and geographies. Metadata must operate at a global scale without entering the data path, something that favors true parallel file system architectures.
NFS separates data from metadata (Image courtesy Hammerspace)
Many storage systems now promote the idea of a “global namespace,” but this feature alone does not make a system a parallel file system. A parallel file system requires both a shared namespace and the ability for clients to access data directly and concurrently across storage nodes, with metadata fully separated from the data path. Some parallel file systems provide this capability only within their own storage domains, while standards-based approaches such as pNFS allow metadata to unify access across heterogeneous NFS-backed storage systems. These differences significantly affect the usefulness of a global namespace is for AI-scale workloads.
While many systems claim support for file and object protocols, the architectural model that delivers that support is critical. In some designs, S3 access is implemented through gateway or controller layers, forcing object traffic through the same bottlenecked pathways used for file I/O. In others, object semantics are integrated directly into the distributed parallel architecture, allowing object access to scale horizontally and follow the same direct-to-storage data paths as file access. Supporting both file and object protocols is meaningless if either is funneled through centralized front ends.
Modern designs incorporate distributed metadata services, dynamic layout negotiation, scalable and distributed locking, client-side delegation, parallel namespace operations, and global data awareness that extends across multiple sites or storage types.
These advanced capabilities reflect a shift toward AI, interactive, and heterogeneous computing environments rather than the batch-oriented workloads that shaped early HPC systems. The state of the art has advanced significantly.
One of the simplest ways to distinguish scale-out NAS from a parallel file system is to examine how clients perform I/O. If clients must route data or metadata through controller nodes, regardless of how many controllers exist, the architecture will eventually reach a performance ceiling determined by the controller CPUs and network capacity.
This constraint becomes especially problematic in AI environments where thousands of GPUs generate massive amounts of east-west traffic, where inference workloads require extremely low latency, and where metadata operations must be served in parallel. Parallel file systems avoid these limits by removing controllers from the data path, enabling direct client access to storage nodes without intermediaries.
Parallel file systems minimize bottlenecks for AI workloads (kubais/Shutterstock)
Many modern distributed systems support advanced erasure coding, parallel rebuilds, and flexible fault domain configurations. These features are widely available across object stores, scale-out NAS, and parallel file systems, and do not indicate whether a system is architecturally parallel.
Much of the industry conversation still centers on training benchmarks, but real enterprise AI performance increasingly depends on inference, microservices, agentic AI behavior, and multi-modal models that require rapid access to diverse, widely distributed data types. These workloads involve high fan-out traffic patterns, extreme concurrency, and sensitivity to latency.
Architectures that rely on controller nodes or serialized metadata operations struggle under these patterns. True parallel file systems are well-suited to these workloads because they provide direct access paths, distributed metadata management, and high levels of concurrency without introducing centralized bottlenecks.
Storage systems designed to support AI at scale share a common set of architectural principles. They enable direct, parallel I/O between clients and storage nodes, allowing bandwidth and concurrency to scale with cluster size. These systems separate metadata from the data path and distribute it in ways that support high levels of parallelism.
At the same time, such modern systems provide unified semantics for file and object access without inserting gateways into critical I/O paths, allowing multiple access models to share the same scalable data plane. They extend across heterogeneous storage systems, clouds, and sites by unifying metadata rather than confining it to a single physical or vendor-defined environment. These systems also account for locality within GPU clusters, ensuring that data access aligns closely with the compute fabric.
Finally, modern parallel architectures favor open, standards-based client access over proprietary client layers, enabling broad compatibility and long-term flexibility at scale.
Taken together, these architectural traits define both modern parallel file systems and, more broadly, the storage foundations required to support AI data pipelines effectively.
A parallel file system is not simply “fast” or “scale-out.” It is an architecture defined by distributed metadata, direct and concurrent client access to storage nodes, and the removal of controller bottlenecks from the data path.
Modern implementations, including those based on open standards such as pNFS, demonstrate how these principles enable scalable operations across heterogeneous, multi-site, and multi-cloud environments.
As AI infrastructure continues to expand, organizations should evaluate technologies based on these architectural fundamentals rather than on labels or marketing terms. Only systems built on genuine parallelism are best positioned for AI workloads. Anything less is simply repackaged scale-out storage.
About the author: Floyd Christofferson is the Vice President of Product Marketing at Hammerspace. Chistofferson has been involved with data management and storage for more than 25 years, focused on the methods and technologies needed to manage extreme volumes of data to keep up with the needs of modern, distributed storage resources and workflows.
The post Killing the Bottleneck: Why a True Parallel Architecture is the Secret to Scaling AI Workloads appeared first on HPCwire.
Apple says end-to-end encryption for RCS messages between iPhone and Android is now available in iOS 26.5, though the feature is still considered beta and depends on carrier support on both sides. MacRumors reports: Apple says that it worked with Google to lead a cross-industry effort to add E2EE to RCS. iOS users will need iOS 26.5, while Android users will need the latest version of Google Messages. End-to-end encryption is on by default, and there is a toggle for it in the Messages section of the Settings app. Encrypted messages are denoted with a small lock symbol. On iPhones not running iOS 26.5, RCS messages between iPhone and Android users do not have E2EE, but the new update will put Android to iPhone conversations on par with iPhone to iPhone conversations that are encrypted through iMessage. Along with Google, Apple worked with the GSM Association to implement E2EE for RCS messages. E2EE is part of the RCS Universal Profile 3.0, published with Apple's help and built on the Messaging Layer Security protocol. RCS Universal Profile 3.0 also includes editing and deleting messages, cross-platform Tapback support, and replying to specific messages inline during cross-platform conversations.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
School board elections are one of the highest-leverage, lowest-participation decisions in Delaware. Turnout is low. Margins are small. In some cases, candidates run without a real contest. When voters do not engage, leadership is not selected. It is decided by default. When governance is decided by default, the system performs accordingly.
It’s clear that when residents fail to vote, it can have consequences — ones that most people recognize, but rarely connect to the ballot box. It shapes whether schools are focused on clear priorities or pulled in competing directions. It determines whether resources are invested in what improves student outcomes or spread thin. Those decisions show up in real ways: in the preparedness of students, the confidence of families, and the strength of Delaware’s workforce and economy.
In 2024, fewer than 5% of eligible voters cast ballots in Delaware school board elections, even as concern about outcomes, funding, and district leadership remained high across every sector of public life. The disconnect between what communities demand and how they participate is one of the most significant, and most solvable, barriers to progress in our state.
Data from the 2026 Delaware Opportunity Outlook reinforce this disconnect. A majority of Delawareans believe school board members have a direct influence on the quality of K–12 education, yet far fewer report understanding how improvement efforts are being carried out, or how decisions are made at the local level. In other words, people believe boards matter, but are not consistently using the one mechanism they have to influence who serves and how decisions are made.
A strong board member asks clear, outcome-focused questions and expects specific answers. They connect decisions to priorities, work through tradeoffs with colleagues, and ensure decisions are understood before the board moves forward. They listen for whether information reflects progress or activity, and press for clarity when it does not.
These are not intuitive responsibilities. They require preparation. School board governance is often treated as something individuals can step into without training, but these are complex roles that involve setting priorities, interpreting data, making tradeoffs, and ensuring decisions lead to results over time.
The Delaware Opportunity Outlook suggests that this is not how the role is widely understood. While Delawareans recognize that school boards influence the quality of education, far fewer identify training and professional preparation as essential.
That gap has direct consequences. As the state advances new priorities, the effectiveness of those efforts will depend on whether local board members are prepared to implement them, monitor progress, and make results visible.
Delaware has established a clear direction for public education: defined priorities, a statewide literacy commitment, and a funding reform that will place significant new responsibilities on local boards. Plans set direction. Boards determine whether those plans turn into results.
What happens next will not be determined by those plans alone. It will be determined by how effectively school boards translate those priorities into decisions, how consistently they track progress, and whether they make results visible to the public.
Evaluating a candidate is straightforward: Can they name a small number of district priorities and explain why those matter? Can they describe what data they would review regularly and how they would use it? Can they explain how resources should align to outcomes and what they would do if results do not improve? Candidates who can answer those questions demonstrate an understanding of the role. Those who cannot speak to governance beyond the issues that brought them to the race may find the role more demanding than they anticipated.
Voting in a school board election is one of the few places where individual participation has a direct and immediate impact on how the system performs. School board elections are decided by small numbers of voters. Your decision to engage, or not, determines who governs. Choosing not to participate is not neutrality. It is a choice, and it carries the same weight as the vote itself.
Today, a decision will be made about who governs Delaware’s schools. You can be part of that decision, or it will be made without you. Either way, the results will show up in classrooms, in communities, and in the long-term strength of this state.
Find out who is running. Evaluate them on the work the role requires, not only on the positions they hold. Vote, and encourage others to do the same.
For more details about voting in today’s elections, visit First State Educate’s 2026 School Board Elections page.
The post Who governs matters: Why school board elections deserve your attention appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
The update also brings some changes to your Maps app and loads of bug fixes to your device.
ATLANTA, May 11, 2026 — Red Hat today announced that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has migrated to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization for its mission-critical IT infrastructure.
JPL selected Red Hat OpenShift with its built-in Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization capability to support a sophisticated, high-performance environment. This unified application platform combines hybrid cloud flexibility with powerful automation, providing a high-efficiency path for managing virtual machine (VM) workloads while supporting a consistent, hybrid cloud foundation for future containerized applications.
This approach uses cloud-native tooling, such as pipelines for VM creation and management, to streamline day-to-day operations and strengthen a foundation for future innovation and evolving workload demands that come with space exploration.
Red Hat OpenShift provides enhanced platform security and compliance capabilities. VMs running on Red Hat OpenShift gain the enterprise-grade security features of the platform, including robust network policies, role-based access control (RBAC) and automatic SELinux security contexts. This foundation is further bolstered by tools like the compliance operator and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes, which provide multi-layered security capabilities for build, runtime and cluster operations.
“Organizations today are grappling with the need to advance their digital capabilities while maximizing the value of their existing application investments,” said Sachin Mullick, director, product management, Hybrid Platforms, Red Hat. “With Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, customers can simplify VM migration and management while taking advantage of built-in automation to reduce operational complexity. Red Hat provides the flexibility, confidence and operational efficiency to help our customers meet their evolving mission goals.”
Learn more about Red Hat Summit here.
About Red Hat
Red Hat is the open hybrid cloud technology leader, delivering a trusted, consistent and comprehensive foundation for transformative IT innovation and AI applications. Its portfolio of cloud, developer, AI, Linux, automation and application platform technologies enables any application, anywhere—from the datacenter to the edge. As the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, Red Hat invests in open ecosystems and communities to solve tomorrow’s IT challenges. Collaborating with partners and customers, Red Hat helps them build, connect, automate, secure and manage their IT environments, supported by consulting services and award-winning training and certification offerings.
Source: Red Hat
The post NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Advances Deep Space Mission Operations with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization appeared first on HPCwire.
LIVINGSTON, N.J., May 11, 2026 — CoreWeave, Inc. today announced it has achieved the strongest combination of speed and price-performance1 for Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.6 in independent inference benchmarking conducted by Artificial Analysis. Across 11 inference providers evaluated on the current top open-source model, CoreWeave simultaneously delivered the highest output speed at the most cost-efficient performance level measured.
CoreWeave ranked first in the most attractive quadrant for inference speed and price-performance on Kimi K2.6, as independently measured by Artificial Analysis.
As AI applications move from training into production, inference efficiency increasingly determines real-world product viability. For organizations running the full AI loop from training to inference to continuous improvement, throughput, latency, and cost per request directly shape how reliably and economically AI can scale in the real world. This is especially significant where performance is non-negotiable, like coding assistants, agentic systems, and real-time enterprise copilots.
“Training launched the first wave of AI, and inference will define the next one. That’s why the effectiveness and economics of inference are becoming critical to organizations bringing AI into the products people use every day,” said Chen Goldberg, Executive Vice President of Product and Engineering at CoreWeave. “This benchmark reflects the investments we’ve made across our full stack, and the deep expertise of CoreWeave engineers in optimizing performance and efficiency. This is a clear signal that speed, responsiveness, and predictable economics are attainable for customers today.”
“Performance gains in inference systems come from optimization across the full stack, including hardware, inference runtime, and model configuration,” said George Cameron, Co-founder at Artificial Analysis. “Artificial Analysis benchmarks are intended to give organizations transparency in how inference offerings perform. CoreWeave performed strongly across speed and price-performance dimensions in our benchmarking of providers of Kimi K2.6. For those deploying agents in production, inference speed and price are critical to user experience and to making open source models a viable choice at scale.”
The gap between theoretical compute capacity and actual production throughput is influenced by how well hardware, model optimization, and runtime execution are tuned together. CoreWeave has optimized its platform across all three layers.
The benchmark result, as validated by Artificial Analysis, reflects the company’s investment in full stack infrastructure optimization for production AI workloads. CoreWeave Inference and Applied Training teams achieved top speed by training an in-house NVFP4 Quantization with Eagle3 Speculative decoding on NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 hardware delivering 205 token/sec at $0.7 per million tokens blended (7:2:1 agentic blend) price. Teams can access this performance directly through CoreWeave Inference offerings:
Artificial Analysis is an independent platform that benchmarks and analyzes AI models, API providers, and infrastructure. It provides data on model quality, speed, cost, and reliability, helping users (developers/enterprises) compare and select AI technologies. Artificial Analysis independently benchmarked Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.6 by testing its performance across 10+ core metrics – including MMLU-Pro, GPQA, and agentic coding tasks –to evaluate speed, cost, and reasoning capability.
The Artificial Analysis result is the latest in a series of independent validations of CoreWeave. The company is the only AI cloud to earn the top Platinum ranking in both SemiAnalysis ClusterMAX 1.0 and 2.0, which evaluate AI cloud performance, efficiency, and reliability, and also demonstrated record-breaking MLPerf benchmark results.
Learn more about CoreWeave’s recognition on the blog or on Artificial Analysis’s website.
1Price performance is measured in Speed vs. Price
About CoreWeave
CoreWeave is The Essential Cloud for AI. Built for pioneers by pioneers, CoreWeave delivers a platform of technology, tools, and teams that enables innovators to move at the pace of innovation, building and scaling AI with confidence. Trusted by leading AI labs, startups, and global enterprises, CoreWeave serves as a force multiplier by combining superior infrastructure performance with deep technical expertise to accelerate breakthroughs. Established in 2017, CoreWeave completed its public listing on Nasdaq (CRWV) in March 2025.
Source: CoreWeave
The post CoreWeave Reports Top Kimi K2.6 Inference Performance in Artificial Analysis Benchmark appeared first on HPCwire.
National average for gas prices has risen by well over a dollar a gallon since late February
Donald Trump pledged to suspend the US federal gas tax in an effort to reduce pressure on Americans after the US-Israel war on Iran sparked a sharp rise in fuel prices.
The US president told reporters on Monday that his administration would look to pause the tax “till it’s appropriate”, as drivers count the cost of the surge in oil prices in the two months since US and Israeli forces attacked Iran.
Continue reading...When comparing these three account types over the next year, there's a clear, lucrative winner for savers to know.
Violence in Guerrero state has driven as many as 1,000 households from their homes, rights group says
Hundreds of Indigenous families have been forced to flee their homes in the mountains of central Mexico by intense attacks from a local criminal group, including drone bombings, an Indigenous rights organisation said on Monday.
A gang known as Los Ardillos has been carrying out attacks in Guerrero state for years, but they started to intensify last week. Villages were subjected to eight hours of bombings on Saturday, the National Indigenous Congress said, forcing between 800 to 1,000 families to flee to other towns.
Continue reading...US president says he is considering restarting naval escorts in strait of Hormuz in attempt to end Iranian blockade
Donald Trump has said the ceasefire with Iran is on “life support” and that he is considering restarting US navy military escorts of ships through the strait of Hormuz in an attempt to end the Iranian blockade of the vital waterway.
The US president dismissed Iran’s peace proposals as stupid, and denied he was under any domestic pressure to reach a deal.
Continue reading...The Dreame X50 Ultra can leave every floor type spotless, and now you can grab one for under $1,000.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Speaking to graduates of University of Central Florida's College of Arts and Humanities and Nicholson School of Communication and Media on May 8, commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield, vice president of strategic alliances at Tavistock Group, told graduating humanities students that AI is the "next industrial revolution," and was met with thousands of booing graduates. "And let's face it, change can be daunting. The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution," Caulfield said. At that point, murmurs rippled through the crowd. Caulfield paused, and the crowd erupted into boos. "Oh, what happened?" Caulfield said, turning around with her hands out. "Okay, I struck a chord. May I finish?" Someone in the crowd yelled, "AI SUCKS!" Her speech begins around the hour and 15 minute mark in the UCF livestream. [...] Before the industrial revolution comment, Caulfield praised Jeff Bezos for his passion and use of Amazon as a "stepping stone" to his real dream: spaceflight. Rattled after the crowd's reaction, she continued her speech: "Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives." The crowd cheered. "Okay. We've got a bipolar topic here I see," Caulfield said. "And now AI capabilities are in the palm of our hands." The crowd booed again. "I love it, passion, let's go," she said. "AI is beginning to challenge all major sectors to find their highest and best use," she continued. "Okay, I don't want any giggles when I say this. We have been through this before, these industrial revolutions. In my graduation era, we were faced with the launch of the internet." She goes on to talk about how cellphones used to be the size of briefcases. "At that time we had no idea how any of these technologies would impact the world and our lives. [...] These were some of the same trepidations and concerns we are now facing. But ultimately it was a game changer for global economic development and the proliferation of new businesses that never existed like Apple and Google and Meta and so many others, and not to mention countless job opportunities. So being an optimist here, AI alongside human intelligence has the potential to help us solve some of humanity's greatest problems. Many of you in this graduating class will play a role in making this happen."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Authorities said they seized unidentified narcotics, cash, 10 guns, 11 vehicles, six motorcycles — and seven tigers.
A cluster of cases aboard the ship have been linked to a type of hantavirus found in Argentina that can spread from person to person, the World Health Organization said.
Trump reportedly involved in securing visa for Zbigniew Ziobro, who is wanted in Warsaw on criminal charges
Poland has said it expects Washington to extradite a former justice minister wanted on criminal charges after reports emerged that he had fled to the US from Hungary, where the former prime minister Viktor Orbán had granted him asylum.
“You can’t hide these days. You can flee, you can delay it for a while, but eventually your options run out,” Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, said on Monday in reference to Zbigniew Ziobro.
Continue reading...Stuart Prior quits as scrutiny grows of new councillors accused of racist, antisemitic or anti-Muslim remarks
A Reform UK councillor has resigned days after being elected, after he allegedly celebrated on social media the rape of a Sikh woman in the Midlands, declared white people the “master race” and called Muslim people “rats”.
Stuart Prior was elected as a councillor for Essex county council last Thursday, winning 2,404 votes, the highest total of any candidate in the ward.
Continue reading...Marty Makary has served as Food and Drug Administration commissioner since March 2025.
SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 11, 2026 — Building on more than 30 years of collaboration, Applied Materials, Inc. today announced a new innovation partnership with TSMC to accelerate the development and commercialization of semiconductor technologies required for the next era of AI. Working together at Applied’s EPIC Center in Silicon Valley, the companies will co-innovate to advance materials engineering, equipment innovation, and process integration technologies designed to deliver energy-efficient performance from the data center to the edge.
“Applied and TSMC share a long history of deep collaboration built on trust and a shared commitment to advancing innovation at the leading edge of semiconductor technology,” said Gary Dickerson, President and CEO of Applied Materials. “By bringing our teams together at the EPIC Center, we are strengthening that partnership and accelerating the development of technologies to address the unprecedented complexity driving the chipmaking roadmap.”
“As semiconductor device architectures evolve with each new generation, the demands on materials engineering and process integration continue to increase,” said Dr. Y.J. Mii, Executive Vice President and Co-Chief Operating Officer at TSMC. “Meeting the challenges of AI at a global scale requires industry-wide collaboration. Applied Materials’ EPIC Center provides an ideal environment to accelerate equipment and process readiness for next-generation technologies.”
Through the EPIC Center engagement, Applied and TSMC will collaborate on materials engineering innovations targeting the most critical challenges facing advanced logic scaling. Areas of focus include:
“Advancing leading foundry technologies calls for a new model for collaboration and innovation,” said Dr. Prabu Raja, President of the Semiconductor Products Group at Applied Materials. “As a founding partner of the EPIC Center, TSMC gains earlier access to Applied’s innovation teams and next-generation equipment, helping accelerate the path from technology development to high-volume manufacturing.”
Applied’s new, $5 billion EPIC Center in Silicon Valley represents the largest-ever U.S. investment in advanced semiconductor equipment R&D. The center, which will be operationally ready this year, is designed from the ground up to dramatically reduce the time it takes to commercialize breakthrough technologies from early-stage research to full-scale manufacturing. For chipmakers, the EPIC Center will provide earlier access to Applied’s R&D portfolio, faster cycles of learning and accelerated transfer of next-generation technologies into high-volume manufacturing, within a secure collaborative environment. In addition, the co-innovation programs at the EPIC Center will provide Applied with greater multi-node visibility to guide R&D investments while increasing R&D productivity and value sharing.
About Applied Materials
Applied Materials, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMAT) is the leader in materials engineering solutions that are at the foundation of virtually every new semiconductor and advanced display in the world. The technology we create is essential to advancing AI and accelerating the commercialization of next-generation chips. At Applied, we push the boundaries of science and engineering to deliver material innovation that changes the world. Learn more at www.appliedmaterials.com.
Source: Applied Materials
The post Applied Materials and TSMC Partner at the EPIC Center to Accelerate AI Scaling appeared first on HPCwire.
Chuck Schumer accuses GOP of ‘asking working families to pay the price while Trump pockets the perks’ in letter
Chuck Schumer, the US Senate’s top Democrat, has vowed to oppose a Republican plan to spend $1bn on security improvements for the ballroom Donald Trump is seeking to build on the White House’s former East Wing.
The money is set to be included in a measure Republicans plan to pass that would allocate about $70bn to the federal agencies leading Trump’s mass deportation campaign, with the intention of keeping them operational through the remainder of the president’s term.
Continue reading...Move comes after PM insisted he would prove his doubters wrong and fight any leadership challenge
More than 60 MPs have called on Keir Starmer to set a timetable to depart as prime minister, including backers of his leadership rivals Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting.
MPs from across the party’s ranks said the prime minister had failed to convince them he had what it took to lead the country into the next election.
Continue reading...Apple and Google start rolling out end-to-end encrypted RCS chats in beta for iPhone owners and Android phone users.
ATLANTA, May 11, 2026 — Red Hat and Voyager Technologies today announced the successful deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.1 and Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI) to Voyager’s LEOcloud Space Edge IaaS Micro Datacenter aboard the International Space Station (ISS). This collaboration extends a container-optimized, enterprise Linux platform into orbit, providing a more consistent and hardened operating foundation for AI-ready workloads to run in space. The milestone advances the evolution of space-based cloud services and orbital data centers (ODCs), delivering a security-enhanced operating foundation for real-time processing at the edge.
As commercial and government organizations increase their reliance on space-based data, the ability to process data in orbit is increasingly critical. Running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the Space Edge Micro Datacenter enables workloads to operate at the data source, reducing latency and operational costs while supporting a more proactive security posture for edge environments.
“Space is the next frontier for hybrid cloud, where success depends on having a trusted, resilient cloud infrastructure wherever data is generated,” said Travis Steele, chief architect of Air and Space Forces, Red Hat. “Together with Voyager, we’re extending trusted open source technology into space, enabling organizations to process data in orbit and act faster with greater confidence.”
Addressing Orchestration Constraints of Spaced-Based Computing
The emergence of Orbital Data Centers (ODCs) requires open innovation and extreme resilience. This collaboration addresses the unique challenges of space-based environments by optimizing for limited power and constrained hardware resources, managing data processing across delayed or disrupted network conditions, and delivering a hardened, enterprise-grade Linux foundation. By integrating these orbital workloads with existing terrestrial DevSecOps practices, Red Hat and Voyager can help organizations extend their hybrid cloud footprint with greater consistency and operational confidence.
Red Hat and Voyager are laying the foundation for a new era of space-based computing, where cloud capabilities extend more consistently from Earth to low earth orbit (LEO), the lunar region and beyond. This approach helps organizations extend existing DevSecOps practices, container strategies and proactive security postures across emerging operational domains with greater operational alignment.
A Durable Foundation for IT Innovation
The deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.1 and Red Hat UBI addresses the extreme operational demands of low earth orbit through several core technology pillars:
Learn more about Red Hat Summit here.
About Red Hat
Red Hat is the open hybrid cloud technology leader, delivering a trusted, consistent and comprehensive foundation for transformative IT innovation and AI applications. Its portfolio of cloud, developer, AI, Linux, automation and application platform technologies enables any application, anywhere—from the datacenter to the edge. As the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, Red Hat invests in open ecosystems and communities to solve tomorrow’s IT challenges. Collaborating with partners and customers, Red Hat helps them build, connect, automate, secure and manage their IT environments, supported by consulting services and award-winning training and certification offerings.
About Voyager Technologies
Voyager Technologies is a defense and space technology company committed to advancing and delivering transformative, mission-critical solutions. By tackling the most complex challenges, Voyager aims to unlock new frontiers for human progress, fortify national security, and protect critical assets from ground to space.
Source: Red Hat
The post Voyager and Red Hat Propel Red Hat Enterprise Linux into Orbit with Space Edge Micro Datacenters appeared first on HPCwire.
Brain trauma and football have become inexorably linked. But a recent Harvard study suggests there are other dangers for football players
When an NFL player takes his own life, there is often speculation about why. Injuries and unemployment – a common occurrence in a violent sport where players are frequently traded and cut – have been linked with increased risks of suicidal ideation. In parallel to those factors, however, exists chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). A degenerative brain condition caused by repeated trauma to the head, CTE’s links with football are established and almost impossible to ignore. Players ranging from widely admired Pro Bowlers such as Junior Seau and Dave Duerson, to those infamous for more notorious reasons, such as Aaron Hernandez and Phillip Adams, were all confirmed to have CTE by autopsies. (The condition can only be diagnosed posthumously.) All four players killed themselves.
Such anecdotal observations imply a certain, coherent logic that connects playing football with suicide. Tackle football, by its nature, increases participants’ risk of head injury. Head injuries increase the likelihood of an affected individual attempting suicide. CTE is often the cumulative consequence of years of head injuries and, indeed, many high-profile NFL players who have taken their own lives have been confirmed to suffer from CTE. So it’s easy to reason that football and/or CTE, by their very nature, lead to an increased risk of suicide.
In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
Continue reading...I have the budget for Either board. I’m slowly starting to hear more about fun engineers. But it seems that most of the future motion boards are going to crap pretty fast. What is the better experience?
Google says it has seen the first evidence of cybercriminals using AI to create a zero-day vulnerability. "Google reported its findings to the unnamed firm affected by the vulnerability before releasing its report," reports Politico. "The company then issued a patch to fix the issue." From the report: Google Threat Intelligence Group researchers detailed the development in a report released Monday. Zero-day exploits are considered the most serious type of security flaw because they are not detected by security companies and have no known fixes. The report noted that this was the first time Google had seen evidence of AI being used to develop these vulnerabilities -- marking a major change in the cybersecurity landscape, as it suggests newer AI models could be used to create major exploits, not just find them. Google concluded that Anthropic's Claude Mythos model -- which has already found thousands of vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser -- was most likely not used to create the zero-day exploit. [...] The Google Threat Intelligence Group report also details efforts by Russia-linked hacking groups to use AI models to target Ukrainian networks with malware, while North Korean government hacking group APT45 used AI technologies to refine and scale up its cyber methods. John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, said the findings made clear that the race to use AI to find network vulnerabilities has "already begun." "For every zero-day we can trace back to AI, there are probably many more out there," Hultquist said. "Threat actors are using AI to boost the speed, scale, and sophistication of their attacks."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A nonprofit group is suing to block the Trump administration's blue resurfacing of the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
Month was one of driest Aprils on record with rainfall 23% less than average, according to Met Office figures
One of the driest Aprils on record for central and southern England has left river levels below normal, raising fears of drought in some areas over the summer.
The latest UK hydrological survey – which tracks river and groundwater levels – suggests central and southern England and eastern Scotland will experience notably low river flows over the next three months, raising concerns about water shortages if dry weather persists.
Continue reading...The family of one of the victims in last year's deadly mass shooting at Florida State University accused ChatGPT developer OpenAI of enabling the suspect leading up to the attack.
Why Should Delaware Care?
In Spring 2025, residents and elected officials raised alarms about increased air pollution coming from the Delaware City refinery. The problem, which led to hundreds of thousands of pounds of excess sulfur dioxide emissions, occurred when pollution controls were circumvented during necessary repairs. The same thing is about to happen again over the next four weeks.
Air pollution surrounding the Delaware City Refinery is expected to spike over the next four weeks as workers at the facility repair equipment, state officials announced Thursday.
Regulators said the refinery reported that repairs to its coker carbon monoxide boiler will require it to change the way it captures gases emitted during the oil refining process.
Shifting from “primary” pollution controls to “secondary” devices during maintenance activities is what caused the refinery to exceed its permitted air pollution limits during a period last May and June.
During that time, the refinery released nearly a million pounds of sulfur dioxide and other toxic chemicals into the atmosphere.
The Delaware City oil refinery is one of the most complex on the East Coast because it refines both light and heavy crude oil. During the process, which includes the use of extremely high heat, certain “undesirable” components are burnt off creating hazardous gases, such as sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide.
Today, the Delaware City Refining Company, which is owned by PBF Energy, is appealing a state violation order that includes a $300,000 fine for the emissions last spring and for other permit violations in 2024 and 2025.
The company also is facing a lawsuit from an area resident on behalf of her young son, claiming the springtime emissions resulted in over $18,000 in medical bills and expenses.
In a Wednesday statement, the refinery said it had been monitoring the equipment that caused pollution problems last spring and that operators last week “observed new signs of a possible water-tube leak.” To address the leaky equipment, refinery workers need to shut down the boiler system entirely for repairs.
The company said it will lower production rates in order to reduce emissions, and that “modeling indicates that impact will remain well below thresholds for public health.”
The company over the weekend launched a new online monitoring platform, where the public can access data from five new, real-time air monitoring devices installed “around its fenceline.”
On Thursday afternoon, Delaware environmental regulators released the first public notification about sulfur dioxide pollution from the planned repairs. The notification does not estimate the amount released.
The Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control said it will “monitor the situation.” Unpermitted emissions “will be assessed for violation and penalties,” the agency stated.
Acute exposure to sulfur dioxide can cause respiratory distress, but state and refinery officials say the current pollution is emitted at a height that is well above ground level where people are.
DNREC also said sulfur dioxide readings did not exceed the federal action limit last spring.
Despite the assurances, some residents are apprehensive about the pollution.
Tim Konkus, owner of the Delaware City Marina, said that everybody who is near the refinery “should be worried about their health.”
“On the one hand, it’s a great thing they’re going to fix it. On the other hand, it’s at great cost while they make billions every year,” Konkus said, while also lamenting that emissions will coincide with a celebration of Delaware City’s Bicentennial on Saturday and Sunday.
House Speaker Melissa Minor-Brown, a Democrat whose home district includes Delaware City, also issued a statement criticizing the refinery for the increased air pollution. She also thanked DNREC officials for “their willingness to hold the refinery accountable.”
“By many accounts, this was not an unavoidable accident, but instead the result of decisions made by the refinery, including the decision to delay necessary maintenance despite clear warnings and opportunities to act sooner,” Minor-Brown said.
In the statement, Minor-Brown did not propose policy changes, nor did she note whether the pollution may place the refinery into the status of “chronic violators,” under a relatively new Pollution Accountability Act.
Thursday’s notice of increased air pollution came only a day after state regulators announced a separate consent order related to a Thanksgiving 2025 release of butane and butane-related chemicals from the Delaware City refinery.
Through that agreement, signed by facility manager Michael Capone, the Delaware City refinery must provide real-time air monitoring data on emissions of volatile organic compounds, known as VOCs.
In addition to the company’s new fenceline pollution sensors, DNREC also maintains air monitors east of the refinery on Route 9 and farther to the west near Lums Pond that provide hourly sulfur dioxide readings that can be found at de.gov/data.
Call to action: Residents can learn more by calling the Delaware City Refining Company Community Information Line at 302-834-6200. The public can report problems and concerns related to environmental issues to DNRECs complaint line at 800-662-8802.
The post Delaware City Refinery air pollution to spike during repairs appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
The bloc’s foreign policy chief said recent remarks from the Russian leader suggested the war may be coming to an end
Russian affairs reporter
The EU on Monday dismissed Vladimir Putin’s suggestion that the Kremlin-friendly former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder could serve as a European mediator in peace talks aimed at ending the war in Ukraine.
Continue reading...MILAN, May 11, 2026 — Algorithmiq has established Milan as its global headquarters, signaling its confidence and commitment to Italy and Europe as the future hub for leadership in the industrialization of quantum algorithms.
To date, the quantum computing narrative has been dominated by the crowded race to develop hardware; Algorithmiq is building and industrializing the algorithmic layer in the technology that can transform quantum computers into tools with real-world applications. Algorithmiq’s decision to situate itself at the heart of the Italian quantum ecosystem reflects a deliberate European bet on quantum’s software layer as the primary area of future innovation in the sector.
Algorithmiq has raised €18 million in funding led by United Ventures and Italian institutional investor Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP), with continued participation from Inventure VC. This funding round brings Algorithmiq’s total funding raised to €36m, and represents Italy’s largest-ever venture capital investment in a quantum startup.
Milan will serve as the base for Algorithmiq to further its commercial operations as the software partner to the world’s leading quantum hardware companies. From Italy, Algorithmiq will also tap into Europe’s deep scientific talent base to expand its rapidly growing team and leverage the region’s growing strategic focus on quantum.
Betting on Italy’s Quantum Future
Algorithmiq’s relocation of its global headquarters to Milan (previously in Finland, where Algorithmiq will maintain significant operations) reflects Italy’s burgeoning quantum technology ecosystem and a broader European effort to close the gap between research and the commercialisation of deeptech.
The decision follows Italy’s National Quantum Strategy, launched in 2025, with a commitment to support the creation of a robust quantum infrastructure in Italy.
Access to national and pan-European capital backing for quantum, paired with the Italian government’s progressive policy commitments, makes Milan a highly attractive strategic base for expansion across European and global markets.
Industrializing Quantum Algorithms
From the theoretical quantum pioneers of Via Panisperna Boys led by Enrico Fermi to today’s research ecosystem, Italy has long contributed to the foundations of modern physics that now underpin the algorithms and applications driving the next phase of the quantum industry. As this industry matures, building better machines remains essential, but it is no longer enough: without major advances in algorithmic efficacy, quantum hardware risks becoming impossible to commercialize and therefore muted in its real-world impact.
Rather than competing in the capital-intensive race for hardware, Algorithmiq focuses on building the algorithmic layer that helps quantum machines become tools of industrial value.
Algorithmiq has recently become the sole winner of the $2 million Wellcome Leap Q4Bio Challenge making it the first company ever to prove that end-to-end quantum-classical algorithms can simulate complex therapeutics, marking a clear path to commercially useful quantum computing and beating competitors such as Harvard University, Oxford University, Stanford University, Nottingham University and Infleqtion.
In 2025, Algorithmiq also became the first company globally to achieve quantum advantage for a useful scientific problem using an Algorithmiq-designed model on IBM quantum hardware. This followed the launch of its commercially available quantum product, an algorithm for noise mitigation designed for researchers and industry practitioners alike, on IBM’s Qiskit Functions Catalog.
Algorithmiq’s relocation to Milan and latest funding round follow a year of exceptional business performance in 2025, in which Algorithmiq signed major commercial agreements with Microsoft, IBM, and Rigetti, demonstrating continued momentum as the elite quantum software option for the world’s largest technology companies.
Dr Sabrina Maniscalco, CEO and Co-Founder of Algorithmiq, commented: “2026 is a year in which more meaningful applications of quantum will become a reality, and we want to be at the centre of that change. This strategic move and funding injection give us the template to hit scale and continue to serve and work with the biggest quantum players in the world. Our quantum software makes quantum computers actually useful, and we’re delighted to be taking that message global from our new headquarters in Milan. As quantum computing matures, the question is shifting from who can build the biggest machine to who can make the machines matter. That challenge sits at the intersection of science, software, and industrial execution, and it is increasingly where the real competitive edge may lie.”
Jacopo Drudi, Partner at United Ventures, added, “With quantum, Europe has the opportunity to set the pace rather than follow it. Italy has always been at the frontier of the mathematical and physical sciences — from Leonardo to Fermi to Marconi — and that foundation gives us a structural advantage in this next technological revolution. Bringing a world-class international team like Algorithmiq to Milan is a win not just for United Ventures, but for the country. We are building a continental tech titan, and for European quantum talent looking to come home, Italy now has a place where they can do their best work.”
Professor Tommaso Calarco said, “It is particularly valuable when a company’s trajectory sends a broader signal about where innovation can be built. Europe needs more of this: decisions that connect scientific excellence, entrepreneurship, and long-term industrial ambition. Italy is well placed to play a role in this context.” Professor Calarco authored the Quantum Manifesto that launched the European Commission’s Quantum Flagship, where he currently serves as Chair of the Quantum Community Network (QCN).
More from HPCwire: Wellcome Leap Announces $2M Prize in $50M Quantum for Bio Challenge Program
About Algorithmiq
Algorithmiq develops quantum software that makes quantum computers useful, enabling breakthroughs in chemistry, materials science, and life sciences through physically meaningful, energy-efficient quantum computation. Algorithmiq is the software counterpart to the world’s leading quantum hardware players, working with the likes of Google, IBM, Microsoft, AWS, Rigetti, Cleveland Clinic and CERN. Headquartered in Milan, Italy, with operations in Finland, the UK, Ireland and the US, Algorithmiq is led by CEO & and Co-Founder Dr Sabrina Maniscalco, CSO and Co-Founder Dr Guillermo García-Pérez, CTO and Co-Founder Dr Matteo Rossi and Lead Researcher and Co-Founder Dr Boris Sokolov. Algorithmiq has raised €36 million to date, backed by United Ventures, institutional investor CDP and Inventure VC.
Source: Algorithmiq
The post Algorithmiq Establishes Milan Headquarters, Raises €18M for Quantum Software Expansion appeared first on HPCwire.
Vin Diesel dropped the news on Monday.
 | It randomly started squeaking while I was riding it. Is it the bearings or loose hub bolts? I checked the mag handle, and there is no rubbing. [link] [comments] |
Though the number of police officers killed in the line of duty has dropped, non-fatal assaults against them have been rising since 2021, according to new data released Monday by the FBI.
Sean Gardner, a gymnastics coach who trained elite young girls, will be in federal court in Mississippi on Monday facing 12 felony counts of sexual exploitation of children.
The Senate is returning to Washington to resume work on funding immigration agencies with a package that includes $1 billion for the renovation of the White House East Wing.
Pop singer accuses electronics manufacturer Samsung of using a copyrighted image of her face to sell TVs.
An American on the repatriation flight began showing symptoms of hantavirus and another "tested mildly PCR positive for the Andes virus," the Department of Health and Human Services says.
President Trump made the comments in a phone interview with CBS News chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes.
Apple now requires Education Store shoppers in the U.S. and several other countries to verify their student, educator, parent, or homeschool-teacher status through UNiDAYS, ending the previous honor-system approach. 9to5Mac reports: Starting today, Apple requires shoppers in the United States to complete verification when making a purchase via the Education Store. This change also applies to Australia, Hong Kong, Turkey, Canada, and Chile. In many other markets around the world, such as the UK, Apple already required verification. As a refresher, people eligible for Apple's Education Store include current and newly accepted college students and their parents, as well as faculty, staff, and homeschool teachers across all grade levels. Apple is teaming up with UNiDAYS to handle the verification process. Students and educators will be asked to create a UNiDAYS ID and then verify their academic status by logging in to their school's academic portal. Alternatively, users can upload a photo of their student or faculty IDs. Homeschool teachers, meanwhile, will need to provide an identity document such as a driver's license, state ID card, or passport. They'll also need to provide one homeschool document, such as a Letter of Intent (LOI) or Letter of Acknowledgment. Most customers will be verified instantly, and those requiring manual verification should hear back within 24 hours. The same verification process applies both in-store and online for Apple Education Store shoppers. Meanwhile, Apple has added Apple Watch to the Education Store for the first time, offering discounts on the Series 11, SE 3, and Ultra 3.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The soldier who put the cigarette in the statue’s mouth was jailed for 21 days, and the one who took the photograph for 14.
Have $100,000 saved in a retirement account? Here's how much you'll be expected to withdraw annually.
Jimmy Fallon will produce show, which will begin filming over the summer, based on New York Times’ hit word game
Savannah Guthrie is to present a TV game show based on the New York Times’ hit word game Wordle, the newspaper announced Monday.
It will be the first new onscreen venture for the host of NBC’s Today show since her return in April after the disappearance two months earlier of her mother.
Continue reading...Poor choice of numbers or deliberate nod/wink? I'd guess just a coincidence most likely.
Exclusive: Britain expected to be allowed to keep ban on live animal exports, sources say, in fillip for Keir Starmer
Brussels is preparing to offer Keir Starmer a key concession in talks over an agricultural deal, giving the beleaguered prime minister an important victory in his efforts to move closer to the EU.
European officials have conceded that the UK can keep its ban on live animal exports as part of any joint deal on food and agricultural products, according to sources on both sides of the talks, even though the EU has not imposed such a ban.
Continue reading...The collaboration supports development of next-generation global and lunar compute and data storage infrastructure and space-based data resilience capabilities
TAMPA, Fla., May 11, 2026 — Lonestar Data Holdings Inc., a leader in resilient space based data storage and infrastructure, today announced it has signed a Space Act Agreement with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) through NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.
Credit: Lonestar
The agreement establishes a framework for collaboration focused on advancing technologies and operational concepts supporting lunar data storage, resilient off-world compute infrastructure, and next-generation space communications architectures. The collaboration is intended to help accelerate development of secure, independent, and disaster-resilient data capabilities beyond Earth.
The initial activities under the agreement are expected to focus on technical collaboration and evaluation of lunar-edge data infrastructure concepts designed to support future commercial, civil, and scientific space missions.
“Signing this Space Act Agreement with NASA Ames represents an important milestone for Lonestar as we continue building the future of resilient space-based data infrastructure,” said Steve Eisele, CEO of Lonestar. “As humanity expands beyond Earth, trusted data resilience and secure digital infrastructure will become as essential as power and communications. We are proud to collaborate with NASA Ames in support of technologies that can help enable the next era of lunar and cislunar operations.”
NASA Ames Research Center has long played a leading role in advancing spaceflight technologies, autonomous systems, and exploration capabilities supporting NASA’s missions and commercial space partnerships.
Lonestar’s vision is to establish the all Earth orbits and especially the Moon as the ultimate secure and resilient location for critical data storage and disaster recovery infrastructure. The company is developing lunar data centers designed to provide sovereign, secure, and independently recoverable storage capabilities for governments, enterprises, and mission-critical applications.
The Space Act Agreement reflects growing momentum between NASA and the commercial space sector to develop infrastructure and operational capabilities supporting long-term lunar exploration and commercialization initiatives.
Lonestar successfully demonstrated successful lunar-edge data operations through its Freedom mission in 2025 and continues development of future Earth orbit and Lunar data storage missions designed to expand commercial access to resilient off-world digital infrastructure.
Space Act Agreements are authorized under the National Aeronautics and Space Act and enable NASA to collaborate with industry, academia, and other organizations on projects that advance NASA’s mission and broader U.S. space leadership objectives.
About Lonestar
Lonestar is a pioneering data infrastructure company developing resilient space based data storage and edge processing capabilities. The company’s mission is to provide secure, sovereign, and disaster-resilient data services supporting governments, enterprises, and future space operations. Lonestar is building the foundation for the cislunar digital economy by extending critical infrastructure beyond Earth.
Source: Lonestar
The post Lonestar Announces NASA Ames Agreement Focused on Lunar-Edge Data Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.
Report suggests that popular initiatives such as NT Live and NT at Home are making UK audiences more adventurous
Theatre streaming services and cinema screenings of stage performances are not a threat to “in-person” attendance and are making audiences more adventurous, according to new research commissioned by the National Theatre.
Introducing the findings on Monday, the NT’s director, Indhu Rubasingham, said that the boom in filmed theatre had raised major questions including the concern that popular initiatives such as NT Live and NT at Home would have a negative impact on live attendance. The organisation commissioned research by the agency Indigo to learn more about audiences’ attitudes to filmed theatre.
Continue reading...You think the XRC or mid-tier in general will receive any upgrades or new board anytime soon? (i.e. XRC-S)
Survey of 27,000 Australian supermarket items found some products boasting environmental benefits had significantly higher emissions than unlabelled counterparts
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Foods in supermarkets boasting environmental terms such as “natural” or “sustainable” are mostly just using marketing speak, rather than verified claims, Australian researchers have found.
More than 27,000 packaged foods sold at Coles, Woolworths, Aldi, IGA and Harris Farm supermarkets in Sydney were assessed by researchers from the George Institute for Global Health.
Continue reading...Kirk Moore, the principal at Pauls Valley High School in Oklahoma, exclusively told CBS News how he acted on "just instinct" when tackling a school shooter.
Casting director urges Keir Starmer to intervene in case of Paata Burchuladze, 71, jailed for seven years after singing at anti-regime demonstrations
The Royal Opera House in London has urged Keir Starmer to intervene in the case of Paata Burchuladze, a world-renowned bass singer who has been imprisoned in Georgia since October on a charge of leading a coup against the country’s authoritarian leader.
The 71-year-old has performed at the Royal Opera House and the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and collaborated with the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and José Carreras. He was arrested after joining a protest outside the presidential palace in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Last week he was given a seven-year jail sentence which Burchuladze suggested to the court was equivalent to a life sentence given his age.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Fictional portrayals of artificial intelligence can have a real effect on AI models, according to Anthropic. Last year, the company said that during pre-release tests involving a fictional company, Claude Opus 4 would often try to blackmail engineers to avoid being replaced by another system. Anthropic later published research suggesting that models from other companies had similar issues with "agentic misalignment." Apparently Anthropic has done more work around that behavior, claiming in a post on X, "We believe the original source of the behavior was internet text that portrays AI as evil and interested in self-preservation." The company went into more detail in a blog post stating that since Claude Haiku 4.5, Anthropic's models "never engage in blackmail [during testing], where previous models would sometimes do so up to 96% of the time." What accounts for the difference? The company said it found that training on "documents about Claude's constitution and fictional stories about AIs behaving admirably improve alignment." Related, Anthropic said that it found training to be more effective when it includes "the principles underlying aligned behavior" and not just "demonstrations of aligned behavior alone." "Doing both together appears to be the most effective strategy," the company said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Far-right extremist Ivan Jennings had earlier pleaded guilty to dissemination of a terrorism publication
A rightwing extremist who called for “killing migrants when they arrive on their boats” has pleaded guilty to terrorism offences.
Ivan Jennings, 46, from Stafford, admitted encouraging terrorism between 15 August and 14 November 2024 at Leicester crown court on Monday.
Continue reading...Running back underwent surgery for gunshot wound
Football team pay tribute to ‘deeply loved’ player
Missouri star running back Ahmad Hardy is in stable condition after being shot at a concert in Mississippi, school officials said on Monday.
Missouri’s football program announced in a statement that Hardy was shot early Sunday morning and that the All-America running back underwent surgery for the gunshot wound later that day.
Continue reading...Defense secretary accuses senator of disclosing classified info but Kelly says ‘that’s not classified, it’s a quote from you’
Pete Hegseth said he has referred Senator Mark Kelly to Pentagon lawyers for allegedly disclosing classified information about depleted US weapons stockpiles – information Kelly says he heard from the defense secretary, in public, under oath.
Speaking on CBS News’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Kelly said American inventories of Tomahawk cruise missiles, Army Tactical Missile Systems, SM-3 interceptors, Thaad rounds and Patriot missiles had been severely drawn down during the Iran conflict, warning that replenishment could take years and leave the US exposed in any future confrontation with China.
Continue reading...Cole Tomas Allen, accused of attempting to assassinate Trump last month, did not speak as plea was entered
The suspect accused of attempting to assassinate Donald Trump last month at a gala in Washington DC has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Cole Tomas Allen did not speak in court on Monday as his attorney entered the plea on his behalf.
Continue reading...Want to buy a home or refinance your current one? Here are the mortgage interest rates you'll need to know first.
Criminal groups and state-linked actors appear to be using commercial models to refine and scale up attacks
In just three months, AI-powered hacking has gone from a nascent problem to an industrial-scale threat, according to a report from Google.
The findings from Google’s threat intelligence group add to an intensifying, global discussion about how the newest AI models are extremely adept at coding – and becoming extremely powerful tools for exploiting vulnerabilities in a broad array of software systems.
Continue reading...Leaders cannot ignore support for reparations resolution this November, says St Vincent and Grenadines ex-PM
It is “inconceivable” that reparatory justice from Britain for the transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans will not be “front and centre” of the next Commonwealth leaders’ meeting, the former prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines has said.
Ralph Gonsalves was in Jamaica to discuss the next steps of the “alive and growing” movement to advocate for reparations for hundreds of years of chattel slavery.
Continue reading...Discovery was made by Union Pacific employee inspecting stopped train at the yard in Laredo before it continued its journey north
Rail workers in Texas found six people dead inside a boxcar at a yard close to the Mexican border on Sunday afternoon, officials said.
The discovery was made by a Union Pacific employee inspecting the stopped train at the yard in Laredo before it continued its journey north, a spokesperson for the Laredo police department said, citing the railroad freight company.
Continue reading...Certain gold investing strategies could work better for seniors this month. Here's what to consider right now.
Allen is charged with attempting to assassinate President Trump, assaulting a federal officer with a deadly weapon and two gun counts.
Kevin González, 18-year-old who had terminal colon cancer, died shortly after reuniting with his parents in Mexico
A Chicago-born teen who advocated for his parents’ release from US immigration authorities’ custody while fighting terminal cancer has died shortly after reuniting with them in Mexico, his family has told media outlets.
The parents of 18-year-old Kevin González had been taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in Arizona in mid-April after they crossed the US border from Mexico without permission in an attempt to see him in Chicago as his health waned. González since then traveled to be with relatives in Mexico, and in recent days he had publicly pleaded for them to be released from ICE custody so they could be with him as he battled metastatic stage four colon cancer.
Continue reading...Carly Schwartz wanted a solution for her mental health struggles. She found one, but not where she expected
On a threadbare carpet in the living room of a Bernal Heights bungalow, I lay blindfolded on my back. Two middle-aged rescue terriers, one missing an eye, sniffed my feet and climbed up and down my legs. F**kin’ Perfect by Pink blared in the background, but the music sounded muffled and distant, like I was listening from underwater.
It was 1pm on a Thursday. Instead of going to the office, I’d allowed a shaman named Jonathan to inject my thigh muscle with a large dose of liquid ketamine. Even in my compromised state, high and spread out like a corpse on a stranger’s rug, I knew I’d reached peak absurdity. I also knew I wouldn’t emerge from this activity with even a slight improvement to my mental health.
Carly Schwartz is the author of the new memoir I’ll Try Anything Twice: Misadventures of a Self-Medicated Life and the former editor in chief of the San Francisco Examiner
Continue reading...Joint postdoctoral research projects will focus on quantum algorithms and applications in research areas across chemistry, computer science, materials science, physics, optimization, and more
May 11, 2026 — New York University and IBM have initiated a postdoctoral program to conduct quantum computer research in the areas of chemistry, computer science, engineering, materials science, physics, and optimization.
This collaboration, as part of NYU’s role as a member of the IBM Quantum Network—a consortium of academic institutions, enterprises, startups, and government labs working to enhance quantum computing through research excellence and technological advancement—is intended to push quantum algorithms and applications development for today’s quantum-centric supercomputer architectures, which combine quantum and classical HPC workloads, as well as for future, large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers, which are expected to accelerate time and cost efficiencies in fields such as drug development, materials discovery, chemistry, and optimization.
“Quantum computing’s potential to understand and address engineering, mathematical, and scientific barriers is unmatched,” says NYU Professor Javad Shabani, director of NYU’s Quantum Institute, who will oversee the university’s role in the postdoc program. “But maximizing its contributions requires developing a network of quantum pioneers across academia and industry who can reach beyond today’s technological boundaries. NYU welcomes the opportunity to work with IBM to help postdocs with their innovative and comprehensive approaches in meeting these challenges.”
“This postdoctoral research sponsorship will give some of NYU’s top talent an opportunity to push IBM’s quantum-centric supercomputing architecture not just for immediate application development, but to lay the groundwork for the algorithms that will power tomorrow’s fault-tolerant quantum computers—all while engaging with the broader quantum community of students, researchers, and industry professionals,” says Jamie Garcia, Director, Growth & Strategic Partnerships, IBM.
NYU postdoctoral researchers chosen for the program will conduct quantum-related projects, sponsored and supported by IBM and the company’s quantum researchers, at NYU’s Quantum Institute and at IBM Research headquarters—the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York—using the company’s quantum computers. The program follows an earlier NYU-IBM program, which included the training of NYU undergraduates and graduates in quantum information physics.
NYU’s Quantum Institute
Last fall, the university established the NYU Quantum Institute, which aims to drive cutting-edge research across three pillars of quantum information science—quantum computing, quantum communications, and quantum sensing—while also serving as a hub for the exchange of ideas and interactions between academia and the private sector, including New York’s startup ecosystem.
“When we launched the Quantum Institute at NYU, its success was to be based on the ingenuity of the outstanding faculty and students leading innovation at NYU, but of equal importance was the collaboration with industry leaders—such as IBM,” notes Juan De Pablo, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Executive Vice President for Global Science and Technology and executive dean of the Tandon School of Engineering. “Together we can help make New York a vital part of the quantum universe.”
Source: James Devitt, NYU
The post NYU’s Quantum Institute, IBM Team Up for Postdoctoral Research Program in Quantum Computing appeared first on HPCwire.
The ESPN star has done brilliant work for Black students. I wrote an open letter to him explaining why his comments on politics alienate much of his audience
Dear Stephen A Smith,
Let me first say that I tremendously respect all you do for historically Black colleges and universities. You have helped generate millions in scholarships, promoted student enrollment and brought national media attention to HBCUs across the United States. Specifically, as ambassador, you have promoted the annual HBCU College Fair, which has garnered over $12m in scholarships. You encourage students to consider HBCUs for their higher education, highlighting the community and nurturing environment they provide.
Etan Thomas played in the NBA from 2000 through 2011. He is a published author, podcaster, poet, activist and motivational speaker.
Continue reading...Data from missions showing critically low snowpack on mountains across the west raises alarm among experts
High above the jagged peaks of California’s Sierra Nevada, the view from the cockpit is breathtaking. At first glance, the mountains appear draped in a pristine white blanket. But as the flight crew gears up for a high-stakes mission, the sensors onboard this specialized aircraft prove that looks can be deceiving.
“This is a distinct dry year,” says Tom Painter, CEO of Airborne Snow Observatories.
Continue reading...AI-powered license plate readers, car trackers and police drones are spreading fast. Here's how state laws are trying to keep pace.
Comedy debuts at Versailles featuring dialogue, music, costumes and scenery created with help of AI tool Le Chat
Molière is to the French what Shakespeare is to the English: the last word in historical literature, drama, wit and satire.
Now, more than 350 years after his death, the 17th-century dramatist has been revived after scholars at the Sorbonne University in Paris used artificial intelligence to help write an experimental play in his style.
Continue reading...  | Again wtf.i went for a ride yesterday, used about a half battery and I didn't put it on the charger so when I left for Dunkin this morning I was at 56. Somebody tell me why the fuck it's saying it has 36% when in fact it's completely dead. I'm tired of this, I need one of these shops to fucking call me back so I can actually start working again and fix my shit right. Now I got 2 miles to get home and it's my first walk of shame in 5 years of having a onewheel. Wtf [link] [comments] |
Vice-president is accused of misusing public funds and threatening the lives of President Marcos Jr and his wife
The Philippine vice-president, Sara Duterte, has been impeached over allegations she misused public funds, amassed unexplained wealth and threatened the lives of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and his wife, in a case that could complicate her presidential ambitions.
Duterte, the daughter of the detained former president Rodrigo Duterte, was impeached by an overwhelming majority of lawmakers in the House of Representatives, which is dominated by allies of Marcos.
Continue reading...French woman taken to Paris in serious condition while American flown to Nebraska is asymptomatic, say officials
A French woman and an American national evacuated from the cruise ship at the centre of a deadly hantavirus outbreak have tested positive for the virus, as the complex operation to repatriate those onboard continued on Monday.
The French woman was one of five French passengers who disembarked from the ship in Tenerife on Sunday before being flown to a hospital in Paris.
Continue reading...European partners question viability of a Trump plan to arm Ukraine as weeks of war with Iran deplete U.S. supplies of critical weapons.
Health service has given US tech firm ‘unlimited access’ to certain data to build integrated platform, according to reports
MPs have warned that an NHS decision to grant Palantir access to identifiable patient information in its plan to use AI to improve the health service is “dangerous” and will fuel public fears that data privacy is not being prioritised.
NHS England has allowed staff from the US tech firm and other contractors to access patient data before it has been pseudonymised, despite internal fears of a “risk of loss of public confidence”, the Financial Times reported.
Continue reading...Amazon faces a proposed class-action lawsuit over claims it used software tactics to shorten the lives of older Fire TV Sticks without telling buyers.
Levels of Pfas in northern gannet eggs in Canada fell up to 74% over 55-year period of study
Levels of some of the most dangerous Pfas compounds have dramatically fallen in Canadian seabird eggs, which the authors of a new peer-reviewed study say illustrates how regulations are effective.
Researchers looked at Pfas levels in the eggs of northern gannets in the St Lawrence Seaway basin over a 55-year period. Pfas levels shot up from the 1960s through the peak of the chemicals’ use in the late 1990s and early aughts, then fell.
Continue reading...Opponents say administration’s plan prioritizes big agriculture at expense of wildlife and protected species
New legal action aims to head off a Trump administration plan to open up to 24m acres of federal lands to cattle grazing, which opponents characterized as a gift to big agriculture and said could cause a spike in deaths among already imperiled wolves, grizzlies, steelhead salmon and other wildlife.
The plan also calls for opening up parts of Grand Canyon national park, and other sensitive landscapes. Cattle destroy critical habitats for wildlife because they strip land bare of essential vegetation and pollute streams with feces, urine, sediment and carcasses. Meanwhile, park rangers and ranchers often kill grizzly bears and other predators who prey on cattle, despite that ranchers and the government pushed the cattle into the predators’ home range.
Continue reading...Backbench MP calls prime minister’s speech ‘too little, too late’ but stops short of moving to stand against him herself
Catherine West, the Labour MP who announced a challenge to Keir Starmer’s leadership, has changed course to say she instead wants the prime minister to set a timetable of September for his departure.
West, the MP for Hornsey and Friern Barnet and a former Foreign Office minister, announced on Saturday that she would seek to gather the 81 Labour MPs’ names needed to formally challenge Starmer, saying this was just a device to tempt others to stand and that she did not wish to take over.
Continue reading...President’s remarks came as Benjamin Netanyahu said the war was ‘not over’. Plus, American passengers of the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship travel to Nebraska
Good morning.
Donald Trump has condemned an Iranian response to a US peace proposal as “totally unacceptable” as the month-old ceasefire appeared to be wearing thin.
What is the US position on Iranian nuclear facilities? The US parameters for nuclear talks reportedly included a moratorium on Iranian nuclear enrichment for up to 20 years; the transfer overseas, possibly to the US, of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU), and the dismantling of Iranian nuclear facilities.
What is the sticking point? According to the Wall Street Journal, the Iranian counter-proposal suggested a shorter moratorium, the export of part of the highly enriched uranium stockpile and the dilution of the rest, and refusal to accept the dismantling of facilities.
How have markets reacted? After Trump rejected the counter-proposal on his Truth Social platform, there was a 4% jump in Brent crude on Monday to $105.50 a barrel, before it settled at $103.50.
Follow our liveblog for the latest updates.
What measures are being taken to control the spread? As well as one who tested positive, another passenger has mild symptoms of hantavirus, the US health and human services department confirmed. These passengers were travelling in the plane’s biocontainment units, it added.
Is the World Health Organization mandating a quarantine? No – it has recommended, but not mandated, a 42-day quarantine once passengers have landed in their home countries. As some countries enforce stricter rules than others, here is how the responses vary.
Continue reading...Linux 7.1 started phasing out support for Intel's 37-year-old i486 processor. Linux 7.2 removed drivers for the old AMD Elan 32-bit systems on a chip. And now some i586 and i686 class processors are being removed, reports Phoronix: Supporting those vintage GPUs without the Time Stamp Counter "TSC" instruction are becoming a burden... TSC-capable Intel Pentium processors and the likes will still be supported with this just being for TSC-less i586/i686 CPUs. Among the CPUs impacted by this latest change is the AMD K5 as well as various Cyrix processor models. The K5 was AMD's first entirely in-house designed processor that was first introduced in 1996 to counter the Intel Pentium CPU. TSC "support can now be assumed as a boot requirement for modern Linux," the article points out, which will allow the removal of various non-TSC code paths from the Linux kernel's x86 code. Tom's Hardware remembers the K5 "wasn't a very popular processor as it arrived late, then offered lackluster performance in the competitive environment it joined." Launch SKUs in 1996 were limited to clocks from 75 MHz to 133 MHz, and, due to being late, Intel's Pentium line was already faster. AMD still managed to get an edge on the Cyrix 6x86, though.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The host of the film awards ceremony at which Tourette syndrome activist John Davidson shouted a racial slur has said he won’t host it again
Alan Cumming has criticised the organisers of the Bafta film awards in February as “bad people who weren’t doing their jobs properly” after the N-word outburst by Tourette activist John Davidson, which was broadcast by the BBC during its coverage of the ceremony.
In an interview with the Sunday Times, Cumming, who was the host of the ceremony, said: “It was bad, bad, bad, bad leadership … Bad people who weren’t doing their jobs properly, who really had not prepared and let people down.”
Continue reading...Move by largest donor to environment programme poses further uncertainty for already troubled negotiations
The largest donor to the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) has paused funding to the body before its revised budget on 12 May, triggering concern among member states and NGOs.
The news could carry significance for the already troubled plastic treaty negotiations being overseen by Unep. Since 2022 countries have been struggling to agree on how to deal with the volume of plastics being produced and used, a subject widely acknowledged to be one of the most serious environmental issues of the age, but despite six rounds of talks there has been no agreement in sight.
Continue reading...Also: James Rodríguez finally makes his mark with Minnesota, and a perfect stat line appears in the Bronx
There are points up for grabs in the East. Inter Miami tooled up to defend their MLS Cup title with uneven results. The Philadelphia Union have dropped them from the top of the heap to the cellar. The Ohio duopoly of Columbus and Cincinnati are below their previous standard, while Orlando City played the long game, conducting minimal business before Antoine Griezmann’s summer arrival.
Nashville SC have been the greatest beneficiary of The Great Points Migration in 2026, storming to the top of the East. But right behind them after a gritty 2-1 win over Philadelphia this week are the surprising New England Revolution, led by Marko Mitrović in his first MLS head coaching role after four years with the US youth national teams.
Continue reading...Debates over secession overshadowed by revelations separatist-linked group gained access to list of electors
The illegal use of voter information by rightwing separatists in the province of Alberta has raised fresh fears over Canada’s electoral integrity by making valuable and “incredibly confidential” personal data easily accessible to malicious actors, security experts have warned.
The data breach, one of the largest in Canadian history, has prompted warnings of a “truly terrifying” new battleground over information, persuasion and foreign interference in already weakened democratic systems.
Continue reading...A new divide is emerging: between workers who use AI at work and those who are managed by it
The real danger that artificial intelligence poses to work is not just job loss – it is the growing divide between people who use AI to extend their skills and those whose working lives are increasingly shaped by opaque, AI-powered systems of surveillance and control.
The debate about artificial intelligence and how it will affect workers is stuck in the wrong place. On one side are warnings that machines are coming for millions of jobs. On the other are claims that AI will turbocharge productivity. Both stories miss what is already happening in workplaces across the world, from Britain to Kenya to the United States.
Continue reading...Liban Mohamed is the progressive underdog in the race for a House seat but victory at the state party convention offers grounds for optimism
Liban Mohamed, a 27-year-old son of Somali immigrants, is headed into a high-stakes Utah Democratic congressional primary in June after narrowly winning the state party convention last month with 51% of the vote in what was seen as an upset for the party’s political establishment.
The sudden emergence of an unknown progressive candidate in Utah has exposed a growing divide within the state’s Democratic party, one that mirrors a broader tension across the national party between its moderate establishment and a younger, more progressive wing.
Continue reading...Address was billed as make-or-break amid mounting speculation of a challenge. Has he done enough to hang on?
Keir Starmer’s speech and press conference on Monday morning was almost universally billed as his final chance to save his premiership. Was it enough? And what – if anything – did he actually offer?
Continue reading...Global health reform cannot wait for a new world order. Middle powers must act now Expert comment LToremark
The World Health Assembly in Geneva presents a narrow window of opportunity for action to save multilateral cooperation on global health. Three things need to happen.
The 79th World Health Assembly (WHA) – the decision-making body of the World Health Organization (WHO) – will take place in Geneva on 18–23 May amid major challenges to global health cooperation. The United States has withdrawn from WHO, leaving a $600 million funding gap and forcing WHO to cut its budget for 2026-27 by 20 per cent. Bilateral health deals under the America First Global Health Strategy are being signed across Africa and Asia, bypassing multilateral frameworks and transferring costs onto the partner countries without commensurate power. In February, WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described 2025 as potentially the most difficult in the organization’s history.
Two recent speeches provide the clearest political diagnosis of the current international moment. On 5 March, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney told the Australian parliament that the rules-based order is not in transition – it is in rupture. That same day – and building on Carney’s speech – Finland’s President Alexander Stubb opened the Raisina Dialogue by arguing that the Global South will decide what the next world order looks like, and that the West has one last chance to prove it is capable of dialogue rather than monologue. Although neither mentioned global health explicitly, both were talking about it.
As global health diplomats head to Geneva, the question WHA79 must answer is not whether WHO needs reforming, but who will drive that reform, in whose interests and on what political basis. Although Carney and Stubb approach the issue from very different angles, they converge on a clear answer: middle powers must act with urgency – and Western middle powers must act in genuine partnership with the Global South.
Carney’s argument is strategic: great powers can compel; middle powers can convene. But not every country can convene because convening power flows from trust, which is earned through consistency between stated values and demonstrated actions. In the global health context, this matters enormously. WHO has never had enforcement powers; its authority has always rested on the legitimacy conferred by member states who believe it acts in their collective interest. That legitimacy is now under structural pressure. A WHO seen as a residual institution – one that the powerful use when convenient and abandon when not – cannot perform its core functions of surveillance, standard-setting and emergency coordination. The middle powers who remain committed to it must therefore act not merely as supporters but as active co-architects of its renewal.
Carney’s concept of ‘variable geometry’ is equally important for global health. Rather than waiting for a comprehensive multilateral settlement that may take years, middle powers should build different coalitions for different issues, based on shared values and common interests. This is not a retreat from multilateralism, Carney argues, but its evolution. For global health, the implication is direct. Issues such as pandemic preparedness, antimicrobial resistance, digital health governance and climate-health linkages each require a different coalition, moving at different speeds. The WHO reform process is necessary but slow. Variable-geometry coalitions can build the normative and financial infrastructure that a reformed global health architecture will eventually need to incorporate. The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control showed what is possible. Similar courageous steps must now be taken in other areas, such as negotiations on a pandemic agreement or possibly in relation to digital health.
Stubb’s argument adds a political dimension to Carney’s intervention: the Global South cannot be a passive recipient of whatever order emerges – it is the decisive actor. The triangular contest he describes between a Global West, Global East and Global South is directly visible in WHO’s governing bodies. How Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and South Africa engage at WHA79 – whether they drive the reform process or treat it as a Northern preoccupation – will shape the outcome far more than any European position paper. Stubb’s challenge to the West is blunt: stop treating engagement with the Global South as a communications exercise and start treating it as a power-sharing negotiation. The global health corollary is equally blunt: a reformed WHO governance structure that still reflects 1948 power distributions, rather than today’s distribution of disease burden and health capacity, will not be legitimate in the world that is now emerging.
In his speech, Stubb called for concrete structural reform of global multilateral institutions: new permanent representation for Asia, Africa and Latin America in global institutions, not as a rhetorical concession but as a condition of legitimacy. Passivity is not a strategy, he said – a charge directed at Europe as much as anywhere. For the European and other Western middle powers who dominate WHO’s financing and governing bodies, this is uncomfortable but necessary. Being present is not the same as exercising leadership and showing willingness to cede structural power. Professing commitment to multilateralism while resisting the governance reforms that would make multilateral institutions genuinely representative is precisely the double standard that Stubb warns will cost the West its last chance.
Authorities added that the victim's mother has also been arrested for aiding and abetting the monk.
Influential IPPR proposes capping rents at whichever is lower of consumer price inflation or wage growth
One of the thinktanks closest to the Labour government is urging ministers to introduce private sector rent controls in England, as the chancellor weighs up how to ease a surge in living costs caused by the Iran war.
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has published a paper calling for a rent “double lock”, which would link rent increases to either wages or inflation, depending on which was lower.
Continue reading...Data from University of Toronto suggests Canadians are avoiding US cities during the second Trump administration
A new research tool that tracks cell phone activity has found a 42% drop in visitors from Canada to big metropolitan areas in the US that is much higher than official border-crossing data, suggesting Canadians during the second Trump administration are avoiding US cities in particular.
Researchers from the University of Toronto said the tool showed a “year-over-year median decline of approximately 42% in Canadian visits to US metropolitan areas – significantly higher than official border-crossing data, which showed a roughly 25% decline”.
Continue reading...As the president’s popularity withers, the party has no will to stage an intervention against him
Donald Trump wins, Republicans lose. The Indiana primaries on 5 May, in which five of seven Trump-backed candidates ousted stalwart conservative Republican state legislators who had refused his command to redraw congressional districts, has been the only victory Trump can claim recently. Indiana, happily for him, is not Iran. His appeal still prevails at least over the increasingly narrow band of Maga voters. But the persistence of Trump’s domination is a sign of mounting haplessness. His victory is an augury of repudiation. Maga devotion is hardening in response to his dwindling popularity, a telltale reaction of true believers to a failed prophesy. The cult survives, the party withers.
On the same day the Indiana Republicans went down to defeat to sate Trump’s vengefulness, a Democrat won a bellwether Michigan state senate seat by 20 points in a district that Kamala Harris carried by less than a point. The bell tolls for thee.
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill Clinton as well as Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist
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Why Should Delaware Care?
Delaware ranks as one of the top states in the nation for healthcare costs. For years, lawmakers have tried to bring prices down, often meeting fierce resistance from hospitals. A new bill meant to address those costs has been held up for months in negotiations with those hospitals.
Nearly two months after lawmakers introduced a bill aimed at bolstering the state’s primary care infrastructure, it has yet to see a vote on the Senate floor as hospital lobbyists continue to negotiate with legislators over the bill’s most contentious provision.
Delaware senators held their first debate over Senate Bill 1 — which would implement price caps on how high hospital systems can negotiate costs with insurers — in March, during an abnormally packed committee hearing. Delaware’s hospital systems descended on the statehouse in protest of the bill, saying it would decimate revenues and lead to job losses.
Multiple lawmakers decried the hospitals’ projected job loss claims, saying they are using healthcare workers as “pawns” in an effort to maintain profits.
“Your campaign of fear, threatening the elimination of 4,000 jobs, is just disgraceful,” said State Sen. Ray Seigfried (D-Wilmington), who is a former ChristianaCare employee and executive of 25 years.
The bill, aimed at rewarding providers that keep patients healthy and away from costly trips to emergency rooms, has largely sat stagnant since then. It quietly passed through the Senate Finance Committee, which doesn’t publicly vote on bills, in April.
Senate Majority Leader Bryan Townsend (D-Newark/Glasgow), who sponsored SB 1, confirmed Wednesday that negotiations with the state’s hospital systems over amendments to the bill were ongoing, but he declined to elaborate further. He did say he anticipates an announcement on amendments soon.
Brian Frazee, CEO of the Delaware Healthcare Association, a trade group that represents the state’s hospitals, also declined to comment on specifics of the negotiations.
But he said he appreciates the opportunity to work with lawmakers to put forth “a resolution that we can all support.”
The bill currently has the support of the state’s insurance department, the Medical Society of Delaware and the Mid-Atlantic Association of Community Health Centers.
At the center of the hospital systems’ campaign against SB 1 is a provision that would regulate the rate at which insurers carrying plans for state employees and some commercial plans regulated by the Department of Insurance can reimburse hospitals for covered services. Those changes would also apply to the state’s Medicaid plan.
Essentially, the state is seeking to drive down its own healthcare spending by capping how much money insurance providers will pay hospitals, which hold a majority of the market share in the state, for their services.
If passed as is, it could save the state hundreds of millions of dollars on medical costs.
By taking aim at how high Delaware healthcare providers can negotiate their prices with insurers in addition to making those insurers spend 11.5% of their medical costs on primary care, the state hopes to better compensate providers proactively working to improve Delawareans’ health outcomes.
One provision in the bill would introduce reference-based pricing to medical services covered under both insurance for state employees and some commercial plans regulated by the Department of Insurance. Essentially, this would limit the amount of money a provider could be reimbursed by insurers, tying that amount to a predetermined benchmark.
Under Delaware’s proposal, that benchmark would cap reimbursement rates at 250% of what the federal government pays providers through Medicare.
For services covered under the state’s health plan that do not have a Medicare rate to compare to, like pediatrics, the state would be able to set those rates through the State Employees Benefits Committee.
The bill would “conservatively” save the state more than $280 million over the first five years of implementation, the Department of Insurance said after announcing the bill.
Frazee, of the hospital association, pointed to that Medicare benchmark, saying it was a provision lawmakers tried, and failed, to introduce in previous legislation — House Bill 350 — that led to a year-and-a-half long lawsuit between the state and Delaware’s largest hospital system.
Officials in Oregon, which implemented a similar proposal in 2017, told Spotlight Delaware the state realized massive savings after enacting price caps. Within a couple years, those officials said the provisions saved the state more than $112 million.
Delaware’s SB 1 also includes language that would exempt hospitals and other healthcare providers from the 250% benchmark requirement if they use a “global budget model” that is approved by the state insurance department.
Global budget models set annual fixed prices for inpatient and outpatient procedures, meaning hospitals are paid on the front end to deliver services at a cost set by their previous Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements from previous years.
In neighboring Maryland, the state implemented global budgeting for all of its acute care hospitals in 2014, according to a report from Mathematica.
Up to this point, the only public debate over this bill happened in March during a Senate Health and Social Services Committee hearing.
As part of that debate, one physician, who has practiced in Delaware for more than 35 years, said the state’s primary care infrastructure is in “dire straits.”
Dr. Jim Gill said independent primary care physicians are currently reimbursed far below the proposed price caps, and that SB 1 is not about giving primary care doctors more money.
Instead, he said the law allows primary care doctors to receive higher reimbursements for care they do during office visits, as well as care they do in between visits, which he said goes frequently unreimbursed.
“Let’s face it, no one went into primary care for the money, but we need enough funding to fully care for the people of Delaware,” Gill said.
Additionally, a rift emerged between doctors working in hospital systems and independent practitioners.
Independent doctors and the Medical Society of Delaware, which represents all licensed state physicians, said they were in support of the bill because primary care is underfunded, while hospital doctors said they were against the bill because of the impacts it could have on their programs.
Richard Henderson, of the Medical Society of Delaware, said SB 1 comes after years of discussion about how to improve primary care in the state. While he said the bill is “not perfect,” he said it would bring down costs and improve people’s health.
“The data both then and now is clear and unequivocal,” Henderson said. “Independent primary care practices improve outcomes and reduce the overall cost of care.”
Henderson also said the bill is “critical” to the survival of independent practices and will create an environment that attracts physicians to the state.
Dr. David Tam, the CEO of Beebe Healthcare in Lewes, also testified at the committee meeting. He aimed his criticism of the bill at the impact it would have on his hospital because of its share of Medicare patients.
Under SB 1, hospitals and providers would be barred from charging more than 250% of what the federal government reimburses for Medicare. But Medicare typically underpays physicians for their services.
Since his hospital serves a large share of Medicare patients from a growing elderly population in Sussex County, Tam said the new price cap on other insurance would make it difficult to cover losses from treating Medicare patients.
It is unclear if and when the Senate will hear any proposed changes to SB 1, though lawmakers will have to move quickly if they want to send the bill to Gov. Matt Meyer’s desk before the end of this year’s legislative session on June 30.
The post Delaware primary care reforms held up in negotiations for months appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Senator Chris Van Hollen and other Democratic lawmakers are embracing a policy that hardly benefits the middle class
Soul-searching within the Democratic party is to be expected after its loss in the 2024 election. Donald Trump’s edge over Kamala Harris in voters’ perceptions of economic competence (perplexing though it now appears following a year of erratic policymaking) was bound to inspire a call to rethink the party platform.
Yet the second-guessing is steering the Democrats down a dangerous path to embracing a tax-cutting strategy that risks defeating the project to enable a healthier, more equitable society.
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A Georgia congressman running for one of the country’s most competitive U.S. Senate seats has vowed in social media posts and interviews to make America’s roads safer — by taking commercial driver’s licenses away from noncitizens.
“If you can’t read English road signs,” Mike Collins, a Republican, posted on Facebook in April, “you don’t belong behind the wheel. Period.”
Collins, the owner of a trucking business and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives’ transportation committee, is one of the loudest champions of the Trump administration’s effort to revoke licenses from nearly 200,000 noncitizen commercial drivers, including thousands of truckers. The Trump administration has pushed the policy forward even though its own officials have written that there’s no empirical evidence to show that foreign truckers cause more crashes than truckers who are American citizens.
At the same time, however, Collins has opposed rules that experts say actually would reduce the odds of serious crashes. Those rules could have required that Collins’ family business sink substantial money into new safety measures for its fleet.
Over the past 25 years, crashes involving truckers for Collins’ business killed five people and injured more than 50 people — including one woman who now needs around-the-clock care due to a severe brain injury — according to federal data, court filings, plaintiffs’ attorneys and police records.
Drivers and passengers who were injured in those crashes later claimed in lawsuits that truckers for Collins’ business have caused them to collectively incur hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical expenses. The figure the business has paid out is not known because the settlements it reached with crash victims have been confidential, as is common in such suits. Court filings in one suit state that both parties agreed to a $1 million payout from the business’s insurer. Collins’ business denied wrongdoing by truckers and the business itself in those cases.
ProPublica’s analysis of federal motor vehicle data from the past two years shows that Collins’ business has a higher rate of unsafe driving and speeding violations per mile than the majority of trucking companies with substantial mileage. The analysis also shows that the company’s recent crash rate sits around the median of similar companies, while the rate of injury from those crashes sits in the top fifth.
Safety experts told ProPublica that some of the technologies opposed by Collins, which include devices on semitrucks to limit their speed and sensors on big rigs to automatically brake in the face of a potential collision, reduce the odds of crashes leading to serious injuries and deaths. The country’s largest trucking trade group — a group that Collins’ family business is a member of, according to the company’s website — has supported mandates for those technologies.
“These are proven technologies,” said Zach Cahalan, executive director of the Truck Safety Coalition, which advocates on behalf of crash victims and their families. He added that the technologies would “protect those we hold dear on our roads from horrific tragedy.”
Neither Collins’ campaign nor his congressional office responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment or to questions about his family business’s safety record or his policy positions on trucking safety. His campaign manager declined to make him available for an interview. The business did not respond to questions sent by ProPublica; an employee told ProPublica that press inquiries about the business are handled by Collins’ congressional office.
In recent years, Collins has described his efforts to keep foreign truckers off the roads as “purely a safety issue.” He has also questioned the effectiveness of other safety measures and said that they would have saddled his industry with extra costs.
“We want to be safe,” Collins said in one congressional hearing. “I don’t know of a trucking company out there that doesn’t want to be safe. And when they are not safe, they are taken off the road.”
Toward the end of 2023, his first year in Congress, Collins had one of his first chances to support a measure that experts believed could make the roads safer. The Biden administration had proposed a rule that would require the installation of devices to limit the speed of trucks, capping it as low as 60 miles per hour.
But Collins questioned the need for the rule. He told officials at a transportation committee hearing that the federal government shouldn’t require the safety measure. He said insurance companies already serve as a sufficient speeding deterrent, because they have the ability to cut off coverage to truckers with unsafe driving records. He also said the rule wasn’t needed because of yet another deterrent that had long been in place.
“They are called speed limit signs,” he said. “They are enforced by law enforcement.”
Collins’ position stood at odds with the industry’s largest trade group, American Trucking Associations, which that year had expressed support for capping the speeds of trucks between 65 and 70 miles per hour. Collins did not respond to questions about why his views are at odds with ATA, which represents the interests of 37,000 members, including Collins’ family business.
In 2025, the Trump administration withdrew the speed limiter proposal. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy celebrated the decision as one that would get “D.C. bureaucrats OUT of your trucks.”
Collins also pushed back against a different proposal, which would have required trucks to have automatic emergency braking systems. That technology can force a truck to slow down if the potential for a collision is detected.
Federal officials had estimated that the braking system mandate could prevent more than 8,000 injuries a year. ATA supported much of the proposal, too. Yet Collins, whose family business has used those systems in some trucks, explained at recent congressional hearings that the technology was “very expensive” and didn’t work that well. “People don’t understand that these things are actually hurting more than they’re helping right now,” Collins said at a hearing last year.
Some of Collins’ truckers have been involved in crashes because of their alleged failure to slow down, according to citations and police reports obtained by ProPublica. Over the past five years, three people hurt in those crashes have sued Collins’ fleet because its truckers allegedly failed to maintain a safe distance, leading them to cause crashes. The plaintiffs claimed that they sustained serious injuries that cost five to six figures in medical expenses.
The truckers and Collins’ business denied wrongdoing in the cases. The three cases were dismissed. Lawyers for two plaintiffs said the cases ended in a settlement; a lawyer for the third plaintiff did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the dismissal of the case.
The fate of automatic emergency braking requirements is now up in the air, too. The Trump administration has delayed the rule from going into effect and, according to ProPublica’s reporting last year, may narrow the scope of it.
Collins has said that his decades in the business make him especially attuned to safety measures that work, compared with bureaucrats who have “beaten to death” his industry with too many regulations. In the late 1980s, Collins became the head of the family’s trucking company before he had graduated college. He took over for his dad, Mac Collins, who served as a congressman from 1993 to 2005.
Shortly into Mike Collins’ time as president, one of his company’s truckers lost control of his trailer. The crash that followed sent a 19-year-old woman to the hospital. The trucker later pleaded guilty to driving under the influence of cocaine. The business drew scrutiny because that trucker had pleaded no contest to drunk driving earlier that year but was allowed to stay on the road. A political opponent later aired a TV ad that accused the family’s trucking business of being cited for “more than a hundred” safety violations.
At the time, Mac Collins blamed the company’s insurer for missing the drunk-driving conviction in a background check. He said the ad contained “falsehoods” but didn’t specify what was wrong. The company ultimately fired the trucker after the crash, Mac Collins told the Ledger-Enquirer in 1994.
The larger the Collins trucking fleet grew — into one of about 100 trucks, hauling timber for Georgia-Pacific as well as tires and steel — the more traffic citations and inspection violations its truckers received. The data ProPublica reviewed showed that truckers have gotten into more than 90 crashes that have led to at least 51 injuries and five deaths since 2001.
In 2007, one Collins trucker veered into oncoming traffic on a North Carolina highway and hit a white Honda CR-V. The CR-V’s driver, Bridget Murphy, and the trucker both died. Murphy’s estate and two of Murphy’s passengers filed a lawsuit and, according to a court filing in 2009, agreed to a $1 million payout from the company’s liability insurance coverage. The company wrote in a filing that the trucker had been “stricken by a physical impairment beyond his control.”
In 2021, another trucker switched lanes on an Indiana highway and collided into a car driven by Larkin Cooper. She claimed in a lawsuit that the trucker’s “negligent and reckless” driving caused injuries that forced her to drop out of nursing school and switch to a lesser-paying career. Her lawyer wrote that the total damages were likely to exceed $75,000.
In 2023, a trucker failed to stop quickly enough while approaching a red traffic light on a northeast Georgia highway, causing a four-vehicle crash, according to court records. Drivers in two vehicles later said in lawsuits that they had sustained serious medical injuries. One of them claimed that the costs to treat his back, knee and neck totaled more than $120,000.
Collins did not answer ProPublica’s questions about the lawsuits. Lawyers for the family’s business denied wrongdoing in the suits in Indiana and Georgia. Soon after, the business settled for undisclosed sums.
During a televised debate in April, just weeks before the May 19 Republican primary for the U.S. Senate race, Collins told viewers that his time in the trucking business had taught him how to work across the aisle in Washington, D.C. His political ads feature him behind the wheel of a rig, and his yard signs have a logo of an American flag in the shape of a semi.
Yet his messaging about making roads safer centers on one main idea: getting noncitizen truckers off the road.
In one social video from November, Collins was on one side of a split screen, speaking about a sign on the other screen.
“You know what this sign says?” Collins asked. “Nah, neither do I.”
“Y’all, It’s a road sign from Uzbekistan, which is exactly why I’m able to drive a truck in Georgia, but not Uzbekistan,” he continued. “But somehow, y’all, that common sense, well, it didn’t apply to one man on our roads.”
Collins then replaced a photo of the sign with a mug shot of an undocumented trucker named Akhror Bozorov. Collins said he had been “wanted in Uzbekistan for terrorism and spreading Jihad.” After Bozorov was arrested last year, the Department of Homeland Security published a press release that criticized Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s transportation department for issuing a license to Bozorov and President Joe Biden’s administration for granting the trucker his work authorization.
Collins went one step further and used the trucker’s story to attack the politician he’s trying to unseat, U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., for not being tough enough on immigration.
He also cited Bozorov’s story as justification to strip noncitizen truckers of their licenses — but failed to present evidence that noncitizen truckers make the roads less safe.
In March, the Trump administration enacted its rule that could eventually revoke commercial licenses from nearly 200,000 noncitizen drivers. But according to the administration’s initial analysis of its own rule last year, “There is not sufficient evidence, derived from well-designed, rigorous, quantitative analyses, to reliably demonstrate a measurable empirical relationship” between a trucker’s citizenship status and safety outcomes.
A letter from nearly 20 Democratic state attorneys general pointed out that the Trump administration cited only five fatal crashes last year that were caused by noncitizens with commercial driver’s licenses, out of more than 4,000 deaths involving CDL drivers nationwide. The letter said that the Trump administration’s rule presented “no facts” to support the claim that revoking thousands of licenses would “benefit public safety.”
Public interest lawyers have also filed a legal challenge to the rule. The challenge is pending.
“The notion that immigrant drivers are less safe than other drivers is not supported by the facts,” said Wendy Liu, one of the lawyers who filed the challenge.
The same week that Trump’s rule was enacted, Collins doubled down on his calls to restrict commercial licenses for noncitizens, writing in an Instagram post that “this isn’t some game. Lives are at stake. Deport these thugs now.”
The post A U.S. Senate Candidate Says Foreign Truckers Are Making America’s Roads Unsafe. His Own Truckers Have Caused Harm. appeared first on ProPublica.
Why Should Delaware Care?
Government works best when its citizens are knowledgeable and engaged. Delaware’s government has scores of commissions, working groups, agencies and legislative committees. All must hold meetings that are open to the public. Below we highlight a few of those meetings that are happening this week.
Below you will find information about the most important or interesting public meetings happening in Delaware this week.
Get ready for a busy week in Dover.
Delaware lawmakers are set to hold hearings on nearly 50 bills this week, kicking off an eight-week sprint toward the end of the legislative session.
The bills closest to becoming law have already cleared their legislative committees and are now awaiting votes before the full House or Senate.
In the House, lawmakers are expected to consider two pieces of electricity-related legislation, including one that would remove a cap on utilities’ purchases of electricity generated by household solar systems and another that would lay the groundwork for expanded electric vehicle tax credits.
Also on the House agenda is a bill that would lower Delaware’s legal bartending age from 21 to 18.
Among the bills before the full Senate is one that would increase fees paid by hundreds of thousands of companies registered in the state – a measure in line with Gov. Matt Meyer’s proposed budget.
Another measure related to Delaware government revenue also is before the Senate – and it is one that could rekindle tensions between the governor and lawmakers.
Delaware House Majority Leader Kerri Evelyn-Harris (D-Dover) introduced House Bill 370 in early April to enshrine into law the existence of the state’s longstanding budget forecasting committee – known by its acronym DEFAC.
Following its introduction, supporters in the House Republican caucus argued the legislation became necessary after actions by Meyer “raised questions about its (DEFAC’s) future.”
The GOP statement noted that the bill followed Meyer’s firing of a longtime budget forecaster after he had criticized the governor’s administration over transparency surrounding the state’s prominent corporate franchise.
WHYY later reported that certain lawmakers said disagreements existed on the bill between the Meyer administration and legislative leadership, but that the Senate’s top member said a discussion between the parties had been productive.
Two weeks ago, the House of Representatives passed an amended version of the bill with no opposition.
📍 The full Senate will meet to consider the DEFAC bill and others at 2 p.m. Tuesday at Legislative Hall, located at 411 Legislative Ave. in Dover. For more details, click here. For information about watching online, click here.
The full House will also meet at 2 p.m. Tuesday at Legislative Hall. For more details, click here. For information about watching online, click here.
Lawmakers will also hear dozens of additional bills in front of legislative committees this week, including proposals that would:
Delaware residents can attend committee hearings in person or participate virtually through the General Assembly’s online meeting system. To view details of all hearings, scroll through the “What’s Happening” box here.
Also happening in Dover this week will be the annual “State of the City” address given by Mayor Robin Christiansen. The speech will occur during the city’s annual meeting, which also will feature the city council’s vote for a new council president.
Christiansen, who has come under fire in recent weeks for a prolonged, unexplained absence from city duties, will give his annual reflection on the landscape of the city, and what he hopes to accomplish going into his 13th year as mayor.
This past year has been tumultuous for the city. Its police chief faced calls to resign, the city council spent months debating a failed panhandling ordinance, and City Manager Dave Hugg was fired.
Most recently, the capital city revealed it is facing a $7 million budget shortfall heading into the next fiscal year, and will be forced to choose between dipping into its budget balance from previous years, or raising taxes on residents.
📍The Dover City Council is scheduled to meet at 6:30 on Monday inside the Dover City Hall council chambers, located at 15 Loockerman Plaza in Dover. For more details, including information about virtual attendance, click here.
Last summer, former-Delaware House Speaker Valerie Longhurst quietly resigned from the Police Athletic League of Delaware, just as the publicly-funded nonprofit was facing a financial crisis.
In the weeks and months that followed, officials revealed that New Castle County police officers took over management of the cash-strapped organization, even as it faced a criminal investigation and an audit that could force it to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars it likely did not have.
On Tuesday, the New Castle County Council will receive an update about the county’s oversight of the Police Athletic League, and its plans for the future. The update will occur during the council’s regular meeting of its public safety committee.
The PAL of Delaware, as it’s known, operates athletic, arts and academic programs for children throughout the year. It does so at community center locations in Hockessin, Delaware City and suburban New Castle – settings that put children in contact with law enforcement.
The nonprofit also has been an integral piece of Delaware’s political landscape, with elected officials regularly making public appearances at its locations.
And, up until recently, it also was one of several prominent Delaware organizations led by a state lawmaker.
📍 The New Castle County Council Public Safety Committee will meet at 4 p.m. Tuesday at the Louis L. Redding City County Building, located at 800 N. French St. in Wilmington. For more information, including about virtual attendance, click here.
The post Get Involved: Lawmakers to vote on dozens of bills; Dover to hear its state of the city appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Why Should Delaware Care?
Wilmington’s charter requires at no more than three candidates be nominated for the city’s four at-large seats. In the liberal city, the rule ensures that one person on the elected body will not be a Democrat. Last fall, the council’s lone Republican became a Democrat, sparking questions of whether the policy goal has been undone.
A majority of Wilmington City Council members voted Thursday to oust their colleague, Councilman James Spadola, but their decision will not immediately remove him from the elected seat.
Just hours before the vote, a Delaware judge ruled that any such council action would be paused until a lawsuit Spadola brought against Council President Trippi Congo and the broader council could be adjudicated.
The court will ultimately decide whether the City Council has the power to remove him.
It all amounts to the latest chapter of a monthslong feud between Spadola and his colleagues, stemming from his decision last fall to change party affiliation from Republican to Democrat.
Currently, Wilmington’s charter prohibits a majority party – currently Democrats – from nominating more than three candidates for the city’s four at-large seats on the council.
The rule effectively guarantees the election of at least one minority party candidate. But the charter does not explicitly prohibit council members from changing party affiliation while in office.
Since Spadola made the switch, several members of the all-Democratic City Council said he had exploited a “loophole” in the city’s charter and disenfranchized the residents who voted him in.
Another council member noted that Spadola and Congo may each have plans to run for higher office.
As part of a council backlash against the party change, Congo sent a letter to Spadola in February, stating his seat would be declared vacant if he did not switch back to the Republican Party.
Then, last month, the City Council approved a resolution asking Delaware’s legislature to prevent any future minority-party at-large member from switching parties mid-term. If they did, they would forfeit their seat.
For his part, Spadola has said his colleagues on the council have misinterpreted the city’s charter.
In his lawsuit filed Monday, Spadola’s attorney upped the rhetoric, calling the council’s likely decision to oust him an “extreme and reactionary path.” He said the move would infringe on Spadola’s own rights and on those of Wilmington voters.
“The sole impetus for the Council’s action is merely that Mr. Spadola has switched political parties from Republican to Democrat in an exercise of his First Amendment,” the legal complaint stated.
Spadola’s attorney in the case is William Larson with the Wilmington-based law firm, MG+M.
Representing the City Council is Jane Brady, who has served in a variety of public capacities in past decades, including chair for the Delaware Republican party, a Superior Court judge, and Delaware attorney general.
As of Friday, Brady had not yet responded to Spadola’s central claims because the immediate issue was whether the council’s decision to oust him should be paused pending the lawsuit’s outcome.
Still, even in those arguments, Brady emphasized the City Council’s stance that Spadola’s party switch “disenfranchised” voters who chose him on the ballot.
The case is expected to be resolved between June and July, Spadola and Congo have each said.
Several council members, including Congo, declined to comment for this story, citing the pending lawsuit.
Congo, who introduced the resolution to vacate Spadola’s seat, has previously noted that the City Council sought legal advice from the city’s law department on the matter, but said they were misled.
Last fall, City Council Chief of Staff Elijah Simmons said Spadola would be able to finish his term, which ends in 2028.
He stated the city’s charter contained “no written prohibitions against party affiliation changes while in office.”
The City Council resolution that passed Thursday states that the intent of the city’s charter is to ensure representation for minority parties.
The resolution also states that Spadola was elected over other candidates because of his party affiliation, and claimed that his choice to become a Democrat has “disenfranchise[d] approximately 15% of non-majority voters.”
During the meeting Thursday, Congo announced that a Delaware Chancery Court judge presiding over Spadola’s lawsuit would allow the City Council to vote on the resolution but that it would be “stayed,” or paused, until the case is resolved.
Spadola was the only council member to make comment about the resolution before the vote. He noted that during a court hearing earlier in the day the judge — Chancellor Kathaleen St. J. McCormick — was surprised the council would hold a vote before getting the court’s opinion first.
Spadola also asserted that the council moving forward with the resolution amounted simply to a “show vote.”
“I joined the Democratic Party because it is a big tent party, and despite the lack of inclusiveness that this council may be showing me, I have full faith the rule of law will prevail,” Spadola said during the meeting.
After his comments, eight members of council voted in favor of the resolution, including Councilmembers Alexander Hackett, Coby Owens, Shane Darby, Zanthia Oliver, Christian Willauer, Yolanda McCoy, Chris Johnson, and Congo.
Councilmembers Latisha Bracy and Nathan Field voted “present.” Councilmembers Michelle Harlee and Maria Cabrera were absent.
Spadola was the sole vote against the resolution.
The post Wilmington City Council votes to vacate Spadola’s seat but court pauses removal appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Exclusive: Human rights group warns of ‘deep collusion’ between criminals and officials in some parts of country
State actors are involved in disappearances in Mexico at an “alarming” rate, according to a report from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
The sweeping investigation, to which the Guardian was given exclusive access, presents a dire picture of the crisis of disappearances in Mexico, where more than 130,000 people have gone missing, mostly in the last 20 years since the government declared its war on drug cartels.
Continue reading...Average cost of one ticket claimed to be $3,000 (£2,200)
Fifa insists terms and conditions of sale were made clear
Numerous Football Associations have been hit by increased prices when buying World Cup tickets for their players’ family and friends, with teams competing at the tournament affected by Fifa’s dynamic pricing model. While Fifa offered all national associations that have qualified for the World Cup a six-week window to buy tickets at a fixed price after the draw in December, any requests for tickets from the end of January have been subject to what Fifa describes as “adaptive pricing”, with the cost rising for most matches.
An executive at one national association said they had requested hundreds of additional tickets in recent weeks and have been surprised at the size of the bill. An executive at another association claimed the average cost of securing attendance at matches for their players’ family and their guests has risen to about $3,000 (£2,200) a ticket after extra purchases, a significant additional cost that will eat into their tournament funding. Fifa sources insisted the average cost of tickets bought by national associations is far lower than $3,000.
Continue reading...Big news from the Debian release team: Debian is going for reproducible package builds.
Aided by the efforts of the Reproducible Builds project, we’ve decided it’s time to say that Debian must ship reproducible packages. Since yesterday, we have enabled our migration software to block migration of new packages that can’t be reproduced or existing packages (in testing) that regress in reproducibility.
↫ Paul Gevers
Reproducible means, in short, that you can verify that the source code used to build a package is indeed that source code. This provides a layer of defense against people tampering with code or otherwise trying to fiddle with the process between source code and final package on your system. This effort constitutes a tremendous amount of work, but it’s massively important.
Toon Kelder artwork from famed Goudstikker collection resurfaces with descendants of Hendrik Seyffardt
An artwork looted by the Nazis from the renowned Goudstikker collection has resurfaced in the home of descendants of a notorious Dutch SS collaborator, according to an art detective.
Portrait of a Young Girl, by the Dutch artist Toon Kelder, is believed to have hung for decades in the home of Hendrik Seyffardt’s family, Arthur Brand said, describing it as “the most bizarre case of my entire career”.
Continue reading...Holding no illusions about making lasting deals at this week’s summit, China’s leader looks to project Beijing as an alternative to U.S. volatility on the world stage.
More than a decade ago, a federal court found that the New York City Police Department had been unconstitutionally stopping and frisking Black and Hispanic residents. The ruling laid out required fixes, including something quite basic: The NYPD would review officers’ stops to make sure they were legal.
But for most of the past three years the nation’s largest police department failed to do that for a key part of an aggressive and politically connected unit as it stopped New Yorkers.
The lack of court-required review was recently discovered and disclosed by the NYPD’s federal monitor, which oversees the department’s compliance with the 2013 stop-and-frisk decision.
In all, more than 2,000 stops weren’t properly reviewed, according to data from the monitor.
The failure involved the Community Response Team, or CRT. A ProPublica investigation last year found that the unit had often sidestepped oversight as it went after so-called quality-of-life issues, such as unlicensed motorbikes and ATVs. The team’s tactics, including high-speed car chases, and its opaque operations disturbed some NYPD officials, but the unit expanded significantly amid the support of then-Mayor Eric Adams.
The lack of reviews is part of a pattern of the NYPD failing to deliver on its obligations under the long-standing court order. Officers across the department, for instance, have often not documented stops.
The importance of reviews is particularly critical for aggressive teams like the CRT, which has a record of unconstitutional stops. It has also drawn hundreds of civilian complaints since it was created three years ago. More than half of the officers assigned to the team have been found by the Civilian Complaint Review Board to have engaged in misconduct at least once in their career, according to a ProPublica analysis of board data last year. That compares with just a small fraction of NYPD officers overall.
Prior to its latest discovery, the federal monitor had raised alarms about the unit’s behavior. A report last year said that only 59% of stops, searches and frisks by CRT officers were lawful, a far worse rate than the NYPD’s patrol units. Nearly all of the stops involved Black or Hispanic residents.
In a letter to the court, the federal monitor said the newly discovered failure means the monitor’s own figures on the CRT’s rate of compliance with the Constitution is probably wrong. The actual rate, the monitor wrote, is “likely lower” than reported.
The court-appointed monitor, Mylan Denerstein, lambasted the NYPD and its failure to review the stops.
“The failure to audit these stops means unconstitutional stops, frisks and searches went undetected,” Denerstein said in a statement to ProPublica. “This is unacceptable. The City must do more and prevent this from happening.”
In a statement to ProPublica, the NYPD said it moved to fix the issues: “Under Commissioner (Jessica) Tisch the NYPD has taken significant additional steps to increase oversight and accountability. The Monitor and the NYPD identified this error, and the NYPD is working collaboratively with the Monitor to address it.”
For the first two and a half years after the unit was created in 2023, the failure to properly review stops affected just part of the unit, which was led by top brass.
But last fall, the issue became more widespread after the NYPD restructured the CRT to put officers stationed across the city under a central command. The move was intended to increase oversight of the team, which had new commanders. But in the process, stops for the entire unit, which had grown to about 180 officers, went unaudited.
One of the unit’s former commanders, John Chell, defended its record.
“This team really changed the game,” said Chell, who retired as the department’s top uniformed officer last year. “Did we make mistakes? Sure. But we stabilized the city. We did our job.”
Lawmakers and civil rights advocates, however, have long criticized the CRT’s aggressive policing and said the latest reporting failure underscores a need to disband the unit.
“The Community Response Team has operated with too little oversight and caused too much harm,” said state Sen. Jessica Ramos, who has recalled being wrongfully stopped and frisked by the NYPD more than a decade ago. “A unit with this record should not continue.”
Lawyers at the New York Civil Liberties Union, one of the original litigants in the stop-and-frisk case, also called for the CRT to be shuttered.
“These units have a long history of aggressive policing against people of color. There is no basis for them,” said Daniel Lambright, the organization’s director of criminal justice litigation. “They do more harm than good and they need to go.”
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who took office in January and pledged during his campaign to reimagine public safety, has endorsed shuttering another unit that has drawn scrutiny for its heavy-handed approach to protests, but his office declined to address the rising calls to disband the CRT.
“We’re aware of issues raised about the Community Response Team, as well as the steps the NYPD has taken to address them,” a mayoral spokesperson said in a statement to ProPublica. “The Mamdani administration is committed to improving public safety in a way that meets the needs and values of New Yorkers.”
When it started three years ago, the CRT focused on Adams’ shifting priorities, such as cracking down on illegal motorcycles. The unit roamed the city proactively looking for crime rather than waiting for calls, the same approach once used by one of the NYPD’s most notorious units.
The CRT quickly developed a reputation for brutality. Just months after the unit started, one officer in an unmarked police car spotted a man on a dirtbike and swerved across a yellow line into oncoming traffic, hitting the motorcyclist head-on and sending him flying. The man later died from his injuries. The NYPD said that it punished the officer by taking 13 days of vacation from him.
Department leaders told ProPublica that even they had a hard time overseeing the unit’s work because it was essentially created off the books — a setup that ultimately led to the dropped reviews of stops. Officers who were part of the unit were often not formally assigned to it, meaning their conduct wasn’t properly tracked.
“It was one of those teams where everyone is a ghost,” one former department official told ProPublica last year.
That approach extended to stop-and-frisk.
When the monitor learned about the CRT in the unit’s early days, the NYPD assured the monitor that it would not do many stops. Only later, the monitor noted in a report last year, it discovered the team was “frequently” doing them.
In 2025, the CRT recorded 1,400 stop-and-frisks, according to data from the monitor and the NYPD. More than 900 were not properly reviewed.
The post Despite Court Order, NYPD Failed to Properly Monitor Stop-and-Frisks by Aggressive Unit appeared first on ProPublica.
ymawky is a small, static http web server written entirely in aarch64 assembly for macos. it uses raw darwin syscalls with no libc wrappers, serves static files, supports
GET,HEAD,PUT,OPTIONS,DELETE, byte ranges, directory listing, custom error pages, and tries to be as hardened as possible.why? why not? the dream of the 80s is alive in ymawky. everybody has nginx. having apache makes you a square. so why not strip every single convenience layer that computer science has given us since 1957? i wanted to understand how a web server actually works, something i know little about coming from a low-level/systems background. the risks that come up, the problems that need to be solved, the things you don’t think about when you’re writing python or c.
this (probably) won’t replace nginx, but it is doing something in the most difficult way possible.
↫ Tony “imtomt”
I love this.
Ada is incredibly well designed. One way this shows is that it takes the big, monolithic features of other languages and breaks them down into their constituent parts, so we can choose which portions of those features we want. The example I often reach for to explain this is object-oriented programming.
↫ Christoffer Stjernlöf
Exactly what it says on the tin.
Brent crude rises after US president calls overture from Tehran ‘totally unacceptable’
Oil prices have climbed after Donald Trump condemned Iran’s response to US proposals to end the war as “totally unacceptable”.
The president’s rejection of Tehran’s overture in a post on his Truth Social platform triggered a jump in Brent crude, the international benchmark for oil prices, by as much as 4% on Monday to $105.50 a barrel, before easing back to settle at $103.50.
Continue reading...Temperatures soar in California and Arizona, while deluge continues across Western and Northern Cape
Heat is expected to intensify across western parts of the US and Mexico this week as a ridge of high pressure pushes temperatures well above the seasonal norm. Daytime highs are forecast to reach 10-15C above average in some areas.
The US National Weather Service has issued heat advisories for parts of California and Arizona, with extreme heat warnings in force on Monday and Tuesday in places such as Palm Springs, where temperatures could reach 40-43C (104-110F). More broadly, temperatures are expected to climb into the high 30s celsius before the heat shifts eastwards towards the midwest later this week.
Continue reading...President Trump didn't provide details on the issues he had with the response or what would come next.
 | had to put my dog down this week. that’s the ramp she used to get up onto the couch. [link] [comments] |
Twenty-two people from MV Hondius cruise spend first day isolating in self-contained flats in Merseyside
Passengers evacuated to the UK from a cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak are spending their first day at an isolation facility after being repatriated from Tenerife.
A chartered Titan Airways flight transported the MV Hondius passengers from the Canary Islands to Manchester airport on Sunday evening. The evacuation of passengers of all nationalities will be completed on Monday, with flights arriving from Australia and the Netherlands, Spain’s health minister has said.
Continue reading...It's time to crown the ISP you love and trust. Here's how.
Warsh would succeed outgoing Fed chair Jerome Powell as Trump continues his push to influence the US central bank
The US Senate is expected to confirm Kevin Warsh this week as chair of the Federal Reserve, as Donald Trump continues his campaign to influence the world’s most important central bank.
The Fed’s influence over the economy spans from the job market to mortgage rates, and its every move is carefully scrutinized by investors on Wall Street. Warsh’s confirmation comes at a turbulent time for the central bank, which has fallen under intense scrutiny from Trump for not lowering interest rates.
Continue reading...Ford's sales of electrified vehicles — including hybrids and all-electric models — dropped 31% from April 2025, reports Electrek. "Hybrid sales fell 32% to 15,758 vehicles, while EV sales continued to crash with just 3,655 all-electric models sold last month, 25% fewer than in the year prior." After discontinuing the F-150 Lightning in December, sales of the electric pickup have been in free fall. Ford sold just 884 Lightnings last month, 49% less than it did last April. The Mustang Mach-E isn't doing much better. Sales fell another 9% year over year in April, to just 2,670 models last month. Through the first four months of 2026, Ford's EV sales have fallen 61% from last year, with F-150 Lightning and Mustang Mach-E sales down 67% and 50%, respectively. Ford has sold just over 10,500 electric vehicles in total so far this year... For comparison, Toyota sold just over 10,000 bZ models in the first quarter alone. That's more than Ford's total EV sales in Q1. April was Ford's fourth straight month of lower sales figures from 2025, the article points out. So Ford is bringing back "employee pricing" discounts on most new 2025 and 2026 Ford and Lincoln vehicles., while also offering "purchase incentives" of up to $9,000 for 2025 Lightning models and up to $6,000 for 2025 Mustang Mach-Es. "It's also offering EV buyers a free Level 2 home charger, 24/7 live support, and proactive roadside assistance through its Power Promise program."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The grand music halls and theatres of the 1920s gave way to the era of the moving image, prompting the acquisition and conversion of lavish cinemas across the US – many of which became enduring cultural landmarks. From the rise of television in the 1950s to today’s streaming platforms and smartphone screens, media consumption has become individualised. As a result, many of these once-grand movie theatres have been abandoned, repurposed or left suspended as hybrid ruins. Photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have documented these early 20th-century relics and the haunting beauty of their decline
Exhibited at Kyotographie 2026 in Japan until 17 May
The Trump–Xi summit: can progress be made on Iran? Expert comment jon.wallace
President Trump should not concede much on issues like Taiwan. But both powers have an interest in opening the Strait of Hormuz and making progress on AI safety.
For Beijing, President Donald Trump is the gift that keeps on giving. His decisions have handed China’s leadership advantages of which it cannot have dreamed before he arrived in the Oval Office for the second time.
Trump has cancelled the Biden-era subsidies for clean technology, allowing China to extend its lead. He has slapped tariffs on allies including Vietnam and India, driving them towards Beijing. He has called NATO into question and sided with Russia in its aims over Ukraine. And now he has tied up the US military and his own attention in a war with Iran which he cannot easily end.
That comes after a year in which China demonstrated its rising power. In October, President Trump was forced to back down on tariffs, after Beijing threatened to withhold critical minerals. In March, Xi’s government published its latest five-year plan, showing how it intends to reap the fruits of its strategy of becoming the world’s dominant advanced manufacturer. Meanwhile China continued to rapidly develop a lead across much of the waterfront of technology, with the exception of the most advanced AI.
When Trump meets President Xi Jinping this week in Beijing, therefore, one question is whether the encounter will confirm a further rebalancing between the two superpowers – in China’s favour.
Trump’s allies, at home and abroad, are afraid that the president will make long term strategic concessions for a handful of soybean, sorghum and Boeing jet sales – seeking short-term ‘wins’ ahead of the midterm elections in November.
He should resist that impulse. Hugely important issues for world stability are at hand, and there are vital US interests that he should pursue.
Tension between China and Japan is rising, becoming an even more likely flashpoint than Taiwan, which Beijing considers Chinese territory. China’s assertiveness in the East China Sea and South China Sea worries other neighbours, including the Philippines and South Korea, with the latter openly debating whether to acquire nuclear weapons.
China is also asserting that it is a ‘near-Arctic nation’, a triumph of language over geography which signals its ambitions for both a mining and military presence in that opening maritime region. In space, China’s ability to block or destroy other countries’ satellites is growing.
Most immediate, though, is the conflict in Iran. The world needs a solution, and China has influence over Tehran that it has so far chosen not to use.
Trump should also make cooperation on AI a priority: both Washington and Beijing increasingly recognize the threats emerging from the technology, as well as its transformational opportunities.
US discomfort over its relative loss of power to China, notably in manufacturing, has been rising for decades. The US has never had a rival like China: its economy size, technological ability, military capacity and ideology make it far more formidable than the USSR ever was.
Alarm at Beijing’s growing challenge to US dominance is one of the forces that brought Trump to the presidency – twice. And China’s position as the greatest threat to the US is one of very few issues on which Republicans and Democrats can still agree.
Europeans and other US allies have tended to see that Washington consensus as excessively belligerent – or they did until they began to realize the existential challenge that China’s export policy poses to their own manufacturing industries.
Trump’s position has been something of an anomaly. The president is more doveish on China than almost all his administration. Many were disconcerted that he agreed to let Nvidia, whose chips underpin the US’s slender lead in AI, sell its H200 chips (only one generation behind the premier Blackwell chips) to China. He has frequently talked of his ‘friendship’ with Xi. That has led to fears that in search of election-year gains he might, for example, change US language on Taiwan from saying it ‘does not support’ independence to a statement that it opposes it.
Enough voices are warning against that outcome that it may deter the president. But for all the intense preparation for the trip, delayed because of the Iran conflict, there has been a lack of clarity on the US side about this meeting’s goals – partly because both the standoff in the Strait of Hormuz and the state of AI have been developing so fast.
On Iran, Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat, has called for the Strait of Hormuz to be opened ‘as soon as possible’ in talks with his Iranian counterpart. Asian countries including China have been among the most affected by the interruption caused to supplies of oil, gas, fertiliser and helium (needed for semiconductors, healthcare and pharmaceuticals). China has some leverage with Iran but will want something from the US in return, if it is to use it.
Members' summer drinks 2 June 2026 — 18:00 TO 20:00 BST Anonymous (not verified) Chatham House
Join us for the Chatham House members’ summer drinks reception.
Join us for the Chatham House members’ summer drinks reception.
Chatham House members are invited to join us at 10 St James’s Square for drinks and a chance to meet with fellow members, council members and our staff.
FoI responses collected by insurer show brigades tackled 1,760 battery-linked fires in 2025, up 147% in three years
Fire brigades across the UK are tackling lithium-ion battery fires at a rate of one every five hours, figures show, as fire chiefs warn that public awareness and government regulation have not kept pace with the ubiquity of this new hazard.
Lithium-ion batteries power most rechargeable devices including mobile phones, electric toothbrushes, toys and vapes, as well as ebikes, e-scooters and electric vehicles.
Continue reading...Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for May 11.
How the war created a new geopolitical divide.
How the summit could change the course of U.S.-China competition.
The ADL said in a statement that it "deeply mourns the loss of our longtime national director," without providing details about where and when Foxman died.
The free/open source project OrcaSlicer is a popular fork of 3D printer slicing software from Bambu Lab. But Tuesday independent developer Pawel Jarczak shuttered the project "following legal threats from Bambu Lab," reports Tom's Hardware: Jarczak's fork of OrcaSlicer would have allowed users to bypass Bambu Connect, a middleware application that severely limits OrcaSlicer's access to remote printer functions in the name of security. Jarczak said in a note on GitHub that Bambu Lab threatened him with a cease and desist letter and accused him of reverse engineering its software in order to impersonate Bambu Studio. From Bambu Lab's blog post: Bambu Studio is an open-source project under the AGPL-3.0 license. Anyone can take its code, modify it, and distribute it... That's what OrcaSlicer does, and 734 other forks do as well. We have no issue with that and never have. At the same time, a license for code is not a pass to our cloud infrastructure... Our cloud is a private service. Access to it is governed by a user agreement, not the AGPL license... [T]he modification in question worked by injecting falsified identity metadata into network communication. In simple terms: it pretended to be the official Bambu Studio client when communicating with our servers... If this method were widely adopted or incorrectly configured, thousands of clients could simultaneously hit our servers while impersonating the official client. "User-Agent is not authentication," counters OrcaSlicer's developer. "It is only self-declared client metadata. Any program can set any User-Agent." And "the User-Agent construction comes directly from Bambu Lab's own public AGPL Bambu Studio code.... So on what basis can anyone claim that I am not allowed to use this specific part of AGPL-licensed code under the AGPL license...? My work was based on publicly available Bambu Studio source code together with my own integration layer." But the bottom line is that Bambu Lab "contacted me directly and demanded removal of the solution." I asked whether I could publish the private correspondence in full for transparency. That request was refused... They also referred to legal materials and stated that a cease and desist letter had been prepared... I removed the repository voluntarily. That removal should not be interpreted as an admission that all legal or technical allegations made against the project were correct. I removed it because I have no interest in maintaining a prolonged dispute around this particular implementation, and no interest in continuing to distribute it. YouTuber and right-to-repair advocate Louis Rossmann reviewed the correspondence from Bambu Lab — then pledged $10,000 for legal expenses if the developer returned his code online. ("I think that their legal claim is bullshit," Rossman said Saturday in a YouTube video for his 2.5 million subscribers. "I'm not a lawyer, but I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is.") The video now has over 129,000 views so far. "Rossman has not started a crowdfunding site yet," Tom's Hardware notes, "stating in the comments that he wants to prove to Jarczak that he has supporters willing to put their money where their mouth is. The video had over 129,000 views so far, with commenters vowing to back the case as requested."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Seventeen passengers to be taken to a Nebraska quarantine center to be assessed, with one testing positive and another showing symptoms
The 17 Americans onboard the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship M/V Hondius – including one person who has tested positive – have disembarked the vessel after it docked in Tenerife on Sunday and are being repatriated to the US.
Upon their arrival in Spain, medical teams from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) awaited and interviewed the passengers, whose identities have not been publicly disclosed and who have not tested positive for the virus, about their exposure on the cruise.
Continue reading...Frenchman ejected for first time in his NBA career
Minnesota level series 2-2 after Sunday’s 114-109 win
Victor Wembanyama was ejected for the first time in his NBA career after an elbow to the jaw and neck of Naz Reid as the Minnesota Timberwolves beat the San Antonio Spurs to level their playoff series at two games apiece.
Wembanyama was whistled for an offensive foul as soon as he struck Reid, who had swarmed the Spurs star outside the paint along with teammate Jaden McDaniels after the 7ft 4in Wembanyama rebounded a missed three-pointer by the Spurs.
Continue reading...In Polymarket's prediction market, "most people end up losing money," reports the Washington Post — typically a few bucks. "Since Polymarket launched in 2022, a few thousand people have lost the bulk of the money... and an even smaller group — .05 percent of users — has gone home with most of the overall profits, according to a new analysis from finance researcher Pat Akey and colleagues." A lot of users aren't that good at predicting the future. They're losing money at roughly the same rate as online gamblers betting on sports and other real-life events at traditional sportsbooks, according to the U.K. gambling regulator's analysis of 2024 data. On Polymarket, the odds of making a profit are slightly higher on weather and tech markets — and a little lower on sports... On Polymarket, just 1,200 people took more than half the profits — $591 million, or more than $100,000 each. ["The top 1% of users capture 76.5% of all trading gains," the researchers write.] When you dabble in prediction markets, you're competing against these sophisticated players who consistently win. Most of those 1,200 big winners didn't place just a few smart bets. They appear to be pros making thousands of trades, mostly in the past year and a half, that were probably automated. One user made $3 million since January on more than a million trades about the Oscars, according to TRM Labs... The most profitable participants are also just good at picking what to bet on, Akey found, winning so often it was statistically unlikely to be dumb luck. They had some sort of edge — expertise, deep research or, perhaps, inside knowledge. "Our results suggest that the informational benefits of prediction markets come at a cost to unsophisticated participants," the researchers conclude.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Taiwan, one of the world's biggest diplomatic flashpoints, will be top of mind for President Xi when he meets with President Trump.
Struggling between Onewheel and an EUC for my first eletric toy.
I know this is a one wheel subreddit so the answers will be biased but could you give me some reasons why you think a one wheel is a better choice than ECU.
Overall it looks like my dollar goes further with an EUC (faster, longer range, etc).
Actor and comedian speaks publicly for the first time since his 42-year-old daughter died by suicide in February
Martin Short has spoken for the first time about the death of his daughter, Katherine Short, saying her death has been “a nightmare for the family”.
Katherine died in February aged 42, at her home in the Hollywood Hills. The County of Los Angeles Medical Examiner’s office confirmed she died by suicide.
In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
Continue reading...Open-source PS3 emulator RPCS3 "has been around since 2011," Kotaku notes, and has made 70% of the PlayStation 3's library fully playable, "bolstered in part by the many users who contribute to its GitHub page." But their dev team "took to X today to very kindly and civilly request that users 'stop submitting AI slop code pull requests' to its GitHub page." Then they immediately proceeded to tell the AI-brain-rotted tech bros attempting to justify their vibe-coding nonsense to kick rocks in the replies, which is somewhat less civil but far more entertaining to read... My favorite one was when someone asked how the team was certain they weren't rejecting human-written code, to which RPCS3 replied: "You can't possibly handwrite the type of shit AI slop we have been seeing."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for May 11, No. 1,787.
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle No. 1,065 for Monday, May 11.
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for May 11, No. 799.
The sailboat used by Brian and Lynette Hooker in their travels around the Bahamas — named "Soulmate" — has been seized by U.S. Coast Guard investigators.
It’s been nearly a quarter of a century since the city had a WNBA team, and fans showed their support by turning out in record numbers.
Iran says it has responded to US peace proposal as ceasefire comes under strain and Israeli prime minister says war is ‘not over’
Benjamin Netanyahu has said the war with Iran will continue as long as the country has a stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU), which could be used to make nuclear warheads.
“It’s not over, because there’s still nuclear material – enriched uranium – that has to be taken out of Iran. There are still enrichment sites that have to be dismantled,” the Israeli prime minister told the CBS programme 60 Minutes, according to an excerpt published before its broadcast.
Continue reading...Sculpt OS, the operating system based on the various components that make up Genode, has seen a new release, 26.04. A lot of the new features and changes to Genode that we’ve been talking about for a while now are part of this release, most notably the new human-inclined data syntax that replaces XML as the configuration language for Genode. That’s not the only major improvement, though.
Regarding technical advances of the new version and device support in particular, all Linux-based drivers have been updated to kernel version 6.18, making the system compatible with most modern Intel-PC hardware. Laptop users may appreciate the new USB networking option that is now offered by default.
Software-wise, the new version comes with a longed-after update of Qt6 along with the Chromium-based Falkon browser, downloadable at the depot of cproc. In the same menu, one can find the experimental first version of the Goa SDK running natively on Sculpt OS without the need of a Linux VM. For the first time, Genode components can now be developed, compiled, and tested using Sculpt OS on its own. The amazement of walking without crutches.
↫ Sculpt OS 26.04 release notes
This new release is available for common PC hardware, the PinePhone, and the MNT Reform.
Sprite scaling. It is the coolest effect of the 2D arcade era, a must-have for games from Space Harrier to Real Bout Fatal Fury Special. Home consoles pretty much lacked it– sorry, Nintendo, but Mode 7 only scales a background, not sprites. So therefore you might be surprised to hear that Sega’s plucky underdog Master System could do it. Well, don’t get your hopes up; this is far too limited– calling it scaling is overstating things. But let’s dig in anyway!
↫ Nicole Branagan
Nicole Branagan has the best articles on obscure console features, and this one is no exception.
Read the full transcript of Major Garrett's May 10, 2026 interview with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu here.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the conflicts in Iran and Lebanon, the prospects for a peace deal, and the relationship between the U.S. and Israel.
After seeing Gout Gout run, Di Sheppard knew he was the real deal and wanted to coach him. In the years since, the teen has broken world records.
Correspondent Jon Wertheim breaks down the data behind 18-year-old Australian phenomenon Gout Gout's U20 world record 200-meter sprint, comparing it to Usain Bolt's standing 2009 world record, and what his coach said it will take to win Olympic gold.
After the Supreme Court ruled a Louisiana congressional map unconstitutional, Gov. Jeff Landry suspended primaries, the state is redrawing its map, and some Black voters fear losing their voice in D.C.
Australian sprinter Gout Gout is breaking records, including one set by Usain Bolt. Track coach Di Sheppard first saw Gout run at age 12 and predicted: "I'm going to make that one a champion."
Knicks return to East finals after 4-0 series win
Team hit record 11 three-pointers in first quarter
Knicks fans dominate in 76ers’ home arena
The New York Knicks are back in the Eastern Conference finals, setting an NBA postseason record with 11 three-pointers in the first quarter in front of a raucous crowd mostly rooting for the road team in Philadelphia.
The Knicks’ 144-114 win on Sunday completed their series sweep of the 76ers. Deuce McBride hit seven of New York’s NBA postseason record-tying 25 three-pointers and scored 25 points. Jalen Brunson had 22 points and Josh Hart and Karl-Anthony Towns each scored 17 in the Knicks’ latest lopsided playoff victory.
Continue reading...An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek: A newly revealed Honda patent shows the company developing a simulated electronic clutch system for electric motorcycles, complete with torque-boost launches and even haptic feedback designed to mimic the feel of a combustion engine.... Instead of using a traditional mechanical clutch, the system uses electronics to alter how the motor responds based on clutch lever position. Pull the clutch halfway in, and the system proportionally reduces motor output. Pull it fully, and power is cut entirely, regardless of throttle position. But the more interesting part is how Honda intends to recreate the behavior riders actually use clutches for. According to the patent as reported by AMCN, riders could preload the throttle while holding in the clutch lever, then rapidly release the lever to trigger a burst of torque — essentially simulating the hard launches motocross riders rely on with gas bikes. Honda believes that could be useful in competitive riding situations where precise power modulation matters, especially on loose terrain or during aggressive starts. Honda also appears to be working on recreating the feel of a gas bike, not just the control inputs. The patent describes multiple vibration motors placed in the handlebars and near the clutch lever to provide haptic feedback that simulates engine vibration and even the "bite point" sensation of a clutch engaging. In other words, Honda may be trying to make an electric dirt bike feel mechanically alive, or at least the old-school idea of what a breathing dirt bike used to feel like.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
US president expresses ire at Tehran’s reported demands, as drones strike Gulf nations and Israel warns war ‘not over’
Donald Trump has rejected an Iranian response to a US peace proposal as “totally unacceptable”, on a day the month-old ceasefire showed signs of fraying as drone strikes were reported around the region and Benjamin Netanyahu warned the war was “not over”.
The Iranian counter-proposal was passed to Washington through Pakistani mediators.
Continue reading...Countries such as US and Mexico that have longer hours also have higher obesity rates, research finds
Those who work longer hours are more likely to be obese and cutting how much time you spend working could help you keep the weight off, research suggests.
International research presented at the European Congress on Obesity in Istanbul compared working patterns and obesity prevalence for 33 OECD countries from 1990 to 2022. The study found that countries such as the US, Mexico and Colombia, which have longer annual working hours, also had higher obesity rates, even though northern European countries consume more energy and fat on average than those in Latin America.
Continue reading...Major American cloud companies with data centers in the Persian Gulf "are channeling data out of the war zone through fiber-optic cables that an Iraqi telecom has strung alongside crude-oil pipelines," reports RestofWorld.org: The data centers serve customers in more than 190 countries, processing transactions, storing files, and running applications for businesses and individuals from Latin America to South Asia. When Iranian drones struck Amazon's facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on March 1, the effects spread across the region. Apps of major banks in the UAE, including Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, stopped working. Payment and delivery platforms went offline. Snowflake, a U.S. enterprise software company used by thousands of businesses globally, reported Middle East service disruptions tied directly to the Amazon Web Services outage. Amazon told its customers to migrate their workloads out of the Middle East... [Data from] banking, payment, and enterprise platforms normally travels to Europe through cables running under the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz, then connects onward to users across the world. The war has put those cables at risk. The overland route through Iraq is meant to serve as a backup if the sea cables are disabled. The overland route through Iraq is meant to serve as a backup if the sea cables are disabled... [Martin Frank, strategic adviser for IQ Networks, the company that built the network, told Rest of World this overland route is already carrying live traffic.] The company, based in Iraq's Kurdistan region, runs fiber from the southern tip of Iraq to the Turkish border. It is now extending the network through gas-pipeline corridors across Turkey to the European border, with the first link expected early next year, Frank said. When that extension is complete, cloud providers will — for the first time — have the option of an unbroken land-based fiber path from the Gulf into the European network, connecting onward to Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London, and Marseille, from where their data connects back to U.S. users. The advantage of this alternative route is that oil and gas pipelines come with their own security perimeters, access roads, and maintenance corridors already built around them, allowing a telecom company to lay fiber without digging new trenches through difficult terrain. Iraq avoided the fate of earlier overland routes that collapsed because of a sustained period of stability, and because existing pipeline infrastructure provided ready-made corridors for laying fiber, Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at network intelligence firm Kentik, told Rest of World... IQ Networks' route, called the Silk Route Transit, has been running since November 2023. The network currently carries enough data to stream about 400,000 high-definition videos simultaneously, Frank said. The land route is faster. Data traveling through submarine cables from the Gulf to Europe takes about 150 milliseconds. The Iraqi terrestrial route cuts that to roughly 70 milliseconds — a difference that matters for video calls, financial transactions, and applications that run on artificial intelligence, according to IQ Networks.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Chances of Starmer remaining in No 10 appear to be diminishing as about 40 Labour MPs call on him to quit
Keir Starmer faces a fight for his political life in the next 24 hours as potential Labour leadership rivals from Wes Streeting to Angela Rayner began to position themselves for a contest.
Starmer is hoping to save his job on Monday with a speech promising to “face up to the big challenges” for the country on growth, energy, defence and Europe.
Continue reading...Writing by Narges Mohammadi, arrested 14 times for activism, offers a disturbing insight into treatment
Read an exclusive excerpt here: ‘Blindfolded, I sat down slowly. Then the interrogation began’
In an exclusive extract of writing smuggled from prison in Iran, the Nobel peace prize laureate Narges Mohammadi has described the “torture” of solitary confinement, and her systematic medical neglect by the prison system.
The writing from the past decade will be part of a soon to be published memoir, A Woman Never Stops Fighting, that gives a rare and alarming insight into the treatment of Mohammadi, who is in critical condition. It details beatings, constant interrogations, deprivation of medical care and long stretches in solitary confinement during her numerous imprisonments.
Continue reading...1st Lt Kendrick Lamont Key Jr was participating in military exercise among US, Nato allies and African countries
A search team recovered the body of a US soldier who went missing near a cliff during a training exercise in Cap Draa, Morocco, the US army said on Sunday.
Moroccan searchers found the remains on Saturday in the water within a mile (1.6km) of where the soldier went missing on 2 May, the army said in a statement.
Continue reading...Britons among passengers and crew taken off vessel and put on flights to 10 countries as part of two-day operation
Dozens of passengers and crew from countries around the world have been evacuated from a cruise ship at the centre of a deadly hantavirus outbreak.
British people were among those taken off the ship as part of a two-day operation that began on Sunday in Tenerife. They were put on chartered flights back to the UK, where they will enter hospital quarantine in Merseyside. At about 9pm on Sunday, a plane carrying 22 UK citizens landed in Manchester, it was reported.
Continue reading...Was looking to get a good all-terrain electric skateboard for the beach, but I saw a lot of people recommending getting an onewheel. For all the onewheel beach riders, is there any model in particular that y'all recommend? I see the rally GT series - do I need to get one of those? Or will the base model work just fine? Thanks!
Ukraine president says Russian army is ‘not complying’ with the US-mediated truce and is ‘not even really trying to’
Russia has been conducting assault operations on the Ukrainian frontline in breach of a three-day ceasefire announced by US President Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday.
“The Russians are continuing assault activity in sectors key for them,” Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, said in his evening address. “On the frontline, the Russian army is not complying with the ceasefire and is not even really trying to.”
Continue reading...As the ADL’s national director for nearly 30 years, he battled antisemitism and other forms of prejudice, building the group into a powerful watchdog.
The Moroccan military recovered the body of one of two U.S. soldiers who went missing on May 2, the U.S. Army said.
Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona said the Trump administration's $1.5 trillion budget request for defense spending is "outrageous."
I’ve released Feature Preview 2. It’s mostly a more refined version of Preview 1, just getting closer to the final product: [ Refloat 1.3 feature preview 2
Cleanups across the board, the smoothing config options defaults are actually (IMO) good now and close to what they will end up being (focused a bit more on smoothness rather than responsiveness for casual users, racers are expected to tweak them a bit).
It’s also got a few new features for the Realtime Data plot and a rework of the remote move (remote wheel turning) for both physical remote and an app and a much better in-app remote tilt when riding.
This week Amazon opened up its parcel shipping, fulfillment, and distribution "to businesses of all types and sizes." Any business can now ship, store, and deliver "using the same supply chain that supports Amazon," according to Monday's announcement of "Amazon Supply Chain Services." The move sent shares of UPS and FedEx "tumbling" Monday writes GeekWire. And though both stocks bounced back as the week went on, GeekWire sees this as the latest example of Amazon "turning its internal capabilities into products and services for sale..." "Amazon had already surpassed both carriers to become the nation's largest parcel shipper by volume, according to parcel-analytics firm ShipMatrix." Initial customers include Procter & Gamble, which is using Amazon's freight network to transport raw materials; 3M, which is using it to move products to distribution centers; Lands' End, which is fulfilling orders across sales channels from Amazon's warehouses; and American Eagle Outfitters, which is using Amazon's parcel service for last-mile delivery. The service can fulfill orders placed through platforms that compete with Amazon's own marketplace, including Walmart, Shopify, TikTok, and others... Peter Larsen, vice president of Amazon Supply Chain Services, compared the launch to the origins of Amazon's cloud business... In addition to putting Amazon in competition with existing players in the logistics industry, the move also raises questions about data privacy. Amazon has faced accusations of using nonpublic seller data to compete against merchants on its marketplace, which it has denied. Larsen told the Wall Street Journal that the company prohibits using supply chain customer data for its own marketplace decisions, noting that hundreds of thousands of Amazon sellers already trust the company to fulfill orders placed on rival platforms. The article notes taht in his annual shareholder letter Amazon's CEO "said the company is also exploring selling its custom AI chips and robotics to outside customers."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Washington last picked No 1 overall in 2010
Wizards had worst record in the NBA this season
The league’s worst team this season are getting the No 1 pick in the NBA draft. The Washington Wizards won the draft lottery on Sunday and are poised to pick first overall for the first time since choosing John Wall in that spot in 2010. Wall was the Wizards’ on-stage representative for this year’s lottery.
Utah won the right to pick No 2, Memphis will pick No 3 and Chicago will pick No 4.
Continue reading...On this "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" broadcast, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Sen. Mark Kelly join Margaret Brennan.
"General Motors sold the data of California drivers without their knowledge or consent," says California's attorney general, "and despite numerous statements reassuring drivers that it would not do so." In 2024, The New York Times "reported that automakers including GM were sharing information about their customers' driving behavior with insurance companies," remembers TechCrunch, "and that some customers were concerned that their insurance rates had gone up as a result." Now General Motors "has reached a privacy-related settlement with a group of law enforcement agencies led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta..." The settlement announcement from Bonta's office similarly alleges that GM sold "the names, contact information, geolocation data, and driving behavior data of hundreds of thousands of Californians" to Verisk Analytics and LexisNexis Risk Solutions, which are both data brokers. Bonta's office further alleges that this data was collected through GM's OnStar program, and that the company made roughly $20 million from data sales. However, Bonta's office also said the data did not lead to increased insurance prices in California, "likely because under California's insurance laws, insurers are prohibited from using driving data to set insurance rates." As part of the settlement, GM has agreed to pay $12.75 million in civil penalties and to stop selling driving data to any consumer reporting agencies for five years, Bonta's office said. GM has also agreed to delete any driver data that it still retains within 180 days (unless it obtains consent from customers), and to request that Lexis and Verisk delete that data. "This trove of information included precise and personal location data that could identify the everyday habits and movements of Californians," according to the attorney general's announcement. The settlement "requires General Motors to abandon these illegal practices, and underscores the importance of the data minimization in California's privacy law — companies can't just hold on to data and use it later for another purpose." "Modern cars are rolling data collection machines," said San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins. "Californians must have confidence that they know what data is being collected, how it is being used, and what their opt-out rights are... This case sends a strong message that law enforcement will take action when California privacy laws are not scrupulously followed."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Péter Magyar strikes radically different tone to predecessor but questions remain about how he will lead the country
Moments after he was sworn in as Hungary’s prime minister, Péter Magyar apologised to those who had been maligned by the state during Viktor Orbán’s time in power as questions continue to swirl over what lies ahead for the country as it launches into a new era.
Magyar used his first speech as prime minister on Saturday to address the many in Hungary who had paid a personal price for speaking up about the steady erosion of rights under Orbán and his Fidesz party.
Continue reading...Safety board says it is gathering information about plane evacuation after person on the runway hit in Denver
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is collecting information about the evacuation of a Frontier Airlines aircraft after the jet struck and killed a person on the runway during departure from Denver international airport.
The flight, which was headed from Denver to Los Angeles international airport, “reported striking a pedestrian during takeoff at DEN at approximately 11:19 pm on Friday”, according to a statement posted on the airport’s official X account. The individual has not been publicly identified.
Continue reading...Russia and Ukraine accused each other of breaking a U.S.-brokered ceasefire on Sunday.
Party leader has been vocal about its gains in London and there is a feeling that its losses could have been worse
By any sane person’s reckoning, the Conservative party had a night to forget in Thursday’s local, mayoral and devolved elections. It lost about 500 councillors in England and ceded control of three local authorities to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK – losing to the rightwing upstarts in England, Wales and Scotland. Why, then, is Kemi Badenoch hailing these results as proof that “the Conservatives are coming back” – and why do many Tory MPs appear to agree with her?
The Conservative leader was vocal on Friday about the eye-catching gains her party made in politically atypical London, where the Tories won back the totemic council of Westminster, took the most seats in Wandsworth council and saw off the threat from Reform in Bexley and Bromley.
Continue reading...Soldiers dropped oxygen supplies and medical aid to Britain’s most remote overseas territory
Paratroopers landed on a “golf course covered in rocks” to supply medical personnel and oxygen to Britain’s most remote overseas territory as it deals with a suspected hantavirus case, an army commander has said.
The UK Health Security Agency confirmed on Friday that a British national had disembarked from the cruise ship MV Hondius to the South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha, where they live, with a suspected case of hantavirus.
Continue reading...The following is the transcript of the interview with Rep. Ted Lieu, Democrat of California, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on May 10, 2026.
The following is the transcript of the interview with former Save the Children President and CEO Janti Soeripto that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on May 10, 2026.
The following is the transcript of the interview with former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who is on boards the of Pfizer and UnitedHealthCare, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on May 10, 2026.
Catherine West issues ultimatum for PM as ex-minister Josh Simons joins calls for prime minister to quit
At the start of her programme Laura Kuenssberg addressed Catherine West and Bridget Phillipson who were sitting waiting for the main interviews.
Kuenssberg told West she wanted a cabinet minister to challenge Keir Starmer. She said she was sitting next to one of them. What was her message to her?
Well, there’s nothing stopping Bridget from standing. Why are all the men better than the women? We do need some senior women to step forward and to challenge for what is going to be a really difficult two and a half years between now and the general election, and also to take us into that second term.
I love you dearly, Catherine, but I just disagree on this one.
Continue reading...Europol said an international operation successfully disrupted a major drug trafficking route known as the "cocaine highway."
Here's how to stream more of the series starring Zendaya, Jacob Elordi and Sydney Sweeney.
Officials reportedly drafting legislation likely to safeguard Britain’s last blast furnaces and save thousands of jobs
The full nationalisation of British Steel is expected to be announced in the King’s speech this week, a year after the government took over the daily running of the loss-making business from its Chinese owner.
The steelmaker, which employs 3,500 people at its plant in Scunthorpe, came under government control last April amid fears that its owner, Jingye, was planning to shut down the site.
Continue reading...Zsolt Hegedűs’s celebrations since the election of Péter Magyar have sparked joy across the country
As Hungary’s Péter Magyar took office, ousting Viktor Orbán after 16 years in power, the daylong event on Saturday was laced with symbolism, from the return of the EU flag to parliament to the ringing out of the European anthem, Ode to Joy.
But it was the 56-year-old tipped to be the new health minister – and more specifically, his dance moves – that may have become the most potent symbol of Hungary’s new political era.
Continue reading...  | There is also detachable mudguard on the front but it is missing from the img Nobody makes these so I designed my own. Original fender roundish look and feel, but you can detach the top. There is ~12mm fender preload so it snugs pretty firmly. https://www.printables.com/model/1712951-onewheel-pintpint-xpint-s-basic-drop-top-fender-wt [link] [comments] |
An anonymous reader shared this report from Futurism: In November, Amazon leaders sent an internal memo to employees, pushing them to use its in-house code generating tool, Kiro, over third-party alternatives from competitors. "While we continue to support existing tools in use today, we do not plan to support additional third party, AI development tools," the memo read, as quoted by Reuters at the time. "As part of our builder community, you all play a critical role shaping these products and we use your feedback to aggressively improve them." It was an unusual development, considering the tens of billions of dollars the e-commerce giant has invested in its competitors in the space, including Anthropic and OpenAI... Half a year later, Amazon is singing a dramatically different tune. As Business Insider reports, Amazon is officially throwing in the towel, succumbing to growing calls among employees for access to OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude... Given the unfortunate optics of opening the floodgates for Codex and Claude Code, an Amazon spokesperson told the publication in a statement that teams are still "primarily using" Kiro, claiming that 83 percent of engineers at the company are leaning on it.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The following is the transcript of the interview with Sen. Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on May 10, 2026.
The following is the transcript of the interview with Energy Secretary Chris Wright that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on May 10, 2026.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the war with Iran is "not over" because there's still highly enriched uranium that needs to be removed from the country.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II stars in Man on Fire, which drew 11 million views in its first four days. Yes, it's that good.
LUANA ROCHA
Staff Reporter
Earlier this week, I was sitting in a lecture hall shamelessly counting down the minutes until class ended. By the 45-minute mark, the discussion of our assigned reading for the week had devolved into a string of muffled sounds. My awareness suddenly pulled itself together when another student said, “We like because, we love despite.”
The context of why he said that is a bit hazy in my mind, but as an immediate reaction, I pulled out my notebook and wrote it down. For the next 35 minutes, I could not stop thinking about it.
Or rather, I could not stop thinking about love itself.
Wondering about love is a common human thought. As we grow up, we crave to experience the flowers, the perfectly planned date at the restaurant we have been hinting at wanting to try and the dramatic love confessions we watched on “Notting Hill” or “27 Dresses.” You want someone to love everything about you and do everything for you, and when you get that warm feeling of being secure and seen, the waterfall stops running and is suddenly still, as in your mind, you achieved the ultimate goal in life: romance.
You run and tell your therapist you are going to cut down on the sessions because, for once, you are actually happy. You now don’t carry all the weight alone — you have a partner to hold your hand and go through life with. You feel kind of proud of yourself because after years of hearing things your parents screamed from the rooftops, such as “You are too young to know what love is,” or “ Just wait, and you’ll know it,” finally it quieted down, because you did it, you feel it and you know it.
But is that true? Is there such a thing as being too young to know what love is? Or is the truth that we forget what love is?
When I was little, I lived on a farm, so my childhood was spent running around shoeless in the mud with my dogs more often than watching television or playing with blocks on my living room floor. This resulted, however, in a lot of injuries — I have the scars to prove it.
Every time, I would run back to my house, hiccuping while trying to explain what happened to my mom. After cleaning my wound and placing a bandaid on it, she would then lean over and kiss it, and I swear for a split second the burning, painful sensation would stop. In those moments, I felt something. I felt secure.
At the end of my freshman year of high school, my cat died. I was devastated. I cried to the point of not being able to breathe. When I went to school the next day, my friend walked up to me holding a bag. When I opened it, it was my favorite candy and a handwritten card telling me she was sorry for my loss and how good of a cat mom I was. I will admit that I started crying in the middle of the hallway, but at that moment, I felt something. I felt seen.
My grandma and I share the same birthday. Every year, we gather as a family and sing happy birthday in front of a Carvel ice cream cake, and of course, we have the tradition of giving the first piece of the cake to someone special.
So every year, she and I hold our pieces pretending to give them to someone else, just to turn around and give them to each other. Our other family members all laugh and say, “We knew this would happen, you guys do this every year.” My grandma and I don’t care, though — in fact, I think we laugh louder the older we get. In that moment, through all of us laughing, celebrating, singing, I feel something. I feel love.
The truth is, I really doubt we have to wait to say we experienced love until we are a certain age or have lived through a real-life romantic movie plot. At some point in the course of humanity, love stopped being ordinary. It stopped being simple, and instead became about expensive chocolates and kissing on the lips.
It became a competition about who found it faster, whose lasted longer and whose was more apparent and intoxicating. It became about stories that are loud and dramatic, forcing us to ignore the love around us because it’s quieter than the gestures we deem to be the dream. Humans have felt this since before we ever got into romantic relationships, because in reality we experience love from the second we leave our mother’s womb — we are raised with love. We feel the feeling, no matter how young we are or the status of a relationship. It just comes quickly, like a breath we are trained not to notice.
We know what love is. Love is your mother ordering takeout on a Wednesday, even though it’s a strictly Friday activity, because she knows her daughter is going through something. Love is your cat running up to you first thing in the morning. Love is your friends begging you to go out with them because they want you there. Love is getting out of bed and showering even though you feel like you don’t want to be alive anymore. Love is quiet. Love is simple. We just forget it.
Nine groups in the Sioux Nation say an exploratory graphite drilling project endangers a recognized ceremonial site
Almost exactly a decade since the start of the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access pipeline gained national and international attention, new disputes are simmering over tribal rights in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
Earlier this month, an environmental organization and a Native American advocacy group sued the US Forest Service, claiming that an exploratory graphite drilling project on national forest land threatened a recognized ceremonial site on mountain meadows known as Pe’ Sla, or Reynolds Prairie.
Continue reading...Barça can seal the title with a win in Sunday's Clásico.
For just the first three months of 2026, Rocket Lab's launch business reports $63.7 million in revenue, reports CNBC — plus another $136.7 million from its space systems business. Besides beating Wall Street's expectations, Rocket Lab also announced that its backlog has more than doubled from a year ago to $2.2 billion, and that it's buying space robotics company Motiv Space Systems. Friday its stock price shot up 34% in one day... Rocket Lab's stock has more than quadrupled over the past year, benefiting from skyrocketing demand for businesses tied to the space economy ahead of SpaceX's hotly anticipated IPO later this year. Demand for space systems and satellites is also escalating as President Donald Trump pursues his ambitious Golden Dome missile defense project and NASA's crewed Artemis missions rev up. Rocket Lab said Thursday that it signed its largest contract ever with a confidential customer for its Neutron and Electron rockets through 2029, weeks after landing a $190 million deal for 20 hypersonic test flights... "The demand signal is clear," CEO Peter Beck said on an earnings call with analysts, calling the pace of new product releases from the company this year "relentless".... Rocket Lab's good news lifted other space companies. Firefly Aeropspace and Intuitive Machines both jumped more than 20, while Redwire gained 19%. Voyager Technologies rose 14%. "The company anticipates revenue between $225 million and $240 million during the second quarter."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Sports Direct founder says people in his employ recorded footage of Peter Cowgill meeting another retail boss
The Sports Direct founder, Mike Ashley, has admitted to arranging surveillance footage that brought down his rival Peter Cowgill, the former JD Sports chair.
Cowgill was secretly filmed in 2021 in a car talking with the Footasylum boss Barry Bown. JD Sports was in the process of acquiring the trainer retailer at the time and the two companies were not allowed to share commercially sensitive information.
Continue reading...Conservative and Reform leaders cheered as they address crowd, while Labour’s Pat McFadden met with boos and shouts of ‘where is Starmer?’
Thousands of people gathered outside Downing Street on Sunday to protest an increase in antisemitic hate crimes and violence, as senior politicians and interfaith leaders called for unity.
The Standing Strong: Extinguish Antisemitism rally, backed by more than 30 Jewish groups, drew thousands of people to Whitehall, as Conservative and Liberal Democrat party leaders, alongside Labour and Reform representatives, addressed a crowd studded with Israeli and union jack flags and ‘Where is Keir?’ placards.
Continue reading...The First Nations woman has been on the priority public housing list in WA since 2023. Despite nearly dying from sleeping rough, she still has a two-year wait
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The family of a homeless First Nations woman who is sick with septicemia fear she will die without a safe home, but advocates warn it could be years before she reaches the top of the public housing waiting list.
Andrea Woodley has been in and out of hospital for weeks with sepsis, triggered by infected blisters on her feet after sleeping rough in inner city Perth. The Noongar, Budimaya and Nyikina woman and her loved ones fear that without a home she is at risk of death.
Continue reading...For those who installed the vesc upgrade, was it worth it and would you recommend it? What are the mayor benefits and changes you have noticed?
Otherwise would an upgrade to a GT make more sense if I don’t install the vesc in the pint s and I feel like I need more range and speed?
IT sector unemployment "increased to 3.8% in April from 3.6% in March," reports the Wall Street Journal. But they add that the increase reflects "an ongoing uncertainty in tech as AI continues to play havoc with hiring. That's according to analysis from consulting firm Janco Associates, which bases its findings on data from the U.S. Labor Department." On Friday, the department said the economy added 115,000 jobs, buoyed by gains in industries including retail, transportation and warehousing and healthcare. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.3%. But the information sector lost 13,000 jobs in April. While it's still too early to say exactly how AI is affecting employment overall, some businesses, especially in the tech industry, have said it's part of the reason they're cutting staff. In April, Meta Platforms said it would lay off 10% of its staff, or roughly 8,000 people, as it seeks to streamline operations and pay for its own massive investments in AI. Nike will reduce its workforce by roughly 1,400 workers, or about 2%, mostly in its tech department, as it simplifies global operations. And Snap is planning to eliminate 16% of its workforce, or about 1,000 positions, as it aims to boost efficiency. In other areas of IT, which includes telecommunications and data-processing, employment is now down 11%, or 342,000 jobs, from its most recent peak in November 2022. But there's not just AI to blame. Inflation and economic uncertainty linked to the Iran conflict is giving some chief executives and tech leaders reason to pull back or pause their IT hiring, said Janco Chief Executive Victor Janulaitis. The article even notes that postings for software developer jobs "are up 15% year-over-year on job-search platform Indeed, according to Hannah Calhoon, its vice president of AI". But employers do seem to be looking for experienced developers, which could pose a problem for recent college graduates.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
IT sector unemployment "increased to 3.8% in April from 3.6% in March," reports the Wall Street Journal. But they add that the increase reflects "an ongoing uncertainty in tech as AI continues to play havoc with hiring. That's according to analysis from consulting firm Janco Associates, which bases its findings on data from the U.S. Labor Department." On Friday, the department said the economy added 115,000 jobs, buoyed by gains in industries including retail, transportation and warehousing and healthcare. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.3%. But the information sector lost 13,000 jobs in April. While it's still too early to say exactly how AI is affecting employment overall, some businesses, especially in the tech industry, have said it's part of the reason they're cutting staff. In April, Meta Platforms said it would lay off 10% of its staff, or roughly 8,000 people, as it seeks to streamline operations and pay for its own massive investments in AI. Nike will reduce its workforce by roughly 1,400 workers, or about 2%, mostly in its tech department, as it simplifies global operations. And Snap is planning to eliminate 16% of its workforce, or about 1,000 positions, as it aims to boost efficiency. In other areas of IT, which includes telecommunications and data-processing, employment is now down 11%, or 342,000 jobs, from its most recent peak in November 2022. But there's not just AI to blame. Inflation and economic uncertainty linked to the Iran conflict is giving some chief executives and tech leaders reason to pull back or pause their IT hiring, said Janco Chief Executive Victor Janulaitis. The article even notes that postings for software developer jobs "are up 15% year-over-year on job-search platform Indeed, according to Hannah Calhoon, its vice president of AI". But employers do seem to be looking for experienced developers, which could pose a problem for recent college graduates.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
When you learn what Martin Short has endured in his private life, as captured in the hilarious and heartbreaking documentary "Marty: Life Is Short," the comedian's irrepressibly sunny attitude is all the more astonishing.
In Los Angeles, rebuilding after last year's devastating wildfires has been a race to the status quo, with speed winning out over safety and strength.
The economic warnings are bleak, but full extent of shortages are still not felt for many European countries
The biggest energy shock in modern history, jet fuel shortages “within weeks”, a global recession – since Iran throttled shipping flows through the strait of Hormuz at the end of February the economic warnings have become increasingly dire.
Yet 10 weeks on from the first US-Israeli attacks, share indices, companies and governments have been surprisingly sanguine. Every day the divergence grows between the eerie quiet on markets and alarming warnings of an imminent supply chain crunch.
Continue reading...A Russian military intelligence unit compromised thousands of routers across 23 states. Here's how to make sure yours isn't next.
Luke Grimes leads the Yellowstone sequel.
Business owners may have to wade through paperwork, but the US government is now actually processing refunds
When the supreme court struck down Donald Trump’s tariffs, many small importers assumed any refunds would be tied up in bureaucracy for years. Surprisingly, that’s not what’s happening.
It’s estimated that roughly 330,000 importers paid more than $166bn in tariff fees imposed by Trump under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). If your business was affected, here’s good news: you can get your tariffs refunded. You just need to be a little patient.
Continue reading...Twenty years ago, Hope Edelman, author of the bestseller "Motherless Daughters," founded a global support network for women who, like her, were young when their mothers died – to share tears, sisterhood and affirmation.
Founded nearly a century ago, CBS Radio, featuring legends such as Edward R. Murrow, Robert Trout and Charles Osgood, created the template for broadcast journalists. But on May 22, CBS will end its heralded radio service.
Man, 45, and 52-year-old woman held on suspicion of conspiracy to commit arson after blaze in Whitechapel
Two people have been arrested by counter-terrorism officers investigating an arson attack at a former synagogue in east London.
A 45-year-old man and a woman, 52, were arrested on Sunday on suspicion of conspiracy to commit arson and have been taken into police custody.
Continue reading...Im looking for a really easy way to get into vesc
The phone is on its third redesign so far.
The Supreme Court has ruled that, under the Voting Rights Act, Congressional districts can no longer be drawn along racial lines, but can be shaped by partisan aims. The result: A dash to re-draw voting districts in several states. What does this portend for democracy?
 | So I got my tire changed last night, and finished putting it back together today. My Tire isn't filled yet but is it gonna rub on that wire when I start riding? There's like barely any clearance. Also. I know it's not normal but it doesn't hurt to pop the beads and fill the tire while itz together, right? The fucking compressor at cumbys was a waste and I couldn't do it with my car compressor. Now I gotta wait for a garage to open. Edit: finally got the tire on. Lol go to ride away from the garage and I fell cuz it wobbled like crazy. Gotta get used to a whole new tire now. Psi was too high so the tire was rounded. Got home, dropped it to 18 psi and now I get to ride today. [link] [comments] |
William Harrison, a US soldier stationed in the region, was convicted and hanged for the murder of Patsy Wylie
On the afternoon of 25 September 1944, William Harrison, a US soldier stationed in Northern Ireland, visited the cottage of the Wylie family in Killycolpy, County Tyrone, and offered to buy treats for the children.
He had visited before and was, if not a friend, at least known to the family. Mary Wylie let him take her seven-year-old daughter, Patricia, better known as Patsy, across the fields to the shops.
Continue reading...The supreme court has gutted one of the strongest federal tools we had against the most effective weapon in US politics
Maps can guide us home. They show us where we are, where we have been and where we might go. Electoral maps can do something even more sinister, though. They often tell us what and who is allowed to matter. They can decide, before a single ballot is cast, whether an entire voting bloc will become powerful or be buried by the design of a party that is indifferent – at best – to their needs and wants.
Memphis is the latest warning. Tennessee’s largest majority-Black city can vote, organize, turn out, remember and resist – and still be cut into pieces by politicians who fear what that city might do with power. This week, Republicans carved up the Memphis-centered congressional district, dividing its only majority-Black district into three Republican-leaning seats while weakening voter-notice requirements in the process.
Continue reading...Independent scientists who reviewed the results said most samples were contaminated with Pfas or phthalates
The Trump administration announced earlier this month that hundreds of baby formula samples it tested for toxic chemicals “meet a high safety standard”, but public health advocates warn this claim contradicts data showing a majority were contaminated with dangerous substances, such as Pfas or phthalates.
Independent scientists who reviewed the results say the data gaps and the contamination raise concerns, though they added the testing shows some bright spots, and praised the US Food and Drug Administration for expanding the testing program, then making the results public.
Continue reading...The problem wasn’t just the perfectly polished, yet mediocre prose. It’s what’s lost when we surrender the struggle to translate thought into words
I have been teaching fiction writing at MIT since 2017. Many of my students last wrote fiction in middle school, and very few have experienced a proper workshop, so at the start of every semester I offer these directions for writer and reader alike:
Read the story at least twice. Mark what works and what doesn’t – underline great sentences, flag clunky syntax, gaps in logic and unrealistic dialogue. Ask yourself: does the story work? Why or why not? What could improve it? Answer in a signed letter to the author, attached to their story. Give your honest opinions. Remember that an effective peer review demands close reading of the text accompanied by a boldness of spirit.
Continue reading...Slavia could forfeit match and have stadium closed
Slavia chair calls incident in derby ‘disgrace’
Slavia Prague face stiff punishment after their fans invaded the pitch during stoppage time in a derby against Sparta in the Czech league on Saturday night. At the time, Slavia were leading 3-2, a scoreline that would have secured their defence of the Czech league title with three games to spare.
The disciplinary committee of the country’s football association said after an extraordinary meeting on Sunday that “such behaviour will not be tolerated in professional football”. Slavia’s punishment could be announced on Tuesday, it said. It could include forfeiting the match, banning fans from the stadium and a fine.
Continue reading...If I buy a GTSFO Thor400 and a 26S battery to upgrade my GT, do I need to upgrade the cable harness or is the stock GT cable harness fine?
I guess the question is whether the stock Controller <--> Battery wire on the GT can handle the higher voltage.
 | I installed my tire backwards. It rides. What will be the drawbacks? [link] [comments] |
Spain has begun the evacuation of the first passengers from the MV Hondius ship which arrived in Tenerife on Sunday
In other news, there are reports of Russian attacks continuing on Ukraine despite a ceasefire that was meant to run from Saturday 9 May to Monday 11 May.
There are reports of people being injured by Russian strikes in areas including the Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Kherson regions.
Continue reading...In her latest book, "The Martha Way," Martha Stewart shares her classic methods for cooking – the building blocks essential to every home chef.
Several people were hurt after a possible boat explosion Saturday near the Haulover Sandbar in Miami, Florida.
Experts warn of ‘soft target’ vulnerabilities and intelligence gaps as federal agencies prepare to secure 78 matches across 11 cities
Fifa World Cup matches set to be held across the United States face heightened terrorism risks, with experts warning that vulnerabilities are being amplified by the US-Israel conflict with Iran and a depletion of counter-terrorism expertise within federal law enforcement.
The biggest threat stems from homegrown violent extremists, often lone actors that may have become radicalized online by extreme political views or jihadists such as the Islamic State (Isis), said four counter-terror experts interviewed.
Continue reading...Vitória Régia imagines rightwing Bolsonaro plot succeeded with US help – and highlights threats facing Indigenous peoples
The year is 2025 and far-right coup plotters have annihilated Brazil’s democracy, assassinating the president, closing the national congress and surrendering the Amazon rainforest and its untold riches to the United States.
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Amazon of America,” a thick-accented North American soldier tells a group of journalists being taken on a propaganda tour of an oil refinery in the newly annexed jungle realm. Nearby, a replica of the Statue of Liberty has been carved out of the wilderness to celebrate Washington’s tutelage over more than half of Brazil.
Continue reading...SS and Glass Lewis back shareholder resolution amid fears over power wielded by Jamie Dimon, who holds both roles
Investors in JP Morgan have been urged to vote in favour of splitting the role of chief executive and chair at America’s largest bank, amid concerns over the power wielded by its billionaire boss Jamie Dimon.
ISS and Glass Lewis, which issue advice to some of the world’s biggest fund managers on how to vote at annual investor meetings, have thrown their weight behind a shareholder resolution that would ensure two separate people hold the office of chair and chief executive “as soon as possible”. Investors are due to vote on the resolution at the bank’s annual general meeting on 19 May.
Continue reading...Contradictory policies that gut harm reduction programs while supporting naloxone access are confusing experts
Within just a few weeks, the Trump administration has proposed multiple contradictory policies related to overdose prevention – some that could help save lives and others that experts say could further strain health resources and put people at risk for overdose.
These policies include a new prohibition on funding for fentanyl test strips, which help people avoid overdoses; proposed budget cuts that would gut the country’s overdose prevention efforts; and an ambitious drug control strategy that will be impossible to implement if the aforementioned cuts go through.
Continue reading...Google's merging Android and ChromeOS to take on the laptop space.
If you're in the market for a treadmill, these are the best to choose from.
CNBC reports: The European Union is considering rules that would restrict its member governments' use of U.S. cloud providers to handle sensitive data, sources familiar with the talks told CNBC. The European Commission — the EU's executive branch — is expected to present its "Tech Sovereignty Package" on May 27, which will include a range of measures aimed at bolstering the bloc's strategic autonomy in key digital areas. As part of preparations for that package, discussions are taking place within the Commission around limiting the exposure of sensitive public-sector data to cloud platforms provided by companies outside of the EU, two Commission officials, who asked to remain anonymous as they weren't authorized to discuss private talks, told CNBC... "The core idea is defining sectors that have to be hosted on European cloud capacity," one of the officials said. They added that companies providing cloud solutions from third countries, including the U.S., could be impacted. Proposals would not prohibit overseas companies' cloud platforms from government contracts entirely, but limit their use in processing sensitive data at public sector organizations, depending on the level of sensitivity, they added. The officials said that talks are ongoing and yet to be finalized... The officials told CNBC there are discussions around proposing that financial, judicial and health data processed by governments and public-sector organizations require high levels of sovereign cloud infrastructure.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Rhun ap Iowerth says he hopes his party’s programme for government will get backing from across the Senedd
The leader of Plaid Cymru is hoping to become Welsh first minister as early as Tuesday after his party won a historic victory in the Senedd elections, soundly beating Labour and holding off Reform UK.
Plaid fell short of winning a majority in the Welsh parliament but Rhun ap Iorwerth said on Sunday he hoped other parties would work with him and told UK Labour not to punish Wales over the result.
Continue reading...Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Liverpool-born actor says depression and anxiety followed death of his father when he was 15
The actor David Morrissey has spoken of how “terrible” social anxiety contributed to him becoming an alcoholic.
“I am a recovering alcoholic,” Morrissey, who has been sober for 21 years, told Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. “Drinking first was about anxiety. I’ve had this terrible social anxiety and that helped me get through it.”
Continue reading...Saudi Arabia’s state oil company’s profits up 26% to £26.9bn in first three months of year
Saudi Arabia’s state oil company reported a 26% jump in profits in its first quarter as its east-west pipeline allowed it to ship millions of barrels of oil out of the Gulf despite conflict in the Middle East.
Profits at Saudi Aramco hit $33.6bn (£26.9bn) in the first three months of the year, while revenue rose nearly 7% compared with a year earlier to $115.5bn.
Continue reading...Property disputes, predatory developers and surging sea levels are putting the historic Black community at risk
On Arthur Champen’s half-acre property in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, a thicket of southern live oaks, palmettos and pine trees muffle the roar of cars on nearby highway 278. His haint blue house, lightened by the sun, sits on stilts to protect it from flooding that comes with the high tide. During the spring, it is common for the marshland adjacent to his land to turn into a muddy soup. “Other than the cars,” Champen, 81, said, “you hear how peaceful it is?”
About a decade ago, Champen’s family nearly lost the grassy marshland next door that their family bought several generations ago.
Continue reading...The salacious gossip website is hounding politicians and tracking vacationing members of Congress
TMZ has only been in Washington DC for a matter of weeks, but the salacious gossip website is already having an impact: hounding politicians, tracking vacationing members of Congress and reporting on a senator taking a trip to Disney World.
It’s been quite the start as the website and TV channel attempts to break into the political scene, with its first focus on members of Congress taking a two-week recess – typically meaning the politicians return to their home districts and states to meet constituents – during a record partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Continue reading...My activist group is about 80% women. Where did all the men go – and how can we get them back?
In Donald Trump’s first term, my Brooklyn-based activist group had the peculiar dynamic of being started by two men while being composed of about 65% women. Since November 2024, our group has doubled in size, and the gender imbalance has tipped even further: we are now about 80% women.
Almost 18 months into Trump’s second term, it is abundantly clear that the appetite for anti-Trump, pro-democracy activism has not dimmed at all. And yet, there is a substantial portion of the populace that, in my experience as an activist, seems to have lost its fervor for the fight.
Continue reading...Ditching my car for a week and riding an Onyx RCR 80V gave me a taste of freedom, without traffic or parking hassles.
You can't totally fix your TV's sound, but changing these settings and other tricks can help.
Previously prohibited use of websites such as Omoggle that connect a streamer to a stranger’s video feed now allowed
Last week, at 4am, 19-year-old Sammy Amz was scrolling through X when something caught his eye: a popular Twitch streamer was competing in a 1v1 “mog-off” with a stranger, and losing.
The next day he opened the Omoggle gaming website and began to play. Quickly he matched with another user – green dots appeared on their faces onscreen, as the website began to compare their measurements: canthal tilt, palpebral fissure ratio, nose-to-face width ratio and so on.
Continue reading...Replacing a leader is difficult, as Jeremy Corbyn proved – but MPs can apply pressure, publicly or privately
Many Labour MPs believe Keir Starmer will not survive as Labour leader for long enough to fight the next election. What they cannot agree on, however – even after a disastrous set of results in this week’s elections – is how his departure might come about.
The Labour rulebook makes it notoriously difficult to unseat a party leader: none has been formally ejected in the postwar period, though some, including Tony Blair, have resigned under pressure from their own MPs.
Continue reading...Zachary Alam spent four years in jail for his role in the Capitol attack before Trump pardoned him in 2025
A convicted participant in the 6 January 2021 US Capitol attack who was pardoned at the start of Donald Trump’s second presidency has been ordered to serve seven years in prison after a jury found him guilty of committing a burglary in Virginia in May 2025.
Zachary Alam, 34, had previously drawn one of the stiffest prison sentences – eight years – for his hand in the violence carried out at the US Capitol in Washington DC by supporters of Trump after his first presidency ended in defeat to Joe Biden after the 2020 White House election.
Continue reading...Mothers’ experiences often intersect with federal policy battles over gun violence, immigration and childcare
Sarah spent the first months of the year following immigration agents around the Twin Cities to document arrests and violations of constitutional rights. On the day Renee Good was killed by a federal agent after dropping her son at school, she too had been surrounded by agents who screamed that they were the good guys.
On the other side of the metropolis, Linsey Rippy showed up daily to a church, ready to assemble and distribute boxes full of produce, beans, rice, cereal, sometimes adding in formula for babies stuck at home with their parents because it wasn’t safe to go out during “Operation Metro Surge”, the Trump administration’s widespread and violent immigration enforcement crackdown.
Continue reading...Bought the vesc kit, its amazing. Sadly, i cant see (my fault). What is needed to make the rgb 3 power my rear and front lights? Just the buck and harness or is there more too it?
Apple removed the lock screen's volume bar a few years ago with iOS 16, but you can bring it back to your screen now.
In his new book, the CBS News correspondent writes of the warning posed by the inadequate response to last year's catastrophic wildfires that destroyed thousands of homes and businesses in Southern California – as well as to the daunting task of rebuilding.
There’s a divisive court battle happening in Bergen County, New Jersey, over 1700s-era blue laws, which limit sales on clothes, home decor and more.
In Ukraine, specialized tour guides are ready for a small but unstoppable flow of visitors who ignore blunt travel advisories.
A judge ruled that the woman should not be deported there, so the Trump administration sent her to Ghana — which returned her to Togo.
Dawn Zuidgeest-Craft, who worked as a nurse practitioner for four decades while raising four kids, will start a three-year residency in July.
The conflict is not only sapping oil revenue, but also Gulf states’ efforts to expand their economies beyond it.
"Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable," reports the New York Times. And "After Meta said late last month that it would start tracking employees' computer use, hundreds of workers spoke up." (One employee even told Meta's CTO in an internal post, "Your callousness to the concerns of your own employees is concerning." In an internal post last month, Meta told its U.S. employees that it was making a change that would affect tens of thousands of them. What employees typed into their computer, how they moved their mouse, where they clicked and what they saw on their screen would be tracked, Meta said. The goal, the company said, was to capture employee data so Meta's artificial intelligence models could learn "how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers." Many workers immediately revolted. In online comments, they blasted the tracking as a privacy violation, calling it antisocial and callous... [One engineering manager even asked "How do we opt out?"] "There is no option to opt-out on your corporate laptop," replied Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer. Employees reacted by posting more than 100 angry and surprised emoji, according to the messages.... Meta is pushing its 78,000 employees to adopt AI tools and factoring their use of the technology in performance reviews. The company is also tracking employees' computer work to feed and train its AI models. And it is cutting jobs to offset its AI spending, saying last month that it would slash 10% of its workforce. That has led to anger and anxiety as employees await news of whether they are affected by the layoffs, which are slated to be carried out May 20, according to 11 current and former Meta employees. Some said they no longer saw Meta as a place for a long career. Others were looking for new jobs or trying to signal that they wanted to be laid off so they could receive severance pay, the current and former employees said. "It's incredibly demoralizing," an employee who does user research wrote in an internal post, which was reviewed by the Times... Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees' consumption of "tokens," a unit of AI use that is roughly equivalent to four characters of text, four people said. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. That led some employees to make so many AI agents that others had to introduce agents to find agents, and agents to rate agents, two people said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Beverly Hills detectives responding to the death of 67-year-old Violet Yacobi — who was found on the marble floor below a staircase in her mansion — suspected foul play and her dentist son, and wondered if the family fortune was a motive for murder.
African archipelago hopes startups, digital infrastructure and diaspora investment can transform its economy
For much of its history since its discovery by the Portuguese in the mid-15th century, the Cape Verde archipelago off the coast of west Africa served as a hub of the international slave trade, with Africans forcibly transported to marketplaces before being distributed across the Americas and Europe.
Now, almost 150 years since slavery was abolished in Cape Verde, and just over 50 years since independence from Portugal, Pedro Fernandes Lopes wants the country to become a beacon for the free movement of human and financial capital across the African diaspora.
Continue reading...Revolutionary Guards issue warning as Trump awaits Iran’s response to Washington’s latest proposal for peace deal
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have threatened to target US sites in the Middle East if its tankers come under fire, Iranian media reported on Saturday, as Washington was left waiting for Tehran’s response to its latest negotiating position.
“Any attack on Iranian tankers and commercial vessels will result in a heavy attack on one of the American centres in the region and enemy ships,” the force said, a day after US strikes on two Iranian tankers in the Gulf of Oman.
Continue reading...The San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Office has concluded its latest search connected to the disappearance of Kristin Smart at a property in Arroyo Grande, but officials say her remains were not recovered.
The US president will be counting on China to influence Iran and help him out of his latest mess. But the price may be high – including for Taiwan
Like an out-of-control wrecking ball, swinging wildly back and forth, Donald Trump smashes up the international order without much thought for the consequences. Lacking coherent strategies, workable plans or consistent aims, he power-trips erratically from one fragile region, tense warzone and complex geopolitical situation to another, leaving misery, confusion and rubble in his wake. Typically, he claims a bogus victory, demands that others repair the damage and pick up the tab, then looks around for something new to break.
The president will bulldoze into another international minefield this week – the fraught standoff between China and Taiwan – when he travels to Beijing for a two-day summit with President Xi Jinping. After a string of humiliating policy implosions over Ukraine, Gaza, Nato, Greenland, and now Iran and Lebanon, needy Trump craves a diplomatic success to flaunt at home. But his hopes of vote-winning trade pacts are overshadowed by his latest war of choice. He needs Xi’s promise not to arm Iran if all-out fighting resumes – and Xi’s help keeping the strait of Hormuz open as part of a mooted framework peace deal.
Continue reading...Well not sure what I'm doing wrong when I'm trying to stop by lifting my heel. I'm riding, I slow down and i try to lift my heel and it doesn't detect that I'm lifting my heel up. Sometimes I'll see the blue light show up for a second that my heel is up but then goes back white before it stops.
Tehran accuses Washington of ‘reckless military adventure’; Trump prepares for rare China visit amid turbulent backdrop – key US politics stories from 9 May 2026 at a glance
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has said Washington is expecting a response from Iran to its proposals for an interim deal to end the conflict in the Middle East, as Iran accused the US of breaching the increasingly fragile ceasefire announced last month.
In recent days there have been the biggest flare-ups in and around the contested strait of Hormuz since the informal truce began. The rise in violence followed Donald Trump’s announcement – then rapid pause – of a new naval mission aimed at opening the strategic waterway.
Continue reading...US leader enters talks with superpower rival from vulnerable position, but will be hoping for economic wins amid turbulent backdrop
If all goes to plan over the next few days – and that is a big if – Donald Trump will arrive in Beijing on Wednesday for a highly anticipated summit with Xi Jinping, China’s leader.
The trip will mark the first time a US president has visited China in nearly a decade. The last visit was also made by Trump, during his first term, in 2017.
Continue reading...Thirty years after first person-to-person transmission was documented in Patagonia, scientists say global heating could increase world’s exposure
An outbreak in rural communities 30 years ago in the Patagonia area of Argentina led scientists, for the first time, to document person-to-person transmission of hantavirus, which until then had been known only to spread through contact with rodents.
Nearly a decade ago another outbreak, also in Patagonia, provided detailed evidence of inter-human transmission when an infected 68-year-old rural worker attended a birthday party in a small village. The infection spread and resulted in 11 deaths.
Continue reading...With Trump wavering on Nato and war in Ukraine, Europe is scrambling to spend billions on weapons such as drones
In a small workshop in England’s East Midlands, engineers at the British startup Skycutter are designing weapons for Ukraine. A row of 3D printers make the fuselage for interceptor drones, while parts such as motors and navigation chips are slotted together by hand. The same process happens hundreds of thousands of times a month in partner Ukrainian factories.
The swarms of cheap, deadly and often autonomous drones deployed in that war have already changed combat completely. Troops far behind the frontline must move constantly to avoid attack from the air, travelling along netted tunnels and landscapes crisscrossed by fibre optic cables used to steer drones past radio jamming. Cities are terrorised by guided missiles that are cheaper and therefore more widely used than those that came before.
Continue reading...While Nvidia has dominated the "infrastructure boom" since 2022's launch of ChatGPT and "the generative AI craze," CNBC writes that "This week offered the starkest illustration yet of what MIzuho analyst Jordan Klein said could be a 'changing of the guard in AI.'" Chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices and Intel notched gains of about 25%, while memory maker Micron jumped more than 37% and fiber-optic cable maker Corning climbed about 18%. All four of those companies have more than doubled in value this year, with Intel leading the way, up well over 200%. Nvidia, meanwhile, is only slightly ahead of the Nasdaq in 2026, gaining 15% for the year, aided by an 8% rally this week. In spreading the wealth to a wider swath of hardware companies, investors are clearly betting that the bull market in AI has long legs and that data centers are going to need a wider array of advanced components for years to come. Memory has been the biggest theme of late due to a global shortage that's driven up prices and turned Micron, a 47-year-old company tucked in a sleepy corner of the semiconductor market, into one of the hottest trades over the past 12 months. Micron blew past an $800 billion market capitalization for the first time this week, and the stock is now up over 750% in the past year. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told CNBC in March that key customers are only getting "50% to two-thirds of their requirements" because of supply issues. The memory market is largely dominated by Micron, along with Korea-based Samsung and SK Hynix, which are also both in the midst of historic rallies... Bank of America estimates the data center CPU market could more than double from $27 billion in 2025 to $60 billion in 2030. AMD's quarterly results this week underscored the emerging trend, as earnings, revenue and guidance sailed past estimates on strong data center growth. The company has long led the CPU charge, and CEO Lisa Su said on the earnings call that AMD now expects 35% growth over the next three to five years in the server CPU market, up from a forecast of 18% growth that the company provided in November. The article cites two other big movers: Intel "is in the midst of a revival sparked by a major investment from the U.S. government last year. Intel's stock had its best month on record in April, more than doubling, and has continued notching massive gains, rising 33% in the early days of May." Nvidia still remains the world's most valuable company "and is expected to show revenue growth of 70% this fiscal year," the article points out — adding that companies like Corning are also benefiting from Nvidia partnerships. "Glass maker Corning, which celebrated its 175th anniversary this week, signed a massive deal with Nvidia on Wednesday that involves the development of three new U.S. factories dedicated entirely to optical technologies... likely a major step in Nvidia's move away from copper cables and towards fiber-optic cables as it builds out its rack-scale systems."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I have been riding my used XR for almost 3 years, and I want more, so I ordered an XRV kit from floatwheel. Everything else is stock. What speeds can I expect for a cruise, and what can I expect for top speed (I weigh 145 pounds)
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for May 10.
Under the nonprofit Linux Foundation, "a new Sustaining Package Registries Working Group will seek to identify concrete funding, governance, and security practices," reports ZDNet, "to keep code flowing as download counts grow.... Because software builds, continuous integration pipelines, and AI systems hammer registries at machine speed rather than human speed, the sites can't keep up. "That growth has brought a surge in bot traffic, automated publishing, security reports, and outright abuse, exposing what the working group bluntly calls a 'sustainability gap'." Sonatype CTO Brian Fox, who oversees the Maven Central Java registry, estimates open-source registries saw 10 trillion downloads in 2025. And "The same pattern is appearing across ecosystems. More machine traffic. More automation. More scanning. More expectations around uptime, integrity, provenance, and policy enforcement. More cost. More support burden. More dependency on infrastructure that the industry still talks about as though it runs on goodwill and spare time." ZDNet reports that "To tackle that, Sonatype has teamed up with the Linux Foundation and other package registry leaders, including Alpha-Omega, Eclipse Foundation (OpenVSX), OpenJS Foundation, OpenSSF, Packagist, Python Software Foundation, Ruby Central (RubyGems), and the Rust Foundation (Crates)." The idea is to give operators a neutral forum to discuss money, governance, and shared operational burdens openly. Once that's dealt with, they'll coordinate how to explain those realities back to companies and organizations that have long assumed registries are "free." No, they're not. They never were. As the Linux Foundation pointed out, "Registries today run primarily on two things: (1) infrastructure donations and credits; and (2) heroic efforts from small paid teams (themselves funded by donations and grants) and unpaid volunteers that operate and maintain registry services. The bulk of donations and grants comes from a small set of donors and doesn't scale with demands on the registry." The working group is explicitly positioned as a venue where registry leaders and ecosystem stakeholders can align on "practical, community-minded" ways to sustain that infrastructure, rather than each operator improvising its own survival plan in isolation. ZDNet says the group will also coordinate security practices and information, and craft frameworks "that make it politically and legally possible to introduce sustainable funding models without fracturing communities." And they will also "align messaging and educational content so developers, companies, and policymakers finally understand what it costs to run these services."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
so is a software decision the only thing stopping FM from making onewheels capable of rolling around on their own, either under RC, an assignment, or AI agency?
This derby clash at the London Stadium has massive implications for both ends of the table.
Broderick was serving a life sentence in California over killings and last month transferred to a medical center
Betty Broderick, who became infamous for the 1989 killings of her former husband and his new wife in a case that shocked the country and inspired movies and books, has died at the age of 78 while still serving a life sentence.
Representatives from the California department of corrections and rehabilitation confirmed to NBC News that Elizabeth A Broderick was moved from the California prison where she had been transferred to a medical center on 18 April. She died on the following Friday.
Continue reading...‘In just a few weeks homelessness has killed a baby, a young mother and a student,’ head of advocacy group says, calling for more investment in upcoming budget
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Fourteen rough sleepers are dying in public parks or countryside areas each year on average in Australia, an analysis of hidden death reports reveals.
The deaths of a young international student sleeping rough in Hyde Park, a young homeless mother who died of sepsis in Western Australia, and a newborn baby at a makeshift homeless camp near Wagga beach have prompted an outpouring of grief and shock in recent weeks.
Continue reading...Raymond Epps, a former Oath Keepers member, said he was the target of conspiracies over his role in US Capitol attack
A federal judge on Friday dismissed a lawsuit alleging defamation by Fox News, ruling for a second time against a former supporter of Donald Trump who claimed he became the target of death threats after the network broadcast inaccurate conspiracy claims about his involvement in the 6 January 2021 US Capitol attack.
Raymond Epps was wrongly accused by Fox of being a government operative who allegedly stirred violence around the Capitol that day in an effort to pin responsibility on supporters of Trump who were upset his first presidency ended in defeat to Joe Biden. According to Epps, formerly a marine and member of the far-right Oath Keepers group, the backlash from those reports led him and his wife to sell their ranch in Arizona and relocate to a recreational vehicle in an attempt to avoid the ongoing harassment.
Continue reading...A company Trump has used for work at his Virginia golf course was awarded $6.9m to paint the iconic attraction
Donald Trump’s latest beautification plan for Washington DC – the restoration of the 2,000ft-long reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial – has been met with claims that a $6.9m contract to carry out the project was hastily handed out to a company that renovated a swimming pool at the president’s Virginia golf course.
The New York Times reported that the no-bid contract for the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool was given to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, based in New Canton, Virginia, on 3 April – despite company records showing it has not previously been awarded a federal contract.
Continue reading...Showdown between Musk and Altman has rendered the world’s most wealthy comical under egalitarian eye of court
For the past couple of weeks, on the fourth floor of a courthouse on a quiet street in downtown Oakland, the world’s richest man and one of the world’s most valuable startups have been at war over the future of artificial intelligence.
Being one of the reporters in the room has felt like watching an updated, opposite-coast version of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities – ambition, ego, greed and the spectrum of social class on full display. The supporting cast has included Elon Musk fanboys, a stern judge and a who’s who of Silicon Valley’s most influential people.
Continue reading...Machines may soon translate every conversation flawlessly. But language is more than information – it is curiosity, intimacy and cultural discovery
One of my earliest assignments as a young interpreter was to provide simultaneous interpretation for the proceedings of an ecumenical council that brought together all Christian denominations. As my homework, I dutifully read scripture, the gospels, papal encyclicals and the conclusion of the first council of Nicaea.
There was, however, one thing I had not foreseen. Mass was held not in the conference hall, but in the church itself, where there were no booths and the interpreter was required to stand discreetly at the altar. Here, translation alone would not suffice – the interpreter had to perform the part of the priest, with his unmistakable clerical timbre, the arms outstretched then folded in prayer, the gaze repeatedly lifted towards heaven.
Continue reading...CHARLOTTE, N.C., May 8, 2026 — Honeywell (NASDAQ: HON) today announced that Quantinuum, a leading, full-stack quantum computing company, has publicly filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) relating to a proposed initial public offering of shares of its Class A common stock.
The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined. Quantinuum intends to list its Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol “QNT.”
J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley (in alphabetical order) are acting as joint lead active book-running managers for the proposed offering. Jefferies and Evercore ISI are also acting as active book-running managers.
The proposed offering is subject to market conditions, and there can be no assurance as to whether or when the offering may be completed, or as to the actual size or terms of the offering.
The proposed offering will be made available only by means of a prospectus. Copies of the preliminary prospectus, when available, may be obtained from: J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, NY 11717 or by email at prospectus-eq_fi@jpmchase.com and postsalemanualrequests@broadridge.com; Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, 180 Varick Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10014, Attention: Prospectus Department or by email at prospectus@morganstanley.com; Jefferies LLC, Attn: Equity Syndicate Prospectus Department, 520 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10022, by telephone at (877) 821-7388 or by email at Prospectus_Department@Jefferies.com; or Evercore Group L.L.C., Attention: Equity Capital Markets, 55 East 52nd Street, 35th Floor, New York, NY 10055, by telephone at 888-474-0200 or by email at ecm.prospectus@evercore.com.
The registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the SEC but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold, nor may offers to buy be accepted, prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction. Any offers, solicitations or offers to buy, or any sales of securities will be made in accordance with the registration requirements of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended.
More from HPCwire: Honeywell Confirms Quantinuum IPO Filing as Quantum Firms Face Market Scrutiny
About Honeywell
Honeywell is an integrated operating company serving a broad range of industries and geographies around the world. Our business is aligned with three powerful megatrends – automation, the future of aviation and energy transition – underpinned by our Honeywell Accelerator operating system and Honeywell Forge IoT platform. As a trusted partner, we help organizations solve the world’s toughest, most complex challenges, providing actionable solutions and innovations through our Aerospace Technologies, Industrial Automation, Building Automation and Energy and Sustainability Solutions business segments that help make the world smarter, safer, as well as more secure and sustainable. For more news and information on Honeywell, please visit www.honeywell.com/newsroom.
About Quantinuum
Quantinuum is a leading quantum computing company offering a full-stack platform designed to make quantum computing deployable in real-world environments. The company has commercially deployed multiple generations of quantum systems built on the well-established QCCD architecture, which it has implemented with novel designs and capabilities to achieve the industry’s highest accuracy levels based on average two-qubit gate fidelity as of December 31, 2025. Quantinuum has active engagements with market leaders across pharmaceuticals, material science, financial services, and government and industrial markets. Quantinuum’s headquarters is in Broomfield, Colorado, with additional facilities across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Singapore.
Source: Honeywell
The post Honeywell Announces Quantinuum’s Filing of Registration Statement for Proposed IPO appeared first on HPCwire.
You could build an entire data center around a new GPU with elaborate scale-up networking, exotic chiplet architectures, and advance liquid cooling. Or if you’re AMD, you could release a powerful GPU that customers can plug directly into the PCI busses of their existing servers, providing an immediate boost for running new AI workloads.
That’s just what AMD did this week with the release of its MI350P, the latest GPU in its Instinct line. Boasting 185 billion transistors, 144GB of HBM3e capacity, and 4 TB per second of peak memory bandwidth, the MI350P is designed to run small, medium, and large language models for AI inferencing and RAG (retrieval augmented generation) use cases.
The MI350 GPU (Source: AMD)
The MI350P plugs into a standard PCIe Gen 5 bus, providing 128GB per second of connectivity with a host. It operates within a 600W thermal envelope, and supports BF16, FP8, MXFP6 and MXFP4 workloads, offering 2,299 teraflops and up to 4,600 peak teraflops at MXFP4 precision through 128 AMD CDNA 4th Gen compute units.
Up to eight MI350P GPUs can be configured per node, and customers can segment their MI350P GPUs into four partitions, each with 36GB of HBM3 memory. The GPU is designed to handle AI models with up to 200 billion to 250 billion parameters; it also provides video and JPG decoding.
The new GPU uses standard air cooling, which AMD makes a point of. “Adopting AI doesn’t mean rebuilding infrastructure from the ground up,” wrote Suresh Andani, who heads business development teams for compute and enterprise AI at AMD, in an AMD blog post. “With AMD Instinct MI350P PCIe cards, enterprises can run more models and serve more users within their existing data centers.”
AMD launched the MI350P with support from computer makers, including Dell Technologies. David Schmidt, Dell’s vice president of product management, said the new GPU will help customers move forward more quickly. “For enterprises serious about AI, on-premises infrastructure isn’t a compromise,” he said. “It’s a competitive advantage delivering the control, security and predictable outcomes that matter most.”
Gigabyte is also adopting the MI350P across its AI server portfolio. Gigabyte General Manager Daniel Hou praised the new GPU for its practicality. “With its PCIe-based design, AMD Instinct MI350P enables flexible deployment and seamless integration into systems, allowing enterprises to build high-performance AI environments with the flexibility and efficiency required to scale globally,” Hou said.
AMD is also touting its software stack for its MI350 line of GPUs (Source: AMD)
AMD is also working on higher end air-cooled GPUs, as well as liquid cooled. For instance, it offers the Instinct UB B8, which is an 8-GPU air-cooled configuration of its MI350X and MI355X line that is delivered as a Universal Baseboard. The UB B8 delivers 2.3TB of HBM3, offering 8TB per second of memory bandwidth. It will also plug into AMD’s Infinity Fabric to provide scale-up capabilities that AMD says will be on par with Nvidia Blackwell. The UB B8 will support models with up to 500 billion parameters and is designed for AI training and inference at scale.
AMD also offers a liquid cooled version of the Instinct MI355X, which features a thermal envelope up to 1,400W. Supermicro and TensorWave are partnering with AMD to support these liquid-cooled chips. AMD also offers a liquid-cooled version of its Radeon gaming GPU.
There is definitely a market for ultra high-end GPUs that can be strung together in exotic ways to train the biggest AI models and power massive AI factories. These absolutely require liquid cooling, and possibly even different electrical regimes, such as Nvidia’s shift to 800V DC. But there are plenty of customers that need HPC gear to run slightly smaller AI models on their existing stack and who don’t want to build an entirely new data centers to do so. This is the segment that AMD is targeting with the MI355P GPUs.
The post AMD Delivers Plug-In AI Power with PCI-Based GPU appeared first on HPCwire.
The 1965 Voting Rights Act has long been considered a landmark Civil Rights era achievement that aimed to end discriminatory practices against Black Americans who tried to vote.
But a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling largely gutted the law, and many Republicans — including U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, the GOP frontrunner in the race for Florida governor — celebrated the court’s decision.
Donalds countered that it was Democrats’ discriminatory gerrymandering practices that spurred the Voting Rights Act’s creation in the first place.
Congress wrote and passed the 1965 law "because of the Democrat party at the time, especially in the South, who were racially gerrymandering districts to disenfranchise Black voters," Donalds said in a May 4 interview with Benny Johnson, a conservative commentator. (Gerrymandering is drawing district boundaries to give one political party, incumbent or group an advantage.)
Historians told PolitiFact that racist gerrymandering was not the driving force behind the law’s creation.
The Voting Rights Act was created to combat discriminatory practices against Black Americans who tried to vote, including literacy and property tests, grandfather clauses, poll taxes, voter roll purges, intimidation and violence.
"Donalds’ statement is not accurate, not even close," said Alex Keyssar, a Harvard University history and social policy professor. The Voting Rights Act passed because, in most Southern states, Black Americans were not permitted to vote or even register to vote, he said.
"Numerous devices were used to prevent Black people from registering, like literacy tests and understanding clauses, but gerrymandering was not the issue. There was no need to racially gerrymander because they couldn’t vote in the first place."
Although Donalds pointed at Democrats for the gerrymandering, Democrats today are not the southern Democrats of the 1960s.
Carol Anderson, an Emory University African American studies professor, called Donalds’ comment ahistorical and disingenuous, saying it ignores the Southern Strategy, where Republicans turned the Democratic South into a GOP-stronghold by criticizing the Civil Rights Movement to gain support.
"It treats the demographics of the two parties as stagnant, when it was the mid-1960s through the Reagan era when the major shifts happened."
PolitiFact asked Donalds’ campaign for comment but received no reply.
President Lyndon B. Johnson moves to shake hands with Martin Luther King, Jr. while others look on during the signing of the Voting Rights Act on Aug. 6, 1965, in Washington, D.C. (photo courtesy of LBJ Library, photo by Yoichi Okamoto)
Congress passed the Voting Rights Act to enforce the 15th Amendment and end over a century of discriminatory practices that prevented Black Americans, particularly in the South, from voting.
Despite Black men gaining the right to vote in 1869 with the amendment’s passage, many Southern states spent decades creating significant barriers for when Black men tried to register or vote. In practice, those barriers nullified the constitutional protection.
"The Voting Rights Act was necessary because the South had choked the life out of democracy through poll taxes, literacy tests, brutality, and white domestic terrorism," Anderson said.
Other barriers included property tests, allowing only property owners to vote and "grandfather clauses" which said people who didn’t own property could vote if their fathers or grandfathers had voted before 1867 — before Black men had the right to do so.
These Jim Crow obstacles led to decades of marches and voter registration campaigns that left activists brutally beaten or murdered. Mounting civil rights activism, along with increased media attention, pushed the federal government to act.
"Bloody Sunday," on March 7, 1965, in which police savagely beat hundreds of protesters as they set out to march for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, was another turning point, speeding the Voting Rights Act ’s passage.
State troopers hit protesters with billy clubs to break up a civil rights voting march in Selma, Ala., on March 7, 1965. (AP)
The law required state and local governments, including some Florida counties, with a history of discriminatory voting practices to go through a federal approval process called preclearance before changing any election laws or procedures. (The Supreme Court overturned this in 2013, ruling that the formula used to determine what places needed preclearance was unconstitutional because it was based on 1960s and ‘70s electoral conditions.)
"The VRA sought to have federal monitoring of areas throughout the U.S. that had a history of these actions," said Keneshia Grant, a Howard University political science professor. "While much of that discrimination was happening in the South, it was not limited to that region."
Section 2 of the law also prohibits governments from imposing election procedures or practices that would deny or restrict the right of U.S. citizens to vote based on race or color.
As a result, states drew new congressional maps to create districts with a Black majority, a practice the Supreme Court all but overruled.
Experts said the VRA primarily sought to fortify the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed that the right to vote could not be denied based on race. The law does not mention "apportionment," "gerrymandering" or "redistricting." Instead, it uses a broad brush to prohibit the many ways Black Americans could have their right to vote abridged or denied.
Some cases of discriminatory gerrymandering, primarily in the South, took place before the law passed, but historians say it wasn’t a primary tool for voter disenfranchisement at that time. It was lumped in as one of many discriminatory election procedures that the legislation aimed at remedying without explicitly saying so.
"I would not say that (gerrymandering) was the driving factor for the VRA," Grant said. "That would be like saying desegregation of buses was the reason for the Civil Rights Act. Are these things related? Yes. But the Civil Rights Act was much bigger than busing. Likewise, the VRA was bigger than just the lines."
Attempts at racial gerrymandering became more prevalent after the VRA passed, Keyssar, from Harvard said. It was in anticipation of such moves, he said, that the law required some states to get preclearance before amending election laws, which would include districting issues.
Donalds said Congress wrote and passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act because "the Democrat party at the time, especially in the South, were racially gerrymandering districts to disenfranchise Black voters."
The law sought to enforce the 15th Amendment and end longstanding racist practices against Black Americans to keep them from voting — including literacy tests, poll taxes, property tests, intimidation and violence.
Historians say racist gerrymandering existed before the law passed, but it wasn’t a primary tool for voter disenfranchisement at that time. The practice became more prevalent later in an attempt to neutralize the power of newly cast ballots as more Black people were able to vote.
The law doesn’t mention gerrymandering, and while it’s included as one of many discriminatory practices the law sought to prohibit, it wasn’t the reason for its creation.
We rate Donalds’ statement False.
RELATED: What does federal law say about partisan gerrymandering? Fact-checking Florida Democratic leader
RELATED: Is Florida’s mid-decade redistricting plan ‘illegal,’ as some Democrats say?
Network lawyers in a legal motion strongly pushed back against the FCC’s investigation into The View talkshow
Lawyers representing an ABC station have accused the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of punishing the network for political purposes in a strongly worded attack on the Trump-controlled commission’s investigation into the top-rated talkshow The View.
In a legal motion filed on Thursday, KTRK-TV, a Houston-based local television station owned by ABC, pushed back strongly against the FCC investigation, accusing the purportedly independent agency of taking actions that “threaten to upend decades of settled law and practice and chill critical protected speech, both with respect to The View and more broadly”.
Continue reading...
Why Should Delaware Care?
In his second year in office, Wilmington Mayor John Carney says he will double down on encouraging affordable housing in Delaware’s largest city. But several council members, concerned about how new money would be spent, are supporting an alternative proposal to send more dollars directly to people struggling to secure housing.
After weeks of scrutiny into Wilmington Mayor John Carney’s proposed $20 million affordable housing initiative, the City Council has introduced an alternative plan that would reduce the amount of money available for subsidies to developers.
The new plan, introduced by Councilwoman Christian Willauer as an amendment to Carney’s initiative, calls for redistributing many of those dollars into various programs to directly support people struggling to secure housing.
During a council meeting Tuesday, Willauer said her proposal aims to address residents’ immediate needs. It also reduces the amount of money used from the city’s savings accounts and provides safeguards around the dollars that would be sent to developers, she said.
“We need a lot more details and guardrails on any spending around the construction of affordable housing,” Willauer said.
Willauer’s skepticism of Carney’s plan highlights persistent ideological divisions between the mayor’s office and a faction of the City Council over how the city should address its housing crisis.
It also sets up what could become the latest policy standoff between the two sides, following previous contention over rent stabilization, tenant protections and homelessness.
In response to Willauer’s alternative plan, Carney’s deputy chief of staff, Daniel Walker, said her amendment relies on funding commitments that would ultimately increase long-term costs for city residents. He also said it unrealistically relies on still-uncommitted dollars from the state government.
“It believes a $10 million match from the state will magically materialize,” Walker said in a statement to Spotlight Delaware.
Carney’s and Willauer’s competing proposals also come in the wake of calls from some housing advocates for the city to direct money to rental assistance and to services for the city’s unhoused population.
But Walker has also pushed back on that approach, saying rental assistance may provide short-term relief but does not increase the city’s supply of affordable housing. He also reiterated the mayor’s longstanding stance that homeless services should not be funded through the city.
During a city council meeting on Tuesday, Walker sat alongside Wilmington housing director, Bob Weir, to provide a presentation of Carney’s original affordable housing plan, which would draw $20 million from the city’s Tax Stabilization Reserve.
Their comments came more than a month after Carney first unveiled the plan during his budget address for the City of Wilmington.
They noted Tuesday that most of that money – $16.8 million – would fund subsidies to developers to incentivize the construction of around 200 affordable homes. Walker said the incentives would offset construction costs and also leverage private investment.
The affordable units would target households making between 60% and 80% of the area median income, as defined under the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development standards. In Wilmington, that would translate roughly to households that earn between $1,434 and $1,910 monthly.
Of the remaining dollars from the initiative, about $2 million would fund the preparation of vacant lots for development. Another $500,000 would be used for architectural design and engineering, and another $500,000 would go to the Wilmington Neighborhood Conservancy Land Bank.
In contrast, Willauer’s plan would direct several chunks of $500,000 into a litany of programs, including emergency rental assistance; first and last month rental assistance; eviction prevention; a homeowner repair program; and a fund to fix property tax assessment errors.
To incentivize development, Willauer’s plan would also allocate at least $10 million into a city housing trust fund to be overseen by the City Council and the mayor’s office. Willauer said the joint oversight would allow both bodies to decide where and how the money would be spent.
WIllauer’s plan would cost the city a total of $12.5 million. It also involves asking the state to match that investment.
During Tuesday’s meeting, several council members expressed support for the alternative plan, which Willauer said had been developed with the help of Councilmembers Shané Darby and Coby Owens.
Councilman Alex Hackett called it “a compromise that needs to be made here.”
Several council members also raised concerns during the meeting about the mayor’s proposal. They questioned Walker and Weir over whether the plan is specific enough, whether it does enough to help current Wilmington residents, and whether the city should spend such a large amount from its reserves without more detail.
Separately, Council members Zanthia Oliver and Ernest “Trippi” Congo stressed what they said was a need for clearer guarantees that Wilmington residents and minority developers would have access to the construction opportunities tied to the program.
Owens challenged the administration’s argument that rental assistance would duplicate state and federal programs, saying the city is already proposing to stack its housing development money with other state and federal development funds.
“Why not try to do both?” Owens asked, adding that rental assistance, if done correctly, could help residents stay in their homes.
Tuesday’s meeting came about a week after another meeting in which City Council members similarly interrogated the Carney administration over its housing plan. During that meeting of the council’s Finance Committee, more than a dozen city residents also occupied the council chamber’s gallery to hold signs making clear their opposition to plan.
During the meeting, council members peppered Weir with questions about the city’s previous housing initiatives they said did not produce what had been promised. Many also voiced concerns that the developer incentive would be directed primarily to the most prominent developers in the city.
Willauer opened her questions of Weir by stating that she has several “concerns about the $20 million.” She then asked how city officials would define “small” and “large” developers, and how much money each could receive under Carney’s plan.
“Do you anticipate that $10 million would be for larger developers and $6 million for smaller developers? Or do you anticipate that it’s going to be $15 million for large developers and $1 million for small developers? “ Willauer asked.
Weir in response said he could only guess what the ultimate breakdown would be. He did note his expectation that the largest developers to receive city dollars would likely be nonprofit companies.
City spokesperson Caroline Klinger later indicated that Wilmington’s most influential developer, Buccini/Pollin Group, would not likely be involved in the affordable housing project.
“Currently, BPG does not develop affordable housing, nor have they approached us about doing so,” Klinger said in a statement to Spotlight Delaware.
The post Wilmington council, mayor at odds over affordable housing dollars for developers appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Why Should Delaware Care?
In 2024, Delaware enacted a law to expunge low-level criminal records, removing a barrier that can keep people from accessing jobs, housing and education. The law was expected to clear nearly 600,000 records, but disagreements among state officials over which records qualify have delayed the process. Until that is resolved, thousands of Delawareans may continue to carry records that could block them from advancing in society.
Rebecka Ash is days away from finishing her bachelor’s degree in social work. Soon after, she will begin an accelerated master’s program.
But as she advances through her education – which comes after a period in which she spent in prison on drug charges – Ash said records that should have been expunged are still showing up on background checks and blocking her from internship opportunities and scholarships for school.
“I take full responsibility for what I did,” Ash said. “But I don’t know what else to do to show people that I’m trying to better myself.”
Her experience reflects a larger issue unfolding across the state. For thousands of Delawareans, a law meant to automatically clear low-level criminal records has yet to deliver as promised, with delays tied to state police processing that is slowing its rollout.
Employers, landlords and educational institutions often use background checks to screen applicants, which can prevent people with minor charges, such as shoplifting or possession of drug paraphernalia, from accessing housing, jobs and education.
In 2021, Delaware passed the Clean Slate Act, which promised to automatically expunge certain misdemeanors, as well as charges that had been dismissed and certain other criminal records.
State officials had three years to set up the automated expungement process before the law went into effect in August 2024. But nearly two years later, that has not happened, and of the 594,000 cases expected to be expunged, Delaware has cleared just over 25,000.
Asked about the issue during a WHYY radio interview last week, Gov. Matt Meyer called the delay “reprehensible.” Other officials, such as his director of research, Matt Rosen, placed part of the blame on Meyer’s predecessor, John Carney, who was governor when the law was enacted.
Carney’s office did not respond Tuesday to a request to comment for this story.
Currently, state officials are in disagreement about the number of cases that should be cleared under the new law.
Rosen described the situation as officials being “not in full alignment yet.”
When the bill was passed in 2021, the Delaware Criminal Justice Information System (DELJIS) identified more than 290,000 adults with nearly 600,000 cases eligible for expungement.
But officials from the State Bureau of Identification, which is under Delaware State Police, say they believe the estimated caseload is inaccurate.
In a statement to Spotlight Delaware, SBI spokesman Lt. Tyler Wright said agency officials found records within the DELJIS list of expungable cases “that were not eligible.”
As a result, SBI officials began to manually evaluate each record up for expungement – a process that has resulted in delays.
“SBI will continue to evaluate each record for accuracy, and we are working with all parties involved to create a more efficient process that minimizes errors and enables swifter review and expungement of records,” Wright said.
Dominic Carretto, executive director of DELJIS, said that differences in determining which cases are eligible for expungement “are not unexpected in a multi-agency environment.”
Those differences do not indicate limitations of the underlying system, he said, but instead may “reflect variations in how eligibility is interpreted or how individual records are reviewed.”
In recent years, a national movement has grown to encourage states to pass legislation that “automates record sealing for people with eligible records,” according to the Clean Slate Initiative.
Delaware was the fifth state to adopt a Clean Slate law when it passed its act in 2021.
Today, a total of 13 states and Washington D.C. have passed similar legislation.
But recently Delaware’s law has been under fire from criminal justice advocates, who say the process is not meeting standards.
“We are coming up on two years since the implementation of the Clean Slate Act, and thousands of Delawareans are still waiting on their second chance,” said Kailyn Richards, associate director of Tide Shift Justice Project, a local advocacy organization.
Tide Shift and other advocacy groups have contrasted Delaware’s lack of progress to Pennsylvania, which expunged over 34 million cases during the first year of implementation of its similar Clean Slate Act.
If SBI continues at its current review rate, it could take Delaware over 20 years to get through the backlog of potentially eligible expungements.
Before the Clean Slate Act passed, cases resolved in favor of a defendant, along with some low-level convictions, could be removed from a person’s record if they met certain criteria. But individuals had to go through a two-step application process and pay fees that start at $75.
Individuals are still able to use this process despite the Clean Slate Act being enacted, though some advocates stress that not everyone can afford the fees.
Rosen and Wright have not given a timeline about when the Clean Slate Act will begin to work to its full capacity.
Ash, the student studying social work, said she began the manual expungement process in 2023, paying out of pocket to clear some charges, while others were supposed to be automatically removed under the Clean Slate Act. Years later, she’s still waiting, she said.
As she has begun working in the social work field, the Kent County resident has seen other people who are also trying to navigate the expungement process.
“I have charges, just like a lot of my clients do, and if I’m having a hard time navigating from a place of privilege … then it’s impossible for me to help them get through it too,” she said.
The post Delaware’s Clean Slate law delayed, leaving thousands with low-level records appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.
Go behind the scenes with our team as we find and make sense of the numbers.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will reduce federal Medicaid spending by more than $900 billion over a decade. But in a series of congressional hearings last month, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. misleadingly claimed that “there are no cuts to Medicaid” as a result of that 2025 law.
Kennedy said there are no cuts to Medicaid under the OBBBA because the CBO also estimated that federal spending on Medicaid will increase by “47% over the next 10 years.” But health policy experts told us that total spending on Medicaid is expected to still grow because of population changes and an increase in healthcare costs.
“[T]he notion that since Medicaid spending overall will continue to rise means that there are no cuts is simply false,” Michael S. Sparer, chair of the department of health policy and management at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, told us in an email. “The rise in Medicaid spending would be far greater had HR1 not been enacted,” he said, referring to the OBBBA’s assigned bill number.
At the hearings, however, Kennedy repeatedly clashed with Democrats who said that the Republican legislation that President Donald Trump signed into law last summer made cuts to Medicaid and would reduce access to healthcare for millions of people.
For example, during an April 22 Senate Finance Committee hearing on the HHS budget, Democratic Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota, while talking about mental health services covered by Medicaid, said that the Trump administration and congressional Republicans had “pushed through the biggest cuts to Medicaid in the history of that program.”
In response, Kennedy said that wasn’t the case. “First of all, there are no cuts in Medicaid,” he said. “I keep saying this. Here’s what the CBO said: In fiscal year 2025, $668 billion. Fiscal year 2036, $981 billion. That’s not a cut. It’s a 47% increase.”
Smith interjected, by saying: “Secretary Kennedy, a trillion dollars in cuts, according to the CBO. Seven million people losing their health insurance because of the Trump administration actions. That’s not debatable.”
Smith was largely correct about what the CBO said. It estimated a more than $900 billion reduction in Medicaid spending and an increase in the uninsured of 7.5 million people over 10 years.
Based on a CBO analysis, KFF, an independent health policy research organization, estimated that the OBBBA reduces federal Medicaid spending by precisely $911 billion. Most of the federal savings, KFF said, come from the law imposing new work requirements on individuals who became eligible for Medicaid due to an expansion of the program under the Affordable Care Act, as well as “limiting states’ ability to raise the state share of Medicaid revenues through provider taxes, restricting state-directed payments to hospitals, nursing facilities, and other providers, and increasing barriers to enrolling in and renewing Medicaid coverage.”
KFF said that those Medicaid spending reductions in the OBBBA would offset some of the costs of another part of the bill, which extended some expiring tax cuts for individuals.
Those spending reductions count as “cuts,” experts in health policy told us.
“By conventional budget scoring methods, including those used by CBO, as well as [Office of Management and Budget] and others, there were very large cuts to Medicaid in OBBBA,” Leighton Ku, director of the Center for Health Policy Research at George Washington University, said in an email. “CBO (and others) compare estimated federal Medicaid expenditures under OBBBA with the amount that would have been spent WITHOUT the legislation.”
Furthermore, Ku said, “A more telling sign of the impact of the cuts is that CBO estimated that the Medicaid and related CHIP cuts will cause the number of uninsured to rise by about 7.5 million people” by 2034. (CHIP is the Children’s Health Insurance Program for families that make too much money to qualify for Medicaid but can’t afford private insurance.)
We reached out to HHS about Kennedy’s claims, but haven’t received a response.
In an April 22 hearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Kennedy said the statement that “we’ve cut Medicaid by a trillion dollars” was a Democratic talking point. He claimed that the CBO “disagrees” with Democrats, and referenced the agency’s estimate that federal spending on Medicaid will increase from more than $600 billion in fiscal 2025 to well over $900 billion 10 years from now.
But Kennedy “is using smoke and mirrors here — everything gets more expensive over time, especially in health care,” Dr. Benjamin Sommers, a Harvard University professor of health care economics and medicine, told us in an email.
Akeiisa Coleman, senior program officer for Medicaid at the Commonwealth Fund, said in an emailed statement that, despite the projected spending reductions resulting from OBBBA, “federal spending on Medicaid is likely to increase over time to reflect changes in population and the cost of health care.”
Ku called Kennedy’s claim “misleading” because it “ignores the reality of medical care inflation, the aging of the population (which causes medical expenditures to rise even more) and other pressures.” He said “the reality is that people will receive much less health care under Medicaid because of these cuts,” and that “health care providers like hospitals, doctors’ offices and nursing homes will hurt financially because of the loss of revenue.”
Meanwhile, HHS has argued that some spending reductions were part of necessary changes to overhaul the Medicaid program.
“To be clear, HHS is taking steps to ensure Medicaid serves those it is intended to support,” Andrew Nixon, an HHS spokesman, told the Associated Press for an April 23 story about Kennedy’s claims. “These actions are not cuts — they are focused on addressing waste, fraud, and abuse to better position the program for those who rely on it.”
However, Sommers said “this is not simply cutting out waste and abuse,” since the CBO estimates that millions of people will lose health insurance because of eligibility restrictions and other changes that the law made to Medicaid.
“Any reasonable person would interpret that as a sizable cut to the program – particularly if you’re one of the millions of people expected to lose their health insurance under the law,” Sommers said.
We’ve explained before that while Republicans have said they are targeting able-bodied adults with the new Medicaid work requirements, health policy experts say that other groups would lose coverage as well due to paperwork burdens and other Medicaid provisions in the legislation.
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The post Kennedy Denies the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s Spending Cuts to Medicaid appeared first on FactCheck.org.
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