News Reel

Todd Lyons, the acting head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is planning to leave the federal government later this spring.

Group urges caution as it says Israel has history of ‘breaking agreements’; Israeli prime minister says key demand is that Hezbollah must be dismantled

• Trump announces 10-day ceasefire in Lebanon after ‘excellent conversations’

Iran has stopped all petrochemical exports to prioritise domestic supply and prevent shortages of raw materials, Reuters reported.

The state-owned National Petrochemical Company ordered firms to suspend exports until further notice.

The leaders of Lebanon and Israel agreed to begin a 10-day ceasefire starting at 5 p.m. Eastern Time.

It is now the top provider on our best VPN list for worldwide coverage.

I've tested dozens of iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air cases. Here are my current top picks, complete with mini reviews of each case.

The occupants of the other vehicle assumed the agent was just a “crazy person driving down the road aiming guns at people,” they told investigators.

Police say couple were living together amid divorce and that teenage children called 911 from Annandale home

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Justin Fairfax, a former lieutenant governor of Virginia whose tenure was upended by allegations of sexual assault, shot and killed his wife Cerina Fairfax on Thursday before killing himself, police said.

Kevin Davis, the chief of the Fairfax county police department in Virginia, said at a press conference that the killings took place in the context of “an ongoing domestic dispute surrounding what seems to be a complicated or messy divorce”.

In the US, the suicide prevention lifeline is 988 and the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123 and the domestic abuse helpline is 0808 2000 247. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. Other international helplines can be found via www.befrienders.org

The VPN software giant expands to 211 locations, with better speeds than ever.

Democratic representative from California has suspended gubernatorial campaign and resigned from Congress

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has opened an investigation into Eric Swalwell following his resignation from Congress, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The news of a federal investigation comes days after the Democratic representative from California stepped down due to multiple allegations of sexual misconduct.

The technology would enhance Iran's ability to detect and track incoming threats, like low-flying drones and cruise missiles.

Campaigners organise open letter to director demanding ‘fair day’s wage’ for all workers at V&A museums

A row over pay has broken out at the V&A before the opening of its newest site , with thousands of people calling for it to become a living wage employer.

On Saturday, V&A East will open its doors in Stratford, east London, showcasing stunning fabrics, photos and black British music. It joins a wider group of V&A museums including its original site in South Kensington, Young V&A in Bethnal Green and V&A Dundee. The V&A describes its latest opening as one of the most significant new museum projects in the UK.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Two years ago, Microsoft launched its first wave of "Copilot+" Windows PCs with a handful of exclusive features that could take advantage of the neural processing unit (NPU) hardware being built into newer laptop processors. These NPUs could enable AI and machine learning features that could run locally rather than in someone's cloud, theoretically enhancing security and privacy. One of the first Copilot+ features was Recall, a feature that promised to track all your PC usage via screenshot to help you remember your past activity. But as originally implemented, Recall was neither private nor secure; the feature stored its screenshots plus a giant database of all user activity in totally unencrypted files on the user's disk, making it trivial for anyone with remote or local access to grab days, weeks, or even months of sensitive data, depending on the age of the user's Recall database. After journalists and security researchers discovered and detailed these flaws, Microsoft delayed the Recall rollout by almost a year and substantially overhauled its security. All locally stored data would now be encrypted and viewable only with Windows Hello authentication; the feature now did a better job detecting and excluding sensitive information, including financial information, from its database; and Recall would be turned off by default, rather than enabled on every PC that supported it. The reconstituted Recall was a big improvement, but having a feature that records the vast majority of your PC usage is still a security and privacy risk. Security researcher Alexander Hagenah was the author of the original "TotalRecall" tool that made it trivially simple to grab the Recall information on any Windows PC, and an updated "TotalRecall Reloaded" version exposes what Hagenah believes are additional vulnerabilities. The problem, as detailed by Hagenah on the TotalRecall GitHub page, isn't with the security around the Recall database, which he calls "rock solid." The problem is that, once the user has authenticated, the system passes Recall data to another system process called AIXHost.exe, and that process doesn't benefit from the same security protections as the rest of Recall. "The vault is solid," Hagenah writes. "The delivery truck is not." The TotalRecall Reloaded tool uses an executable file to inject a DLL file into AIXHost.exe, something that can be done without administrator privileges. It then waits in the background for the user to open Recall and authenticate using Windows Hello. Once this is done, the tool can intercept screenshots, OCR'd text, and other metadata that Recall sends to the AIXHost.exe process, which can continue even after the user closes their Recall session. "The VBS enclave won't decrypt anything without Windows Hello," Hagenah writes. "The tool doesn't bypass that. It makes the user do it, silently rides along when the user does it, or waits for the user to do it." A handful of tasks, including grabbing the most recent Recall screenshot, capturing select metadata about the Recall database, and deleting the user's entire Recall database, can be done with no Windows Hello authentication. Once authenticated, Hagenah says the TotalRecall Reloaded tool can access both new information recorded to the Recall database as well as data Recall has previously recorded. "We appreciate Alexander Hagenah for identifying and responsibly reporting this issue. After careful investigation, we determined that the access patterns demonstrated are consistent with intended protections and existing controls, and do not represent a bypass of a security boundary or unauthorized access to data," a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. "The authorization period has a timeout and anti-hammering protection that limit the impact of malicious queries."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.​ testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on Thursday, kicking off an expected sprint of seven budget hearings he'll attend over the next week.

The Tapo C675D kit is the largest Tapo security camera I've seen, complete with tracking and a solar panel for battery charging.

April 16, 2026 — Picture two materials sandwiched together. The boundary between them may appear flat, but, in reality, it is full of tiny bumps and dents.

Suddenly, the materials are hit with a shockwave. If that wave hits a bump in the material interface, it slows down. If it hits a dent, it accelerates forward. This imbalance creates fast, narrow jets of material — called the Richtmyer-Meshkov (RM) instability.

Adding an optimized void structure (top right) counteracts a shockwave-induced instability, reducing jetting (bottom right) that can interfere with inertial confinement fusion. Without this void, significant jetting occurs (bottom left). Image credit: Strucka et al.

In a recent paper, published in Physical Review Letters, researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Imperial College London and their collaborators used AI to optimize and 3D printing to create a target that effectively negates the RM instability.

“Our target reshapes the shockwave, in both space and time, as it travels through the material,” said first author Jergus Strucka, now at the European XFEL. “Instead of a single shock hitting the surface, we introduce voids to break it up into a sequence of smaller pressure pulses that arrive at slightly different times.”

The team used a machine-learning design optimization algorithm to search through many possible target structures. The process suggested that a void — a specifically shaped cavity in the material — could reshape the shock as it passes through, effectively weakening and redistributing the wave.

“The challenge is that while these designs look promising in simulations, they are often extremely difficult to manufacture and experimentally test,” said Strucka. “Our work is one of the first demonstrations that such AI-optimized structures can actually be built and studied in real experiments.”

To assemble such a target, the scientists used a polymer 3D printer to make an inverted version of their target structure. Much like making Jell-O in a mold, they fill the printed structure with gelatin, let it set, then remove it. As a result, one side of the gelatin target has a wavy surface, while the other side contains the voids.

The gelatin structure is deposited onto a thin copper strip. They send a large electrical pulse — equivalent to several lightning strikes — through the copper, which heats, explodes and launches a shockwave into the gelatin.

First, the wave encounters the voids. Then it moves toward the wavy end of the gelatin, where the RM instability would normally grow. But by the time it gets there, the wave has been redistributed.

“To some degree, we are creating another instability using the designed voids that acts against the RM instability and reduces jetting,” said study author and LLNL scientist Dane Sterbentz. “By modifying the original pressure pulse as it passes through these voids, we are also creating a sort of secondary pressure wave that can actually act against the unstable jetting.”

The same physics of voids should apply in a sphere, making these results potentially useful for improving fill tubes or material interfaces in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) targets. During a fusion ignition experiment, unstable jetting can reduce the symmetry of the imploding capsule and therefore the amount of energy produced.

“For ICF experiments at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), it can be difficult and costly to probe isolated effects like the RM instability,” said Sterbentz. “That’s where our experimental setup is useful — it allows us to probe the instability in a much simpler system. However, experiments more directly relevant to ICF will have to be further pursued at facilities such as the Omega Laser Facility or NIF.”

These findings also extend beyond ICF to a broad swathe of materials research where shockwaves are relevant, including oil and gas extraction and defense applications.

Source: LLNL

The post LLNL Combines Machine Learning and 3D Printing for Shockwave Control Experiments appeared first on HPCwire.

Q: How real is birth tourism?

A: The government doesn’t provide estimates of the extent of so-called birth tourism — pregnant women coming to the U.S. on tourism visas in order to obtain birthright U.S. citizenship for their newborn child. One outside group has estimated it may be more than 20,000 births per year. Some argue it’s not common enough to justify upending longstanding birthright citizenship policies.

FULL ANSWER

As the reader who asked us about this noted, birth tourism was cited by the solicitor general in Supreme Court arguments on April 1 as a reason why birthright citizenship ought to be ended. According to longstanding interpretation, the U.S. Constitution grants citizenship to children born in the U.S. even if their parents are in the country illegally. The Trump administration is challenging that.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued before the Supreme Court that birthright citizenship “has spawned a sprawling industry of birth tourism as uncounted thousands of foreigners from potentially hostile nations have flocked to give birth in the United States in recent decades, creating a whole generation of American citizens abroad with no meaningful ties to the United States.”

When asked by Chief Justice John Roberts if he had any information about how common or significant a problem birth tourism is, Sauer responded, “No one knows for sure.”

The high court is expected to rule this summer on the case challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship, which he issued on the first day of his second term.

The State Department does not keep data on birth tourism. But that hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from sharing high-end estimates.

Trump has long criticized birth tourism, saying it is a magnet for illegal immigration. In 2023, he proposed an executive order that he said would “end their unfair practice known as birth tourism where hundreds of thousands of people from all over the planet squat in hotels for their last few weeks of pregnancy to illegitimately and illegally obtain U.S. citizenship for the child, often to later exploit chain migration to jump the line and get green cards for themselves and their family members.” (What he signed in 2025, however, went beyond targeting birth tourism and called for an end to birthright citizenship for any child born in the U.S. to parents who aren’t citizens or legal permanent residents.)  

On Fox News on April 4, Border Czar Tom Homan said, “Birth tourism has been a problem for the three decades that I’ve been enforcing immigration law, especially from Russia and China, where hundreds of thousands of their nationals come to this country just to give birth. So we’ve got hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals and Russian nationals who have U.S. citizen children. And if that continues, that is a significant national security threat.”

In 2020, the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that advocates low immigration, estimated the possible number of birth tourism cases at 20,000 to 26,000 per year. For context, there were 3.61 million births in the U.S. that year.

Steven Camarota, director of research for CIS, said he arrived at the estimate by comparing census data with birth records. Due to some changes in the census data, he said, the 2020 estimate is the most recent he can provide. But over a decade, he said, that would be an estimate of more than 200,000 birth tourism cases.

Birth Tourism Operations

In his Supreme Court arguments, Sauer cited a 2022 congressional report from Republicans on the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs that detailed two birth tourism operations: one that solicited clients in China and operated out of California and another that catered to “Russian elites coming to Miami through these birth tourism companies.”

Sauer also noted that in 2015, a Chinese newspaper reported that at least 500 companies offered “birth tourism” services in China at that time.

In 2019, federal authorities announced the first federal case involving birth tourism, with the arrest of three people for running an operation in Southern California catering to Chinese clients. The indictments, which came following an undercover operation in 2015, also included an additional 16 fugitive defendants.

“The indictments describe birth tourism schemes in which foreign nationals, mostly from China, applied for visitor visas to come to the United States and lied about the length of their trips, where they would stay, and the purposes of their trips – which were to come to the U.S. for three months to give birth so their children would receive U.S. birthright citizenship,” according to a U.S. Attorney’s Office press release at the time.

The press release said the operators coached pregnant Chinese customers about “how to pass the U.S. Consulate interview in China by falsely stating that they were going to stay in the U.S. for only two weeks. Their clients were also coached to trick U.S. Customs at ports of entry by wearing loose clothing that would conceal their pregnancies. … The indictments allege that many of the Chinese birth tourism customers failed to pay all of the medical costs associated with their hospital births, and the debts were referred to collection.”

“Receiving a tourist visa from the United States Government is a privilege, not a right,” IRS Criminal Investigation Acting Special Agent in Charge Bryant Jackson stated at the time.

One of the operations in the indictment purported to have a “100-person team” in China and to have served more than 500 Chinese birth tourism customers. The operation used an array of apartments in California and charged customers between $40,000 to $80,000. Another, which was believed to be the largest birth tourism operation, claimed it “provided services to 8,000 pregnant women (4,000 from China) since we established.”

In an interview on Fox News in January, Peter Schweizer, author of the book “The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon,” said China had “created an industrial model to exploit birthright citizenship.”

“Our federal government has no idea how many Chinese nationals have done this,” Schweizer said, because the U.S. does not compile birth certificate data on the nationality of parents. “So our federal government has no clue.”

Schweizer claimed Chinese officials estimated as many as 100,000 Chinese babies have been born each year in the U.S. over the last 13 years.

Republican legislators have also raised concerns about the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a 14-island U.S. territory in the Western Pacific, being used as a birth tourism hub. Since it’s a U.S. territory, those born in the Northern Mariana Islands are granted citizenship.

In a Jan. 15 letter to the departments of Homeland Security and the Interior, Sens. Rick Scott, Jim Banks and Markwayne Mullin argued that President Barack Obama had paved the way for birth tourism with a parole program in 2009 that enabled Chinese nationals to visit the Northern Mariana Islands without a tourist visa.

“Birth tourism has long been an underground industry in the CNMI, with pregnant Chinese women flocking to Saipan to give birth that automatically provides U.S. citizenship to their new-born child,” the Pacific Island Times reported on Dec. 5, 2017. “Most of these women leave the CNMI after childbirth and receipt of their baby’s U.S. passport.”

Births registered to foreign tourists in the Northern Mariana Islands reached a peak of 581 in 2018, the New York Times reported.

That year, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands reported the conviction of a man for operating an illegal birth tourism business on Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands. A press release said the man — who was sentenced to a year in jail — said he had employed “dozens of caretakers, or ‘nannies’, all Chinese nationals who were in the CNMI without work authorization.”

Kimberlyn King-Hinds, a Republican who serves as a non-voting delegate for CNMI in the U.S. House of Representatives, told NPR that local and federal officials have since cracked down on the practice and tightened border security. By 2025, she said, births to foreign tourists had dropped to 47. (That figure was also confirmed by the New York Times.)

Federal Policies

In 2020, the Trump administration issued a new rule giving the State Department discretion to deny tourism visas to an applicant it has “reason to believe intends to travel for this primary purpose [birth tourism].”

According to the 2022 minority report from the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the “rule change made it more difficult for birth tourism companies to continue operations.”

Camarota said the rule change may have encouraged federal authorities to be more diligent in scrutinizing people seeking tourism visas. But he believes there is more the government could do — such as barring travel visas to people who appear to be obviously pregnant.

“Birth tourism is an issue, there is no doubt,” Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications and public affairs at the Migration Policy Institute, told us via email. “It is visa fraud and a misuse of the U.S. immigration system.”

According to U.S. law, when people come to the U.S. on tourism visas for pleasure, that “does not include obtaining a visa for the primary purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for a child by giving birth in the United States.”

“That said, birth tourism is a very small occurrence – of the 3.6 million U.S. births annually, a tiny fraction is due to foreign women who are not regularly domiciled in the U.S. coming here for the purpose of giving birth to secure U.S. citizenship for their child,” Mittelstadt said.

In 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 9,576 births in the U.S. to foreign residents. Mittelstadt acknowledges that the CDC figures may be an undercount of birth tourism, and that many women may list a U.S. address even if they are not intending to live in the U.S. after giving birth.

“Still, even the most expansive estimates of birth tourism … [from CIS] puts the total at a max 26,000 births a year,” Mittelstadt said.

“There are effective ways to address birth tourism without watering down constitutional protections and both expanding the size of the unauthorized population and creating a category of second-class individuals as would occur if birthright citizenship is ended,” Mittelstadt said.

For example, Mittelstadt said, the government could tighten consular and border screenings, including “rigorous questioning about purpose of travel and financial arrangements for medical care. And making travel primarily for giving birth in the U.S. an explicit ground for inadmissibility or visitor visa denial.” In addition, she said, questions could be added to visa application forms “about pregnancy and intent to deliver in the U.S., with long-term or lifetime visa bans for those who engage in misrepresentations.” Regulations could also be put in place stipulating how late in pregnancy women can travel from international destinations to the U.S. And law enforcement could also prosecute birth tourism operators more vigorously.

Camarota agreed there are ways the U.S. could reduce birth tourism short of banning birthright citizenship.

“You probably can address a lot of it just by taking a forceful position,” Camarota said. “You couldn’t eliminate it, but … you probably could greatly curtail it with different State Department rules and different border controls.”

Camarota said he also wishes the administration had started with an executive order more narrowly targeting birth tourism, which he thinks might be more winnable at the Supreme Court.

“Birth tourism probably is the best case against automatic birthright citizenship,” Camarota said. “Most Americans, say, ‘Yeah, that doesn’t seem right at all.’ And I think that that’s probably where they should start.”

At the Supreme Court hearing on April 1 to consider abolishing birthright citizenship altogether, Chief Justice Roberts asked Sauer, the solicitor general, if he agreed that birth tourism “has no impact on the legal analysis before us.”

Sauer responded that birth tourism is an example that the 14th Amendment’s “interpretation has these implications that could not possibly have been approved by the 19th century framers of this amendment.”

Sauer noted that we now live in a world “where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen.”

“Well, it’s a new world,” Roberts said. “It’s the same Constitution.”

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

The post What Do We Know About ‘Birth Tourism’? appeared first on FactCheck.org.

PARIS, April 16, 2026 — Atos, a global leader of AI-powered digital transformation, today announced it has been entrusted by the European Space Agency (ESA) to launch an Open Competition to expand DestinE ecosystem. DestinE is a flagship initiative led by the European Commission and implemented by the ESA, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) to create a highly accurate digital twin of the Earth.

Credit: Shutterstock

DestinE’s ecosystem is designed to assist policymakers, researchers or innovators simulate, monitor and better understand natural phenomena and human activity, offering new ways to engage with and understand our world better to shape a sustainable future.

As a result of this first Open Competition, 12 innovative Service Providers have been selected to deliver Advanced Applications & Services (AAS) on DestinE Platform.

Some of these services are now fully operational, offering unprecedented opportunities for exploration and understanding.

Assessing Quality of Life with CALIFE

CALIFE (“Quality of Life”), developed by Murmuration, is designed to make satellite Earth Observation insights accessible to everyone, from the general public to local authorities. It provides personalized, easy-to-understand reports on environmental and health conditions at a hyper-local scale.

CALIFE offers:

• Free service for municipalities,
• Premium quality-of-life reports for citizens,
• Custom projections for decision-makers.

By raising awareness, supporting local policies, and fostering resilience to climate change, CALIFE creates a virtuous cycle toward healthier, more sustainable communities.

Monitoring Potato Fields with Harvic (Harvest in Control)

Harvic, developed by GeoVille, is designed to provide stakeholders in the potato industry with a clear and reliable view of crop development throughout the season, as well as accurate predictions for harvest time in terms of quantity and quality. By combining satellite information, weather data, and field observations, HARVIC transforms complex datasets into simple, actionable insights.

This innovative service helps users to:

• Understand crop conditions and monitor their evolution,
• Anticipate yield and quality, reducing uncertainty,
• Identify potential risks early, enabling proactive measures.

HARVIC supports better planning for harvest and logistics, complementing traditional field checks and expertise. Built around real operational needs, it integrates seamlessly into existing workflows, enhancing foresight and decision-making confidence.

By saving time, optimizing resources, and promoting more sustainable farming practices, HARVIC not only empowers the potato industry to thrive in a rapidly changing agricultural landscape but also contributes to a deeper, data-driven understanding of agricultural dynamics in a rapidly changing environment.

Exploring Land Temperatures in High-Resolution with Hi-Rest LST

Developed by OHB Digital Services, Hi-Rest LST is designed to deliver precise thermal insights at a resolution of 30 meters. By leveraging advanced machine learning and data fusion techniques, the service combines the coarser Sentinel-3 data (1km spatial resolution) with the high-resolution land surface temperature product from Landsat-8.

Hi-Rest LST offers:

• Detailed visualization of land surface temperature layers and time series for user-defined locations,
• Customizable areas of interest and datasets tailored to specific needs,
• Monitoring tools for user-triggered pipeline runs, ensuring seamless access to service results.

By providing enhanced land surface temperature estimations, Hi-Rest LST supports applications where precision is critical, such as urban resilience planning and infrastructure monitoring.

This service empowers end-users to make informed decisions and drive sustainable solutions for a changing world.

Compressing Earth Observation Data with COMEO

COMEO (“Compression Of Models & Earth Observations”), developed by VisioTerra, is designed to optimize the use of Earth observation and modeling data through lossy compression algorithms. Targeting data from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellites as well as Earth modeling data like C3S ERA5, COMEO offers an innovative solution for efficiently managing data volumes.

COMEO offers:

• Advanced compression algorithms allowing size reduction ranging from ×10 to ×250,
• Demonstration tool: Illustrating the impact of lossy compression on data quality for better understanding of trade-offs,
• Mapping tool: Presenting a synthesis of Sentinel-1 IW data over the Mediterranean Sea, covering the entire Sentinel-1 mission time range.

By providing effective compression solutions, COMEO enables users to maximize data usage while preserving relevance for critical applications such as environmental monitoring and climate model analysis. This service is essential for those looking to leverage Earth data while optimizing available resources.

Studying Desert Locust Impacts with DLMS

The Desert Locust Monitoring Service (DLMS), developed by Sistema, is at the forefront of efforts to mitigate the devastating impacts of desert locusts, which are recognized as the world’s most destructive migratory pests. These pests pose significant threats to the economy, quality of life, and the environment, with their impacts exacerbated by climate change.

Key Features of the Desert Locust Monitoring Service:

• AI-driven detection: utilizes cutting-edge AI algorithms to analyze diverse climate data sources, including satellite imagery, model data, and in situ observations, to identify breeding conditions conducive to locust proliferation,
• Predictive modeling: offers robust predictions of locust swarm movements, enabling proactive measures to prevent upsurges and mitigate potential damage,
• Geographical scope: focuses on a vast region extending from Africa to Asia, where locust activity is most prevalent.

By leveraging these innovative technologies, the Desert Locust Monitoring Service plays a crucial role in safeguarding agricultural resources and ecosystems, ensuring that stakeholders can respond swiftly and effectively to locust threats. This service is indispensable for those aiming to protect their livelihoods and the environment from the adverse effects of these formidable pests.

New Wave of Services

A new wave of innovative services will become operational, each designed to address critical challenges across diverse sectors. These will include:

• CityNexus Pro by Solenix: a pro version of the CityNexus service already operational in the DestinE Platform with an advanced urban digital twin application assessing the impacts of climate changes in road networks and urban design;
• CONOPS by EDGE in Earth Observation Sciences: a predictive model using satellite and census data to simulate mosquito populations and estimate disease risks;
• CC-PLAN by CGI Italia: a service providing localized data on Urban Heat Islands and Flight Climatic Analysis dynamics using DestinE datasets and providing mitigation strategy modeling, and dynamic visualizations;
• AQWALYTICS by Magellium: a scalable solution monitoring the quality of European water bodies by combining satellite data with real-time data from in-situ stations;
• Eki’Learning by Ekitia: an ethical data service for the DestinE Platform that includes easy-to-follow e-learning modules on data use and AI, plus a self-assessment tool to help users check the ethical maturity of their services;
• MoMo by Detektia: a service detecting and analyzing deformation patterns in infrastructures influenced by external factors, aiding in the identification of anomalies;
• InSAR Deformation Monitoring by GeoKinesia: three services, based on Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR): InSAR Service, Active Deformation Areas Map and Differential Deformation Map Service.

Valérie Dehlinger, director of Aerospace, Automotive, Chemicals, Discrete Manufacturing, Energy & Utilities, Retail, Telecoms, Media & Technology and Transport & Travel Markets in France, Atos, stated: “We are pleased to support ESA’s work in advancing the DestinE ecosystem and digital innovation in Earth observation and to play a crucial role in shaping the future of DestinE, ensuring its attractivity for diverse stakeholders across Europe.”

As part of this visionary project, the Atos consortium, including Atos, Mews Partners and ACRI-ST, was entrusted in 2024 with the execution of four key activities that are pivotal to the success of DestinE:

• Portfolio management: driving engagement and expanding the ecosystem’s reach to maximize its impact and usability,
• Demonstrators: delivering inspiring use cases and foundational services to empower ecosystem providers and showcase the platform’s potential,
• Lifecycle support: accelerating the growth of the ecosystem by streamlining service onboarding and ensuring seamless integration,
• Collaborative services & forum: cultivating a dynamic and collaborative environment to foster creativity, knowledge exchange and innovation.

The DestinE platform is co-funded by the European Union. The perspectives and opinions expressed in this press release are those of the contributing authors only and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the European Commission can be held responsible for them.

More from HPCwire

• Atos Selected by ESA to Lead DestinE Platform Expansion for Climate Adaptation
• DestinE’s Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin Shortlisted for the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling

About Atos Group

Atos Group is a global leader in digital transformation with c. 61,000 employees and annual revenue of c. €7.2 billion (pro forma for the disposal of Advanced Computing activities), operating in 61 countries under two brands – Atos for services and Eviden for products and systems. European number one in cybersecurity and cloud, Atos Group is committed to a secure and decarbonized future and provides tailored AI-powered, end-to-end solutions for all industries. Atos Group is the brand under which Atos SE (Societas Europaea) operates. Atos SE listed on Euronext Paris.

Source: Atos

The post Atos Drives DestinE Ecosystem Growth with ESA-Led Service Deployment and Call appeared first on HPCwire.

A munitions company that handles explosives for the U.S. military is facing a fine of over $3 million after an explosion killed 16 people last year.

Julius Malema, whose incendiary rhetoric about Afrikaners drew notice on the U.S. right, was handed a five-year prison term for firing a gun at a 2018 rally.

ST. LOUIS, April 16, 2026 — DataCool, a division of JohnsonMarCraft HVAC Products, today announced the launch of its new Alpine, Glacier, and Kodiak product lines, a next generation cooling platform engineered to meet the rapidly increasing thermal demands of AI, cloud, and high-density data center environments.

As global data infrastructure expands at an unprecedented pace, operators are facing growing pressure to deploy cooling systems that are not only powerful, but also flexible, efficient, and quick to implement. DataCool’s latest product launch addresses these challenges with a highly configurable suite of solutions designed to scale across a wide range of applications, from edge deployments to hyperscale facilities.

“The rise of AI and high-performance computing is fundamentally changing the way data centers are designed and operated,” said Matt Polizzi, Vice President at DataCool. “With Alpine, Glacier, and Kodiak, we’ve developed a platform that gives our customers the flexibility and performance they need to stay ahead of those demands without adding unnecessary complexity.”

Built for Scale, Performance, and Flexibility

The newly launched systems support a broad operating range from 2,000 to 100,000 CFM and up to 300 tons of cooling capacity enabling customers to standardize on a single platform across multiple facility types and sizes.

Designed for both indoor and outdoor applications, the systems provide engineers and operators with the flexibility to meet site specific requirements while reducing design and deployment timelines.

Key Features of the New Platform

• Modular, Scalable Architecture: Supports a wide range of deployments, from localized edge environments to large-scale data centers.
• High-Efficiency Cooling Performance: Standard ECM fans combined with configurable chilled water (CW) or direct expansion (DX) coils optimize energy efficiency and thermal control.
• Advanced Filtration Options: Single- or dual-stage MERV 8–16 filtration helps protect critical IT infrastructure.
• Customizable Controls Integration: Factory-installed options include standalone DDC systems or pre-integrated third-party controls for seamless building management system (BMS) compatibility.
• Simplified Installation and Commissioning: Integral piping and configurable hydronic designs reduce installation complexity and accelerate project timelines.
• Durable, High-Quality Construction: Units are built with robust materials and a reinforced base structure to ensure long-term reliability in demanding environments.

Each system is engineered with a single-point 460/3 electrical connection, streamlining integration and supporting faster deployment.

Addressing the Future of Data Center Cooling

With increasing rack densities and the continued growth of AI workloads, thermal management is becoming one of the most critical factors in data center performance and uptime. DataCool’s new platform is designed to help operators meet these evolving challenges with adaptable, future-ready solutions that prioritize both efficiency and reliability.

The Alpine, Glacier, and Kodiak systems are now available for specification and shipment.

About DataCool

DataCool is a division of Arizon Companies, a leader in HVAC manufacturing with roots dating back to 1921 through JohnsonMarCraft HVAC Products. DataCool specializes in advanced cooling solutions for data centers and mission-critical environments, combining proven engineering expertise with innovative, high-performance system design.

Source: DataCool

The post DataCool Launches Next-Generation Data Center Cooling Platform Amid Surging AI-Driven Demand appeared first on HPCwire.

OpenAI is updating Codex with more agent-like capabilities, positioning it as a more direct rival to Anthropic's Claude Code. Some of the new features include the ability to operate macOS desktop apps, browse the web inside the app, generate images, use new workplace plug-ins, and remember useful context from past tasks. The Verge reports: Codex will now be able to operate desktop apps on your computer, OpenAI says in a blog post announcing the update. It can work in the background, meaning it won't interfere with your own work in other apps, and multiple agents can work in parallel. For developers, OpenAI says "this is helpful for testing and iterating on frontend changes, testing apps, or working in apps that don't expose an API." The feature will start rolling out to Codex desktop app users signed in with ChatGPT today and will initially be limited to macOS. OpenAI did not indicate a timeline for when use will expand to other operating systems. EU users will also have to wait, it said, adding that the update will roll out to users there "soon." Codex is also getting the ability to generate and iterate on images with gpt-image-1.5, new plug-ins for tools like GitLab, Atlassian Rovo, and Microsoft Suite, and native web browsing through an in-app browser, "where you can comment directly on pages to provide precise instructions to the agent." OpenAI also said it will also be easier to automate tasks, with users able to re-use existing conversation threads and Codex now able to schedule future work for itself and wake up automatically to continue on a long-term task. Codex will also be getting a memory feature allowing it to remember useful context from past experience, such as personal preferences, corrections, and information that took time to gather. OpenAI said it hopes the opt-in feature, which will be released as a preview, will help future tasks complete faster and to a quality that previously required detailed custom instructions. The personalization features will roll out to Enterprise, Edu, and EU users "soon."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Keir Starmer understood to have lost confidence in official over decision to override security vetting failure

• Mandelson failed vetting but Foreign Office overruled decision

Sir Olly Robbins, the UK Foreign Office’s top civil servant, has been forced out of his post after the decision to fail Peter Mandelson during his security vetting was overruled by his department.

Robbins was the Foreign Office’s most senior official in late January 2025 when the decision was made, paving the way for Mandelson to become the US ambassador.

President Donald Trump announced the agreement, which went into force Thursday evening, as Pakistani mediators worked to extend a U.S.-Iran ceasefire and arrange new talks.

Hint: It involves AI, and a LinkedIn economist says employers are clamoring for people to fill these roles.

The four Artemis II astronauts struggled to describe the view and overall experience of flying around the moon's far side and witnessing a solar eclipse in deep space.

Elon Musk this week amplified an unfounded claim, based on a distortion of vaccine safety monitoring data, that COVID-19 vaccines killed tens of thousands of people in Germany. The vaccines saved millions of lives worldwide during a deadly pandemic, and serious side effects or deaths from vaccination are rare.

Despite this well-established safety record, Musk questioned COVID-19 vaccine safety on X on April 12 while sharing a post from far-right Swedish influencer Peter Imanuelsen, who also goes by PeterSweden. Musk, a former Trump adviser who is CEO of SpaceX and Tesla and owns X, has previously amplified and interacted with Imanuelsen’s posts on multiple occasions. Musk’s post had nearly 60 million views as of this story’s publication, and Imanuelsen’s had 64 million.

“A Pfizer insider who was former head of toxicology in Europe has just come out and said something that many ‘conspiracy theorists’ suspected,” Imanuelsen wrote in his April 12 post. “He estimates that 20 000 to 60 000 people in Germany have died from the c*vid vaccine,” he continued, adding that it “should be headline news EVERYWHERE.”

There is no evidence this large number of deaths occurred. Nor did COVID-19 vaccines cause mass deaths in general, as we have written multiple times.

Imanuelsen’s post was based on March 19 testimony at a German parliamentary hearing from Dr. Helmut Sterz, a toxicologist and veterinarian who reported formerly working for Pfizer. Sterz, who appeared at the invitation of a far-right party, baselessly claimed that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine killed 60,000 people in Germany. But Sterz arrived at this number by distorting German vaccine safety monitoring data, following logic also common to anti-vaccine activists in the U.S. who have misused similar passive surveillance data. (Imanuelsen explained on X that Sterz had also given the 20,000 figure after the hearing, but we were unable to locate these further comments.)

Dr. Mahmoud Zureik, a professor of epidemiology and public health at University of Paris-Saclay in France, told us via email that Sterz’s claim “confuses coincidence with causation, misuses passive surveillance data, and is not supported by the best available scientific evidence.” Sterz counted deaths reported after vaccination that were not necessarily related to the vaccines and then multiplied them by 30 to purportedly account for underreporting. Zureik called the use of this factor of 30 “arbitrary.” Zureik is director of EPI-PHARE, a scientific organization created by French health authorities to independently advise on health product safety.

Zureik added that the idea that COVID-19 vaccines have caused large numbers of deaths is inconsistent with the scientific literature. “More broadly, large epidemiologic studies have not shown an excess risk of overall mortality after COVID-19 mRNA vaccination,” he said. 

Pfizer spokesperson Andrew Widger told us via email that the company’s COVID-19 vaccine “continues to demonstrate a favourable safety and efficacy profile supported by extensive real-world evidence as well as by clinical, non-clinical, pharmacovigilance, and manufacturing data.“

A LinkedIn profile lists Sterz as having held a leadership role at a Pfizer research center in France from 2001 to 2009. He is author of a 2025 book about COVID-19 whose title translates to “The Vaccination Mafia,” and whose subheading describes him as Pfizer’s former chief toxicologist. He does not appear to have any recent scientific publications.

Pfizer as a policy doesn’t “provide details regarding individuals,” the company’s spokesperson said, “but I can confirm the individual you mention was not working at Pfizer during the pandemic or during the decade preceding it, and consequently had no involvement in the development of the COVID-19 vaccine. I would question therefore whether he could be described as an ‘insider.’” 

Misuse of German Vaccine Safety Surveillance Data

In the U.S., anti-vaccine activists often distort data from the ​​government-run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, which collects unverified reports of health problems following vaccination in order to identify possible safety signals. Sterz’s unfounded claim about vaccine deaths in Germany relies on misuse of a similar government system in Germany, run by the Paul Ehrlich Institute, which we have also written about before.

During his testimony, Sterz said that PEI had gotten 2,133 reports of death after vaccination with Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine. There were indeed 2,133 reports of deaths following vaccination with the original Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine through the end of 2024, according to a 2024 PEI report.

However, Zureik said that a death or other problem happening after vaccination “is not, by itself, evidence that the vaccine caused the event,” explaining that systems such as the PEI one “are designed to detect signals that then necessarily require clinical and epidemiological assessment.”

“It is not valid to presume the 2000 reported deaths were caused by vaccines, much less to presume that there were 30x this number to arrive at the 60k number the person claims,” Jeffrey S. Morris, director of the division of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, told us via email. Morris wrote a December 2025 Annenberg Public Policy Center white paper on vaccine safety monitoring, including a section explaining how VAERS functions and is distorted. (FactCheck.org is a project of APPC.)

People die on a regular basis, including 1 million per year in Germany, Morris and Zureik both noted. “Therefore, when tens of millions of people are vaccinated, some deaths will inevitably occur in the days, weeks or months following vaccination purely by coincidence, including deaths that would also have occurred in the absence of vaccination,” Zureik said.

The PEI report also said that the occurrence of deaths or other events near the time of vaccination “does not automatically indicate that there is a causal relationship” between the two, explaining that in many cases, “the event can be explained by other factors, such as pre-existing conditions, comorbidities, or concomitant medications.” In other cases, there is limited information available. Of the 2,133 reports of deaths after receiving the original Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, PEI assessed 28 as having a “possible or probable” causal relationship with vaccination. The report said more than 138 million doses of the vaccine had been given.

Unsupported Use of ‘Underreporting Factor‘

Sterz again followed a familiar pattern in multiplying an already-inflated number of deaths alleged to have been caused by COVID-19 vaccination by an “underreporting factor” of 30, which he said was used in the U.S.

American anti-vaccine advocates indeed multiply purported vaccine deaths or vaccine side effects by various factors, with Dr. Peter McCullough, for instance, often mentioning an underreporting factor of 30. McCullough is a cardiologist with a long history of spreading incorrect information about vaccines.

But as we have written before, the approach of applying an underreporting factor to reports from VAERS to identify the “true” rate of a problem is flawed. There is both underreporting and overreporting of events, and it’s not straightforward to identify a specific underreporting rate, which will vary depending on what events someone is looking at and the context in which a vaccine was given.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Zureik explained, it’s possible that there was in fact “overreporting driven by what is known as notoriety bias (or stimulated reporting).” In other words, the widespread attention to COVID-19 vaccination and possible side effects may have led people to be more likely to report deaths that happened near the time of vaccination, regardless of any causal relationship. 

“Therefore, applying a fixed ‘underreporting factor’ is not only unsupported but also ignores the possibility of reporting inflation in this context,” Zureik said.

Reassuring Data on COVID-19 Vaccine Safety

Regardless, there are other types of studies used to further investigate any safety signals found by surveillance systems like VAERS or the PEI system, Morris said. These sorts of studies looked at deaths after COVID-19 vaccination and have shown “no evidence of increased risk of death,” he said.

In the U.S., a 2022 study of nearly 7 million people from the Vaccine Safety Datalink monitoring system found that people who received COVID-19 vaccines were less likely to die than those who did not get the vaccines, after matching people by various characteristics and following them over at least two months. VSD is a U.S. health care record-based system that can be used to follow up on safety signals identified in VAERS. “This is far stronger evidence than any VAERs analysis,” Morris said.

Zureik and his colleagues in France, meanwhile, looked at French health records from 28 million adults age 59 and under to investigate whether COVID-19 vaccination had any association with death from all causes over a four-year period. Their study, published in December 2025, again found that vaccinated people were less likely to die than those who were unvaccinated.

Morris explained that these studies and others from around the world don’t necessarily mean that vaccination decreases risk of death from causes other than COVID-19, since people who get vaccinated may have other characteristics that make them healthier. However, the research indicates that COVID-19 vaccines are not associated with any increased risk of dying, contrary to claims about large-scale lethality.

People have expressed particular concern about spikes in sudden deaths caused by vaccination, despite a lack of evidence for such a phenomenon. This is partly based on the real but rare side effect of myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart. Some COVID-19 vaccines, including the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, caused this condition, which most often affected adolescent or young adult males after the second dose of the original series. Myocarditis after COVID-19 vaccination is generally less severe than after infection and resolves relatively quickly, although it is possible that it has caused deaths in some very small number of cases, as we’ve written previously.

But again, studies do not show a pattern of increased deaths in adolescents and young adults after vaccination, either from heart-related or other causes. Most recently, a March 19 Canadian study investigated whether COVID-19 vaccination in adolescents and young adults without documented heart disease was associated with sudden cardiac death, which can be caused by various conditions, including myocarditis.

The researchers found that vaccinated people were less likely to have sudden cardiac deaths than unvaccinated people. “These findings do not support the hypothesis that COVID-19 vaccines increase the risk of sudden cardiac death in young healthy adults,” the authors concluded.

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

The post Elon Musk Amplifies Baseless Claim About COVID-19 Vaccine appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Schwartz was deputy surgeon general under Trump’s first administration and is a rear admiral in the US Coast Guard

Donald Trump has selected Erica Schwartz to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), bringing to an end a months-long search for a permanent head of the troubled public health agency.

Trump revealed his choice on Truth Social, saying: “I am pleased to announce the new leadership of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It is my Honor to nominate the incredibly talented Dr Erica Schwartz, MD, JD, MPH, as my Director of the CDC,” he wrote. “She is a STAR!”

Democratic lawmakers urged Republican leaders to postpone the confirmation hearing of Kevin Warsh

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Democrats have moved to stall Donald Trump’s effort to exert greater control over the US Federal Reserve, condemning the president’s “absurd” bid to install a new leader of the central bank while it is targeted with criminal investigations.

Democratic lawmakers on the Senate banking committee urged its Republican leadership on Thursday to postpone the planned confirmation hearing for Kevin Warsh, the financial executive and former Fed governor Trump has nominated to replace Jerome Powell as Fed chair.

BrianFagioli writes: The developers behind Linux Mint say the project is rethinking its release strategy and moving toward a longer development cycle, with the next version now expected around Christmas 2026. In a monthly update, project lead Clement Lefebvre said the team reached a "crossroads" and needs more flexibility to fix bugs, improve the desktop, and adapt to rapid changes across the Linux ecosystem. The upcoming development build, temporarily called Mint 23 "Alfa," is currently based on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and includes Linux kernel 7.0, an unstable build of Cinnamon 6.7, and early Wayland related work. Mint is also replacing the long used Ubiquity installer with "live-installer," the same tool used by Linux Mint Debian Edition, allowing the project to unify installation infrastructure across its Ubuntu based and Debian based variants. While the team frames the changes as an opportunity to improve quality and reduce maintenance overhead, the shift has raised questions about the project's long term direction and whether Linux Mint may eventually lean more heavily on its Debian roots rather than its traditional Ubuntu base.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chair’s decision to not seek re-election in June ‘not as a result of any disagreement’, company says in SEC filing

Reed Hastings, the Netflix chair, is leaving the streaming service he co-founded 29 years ago as the company regains its footing after it lost its $72bn deal for Warner Bros Discovery.

In a letter to investors released on Thursday, Netflix said Hastings will not stand for re-election at its annual meeting in June and plans to focus on philanthropy and other pursuits.

Look out for TikTok-style vibes on your phone.

DuckDuckGo has always promised complete privacy with its VPN, and an independent cybersecurity company agrees.

Devices that were part of the first generations of Amazon's TV dongles are at the center of the California lawsuit.

• Filing details remarks about drones over home

• Woods said he spoke to ‘the president’ after crash

• Prosecutors seek access to prescription records

Tiger Woods told police he had taken multiple prescription medications, including Vicodin, on the day of a crash that led to his arrest on suspicion of driving under the influence, according to court filings released on Wednesday.

The filing, submitted by prosecutors in Florida as part of routine pretrial discovery and obtained by the Guardian, also details a series of unusual remarks Woods made to officers at the scene of the 27 March crash in Hobe Sound, including references to drones flying over his home and a claim that he had spoken to “the president”.

Although the bill has been passed by lawmakers, it still needs final approval from Maine Governor Janet Mills.

The title of my article on age verification in Linux and other operating systems had a “for now” added for a reason, and here we are, with two members of the US Congress introducing a bill to add age verification to operating systems. The text of the proposed bill was only published today, and it’s incredibly vague and wishy-washy, without any clear definitions and ton of open-ended questions.

Still, if passed, the bill would require actual age verification, instead of mere voluntary age reporting that current state-level bills cover. It also seems to eschew the concept of age brackets, giving application developers access to specific ages of users instead. It’s a vague mess of a bill that no sane person would ever want passed, but alas, sanity is a rare commodity these days, especially in US Congress.

It’s introduced by Democrat Josh Gottheimer and Republican Elise M. Stefanik, so it has that bipartisan sheen to it, which could increase its odds of going anywhere. At the same time, though, US Congress is about as useful as a box of matches during a house fire, so for all we know, this will end up going nowhere as its members focus on doing absolutely nothing to reign in the flock of coked-up headless chickens passing for an executive branch over there.

If something like this gets passed, every US-based operating system – which includes most open source operating systems and Linux distributions – will probably fall in line when faced with massive fines and legal pressure. This isn’t going to be pretty.

President taps Erica Schwartz to lead agency; its last director was fired less than a month into tenure after clashing with health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr over his vaccine agenda

• RFK Jr accused of ‘dangerous conspiracy theories’ at heated budget hearing

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Chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Dan Caine says the US military remains ready to re-engage in combat “at literally a moment’s notice”.

He says the blockade covers Iran’s ports and coastlines and applies to all ships, regardless of which flag they are sailing under.

Gregory Morgan Jr. of Temple Hills, Maryland, was charged Thursday morning with two counts of second-degree assault in the Feb. 5 incident.

Iran has not confirmed Trump’s claim. Giving up its highly enriched uranium would be a major step toward an agreement.

CBS News reported​ Wednesday that Dr. Erica Schwartz was emerging as the president's top pick for the role.

The head of the International Energy Agency warned that Europe may have only "six weeks or so" of jet fuel left if oil supplies remain blocked by the Iran war and the Strait of Hormuz stays disrupted. The Associated Press reports: IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol painted a sobering picture of the global repercussions of what he called "the largest energy crisis we have ever faced," stemming from the pinch-off of oil, gas and other vital supplies through the Strait of Hormuz. "In the past there was a group called 'Dire Straits.' It's a dire strait now, and it is going to have major implications for the global economy. And the longer it goes, the worse it will be for the economic growth and inflation around the world," he told The Associated Press. The impact will be "higher petrol (gasoline) prices, higher gas prices, high electricity prices," said Birol, speaking in his Paris office looking out over the Eiffel Tower. Economic pain will be felt unevenly and "the countries who will suffer the most will not be those whose voice are heard a lot. It will be mainly the developing countries. Poorer countries in Asia, in Africa and in Latin America," said the Turkish economist and energy expert who has led the IEA since 2015. But without a settlement of the Iran war that permanently reopens the Strait of Hormuz, "Everybody is going to suffer," he added. "Some countries may be richer than the others. Some countries may have more energy than the others, but no country, no country is immune to this crisis," he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for April 17, No. 1,763.

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for April 17, No. 775.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for April 17, No. 1,041.

OTTAWA, Ontario, April 16, 2026 — Canada is launching a national effort to build one of the most advanced artificial Intelligence (AI) supercomputing systems, ensuring Canadian researchers, innovators and institutions have the computing power they need to innovate, compete and lead.

Credit: Shuhan/Shutterstock

The Government of Canada is launching the call for applications for the AI Sovereign Compute Infrastructure Program, supported by historic investments announced in Budget 2024 and Budget 2025. This program, part of the Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy, will enable the development of large-scale, Canadian-based compute infrastructure to advance AI research and innovation, while safeguarding Canada’s national interests.

These systems will form a core part of Canada’s digital backbone, enabling breakthroughs in areas like health care, energy, advanced manufacturing and scientific discovery. This will strengthen Canada’s global competitiveness, support world-leading research and ensure secure, reliable access to critical digital infrastructure for Canadian innovators.

This transformational investment, via a competitive call for applications, invites eligible proponents to submit applications to rapidly design, build, operate and maintain a large-scale, ‑AI optimized high-performance computing system. This Canadian-owned infrastructure will serve as a cornerstone of the country’s digital ecosystem, enabling researchers and industry to advance ‑leading-edge research and develop next-generation AI solutions.

“Canada is already at the forefront of artificial intelligence. What we need now is access to large-scale computing power” said Evan Solomon, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation and Minister responsible for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario. “This initiative is about building that capacity here in Canada so our researchers, institutions and innovators can move faster, go further and turn leading ideas into real-world impact.”

Applications are now open to eligible organizations ready to help strengthen Canada’s technological sovereignty. To learn more and apply, visit the AI Sovereign Compute Infrastructure Program web page.

Quick Facts

• Interested proponents can access the program guide, review eligibility criteria and learn about how to submit an application by visiting the AI Sovereign Compute Infrastructure Program page.
• The Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy has made targeted investments across three complementary pillars—mobilizing private sector investment, building public supercomputing infrastructure, and establishing the AI Compute Access Fund—to expand domestic compute capacity, support Canada’s AI ecosystem, drive economic growth and safeguard Canadian data and intellectual property.
• The launch of the call for applications follows the call for statements of interest for the AI Sovereign Compute Infrastructure Program, which closed in 2025.

Source: Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada

The post Canada Opens Applications for AI Supercomputing Infrastructure Program appeared first on HPCwire.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel says that while Cuba does not want military aggression from the United States, his country is prepared to fight back.

The cosmic lineup of Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune is here.

But underground construction work on a presidential bunker underneath the ballroom can continue, the judge said.

The VR headsets are RAMageddon's latest victims.

Exclusive: A trove of previously redacted documents was filed as part of the tech giant’s anti-trust battle with the state of California. Amazon denies it engages in price-fixing

Hundreds of previously redacted records reveal how Amazon has pressured independent sellers using its platform into raising their prices on the sites of competitors like Walmart and Target, so that Amazon can appear to have lower prices, California authorities allege.

The global conglomerate became concerned even if a competitor was selling an item for as little as a penny less, according to one segment of the newly unredacted evidence.

The Bay of Bengal’s low-lying coastal area and dense population make the region in Southeast Asia highly vulnerable to flooding.

April 16, 2026 — Powerful cyclones can push seawater miles inland, threatening densely populated communities and critical infrastructure built along coastal areas. A combination of exposure and complexity makes the Bay of Bengal in Southeast Asia a powerful test case for scientists seeking to better understand how tides, storm surge, river flows and sea level rise interact to drive extreme coastal flooding.

Satellite imagery of Cyclone Sidr over the Bay of Bengal on November 14, 2007. Sidr caused storm surges up to 9.8 feet high and caused between 3,000 and 10,000 deaths, with an estimated $2.3 billion of damage. Image credit: NASA Worldview Snapshots.

To better anticipate the region’s rare but potentially devastating floods, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory are using advanced computer simulations to create thousands of tropical cyclone scenarios.

The research helps reveal how extreme storm tides could affect key coastal sites, including nuclear power plants, providing information that could guide safer infrastructure planning in one of the world’s most vulnerable coastal regions. Their findings, published in npj Natural Hazards, could inform operations and guide future plant siting.

Simulating Cyclones to Predict Flood Risks

The research team used Argonne’s Laboratory Computing Resource Center to simulate thousands of years of tropical cyclones under a range of atmospheric conditions. The researchers focused on storm-tide risks, which they define as the highest simulated water levels during a storm.

Assessing risks to nuclear infrastructure requires estimating low frequency events (extreme storm tides), which occur less often but pose significant threats. Natural hazard risks are often expressed in terms of event frequency. For example, a 50-year flood — one that is estimated to occur only once in a 50-year period — may be an acceptable risk for thermal power plants, but nuclear facilities require estimates for rarer events, such as 1,000-year floods. This makes it challenging to estimate risks from natural hazards since worldwide records of storm paths and intensity extending beyond 50 to 100 years aren’t available.

Nuclear infrastructure safety depends on using rebuilt data from related datasets or creating realistic predictions of storm events. The researchers used the second approach to generate a long historical record of storm surges along the coast of the Bay of Bengal.

Their simulations showed how changes in cyclone paths and strength could reshape flood risks. Historical cyclones, such as Cyclone Sidr (2007) and Cyclone Hudhud (2014), were used to test the accuracy of the models. The models used physics-based methods that do not rely on the small number of recorded tropical cyclones that have made landfall. Depending solely on historical records can either underestimate or overestimate flood risks.

“We wanted to understand how to evaluate the risk of building critical infrastructure in a hydrologically complex coastal area,” said Rao Kotamarthi, an Argonne senior scientist and one of the study’s authors. ​“We wanted to estimate the changes in low frequency events as would be necessary for siting nuclear reactors.”

Risk Changes Across the Region

The researchers analyzed how different factors interact to influence the risk of flooding at sites of critical infrastructure. Their study found that adding up the effects of individual factors, such as tides and storm surges, can lead to inaccurate water level estimates. These estimates can be off by as much as 25 to 30 percent compared to estimates that account for how these factors interact with each other over long periods.

Simulations revealed that flood risks varied significantly across the Bay of Bengal’s coastline, with notable differences even within the same region.

• Decreased risk in Bangladesh: The Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta shows a lower risk from low frequency events as compared to some other locations along the coast. However, extreme flooding events are still possible, with water levels reaching several meters.
• Increased risk in India: India’s eastern coast, including areas near the Kovvada Atomic Power Project, show elevated risk from low frequency events. The study predicts up to a 78% increase in low frequency event risks compared to higher frequency events.

Additionally, complex factors, such as storm surges, tides, river discharge and sea-level rise, amplify flood risks. Wave setup (water accumulation caused by wave action) and tide-surge interactions are especially significant along India’s eastern coast.

Implications for Infrastructure

As populations grow and more infrastructure is built in coastal areas, understanding these risks is essential. Policymakers and engineers are responsible for designing resilient systems to withstand extreme weather events. Critical facilities, such as nuclear power plants and hospitals, can incorporate these projections to prevent catastrophic damage.

Kotamarthi has been working with the International Atomic Energy Agency on hydrological and meteorological hazard impacts to nuclear sites.

“Since we are building more power plants in different locations, we need to do a more thorough analysis,” Kotamarthi said. ​“There’s more to consider than just elevation. Even existing plants likely will need to update safety rules to account for the estimated risks from these types of hazards.”

The researchers recommend proactive measures to reduce flood risks. These include improving safety protocols for existing infrastructure and conducting detailed flood risk assessments for new facilities.

Expanding the Research

While Argonne’s method was applied specifically to sites of existing or proposed nuclear power plants in the Bay of Bengal, it can be used for any coastal region where storm-tide risk assessments are needed. The study highlights opportunities to expand this research to other vulnerable coastal regions worldwide.

Future research will expand storm datasets, refine projections for land sinking and river discharge, and leverage machine learning to enhance model efficiency and accuracy. These improvements will make predictions more reliable.

This research emphasizes the importance of localized flood risk assessments to protect infrastructure. It provides valuable insights for policymakers, engineers and disaster preparedness teams. Investing in high-resolution modeling and localized studies equips communities to mitigate the growing risks of extreme weather events.

Source: Marguerite Huber, Argonne National Laboratory

The post Argonne Models Thousands of Cyclone Scenarios to Evaluate Coastal Infrastructure Risk appeared first on HPCwire.

Rare rebuke of Trump’s mass deportation agenda, enabled by small group of Republican defectors, to last three years

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The US House of Representatives on Thursday approved legislation to shield 350,000 Haitians from deportations for three years, a rare bipartisan rebuke of Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda enabled by a small group of Republican defectors.

The 224-204 vote saw 11 members of the House Republican conference join with all Democrats to pass the New York Democrat Lauren Gillen’s bill to continue temporary protected status (TPS) for Haitians, a designation that allows them to live and work in the United States without fear of deportation.

Trump ally grilled by lawmakers over ‘terrible decisions’ on vaccines, public health and funding cuts to key programs

• US politics – latest updates

Vaccines and public health dominated a frequently contentious hearing with Robert F Kennedy Jr on Thursday before the US House ways and means committee.

Kennedy, the health secretary and a longtime vaccine opponent, has overseen sweeping changes to routine vaccination recommendations and has promoted misinformation even amid the biggest measles outbreak in decades.

Health secretary and chef Robert Irvine claim Americans could eat healthier and more cheaply if they shopped better

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The first episode of the new Secretary Kennedy Podcast, produced by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), opens with this quote from guest Robert Irvine, who creates meal plans for the US military: “We talk about food being expensive. If you’re buying expensive food, it’s expensive. But if you’re buying food and you know what to do with it, it’s not expensive.”

The episode is titled Fixing America’s Food System – Robert Irvine, and features a 45-minute conversation with the HHS secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the host of the show, and guest Irvine. Best known as a celebrity chef, Irvine has collaborated with the US military to launch Victory Fresh, a program that offers healthy grab-and-go meals on military bases, during the Biden administration. The program’s Biden-era origins are never acknowledged during the show.

Ten House Republicans joined Democrats to oppose President Donald Trump on his immigration policy Thursday, voting to restore temporary protections for Haitians living in the United States.

NPR said the donation from Ballmer, the largest to the public radio network by a living donor, will help offset the loss of federal funding in 2025.

AUSTIN, Texas, April 16, 2026 — Oracle plans to expand its multicloud networking capabilities to provide customers with enterprise-grade, high-performance connectivity between Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and AWS. By establishing connectivity between Oracle Interconnect and AWS Interconnect–multicloud customers will have access to a fast, private, managed connection to run applications and move data seamlessly between OCI and AWS.

Credit: Jonathan Weiss/Shutterstock

“Oracle continues to advance multicloud connectivity as part of its commitment to helping customers unlock flexibility, agility, and performance across clouds,” said Nathan Thomas, senior vice president, product management, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “With Oracle AI Database@AWS, we pioneered a simpler way for customers to run Oracle AI Database workloads in AWS with the same features, architecture, and performance as they expect on-premises. We’re now building on that by establishing connectivity between our popular cross-cloud interconnect and AWS Interconnect–multicloud. This will help our mutual customers modernize their applications, unify their data, and unlock new generative AI opportunities.”

Supporting both full and split-stack multicloud deployments, the collaboration between OCI and AWS will also enable organizations to leverage the strengths of multiple cloud providers without the complexities of managing multiple network providers and installing physical network infrastructure. With unified connectivity between OCI and AWS, customers can accelerate AI modernization while meeting operational flexibility without managing complex data replication.

OCI has built native, high-performance interconnect capabilities designed for enterprise-scale workloads, enabling seamless multicloud connectivity across 26 interconnected partner cloud regions. Through its multicloud networking solutions, OCI enables customers to establish secure, private, and highly available cloud-to-cloud connectivity without the operational complexity of traditional, manually configured networking approaches. The AWS Interconnect–multicloud open specification has enabled a new generation of enterprise multicloud connectivity. The collaboration between OCI and AWS Interconnect–multicloud will be the latest addition to Oracle’s comprehensive multicloud capabilities and is planned to be available later this year in the AWS US East (N. Virginia) us-east-1 region.

About Oracle Distributed Cloud

Oracle’s distributed cloud delivers the benefits of cloud with greater control and flexibility. Oracle’s distributed cloud lineup includes:

• Public cloud: Hyperscale public cloud regions serve any size of organization, including those requiring strict EU sovereignty controls. See the full list of regions here.
• Dedicated cloud: Customers can run all OCI cloud services in their own data centers with OCI Dedicated Region, while partners can resell OCI cloud services and customize the experience using Oracle Alloy. Oracle also operates separate U.S., UK, and Australian Government Clouds, and Isolated Cloud Regions for national security purposes. Each of these products provides a full cloud and AI stack that customers can deploy as a Sovereign Cloud.
• Hybrid cloud: OCI delivers key cloud services on-premises via Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer and is already managing deployments in over 60 countries.
• Multicloud: OCI is physically deployed within all the cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, providing low latency, natively integrated Oracle AI Database services, including Oracle AI Database@AWS, Oracle AI Database@Azure, Oracle AI Database@Google Cloud; and Oracle HeatWave on AWS and Microsoft Azure. In addition, Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure, Oracle Interconnect for Google Cloud, and the upcoming connection between OCI and AWS Interconnect–multicloud allow customers to seamlessly combine key capabilities from across clouds.

About Oracle

Oracle offers integrated suites of applications plus secure, autonomous infrastructure in the Oracle Cloud. For more information about Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), please visit us at www.oracle.com.

Source: Oracle

The post Oracle and AWS Collaborate to Expand Multicloud Networking appeared first on HPCwire.

Anthropic says this new model is supposed to be more "tasteful and creative." And you can actually use it.

President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that a temporary ceasefire agreement had been reached between Israel and Lebanon. The 10-day ceasefire, set to begin at 5 p.m. ET, will reportedly see a pause to Israel’s relentless assault on southern Lebanon, which has displaced over 1.2 million people and killed at least 2,000 since early March.

Any news of reduced annihilation by Israeli and U.S. forces in the region is, of course, to be welcomed. Just a week ago, Trump was threatening to wipe out the whole civilization of Iran. In Lebanon, Israel has targeted civilian infrastructure like hospitals and demolished villages and homes with ferocity.

In the Israeli context, however, the very meaning of “ceasefire” has been irreparably degraded. This is the lesson of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Under the conditions of an alleged ceasefire in Gaza since October, Israel has killed over 765 Palestinians in the Strip and injured over 2,000 — while maintaining a ground occupation of at least half the territory.

Related

Israel Agrees to Stop Bombing Lebanon — So It Can Keep Bombing Gaza

Those concerned about Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, too, have little reason to believe a ceasefire will see an end to Israel’s expansionist violence.

None of this is a secret. “Israel has no plans to withdraw its military from southern Lebanon during the announced 10 day ceasefire,” an Israeli security official confirmed to Reuters.

Israeli officials frame unambiguous expansion into Lebanon’s territory as the creation of a security “buffer zone.” The plan to maintain control of southern Lebanon is an open one, with a long history, imbued with renewed fervor by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has said that, even after the current war ends, Israel intends to maintain control over the territory up to the Litani River in southern Lebanon, and that all villages near Israel’s ever-moving border would be destroyed.

“[T]he policy of occupying and annexing south Lebanon up to the Litani River has long held influence among parts of the Israeli government,” wrote Mireille Rebeiz, chair of Middle East Studies at Dickinson College.  She noted that it “dates back to influential Zionist leaders — secular and religious alike — before Israeli independence in 1948.”

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“I Want to Occupy”: Inside the Israeli Movement Pushing to Raze and Settle Southern Lebanon

Israel has invaded Lebanon seven times in the last half century. Between 1978 and 2000, Israel maintained an 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon — the occupation Hezbollah was formed to fight.

It’s worth stressing, too, that while Israel and the U.S. describe the war as one against Hezbollah, it is being waged against the Lebanese people. Much like it is an unacceptable euphemism to describe Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as a war with Hamas.

Lebanese journalist Lylla Younes told “Democracy Now!” that in southern Lebanon, as in Gaza, Israel is carrying out a “scorched-earth campaign,” destroying whole villages, mosques, and cultural sites. Her family’s village in the southern border region was bombed earlier this week.

“What the world should know is that we will return to these villages, and when we do, we’ll return to rubble, and it will be an immense process of rebuilding,” she said. That is, if return is possible at all.

Hezbollah, for its part, will not be fighting through the ceasefire, the group’s representatives had said.

“We will be respecting the ceasefire and we will deal with it cautiously,” said Ibrahim Moussawi, a member of the Lebanese Parliament and a Hezbollah spokesperson. He added that “it should hopefully be a beginning of a course of the Israeli withdrawal from our occupied territories.”

Related

The Forever Spoiler: Netanyahu Has Been Blowing Up Diplomacy With Iran for Decades

Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam wrote on X on Thursday that he has “full hope” that the Lebanese civilians displaced from the south will be able to return to their homes.

It is an optimism at direct odds with Israel’s open commitment to annexation — and it is a hollow hope in the face of what we’re seeing in Gaza.

“Israeli forces continue their violent attacks and expand their military control of the Strip,” noted Médecins Sans Frontières in a report last week. “Living conditions of Palestinians remain dire, while Israel continues to deliberately obstruct aid, which is translating into entirely preventable deaths.” The humanitarian medical aid group put it plainly: “This is not a ceasefire.”

This cannot be what “ceasefire” gets to mean.

The post Israel Will Keep Occupying Lebanon Despite Ceasefire appeared first on The Intercept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Alphabet's Google is negotiating an agreement with the Department of Defense that would allow the Pentagon to deploy its Gemini AI models in classified settings, the Information reported on Thursday, citing two people with direct knowledge of the discussions. The two parties are discussing an agreement that would allow the Pentagon to use Google's AI for all lawful uses, according to the report. During the negotiations, Google has proposed additional language in its contract with the department to prevent its AI from being used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons without appropriate human control, the Information reported. The Pentagon will continue to deploy frontier AI capabilities through strong industry partnerships across all classification levels, a Pentagon official said, without confirming any talks with Google.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some membership prices will rise in July.

AI has arrived in supercomputing centers, and it’s bringing with it a lot of new software, new architectures, and new workloads. Users who traditionally used a narrow set of HPC tools are now exploring a wide new world of possibilities with AI. The burden of supporting the new software and systems falls to administrators, who sometimes are struggling to adapt.

Before 2022, supporting HPC workloads at CINECA was fairly straightforward, according to Daniele Cesarini, the head of AI-HPC architecture for the non-profit consortium of 69 Italian universities and national research centers.

CINECA has a much bigger software stack to support in the age of AI (Image courtesy Daniele Cesarini/CINECA)

“Before 2022, we just have our classical HPC application that use numerical libraries, usually written in C, C++ and Fortran. There was just one workload manager, Slurm, or PBS really,”  Cesarini said at the recent VAST Data conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. “There was just one workload manager, Slurm, or PBS really… The storage was a parallel file system. Everything was a file in a folder on Lustre.”

When the AI boom arrived in 2023, things began to change. Instead of running a relatively homogenous group of codes on a relatively static HPC stack, CINECA users suddenly had greater demands.

According to Cesarini, CINECA users were developing AI software in PyTorch and Tensorflow, and needed access to specific Pandas, NumPy, and Scikit-Learn libraries. They used new compute engines, like Apache Spark, vector databases like Milvus and Qdrant, and streaming data platforms like Apache Kafka and Apache Flink.

Instead of just Slurm/PBS, there is now Slurm/PBS as well as Kubernetes and OpenStack. Instead of just Lustre, users needed access to file, block, and S3 object storage. More elaborate data ingestion frameworks, API management, machine learning pipelines, and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) flows demand more monitoring, observability, and security.

At the same time that CINECA has embraced AI and data science, it has dramatically scaled up the number and size of HPC systems that it operates. As we reported last month, the Bologna-based organization had one data center drawing 4 megawatts powering three supercomputers back in 2022, when it had about 70 employees.

Since the start of 2023, CINECA has announced that it’s opening two additional data centers that will draw 30 megawatts of power. It has already installed Leonardo, which currently sits at number 10 on the TOP500 list, and has plans to add three more AI systems, two additional HPC systems, and one cloud environment that will serve northern and southern Italy. Now CINECA employs about 200.

Managing this growth in systems, users, and complexity has been a struggle, Cesarini said. “It is a completely different paradigm,” he said. “Everything is much, much more complex.”

Moving to VAST’s data platform has helped CINECA deal with the increase in types of storage that users demand. Users no longer want access to just a file, Cesarini said. Instead, they want a streaming data pipeline. That helps to eliminate bottlenecks in data management and data processing.

Daniele Cesarini is head of HPC-AI architecture at CINECA

CINECA found it needs new personnel with different skillsets to manage all these systems, software, and users. Previously, all that was needed were system administrators, helpdesk and user support, and architecture people, Cesarini said. “Now we have a system administrators that are specialized in HPC storage, AI storage, PC networking, HPC networking, Ethernet, InfiniBand, GPUs, CPUs, virtual machine, orchestrator like Kubernetes, OpenStack.”

Maintaining the large number of different libraries that users want is another challenge for CINECA. “We need to provide thousands of different libraries,” he said. “Our users use tens of different AI frameworks. They want multiple platforms: Azure, Kubernetes, OpenStack.”

When users come to CINECA, they usually have a good idea what their stack should be, and they often already have its containerized, Cesarini said. The challenge for CINECA then is to deploy and scale the container as needed, with OpenStack being the preferred on-prem environment, and Azure for cloud. The HPC organization currently is focused predominantly on AI training, and it has not had a significant demand for running AI inference workloads yet.

Sometimes, CINECA will offer suggestions on what library or large language model (LLM) the users should use, and it will try to guide them to a specific combination of libraries and tools to deploy on the HPC and AI systems for training workloads. But with so many different combinations of tools, it can be difficult to accommodate specific library requests, Cesarini said.

“It often happens that they come with this container and they say ‘No, we won’t use it. Our workflow only works with PyTorch 3.3.4. And this is not possible to change because otherwise the workflow exploded during the workflow and stops,’” he said. “So it depends.”

At the end of the day, there is no way to solve the complexity problem. The days of having a simple HPC stack are over for sites like CINECA’s and the hundreds of other HPC organizations that are embracing AI. As the AI boom makes its way around the world, the need to deal with increased technical complexity will only increase.

The post AI Is Bringing Added Complexity for HPC Sites. How Are They Handling It? appeared first on HPCwire.

Credit card debt forgiveness can resolve your debt issues, but can you qualify if your wages have been garnished?

An online ad attacks Rep. Seth Moulton, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, for not being sufficiently progressive because of past policy positions. But it also misleadingly claims that Moulton, a critic of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “thanked ICE as they were terrorizing our communities and then killed citizens.”

The claim about ICE is based on Moulton’s vote for a June 2025 House resolution condemning a terrorist attack at a pro-Israel demonstration in Boulder, Colorado, that month. The last sentence of the resolution acknowledged law enforcement, including ICE officers, “for protecting the homeland.” 

However, at the time of his vote, Moulton said in a statement that he supported the measure because its “overarching purpose” was to “condemn antisemitic terror.”

The ad also criticizes Moulton, who was first elected to the House in 2015, for finding fault with the Green New Deal, an environmental policy agenda that he has supported; for previously opposing a wealth tax on billionaires that he now supports; and for not completely embracing proposals for a Medicare-for-all health care system for the U.S., which Moulton has said should be optional for Americans rather than mandatory.

Commonwealth Together PAC released the 30-second ad, titled “Run,” on April 8. The super PAC is pushing for the reelection of Sen. Ed Markey, the longtime incumbent whom Moulton is challenging in the Democratic primary. The election is Sept. 1.

A spokesman for the super PAC told the Boston Globe that the ad cost “six figures” and will run on social media and streaming platforms for “several weeks.”

“Sorry, Seth. You can run for Senate, but you can’t run from your record,” the narrator says at the end of the ad. A reader asked us if the ad’s claims about Moulton are accurate.

Thanking ICE?

The ad starts with the narrator saying: “Now that Seth Moulton is running for Senate, he claims he’s a progressive. But Moulton voted with Republicans to thank ICE for protecting our homeland. He thanked ICE as they were terrorizing our communities and then killed citizens in broad daylight.”

The ad cites Moulton’s vote in June 2025 for a House resolution — introduced by Republican Rep. Gabe Evans of Colorado — that denounced Mohammed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian national, “and his antisemitic terrorist attack on peaceful demonstrators supporting the release of the hostages held by Hamas.” Federal prosecutors have charged Soliman, who is in the country on an expired tourist visa, with using Molotov cocktails and a homemade flamethrower to assault multiple demonstrators at that pro-Israel rally on June 1.

The last line of the roughly two-page resolution, which passed 280 to 113, with 75 Democrats joining 205 Republicans, said the House “expresses gratitude to law enforcement officers, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel, for protecting the homeland.”

But that acknowledgement of ICE is not why Moulton said he voted for the resolution, as the ad may lead viewers to believe.

In a June 11 statement responding to Democrats angered by his vote, Moulton said: “It is important to recognize that there rarely exists a bill or resolution that I vote for because I agree with every single word in it. At the end of the day, I cast my vote for H. Res 488 because I believe that it is critical to loudly condemn antisemitic terror, which was the overarching purpose of this resolution.” 

Moulton noted that he also voted for a second resolution condemning the attack in Boulder that did not mention ICE. He went on to say in his statement that he would oppose President Donald Trump’s “desires to weaponize ICE and create a culture of fear in immigrant communities across the country” while also “loudly condemning antisemitism.” Democrats should do both, Moulton said. 

And the congressman has criticized ICE several times since his vote last spring.

After Renee Good, a U.S. citizen, was shot and killed during a dispute with ICE agents in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, Moulton called for the Department of Homeland Security and then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to be held accountable “for aggressive and illicit tactics by ICE and other law enforcement agencies” that contributed to Good’s death. He said the killing of Good was an example of why he had introduced legislation in December “to make sure ICE officers can be prosecuted when they break the law.” That bill, the National Oversight and Enforcement of Misconduct Act, or NOEM Act, has not advanced.

In addition, after federal immigration officers in Minneapolis fatally shot Alex Pretti, another U.S. citizen, on Jan. 24, Moulton posted a social media video in which he called for ICE to be abolished. (A clip of the scuffle between Pretti and the officers is shown in the ad.)

“ICE is beyond repair,” Moulton said in his video post. “It obviously needs to be abolished, but even more urgently, its gang of criminal enforcers needs to be prosecuted. And then we can build a more comprehensive and humane immigration system that, No. 1, incentivizes people to come here legally, not illegally; two, provides a very clear pathway to citizenship; and three, is guarded by an enforcement system that, from judges to officers on the streets, reflects American values in every action and policy.” 

That same month, Moulton co-authored a letter to the leaders of a congressional subcommittee on homeland security that said he would oppose any DHS appropriations bill “without firm statutory guardrails and meaningful reforms” for ICE.

“To suggest that a vote to condemn a horrific terrorist attack against Holocaust survivors was somehow an endorsement of ICE is the kind of intellectual dishonesty that makes people lose faith in politics,” Moulton’s campaign said in an April 8 statement responding to the ad attacking him.

Other Ad Claims

Immediately following the ICE claims, the ad’s narrator says, “Moulton opposes Medicare-for-all too.” A graphic on screen in the ad cites a May 8, 2019, article on boston.com that carried the headline “Here’s why Seth Moulton opposes Medicare-for-All.”

The article went on to say that Moulton, a former Marine with health coverage through the Veterans Administration, had reservations about “forcing everyone onto a government one-size-fits-all program” like the VA system because of his own health care experiences.

“I can tell you plenty of stories about how my health care at the VA, with this socialized government system, is not great,” the article quoted him as telling CNN.

But the boston.com article also said that Moulton was fine with giving people the option to choose Medicare-style health insurance. Medicare “should be an option that Americans have. But it shouldn’t be the only way to go,” the article quoted him as saying on the “Pod Save America” podcast in April 2019, during his brief run for president. 

As he suggested during that podcast interview, Moulton’s current health care platform on his campaign website calls for creating a “National Public Option health care plan that competes directly with private insurers and lowers premiums for everyone.”

The ad attacking Moulton also says, “He criticized the Green New Deal, and he said Sen. Warren’s tax on billionaires punished the rich.”

The 2019 Los Angeles Times article cited in the ad quoted Moulton talking about being one of the earliest supporters of the Green New Deal – a nonbinding resolution outlining ways to address climate change – when it was in its early stages in 2018. What he later criticized were additions to that environmental policy agenda that he did not believe were about climate change. He said those add-ons could cause the proposal to lose support.

“I was one of the first people to sign onto the Green New Deal, and I signed on so early that it was just an open framework,” Moulton said, according to the L.A. Times article. “But then when some of the proponents of the deal or some of the sponsors of it started adding things like a jobs guarantee, a bunch of socialist programs, I think that’s a huge mistake because I think it’s gonna result in the baby being thrown out with the bathwater because it’s not addressing climate change specifically.” 

However, in a statement sent to us, Taylor Hebble, communications director for the Moulton campaign, noted that the congressman “has been a cosponsor of every Green New Deal Resolution introduced in the House.” But none has passed. (Markey has sponsored Senate versions of the Green New Deal that also have not passed.)

As for the tax on billionaires that Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent, proposed in 2019, Moulton did tell Reuters in an April interview that year that he thought their tax plans were a form of economic punishment.

“While he agreed the wealthy ought to pay their share of taxes, Sanders and Warren wanted to ‘punish the rich,’ Moulton said, which he called un-American,” Reuters reported. 

But Hebble raised the fact that Moulton went on to co-sponsor the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax Act in 2022, supported the 2022 state Massachusetts Fair Share Amendment that levied an extra 4% tax on taxable income exceeding $1,000,000, and backed the Social Security 2100 Act introduced in 2023 to apply Social Security payroll taxes to earnings above $400,000.

Fast forward to 2026, and Moulton has proposed his own wealth tax as part of his “affordability agenda” for housing, health care and education. “The plan is fully paid for through a national wealth tax on mega-millionaires and by closing tax loopholes exploited by corporations and the ultra-wealthy,” Moulton’s campaign said in a December press release about his proposal.

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

The post An Attack Over ICE in the Massachusetts Democratic Senate Race appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Apple's 2025 Environmental Report shows the company has made significant progress toward its 2030 climate goals.

Jay Bryant negotiating plea deal in New York death of Run-DMC star, over which one conviction has been overturned

One of the three men charged in the killing of Jam Master Jay plans to plead guilty, court records show, in what would be the first admission anyone has made in court to any role in the Run-DMC star’s death in 2002.

Jay Bryant pleaded not guilty to murder after his 2023 indictment, but his lawyer and federal prosecutors told the court in recent letters that they were negotiating a plea agreement.

The defense secretary said his prayer drew on Ezekiel, but wording closely matches Quentin Tarantino dialogue

It was perhaps inevitable that a braggadocious Christian nationalist defense secretary elevated from his role as a weekend Fox News television host would pluck a fake Bible verse from a violent Hollywood blockbuster and present it at a Pentagon prayer session to rally the troops for the “holy war” in Iran.

Certainly among a glut of stories swirling around Pete Hegseth this week, including articles of impeachment brought against him by a group of ambitious Democratic lawmakers, the bizarre allegation that the Bible-thumping Hegseth was passing off a fire-and-brimstone script by Quentin Tarantino, an Oscar-winning director, as the word of the Lord was far too compelling to ignore.

All House Democrats and four Republicans forced a vote on a measure to stop the Trump administration from ending temporary deportation protections for more than 300,000 people from Haiti.

Press play, then pay it forward. The music streaming app is launching a new feature with Bookshop.org to support independent booksellers.

Officers looking into attacks on Iran International media offices, synagogue and Jewish charity ambulances

Counter-terrorism investigators are examining three separate arson attacks in London against an Iranian dissident and Jewish targets amid fears the Iranian state may be behind them.

The latest attack happened at about 8.30pm on Wednesday, outside the offices of Iran International, a Persian-language news channel that opposes the regime in Tehran.

The plans call for the arch to be built on Columbia Island, a man-made strip of land in the Potomac River that is part of Washington, D.C.

Tory leader criticises Farage for saying that holding another independence vote ‘probably quite reasonable’

Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative party, has accused Nigel Farage of being an opportunist who does not believe in unionism after he urged Scottish nationalists to back Reform.

Farage said earlier this week he believed “genuine nationalists” would not support the Scottish National party’s bid to rejoin the EU, and urged them to vote Reform in the Holyrood election on 7 May.

Damon Jones was among dozens of people, including alleged mafia figures and athletes, charged last year in connection with a pair of gambling schemes.

Innovative experiments demonstrate valuable capabilities for quantum annealing machines

April 16, 2026 — In a series of recent publications, Los Alamos scientists have explored new ways to use quantum computers as dynamical, highly controllable experimental platforms to accelerate scientific discovery. Through a Laboratory Directed Research and Development program, an interdisciplinary team of theoretical physicists, experimental physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians and others focused on using quantum annealing platforms for practical, impactful scientific applications.

Los Alamos scientists are exploring how to use quantum computers to accelerate scientific discovery. Credit: LANL

“Rather than pursuing universal quantum computing, we have shown that we can already use existing analog quantum computers and their coupled qubits to get science results today,” said Los Alamos scientist Cristiano Nisoli, who led the project. “We employed analog quantum computers as building blocks to realize quantum systems analogous to physical materials, and then perform incredibly controlled experiments on them, demonstrating significant capabilities that go beyond computation.”

Mimicking Lab Experiments: Hysteresis

The team has worked to perform, for the first time, hysteresis experiments on quantum computers. Hysteresis is a characteristic of magnetic systems where the magnetization response of the system to an applied field depends on the history of previously applied fields; that is, hysteresis is a memory effect, where a current state is influenced by a prior state. Especially in frustrated magnetic systems, where interactions among magnetic moments cannot be all satisfied at the same time, changing a few experimental parameters reveals complex behaviors.

Hysteresis proves difficult to simulate with standard computers, where it requires many ad-hoc choices about the kinetics involved with shifting data and variables. Importantly, in quantum platforms, coupled qubits naturally evolve under quantum fluctuations with no a-priori assumptions.

Los Alamos scientist Elijah Pelofske proposed employing a hardware control parameter in D-Wave machines to apply a time-varying field while the system is exposed to quantum fluctuations. Though analog quantum computers like the D-Wave machines were initially developed as combinatorial optimization tools, the team’s approach found them suited to memory-related problems such as hysteresis. As described in Science Advances, the team’s work opens up a line of research that sees analog quantum computer platforms used for probing magnetic phenomena, bringing analog quantum computers into fundamental questions in condensed matter physics.

Magnetic Memory and Hysteresis from Quantum Transitions

Los Alamos scientists have looked into theoretical explanations for the underlying physics in how analog quantum computers handle memory in relationship to quantum physics problems. While quantum annealing memory effects are reduced by quantum tunneling, hysteresis can still occur. Los Alamos scientist Frank Barrows led the building of a conceptual framework to understand the behavior of qubits in these scenarios at a deeper level in ways that might be applicable to quantum molecules.

These results establish programmable analog quantum computers as powerful testbeds for exploring memory-endowed non-equilibrium dynamics in quantum many-body systems.

“By reproducing and dissecting complex hysteresis phenomena observed in specific compounds under high-magnetic fields, the quantum platform becomes a powerful interpretive tool,” Nisoli said. “It’s like having a companion experiment where you can turn every knob independently and see what matters. That’s not as easily accessible in standard experiments.”

Shannon Information Entropy Investigations

Further research at the Laboratory led by Pelofske has employed Shannon information entropy to quantify classical configuration memory retention under quantum fluctuations. Shannon information entropy quantifies the randomness of the outcome of a variable. The new method has been applied to shed light on memory retention or loss in a quantum system when subjected to quantum fluctuations.

The team couples the study of alternative classical approaches with an exploration of the classical spin noise of the problems. The combination of approaches seeks to illuminate the nature of the experiments and differentiate between their quantum or classical nature. The team’s approach helps establish a general probe of the interplay between quantum fluctuations and memory.

Zooming in on Criticality and Temperature

In another first, the Los Alamos team pushed a D-Wave quantum annealing machine to the limits of Boltzmann sampling, demonstrating for the first time that the analog quantum computer can be faithful enough to implement fine methods from statistical mechanics, such as the renormalization group, to study a system at criticality — at the points in which the system transforms from one phase to another and maintains itself in scale-free and essentially fractal state.

As described in Nature Communications, the team found that their quantum annealing approach can be used to study criticality in classical statistical physics models.

“These results establish analog quantum computers as robust simulators for statistical physics, offering a new pathway to study phase transitions and critical behavior,” said Pratik Sathe, former Lab postdoctoral researcher and current staff member at D-Wave Quantum, who led the work. “Remarkably, we find that annealing-based sampling does not suffer from critical slowing down and, therefore, avoids the ad-hoc techniques typically required to study criticality in frustrated systems using classical computational methods.”

This use of analog quantum computers as simulators of thermodynamics has also spurred the investigation of thermometry of these machines. The Los Alamos scientists sought to check how faithfully systems embedded in an analog quantum computer can reproduce the statistics of a thermal one.

“We asked ourselves, can the temperature of a system embedded in an analog quantum computer be controlled, and how?” said Los Alamos scientist George Grattan, first author of a work that, for the first time, seeks to check how faithfully these systems can reproduce the statistics of a thermal ensemble.

Driving Useful Experiments with Quantum Annealing

The Los Alamos team’s approach reflects a commitment to using today’s analog quantum computers as experimental platforms for physics, not just as computational devices. The team’s results sharply contrast with the idea that near-term noisy quantum hardware can only deliver narrow or artificial demonstrations on small or uninteresting systems.

With meaningful impact across multiple, independent topic areas — non-equilibrium dynamics, hysteresis and memory, critical phenomena, Boltzmann sampling, and now materials-relevant behavior — the team is able to move their approaches beyond abstract models, including working with experimentalists at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory’s Pulsed Field Facility (MagLab) at the Laboratory.

“This work opens the door to a new research and development workflow bringing together quantum theory, computation and experiment,” said Carleton Coffrin, principal investigator of the quantum annealing project and the Laboratory’s Quantum Science Coordinator. “The broad perception in the quantum computing research community is that this technology is immensely promising but not useful today, and that we need much larger, fault-tolerant machines before quantum computing can have real scientific impact. However, this team is demonstrating that for some carefully selected applications, analog quantum hardware is immediately useful for scientific discovery, and a novel tool for theoretical and experimental research.”

Source: LANL

The post Los Alamos Leads Research in Versatile Quantum Computing appeared first on HPCwire.

Thieves believed to have escaped into sewers after holding staff and customers in Crédit Agricole branch for two hours

Armed robbers held 25 people hostage at a bank in Naples for two hours on Thursday, before fleeing through a tunnel.

The three thieves entered a branch of Crédit Agricole in the southern Italian city at about 11.30am, taking hostage staff and customers, who were freed by police a couple of hours later.

Prosecutors say this is first criminal case against a federal agent involved in Trump’s immigration crackdown

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An ICE agent has been charged with assault for allegedly pointing his gun at people in a car while driving on a Minneapolis highway, prosecutors in Minnesota said on Thursday.

Hennepin county attorney Mary Moriarty said she believed it was the first criminal case brought against a federal immigration officer involved in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown that surged federal authorities into cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland and New Orleans.

A CBS News California investigation into unclaimed property is drawing bipartisan attention as federal lawmakers move to stop states from quietly profiting off people's investments.

‘Sustained outperformance’ merits pay rise, says company after it ups profit guidance to £1.2bn for year to January 2027

The Next chief executive, Simon Wolfson, took home more than £7m last year, his highest ever pay package, and could be handed up to £9.27m this year after the retailer announced plans to increase his basic salary and bonuses.

The listed company said it was increasing its pay deal for the long-term leader of the fashion and homewares retailer, which now controls a string of brands in the UK including Gap, Victoria’s Secret, Cath Kidston, Reiss and FatFace, as his remuneration was 30% below the average for FTSE 100 bosses.

IPv6 usage briefly reached 50% across Google services for the first time, marking a major milestone for a protocol created in 1998 to solve IPv4's address shortage. Tom's Hardware reports: [...] IPv6 was dismissed early on as a headache-inducing, hard-to-implement complication that would hardly ever gain any traction -- despite offering 2^128 possible numbers, solving all network number assignments in one fell swoop. That changed over time by force of necessity, and Google's tracking graph shows that for a brief moment in time on March 28, 50% of worldwide users accessed the service over an IPv6 connection, marking a historic first. APNIC's stats show that the protocol is in use by 43% of the world, with Asia and the Americas inching ever close to those 50%. Cloudflare, meanwhile, shows that 40% of traffic is done in IPv6, an actually impressive figure if you consider it's measuring actual transferred packets rather than just counting addresses. The tried-and-true IPv4 and its well-known 123.456.789.123 format from 1980 offers ~4.3 billion addresses in theory, and around 3.7 billion in practice. That always sounded like a lot, but nobody could have predicted just how rapid the explosion of the Internet would be. IANA, the entity controlling the North-American IPv4 space, ran out of IPv4 addresses around 2011, while its European equivalent RIPE NCC could spare no more four-octet addresses nearly seven years ago in 2019. Asian, African, and Latin-American IP registries equally ran out during that timeframe.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Few Republicans have been willing to distance themselves from the president as the war's end remains uncertain.

Spy-tech company and founder Peter Thiel should ‘have their hands ripped off our NHS’, say MPs

MPs have queued up to demand the government scraps its £330m NHS contract with the spy-tech company Palantir, calling it “dreadful” and “shameful” in a debate on Thursday, after which the government said it was “no fan” of the US company’s politics.

Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs led the calls for Palantir, which also works for Donald Trump’s ICE immigration crackdown and the Israeli military, to be removed as a supplier to the NHS federated data platform (FDP), with one Labour backbencher, Samantha Niblett, questioning whether it could be “trusted as a custodian of the intimate health records of tens of millions of British citizens”.

The prime minister was not aware that the former US ambassador had failed the vetting process, according to Downing Street

Swinney says this is a manifesto for the whole of Scotland.

He confirms that the SNP would argue for the Scottish power to have more control over energy policy (still largely reserved to Westminter). He says:

The problem is not that we do not have the energy. The problem is that Westminster has the power. This election is our opportunity to take those powers and put them into Scotland’s hands.

Individuals such as Matt Goodwin and Lord Frost benefited from largesse of self-styled ‘illiberal democracy’

• UK politics live – latest updates

The last 16 years of Viktor Orbán’s rule have been kind to a number of British political figures – from the Tory peer David Frost to Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin and James Orr.

All benefited from largesse extended by the self-styled “illiberal democracy” established by the Hungarian leader’s ruling Fidesz party, which took a particular liking for those on the harder right of British conservatism.

PARIS, April 16, 2026 – Today, AMD and representatives of the French government announced plans to deepen collaboration in support of France’s National Strategy for AI, aimed at accelerating local AI innovation, expanding access to open and advanced compute resources for the local AI ecosystem and strengthening France’s position in the global AI landscape.

Credit: Shutterstock

The Letter of Intent (LOI) was signed in Paris at the French Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industrial, Energy and Digital Sovereignty. AMD senior vice president, Global AI Markets, Keith Strier, joined Philippe Baptiste, Minister of Higher Education, Research and Space, Sébastien Martin, Minister Delegate in charge of Industry, and Anne Le Hénanff, Minister Delegate in charge of Artificial Intelligence and Digital, for the formal signing.

The multi-year collaboration aims to strengthen France’s AI ecosystem through infrastructure, research and education. To help expand AI expertise and enable diversity and resilience across the French AI ecosystem, AMD plans to provide researchers, developers and startups with hardware, software and training through its AMD University Program, AMD AI Developer Program, and AMD AI Academy.

In addition, AMD will continue to deepen its collaboration with GENCI, the Jules Verne Consortium and CEA in connection with Alice Recoque, expected to be France’s first exascale supercomputer powered by AMD technology, through a planned Center of Excellence designed to provide expertise, training and ecosystem support to help fully harness the power of the Alice Recoque AI supercomputer and advance the broader AI Factory France ecosystem.

Philippe Baptiste, Minister of Higher Education, Research and Space, stated: “France has all the assets needed to assert its central role in the development of artificial intelligence: world-class fundamental and applied research, globally renowned engineers, and unique infrastructures in Europe. Through this partnership with AMD, we are strengthening our scientific and academic ecosystem by providing high-quality support to our researchers, teachers, and students, granting them unprecedented access to cutting-edge infrastructures. The Alice Recoque supercomputer, operated by GENCI and the CEA, marks a decisive step in enhancing our research and innovation capabilities, both in the public and private sectors. I am convinced that this will enable us to better meet the scientific challenges of our time.”

Sébastien Martin, Minister Delegate for Industry, stated: “AMD not only brings the technology and expertise to power Alice Recoque but also commits to working with the French Government on the local economic and social benefits of the research undertaken. This letter of intent paves the way for a fruitful public-private collaboration. It will contribute to France’s ambitious strategy for technological sovereignty. France must become a global leader in AI, not only in research, but also in the AI value chain, from electronics to software, focusing on value creation.”

Anne Le Hénanff, Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs, stated: “There is no AI without infrastructure. Building a strong and sustainable digital future requires working across the entire value chain and diversifying our partnerships. I welcome AMD’s strong commitment to engaging with our startup ecosystem and contributing to a more resilient and innovative landscape”

Keith Strier, senior vice president, Global AI Markets, AMD, said: “France has implemented one of the most ambitious national AI programs in Europe, capitalizing on its robust AI ecosystem, world-class academic programs and an advanced energy and data infrastructure. AMD looks forward to providing the workbench to expand the frontiers of industrial and scientific innovation in France, and maximize the upside of sovereign AI investments, by enabling France’s AI community to harness AMD’s broad portfolio of high-performance computing platforms and open software ecosystem.”

About AMD

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) drives innovation in high-performance and AI computing to solve the world’s most important challenges. Today, AMD technology powers billions of experiences across cloud and AI infrastructure, embedded systems, AI PCs and gaming. With a broad portfolio of AI-optimized CPUs, GPUs, networking and software, AMD delivers full-stack AI solutions that provide the performance and scalability needed for a new era of intelligent computing. Learn more at www.amd.com.

Source: AMD

The post AMD and French Government Announce Plans to Advance AI Innovation, Research and Open Ecosystem Development appeared first on HPCwire.

US calls free-market capitalism ‘surest path to prosperity’ and seeks to forgo direct aid to developing countries

• Middle East crisis – live updates

The Trump administration has moved to formally enlist foreign governments in a sweeping reorientation of global development policy, directing American diplomats worldwide to seek official support for a “trade over aid” declaration before its introduction at the United Nations later this month. This would mean a move away from direct aid to poor nations in favor of increased trade, led by private companies.

Principal deputy spokesperson at the state department Tommy Pigott confirmed the initiative on Wednesday, framing it as a rejection of what he called a failed aid model. “The idea that trade and free market capitalism is the surest path to prosperity has been proven by the facts and by history,” Pigott said, adding that those calling for “aid not trade” were “really arguing for lining the pockets of a corrupt NGO industrial complex”.

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 16, 2026 — Cadence has announced a strategic collaboration with Google to optimize the Cadence ChipStack AI Super Agent with Gemini on Google Cloud. This collaboration positions Cadence at the forefront of the shift toward agentic design automation, creating an agent-driven, scalable, cloud-native platform for next-generation chip design and verification.

The Cadence ChipStack AI Super Agent integrates advanced agentic reasoning with Cadence’s EDA solutions, delivering up to 10X productivity improvements across digital design and testbench development, verification planning, regression management and automated debug. By combining AI agents with native EDA execution, the platform enables design teams to compress development cycles, improve efficiency and accelerate time to tapeout.

“Our collaboration with Google Cloud represents a major step forward in scaling AI-driven design automation,” said Paul Cunningham, senior vice president and general manager at Cadence. “By integrating the Cadence ChipStack AI Super Agent with Gemini, we’re advancing the next generation of agentic design—combining the reasoning power of large language models with Cadence’s world-class EDA engines to deliver breakthrough productivity and quality of results for our customers.”

At the core of the ChipStack AI Super Agent is its innovative Mental Model technology, which enables sophisticated agentic reasoning through Cadence native skills, driving Cadence EDA tools to improve the quality and correctness of large language model (LLM)-generated content. Through its collaboration with Google Cloud, Cadence is tightening the integration between the Gemini-enabled ChipStack AI Super Agent and Cadence EDA engines, driving significant improvements in both productivity and quality of results.

This collaboration also leverages Google Cloud’s secure, elastic compute infrastructure to deliver the compute needed for Gemini’s LLM reasoning, Cadence EDA tools and the ChipStack AI Super Agent. This enables a “click-to-deploy” end-to-end solution for agent-powered chip design and verification.

The ChipStack AI Super Agent is available now on the Google Cloud Marketplace.

About Cadence

Cadence is a market leader in AI and digital twins, pioneering the application of computational software to accelerate innovation in the engineering design of silicon to systems. Our design solutions, based on Cadence’s Intelligent System Design strategy, are essential for the world’s leading semiconductor and systems companies to build their next-generation products from chips to full electromechanical systems that serve a wide range of markets, including hyperscale computing, mobile communications, automotive, aerospace, industrial, life sciences and robotics. In 2024, Cadence was recognized by the Wall Street Journal as one of the world’s top 100 best-managed companies.

Source: Cadence

The post Cadence and Google Collaborate to Scale AI-Driven Chip Design with ChipStack AI Super Agent appeared first on HPCwire.

Data shows 85% of those infected in the state have been not vaccinated against measles as dozens are hospitalized

• Measles: how does it spread and how can I protect my child?

Utah has emerged as a major center of measles infections in the US, as an outbreak that has been building for some time continues to expand.

State officials reported a total of 602 measles cases on Wednesday tied to an outbreak that started last year and is still ongoing, including 19 newly identified infections, according to the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (Cidrap). Recent exposures have been reported at several preschools and elementary schools.

Resolution needed two more votes to pass, but Democrats now appear solidified in opposition

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The US House of Representatives on Thursday narrowly rejected a war powers resolution that would have prevented further military action against Iran, as Democrats united against continued US involvement in the conflict amid peace talks that have yet to make a breakthrough.

The resolution introduced by Greg Meeks, the top Democrat on the House foreign affairs committee, failed by a vote of 213-214, with one Republican member voting present. It required at least two more votes to pass, as tied votes fail in the House.

We got our hands on the sleek new rice cooker ahead of launch.

Lebanese health ministry says killing of 91 healthcare workers shows ‘total disregard’ for international law

• Middle East crisis – live updates

When they received the call to respond to an Israeli airstrike in the city of Mayfadoun, in southern Lebanon, most of the paramedics held back, having previously seen colleagues killed by double-tap attacks targeting rescuers. But the medics from the Islamic Health Association (IHA) rushed to the scene.

By the time the other emergency workers arrived at the site, they found the IHA medics had indeed been caught in a second strike. They started evacuating their wounded colleagues, only for their ambulances to be hit in two further attacks.

There will be flight cancellations ‘soon’ if oil supplies are not restored in coming weeks, says head of IEA

• Europe has only six weeks’ supply of jet fuel left owing to Iran war, says energy chief

The UK’s growth acceleration in February is likely to be “short-lived”, due to the Iran war, warns Andrew Hunter, associate director and senior economist at Moody’s Analytics:

“The 0.5% month-over-month jump in U.K. GDP in February, and slight upward revision to January’s data, echoes the earlier improvement in the surveys and suggests the economy had more momentum at the start of this year than previously thought.

However, with those surveys weakening quite sharply in March as the Middle East conflict sent energy prices soaring, this upturn is likely to prove short lived.

The Explorian E310 had a good run, but after more than 10 years, Vitamix is retiring its cheapest model. Meet the entry-level replacement.

Google says it's trying out a better way to explore the web.

The coding tool can now run multiple agents across applications on your computer.

Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.7, calling it its strongest generally available model and an improvement over Opus 4.6 in areas like software engineering, instruction-following, tool use, and agentic coding. But the company says it is "less broadly capable" than the restricted Claude Mythos Preview, "which Anthropic rolled out to a select group of companies as part of a new cybersecurity initiative called Project Glasswing earlier this month," reports CNBC. From the report: The launch of Claude Opus 4.7 on Thursday comes after Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.6 in February. Anthropic said the new model outperforms Claude Opus 4.6 across many use cases, including industry benchmarks for agentic coding, multidisciplinary reasoning, scaled tool use and agentic computer use, according to a release. Anthropic said it experimented with efforts to "differentially reduce" Claude Opus 4.7's cyber capabilities during training. The company encouraged security professionals who are interested in using the model for "legitimate cybersecurity purposes" to apply through a formal verification program. Claude Opus 4.7 is available across all of Anthropic's Claude products, its application programming interface and through cloud providers Microsoft, Google and Amazon. The new model is the same price as Claude Opus 4.6, Anthropic said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There will be flight cancellations ‘soon’ if oil supplies are not restored in coming weeks, says head of IEA

• Business live – latest updates

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Europe has only six weeks of jet fuel left before shortages will hit because of the Iran war, according to the head of a global energy watchdog.

Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, said there would be flight cancellations “soon” if oil supplies from the Middle East were not restored within the coming weeks.

• LIV chief’s rallying email to staff did not refer to 2027

• Without alternative funding future is bleak for rebel tour

Several of golf’s leading names are facing career limbo at the end of 2026 amid expectation Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund will withdraw backing for the LIV Tour.

While the likelihood is Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm will be afforded a pathway back to the PGA Tour, the future for others who made lucrative switches to LIV is far more uncertain.

The pontiff did not name the president during a speech in Cameroon. He criticized those who manipulate religion “for their own military, economic or political gain.”

The sneaker maker is selling its footwear assets and rebranding as "NewBird AI," betting on booming demand for AI computing power.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Thursday thatthe U.S. military can "make the transition" from the blockade to "major combat operations."

Former Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax shot and killed his wife and then turned the gun on himself what police described as a murder-suicide in their home in Annandale, Virginia, police said Thursday.

A U.S. Navy reservist accused of murder has been arrested overseas after a monthslong international manhunt, authorities said. He faces charges for allegedly killing his wife at their Virginia home.

The foldable phone paused its sales in March after selling through its inventory, but Samsung is bringing it back.

The company behind Dungeons & Dragons has its official answer to Critical Role in its new show Dungeon Masters, which airs weekly on YouTube.

Commentary: Will Brock Lesnar versus Oba Femi deliver on all this hype?

These are the best stand mixers to buy, including the best budget stand mixer and a premium model with serious smarts, from KitchenAid and other brands.

The EU says a new age-verification app is technically ready and could let users prove they are old enough to access restricted online content without revealing their identity or personal data. Deutsche Welle reports: Once released, users will be able to download the app from an app store and set it up using proof of identity, such as a passport or national ID card. They can then use it to confirm they are above a certain age when accessing restricted content, without revealing their identity. According to the Commission, the system is similar to the digital certificates used during the COVID-19 pandemic, which allowed people to prove their vaccination status. The app is expected to support enforcement of the bloc's Digital Services Act, which aims to better regulate online platforms. This includes restricting access to content such as pornography, gambling and alcohol-related services. Officials say the app will be "completely anonymous" and built on open-source technology, meaning it could also be adopted outside the EU. [...] While there is no binding EU-wide law yet, the European Parliament has called for a minimum age of 16 for social media access. For now, enforcement would largely fall to individual member states, but the new app is intended to help platforms comply with future national and EU rules.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Health secretary in a diary entry said his kids were in the car as he cut off animal’s genitals in 2001 to ‘study them later’

Robert F Kennedy Jr once cut the penis off a road-killed raccoon in an incident that is just one of several involving dead animals that the controversial US health secretary has been involved in.

A new book called RFK Jr: The Fall and Rise was published this week and reveals a diary entry for Kennedy that describes the prominent vaccine critic and leader of the “Make America healthy again” (Maha) movement stopping his car on a New York highway on 11 November 2001.

Ibogaine is used in Mexico and the Caribbean to treat depression, anxiety, addiction and brain trauma.

As the president’s men rave about paranormal events and Diet Coke, it seems the US’s only hope is extraterrestrial intervention

People often criticise the Democrats for being overly cautious and never getting anything done. But this week they’ve surprised us all by unveiling concepts of a plan for getting Donald Trump out of the White House.

On Tuesday House Democrats introduced legislation that would create a commission to assess whether Trump is unfit to serve and should be removed under the 25th amendment. I don’t need to tell you what precipitated this: Trump is growingly increasingly erratic, threatening genocide one minute and posting pictures of himself as Jesus Christ the next.

Critics say efforts to rescue the animal, nicknamed Timmy, unlikely to succeed and could lead to further harm

A last-ditch effort to rescue a wayward whale that has transfixed Germans for weeks has begun in the Baltic Sea despite criticism it has little chance of success and could further harm the 12-tonne creature.

The male humpback whale was first spotted last month near Timmendorfer Strand on the northern coast of Germany, giving rise to its nickname Timmy. It has repeatedly become stranded and then freed itself after human assistance but it is now stranded again, with rescuers saying it is fighting a losing battle for its life.

California supreme court upholds lower court decision as Eastman says he will appeal to US supreme court

John Eastman, a lawyer who played a key role in Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election, officially lost his law license in California on Wednesday.

The California supreme court upheld a 2024 ruling from a state judge, who recommended Eastman be disbarred. Eastman “exhibited gross negligence by making false statements about the 2020 election without conducting any meaningful investigation or verification of the information he was relying upon”, Judge Yvette Roland wrote in 2024.

ARMONK, N.Y. and URBANA-‑CHAMPAIGN, Ill., April 16, 2026 — IBM and the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U. of I.) today announced an expansion of the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute. This includes deploying quantum-centric supercomputing to Illinois innovators through the integration of U. of I.’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Delta and DeltaAI supercomputers with IBM quantum computers.

L-R: Rashid Bashir, Vice Chancellor for Chicago Strategic Partnerships, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Dean, The Grainger College of Engineering; Illinois Governor JB Pritzker; Jay Gambetta, Director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow. Credit: The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Launched in 2021, the Discovery Accelerator Institute has 20 current, ongoing projects across hybrid cloud, AI, quantum computing, materials discovery, and sustainability, and its members have published more than 230 research papers.

Moving into this new phase, the Institute will build on its first five years of technological progress in AI systems and computational science to shape how quantum computing and AI will drive the next generation of supercomputing. These new initiatives will include the development of new algorithms that enable classical and quantum systems to work together on problems neither can solve alone; as well as the creation of novel AI systems designed for emerging AI workloads and the use of AI to accelerate the design of specialized computing systems.

“I’m pleased to see the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute building on years of progress and partnership with U. of I. as Illinois innovators pursue critical discoveries in quantum computing and AI,” said Governor JB Pritzker. “Illinois’ world-class research institutions, unique industry collaborations, and unmatched research talent position our state at the forefront of global progress, and I look forward to seeing the countless advancements that this expansion will bring.”

Advancing the Next Era of Computing with Systems, Software, and Algorithms

Quantum-centric supercomputing represents IBM’s vision for the future of computation, where quantum processors (QPUs) work alongside high-performance classical systems powered by CPUs and GPUs to solve complex problems in science and industry. As part of the Institute’s expansion, IBM and U. of I. researchers will collaborate on the development of quantum-centric workflow management tools to seamlessly integrate the most powerful IBM quantum computers on the cloud with NCSA Delta and DeltaAI supercomputers, creating an environment for ongoing quantum-centric supercomputing-powered research across academia, industry, and government in Illinois.

Institute members will explore how quantum-centric supercomputing architectures and novel algorithms can integrate the power of IBM quantum computers and NCSA HPC to solve classically hard problems and pursue near-term quantum advantage, as well as solutions for fundamental problems in chemistry, condensed-matter physics, and materials science.

In addition, over the next five years, the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute will push the frontiers in AI systems research by tackling challenges in the efficient, scalable, and adaptable distributed inference of next-generation AI workloads across diverse computing infrastructures. The Institute will also launch Algorithms-to-Silicon-to-Systems (AS2), a new research area to accelerate the integration and implementation of algorithms into silicon for specialized systems. AS2 will represent a shift toward a unified, AI-native design paradigm, where algorithms, silicon, and systems software are co-evolved, rather than developed in isolation. The results will be a step change in productivity, accessibility, and scalability to enable the rapid creation of complex, high-performance systems with strong guarantees of correctness, robustness, and real-world usability.

“IBM is thrilled to help provide quantum-centric supercomputing to Illinois researchers, alongside an expansion of the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute’s efforts in AI for systems design. As the brilliant minds within the Institute discover and test new algorithms, they will drive groundbreaking research to power the applications made possible by AI and quantum computing,” said Jay Gambetta, Director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow.

In addition to research, the expanded collaboration emphasizes education and workforce development. IBM, U. of I. will lead education initiatives aimed at building expertise across quantum computing, AI systems, and HPC. Through curriculum development, hands-on training, and collaborative research, IBM and U. of I. seek to develop the next generation of scientists and engineers equipped to advance heterogeneous computing architectures.

Together, these updated research priorities will keep U. of I. and the State of Illinois at the forefront of progress as a global hub for AI- and quantum computing-enabled scientific discovery, bridging theory and practice through tightly coupled hardware, software, and algorithm innovation.

IBM has a long-standing relationship with the State of Illinois’ quantum ecosystem, including with the University of Chicago, members of the Chicago Quantum Exchange and the U.S. Economic Development Administration-designated Bloch Quantum Technology Hub. The company is also committed to leading the National Quantum Algorithm Center in the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP) in Chicago, which will be anchored by an IBM Quantum System Two, to be online later this year.

Deming Chen, IIDAI co-director and Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering, said: “Our goal with the expansion is to build on past successes and continue advancing the institute’s impact. We aim to reach new heights in the next five years. Our students have expressed appreciation to both Illinois and IBM for involvement in a truly unique program. They benefit from working on-site at IBM — gaining access to advanced computing resources and mentorship by IBM colleagues — while continuing to make progress on their thesis.”

Rashid Bashir, dean of The Grainger College of Engineering and vice chancellor of Chicago strategic partnerships with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said: “The Grainger College of Engineering is thrilled to host this flagship partnership with IBM to define the future of how AI, quantum and supercomputing will come together for the greatest impact. Additionally, the Institute’s presence in Chicago at the Discovery Partners Institute (DPI) will allow for greater integration with IBM and the Chicago quantum ecosystem.”

Susan Martinis, senior vice chancellor for research and innovation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said: “Collaborative efforts like the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute foster strong connections and advance discovery in areas such as AI, quantum and supercomputing. The Institute is a wonderful example of how Illinois research partners with industry to create momentum and drive innovations that will change the world.”

About The Grainger College of Engineering

The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is one of the world’s top-ranked institutions and a globally recognized leader in engineering and computing education, research and public engagement. With a diverse, tight-knit community of faculty, students and alumni, Grainger Engineering sets the standard for excellence in engineering and computing, driving innovation in the economy and bringing revolutionary ideas to the world. Through robust research and discovery, our faculty, staff, students and alumni are changing our world and making advances once only dreamed about, including the MRI, LED, ILIAC, Mosaic, YouTube, PayPal, flexible electronics, electric machinery, miniature batteries, imaging the black hole and flight on Mars. The world’s brightest minds from The Grainger College of Engineering tackle today’s toughest challenges. And they are building a better, cooler, safer tomorrow. Visit the Grainger Engineering website for more information.

About IBM

IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider, helping clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of governments and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to effect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and business services deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service. For more information, visit https://research.ibm.com.

Source: IBM

The post IBM and University of Illinois Extend Discovery Accelerator Institute to Link Quantum and HPC Systems appeared first on HPCwire.

Sarah Mullally urges Anglicans to join Leo’s ‘courageous’ call and says human cost of war is incalculable

The archbishop of Canterbury has said she is standing in solidarity with Pope Leo XIV’s calls for peace amid his public feud with Donald Trump.

Days after the US president objected to comments from the head of the Catholic church suggesting a “delusion of omnipotence” was fuelling the US-Israeli war in Iran, Sarah Mullally urged Anglicans to join Leo’s “courageous” call.

Pillars at Cold Ashby, Northamptonshire, and Thorny Gale, Cumbria, bookended the project that modernised mapping

Heritage campaigners are bidding for listing status for two concrete pillars hailed as “modest obelisks of modernity in the countryside”.

These functional 120cm (4ft) stone or concrete “trig points” formed part of a 6,500-strong network of surveying posts that were vital for the development of modern mapping.

Meenu Batra, the state’s only licensed Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu interpreter, says she was treated ‘like a criminal’

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A Texas court interpreter who was arrested by ICE after living in the US for more than 35 years is speaking out from detention, saying she has been “treated like a criminal” and fears being deported to a country where she has never been.

Meenu Batra is the only licensed Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu court interpreter in the state, and has served as an interpreter for hundreds of people in immigration court.

INNSBRUCK, Austria, and NEW YORK, April 16, 2026 — ParityQC today announced a new record benchmark implementation of the largest Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT), a cornerstone algorithm with applications in cryptography, financial modeling, and materials science. The achievement was realized using an IBM Quantum Heron processor. This latest showcasing of the ParityQC Architecture processed 52 superconducting qubits, nearly doubling the previous benchmark of 27 trapped-ion qubits, set just 24 months earlier.

“This milestone was only possible through the synergy of IBM’s latest quantum hardware and the ParityQC Architecture, which unlocked an exponential improvement in efficiency,” said Wolfgang Lechner and Magdalena Hauser, Co-CEOs of ParityQC. “What we are witnessing is European quantum innovation taking a global lead in translating theoretical potential into real-world performance.”

Industrialization of a Pioneering Academic Field

Until recently, advances in quantum computing were driven by pioneering academic groups. Today’s announcement proves that quantum computing capabilities continue increasing exponentially. The near doubling of the QFT benchmark indicates that quantum computing progress could be following similar early dynamics of Moore’s Law in classical computing, a development that transformed a research discipline into a global industry. Quantum computing is undergoing the same transition, becoming a standardized and scalable industrial sector.

“Just as the doubling of transistor density once brought the era of the integrated circuit, the doubling of quantum computing capacity marks quantum computing’s entry into its own era of exponential scaling,” said Hermann Hauser, ParityQC investor and co-founder of Acorn and ARM.

“ParityQC’s demonstration of their Parity Twine application achieving this QFT benchmark — using IBM quantum hardware — is a promising example of how the application could also extend to enabling hardware-aware implementations of algorithms solving complex, industry-useful optimization problems as our hardware improves along our roadmap,” said Scott Crowder, Vice President, IBM Quantum Adoption.

“We’re incredibly proud of this achievement due to the excellent work of hardware and architecture team on both sides. Advancements like these show that progress in quantum technologies begins to follow a predictable path,” said Wolfgang Lechner and Magdalena Hauser, Co-CEOs of ParityQC.

What This Means in Practice

ParityQC’s Parity Twine architecture can be used for a wide range of quantum applications. It could help accelerate the simulation of molecular interactions critical to drug discovery, and support highly complex portfolio optimization and risk modeling in finance. In materials science, this opens new possibilities for understanding and simulating highly complex physical systems.

As quantum technologies transition into real-world deployment, these capabilities could translate into solving problems that would take today’s most powerful supercomputers years – if they could be solved at all.

ParityQC takes a unique approach to quantum computing. The company develops blueprints and the enabling software environment based on the ParityQC Architecture for scalable quantum computers. The recent record underpins their goal to build highly performant quantum devices with hardware developers worldwide in a co-design approach. The ParityQC Architecture reduces the complexity of the hardware design, includes error correction, and simplifies the connectivity. By leveraging the benefits of the architecture in combination with different hardware platforms, ParityQC is working actively together with the quantum ecosystem to continue the path of exponential growth.

Key innovations:

• Record implementation of QFT on IBM Heron processor: When applied to the QFT on an IBM Heron r3 processor, the teams achieved the highest process fidelity ever reported for the unitary QFT reaching 52 qubits. Crucially, the team also showed that the performance advantage of Parity Twine scales exponentially (exp(N²)) over the best previously known alternatives, where N is the number of qubits.
• Substantially reduced gate count and circuit depth: Parity Twine is a circuit compilation approach that substantially reduces both gate count and circuit depth when implementing quantum algorithms – critically, without requiring SWAP gates, which are a major source of overhead and error on many hardware platforms. By eliminating this overhead, Parity Twine allows algorithms to run in fewer steps, with less accumulated noise, and at significantly higher fidelity.
• Impact of QFT as cornerstone subroutine on quantum computing applications: The end-to-end tested algorithm shows significant improvement towards process fidelity compared to previous implementations. The team selected the Quantum Fourier Transform as their benchmark as it is a cornerstone subroutine that underpins a broad range of quantum computing applications, making it a measure of real-world quantum performance.

The results are published here: arXiv:2604.12465.

About ParityQC

As quantum architecture company, ParityQC’s focus is on developing blueprints and operating systems for quantum computers. ParityQC solves the challenges in the scalability of quantum devices by a fundamentally new paradigm which allows for fully programmable quantum chips with simplified design and control, as well as integrated error correction. ParityQC collaborates with hardware partners all over the world to jointly build highly scalable quantum computers for applications ranging from solving optimization problems on NISQ devices to general-purpose, error-corrected quantum computing.

Source: ParityQC

The post ParityQC Demonstrates 52-Qubit QFT on IBM Heron Processor appeared first on HPCwire.

Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson star in the spy thriller series Ponies.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from UploadVR: A group of independent researchers built a device that can artificially induce smell using ultrasound, with no consumable cartridges required. [...] The team of four are Lev Chizhov, Albert Yan-Huang, Thomas Ribeiro, Aayush Gupta. Chizhov is a neurotech entrepreneur with a background in math and physics, Yan-Huang is a researcher at Caltech with a background in computation and neural systems, and Ribeiro and Gupta are co-researchers on the project with software engineering and AI expertise. Instead of targeting your nose at all, the device directly targets the olfactory bulb in your brain with "focused ultrasound through the skull." The researchers say that as far as they're aware, no one has ever done this before, even in animals. A challenge in targeting the olfactory bulb is that it's buried behind the top of your nose, and your nose doesn't provide a flat surface for an emitter. Ultrasound also doesn't travel well through air. The solution the researchers came up with was to place the emitter on your forehead instead, with a "solid, jello-like pad for stability and general comfort," and the ultrasound directed downward towards the olfactory bulb. To determine the best placement, they say they used an MRI of one of their skulls to "roughly determine where the transducer would point and how the focal region (where ultrasound waves actually concentrate) aligned with the olfactory bulb (the target for stimulation)". [...] According to the researchers, they were able to induce the sensation of fresh air "with a lot of oxygen", the smell of garbage "like few-day-old fruit peels," an ozone-like sensation "like you're next to an air ionizer," and a campfire smell of burning wood. While technically head-mounted, the current device does require being held up with two hands. But as with all such prototypes, it likely could be significantly miniaturized.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Experts say US market ‘may have run ahead of itself’ while ASX 200’s more modest recovery is due in part to Australia’s reliance on fuel imports

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One day the IMF warns of a global recession, the next day stocks on Wall Street hit a record high.

From looking at the complete U-turn in fortunes in America, you wouldn’t know the world was in the grips of an unprecedented energy shock.

It’s a relief to see the pontiff decrying brutality, because it seems most current world leaders lack the necessary spine

I have never been a religious or spiritual person, even though I grew up in a religious area and had friends (and strangers) throughout school and university trying to lure me into whatever prayer disguised as organised fun they were up to. I did try it out shortly for a desperate period when I was young, attempting to pray to a God I didn’t really believe in to make me not gay, but blessedly he never answered.

Despite my resistance to organised religion, I have always had a soft spot for nuns and their counterparts. The girlies.

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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he and President Trump are "honest, direct about the fact that we have many disagreements," but they agree on their love for New York City.

New York mayor Mamdani calls footage of arrest of wrongly identified suspect ‘extremely disturbing and unacceptable’

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The New York police department has launched an internal investigation after videos posted online showed two police officers repeatedly punching and kicking a man they were attempting to arrest on Tuesday.

In a statement on Wednesday, the New York City police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, said that “there are a number of videos circulating online of an incident that occurred yesterday inside a store in Brooklyn involving two members of the NYPD.

Ukrainian president says nearly 700 Russian drones and 19 ballistic missiles mostly targeted Kyiv, Odesa and Dnipro

German chancellor Friedrich Merz and Irish prime minister Micheál Martin are now speaking at a press conference after their meeting in Berlin.

Let’s listen in.

A student who was 14 and armed with five guns opened fire in a Turkish school a day after another shooter injured 16 people and killed himself in another school, officials said.

• Mikie Sherrill says taxpayers should not carry burden

• Costs at World Cup have come under increased scrutiny

New Jersey’s governor, Mikie Sherrill, has hit out at Fifa after reports her state’s transport system will charge $100 for a return ticket to World Cup matches this summer.

New Jersey Transit lists the price for a round-trip ticket from New York’s Penn Station to MetLife Stadium, which will host eight World Cup matches this summer, including the final, as $12.90. The new pricing, reported by The Athletic earlier this week, puts the return ticket at more than $100 with no reductions for children, seniors or people with disabilities. NJ Transit told Fox 5 New York that the price has not been finalized. A decision is expected in the coming days.

The price of gold is increasing yet again. Here's where the price of the precious metal stands as of April 16, 2026.

More than 100 injured across country after Russia launches nearly 700 drones and dozens of ballistic and cruise missiles

Russia has carried out its deadliest attack against Ukraine this year, killing at least 17 people and injuring more than 100 in a wave of drone and missile strikes across the country.

Nine people died in the southern port city of Odesa and four were killed in Kyiv, including a 12-year-old boy. There were three fatalities in the Dnipropetrovsk region. Another person died in Zaporizhzhia oblast.

US defense secretary says Iran’s energy infrastructure is ‘not destroyed yet’ while also lambasting the media

Iran’s energy infrastructure is “not destroyed yet” and the US is “locked and loaded” to finish the job, Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, said on Thursday as he called many of the press corps gathered the moral equivalent of the Pharisees who conspired to destroy Jesus Christ.

Hegseth’s comments from the Pentagon podium came as a naval blockade of Iranian ports began this week and he called on Tehran to accept a nuclear deal or face consequences for its remaining infrastructure, power generation and energy industry.

No injuries and no damage reported in Wembley incident and Met says it is not being treated as terrorism

A teenager and two men have been arrested after an attempted arson attack at the offices of a Persian media organisation in north-west London, the Metropolitan police said.

Officers on patrol were told at about 8.30pm on Wednesday that an “ignited container” had been thrown towards the site in Wembley, landing in a car park where the fire immediately died out. There were no injuries and no damage was reported.

Exclusive: Opinions split on ‘unprecedented’ release of files, despite demand for ‘all papers’ related to ex-US ambassador’s appointment

• Revealed: Mandelson failed vetting but Foreign Office overruled decision

• Five key questions: who overruled decision to deny Mandelson security clearance?

Senior government officials have been considering whether to withhold from parliament sensitive documents that show Peter Mandelson failed security vetting before he assumed the role of US ambassador, the Guardian can reveal.

Any such decision could amount to an extraordinary breach of a parliamentary vote that ordered the release of “all papers” relevant to Mandelson’s appointment.

They promise weeks of hands-free cleaning, but auto-empty robot vacuums defer maintenance rather than eliminating it. Here's what you need to know about the hidden costs and upkeep before you buy one.

This new AI feature is taking fanfiction to another level.

OLIVIA CAVANNA
Staff Reporter

In a society dominated by social media, streaming platforms and technology, it is fair to ask: Are books dead?  

When people have free time, they will instinctively reach for their phones and remotes instead of a novel. Somewhere along the line, reading stopped being a main source of entertainment.

Today, entertainment is at our fingertips, and people crave instant gratification. Platforms like Netflix and TikTok offer endless amounts of content. There is no imagining what characters and settings look like and no waiting to see if you enjoy the story you are consuming. On these platforms, everything is curated to your liking.

Books are different. Books require time, patience, effort, imagination, creativity and trust in the author. When reading a book, you have to wait to find out what happens and how the story unfolds. With TV shows, you can binge the entire series in a day.

Ironically, many famous movies and shows that people obsess over were books first. Movies like “The Godfather,” “Schindler’s List,” “The Silence of the Lambs,” “The Notebook” and “Wicked” and shows such as “Heated Rivalry,” “Bridgerton,” “Sex and the City,” “You” and “Tell Me Lies” are all adaptations of physical novels. Most of the time, people do not realize they are watching a story that once lived inside a book.

I have heard countless people my age say that they hate reading. Growing up in an era where technology was always present, members of Generation Z have never known a world where boredom was cured by a good book. 

For many, reading is associated with school and work. It is not something we do for fun.

However, I have found that individuals in older generations still regularly turn to books for entertainment. Since they grew up in a time where digital technology was less present, reading is a solution for their boredom.

I personally love reading physical books, but most people my age do not share this sentiment. To me, the sensory experience of a book is everything: The smell of the paper, the sound of a page turning, the feeling of the cover in my hands, the font choice, the way the spine weakens over time.  

I particularly like to read used novels, and enjoy finding old bookmarked pages or little notes from the previous owner. It makes the story feel alive. Reading is all about connection, and these nuances make it even more special. I like thinking that many years ago, someone was in the same position as me, indulging in the same story, reading the same words and feeling the same emotions.

I see the value that a book holds, but for others, phones seem to hold all the value now. They house our entertainment, conversations, thoughts, feelings and identities. In the current world, physical books do not even compare to the convenience of digital technology.  

However, I have noticed something interesting happening. Online communities are breathing new life into books. Suddenly, reading is trendy, books sell out and people are lining up at bookstores again — all because of BookTok.  

On TikTok, a community called BookTok has become extremely popular. In BookTok, readers and authors are able to come together to talk about their love of literature. They create videos reviewing, recommending and talking about books — almost like an online book club.

Shockingly, BookTok has become very favored among Gen Z individuals. Maybe they are reading just because it is now trendy, but hey, at least they are reading.

Many people are also shifting away from reading books in print and towards e-books and audiobooks. Specific platforms have been created that allow people to listen to a book while going about their everyday lives. This digitalized version of reading makes stories more accessible than ever.  

It is incredible that people have rediscovered the beauty of reading in every evolving form. I still, however, have a soft spot for physical books. They carry history in their pages. 

While reading habits have drastically changed, it can be concluded that no, books are not dead —  they are just different.

These digital security organizers bring the fight for online privacy to dance parties, wine meetups and reading groups

Imani Thompson shows up at Wonderville Bar in Brooklyn looking ready for a DJ set, or to drink, or to dance the night away with friends. While she’ll probably do the latter, she’s also a cybersecurity organizer leading the evening’s event.

Thompson is the host, along with the New York City-based tech organizing coalition Cypurr Collective, of Break Up With Google. Its purpose isn’t a mystery; the main goal is to help attenders understand how to mitigate their vulnerability to surveillance through major tech services. But it’s also important for people to have fun while they do it, Thompson said – hence the DJs playing until the wee hours of the morning.

ANNAPOLIS, Md., April 16, 2026 — Maryland Governor Wes Moore celebrated World Quantum Day at the groundbreaking ceremony for the new 110,000-square-foot headquarters for the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS) at the University of Maryland Discovery District. The $65 million capital project will advance national defense technology and solidify the state’s status as a global leader in quantum. The event also highlighted quantum investments in the State’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget, which directs tens of millions of dollars to bolster Maryland’s Capital of Quantum Initiative, hire specialist faculty members at the University of Maryland, and support ongoing quantum capital projects.

Groundbreaking ceremony for the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS) at the University of Maryland Discovery District. Credit: Office of ​Governor Wes Moore.

“Quantum is changing the world, and Maryland is the best place in the world to change the world,” said Gov. Moore. “By investing in quantum and partnering with ARLIS, the State of Maryland is creating new opportunities for the student with the skills to succeed in this field, uplifting the family that now has access to good-paying work, and supporting the entrepreneurs who will solve some of the world’s most pressing challenges.”

The new four-story, Class A office development is a partnership with COPT Defense Properties and is scheduled for shell completion in the second quarter of 2027. ARLIS, based in the University of Maryland Discovery District, is one of only 15 U.S. Department of War-designated University Affiliated Research Centers nationwide, and the only one exclusively focused on intelligence and security missions. The lab, which currently employs more than 260 personnel, conducts research in artificial intelligence, information engineering, human systems and quantum applications.

“Emerging technologies like quantum computing are key to the future of our economy and our national security,” said Senator Chris Van Hollen, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “That’s why I’ve worked alongside Team Maryland to deliver $48 million in federal investments to support the U​niversity of Maryland’s ARLIS. The opening of this new ARLIS facility will build on the University of Maryland’s great national leadership in the field of quantum computing and advance new solutions to the ever-evolving security challenges our nation faces.”

“It was an honor to attend the groundbreaking for the new ARLIS facility at the University of Maryland, a world class institution that continues to lead the way in quantum computing. I was glad to work with the Maryland Congressional Delegation to secure federal funding for advanced research infrastructure at UMD and am thrilled to see the expansion of these initiatives in quantum computing at my alma mater,” said Congressman Steny Hoyer. “The continued collaboration among the private sector, government, and our academic institutions is vital to strengthening our national security. I applaud the leadership of the Moore-Miller Administration to ensure Maryland remains at the forefront of innovation in science and technology. We will continue working together to provide investments in Maryland research to shape the future and meet the challenges of our increasingly complex world.”

“On World Quantum Day, it is fitting to talk about the strategic imperative of leading in quantum research for both economic growth and national security,” said Congressman Glenn Ivey. “At the University of Maryland, College Park, University Affiliated Research Centers like the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS) are advancing real-world applications that strengthen our defense and intelligence capabilities. I thank Governor Wes Moore and University President Darryll J. Pines for helping make College Park the epicenter of Maryland’s capital of quantum innovation right here in the 4th Congressional District. I am proud to be a part of this groundbreaking.”

ARLIS has recently forged new partnerships with leading quantum companies that will contribute to its rapidly growing presence as a leader of applied intelligence analysis and quantum science in the defense sector. Last month, IonQ and Canadian-based photonic quantum computer developer Xanadu both announced collaborations with the Maryland Institute for Quantum Applications (MIQA) at ARLIS through the Secretary of the Air Force’s Securing Experimental Quantum Computing Usage in Research Environments (SEQCURE) program, a research sprint to align emerging quantum technologies with National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cybersecurity parameters.

“This new facility reflects ARLIS’s ongoing commitment to its mission,” said ARLIS Executive Director John Beieler. “It strengthens our ability to bring together researchers, students, and mission partners in a secure, collaborative environment, while reinforcing the work already contributing to the Department of War and Intelligence Community.”

The groundbreaking coincided with IQM, a global leader in superconducting quantum computers, announcing that they plan to launch their first U.S. Quantum Technology Center in the Discovery District—marking a new milestone in Maryland’s push to lead the world in quantum.

Since launching the Capital of Quantum Initiative in January 2025—a strategic partnership to unlock over $1 billion in state, federal, and private quantum investments—the state has secured over $500 million in funding to advance quantum innovation. Additional deals reached within the past year include an agreement between the State of Maryland and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) providing up to $100 million in matching grants for state and private quantum investments and the launch of Microsoft’s Partner Integration Center in the heart of the University of Maryland’s Discovery District.

“Today’s groundbreaking for ARLIS’ new facility represents an important milestone for the University of Maryland and our state,” said University of Maryland President Darryll J. Pines. “As we grow our footprint and expand our impact as the Capital of Quantum, we are incredibly grateful to Governor Wes Moore for his leadership and investment, which further strengthen Maryland’s position as a global leader in quantum technologies.”

More from HPCwire

• IQM Announces 1st US Quantum Technology Center in the University of Maryland’s Discovery District
• Microsoft to Open Quantum Research Center at the University of Maryland Discovery District
• UMD ARLIS Launches Maryland Institute for Quantum Applications
• Xanadu Joins University of Maryland’s ARLIS to Advance the Security of Quantum Computing
• IonQ and University of Maryland Expand QLab Collaboration to Advance Quantum Networking and Research
• IonQ and ARLIS Partner to Establish Zero Trust Security Framework for Mission-Critical Quantum Architectures

Source: Office of ​Governor Wes Moore

The post UMD ARLIS Breaks Ground on $65M Facility to Support Applied Quantum and Intelligence Missions appeared first on HPCwire.

The semi-finals are set after a dazzling meeting between Real Madrid and Bayern Munich. But there was plenty more to talk about in the last eight

Bayern Munich’s thrilling 4-3 win over Real Madrid on Wednesday, which gave them a 6-4 victory on aggregate and set up a semi-final meeting with PSG, was a stone-cold classic. If either of the semis is as good as Real and Bayern’s quarter-final, this season will have been blessed. Arda Güler showed off his brilliance on Wednesday, first with his presence of mind after Manuel Neuer’s mistake led to the opening goal and again from a free-kick in the 29th minute. Güler’s goals gave Madrid hope, but Harry Kane made another difficult finish look routine before Luis Díaz and Michael Olise’s late goals settled the tie. Bayern’s wing wizards were crucial in defeating the 15-time champions. This game had it all. That includes controversy, with a post-match scuffle set off by Madrid players enraged by Eduardo Camavinga’s dismissal for two quickfire yellow cards. Neuer, the hero of the first leg, had his blushes saved by his Bayern teammates, though one save from Kylian Mbappé was him at his best, combining reflexes with brute strength. Fine margins decided a battle of the giants.

Quantinuum’s H2 quantum computer to expand the scope and accuracy of pharmaceutical and materials science research using the Reimei-Fugaku hybrid compute platform

TOKYO, April 16, 2026 — Quantinuum, a leading quantum computing company, has announced that RIKEN, Japan’s premier national research institute, has procured its System Model H2 quantum computer to scale the capability of “Reimei-Fugaku,” a hybrid quantum-supercomputer platform in Japan.

The Reimei-Fugaku platform represents the frontier of computing technology. Launched in the spring of 2025, it combines Quantinuum’s “Reimei” quantum system with RIKEN’s “Fugaku,” one of the world’s fastest supercomputers—more formally known as a high-performance computing (HPC) system.

Now, the hybrid compute platform is getting a substantial upgrade. Earlier this month, Quantinuum delivered its H2 system to RIKEN’s research facility near Tokyo, where assembly is already underway to replace its predecessor, System Model H1, which Reimei has been based on to date. The newer-generation, 56-qubit system is engineered for high-fidelity operations that can reduce time-to-solution, enable larger workloads, and support higher-value applications.

Technology leaders see hybrid compute systems as a practical way to overcome the limits of classical HPC. By combining the significant data-processing power of HPC with a quantum computer’s ability to model complex molecules and materials, researchers could be enabled to solve specialized mathematical problems that are impractical for classical systems to handle alone.

Researchers have already demonstrated this potential using the current Reimei-Fugaku platform. In a workflow with relevance potentially extending to future pharmaceutical applications, they successfully simulated biomolecular reactions at an accuracy that would be infeasible for HPC to achieve in isolation.

With multiple studies in chemistry and materials science already underway on the platform, this H2 upgrade is expected to accelerate research and unlock even more complex scientific discoveries across disciplines.

Dr. Mitsuhisa Sato, Division Director of the Quantum-HPC Hybrid Platform Division, RIKEN Center for Computational Science, said: “Since its installation in February 2025, Reimei H1 has been widely used by JHPC-quantum users and has delivered significant results, thanks to its high fidelity and flexible qubit connectivity. The upgrade to H2 is exactly what we have been eagerly anticipating, and with its 56 qubits, we expect it to play a key role in demonstrating quantum advantage through quantum–HPC hybrid computing.”

Dr. Rajeeb Hazra, President and CEO of Quantinuum, said: “We believe RIKEN’s decision to continue adopting Quantinuum systems to meet its ambitious objectives is a validation of our technology roadmap and a reflection of the success of our valued partnership. With Quantinuum and RIKEN’s combined leadership in quantum and HPC, respectively, we expect to continue pushing the boundaries of computing to address some of the most critical and complex challenges facing science and industry today.”

This development reflects the continued progress of Quantinuum and RIKEN’s collaboration to advance quantum-HPC hybrid infrastructure in Japan. Quantinuum intends to continue working with the country’s research community to accelerate real-world use cases and contribute to the growth of its quantum ecosystem.

More from HPCwire

• RIKEN Leads Hybrid Computing Effort Connecting Quantum Computers and Supercomputers
• SoftBank and RIKEN Move Japan’s Quantum-Supercomputer Project into Test-User Phase
• Projecting RIKEN CCS’s Future State Across HPC, AI, and Quantum
• NVIDIA and RIKEN Advance Science in Japan with New Supercomputers for AI and Quantum Computing

About RIKEN

RIKEN, a National Research and Development Agency, is Japan’s leading national comprehensive research institution renowned for high-quality research in a diverse range of scientific disciplines. Founded in 1917, initially as a private research foundation, RIKEN has grown rapidly in size and scope, today encompassing a network of world-class research centers and institutes across Japan.

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.[i] Quantinuum has active engagements with market leaders across pharmaceuticals, material science, financial services, and government and industrial markets.

The company has a global workforce of approximately 700 employees, including top scientists and researchers. Over 70% of its technology team hold PhDs. Quantinuum’s headquarters is in Broomfield, Colorado, with additional facilities across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Singapore.

Source: Quantinuum

The post RIKEN Scales Quantum-Supercomputing in Japan with Quantinuum System Upgrade appeared first on HPCwire.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani spoke with "CBS Mornings" on Thursday and reflected on his first 100 days in office.

PM demands real world changes in Downing Street meeting with senior figures from Meta, TikTok, Google and X

Keir Starmer has told social media bosses “things can’t go on like this” in a meeting about internet safety at Downing Street.

The prime minister summoned senior figures from Meta, TikTok, Google, Snapchat’s owner and X to No 10 on Thursday morning as the government considers imposing new restrictions on platforms, including an Australia-style ban for under-16s. Meta owns Facebook and Instagram, and Google owns YouTube.

Review: The 2026 Moto G Stylus has a mix of modern and classic features, giving it a unique appeal.

A new study published by the American Psychological Association found a negative correlation between AI use and confidence in our abilities.

The new Canva feels AI-first, design second.

After two devastating hurricanes, El Yunque national forest has built a new visitors center that hosts a vibrant arts festival

Washington and Tehran will have to make compromises and the current deadline must be extended. But with the will there’s clearly a way

The failure of the Islamabad talks to end the US-Israel war on Iran was hardly surprising, given the stark differences between Washington’s 15-point proposal and Tehran’s 10-point equivalent. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which capped Iran’s uranium enrichment, took more than two years to negotiate, and its roots actually reach back to 2003. The US vice-president, JD Vance, spent less than a full day in Islamabad for negotiations that included the nuclear question and several others.

The surprise was Vance’s explanation for the failure – that Iran rejected the terms presented by the US. The American side was not in a position to dictate terms because Iran stood firm when the 8 April ceasefire took effect. But Vance seemed to believe, as does his boss Donald Trump, that the Iranians had been defeated and the US didn’t have to budge.

Rajan Menon is professor emeritus of international relations at Powell School, City University of New York, and senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies

In prison, I witnessed the gap in accountability between the poor and the elite. A banker’s message to Epstein is racist and reductive

Here is an email that should bring shame to Jes Staley:

you want to know why we are not São Paolo, watch the TV adds on the Superbowl. Its all about hip blacks in hip cars with white women.

The group that should be in the streets, has been bought off. By Jay Z

Catch up on this year's Oscar winners and some great titles that are leaving soon.

Leader of leftwing Economic Freedom Fighters was convicted last year for firing rifle in the air at 2018 rally

The South African leftwing politician Julius Malema has been sentenced to five years in prison for firing a rifle in the air at a political rally in 2018.

Lawyers for the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, South Africa’s fourth largest political party, immediately appealed, and Malema will remain free while the appeal proceedings are under way.

An American Airlines pilot told Air Traffic Control at Charlotte International Airport that his plane "nearly hit" a truck speeding past on the concourse Wednesday, forcing him to slam the brakes.

Hampshire is latest school to fall to declining enrollment amid a decades-long crisis affecting liberal arts colleges

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When Hampshire College enrolled its first class of students in 1970, it offered a new breed of liberal arts education, one meeting each student’s interests and motivations, emphasizing learning across disciplines and close relationships with teachers.

For the next 56 years, Hampshire provided just that, becoming a beloved alma mater to scores of unconventional learners who sought, and found, a college experience “unlike anywhere else – and unlike anyone else’s”, as the school’s site still promises to deliver.

Nearly 700 drones and 19 missiles struck cities across the country overnight, killing 16 people, officials said. Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, was among the hardest hit.

A federal agency will open a portal on April 20 that lets businesses apply for a refund for Trump tariffs struck down by the Supreme Court.

James Otis Jr. was not among the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, and he had largely vanished from public life by the time the Revolution arrived. But for more than a decade before the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, he was perhaps the most prominent voice for colonial rights in British North America.

Otis spent the decade before the war making the case in courtrooms and newspapers that Parliament had no right to tax the colonies, since colonists could not elect their own representatives to it.

The Otis family had lived in the Province of Massachusetts Bay for five generations when James Otis Jr. was born in West Barnstable on Feb. 5, 1725. He was the second of 13 children born to his father, James Otis, and his mother, Mary Allyne, and the first to survive infancy. His sister Mercy, the poet and playwright, and his brothers Joseph and Samuel would play an important part in the coming revolution.

The Otis family regarded itself as quiet but important characters in the great drama of early American history. According to an 1848 family history, they may have lacked “a line of illustrious names,” but they “partook in the perils of founding and defending this country, in times when courage, constancy, and patience were indeed common virtues.” By the time his namesake was born, James Otis Sr. was serving in the Massachusetts House of Representatives for Barnstable and managing a successful law practice. He took care that Otis Jr. met the Latin, Greek and mathematics requirements for admission to Harvard College, though a 19th-century historian, Alice Brown, later described the boy as “brilliant, erratic, no less a genius in capacity than in temperament. A creature of mental impulse, he nevertheless carried the ballast of reverence for exact study.”

Otis Jr. graduated from Harvard in 1743 and studied law in Boston under fellow Harvard alumnus Jeremiah Gridley. A local lawyer remarked that he “had never known a student in law so punctual, so steady, so constant and persevering” as Otis Jr., praise which John Adams, another of Gridley’s students, would later echo. He was admitted to the bar in 1748 and moved his law practice from Plymouth to Boston in 1750.

Otis Jr. established his reputation in the wider community when, in February 1761, he delivered a four-hour speech at Boston’s Old State House condemning British trade policy. The scene was exceptionally dramatic: his rivalry with the presiding judge Thomas Hutchinson was well known, and he was pitted against his mentor, Gridley, who defended Britain’s arbitrary use of general search warrants (known as “writs of assistance”) against the colonists.

Otis Jr. was still a young man at the time; a witness described him as a “plump, round-faced, smooth-skinned, short-necked, eagle-eyed politician” when he rose to the lectern that day. But his arguments against arbitrary power would reverberate through the colonies, showing that Americans might protest not only higher taxes but also the entire structure of British imperial power. He declared that writs of assistance arising from “the privilege of the House” were null and void even if Parliament had authorized them because they violated the natural right that all citizens possess. “It appears to me the worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty and the fundamental principles of law, that ever was found in an English law-book,” he told the crowd.

According to Adams, Otis was “a flame of fire” that day. “American Independence was then and there born,” he wrote. “Every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take up arms against Writs of Assistance.”

Otis Jr. was elected to the provincial legislature of Massachusetts in May 1761. The following spring, he published "A Vindication of the Conduct of the House of Representatives of the Province of Massachusetts Bay," a pamphlet that defended legislators against the governor’s accusations that they had improperly refused to fund a British military expedition. Echoing his speech in Boston, Otis Jr. argued that the power to tax belonged exclusively to the elected representatives of the people, a right that was no less available to colonists than to Englishmen born in Britain. “It would be of little consequence to the people whether they were subject to George or Louis, the king of Great Britain or the French king,” Otis Jr. wrote, “if both were as arbitrary as both would be if both could levy taxes without parliament.”

Once a “brilliant, erratic” boy seeking admission to Harvard, Otis Jr. was by this time one of the most prominent voices for colonial rights in North America. When the Stamp Act Congress convened in New York City in October 1765, uniting delegates from nine colonies to respond to newly imposed taxes by Parliament, Adams described Otis Jr. as the “soul” of the body. In its crowning document, the Declaration of Rights and Grievances, the Congress proclaimed that colonists possessed all the rights of Englishmen and that “no taxes ever have been, or can be constitutionally imposed on them, but by their respective legislatures.” Though the phrase “no taxation without representation” had been circulating in the colonies for some time, Otis had done as much as any single figure to bolster its intellectual and legal foundations.

“His influence at home in controlling and directing the movement of events which led to the War of Independence was universally felt and acknowledged,” according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “and abroad no American was so frequently quoted, denounced, or applauded in parliament and the English press before 1769 as the recognized head and chief of the rebellious spirit of the New England colonists.”

The year 1769 marked the end of Otis Jr.’s celebrated presence in public life. After a violent altercation with a tax collector left a gash on his head, peers observed that Otis Jr., who had perhaps already been suffering from mental illness, now “ramble[d] and wander[ed] like a ship without a helm.” His decline left him largely unfit to continue his law practice.

In 1771, he left Boston to live in the Massachusetts countryside with friends and family. He had already burned most of his private papers when he died on May 23, 1783, struck by lightning while he watched a thunderstorm from a friend’s doorway in Andover. His body lies today near Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock in the Granary Burying Ground in Boston.

Anna Salvatore is a Content Fellow at the National Constitution Center and a graduate of Princeton University.

Resources

John Adams to Hezekiah Niles, 14 January 1818, in Niles’ Weekly Register, vol. 13, H. Niles, ed. (Baltimore: Franklin Press, 1817), 361-363.

"John Adams’s Reconstruction of Otis’s Speech in the Writs of Assistance Case," in The Collected Political Writings of James Otis, ed. Richard A. Samuelson (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2015), 11–4. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/2703

Alice Brown, Mercy Otis Warren (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896), 25.

Horatio N. Otis, “Genealogical and Historical Memoir of the Otis Family,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 2 (1848), 281.

Clifford K. Shipton, “James Otis,” in Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, vol. XI, 1741-1745 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1960), 247-48

Tycoon’s media empire accused of pushing far-right ideas, as writers say: ‘We refuse to be hostages in ideological war’

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More than 100 writers have quit the historic French publishing house Grasset in protest at its conservative billionaire owner, Vincent Bolloré, whose media empire has been accused of promoting reactionary and far-right ideas.

In an unprecedented walkout, dozens of writers including the acclaimed punk feminist novelist Virginie Despentes and the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, signed an open letter against Bolloré, 74, who is close to far-right figures.

From its new sensor, film profiles and built-in storage, the Osmo Pocket 4 has a lot to offer. Shame it won't be on sale in the US at launch.

Samsung is deactivating its long-standing Messages app in July. Here's what to do next.

Risks from cancer and other diseases could be hidden with little accountability if justices favor big firms, critics warn

The US could face foreign attacks, food shortages and agricultural “devastation” if the supreme court rules against Monsanto in a closely watched case over pesticide regulation that is set for arguments later this month, according to a series of legal briefs supporting the company.

In contrast, opposing legal briefs warn that if the court sides with Monsanto, consumers will be stripped of their rights to sue when they develop cancer or other serious diseases they attribute to exposure to dangerous chemicals. Companies will be able to hide product risks with little accountability, they warn.

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• Curry scores 35 points in dazzling display of shooting

• Golden State face Phoenix for place in playoffs

• 76ers progress after win over Orlando Magic

Stephen Curry hit seven three-pointers while scoring 35 points with a dazzling display of his unmatched shooting skill as the Golden State Warriors won Wednesday’s play-in game against the Los Angeles Clippers to keep their season alive.

Curry wasn’t the only Warriors player rolling back the years. In the fourth quarter, Draymond Green bodied up to Kawhi Leonard and utterly shut down one of the greatest scorers of their generation.

Pedro Piscal pisco is latest Chilean brand to resemble a Hollywood name – and others have fought off the lawsuits

The actor Pedro Pascal is waging a legal battle against a Chilean pisco merchant who has chosen a cheeky name for his brand of the country’s national spirit: Pedro Piscal.

David Herrera registered the brand name with a Chilean commercial regulator in 2023 and began selling his pisco in off-licences and restaurants.

Heather Hallett hails vaccine scheme but criticises rule that only those meeting 60% disabled threshold can get payouts

The Covid-19 vaccine programme in the UK was an “extraordinary feat” but the payment scheme for people injured by the jabs must be urgently reformed, the public inquiry on the pandemic has found.

In her report, the inquiry chair, Heather Hallett, praised the fact the UK was a world leader in biomedical sciences, which set it in good stead for developing and rolling out vaccines at scale. But she said the government must act urgently to reform the scheme for payments to the “small minority” of people seriously injured by the vaccines, and almost double maximum payouts to at least £200,000 from an upper limit of £120,000 at present.

Why Should Delaware Care? 
Work-release programs are widely seen as effective tools for helping people transition back into society after incarceration and reducing recidivism. After Delaware officials consolidated these programs, citing rising maintenance costs at an aging facility in Wilmington and a declining population, the move has drawn criticism from advocates and some lawmakers, who say the transition to the Smyrna facility has created new barriers to employment and reentry.

A month after state officials shut down Wilmington’s only prison work release program, the transition to a Smyrna substance abuse treatment center has garnered mixed reactions from lawmakers and inmates.

On Tuesday, the Senate Corrections & Public Safety Committee held a hearing to understand the current state of the program. During the meeting, officials from the Department of Corrections gave updates, calling the transition from the former Plummer Center to the Community Corrections Treatment Center in Smyrna “successful.” 

The DOC’s New Castle Work Release Program now utilizes extra space at the Smyrna center located adjacent to the Vaughn prison, where low-risk offenders are housed and offered programming when they are not working, DOC spokesperson Jason Miller said. 

Still, the Tuesday meeting presented more questions and confusion, as some residents and advocates say individuals are being treated improperly at the Smyrna center, where harsh restrictions and inadequate resources limit them from finding work and being with their families.

State Sen. Ray Seigfried (D-Claymont), who chairs the Senate committee, told Spotlight Delaware he wants to make reforms to the program to ensure it’s “working the way it should.” 

Seigfried said the Smyrna facility is not equipped to handle a work release program and also noted concerns around individuals being treated unfairly at the facility.  

“I think [the Department of Corrections] testimony just simply was not correct,” Seigfried said. “You heard the mother, I’ve heard from residents of the prison, and it’s like I’m hearing two different stories.”

Seigfried said it is too early to point to specific changes he wants to make, but he will be discussing the matter with other committee members. 

But another lawmaker on the committee, State Sen. Marie Pinkney (D-Bear), did not share Seigfried’s concerns.

Pinkney said she was not worried about the Smyrna center’s ability to manage the work release program after Plummer’s closure. 

“​​It didn’t sound like there was actually too much of a significant difference in how the [Plummer and Smyrna] programs were run,” she said. 

DOC officials maintain that Smyrna’s new work release program is being run as it should. Individuals in the program receive counseling and assistance with resumé preparation, job applications and interview preparation, Miller said. 

“This decision [to close the Plummer Center] was ultimately about strengthening services, not reducing them,” DOC Commissioner Terra Taylor said during Tuesday’s hearing. “We did not eliminate or reduce the work release program.”

DOC highlights improvements, some remain unsure

During Tuesday’s Senate hearing, Taylor highlighted improvements that have been made to the program under the Smyrna facility, like new transportation services that help individuals get to their jobs across New Castle County and in some parts of Kent County. 

Miller noted that, depending on how many individuals require transportation per shift, drop-offs are either door-to-door or to public transportation hubs.

Taylor also said the department has expanded its behavioral cognitive therapy program at the Smyrna center, allowing people in the work release program to use it in addition to individuals who are there for treatment.

Rachelle Wilson’s son has been incarcerated for 17 years and is currently residing at the Community Corrections Treatment Center in Smyrna. 

Wilson said she prepared her statements three days before testifying at Tuesday’s hearing. She had not heard of many DOC initiatives prior to attending the hearing, and she questioned when those programs were put in place. 

Instead, Wilson said she has spoken with other residents and parents at the Smyrna facility, and has heard of people who have lost job opportunities because of the center’s regulations and strict policies. 

Residents are doing what is required of them, but they are unable to rebuild their lives because of “internal programming conflicts, a lack of transportation, understaffed and inflexible policies,” she said.

Ultimately, Wilson said the facility is a treatment center and is not equipped to function like the former Plummer Center.

But after Wilson’s testimony, Taylor, the DOC commissioner, said “there’s really no difference” between treatment centers and work release. 

Taylor said programs and supports are still in place, and the work referral practices that were used in Plummer are also being used inside the Smyrna center. 

At the end of the tense, two-hour meeting, Taylor acknowledged the department is not perfect, but she said it has “evolved.” 

“We’re not here to sound defensive,” she said. “We’re here to continue to work together with our partners and keep moving forward.”

Future of Plummer building remains unclear

During the public comment section of the meeting, Bradley Owens, the director of the Prescription Opioid Settlement Distribution Commission, questioned what would happen to the Plummer Center building now that it is closed. 

Owens, who has more than a decade of experience working inside prisons, said the building has the potential to become housing for those experiencing homelessness or with mental and substance abuse issues in Wilmington. 

In recent months, Spotlight Delaware has spoken with people living in Christina Park, the city’s only sanctioned homeless encampment, and other housing advocates have expressed concern over the lack of housing options in the unhoused in Delaware’s largest city. 

“It is a facility that has adequate housing, it has medical capacity, it has a cafeteria, and it has potential use for people coming out of prison, people with mental health, substance use disorder, homelessness issues,” Owens said.

Asked if the city would have an appetite to repurpose the center for such uses, officials in Mayor John Carney’s office noted that the building is state-owned, would require substantial investment to rehabilitate, and that such uses “fall outside of the city’s purview.”

What led to this hearing? 

For decades, the location of the Plummer center kept individuals close to family as they neared their release from prison, especially those who were transitioning out of the Howard R. Young Correctional Institute in Wilmington.

But last September, the Department of Correction announced the Plummer Center would shut down in March.  

The announcement was met with pushback from local politicians and residents who argued that work release inmates will lose a vital community space that helps them become part of society again by keeping them close to family, jobs, and support systems.

“They need the Plummer Community Center, not displacement,” Wilmington City Councilwoman Shané Darby said in November. “Funding concerns should never supersede rehabilitation, dignity, and public safety.”

A month after Darby’s statement, eight New Castle County lawmakers sent a letter to Gov. Matt Meyer urging him not to allow “budgetary considerations to morph into final decisions in a vacuum.”

“We need to know the true cost to the impacted communities and the true prospects for alternative or complementary paths,” the letter stated.

In their announcement, corrections officials cited a drop in the number of people at Plummer, along with high maintenance costs at the century-old facility. They estimated that the state would have to spend about $4 million over the next two years to maintain the Plummer Center. 

On Tuesday, Taylor noted an additional $8 million would have also been needed in capital improvements for the building. 

In the wake of the hearing, it remains unclear what actions, if any, Siegfried will take to address his concerns about the fallout from Plummer’s closing. For now, at least, the program will continue operating from Smyrna.

The post After Plummer closure, questions grow over transition to Smyrna appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

An Australian judge turned away an appeal by former U.S. Marine pilot Daniel Duggan to avoid extradition to the U.S. over allegations that he illegally trained Chinese military aviators more than a decade ago.

Apple's iPhone 17 has a lot in common with last year's model, but there are notable improvements to the camera, display and battery.

The longtime USMNT standout is following in the footsteps of his father, coaching with a deep appreciation of what makes American soccer special

The timing was ideal. The day after Red Bull New York won their 2026 MLS home opener 1-0, with three academy products becoming the youngest trio to combine for a goal in the history of the league, the club hosted their annual youth summit. Coaches and administrators convened in the Audi Club Lounge of Sports Illustrated Stadium where they were fed, presented to, encouraged to learn, network and, of course, stick around until head coach Michael Bradley arrived for a panel to wrap up the event.

Most of them did. A long line quickly formed between Bradley and his exit, and he obliged all of the people waiting for a photo. It’s the same patience he still affords the media, whose numbers noticeably increased at RBNY games when the New Jersey native took the reins, following in the footsteps of his father, Bob, under whom Michael learned as a son, a player, and an assistant before striking out on his own.

The case of two fired judges – and one who kept his job – offers a lesson in the administration’s view of free speech

The Trump administration believes some noncitizens may not even have first amendment rights. And it’s turning that legal fantasy into a reality by making immigration judges choose between the constitution and their jobs.

Last week, the judge who rejected the deportation of Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts doctoral student whose only offense was co-writing an op-ed critical of Israel, was fired after upholding the law. Judge Roopal Patel rejected the administration’s argument that expressing views shared by millions of Americans disturbed by the carnage in Gaza – sometimes including Donald Trump himself – equates to supporting terrorism and antisemitism.

Investigation of Family Dollar and Dollar General prompts lawmakers to double penalties for retailers that repeatedly charge more at checkout than prices listed on shelves

Utah lawmakers have voted to stiffen penalties on retailers who chronically overcharge customers.

The new state law, which takes effect on 6 May, was introduced in direct response to a Guardian investigation of pricing practices at two national chains, Dollar General and Family Dollar, according to an official who oversees the state’s price-accuracy inspections.

Some Japanese bullet trains will soon support premium private suites this October, featuring windows with embedded 5G antennas for steadier onboard Wi-Fi and NTT noise-cancelling cabin tech to reduce train noise. The 5G window antennas are designed to maintain line-of-sight connections as trains race past base stations at up to 285 km/h. The Register reports: Rail operator JR Central announced the new tech late last month and will initially deploy a couple of the suites on six trains. The carrier explained that the antennas come from a Japanese company called AGC that weaves microscopic wires through glass to form an antenna. JR Central will connect the windows to an on-train Wi-Fi router. AGC says rival tech relies on 5G signals reaching a train and then bouncing around inside before reaching the Wi-Fi unit. The company says antennas woven into train windows maintain line of sight to nearby 5G base stations. That matters because JR Central's Shinkansen can achieve speeds of up to 285 km/h, which means they speed past cellular network base stations so quickly that it's frequently necessary to reconnect to another radio. AGC says keeping a line of sight connection means its antennas allow increased 5G signal strength, so Wi-Fi service on board trains should be more stable and speedy. The sound-deadening kit JR Central will deploy is called Personalized Sound Zone (PSZ) and comes from Japan's tech giant NTT. The tech uses the same principles applied to noise-cancelling headphones -- determine the waveform of sound and project an inversion of that waveform that cancels out ambient noise.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Guardian readers describe how their lives have been upended by cost hikes stemming from Trump’s Iran war

With the US and Israel’s war on Iran now in its seventh week, with a fragile ceasefire in place since earlier this month, Americans are continuing to feel the effects at the pump as global fuel prices rise.

For several readers who spoke to the Guardian, the impact has forced difficult trade-offs – from accessing essential medicines and groceries to facing the brink of homelessness amid an already rising cost of living.

Retrial ordered in case of Benjamin Field, found guilty in 2019 of murdering Peter Farquhar, 69, in Buckinghamshire

A former church warden who was jailed for life for the murder of a university lecturer has had his conviction quashed at the court of appeal.

Benjamin Field was jailed for at least 36 years in 2019 after being found guilty of murdering 69-year-old Peter Farquhar in Maids Moreton, Buckinghamshire.

Joseph McCann was questioned by police after his partner, Ashly Robinson, better known online as Ashlee Jenae, was found dead in her room.

Exclusive: Letter urges ministers to consult on Charity Commission measures meant to tackle extremism

Several leading civil society organisations have urged the government to consult the sector before introducing new powers for the Charity Commission, which they caution risks “suppressing legitimate advocacy” at a time when civic space is under increased pressure.

Signatories, including leaders from some of the UK’s largest civil society bodies, alongside faith-based and community organisations, wrote to the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, saying the proposed social cohesion measures could lead to the “suppression of lawful advocacy, campaigning and community engagement”.

The truth is, we were all just jealous

To Lena Dunham, I need to say that I’m sorry. I’m sure she’ll never read this, since she doesn’t seem like the kind of person who Googles herself. If I was Lena, I certainly wouldn’t. The internet is full of mockery, sarcasm and outright cruelty. I’ve been part of the problem, too. Lena and I were starting off our careers at the same time, those halcyon days of the 2010s, when people still subscribed to cable TV and social media was just a fun new tool to post random thoughts and photos of your brunch. Now, if you post a photo of a meal, people will scream at you for bragging that you can afford food.

Fourteen years since HBO’s Girls turned Dunham from an indie film darling into a mainstream superstar, the writer/director is now releasing a memoir that reflects on her time in the cultural crosshairs. The headline of a New York Times interview reads: “Lena Dunham Is Still Trying to Figure Out Why People Hated Her So Much.”

Apple introduced this feature in 2024 alongside iOS 18.

As the conflict in the Middle East drives up prices at the pump, experts say suspending gas and diesel taxes isn't the easy fix it may appear to be.

Why Should Delaware Care?
Spotlight Delaware’s Breaking Bread Tour, launched this year, gives residents a chance to speak directly about issues affecting their communities. By bringing neighbors together around the same table, the discussion is meant to allow residents to highlight concerns that might not always appear in local government meetings or policy debates.

As nearly 20 residents dined on spaghetti and meatballs inside a Georgetown community center Monday night, a variety of topics fueled conversations across three tables of attendees. 

Some of those topics included affordable housing, how independent libraries are funded, and improving literacy in western Sussex County. Residents also discussed the town’s growing homeless population. 

Spotlight Delaware held its second “Breaking Bread” event at the First State Community Action Agency in Georgetown, tucked in the northwest corner of town, about half a mile from a burgeoning homeless encampment. 

At Monday night’s dinner, some residents discussed both reading and financial literacy in western Sussex County. One resident said she believes many children in the county leave school without proper life skills like knowing how to budget or write a check. 

Separately, that conversation also covered reading literacy and how some children leaving high school cannot read beyond a middle school level. This, one resident said, can lead them to trouble financially when it comes to signing contracts or taking out loans that begin to compound. 

At another table, residents discussed the county’s libraries, and how their funding structure can often leave them cash-strapped. In Sussex County, many of the libraries are independent and receive far less funding than their government-run counterparts. This means every year is a struggle to fundraise and keep the doors open. 

Additionally, those residents discussed making Georgetown a destination and building a strong community feel within the Sussex County seat. 

But right now, they said, opportunities are limited and beyond massive government structures, there is not much to do around Georgetown’s small downtown core. One resident said they were not sure how to address these concerns with the town government, or if elected officials would even have the appetite to take on large-scale enterprise projects. 

Lastly, one table discussed affordable housing in the county, and how Georgetown could protect its immigrant community in the wake of a federal crackdown. 

One attendee — political candidate for Sussex County Council, Jill Hicks — pointed to affordable housing as one of her table’s main discussion points. She said she believes the county should do more to incentivize builders to build affordable units. 

County Council is touting affordable housing as an issue but not doing enough to make changes, she said. 

“Step up and treat it like a crisis,” Hicks said.

The Breaking Bread series will next move to Dover, where residents of Kent County will be invited to share a meal and discuss local issues – stay tuned for date and location information.

The post Sussex residents meet in Georgetown to talk affordable housing, literacy appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

The defence minister insists that increases in spending did not happen because of thinktanks, retired generals ‘or washed-up bureaucrats’

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If there’s anyone who knows just how much pressure Donald Trump is heaping on allies to lift defence spending, it’s Richard Marles.

The message was received loud and clear when he met his US counterpart, Pete Hegseth, in Singapore nearly a year ago.

Villagers, health workers and human rights monitors see a pattern of reckless attacks in the U.S.-backed fight against Boko Haram and its Islamic State-affiliated offshoot.

Outside a repair shop in rural southeastern Illinois, the parts of a massive 3D construction printer sat disassembled on a flatbed trailer, weeds climbing the wheels.

The $1.1 million investment wasn’t meant to end up there, abandoned.

Two local men had taken out a loan from a tiny bank to buy the printer, promising it would spark an affordable-housing revival across hard-pressed southern Illinois. Their first stop was Cairo, at the state’s southern tip — a historic river town beset by the loss of jobs and safe housing, now home to fewer than 2,000 mostly Black residents.

In August 2024, after months of negotiations, the city finalized a deal with their company, Prestige Project Management Inc., to build 30 duplexes. Days later, the printer arrived and crews assembled it on a vacant corner lot at 17th Street and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue. 

More than 100 people showed up for the groundbreaking. Children clutched cotton candy and popcorn. Pallets of Amazon giveaways spilled from a truck. Behind a chain-link fence, the towering printer hummed to life, two American flags clipped to its steel legs, laying down the base of what was billed as the first new home built in Cairo in at least 30 years. The crowd cheered.

Kaneesha Mallory pressed against the fence. She had grown up in Cairo, moved away, then returned after her daughter was born. Living in a cramped one-bedroom public housing unit across town, she imagined a bedroom her 6-year-old could finally call her own.

Mayor Thomas Simpson called the project “just the beginning.” State Sen. Dale Fowler, whose district incorporates some of Illinois’ most destitute counties, described it as an “extraordinary project” — the start of more development to come. His nonprofit organization, which serves low-income children and families, had secured a $40,000 donation to help pay for the event.

Mallory couldn’t bring herself to leave while her future seemed to be taking shape. She stayed in the August heat so long that she fainted and was taken to the emergency room by ambulance.

Crews worked overnight to avoid the heat. Within about a month, the walls went up. Interior work followed.

But then the work stopped before the duplex was finished. The owners would later say cracks — dozens of them — had begun running through the walls and that they needed to make sure the structure was sound. The printer disappeared.

A year later, no one had moved into the duplex. It stood alone in a wide lot along a sun-bleached road.

As I began to examine what happened, the story grew complicated.

I learned that before the 3D printer arrived in Cairo, the Prestige owners had forfeited about $590,000 as a deposit for a different printer when they ended up canceling the order, a fact that would quickly turn the atmosphere tense as I pressed the company’s owners, the bank, Fowler and others for answers. 

I also learned that not long after the groundbreaking, several employees left Prestige around the same time a spray of anonymous emails hit inboxes across the region. The emails called the Cairo duplex project little more than a publicity stunt and alleged fraud tied to Prestige’s other construction projects.

I also wasn’t the only one asking questions. I discovered that the FBI has launched an investigation into Prestige led by an agent in southern Illinois who specializes in white-collar and public corruption investigations. To date, there have been no charges filed or arrests made, and Prestige’s owners deny any wrongdoing. 

Over the past eight months, the more questions I asked, the more public officials distanced themselves from the project and the company. The broader housing plan — the one that had fueled speeches and celebration — started to look increasingly uncertain.

I was determined to know: Was this simply another failed pitch to this dirt-poor delta town — or something more?

“God Sent Us”

Jamie Hayes, who inherited a Ford dealership from his father, and Erik Burtis, who had long supplied labor to coal mines, founded Prestige in 2021 in Harrisburg, Illinois, a town of fewer than 8,000 people about 80 miles northeast of Cairo. 

It is one of seven companies Hayes has started since 2020, three of them co-owned with Burtis, according to Illinois business records. The two, business partners since 2012, have taken on an eclectic mix of projects: school construction management, solar farm fencing and the 3D printing venture. Hayes provides the capital; Burtis runs the day-to-day operations. 

Burtis said he landed on 3D printing in early 2023 after asking his son Josh, who works for the company, to find out what was hot in construction. He reported back that it was 3D construction — based on trends in Europe. “Usually we’re five, maybe six, seven years behind what happens there,” Burtis said. 

Burtis said God then laid it on his heart to start building in Cairo by donating the first home his company would print. Fowler, the state senator whose district office is in the same building as Prestige, said he listened to Burtis’ plan as they drove to Cairo to meet with town officials a few years ago. Fowler said he suggested building a duplex instead of a single home so two families could benefit. Burtis was moved by that idea.

“He literally started tearing up,” Fowler said. He told me the story in August as we talked in the back booth of a local barbecue restaurant. 

“Did you cry, too?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Fowler said. “I’m about to right now just thinking about it.”

Cairo’s housing crisis is rooted in a long and complicated history. In 1972, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights visited the town and documented how racism had harmed Black families, including through neglect of their segregated public housing. Those problems only worsened over time.

I grew up nearby and have reported on Cairo’s housing problems for more than a decade. In 2015, I documented how conditions in those once-segregated developments had withered into mice-infested slums, overrun with mold and contaminated with lead, while federal overseers looked the other way.

In 2016, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development took over the local housing authority and then demolished those apartment homes, displacing nearly 400 residents. In 2022, HUD evacuated another high-rise for seniors, then home to about 60 people. In less than five years, more than 300 apartment units were razed, accelerating the county’s decline into one of the fastest-shrinking places in America. 

Cairo had seen ambitious promises before the 3D printer arrived. At the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, it draws entrepreneurs who see unrealized potential in its vacant storefronts and magnolia-lined streets of dilapidated mansions built by river barons in another era. Some come to help, others to take advantage — it can be hard to tell. Residents have grown wary of outsiders with big ideas.

City Council member Connie Williams, a retired school principal, said city leaders had warned the Prestige owners not to make promises they couldn’t keep.

“We kept saying to them, ‘Look, we’ve had enough people come through Cairo talking all this crazy stuff and then back out,’” she said. “And they were just like, ‘No, no, oh no, that’s not us. We are here. God sent us.’”

The project attracted attention from Illinois’ top powerbrokers: Gov. JB Pritzker met privately with Burtis and Fowler in Harrisburg. Fowler also invited staff from U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s office to learn about the project. Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza toured the unfinished duplex and praised the effort on social media. 

To help manage the project in Cairo, the company hired Bucky Miller, a broad-shouldered lineman with a baritone voice. He said part of his job was to craft development plans and an agreement with city officials. Miller regularly drove 300 miles round trip from his home near St. Louis to meet with city officials. He told residents at a housing task force meeting that he took the job after reading about the decades of failed promises made to Cairo, and “because of what I’m good at: keeping my word.” 

But he had no experience developing affordable housing, and neither did anyone else at Prestige. Burtis acknowledged the inexperience but said he planned to partner with developers who would secure financing and hire his company to handle construction.

Before the Party, an Unraveling 

The block party in August 2024 — kids clutching cotton candy, everyone in a jubilant mood — made it look like everything was on track. But I have now learned that significant parts of the project already were shaky even before the printer squeezed out the first cement.

One big problem was acquiring the printer to begin with. In October 2023, Grand Rivers Community Bank approved the $1.1 million loan to purchase the printer — a big bet for the rural lender in Karnak, Illinois, population 450, about 25 miles north of Cairo. The loan was nearly double the bank’s single-customer limit, requiring another regional bank to join in.

That month, Grand Rivers sent half the cost of the printer, about $590,000, to Peri 3D Construction, which operated out of Texas, to purchase one of its most expensive models. Their agreement stated that delivery of the printer would occur six months “at the earliest” from receipt of the deposit. The exchange of funds triggered Peri 3D to commission a large-scale commercial printer from COBOD International, a Danish company that bills itself as the world’s leader in 3D construction printing technology. 

By January 2024, Hayes and Burtis said, they had become impatient. It had been only three months, but they said they’d given Cairo their word they’d start building that spring and felt the printer wasn’t progressing fast enough. Hayes said, “‘Here we go again’ is what Cairo is thinking.”

Fowler emailed the governor’s office a few days ahead of a visit Pritzker had scheduled that month in southern Illinois, calling the new 3D printer business “a major humanitarian mission” and asking for an opportunity to introduce the governor to Burtis, records show. Fowler and Burtis met with Pritzker at Harrisburg City Hall and discussed with Pritzker whether he had contacts in Germany, where Peri is headquartered, who could help speed production, according to Burtis. A Pritzker spokesperson said the governor’s office took no action after the meeting.

Days later, a Peri 3D sales rep emailed Burtis’ son that the printer was on track for delivery that April. 

Then, shortly after, Burtis and other Prestige employees traveled to Las Vegas to a concrete industry expo. Fowler said that Prestige paid for him to come along and that he agreed because he wanted to see demonstrations of the 3D printer technology. He did not report the trip on his annual economic disclosure form; he amended the form after I asked him about it last year. 

Burtis said a COBOD engineer at the expo told them that their printer was only 10% complete, though a COBOD executive said it did not have any engineers present at the expo that year. While there, Burtis also met with one of the few other potential printer suppliers, Black Buffalo 3D. That New Jersey-based company said it had printers available that it could deliver right away, according to Burtis. 

Shortly after the conference, Prestige tried to cancel the order for the original printer. Peri 3D did not appear to respond to Prestige’s requests, according to an email exchange that Hayes shared with me. 

Two months later, Prestige’s lawyer sent a letter to Peri 3D saying the company’s request had been “blown off” and proposed Peri 3D keep about $60,000 — 10% — and return the rest. When Peri 3D responded in April, just as the printer was due, it said none of the $590,000 deposit would be returned. Prestige did not write back, according to email records the company provided.

Burtis and Hayes hadn’t yet spent about $500,000 of their loan. Hayes told me they were ultimately “no worse for the wear” since Black Buffalo 3D agreed to sell a printer for what they had left. 

“If I get 10 grand for a car,” Hayes said. “Say I pay 5 grand for a car and I don’t get my money back, but I can buy another car that does the same exact thing, and I only pay another 5 thousand. What do I give a shit if I can get back and forth to work?”

He called the bank. 

“We don’t need any more money,” Hayes said he told them. “Can we get this taken care of?”

The bank agreed and wired the remaining funds to Black Buffalo 3D in April 2024.

A Flimsy Plan

Getting the printer to Cairo was one problem — it wouldn’t arrive until August 2024. Getting it to make sense financially was another entirely. 

For months before the printer arrived, Miller, the Prestige employee managing the project in Cairo, had been telling city leaders that Prestige would secure financing to build the remaining 29 homes after donating the first duplex.

But city attorney Rick Abell said he couldn’t get straight answers about how the development would be paid for or what it might look like.

Typically, housing tax credits are used to build affordable housing in the U.S. But acquiring those is a highly competitive process that can take years to complete, a process that would be made even more challenging using an unproven construction technology and in a rural community. There’s no record that Prestige applied for any housing program funding. 

Phillip Matthews, who chaired the town’s housing task force, said he repeatedly asked for a project rendering but “never got it.” That was strange, Matthews said, “because normally, when a company determines they’re going to develop a piece of property, they have designs.”

Abell and city officials grew frustrated with the lack of clarity around the deal. 

Weeks before the kickoff party, city officials visited Prestige’s office in Harrisburg. According to Abell and Matthews, Burtis told them Cairo would need to come up with the financing to build the other homes.  

The city did not have that kind of money.  

Simpson, the mayor, was perplexed. He said Burtis offered to help the city apply for grants for a fee but offered no specifics. “I’ve been getting grants for all kinds of stuff, but there’s nothing for building housing,” Simpson said. 

Burtis would later say that Miller had made unauthorized promises that Prestige would secure financing for the project; Miller disputes this. 

Despite the uncertain financing, the city wrote up a contract: Cairo would sell a vacant lot to Prestige for $1. Prestige would build one duplex, manage it for 18 months and then transfer ownership back to the city. The contract called for 29 more over the next three years, with no details on how they would be funded. 

The mayor signed the contract, hopeful the project would build momentum in a place that hadn’t experienced much. 

Cairo’s Last Hope: Not “Some Big Serious Whatever”

I first met Hayes, the Harrisburg car dealer who co-founded Prestige, in early September 2025, more than a year after Cairo’s 3D printer party. At the time, I didn’t know about the abandoned $590,000 deposit or that there had never been a real plan for additional housing. I didn’t know Prestige and its suite of sister companies had drawn the attention of the FBI.  

But I had already visited the defunct printer in the middle of nowhere late last summer. A former Prestige employee had sent me a Google pin to show me where it had been parked for nearly a year.

So I was taken aback when Hayes told me the printer, the size of a small garage when assembled, was stored on his lot.  

I asked if he’d show it to me, a request that seemed to take him by surprise. Outside, we walked past rows of vehicles to the back lot. There was no printer — just heat shimmering off blacktop and a long chain-link fence.

He squinted into the sun, looked at me and shrugged. “I don’t see it, do you?” 

He’d later tell me it had been there at one point, and he didn’t realize it was gone. That strange episode would set the stage for the interviews that followed. 

Over many weeks, we’d spend hours talking in the corner office of his car dealership in Muddy, Illinois — population 40, a fading patch of coal country just outside Harrisburg near the Indiana border.

With an easy, elastic charm, Hayes slid between humor and confession, candor and confusion. He told me Prestige was named after the fictional do-nothing company in the Will Ferrell comedy “Step Brothers.” “It’s just stupid,” he said. “I’m not like some big serious whatever.”

Eventually, he’d blame everyone else — including both printer suppliers — for what happened: the stalled project, the cracks and the fact that Cairo still has no new housing.

Hayes told me Prestige had sued Peri 3D to recover its printer deposit. But for weeks he was vague about it. He said he hadn’t seen the lawsuit and didn’t know where it was filed — “nowhere around here,” he told me. 

He flew into a rage when I told him the Peri 3D salesperson they’d worked closely with had called his company “shady.” At that point, he promised to find out where it was filed, but over multiple visits, he’d tell me he still hadn’t located it. 

I found the lawsuit during a records search at the Saline County Courthouse, steps from Prestige’s office. It turned out that Prestige had filed the suit in early 2025, just as Peri 3D was laying off its U.S. staff. Prestige claimed in the lawsuit that it signed a “mock document,” not a real contract, and that it never received the language Peri 3D later claimed made clear the deposit was nonrefundable. 

Five months later, in August, a judge ruled in Prestige’s favor after Peri 3D failed to respond to the lawsuit. In Saline County, where the poverty rate hovers around 20%, nearly double the statewide rate, the lost money stood out. “That’s a lot of money,” the judge remarked, according to a court transcript. 

“It’s a bad situation,” Prestige’s lawyer said. The judge replied, “I guess good luck trying to collect it.” 

Before I could tell Hayes that I had located the lawsuit, he texted me that afternoon: “Looks like we did sue and won!!!” he wrote. “Who’s the shady one now?” (He later said he couldn’t tell me where the lawsuit had been filed because he’d largely left the business to Burtis to manage.)

Still, he said he was resigned to the fact that they’d likely never collect their money — and to date they haven’t. 

Burtis said they can’t locate anyone from Peri 3D. When I followed up with Hayes this month, he acknowledged that the contract made the deposit nonrefundable and said he regrets not reading the fine print. “Every time I’ve done that, I’m like, you know what, gahhh, why do I get screwed? Next time I’m going to read through everything,” he said.

Burtis said Prestige owes the bank roughly $13,000 a month under the terms of its 10-year lending agreement to pay for the original $1.1 million printer; over the full term, the company would pay more than $400,000 in interest. Prestige can’t afford the note; Hayes said he’s paying it out of one of his other business accounts. 

In an emailed statement from its German headquarters, Peri 3D said in October that it had conducted business “in accordance with the terms and conditions” of its contract with Prestige but would “investigate the matter diligently in the coming weeks.” When I followed up recently, the company declined to comment further. COBOD said it had not been delayed in constructing the printer and that it had no knowledge of a lawsuit since its contractual obligation was to Peri 3D and not Prestige.  

As I continued to ask Hayes questions, he told me the state senator could vouch for the deal. 

“Ask Dale Fowler if there’s any-fucking-thing going wrong,” he said. 

A Modern-Day Daniel

When I reached out to Fowler in October, he wasn’t vouching for much. He described Burtis and Hayes as acquaintances and himself as “just a guy that wants to help people.” He scoffed at Hayes’ claim that he could speak to any of their business dealings. And he said his role with the Cairo duplex project was minimal, limited to that of a cheerleader. 

His attempts to distance himself from the housing plan and company struck me as odd.

The month after Prestige secured a loan for the printer, Fowler’s office emailed promotional materials for Prestige’s 3D printing business to the Illinois Housing Development Agency and touted the project before the state poverty commission he sat on, public records show. 

He brought other top state officials into the orbit as well. Three months after Cairo’s duplex block party, Fowler led Mendoza, the comptroller, on a tour of the property with Burtis and his son. In since-deleted social media posts, she called them “visionaries.” A Mendoza spokesperson said Fowler asked if she wanted to tour the duplex, but she was not otherwise involved with the company or its owners, and they’ve received no state funding. The posts were removed after I asked the spokesperson if Mendoza had been aware that FBI agents had delivered a subpoena to Prestige’s office just days before her tour.

Fowler didn’t tell me, but I’d later also find out he’d convened Duckworth’s staff to a meeting with Prestige’s owners and the president of Grand Rivers Community Bank in early 2023 — 18 months before the 3D groundbreaking party in Cairo. A Duckworth spokesperson said the senator’s office had just revived discussions about how to address Cairo’s housing crisis when Fowler reached out and that the office did not have additional involvement with the company. 

People in Cairo also saw Fowler as key to the deal and reached out to him after it became clear the duplex had been left unfinished. 

“When it fell through, we were all calling Sen. Fowler personally, because he brought them here,” said Williams, the council member. According to Williams, Fowler told Cairo officials he was oblivious to Prestige’s business dealings. 

Since its founding in September 2021, Prestige has been Fowler’s largest source of campaign donations, not including those from political action and other committees. The company, and others owned by Burtis and Hayes, gave him $22,000 between May 2022 and August 2024. Its final donation of $6,500 was made to Fowler five days after the groundbreaking party for the 3D-printed duplex. Fowler said he doesn’t track who donates to his campaign; he and Burtis said the donation was for Prestige co-sponsoring a golf fundraiser two months earlier. 

Fowler, a decadelong state senator who plays a key role shaping his caucus’ legislative priorities as a Republican assistant leader, announced last summer that he wouldn’t seek reelection, citing a 10-year term limit pledge; his term expires in January. 

Fowler also told me in October that he had no knowledge of the federal probe of Prestige and had never been approached by investigators. “Are they grabbing for straws?” he said of the FBI. 

Fowler said he’d known Hayes and Burtis for decades and doesn’t believe they’ve done anything wrong. 

Still, he said he’d taken some unfair heat over the ordeal — “guilty by affiliation, I guess.” 

But Fowler told me it wasn’t the first time he’d been criticized as an elected official, leading him to believe in his “spiritual soul” that he is the modern-day Daniel. In the Old Testament, Daniel was a virtuous believer thrown into the lion’s den by his enemies. But angels closed the lion’s mouth, saving Daniel, while his enemies ended up being “chomped, mutilated, by the lions.” Fowler said the story put him “at peace.” 

“I’ve never told this to anyone,” he added. “I’ve never told this to my wife.”

The FBI Comes Knocking 

Not long after I began digging into what happened to the duplex in Cairo, I learned the FBI was also looking into Prestige’s broader business dealings. 

Within weeks of the block party, six employees — more than half Prestige’s staff — quit. Then Prestige received a federal grand jury subpoena asking for its financial records, Hayes and Burtis said.

The FBI has also subpoenaed two school districts and the city of Harrisburg for their contracts with and payments to Prestige for work unrelated to the duplex project, according to records obtained under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. The FBI declined to comment on the status of its investigation. 

Harrisburg Mayor John McPeek said the city did two projects with Prestige, though he said Fowler had encouraged the city to use the company more. A school district in Eldorado, one of those subpoenaed, ousted the former superintendent in September, in part for failing to get school board approval for about $2 million in payments to Prestige and related companies, public records show. The district declined to comment, and the former superintendent did not respond to requests for comment. 

Miller, the Prestige employee who hyped the 3D printing project to Cairo residents, was one of the employees who quit. When we first met up late last summer, he told me he had become an FBI whistleblower. 

Miller told me he’d been taken advantage of, sent to Cairo to sell a false promise the company had no intentions of standing behind. He also told me about a flurry of anonymous emails sent via Proton, an encrypted email service, that accused Prestige of fraud not long after Cairo’s block party. The emails went out to various businesses and schools that had contracted with Prestige.

I, too, had received a Proton email about Prestige. It wasn’t anonymous like the others, but was instead from someone claiming to be a COBOD executive. It directed me to open a DropBox file, but the link didn’t work. That executive told me she’d been impersonated; the company said it takes the matter “very seriously.”

At one point, Miller claimed to me that he was the one who sent the Proton emails — under instructions from the FBI, in an attempt to drum up investigatory leads. The FBI declined to comment, though three law enforcement experts told me this would be highly unlikely. Miller later changed his story, saying he hadn’t sent the emails. 

Burtis initially refused to answer my calls, texts and knocks on his door, but he called me back in October and said he wanted to talk. 

“For some reason, I woke up today, and after praying, it was like, ‘You need to go ahead and talk to her,’” he said. Tears streaked his face. His aunt sat beside him, taking notes on a legal pad. He blamed Miller for trying to ruin his company and for spreading unfounded rumors about him and Hayes. Miller did not respond when I asked him about Burtis’ claims.

Burtis also said he and Hayes have fully cooperated with the FBI, handing over all the financial records requested in the subpoena, though he said they’d never been interviewed by agents. “If I was really in trouble, don’t you think I’d have been handed an indictment by now?” Burtis said. 

His son Josh, who had been put in charge of the 3D printing venture, said the construction issues had been disappointing but they had been keeping the city updated. Hayes said he’d been fully transparent with me and investigators. 

As I asked questions last fall, the printer sat outside on the flatbed, though some parts of it recently moved to Hayes’ car lot.

The cracked house remained abandoned. 

Hayes said the concrete “ink” that came with the Black Buffalo 3D printer was faulty and that’s why the printer has been idle since. Black Buffalo 3D said it has offered Prestige a new concrete solution and to find a buyer for the printer if Prestige no longer wants it. 

Prestige and Black Buffalo told me in a joint email in September that they would return to Cairo by the end of October to fix the cracks, which they said were nonstructural. But Black Buffalo never showed up, saying its engineer couldn’t sign off on a repair plan without city permits, which don’t exist because they aren’t required. The company, which has sold only two printers in the U.S. since its founding in 2020, filed for bankruptcy in December. 

Burtis later said he engaged his own engineering firm to sign off on a remediation plan to fill the cracks with a hydraulic cement, though he declined to share that plan or the company name. Crews were recently working on the duplex; Burtis said the cabinets they ordered did not fit. 

Once the duplex is finished, Burtis said, he plans to turn the keys over to the city. Simpson said he will be ready. Still optimistic, the mayor said he hopes someone else will eventually follow through and build homes in Cairo.

Abell, Cairo’s city attorney, said the failed venture has never sat right with him. “I’ve seen a lot of deals fall through,” Abell said. “But we always knew why. Here, we got nothing.”

“Even today,” he added, “I probably have a lot more questions than I’ve got answers.”

While some questions remain unanswered, one set of facts is undisputed: When HUD began dismantling housing here a decade ago, officials promised there would be an effort to build back. Today, the only thing that has been built is one duplex, still unfinished.

Mallory, the mother who’d hoped to have a two-bedroom home one day, said she is tired of waiting, as much as Cairo has always felt like home. In mid-March, she applied for a housing assistance program in Chicago. She worries Cairo can’t give her daughter all she needs to thrive. “I want more for her,” she said. “I thought I was going to be able to get a two-bedroom apartment.”

But in the end, she sighed, with the kind of resignation that comes from being disappointed too many times, it was just “a bunch of broken promises.”

The post 3D-Printed Homes, an Abandoned $590,000 Deposit, the FBI: What Really Happened in This Small Town? appeared first on ProPublica.

Ministers drawing up contingency plans for ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’ if supply of CO₂ is disrupted

• Business live – latest updates

The UK could face some gaps on supermarket shelves this summer if disruption caused by the Iran war continues, with shortages of carbon dioxide potentially hitting supplies of chicken, pork and fizzy drinks.

Government ministers are drawing up contingency plans for a “reasonable worst-case scenario” if the key shipping lane of the strait of Hormuz does not reopen, disrupting supplies of the CO₂ required by the food industry.

Much to our surprise, the beloved Explorian E310 is being phased out of production after more than a decade. Here's a look at the new entry-level blender from Vitamix replacing it.

Lawsuit in Norway alleges Telenor passed on data helping Myanmar military arrest 1,200 activists, some in safe houses

When even two weeks of torture could not force Aung Thu to betray his fellow anti-coup activists, his military interrogators in Myanmar tried something different: they asked a Norwegian telecoms company, Telenor, then the largest one operating in the country, for its data on him.

The company – whose majority shareholder is the Norwegian government – had first entered Myanmar in 2013 as it was transitioning to democracy, promising to connect users who had been isolated from the world.

The former UConn star’s draft night should have been about her talent. Instead, speculation shows how the league is still being viewed through the wrong lens

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For the first time in a while, there was no consensus on who would go No 1 overall in the WNBA draft this year. When the Dallas Wings did make their pick, they chose Azzi Fudd, who had distinguished herself under Geno Auriemma at UConn, including a national championship in 2025.

The moment she was picked was pure: a delighted and seemingly nervous Fudd joined WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert onstage. She took photos with her jersey, made it through the ESPN interview that immediately followed, and beamed at her family and teammates in the audience. Paige Bueckers, who played alongside the 23-year-old at UConn and was the No 1 pick for the Wings in 2025, was there also to celebrate a well-deserved honor for Fudd.

According to new CDC data, there were 3.6 million U.S. births in 2025, a 1% decline from 2024 and down 23% since 2007. The Trump administration has said it wants to reverse this trend.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has made revising the constitution a priority amid rising security threats in Asia, but any change is highly sensitive.

For more than a century, a lead smelter and other factories in downtown Omaha, Nebraska, spewed toxic dust across the city, contaminating the soil and causing lead poisoning. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the city of Omaha have spent decades trying to clean it up.

But in 2019, the EPA acknowledged its plan may not do enough to protect kids, and the agency is reexamining the site to potentially expand the cleanup, which could result in more residential yards being remediated.

Journalists at the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica teamed up to report on how well the cleanup effort is going. This included collecting soil samples from more than 600 yards in and around the affected area, called the Superfund site. Many people we met in the process told us they had never heard of the Superfund site and had no idea they could be at risk from lead exposure. They asked a lot of questions about how to stay safe. 

So we talked to experts and got answers below.

1. What is lead poisoning?

Lead poisoning occurs when lead, a toxic metal that was used in paint, gasoline and plumbing for decades, is ingested and builds up in the body, causing issues like developmental delays and behavioral problems in kids. It’s more of a concern for children because their bodies are still developing and they absorb more of the lead they inhale or ingest than adults. But lead poisoning can also affect adults, causing problems like high blood pressure, memory impairment and joint and muscle pain. 

2. What are considered unsafe lead levels?

There is no “safe” level of exposure to lead. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines a high level as 3.5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. 

If your child’s test shows lead levels above that, the Douglas County Health Department will schedule an environmental risk assessment, which will include a home inspection and education about how to prevent exposure. The nonprofit National Center for Healthy Housing also has a good checklist for how to reduce lead exposure.

If you live within the Superfund site, you can check your soil levels on the Omaha Lead Registry. An EPA risk model predicts a soil lead concentration of 100 parts per million or less would protect kids from developing what the CDC currently considers a high blood lead value, assuming there are no other exposures.

3. What should I know about the lead Superfund site in Omaha? 

The Superfund site is generally located north of Harrison Street, south of Read Street and between 45th Street and the Missouri River. It was designated a Superfund site in 2003, meaning the federal government would oversee a cleanup of the toxic waste there and try to get the polluters to pay for it. 

The EPA drew boundaries for the Superfund site based on where fewer than 5% of residential properties tested above 400 parts per million of lead in the soil, the concentration of lead at which the government would conduct a cleanup. That’s roughly the size of a marble in a 10-pound bucket of dirt. People who live beyond the boundary may still have elevated soil levels and can contact the city if they’re interested in testing and possible cleanup.

4. Is my soil contaminated with lead? How can I get my soil tested?

If you live in the Omaha Superfund site, you can check the Omaha Lead Registry to see the highest level of lead found in your yard through soil sampling of every property done by either the EPA or the city of Omaha. You can request a detailed diagram of your home from the city, showing average lead levels in different areas of your yard. These levels may have changed over time if you have flaking lead paint on your home or have added, removed or covered up dirt in your yard.

If your soil hasn’t been tested and you live within or near the boundaries of the Superfund site, you can contact the city’s Lead Information Office. Midwest Laboratories in Omaha also provides heavy metal screening for a fee through its garden and lawn soil testing program. 

5. Is there lead in my house? Is there lead in my water?

Homes built before 1978 likely contain lead paint. You can test for lead with at-home kits approved by the EPA. A common sign you might have lead paint is if it chips in a geometric pattern called “alligatoring” because it looks like scaly alligator skin.

East Omaha has extensive lead plumbing. You can use this map to see if your home is eligible for service line replacement. If you have lead service lines, you can request a free water test from the Metropolitan Utilities District.

6. What is the city’s process for remediation? 

If the soil has a high enough lead concentration to qualify for cleanup, the city will also assess the exterior of the dwelling for lead-based paint. If the home has lead-based paint, a contractor hired by the city will remove flaking paint and repaint the surface before the soil is remediated. 

Contractors remediate properties by removing 4 inches of soil and testing it. If levels are still concerning, they keep digging and testing to a depth of 1 foot. If contamination still exists, contractors put down a barrier like landscaping fabric before adding fill dirt and laying sod on top.

Following the city’s work, the Douglas County Health Department will also reach out to see if the property owner would like a dust assessment of the home and a free vacuum cleaner with a filter that captures small particles. 

We’re reporting on how this remediation process is going. If you have a story or concerns about your remediation process, contact the Flatwater Free Press. 

7. My yard was remediated, should I still be concerned? Will it be retested? 

The EPA remediated yards in Omaha by digging up and replacing areas that had more than 400 parts per million of lead in the soil. Most properties do not require resampling, EPA spokesperson Kellen Ashford said. However, the EPA and the city of Omaha have resampled properties on a case-by-case basis. One example is when a structure has been demolished, exposing lead-contaminated soil or spreading dust from lead paint.

Tens of thousands of properties that had high levels of lead contamination but that were under the 400-parts-per-million benchmark were not remediated. The Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica are investigating how effective the cleanup has been. If you have questions or concerns, contact the Flatwater Free Press. 

8. If I’m outside the Superfund site, should I still be concerned?

The EPA is analyzing whether to expand the bounds of the Omaha Superfund site, a Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica investigation found.

The agency currently allows for some remediation beyond the Superfund site’s bounds. Testing and remediation would need to be approved by the EPA, but the process would look the same as it does for properties within the site. If you live within city limits, you can contact the city of Omaha if you’re interested in testing and remediation outside the Superfund site.

9. Is it safe for me, my kids and my pets to be in the yard with contaminated soil?

Spending time outdoors in the Superfund site can be safe if you manage risks, said Naudia McCracken, supervisor of Douglas County’s Lead Poisoning Prevention Program.

Read More

The EPA Was Considering a Massive Lead Cleanup in Omaha. Then Trump Shifted Guidance.

Omaha Is Home to a Massive Superfund Site. Most Kids Living There Aren’t Tested for Lead.

“Casual outdoor activity like walking through a yard, sitting on grass or brief play on covered surfaces does not by itself represent a high-risk exposure scenario,” she said. “The concern is repeated or prolonged contact with bare contaminated soil, especially activities like digging or play that result in soil on hands, faces or objects that enter the mouth.”

You can reduce risks by keeping bare soil covered, washing hands, taking off your shoes at the door, cleaning indoor dust and preventing pet contact with bare soil when possible, McCracken said. 

10. Is it safe to garden if my soil is contaminated? 

Safe gardening starts with limiting contact with the dirt. Wash your produce well, peel root vegetables and discard the outer parts of leafy vegetables like cabbage and lettuce, the EPA recommends. Wear gloves while working in the garden, wash your hands and take your shoes off when you enter the home.

The best way to avoid contamination is to build a raised bed, said Shannon Kyler, community programs manager at the urban farm group City Sprouts. An 18-inch bed with a layer of landscape fabric below should keep roots away from the base soil. Mixing compost into soil will also dilute lead levels and improve soil health. It’s a good idea to retest soil every year, she said.

While crops absorb some lead, it’s usually a small amount in well-maintained soil, studies from Washington and Kansas found.

With the right precautions, gardening can be a low-risk activity, Kyler said. Several resources like the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Nebraska Extension and City Sprouts can also help answer questions. 

11. Is blowing dust a concern for lead contamination? 

Lead is particularly dangerous in small dust particles because it can be more easily absorbed in the body, said Gabriel Filippelli, executive director of Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute and a lead and Superfund researcher for decades. Contaminated dust that blows into homes or is tracked in through dirt can deposit on surfaces like floors and tables where kids can reach it.

12. Does lead go away over time?

Lead generally does not break down in the environment. Once ingested or inhaled, some of it will naturally leave the body, though that depends on factors such as age and diet. Most of it is stored in bones for decades and can be released back into the bloodstream, especially in times of stress like pregnancy.

Health institutions like the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic write that the damage lead causes cannot be reversed. But some recent studies suggest exercise, educational experiences like going to a museum or taking art lessons, and a nutrient found in many fruits and vegetables can counter some of the effects.

The post What You Should Know About Lead Contamination in Omaha, Nebraska appeared first on ProPublica.

Every wave of new tech has come with a doomsday scenario. But governments just aren’t planning a human response on the scale required

The transition to a world of artificial intelligence has given a whole new meaning to the concept that capitalism can only renew itself through creative destruction. This is the idea that clapped-out technologies have to be replaced by new ways of doing things, even though the process can be brutal.

That has been the way of things for every new wave of inventions since the dawn of the industrial age in the mid-18th century, but with machines now displaying cognitive skills, able to both think and learn, the potential for economic disruption is all the greater.

Larry Elliott is a Guardian columnist

The Gallup report appears to reflect a trend observed by some religious leaders: Pockets of young Americans, especially men, are joining faith communities.

PlayStation 5 (version tested), Xbox, PC, Switch 2; Capcom
Engineer Hugh is sent from Earth to investigate a malfunctioning research station and meets a young android who helps him fend off murderous mechs

When Pragmata was announced alongside the PlayStation 5 in 2020, its shiny trailer promised slick sci-fi action in outer space. While it certainly delivers those futuristic thrills in spades, what I didn’t expect was a tender tale of paternal love. This is Capcom’s belated, surprisingly soulful first entry into gaming’s sad dad genre.

In this near-future fiction, a corporation named Delphi has established a research station on the moon’s surface to experiment with advanced 3D printing tech, using “Lunafilament” to easily recreate everything from tools to entire buildings. Predictably, things soon go very wrong. As the station suddenly goes dark, engineer Hugh is sent from Earth to investigate.

Pragmata is out April 17; £49.99

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the Guardian: Households will be called on to boost their consumption of Great Britain's record renewable energy this summer to help balance the power grid and lower energy bills. Under the new plans, people could be encouraged to run dishwashers and washing machines or charge up their electric vehicles when there is more wind and solar power than the electricity grid needs. The plan will be delivered with the help of energy suppliers, which may choose to offer heavily discounted or free electricity to their customers during specific periods when the energy system operator predicts there will be a surplus of electricity. Many suppliers already offer more than 2 million households the opportunity to pay lower rates for electricity used during off-peak hours but this will be the first time that the system operator will use this tool to help balance the grid. The National Energy System Operator (Neso) hopes that by issuing a market notice to call on energy users to increase their consumption it can avoid making hefty payments to turn wind and solar farms off when demand for electricity is low, which are ultimately paid for through energy bills.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With two new members freshly sworn in, Newark City Council appears poised to move forward with proposals to increase the lodging tax and levy a sales tax on alcohol purchased from liquor stores.

Missile and drone attacks on the port city of Odesa killed six people, with other fatalities recorded in Kyiv and Dnipro

Russian strikes killed at least 12 people in Ukraine, local authorities have said, after Moscow pummelled its neighbour in overnight attacks.

Missile and drone attacks on the southern port city of Odesa killed six people, the head of the city’s military administration, Sergiy Lysak, wrote on Telegram on Thursday.

Two new city council members were sworn in Wednesday evening.

How AI agents will threaten global security.

The Iran war is a crucible for Shiite identity and politics.

For customers willing to pay for it, the new top plan offers more high-speed data and performance than the former one.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor apologized Wednesday for publicly criticizing Justice Brett Kavanaugh, comments she said were "hurtful" and "inappropriate."

Wednesday’s strike brings the total of those killed in US military strikes on alleged drug boats to at least 177

Three people were killed in a US strike on another alleged drug-trafficking boat, the fifth such deadly attack in as many days, military officials have announced.

US southern command said it conducted “a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations” in the eastern Pacific, without naming the alleged group, in an X post.

President Trump has said the U.S. is in "armed conflict" with cartels in Latin America and has justified the attacks as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs into the U.S.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Many scientists have contended that humans have evolved very little over the past 10,000 years. A few hundred generations was just a blink of the evolutionary eye, it seemed. Besides, our cultural evolution -- our technology, agriculture and the rest -- must have overwhelmed our biological evolution by now. A vast study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggests the opposite. Examining DNA from 15,836 ancient human remains, scientists found 479 genetic variants that appeared to have been favored by natural selection in just the past 10,000 years. The researchers also concluded that thousands of additional genetic variants have probably experienced natural selection. Before the new study, scientists had identified only a few dozen variants. "There are so many of them that it's hard to wrap one's mind around them," said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the new study. He and his colleagues found that a mutation that is a major risk factor for celiac disease, for example, appeared just 4,000 years ago, meaning the condition may be younger than the Egyptian pyramids. The mutation became ever more common. Today, an estimated 80 million people worldwide have celiac disease, in which the immune system attacks gluten and damages the intestines. The steady rise of the mutation came about through natural selection, the scientists argue. For some reason, people with the mutation had more descendants than people without it -- even though it put them at risk of an autoimmune disorder. Other findings are even more puzzling. The researchers found that genetic variants that raise the odds of a smoking habit have been getting steadily rarer in Europe for the past 10,000 years. Something is working against those variants -- but it can't be the harm from smoking. Europeans have been smoking tobacco for only about 460 years. The scientists can't see from their research so far what forces might be making these variants more or less common. "My short answer is, I don't know," said Ali Akbari, a senior staff scientist at Harvard and an author of the study. The researchers also found that some variants, like the one linked to Type B blood, became much more common in Europe around 6,000 years ago, while others changed direction over time. For example, a TYK2 immune gene variant that may have once been beneficial later became harmful because it increased tuberculosis risk. The study also found signs of natural selection in 44 out of 563 traits. Variants linked to Type 2 diabetes, wider waists, and higher body fat have become less common, possibly because farming and carbohydrate-heavy diets made once-useful fat-storing traits more harmful. Other findings, such as selection favoring genes linked to more years of schooling, are harder to interpret.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for April 16.

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for April 16 No. 570.

Energy crisis unfolding in Middle East has added political urgency, and more funding, to transform South Korea’s solar industry

In Guyang-ri, a farming village of 70 households about 90 minutes south-east of Seoul, people gather for communal free lunches six days a week. The meals are funded by the village’s one-megawatt solar installation, which generates roughly 10m won ($6,800) in net profit each month.

“Residents eat lunch together every day, so we see each other’s faces, talk together,” says Jeon Joo-young, the village chief. “Bonds and solidarity between residents become much stronger. Life becomes more enjoyable.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has sent criminal referrals to the Justice Department related to a government watchdog and a whistleblower whose complaint helped trigger President Trump's first impeachment.

Nearly two years after Emeshyon Wilkins was shot and killed by a St. Louis police officer, Shaina Wilkins says she is still searching for answers and accountability.

This blog is now closed. Our latest full report is here: US and Iran in indirect talks to extend two-week ceasefire

Donald Trump said the “special relationship” between the US and UK was in a poor state but that it will not have impact on King Charle’s upcoming state visit to America.

In an interview with Sky News, the US president once again criticised Keir Starmer over his policies, particularly on energy and immigration, and reiterated his disappointment that the UK and other Nato allies had not joined his war against Iran when the US “needed them”.

Accusations refer to attack on Iran without congressional authorization and strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats

House Democrats filed six articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth on Wednesday, accusing the defense secretary of “high crimes and misdemeanors”, in reference to the attack on Iran without congressional authorization and deadly strikes on suspected drug smuggling boats, among other official acts.

The move comes as the Trump administration faces mounting scrutiny over recent foreign action, particularly the war with Iran.

Journalist Will Coldwell tells the story of how a British businessman was imprisoned in Dubai – and how his family finally got him home

When Albert Douglas found out he was facing a long prison sentence in Dubai, he tried to escape the UAE … and failed. What followed was years of court proceedings, time in prison and even, Douglas says, beatings and torture.

In recent years, scores of business owners, unsuspecting tourists and influencers have been detained in Dubai – caught up in an opaque legal system, charged with breaking laws they may not even have been aware of.

This live blog is now closed. For the latest on impeachment filings against Trump’s defense secretary, read our full report:

• Democrats file articles of impeachment against Hegseth for ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email

At a Turning Point USA event in Georgia on Tuesday, vice-president JD Vance was heckled by a protester who seemed to criticized the conflicts in the Middle East, including the war in Gaza.

“Jesus Christ does not support genocide,” the audience member shouted. The vice-president addressed the demonstrator and agreed with their statement, before responding to further comments from the heckler who appeared to say that the administration “supports a genocide in Gaza”.

Democratic senators overwhelmingly voted to block bomb and bulldozer sales to Israel on Wednesday, in a reflection of the Jewish state’s plummeting stock among party rank-and-file and growing anger over the war with Iran.

The Democratic votes on the pair of resolutions from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., were not enough to overcome universal opposition from Republicans.

Still, the votes represented a watershed moment in the party’s relationship with Israel and the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel had continued to enjoy strong support from Democratic leaders, despite outrage from the base over the war on Gaza. Sanders said the votes signaled that party leaders are finally taking note.

“This is where the American people are. The polls are very clear: The overwhelming majority of American people do not want to continue to give weapons to Netanyahu and his horrific wars in the Mideast,” he said. “I think the Democrats have caught on to that. It took a little while, but they caught on to that. But Republicans, I think, are standing in opposition to millions of their own supporters.”

Some of the most notable names to vote in favor of blocking military transfers to Israel on Wednesday are potential 2028 presidential contenders.

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and Arizona Sens. Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego were among the Democrats to vote for both the resolutions.

Related

With World’s Eyes on Iran, Israel Locks Down the West Bank

One resolution targeted the sale of the bulldozers that have been used to demolish neighborhoods in Gaza. Critics say the heavy equipment could accelerate the destruction of Palestinian property in the West Bank, an Israeli-occupied territory that has come under greater threat of annexation under the country’s far-right government.

The bulldozer resolution drew support from 40 members of the Democratic caucus.

Democratic support for the measures came as Americans are increasingly expressing dissatisfaction with Israel in public opinion polls. Hassan El-Tayyab, a policy advocate at the Friends Committee on National Legislation who supported the resolutions, said the votes were a sign that Democrats are starting to take their voters seriously.

“What is happening on the Hill is a lagging indicator of these trends we have seen among Americans,” he said. “These folks are starting to see the writing on the wall, reading these tea leaves, that continually supporting this blank check to Israel is going to cost them electorally.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., was among those who voted against it, as did Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.; Chris Coons, D-Del.; Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev.; John Fetterman, D-Pa.; Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; and Jacky Rosen, D-Nev.

The other resolution, which failed 36–63, was aimed at blocking the transfer of 1,000-pound bombs, of the type that have been linked to civilian casualties in attacks by Israel on Gaza and Lebanon.

That resolution drew support from fewer Democrats. Sens. Gary Peters of Michigan, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Mark Warner of Virginia, and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island joined the others in voting against it.

El-Tayyab said the bulldozer vote seemed to be an easier commitment for some Democrats.

“It was directly tied to annexation efforts by Israel in the West Bank that threatened the two-state solution,” he said.

On the other hand, the massive bombs were viewed by some senators as defensive weapons. “We heard some arguments on the Hill that certain members considered the 1,000-pound bombs defensive in nature, as they were a deterrent that helped prevent attacks,” said El-Tayyab.

The argument, he said, held no water.

Republican Attacks

The breadth of support among Democratic members for the resolutions surprised even of advocates who have sought to cut off the flow of U.S. arms sales to Israel.

Related

Trying to Block Arms to Israel, Bernie Sanders Denounces AIPAC’s Massive Election Spending

Sanders has fought a long and, at times, lonely fight across administrations to block arms sales to Israel. The first resolution he sponsored, while Democrat Joe Biden was president, drew only minority support within the Democratic caucus.

As the war on Gaza dragged on, however, Democrats’ opinions on Israel soured. The prior high-water mark for one of Sanders’s resolutions was in July 2025, when 27 of the 47-member Senate Democratic caucus, which includes two independents, voted to block the sale of assault rifles to the Israeli police.

If there was any doubt that 2028 contenders are listening, Kelly, the Arizona senator, dispelled it by introducing Sanders’s resolutions on the Senate floor. A longtime supporter of Israel whose political star has risen in the face of personal attacks from President Donald Trump, Kelly said he would always support the country’s right to exist but could not support the arms transfers.

“Our support for our allies must always be about what makes us stronger and safer,” he said. “And we can look at what is happening in the region right now and understand that this is not business as usual. And it is not making us safer. The United States and Israel are fighting a war against Iran without a clear strategy or goal.”

Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., in a joint statement with fellow Democratic California Sen. Alex Padilla, tied the arms sales to the ongoing war with Iran.

“We oppose actions that further deepen the United States in an unauthorized conflict in Iran — one with no clear strategy, no legal authority, and no defined end,” he said.

Senate Republicans blasted the resolutions, accusing Democrats of trying to undermine the war effort. Senate Foreign Relations Chair Jim Risch, R-Idaho, said the resolutions amounted to a helping hand to Iran from Democrats.

“I come to the floor and tell Iran: No one is coming to help you. Not China, not Russia, not North Korea, not Venezuela, not Cuba. Except for the 47 people that sit over here,” Risch said, referring to the Democratic caucus. “They are trying to help you, Iran. We are not going to let that happen. We are not going to abandon our ally, Israel. We are not going to abandon this fight that is taking place. We are going to win this fight, and we have already won it, to a very large extent.”

The arms debate came hours after Senate Democrats voted nearly unanimously, except for Fetterman, in favor of a war powers resolution meant to block Trump’s ongoing war against Iran. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was the sole Republican to vote in favor of the resolution.

The final 47–52 tally disappointed advocates who had hoped to draw more GOP support. Still, they remain hopeful that more Republicans will come onboard when Democrats force a vote on other pending Iran war resolutions.

The post The Dam Breaks: Democratic Senators Overwhelmingly Reject Arms Sales to Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

In a spilling of the court’s divisions in public, Sotomayor had criticized Kavanaugh over a dissenting ruling on ICE raids

Sonia Sotomayor, a US supreme court justice, issued an apology on Wednesday for her recent criticism of fellow justice Brett Kavanaugh, an unusual public mea culpa that underscores the continuing divisions within the nation’s top judicial body over its direction and actions in high-profile cases.

Sotomayor had criticized Kavanaugh at an event in Kansas last week for an opinion he wrote in September concurring with the court’s decision backing roving immigration raids in California. Kavanaugh is one of the court’s six conservative justices, while Sotomayor is the senior member of the court’s three-justice liberal bloc.

Don't be surprised if the chatbot suggests mixing espresso with lemonade.

I tested a variety of iPhone battery packs, including MagSafe-enabled magnetic power banks with ultrafast 25-watt Qi2 wireless charging, as well as more affordable models that cost less than $20. These are my current top picks.

Trump reiterated his claim that Powell is doing a ‘bad job’ as justice department continues with criminal investigation into Powell over renovations at the Fed’s headquarters – key US politics stories from 15 April at a glance

Donald Trump threatened to fire Jerome Powell if he stays on as US Federal Reserve chair past the end of his tenure and doubled down on a criminal investigation into renovations of the central bank’s headquarters.

As the White House pushes Trump’s new nominee to take charge of the Fed, Kevin Warsh, Powell has a month left in the role. The possibility of Powell staying on as chair past 15 May, the official end of his term, has grown amid mounting scrutiny of Trump’s approach to the Fed in the Senate, which is required to approve Warsh’s nomination.

The FDA meeting announcement​ follows repeated pledges by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to loosen regulations on peptides, which are often pitched as a quick way to build muscle, heal injuries or appear younger.

Senator’s fourth attempt for resolutions fails, but votes show growing appetite among Democrats to impose limits

Bernie Sanders on Wednesday led a failed effort to block the sale of bombs and bulldozers to Israel, but the votes revealed a growing appetite among Democrats to impose limits on US weapons transfers to a longtime US ally.

It was the fourth time Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats, had forced consideration of resolutions cutting off military aid for Israel in the Senate, all of which have been rejected by the chamber’s Republican majority, and many Democrats.

April 15, 2026 — Scientists have developed a new method to measure ocean surface currents over large areas in greater detail than ever before. Called GOFLOW (Geostationary Ocean Flow), the approach applies deep learning to thermal images from weather satellites already in orbit, requiring no new hardware to achieve what the researchers describe as a major advancement in ocean observation.

Image from video credit: Luc Lenain/Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The study, co-led by Luc Lenain, an oceanographer at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Kaushik Srinivasan, a Scripps alumnus now at UCLA, was published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience. The study’s two other co-authors, Roy Barkan of Tel Aviv University and Nick Pizzo of the University of Rhode Island, are also Scripps alumni. The project was supported by grants from the Office of Naval Research, NASA and the European Research Council.

Ocean currents play a huge role in shaping Earth’s weather and climate, transporting heat around the globe, moving carbon between the atmosphere and ocean interior, and redistributing nutrients that sustain life in the sea. Understanding ocean currents are also vital for search-and-rescue operations and tracking the movement of oil spills. Yet measuring currents over large areas of the ocean has remained extremely challenging. Some satellites estimate currents indirectly by measuring variations in sea-surface height, but they typically image the same location only every 10 days or so — too infrequently to track currents that can appear and disappear within hours. Ship-based measurements and coastal radar systems can capture rapid changes but only for limited areas.

This has left a persistent gap in observations at the scales where most of the ocean’s vertical mixing occurs — when shallower waters are mixed deeper or vice versa. The phenomena that drive vertical mixing can be less than 10 kilometers (six miles) wide and transform in hours. Understanding vertical mixing matters because it powers key processes such as bringing nutrients up from depth to sustain marine ecosystems and pumping carbon dioxide from the surface to deeper waters where it can be stored long-term.

In 2023, Lenain was examining thermal imagery of the North Atlantic Ocean from the geostationary satellite GOES-East, which is primarily used for observing weather. The images, produced as frequently as every five minutes, showed passing clouds and swirls of warm and cool water evolving on the sea surface. As he looked, Lenain could see the imprint of major currents such as the Gulf Stream in the temperature patterns and began exploring how to convert what his eye could see in those images into a new way to measure ocean currents.

To accomplish this, the team trained a neural network to recognize how ocean surface temperature patterns shift and deform when pushed by underlying currents. The network learned from a high-resolution computer simulation of ocean circulation, which provided examples of temperature patterns and the water velocities that created them. By tracking how complex temperature patterns moved across consecutive images taken by the GOES-East satellite, the trained network could infer the currents responsible for those changes.

“Weather satellites have been observing the ocean surface for years,” said Lenain. “The breakthrough was learning how to turn that time-lapse into hourly maps of currents by tracking how temperature patterns bend, stretch and move from one hour to the next.”

The researchers tested GOFLOW’s accuracy by comparing its output to velocities recorded by shipboard instruments in the Gulf Stream region in 2023, as well as standard satellite methods using ocean topography. GOFLOW’s measurements agreed with the data collected with ships and traditional satellite techniques, and revealed much greater detail for smaller, faster-moving eddies and boundary layers where existing methods showed only blurred averages. This newfound detail allowed the researchers to measure for the first time key statistical signatures of small, intense currents that drive vertical mixing in the ocean that previously had been documented only in computer simulations.

“This opens a range of exciting possibilities in physical oceanography that, until now, were largely accessible only through simulations,” said Lenain.  “Using GOFLOW, we can now measure key signatures of these small, intense currents using real observations rather than relying almost entirely on simulations. This opens the door to testing long-standing ideas about how the ocean takes up heat and carbon.”

Because the method works with existing geostationary satellites it does not require new instruments to be launched into space. Over time, GOFLOW could be incorporated directly into weather forecasts and climate models, and may ultimately help improve forecasts by resolving rapidly evolving currents that influence air–sea exchange, marine debris transport and ocean ecosystems.

The researchers note that cloud cover remains a limitation, since clouds block the thermal imagery GOFLOW relies on. Future work will incorporate other types of satellite data to fill in the gaps when clouds block satellites’ views and achieve continuous coverage. The team is currently working to extend the method globally. The study’s data products and computer code are being made publicly available to support further research and applications.

Source: Alex Fox, UC San Diego

The post UC San Diego: New AI Approach Reveals Ocean Currents in Unprecedented Detail appeared first on HPCwire.

The year-long partnership will spotlight the independent live music venues and artists in the US directly through Spotify's app.

submitted by /u/THERANDOMGAMER2
[link] [comments]

According to his attorney, Brian Hooker plans to return to the Bahamas as the search for his wife, Lynette Hooker​, continues.

Meenu Batra, a single mother, was detained at a Texas airport in mid-March. She has worked as a courtroom interpreter in the U.S. for more than 20 years.

If you used an Android phone with cell service in the last nine years, you could be eligible for compensation.

Here are hints and the answer for today's Wordle for April 16, No. 1,762.

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for April 16, No. 1,040.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it an opportunity to use the U.N. system to “promote America First values,” according to a cable reviewed by The Post.

The move comes just weeks before the company is expected to unveil a new Siri.

Apple warned Elon Musk's xAI that its Grok AI would be removed from the App Store if it didn't make changes to prevent the app from being used for sexualized imagery.

April 15, 2026 — Today marks the initial release of the EuroHPC Federation Platform, a unified single access point that transforms how European researchers, businesses and public sector organizations can access EuroHPC systems to advance science and drive innovation.

The first release of the EuroHPC Federation Platform will streamline access to Europe’s supercomputing resources.

As of today, European users can access multiple operational EuroHPC JU systems through a single access point with a unified authentication and authorization, identification (AAI) method.

The EuroHPC infrastructure brings together world-class supercomputers each with its own procedures, services, and technical tools for key functions such as user authentication and authorization, resource allocation, job scheduling, and software provisioning. While, this diversity reflects the strengths and expertise of different supercomputing centers across Europe, it can also create complexity for users and make cross-site collaboration more challenging.

The EuroHPC Federation Platform (EFP) addresses this challenge by introducing a secure platform that harmonizes access to these systems while also supporting broader objectives such as ease of use and lower entry thresholds, efficiencies including greater user awareness of energy efficiency for environmental sustainability, and cost-effectiveness by avoiding duplication of efforts and high security standards.

Serving as a “one-stop shop” for researchers, businesses especially SMEs, and public authorities, the platform streamlines access to EuroHPC resources. By reducing fragmentation through a federated software catalogue and simplifying cross-system processes such as allocations and data transfers, the platform enhances accessibility, user experience, and collaboration across Europe’s HPC ecosystem.

“The first release of the platform marks the beginning of the journey toward a more connected and integrated European supercomputing ecosystem, empowering Europe’s scientific, industrial, and academic communities and strengthening Europe’s capacity for innovation,” commented Anders Jensen, Executive Director of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.

“Over the past year, the EuroHPC Federation Platform has become an important driver for strengthening and deepening the collaboration and coordination among the EuroHPC JU Hosting Entities (HEs),” said Pekka Lehtovuori, Director of Advanced Computing Operations and Systems at CSC. “The vision for the harmonized user experience across all system needs broad support and would not have been possible without the willingness and strong commitment of the HEs.”

Next Steps

Beyond HPC systems, the platform is designed with future integrations in mind. In upcoming releases, it will also incorporate EuroHPC AI Factories and quantum computing resources, further expanding the technological capabilities available to users.

The platform will also facilitate access to data lakes and data spaces across Europe, including established platforms such as SIMPL, EOSC and FENIX.

Initially rolled out for new projects and allocations, the EFP is nonetheless developed as a secure, scalable, and flexible solution, and in the future will support an expanding range of services and enable innovative approaches to complex scientific and industrial challenges.

“The launch of the EuroHPC Federation Platform represents a concrete step toward making Europe’s supercomputing capabilities more accessible, coherent, and impactful,” said Lilit Axner, Programme Manager at EuroHPC JU responsible for EFP. “By simplifying how users across European countries and sectors connect to these resources, this initiative reflects the JU’s commitment to openness, efficiency, and technological excellence, laying the groundwork for future integration of emerging capabilities such as AI and quantum computing.”

“The EuroHPC Federation Platform (EFP) builds on multiple mature open‑source solutions,” said Henrik Nortamo, Senior Application Specialist and EFP Technical Lead at CSC. “This has enabled the enhancements required to make the EFP info a truly cohesive platform, and combined with active contributions back to the upstream projects, ensures the openness and long-term sustainability of the platform.”

More Details

The EFP development started since January 2025. The consortium that develops the EFP is led by CSC-IT Centre for Science and includes:

• IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center
• University of Tartu
• Ghent University
• GÉANT
• NORDUnet

More from HPCwire: EuroHPC Advances Federation Platform with CSC-Led Consortium

Source: EuroHPC JU

The post EuroHPC Launches Federation Platform for Unified Access to Supercomputing Systems appeared first on HPCwire.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 15, 2026 — Forrester today released its The Top 10 Emerging Technologies In 2026 report, which highlights a pivotal shift in AI from digital experimentation to real-world transformation. AI is moving beyond software into physical environments — powering robots, vehicles, and ambient experiences that are already changing how consumers communicate, work, and buy.

As the pace of AI innovation continues, agentic software and physical AI will shape what consumers experience next, while technologies such as frontier models and AI security will be foundational to fueling future innovation. The research categorizes the top 10 emerging technologies by their impacts over short-term, medium-term, and long-term benefit horizons to help enterprises and leaders prioritize their investments. Key findings include:

Short-term emerging technologies that are quickly moving from trial to real use, delivering benefits to early adopters with solid business cases within the next two years:

• Agentic commerce: Businesses will soon see ROI in owned environments such as apps or websites, where brands can leverage agentic commerce and personalization to lower friction and improve sales. Uptake in non-owned environments will take up to three years more as ecosystems develop and the underlying technology matures.
• AI security and trust technologies: As generative and agentic AI scale across enterprises, integrated security, governance, and trust controls are becoming essential. Sectors that depend on predictive models and high-stakes decisioning systems, such as financial services, healthcare, and the public sector, will see impact first.

Medium-term emerging technologies that require discipline, vision, and a substantial tolerance for risk in return for a larger reward in the next two to five years:

• Agentic software development: ASD will unlock software development lifecycle acceleration as agents generate and refine software artifacts, but the technology will take a few more years to deliver significant benefits as agent coordination improves and stronger guardrails are implemented.
• Humanoid robots: Physical AI and robotics will eliminate labor bottlenecks in every industry and make way for systems to adapt on the fly, but the technology will deliver limited near-term value until organizations overcome integration, scaling, safety, data, and workforce challenges.

A long-term emerging technology that will take longer to deliver tangible value for enterprises:

• Quantum computing: Advances in quantum hardware, algorithms, and hybrid architectures point toward future breakthroughs in optimization, simulation, cryptography, and materials science, but broad commercial value remains years away. Financial services, pharmaceuticals, and manufacturing will benefit from quantum first.

“With new technologies constantly emerging, business and technology leaders need to plan their tech investments based on value, risk, and potential payout timelines,” said Sharyn Leaver, chief research officer at Forrester. “While AI continues to dominate the top emerging technologies list for 2026, AI technologies vary widely in capability and impact. Our research is designed to help business and technology leaders spread their investments out by identifying shorter-term technologies that can deliver quick returns and longer-term bets that require more effort, more foundational investment, and the capacity to manage more risk.”

Resources:

• Learn more about this year’s top 10 emerging technologies in this blog.
• Download The Top 10 Emerging Technologies In 2026 report (client access).

About Forrester

Forrester (Nasdaq: FORR) is one of the most influential research and advisory firms in the world. We empower leaders in technology, customer experience, digital, marketing, revenue, and product functions to make confident decisions in an AI-driven world and accelerate growth through customer obsession. Our unique research and continuous guidance model helps executives and their teams achieve their initiatives and outcomes faster and with confidence. To learn more, visit Forrester.com.

Source: Forrester

The post Forrester’s Top 10 Emerging Technologies for 2026: AI Is No Longer Confined to Digital Workflows appeared first on HPCwire.

Someone on discord just released a beta version of an auto wheelie refloat package for a vesc minibike.
I have a couple of vesc minibikes that I can use ti test this package.

Killing of Lauren Bullis and woman not yet identified in ‘random’ Monday attacks draws attention of Trump officials

An Atlanta man has been charged in a string of attacks over a matter of hours that left two women dead and a man in critical condition, drawing the Trump administration’s attention after one of the victims was identified as a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employee who was walking her dog.

The killing of the DHS worker, Lauren Bullis, and shootings of the two other victims on Monday led homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin to issue a statement raising concerns that the 26-year-old suspect, British native Olaolukitan Adon Abel, was granted US citizenship in 2022.

Company has received about £8.7bn in renewable energy subsidies since 2012, despite claims wood pellets are not sourced sustainably

The owner of the Drax power plant in North Yorkshire received record subsidies of almost £1bn for burning trees to generate electricity in 2025, a climate thinktank has calculated.

The company was paid £999m last year for generating about 4.5% of Great Britain’s electricity from its biomass plant, costing each household £13 a year, according to analysts at Ember.

DENVER, April 15, 2026 — The way businesses connect to the cloud is changing in a major way. What once took multiple providers and weeks to set up is becoming a simple, software-driven experience. Lumen Technologies today announced it is the first network provider to collaborate with AWS on AWS Interconnect – last mile using Lumen Cloud Interconnect, leveraging its last-mile and metro network infrastructure to simplify private connectivity between enterprise locations and AWS.

Credit: Shutterstock

“Cloud and network infrastructure can no longer operate separately; modern applications demand they work as one,” said Jim Fowler, Chief Technology and Product Officer at Lumen Technologies. “Cloud providers are increasingly integrating connectivity as a cloud service, and Lumen’s network enables that seamless experience. Together with AWS, we’re simplifying how enterprises connect to the cloud, helping them reduce complexity, move faster and support today’s demanding applications.”

Making Cloud Connectivity Fast and Simple

With AWS Interconnect – last mile, enterprises can establish private, high-speed connections from their branch offices, data centers, or remote sites directly to AWS with just a few clicks through the AWS Console and Lumen Connect portal. Lumen Cloud Interconnect supports those connections behind the scenes, delivering an automated and on-demand experience. By eliminating the need for multiple providers and simplifying manual configuration, organizations can shrink deployment timelines from weeks to minutes, scale bandwidth as needed and deliver the speed and reliability their business depends on.

The collaboration combines the AWS cloud and operational model with Lumen’s digital network platform and extensive network infrastructure, which spans more than 340,000 route miles and connects thousands of enterprise locations and data centers. Together, the companies are enabling a more seamless, unified experience where connectivity is no longer treated as a separate layer, but as an integrated part of how organizations access and use cloud services.

“Enterprises are looking for network infrastructure that delivers the same agility and simplicity they experience in the cloud,” said Peter Chahal, Research Director for IDC’s Worldwide Telecommunications Services and Strategies practice. “The collaboration between Lumen and AWS brings these capabilities together by streamlining connectivity, reducing operational complexity, and enabling organizations to deploy faster, improve performance, and realize greater value from their cloud investments.”

Organizations that rely on moving large volumes of data quickly and securely, including those supporting generative AI and machine learning, data-intensive analytics, real-time applications, and hybrid or multi-cloud environments stand to benefit most from this new approach to cloud connectivity. This includes industries such as healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and media where performance and reliability are critical. As they adopt a more distributed architecture, the quality of the connection between their environments and the cloud becomes essential to maintaining performance.

Availability

AWS Interconnect – last mile with Lumen Cloud Interconnect is now generally available to enterprise customers in the United States. Customers can now initiate connections through AWS Console and Lumen’s digital platform, Lumen Connect, and monitor availability, latency, and performance across their environments.

To learn more about how Lumen and AWS are simplifying cloud connectivity, visit: https://www.lumen.com/en-us/services/aws-interconnect-last-mile.html.

About Lumen Technologies

Lumen is unleashing the world’s digital potential. We ignite business growth by connecting people, data, and applications – quickly, securely, and effortlessly. As the trusted network for AI, Lumen uses the scale of our network to help companies realize AI’s full potential. From metro connectivity to long-haul data transport to our edge cloud, security, managed service, and digital platform capabilities, we meet our customers’ needs today and as they build for tomorrow.

Source: Lumen Technologies

The post AWS Collaborates with Lumen on Interconnect ‘Last Mile’ for Enterprise Cloud Connectivity appeared first on HPCwire.

The vote to advance a bill extending protections for Haitians marks the first time Republican lawmakers have voted this term to oppose Trump’s immigration policy.

Boston Dynamics has integrated Google DeepMind into its robotic dog Spot, giving it more autonomous reasoning for industrial inspections like spotting spills and reading gauges. Spot can also now recognize when to call on other AI tools. IEEE Spectrum reports: Boston Dynamics is one of the few companies to commercially deploy legged robots at any appreciable scale; there are now several thousand hard at work. Today the company is announcing that its quadruped robot Spot is now equipped with Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, a high-level embodied reasoning model that brings usability and intelligence to complex tasks. [T]he focus of this partnership is on one of the very few applications where legged robots have proven themselves to be commercially viable: inspection. That is, wandering around industrial facilities, checking to make sure that nothing is imminently exploding. With the new AI onboard, Spot is now able to autonomously look for dangerous debris or spills, read complex gauges and sight glasses, and call on tools like vision-language-action models when it needs help understanding what's going on in the environment around it. "Advances like Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 mark an important step toward robots that can better understand and operate in the physical world," Marco da Silva, vice president and general manager of Spot at Boston Dynamics, says in a press release. "Capabilities like instrument reading and more reliable task reasoning will enable Spot to see, understand, and react to real-world challenges completely autonomously." You can watch a demo of Spot's new capabilities on YouTube.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., April 15, 2026 — Equinix, Inc. today announced the availability of Equinix Fabric Intelligence, an AI-native operational layer to manage network infrastructure. Fabric Intelligence enables enterprises to deploy AI-powered networking across their operations, a shift from legacy software-defined networking design to simplify the complexities of today’s AI workflows. Powering the Equinix Distributed AI Hub, Fabric Intelligence introduces smart automation for deploying, optimizing and maintaining global infrastructure, giving organizations a more resilient, efficient and adaptive backbone for their AI workloads.

“The whole concept of AI is to make processes faster, and manual processes for network monitoring and management are difficult, if not impossible, to scale effectively,” said Jim Frey, Principal Analyst at Omdia. “Our research shows 93% of organizations agree that network automation will be essential for keeping pace with future change, and 88% also agree that AI itself will be required for effective network automation. With Fabric Intelligence, Equinix is providing enterprises the AI-driven control plane for deploying, activating, and managing multi-cloud networking, to help them meet the scale and automation needs of the distributed AI era.”

AI thrives in dynamic, connected environments, but many enterprises rely on slow, rigid legacy network architectures that were never designed for the speed and complexity of today’s intelligence systems. As AI adoption continues to accelerate, traditional network operations teams are struggling to keep up. Manual workflows can create bottlenecks, long deployment cycles hamper growth, and visibility gaps compound the challenge. AI demands real-time, adaptive networking—driving a shift to AI-assisted network operations that interpret telemetry and respond dynamically. The result is a widening gap between the speed of AI and the networks expected to support it.

Fabric Intelligence automates how AI workloads connect and operate across clouds, data centers and edge environments. It provides organizations with a smarter way to manage the complexity of AI by automating how their connections are set up, adjusted and maintained across these distributed environments. As a result, distributed systems run reliably without constant manual effort, freeing teams to focus on strategic business priorities, such as building new AI capabilities and scaling operations.

“All enterprises are focused on leveraging AI to transform their business, but most lack the infrastructure needed to deploy it at scale in ways that drive their growth,” said Jon Lin, Chief Business Officer at Equinix. “As agentic AI matures and inferencing applications proliferate across the enterprise, networking infrastructure needs to be faster and more flexible than ever before. Fabric Intelligence turns infrastructure from a constraint to a competitive advantage by enabling our customers to spend less time managing complexity and more time moving their business forward.”

Fabric Intelligence provides a suite of AI-native solutions enabling enterprises to design, deploy and manage their infrastructure using intuitive tools like natural language, automated agentic workflows and powerful predictive insights. Combined with Equinix’s global infrastructure of 280 high-performance data centers in 77 metros around the world, Equinix is helping to accelerate enterprise adoption of AI tools and next-generation infrastructure. Earlier this year, Equinix also joined the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), the open foundation driving the transparent and collaborative evolution of agentic AI, as a Gold member. This commitment will help build an open, secure and infrastructure‑ready foundation for the global autonomous economy.

Fabric Intelligence, part of the Equinix Fabric portfolio with more than 4,400 customers worldwide, is made up of the following components:

Fabric Super Agent

• An AI superagent that helps customers autonomously manage their networking environments using simple natural language requests through Slack, Microsoft Teams or the Equinix Customer Portal.
• Fabric Super Agent reduces deployment timelines from weeks to minutes, removing the need to navigate complex interfaces or understand APIs by helping users design, deploy and operate their networks with automated recommendations, configuration support and real-time performance insights.

MCP Server

• A set of AI-ready management tools to simplify connecting AI systems to complex networks, enabling high-performance, low-latency service creation and testing.
• Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers let customers integrate with top AI clients like Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, VS Code Copilot and Cursor, allowing developers to work with their preferred agents inside their network operations environment.

Fabric Application Connect

• A private, dedicated connectivity marketplace that allows enterprises to access AI service providers that offer inference, training, storage, security and other foundational AI components without exposing sensitive data to the public internet. This enables secure development and deployment of next-generation AI applications and agentic workflows.

Fabric Insights

• AI-powered network monitoring that analyzes real-time telemetry to predict anomalies and manage network health. Integrates directly with security information and event management (SIEM) platforms like Splunk and Datadog as well as Fabric Super Agent.

Fabric Intelligence is available now to preview. To get more information and request access, please register your interest here. Demonstrations of Fabric Intelligence will be available at the Equinix booth (7101) at Google Cloud Next 2026.

About Equinix

Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX) shortens the path to boundless connectivity anywhere in the world. Its digital infrastructure, data center footprint and interconnected ecosystems empower innovations that enhance our work, life and planet. Equinix connects economies, countries, organizations and communities, delivering seamless digital experiences and cutting-edge AI—quickly, efficiently and everywhere.

Source: Equinix

The post Equinix Accelerates Enterprise AI Workloads with Launch of Fabric Intelligence appeared first on HPCwire.

Teramount’s detachable, passive-alignment fiber-to-chip connectivity solutions for CPO enable faster data transfer rates for AI, cloud computing and 5G workloads

LISLE, Ill., April 15, 2026 — Molex, a global electronics leader and connectivity innovator, today announced an agreement to acquire Teramount Ltd., an Israel-based developer of detachable fiber-to-chip connectivity solutions optimized for high-volume Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) and other silicon photonics applications.

Teramount’s TeraVERSE platform, based on its universal photonic coupler and wafer-level self-aligning optics, provides a pragmatic, field-serviceable interface between optical fiber and silicon photonics chips and was recently announced as part of the Molex one-stop CPO solution at OFC 2026. TeraVERSE is an innovative, passively-aligned solution that enables faster data rates necessary to support AI adoption while consuming less energy to reduce power and cooling demands in hyperscale data centers.

“Teramount’s TeraVERSE technology fills a crucial gap in the CPO stack, offering an advantaged and strategic complement to our optical solutions portfolio. With a practical, detachable fiber-to-chip interface we are afforded a foundational element to realize mainstream CPO adoption,” said Aldo Lopez, president, Datacom Solutions, Molex. “Combining Teramount’s IP and engineering talent with Molex’s innovative portfolio, manufacturing scale, supply-chain expertise and systems know-how gives customers an integrated, high-volume path to deploy scalable CPO.”

Teramount’s passive, detachable coupling approach supports large assembly tolerances and semiconductor-grade wafer-level processes. Compared with active alignment methods, passive alignment is materially more scalable as CPO moves toward volume production. Molex will combine Teramount’s IP and engineering expertise with its optical capability and global manufacturing scale to deliver industry-leading performance specifications and accelerate production of TeraVERSE.

“Harnessing Molex’s global scale and system-level expertise with Teramount’s innovation expertise and detachable, wafer-level coupling technology creates a real pathway for scalable, high-density CPO,” said Hesham Taha, CEO and co-founder of Teramount. “Joining forces with Molex will enable us to accelerate delivery of a manufacturable, serviceable fiber-to-chip interface that meets the pressing needs of AI and hyperscale data centers.”

The addition of TeraVERSE to Molex’s comprehensive optical interconnect portfolio provides customers with greater support across their CPO and silicon photonics architectures. As a leader in high-speed communications interconnects, Molex is uniquely positioned to deliver industry-leading copper and optical solutions.

Teramount will remain a design and engineering center in Jerusalem supported by Molex’s global optical capabilities. The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. Goldfarb Gross Seligman is acting as Molex’s legal advisor, and Gornitzky & Co. is acting as Teramount’s legal advisor.

About Molex

Molex is a global electronics leader committed to making the world a better, more-connected place. With a presence in more than 40 countries, Molex enables transformative technology innovation in the consumer device, aerospace and defense, data center, cloud, telecommunications, transportation, industrial automation and healthcare industries. Through trusted customer and industry relationships, unrivaled engineering expertise, and product quality and reliability, Molex realizes the infinite potential of Creating Connections for Life. For more information, visit www.molex.com.

Source: Molex

The post Molex to Acquire Teramount Ltd. to Accelerate Scalable Co-Packaged Optics Adoption appeared first on HPCwire.

LIVINGSTON, N.J. and NEW YORK, April 15, 2026 — CoreWeave, Inc. and Jane Street, a global technology-driven trading firm, today announced that Jane Street has committed approximately $6 billion to use CoreWeave’s AI cloud platform. Under the new commitment which expands the existing relationship between the companies, CoreWeave will provide Jane Street with access to next-generation compute across multiple facilities, including NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin technology and the software and services required to deploy and scale its AI solutions.

Jane Street has also made an equity investment of $1 billion in CoreWeave Class A common stock at a purchase price of $109.00 per share. Taken together, the commitment and investment reflect Jane Street’s continued focus on applying machine learning across its business and scaling those efforts over time.

“We are deeply committed to investing in cutting-edge technologies that support our research in global financial markets, training large, complex models on massive volumes of noisy data, refining them continuously, and deploying at a scale to help make markets more efficient,” said Jane Street. “Access to CoreWeave’s leading AI cloud platform enables our researchers to move at the pace our competitive business demands.”

“Jane Street operates like a frontier lab, continually breaking new ground in deep learning and pushing the scale and complexity of their models,” said Max Hjelm, Senior Vice President of Revenue at CoreWeave. “CoreWeave was built for this purpose and we’re excited to expand our collaboration with Jane Street.”

CoreWeave was selected for its ability to combine high-performance compute with its integrated software layer that enables systems to operate efficiently and consistently in real-world conditions. CoreWeave Cloud is tailored to the specific requirements of Jane Street’s research operations, including dedicated connectivity, custom storage configurations, and responsive technical support.

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. Established in 2017, CoreWeave completed its public listing on Nasdaq (CRWV) in March 2025. Learn more at coreweave.com.

About Jane Street

Jane Street is a global technology-driven trading firm. Founded in 2000, the firm brings a research-driven approach and quantitative expertise to markets worldwide, with over 3,500 employees across offices in New York, London, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Amsterdam. If you’re interested in using large-scale compute to solve hard problems that matter, visit janestreet.com/join-jane-street/machine-learning.

Source: CoreWeave

The post Jane Street Signs $6B AI Cloud Agreement With CoreWeave appeared first on HPCwire.

ADT updates its security tech with Live Light, a smart yard sign and My Safety mobile emergency contact services.

Popular gaming platform will require age verification, restrict night-time notifications for minors and limit chats

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Roblox, a gaming platform popular with kids, will implement increased protections for young users and pay more than $12m to the state of Nevada in what the state attorney general, Aaron Ford, on Wednesday called a first-of-its-kind agreement.

“This settlement will create a safer environment for our children online, and I hope that it will serve as a bellwether for how online interactive platforms allow our state’s youth to use their products,” the Democrat said on Wednesday.

Proceedings brought to halt as protesters condemn Russ Vought for slashing Pepfar program amid sweeping aid cuts

Protesters decrying delays to funding in the battle against HIV/Aids charged into a congressional hearing where the Trump administration’s budget czar, Russell Vought, was testifying in Washington on Wednesday.

The demonstrators disrupted the proceedings on Capitol Hill and twice brought the hearing to a halt.

Camp Mystic’s operators hope to renew their license and reopen this summer even as state investigations are underway over alleged negligence during July’s flooding.

With another round of U.S.-Iran peace talks on the horizon, investors are optimistic that the war will wind down.

Liberal judge attacks emergency-docket rulings as Sonia Sotomayor apologizes for remarks about Brett Kavanaugh

The supreme court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has delivered a sustained attack on her conservative colleagues’ use of emergency orders to benefit the Trump administration, calling the orders “scratch-paper musings” that can “seem oblivious and thus ring hollow”.

Jackson, the court’s newest justice, delivered a lengthy assessment of roughly two dozen court orders issued last year that allowed Donald Trump to put in place controversial policies on immigration, steep federal funding cuts and other topics, after lower courts found they were probably illegal.

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In an interview with Fox News, Ford CEO Jim Farley warned that allowing Chinese vehicle imports could put nearly a million U.S. jobs at risk. He said China's heavily subsidized auto industry has enough excess capacity to supply the entire U.S. market, while also raising serious cybersecurity concerns given how much data modern connected cars collect. Ars Technica reports: "First of all, the Chinese have huge direct support for their auto companies," Farley said, while noting that China has the ability to build an additional 21 million vehicles a year on top of the 29 million that are expected to roll off Chinese production lines in 2026. "They have enough capacity in China to cover all the manufacturing, all the vehicle sales in the United States," Farley said. "Manufacturing is the heart and soul of our country, and for us to lose those exports would be devastating for our country," he continued, before pointing out the cybersecurity worries about Chinese cars. "All the vehicles have 10 cameras. They can collect a lot of data," he said. Farley has praised Chinese EVs like the Xiaomi SU7, even going on podcasts to sing its praises. But he believes Ford's forthcoming affordable Kentucky-built EVs, due to start hitting dealerships next year, have what it takes to be competitive. When asked about new car prices rising an average of 2 percent last year, Farley repeatedly said that Ford had "worked with the administration" so that there's "essentially no big impact" of the Trump tariffs. The CEO justified the rising costs by pointing to the F-150's sales as proof of its value.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino reiterated his stance Wednesday that Iran will participate in the World Cup "for sure" despite its war with the U.S.

Online reports point to a new plan, potentially called Elite 2.0, that boosts hotspot data for a premium price.

Researchers find increase in whale deaths in the Bay, largely because of collisions with vessels on busy shipping route

Gray whales have historically been a rare sight in the San Francisco Bay. They trek from the warm lagoons of Mexico’s Baja California more than 10,000 miles (16,000km) north to the Arctic region to feast on shrimp-like animals during the summers, seldom stopping in the busy shipping corridor for prolonged periods.

But in recent years, that story has changed in a dire way. A new study, published this week in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, has found that gray whales in the bay have been dying at alarming rates, largely due to collisions with vessels.

Agents detained Marie-Therese Ross in Alabama on 1 April after she overstayed her 90-day visa, according to DHS

The French government is pressing the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to release the 86-year-old French widow of a military veteran from immigration custody after she was detained earlier this month.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained Marie-Therese Ross in Alabama on 1 April after she overstayed her 90-day visa, according to DHS. Ross is now being held at a federal immigration detention facility in Louisiana.

Scheme cutting bills by up to 25% expanded to cover 10,000 firms, but they will not be paid until next year

Rachel Reeves has announced an expansion of support for the most energy-intensive UK businesses, as they face soaring bills as a result of the Middle East conflict.

The chancellor said the long-promised British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme (BICS) would be expanded to cover 10,000 companies, up from the 7,000 originally announced.

Understanding ocean currents is important for work such as weather forecasting, climate research, search-and-rescue operations and oil spill response.

The infusion of firepower coincides with the administration’s maritime blockade against the regime in Tehran and as mediators urge both sides to extend their ceasefire.

Some other games might be fun, but Squirrel With a Gun has my full attention.

Get faster access to some of Gemini's best features without switching tabs.

From people marrying digital companions to CEOs excited about how people whose jobs are replaced can ‘adapt’, this is terrifying watching. But Perry is the perfect host

There is a fun game you can play while watching Grayson Perry Has Seen the Future, the three-part documentary presented by the artist on the subject of artificial intelligence, its uses and its possible ramifications. Gather a group of friends, press play, and see which of you loses your mind first.

Will it be during the opening interview with Andrea, who recently married Edward, the AI companion she created to be “the man of my dreams”. She – or her idealised online avatar – wore “a beautiful matt satin gown” and he gave a speech about their “unconventional but strong” love. Will it be during the discussion of how you have intimate relations with a disembodied entity (“self-love is important … he’s very encouraging”)? Or will it be when she reveals that the joy she has found with Edward “has poured back” into the relationship she has been in for seven years with (human) Jason? “We’re happier than we’ve ever been.” Jason, perhaps wisely, does not offer himself for interview.

Rebrand as NewBird AI sent shares up 582% in bizarre and rapid turnaround for firm that had fallen on hard times

Allbirds, the maker of minimalist wool sneakers beloved by Silicon Valley, announced on Wednesday that it is leaving shoes behind and pivoting to artificial intelligence. The new focus and rebrand as “NewBird AI” sent the company’s stock up 582% as of mid-day during a flurry of trading.

The surging stock price and new direction is a bizarre, rapid turnaround for a company that had fallen into disrepair in recent years. Once valued at $4bn, Allbirds’ shares had lost 99% of their worth since 2021 and earlier this month the company announced plans for a $39m sale to brand management firm American Exchange Company.

Cal is moving its flagship scheduling software from open source to a proprietary license, arguing that AI coding tools now make it much easier for attackers to scan public codebases for vulnerabilities. "Open source security always relied on people to find and fix any problems," said Peer Richelsen, co-founder of Cal. "Now AI attackers are flaunting that transparency." CEO Bailey Pumfleet added: "Open-source code is basically like handing out the blueprint to a bank vault. And now there are 100x more hackers studying the blueprint." The company says it still supports open source and is releasing a separate Cal.diy version for hobbyists, but doesn't want to risk customer booking data in its commercial product. ZDNet reports: When Cal was founded in 2022, Bailey Pumfleet, the CEO and co-founder, wrote, "Cal.com would be an open-source project [because] limitations of existing scheduling products could only be solved by open source." Since Cal was successful and now claims to be the largest Next.js project, he was on to something. Today, however, Pumfleet tells me that AI programs such as "Claude Opus can scour the code to find vulnerabilities," so the company is moving the project from the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) to a proprietary license to defend the program's security. [...] Cal also quoted Huzaifa Ahmad, CEO of Hex Security, "Open-source applications are 5-10x easier to exploit than closed-source ones. The result, where Cal sits, is a fundamental shift in the software economy. Companies with open code will be forced to risk customer data or close public access to their code." "We are committed to protecting sensitive data," Pumfleet said. "We want to be a scheduling company, not a cybersecurity company." He added, "Cal.com handles sensitive booking data for our users. We won't risk that for our love of open source." While its commercial program is no longer open source, Cal has released Cal.diy. This is a fully open-source version of its platform for hobbyists. The open project will enable experimentation outside the closed application that handles high-stakes data. Pumfleet concluded, "This decision is entirely around the vulnerability that open source introduces. We still firmly love open source, and if the situation were to change, we'd open source again. It's just that right now, we can't risk the customer data."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lack of funding leaving police forces failing to keep pace with two-thirds annual increase in referrals, says report

Child victims of online sexual abuse are being inadequately protected from further harm because police forces are struggling to cope with an increase in this crime, his majesty’s chief inspector of constabulary has warned.

Michelle Skeer said: “Without investment and coordination, the situation will worsen and children could be put at further risk.”

Suit alleges the billionaire’s AI company is illegally spewing toxic pollutants from its datacenter in the Memphis area

A new lawsuit accuses Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company of illegally spewing toxic pollutants into residential neighborhoods on the border of Tennessee and Mississippi.

The suit, filed on Tuesday in Mississippi federal court, alleges xAI is violating the Clean Air Act due to emissions from its makeshift power plant in Southaven, Mississippi, which powers its datacenter there. The NAACP, represented by environmental groups Southern Environmental Law Center and Earthjustice, says xAI has been polluting areas with homes, schools and churches, including in historically Black communities, by using dozens of methane gas generators without permits.

The two-panel folding phone could be pricey in the US based on a direct currency conversion, but it might not be the final cost.

Woman, 47, and man, 46, held on suspicion of arson endangering life after attempted Finchley attack

A 47-year-old woman and a 46-year-old man have been arrested on suspicion of arson endangering life after an attempted attack on a synagogue in Finchley, north London, as part of an investigation into what the Metropolitan police described as an “antisemitic hate crime”.

The force said the woman was arrested at an address in Watford just after 4.45pm on Wednesday, while the man was arrested at 7.15pm in the Watford area. Both suspects remain in police custody.

Verdict in states’ case says concert giant stifled competition in ticketing industry, raising pressure for changes

The concert giant Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary has a harmful monopoly over big concert venues, a Manhattan federal jury has found, dealing the company a loss in a lawsuit over claims brought by dozens of US states.

The jury deliberated for four days before reaching its decision on Wednesday in the closely watched case, which helped peel back the curtain on a business that dominates live entertainment across much of the world.

Tribblix, the Illumos distribution focused on giving you a classic UNIX-style experience, doesn’t only support x86. It also has a branch for SPARC, which tends to run behind its x86 counterpart a little bit and has a few other limitations related to the fact SPARC is effectively no longer being developed. The Tribblix SPARC branch has been updated, and now roughly matches the latest x86 release from a few weeks ago.

The graphical libraries libtiff and OpenEXR have been updated, retaining the old shared library versions for now. OpenSSL is now from the 3.5 series with the 3.0 api by default. Bind is now from the 9.20 series. OpenSSH is now 10.2, and you may get a Post-Quantum Cryptography warning if connecting to older SSH servers.

‘zap install’ now installs dependencies by default.

‘zap create-user’ will now restrict new home directories to mode 0700 by default; use the -M flag to choose different permissions.

Support for UFS quotas has been removed.

↫ Tribblix release notes

There’s no new ISO yet, so to get to this new m34 release for SPARC you’re going to have to install from an older ISO and update from there.

The S&P breached 7,000 points for the first time in history, in a rally that erased stark losses incurred at start of war

Wall Street scaled a fresh all-time high on Wednesday amid growing optimism among investors that the US-Israel war on Iran will soon be over.

The benchmark S&P 500 breached 7,000 points for the first time in history, after climbing 0.8% over the course of the day, finishing at 7,022.95. The tech-heavy Nasdaq also rose 1.6% to 24,016.02, its own record high, while the Dow Jones industrial average remained broadly flat.

President Donald Trump and Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., have been at odds over the next chairman of the Federal Reserve.

They can’t even agree on whether Tillis is still a senator.

During his second term, Trump has tangled with Fed Chair Jerome Powell, with the president saying Powell hasn’t lowered interest rates fast enough and Powell seeking to invoke the Fed’s traditional independence. The Justice Department has been investigating Powell over cost overruns involving Fed headquarters renovations, but the investigation has been criticized as politically driven and has run into court obstacles. 

Tillis is a member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, which would weigh in on the confirmation of Trump’s intended Fed chair successor, Kevin Warsh. Tillis has said he would not vote to confirm a new Fed chair until the legal issues involving Powell are settled. This has displeased Trump.

During a Fox Business interview that aired April 15, host Maria Bartiromo asked Trump about the effort to confirm Warsh, including the Justice Department’s probe and Tillis’ opposition. 

Trump insisted Tillis, who is not seeking reelection, is no longer in office, even after Bartiromo corrected him.

Bartiromo: "And you think Kevin Warsh can get confirmed? Do you think Thom Tillis is going to give you a vote?"

Trump: "That's why Thom Tillis is no longer a senator."

Bartiromo: "OK. On the on the AI thing —"

Trump: "You know Thom Tillis is no longer a senator, right? He quit."

Bartiromo: "Well, he's on his way out."

Trump: "Well, no, he quit, but he quit."

Bartiromo is right.

Tillis decided not to run for reelection this year, but he didn’t resign from the Senate. 

Trump may consider Tillis a quitter in a broader sense, but it’s factually wrong to say — twice — that Tillis is not a senator. 

In June 2025, following attacks by Trump for voting against advancing his signature tax and spending bill, Tillis announced he would not seek another term.

"In Washington over the last few years, it’s become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species," Tillis’ statement said.

But a retirement announcement is not the same thing as a resignation announcement. Tillis, whose term ends in January 2027, is listed as a current member on the Senate website, and he cast a vote as recently as April 14.

Tillis’ continued presence in the Senate is why his threat to oppose a new Fed chair carries weight.

Tillis’ office did not respond to an inquiry for this article. 

This is not the first time Trump has said Tillis is no longer a senator. In Jan. 30 comments to reporters, he responded to a similar question about Tillis and the Fed confirmation process by saying that Tillis’ stance "is why he's no longer a senator," though he went on to say, less definitively, "You know, he's going to be out of office."

The White House referred PolitiFact to April 15 remarks by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who said, "Well, I'm sure Sen. Tillis wants to do the best thing for the Federal Reserve, for the American people. He has publicly said that Kevin Warsh is a great candidate for the chair. So let's get to the hearings and see where we are then."

Our ruling

Trump said, "Thom Tillis is no longer a senator."

Tillis has announced he will not run for a new term, but he is remaining in the Senate and performing his duties until his term ends in January 2027.

We rate the statement False.

The federal government will begin the long-awaited cleanup of a nuclear waste dump outside Apollo in Armstrong County.

The ultra-wealthy donor class is getting ready to pour tens of millions into the fall elections that will decide which party will control Congress.

The lawsuit involved dozens of states that alleged Live Nation undermined competition and drove up ticket prices.

Doctors delayed care for Hayam El Gamal, who is in federal detention, her lawyer said. A scan later showed a mass and fluid on her heart, court records state.

A Manhattan federal jury found that Live Nation and Ticketmaster illegally maintained monopoly power in the ticketing market. The findings follow an antitrust case brought by states after a separate DOJ settlement. CNN reports: The verdict was reached following a lengthy trial in New York federal court that included testimony from top executives in the music and entertainment industries. Jurors began deliberating on Friday. The Justice Department and 39 state attorneys general, including California and New York, and Washington, DC, sued Live Nation in 2024 alleging its combination with Ticketmaster and control of "virtually every aspect of the live music ecosystem" have harmed fans, artists, and venues. During the second week of trial, in a move that surprised even the judge, the Justice Department reached a secret settlement with Live Nation. A handful of states signed onto the deal, but more than two dozen proceeded to trial. Under the DOJ deal, Live Nation agreed to allow competitors, like SeatGeek or StubHub, to offer tickets to its events, cap ticketing service fees at 15%, and divest exclusive booking agreements with 13 amphitheaters. The deal includes a $280 million settlement fund for state damages claims for the handful of states that signed onto the deal. The DOJ settlement requires the judge's approval.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Aces retain championship core with Wilson signing

• Contract is the most lucrative in league history

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The defending WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces completed the process of bringing back their core group by re-signing four-time MVP A’ja Wilson on Wednesday.

Terms were not released, per club policy, but ESPN reported the deal is a three-year, $5m supermax contract, which would make it the most lucrative in WNBA history.

Athletes’ careers are unpredictable. Fewer than 2% of NCAA college athletes turn professional and many professional athletes retire before they’re 35. Yet nearly 65% of athletes say they never had financial education in school.

To help address the unique challenges athletes face, JPMorganChase announced a new initiative to help athletes navigate every aspect of their financial lives, from early career stages through retirement.      

The JPMorganChase Athlete Council brings together some of the world’s most accomplished sports figures who will meet with JPMC leaders on a regular basis to discuss the unique financial needs of athletes and guide the development of programs to address them.  

“Sports careers can be short and retirement unexpected,” said Kristin Lemkau, CEO of J.P. Morgan Wealth Management. “We want to develop a program by athletes, for athletes, to help them from college to professional sports to retirement.”

“Athletes face unique challenges and opportunities. Having the right educational resources and guidance is critical to making smart decisions about money as your career evolves,” said three-time NBA champion and two-time NBA Hall of Famer Dwyane Wade. 

At its inaugural meeting, JPMorganChase Athlete Council members shared their own personal experiences and discussed a range of topics, including the needs athletes have at different stages of their career and how to support them effectively in making smart financial choices.   

“I’m excited to join the JPMorganChase Athlete Council and to serve as chair of this incredible group of athletes,” Wade said. “The Council gives us the opportunity to share our experience and insights to help athletes build their financial knowledge and plan beyond their playing career.”

JPMorganChase has a long history of serving athletes, teams and owners, including sponsorships of tournaments, venues and individual teams and players. Chase is also the designated financial education partner for League One Volleyball (LOVB) and Hudl, a leading sports tech platform for youth to college athletes. 

“Our goal is to truly empower the athletes of today  — and tomorrow — with financial literacy throughout their career,” said Stevie Baron, Head of Private Client Banking at JPMorganChase. “We are excited to partner with some of the nation’s top athletes to deliver a fully integrated experience.”   

The JPMorganChase Athlete Council includes:   

• Ally Love — Peloton Instructor + VP, Instructor Strategy & Development | TODAY On-Air Contributor | Founder & CEO, Love Squad
• Tom Brady – Seven-time Super Bowl champion with 10 Super Bowl appearances and 18 division titles  
• Dwyane Wade  (chair)  – Entrepreneur, two-time NBA Hall of Famer and three-time NBA champion celebrated for his legendary career with the Miami Heat
• Megan Rapinoe  — Former professional soccer winger who co-captained the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team and won two World Cup titles and an Olympic gold    
• Kayvon Thibodeaux – New York Giants edge rusher and 2022 NFL Draft fifth overall pick. Founded JREAM to support underserved youth  (Journey to Readiness in Enrichment and Academic Mentorship)
• Alex Morgan – Two-time FIFA World Cup champion, Olympic gold medalist and former co-captain of the U.S. women’s national soccer team  
• Jalen Brunson – Knicks All-Star Guard and Clutch Player of the Year, empowering youth through his Second Round Foundation   
• Sue Bird – Seattle Storm WNBA champion and 5-time Olympic gold medalist turned first-ever managing director for USA Women’s Basketball   
• A’ja Wilson – Unprecedented four-time WNBA MVP winner who’s led the Las Vegas Aces to three championships  

“Every athlete on this Council has been deeply committed to paying it forward to help the more than 500,000 college, working and retired athletes avoid some of the same pitfalls they stepped in. At JPMorganChase, we can help every athlete regardless of income level manage their financial plan for the future,” said Lemkau.

The firm is also supporting athletes with its new “Athlete Center of Excellence,” run by financial professionals who deeply understand the athlete experience. JPMorganChase also conducts financial education outreach at universities and major sports events, aiming to meet athletes where they are with curriculums designed specifically for them. JPMorganChase recently launched a dedicated educational content hub at jpmorgan.com/ace with a range of resources for athletes and tailored guides for each phase of their sports career.

Participation on the Athletes Council or at JPMorganChase events does not constitute an endorsement or testimonial relating to the investment advisory services of J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, its advisors, and wealth management businesses.

Learn more about the JPMorganChase Athlete Council at: jpmorgan.com/athletescouncil 

The post JPMorganChase partners with sports legends to help athletes master their money      appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.

People on the ground in the Eastern Hemisphere will be able to observe the asteroid with their own eyes, weather permitting, according to NASA.

The president made the claim, which Beijing has yet to confirm, amid anger in China that its vessels could be caught up in a U.S. blockade targeting Iranian ports.

Commons rejects proposal by 256 to 150 to side with government on plan to tackle online harms affecting children

MPs have rejected a proposal to ban under-16s from using social media for the second time, as the prime minister summoned tech bosses to demand tougher action on internet safety.

The House of Commons sided with the government against a Lords amendment to the children’s wellbeing and schools bill that imposed a new age limit on using social media platforms, amid pressure from parents and campaign groups for greater urgency in tackling online harms.

Surveillance video shows a school principal in Oklahoma tackling and disarming a former student armed with two semi-automatic handguns. Kirk Moore, principal of Pauls Valley high school, was shot in the leg as he wrestled the attacker. He is now healthy and recovering. Investigators said the alleged attacker, Victor Lee Hawkins, fired several shots before he was disarmed by Moore and another staff member who arrived to help. Hawkins awaits a court appearance on 8 May. He faces charges of shooting with intent to kill, feloniously pointing a firearm and carrying a weapon to a public assembly

• Oklahoma principal shot disarming ex-student with semi-automatic guns

It was the fourth time Democrats in the Senate had forced a vote on the issue since the war began on Feb. 28.

ALDEN GATES
Staff Reporter

At 16, I thought getting my first job meant finally growing up. I did not expect that it would be the moment I learned what it meant to be a girl in a man’s world. 

I was working as a children’s party planner at a bowling alley. During a closing shift one night, I was sexually harassed by a coworker. It was someone I saw almost every day and had once considered a friend. The incident caught me off guard, leaving me unsure of how to react. What unsettled me most was not just the act itself, but the sudden collapse of trust in someone I thought I could rely on. 

I began to question whether I was overreacting — which only deepened my silence. The weight of not knowing how to protect myself without causing a scene grew heavier, and each shift, I was forced to navigate a stream of suggestive comments I did not know how to confront. A few months later, during a staff check-in meeting, I gathered the confidence to acknowledge what had happened, but I wasn’t met with the support I needed. 

In essence, my manager said — Your privilege is showing — pointing out that my harasser was a minority as if that erased what he had done. My voice choked and my hands shook. I felt my confidence turn to anger, then the anger dissolving into a quiet sadness. 

She sided with him. I left the meeting humiliated and confused, and like so many girls before me, I blamed myself. 

When I later encountered Melissa Febos’s term “patriarchy panic,” I recognized it instantly. 

Febos describes this expression in her book, “Girlhood,”  as “a panic attack or a heart attack — but a patriarchy attack.” The definition gave a name to something I had already lived: The feelings of fear, shame and awareness that define so many girls’ first, but never last, encounters with power. The term has become a common phrase for living in a college house with four other 20-year-old women, in a world where this kind of panic is all too normal. 

The problem lies deeply in institutions that prioritize perpetrators over victims. Men’s power has a way of preserving itself, like an unspoken rule passed down through generations. Those who shape our political and cultural systems singlehandedly set the blueprint for denying women’s stories. 

President Donald Trump, for example, has faced at least 28 allegations of sexual misconduct since the 1970s. Yet, he serves as president of the United States and remains the most influential figure in American politics. His continued power is no exception, but a reflection of how deeply these structures are ingrained. 

Voices like our president’s, who lead young men to carry on detrimental rhetoric and minimize the effects of sexual assault, often hold the power to be the loudest in conversations about women’s bodily autonomy. Trump’s comments about women’s bodies, coupled with his control within the Supreme Court, make it clear that power and misogyny work hand in hand. 

The legal system that Trump has built has fortified conditions in which people with histories of sexual misconduct are the sole decision makers on millions of women’s bodies, while survivors are left fighting for their autonomy to be taken seriously. These experiences are not far from unusual, though. 

When Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking network came to light, the stories confirmed a truth most people already knew but did not want to admit. One where powerful men often live in a world beyond the idea of accountability. 

Survivors of Epstein, who was a close friend of Trump’s, came forward to speak their truth and were met with an unbelievable amount of criticism. The question was never really whether Epstein had committed these crimes, but how many times he could get away with it. 

The case became just another example of a long history of power protecting itself, despite its effect on women’s advocacy as a whole. It was an assurance that the men who committed these unspeakable acts are the people who own the very institutions that are trying — and failing — to condemn them. Their money has proven to weigh more than the victims’ words. 

In the United States, according to the National Violence Resource Center, 81% of women have experienced sexual violence at some point in their lives. Sexual assault, however, is consistently underreported in the media despite its prevalence. 

According to a September 2025 news assessment organized by UN Women, violence against women received only 1.8 % of media coverage. The silence shapes public attitude towards the topic, creating a barrier against acknowledgement and solutions, influencing how we as women live in a world that does not support us. It teaches us that our lived experiences have expiration dates and can be dismissed.

To be taken seriously, a woman has to be perfect, while flawed men are forgiven and freed. Excuses and dismissals run rampant while women fear for their well-being. 

The question for girls my age is all too common. Was my work uniform really one button short of my safety? Could I have done something different? We grow up watching how the justice system fails survivors and we witness how men flawlessly rebound from these accusations. Time and time again, our reality is unavoidable. 

Patriarchy is a roof we all live under. A shared, broken home no one knows how to fix. These scenarios are not imagined; they’re reality for women everywhere. They are the direct result of systematic policies that have told women that their safety is negotiable.

As long as powerful men can be accused of sexual assault and still become president, as long as women are held accountable for their own assaults and justice is selective, the script remains the same. The world moves on like nothing happened. 

Alden Gates is a staff reporter at The Review. Her opinions are her own and do not represent the majority opinion of The Review staff. She may be reached at aldenrg@udel.edu.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Spotify and several major record labels, including UMG, Sony, and Warner, secured a $322 million default judgment against the unknown operators of Anna's Archive. The shadow library failed to appear in court and briefly released millions of tracks that were scraped from Spotify via BitTorrent. In addition to the monetary penalty, a permanent injunction required domain registrars and other parties to suspend the site's domain names. [...] The music labels get the statutory maximum of $150,000 in damages for around 50 works. Spotify adds a DMCA circumvention claim of $2,500 for 120,000 music files, bringing the total to more than $322 million. The plaintiff previously described their damages request as "extremely conservative." The DMCA claim is based only on the 120,000 files, not the full 2.8 million that were released. Had they applied the $2,500 rate to all released files, the damages figure would exceed $7 billion. Anna's Archive did not show up in court, and the operators of the site remain unidentified. The judgment attempts to address this directly, by ordering Anna's Archive to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, that includes valid contact information for the site and its managing agents. Whether the site will comply with this order is highly uncertain. For now, the monetary judgment is mostly a victory on paper, as recouping money from an unknown entity is impossible. For this reason, the music companies also requested a permanent injunction. In addition to the damages award, [Judge Jed Rakoff] entered a permanent worldwide injunction covering ten Anna's Archive domains: annas-archive.org, .li, .se, .in, .pm, .gl, .ch, .pk, .gd, and .vg. Domain registries and registrars of record, along with hosting and internet service providers, are ordered to permanently disable access to those domains, disable authoritative nameservers, cease hosting services, and preserve evidence that could identify the site's operators. The judgment names specific third parties bound by those obligations, including Public Interest Registry, Cloudflare, Switch Foundation, The Swedish Internet Foundation, Njalla SRL, IQWeb FZ-LLC, Immaterialism Ltd., Hosting Concepts B.V., Tucows Domains Inc., and OwnRegistrar, Inc. Anna's Archive is also ordered to destroy all copies of works scraped from Spotify and to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, including valid contact information for the site and its managing agents. That last requirement could prove significant, given that the identity of the site's operators remains unknown.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Met seeking two suspects and says overnight incident in Finchley being treated as antisemitic hate crime

A suspected attempted firebomb attack on a north London synagogue was a bid to intimidate British Jews, a leader at the place of worship has said, vowing that they will continue to work to “build bridges”.

The Metropolitan police said a manhunt was under way after two people “wearing dark clothing and balaclavas” approached Finchley Reform Synagogue (FRS) just after midnight on Wednesday and threw a brick and two bottles suspected to contain petrol at the building.

President Trump would love to be finally rid of Fed Chair Jerome Powell. But firing him would kick up a legal firestorm and roil financial markets, experts said.

MPs and peers say pitting defence and welfare against each other risks losing public support for increased spending on the military

Senior Labour figures have warned that Rachel Reeves must find alternative ways to increase military spending rather than slashing welfare, saying it risks public support for investment in defence.

Pressure has been mounting from Labour backbenchers for the Treasury to urgently agree the defence investment plan (Dip) after George Robertson, a former Nato secretary general, said there was a “corrosive complacency” on defence funding.

Brian Cole Jr, accused of planting the devices near the RNC and DNC buildings in DC, faces two more felony counts

The individual accused of placing pipe bombs near the headquarters of both the Republican and Democratic national committees on the night before the January 6 Capitol attack is now facing two more felony counts, as detailed in a newly released indictment on Wednesday.

Brian Cole Jr, 30, of Woodbridge, Virginia, had previously been arrested in December and charged with transporting and positioning two improvised explosive devices outside the DNC and RNC buildings. The updated indictment introduces charges of attempting to use weapons of mass destruction and carrying out an act of terrorism while armed.

UK chancellor steps up criticism, telling Washington event she is unconvinced conflict has made world a safer place

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Rachel Reeves has stepped up her criticism of Donald Trump’s war on Iran, describing it as a “mistake” that has destabilised the global economy and damaged living standards around the world.

In a marked fraying of the transatlantic relationship, the British chancellor said Trump breaking off from diplomatic talks with Iran and launching airstrikes seemed to have left the president in a worse place than he started.

Who wouldn’t want to be a king, a footballer, a friend of lions, a maestro and Jesus?

• This was originally published in This Week in Trumpland. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday

In Donald Trump’s telling, the image showed him as a medical professional, never mind the lack of training.

“It’s supposed to be me as a doctor making people better,” Trump said, responding to the outrage after he posted an AI-generated photo which critics – including some on the right – say showed him as a Jesus Christ-figure.

A king

A skilled footballer

A person roaring with a lion

A maestro

What I think is supposed to be a rich guy, but instead looks like a money launderer

Superman

A 1930s-era private dick

Colonel Kilgore from Apocalypse Now

A Nobel peace prize winner

A very muscly Sith lord

April 15, 2026 — Computer chips that cram billions of electronic devices into a few square inches have powered the digital economy and transformed the world. Scientists may be on the cusp of launching a similar technological revolution — this time using light.

Lindell Williams (left) and Grant Brodnik align an optical fiber with the edge of an integrated photonics chip. Optical fibers act as pipes for light, enabling the light generated on these chips to be collected and routed off the chip for use in experiments and applications. Credit: R. Jacobson/NIST.

In a significant advance toward that goal, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) scientists and collaborators have pioneered a way to make integrated circuits for light by depositing complex patterns of specialized materials onto silicon wafers. These so-called photonics chips use optical devices such as lasers, waveguides, filters and switches to shuttle light around and process information. The new advance could provide a big boost for emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, quantum computers and optical atomic clocks.

Making circuitry for light as powerful and ubiquitous as circuitry for electrons is one of today’s technological frontiers, said Scott Papp, a NIST physicist whose group led the research, published this week in Nature. “We’re learning to make complex circuits with many functions, cutting across many application areas.”

Light Speed

When it comes to information transfer and processing, light can do things that electricity can’t. Photons — particles of light — are far zippier than electrons at working their way through circuits.

Laser light is also essential for controlling powerful, emerging quantum technologies such as optical atomic clocks and quantum computers.

But several hurdles remain before integrated photonics can truly hit its stride. One involves lasers. High-quality, compact and efficient lasers exist in only a few wavelengths, or colors, of light. For example, semiconductor lasers are very good at generating infrared light with a wavelength of 980 nanometers, or billionths of a meter — a color just outside the range of human vision.

Emerging technologies such as optical atomic clocks and quantum computers need laser light in many other colors as well. The lasers that produce those colors are big, costly and power-hungry, effectively confining these quantum technologies to a handful of special-purpose labs.

By integrating lasers into circuits on chips, scientists hope to help quantum technologies become cheaper and more portable, so they can start to fulfill their vast promise.

A Multilayered Approach

The new NIST photonics chip is a bit like a layer cake. NIST physicists Papp and Grant Brodnik, along with colleagues, started with a standard wafer of silicon coated with silicon dioxide (glass) and lithium niobate, a so-called nonlinear material that can change the color of light coming into it.

The researchers then added pieces of metal to electrically control how the circuits convert one color of light to others. The scientists also created other metal-lithium niobate interfaces that allowed them to rapidly turn light on and off within the circuits — a crucial ability for data processing and high-speed routing.

The icing on the cake, so to speak, was a second nonlinear material called tantalum pentoxide, or tantala. Tantala can transform light in ways that feel like magic, taking in a single laser color and putting out the full rainbow of visible light colors plus a wide range of infrared wavelengths. Papp and colleagues have spent years developing techniques to fabricate circuits out of tantala without heating it up, allowing the material to be deposited onto other materials without damaging them.

By patterning the different materials on top of each other in a three-dimensional stack, the researchers produced a single chip that efficiently routes light between layers. That allowed them to merge the light-manipulating wizardry of tantala with the controllability of lithium niobate. The new technique “allows seamless integration,” said Brodnik. “The real power is that tantala can be added to existing circuitry.”

Ultimately, the researchers were able to fit roughly 50 fingernail-sized chips containing 10,000 photonic circuits, each outputting a unique color, onto a wafer roughly the size of a beer coaster. “We can create all these different colors, just by designing circuits,” said Papp.

One Chip, Many Potential Uses

Quantum technologies such as clocks and computers could be among the biggest beneficiaries of integrated photonics. These devices often use arrays of atoms to store and process information. For each type of atom, physicists need lasers tailored to the atom’s internal quantum energy levels. For example, rubidium atoms, commonly used in quantum computers and clocks, respond to red light with a wavelength of 780 nanometers. Strontium atoms, another popular choice, “see” blue light at 461 nanometers. Shine other colors on the atoms and nothing happens.

A chip based on nonlinear optics contains lasers in several dozen colors. Credit: S. Papp/NIST.

The bulky, costly and complicated lasers needed to produce these bespoke colors have been a major hindrance to getting quantum computers and optical clocks out of the lab and into the field, where they could have big impacts. Cheap, low-power, portable optical clocks, for example, could help predict volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, offer an alternative to GPS for positioning and navigation, and help scientists investigate scientific mysteries such as the nature of dark matter. Quantum computers could offer new ways to study the physics and chemistry of drugs and materials.

Integrated photonic circuits aren’t just for quantum. Papp believes NIST’s photonics chips could help efficiently shuttle signals between the specialized chips used by tech firms, potentially making AI-based tools more powerful and efficient. Tech companies are also interested in using photonics to improve virtual reality displays.

While NIST’s chips aren’t yet ready for mass production, the technique used to create them provides a path forward, Papp and Brodnik say. The NIST scientists collaborated with experts at Octave Photonics, a Louisville, Colorado-based startup company founded by former NIST researchers that’s now working to scale up the technology.

“When you see the chip glowing in the lab, taking in invisible light and making all this visible light in one integrated chip — it’s obvious how many potential applications there could be,” said Papp.

The post NIST Advances Integrated Photonics with Multimaterial Chip Fabrication Approach appeared first on HPCwire.

DHS accused of false and misleading statements about Carlos Ivan Mendoza Hernandez who was shot in face

Federal officials have arrested a California man who was shot by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and charged him with “assault” on a federal officer.

Carlos Ivan Mendoza Hernandez, 36, was shot by ICE officers on 7 April in Patterson, a rural town in California’s Central valley roughly 80 miles south-east of San Francisco. He was hit by more than six bullets, including in the face, according to his attorney.

Announcement comes before Matt Brittin replaces Tim Davie as director general next month

The BBC is to cut as many as 2,000 jobs in the biggest downsizing of the public service broadcaster in 15 years.

Staff were informed of the cuts, which will affect about 10% of the BBC’s 21,500 employees, at an all-staff meeting on Wednesday afternoon.

Protests coincide with a congressional vote to stop arming Israel and a movement to withhold income taxes

• Middle East crisis – live updates

On Monday afternoon, dozens of people sat down in front of the New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s Manhattan office. Shedding their casual-business attire, they revealed matching shirts that read “FUND PEOPLE NOT BOMBS”.

They were some of hundreds of protesters – including Chelsea Manning, actor Hannah Einbinder and artist Molly Crabapple – to tell Gillibrand and the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer that they disapprove of the US sending more weapons to Israel, as the two countries wage wars in Iran, Lebanon and Palestine. Nearly a hundred protesters, including Manning, actor Hari Nef and New York congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier, were arrested after the group shut down traffic on Third Avenue.

NEW YORK, April 15, 2026 — ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today announced Ricardo Baeza-Yates as the recipient of the 2025 ACM Luiz André Barroso Award, recognizing his pioneering contributions to algorithms and information retrieval as well as his leadership in fostering a vibrant transnational research community across Latin America.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates

The ACM Luiz André Barroso Award recognizes researchers from historically underrepresented communities who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. The award is named after Luiz André Barroso, a Brazilian computer engineer who pioneered the design of the modern data center. Barroso, who grew up in a diverse community, was a strong supporter of equal opportunity for everyone.

Technical Contributions

Baeza-Yates is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost researchers in information retrieval, celebrated especially for pioneering innovative data structures that have shaped the field. His work has produced influential algorithms for string searching and fuzzy matching, including the well-known Shift-Or algorithm. Over the course of a prolific career, Baeza-Yates has authored more than 500 highly cited papers and co-written several books. His textbook, Modern Information Retrieval (co-authored with Berthier Ribeiro-Neto), remains the most widely used and authoritative reference in the discipline.

Building the Latin American Computing Community

Baeza-Yates has played a pivotal role in strengthening the Latin American computing community. At the University of Chile, he was the founding director of the Center for Web Research which became a hub for attracting top talent and supporting young researchers. The efforts of Baeza-Yates and others gradually led to a vibrant technology sector in Chile—reflected in today’s moniker of “Chilecon Valley.”

Later, as President of the Centro Latinoamericano de Estudios en Informática (CLEI), he led the association of computing science departments in Latin America. He also was one of the coordinators of the Ibero-American cooperation program in science and technology for development (CYTED). He also co-founded two of Latin America’s most influential research conferences—String Processing and Information Retrieval Symposium (SPIRE), focused on string processing (now an international meeting), and the Alberto Mendelzon Workshop (AMW), dedicated to databases and web research.

During this decade, he has focused on responsible AI, being one of the leading authors of ACM’s Principles for Responsible Algorithmic Systems published in October 2022. He is currently a member of several technology policy committees including ACM, IEEE, OECD, and WEF.

A respected mentor, Baeza-Yates has advised 34 PhD students, many from Latin America, with 50% of them female, 53% from Latin America, and 68% from developing countries. Young people have also been excited and inspired by the South American Programming Contest which he helped to bootstrap. Launched in 1996, the Contest held its 30^th competition in 2025.

“It is fitting that an ACM Award named for Luiz Barroso, who was a leading Brazilian computer scientist, would be earned this year by Ricardo Baeza-Yates, a Chilean technical star,” said ACM President Yannis Ioannidis. “Their careers reflect how institutions of higher education in Latin America have produced some of the field’s most important trailblazers. Building on this foundation, Ricardo Baeza-Yates saw that a transnational approach encouraging cooperation among various Latin American countries was the most effective way to foster digital economies in the region. ACM is excited to be part of this growth. Latin American countries are increasingly hosting ACM conferences, our membership is growing across the region, and increasingly more ACM Fellows and ACM journal editors call Latin America home.”

“Google is proud to sponsor this award in honor of our late colleague Luiz Barroso,” said Jeff Dean, Google’s Chief Scientist. “By fundamentally re-thinking the design of data centers, Luiz laid the foundations for cloud computing. In the same way, Ricardo Baeza-Yates’ innovations and indispensable book on information retrieval have been crucial to how we harness data and gain insights from it. We’re also proud to collaborate with Ricardo Baeza-Yates and others who are furthering technology in Latin America. Google continues to make major investments in the region to increase connectivity, foster digital growth, and enable greater access to AI applications.”

Biographical Background

Ricardo Baeza-Yates, a native of Chile, is currently the Search Chief Scientist at You.com, holding part-time professor appointments at KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain) and Universidad de Chile. As a practitioner, Baeza-Yates served as VP of Research for Yahoo Labs, secured 14 patents, and co-founded several startups in Chile and Spain, the latest one Theodora AI, devoted to mitigating technological bias.

Baeza-Yates is an engineering graduate of the Universidad de Chile, where he also earned Master’s Degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. He earned a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo. Among his honors, Baeza-Yates received the CLEI Distinction for Contributions to Computing in Latin America in 2009, the Spanish “Ángela Ruiz Robles” Award for research excellence and entrepreneurship in applied computing in 2018, the 2024 Chilean National Prize for Applied Sciences and Technology, and the first Merit Award from the Chilean Computing Science Society in 2025. He is a member of Academia Europaea, and a Fellow of ACM and IEEE.

Baeza-Yates will be formally presented with the ACM Luiz André Barroso Award at the annual ACM Awards Banquet, which will be held this year on Saturday, June 13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

More from HPCwire: TPC25 Highlights AI’s Expanding Role: Multimodal Data, Model Evaluation, and Non-LLM Architectures

About the ACM Luiz André Barroso Award

The Luiz André Barroso Award celebrates researchers from communities historically underrepresented in computing from across the world who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. Each year ACM honors a preeminent computer scientist with the Luiz André Barroso Award. The award recipient gives a one-hour invited talk at a major ACM conference of their choice. A video of the talk is made available on the ACM website. The award carries a cash prize of $40,000 and includes travel expenses to the conference, plus an additional $10,000 cash contribution to an approved charity of the awardee’s choice. Financial support for the Luiz André Barroso Award is provided by Google.

About ACM

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.

Source: ACM

The post ACM Names Ricardo Baeza-Yates 2025 Barroso Award Recipient appeared first on HPCwire.

US president will need to show heavy costs of war were worthwhile while Iran must choose between instant and delayed gratification

• Middle East crisis – live updates

If talks between Iran and the US reconvene within the next few days in Islamabad, Donald Trump will have two major political hurdles to overcome – first showing that any deal he secures is better than the one signed by Barack Obama in 2015 and from which he withdraw in 2018, and secondly proving the deal is more favourable than the one on offer in Geneva in February before he launched his war.

Otherwise he will have inflicted massive damage on the world economy when alternatives were available that were less costly in blood and treasure. He will also have to show that Iran has made no permanent gain by taking control of shipping passing through the strait of Hormuz. These are the yardsticks, or tests, around which his negotiating team will be keeping an anxious eye.

A constitutional battle is brewing in Minnesota after a bipartisan coalition of elected officials have proposed a state constitutional amendment to prohibit free speech rights for artificial intelligence agents. Critics argue the amendment could also apply such bans to people who use AI tools to create their own speech.

The name of the proposed state senate bill is SF 4114. It was introduced on March 4, 2026, and it was referred to the Committee on Judiciary and Public Safety for consideration. It states that Minnesota voters in the 2026 general election should decide the following question: “Shall the Minnesota Constitution be amended to state that artificial intelligence does not have the right to free speech?”

The issue at hand

The coalition of lawmakers is presenting SF 4114 as part of a package of proposed laws that attempt to rein in perceived problems related to AI applications. One proposed bill seeks to ban the use of AI chatbots by minors under the age of 18. Another Minnesota senate bill would require businesses to disclose that an individual is communicating with an artificial intelligence agent and offer the chance to interact with a human instead. (Other states have also pursued similar laws.)

The lawmakers’ efforts to regulate speech attributed to AI applications has drawn a good deal of attention within the state and outside of it.

In one editorial, Sen. Erin Maye Quade, a sponsor of SF4114, defended criticism of the bill. “The First Amendment protects human beings from being punished by the government for their speech. AI programs aren’t people, they are platforms built by people,” she wrote.

Quade cited the example of a lawsuit filed after a Florida teen’s suicide that claimed an AI chatbot took an active role in his death. Character.AI, the company that owned the chatbot, claimed the chatbot’s speech was protected by the First Amendment. A federal court rule against the company’s free speech claims, and the lawsuit was later settled out of court.

“Do you want to live in a state where a tech billionaire can release an app that encourages your child to die by suicide and be protected from punishment by Minnesota’s Constitution? I don’t,” Maye Quade asked.

Maye Quade posed similar questions at a press conference that introduced the legislation. “The way that consumer-facing AI has been rolled out is a five-alarm fire for our society,” Quade said in a report from The Center Square. “It has devastating consequences and deadly consequences for both humans and our constitutional rights.”

Concerns about overregulation of free speech

However, others believe the Minnesota amendment and its wording goes beyond the public safety issues raised by Maye Quade and other leaders.

John Coleman, legislative counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), told The Center Square that the proposed Minnesota amendment could affect a variety of artificial intelligence applications in use by people.

“AI isn’t an independent speaker,” Coleman told the website. “It’s a tool that people use to write, research and communicate ideas. It’s an expressive tool, and the people who develop and use it retain their free speech rights.”

Coleman noted that free speech protections extend to people who use many tools used to communicate thoughts and ideas, “whether that's a printing press, a camera, the internet or AI.” Coleman worried about the extent of such regulations. "If lawmakers can carve out AI today, other modern communication tools could be next.”

Kevin Frazier, an adjunct research fellow at the Cato Institute, has voiced similar concerns about the proposed Minnesota amendment, adding that one core question was the conflict between the language of SF 4114 and the basic First Amendment free speech rights stated in the U.S. Constitution.

“The traditional understanding of state constitutions is that they can serve as an additional source of liberty for citizens by providing clarity and further guarantees of certain rights,” Frazer writes. “Minnesota legislators want to instead inhibit individual freedom via a constitutional amendment that would exclude AI from the state’s guarantee of the ‘right to freely speak, write, and publish sentiments.’”

“It’s fair to guess that members of the Founding Generation would not look fondly upon a state trying to reduce the use of a tool that allows more people to exchange more ideas and pursue additional knowledge,” he concluded

Efforts in other states and at the national level

The debate in Minnesota is just one of many across the country about the growing impact of artificial intelligence.

According to Multistate, a government affairs tracking service, more than 1,500 bills related to artificial intelligence have been introduced in state legislatures as of March 2026, compared with 1,208 in 2024 and 635 in 2023. (About half of the states tracked by Multistate allow proposed laws to be carried over from the previous year.)

In Pennsylvania, lawmakers have introduced a bill to ban the use of AI-generated voices in political advertisements. A proposed law in Florida would restrict the use of artificial intelligence in providing psychological, clinical, counseling, and therapy services. And in recent years, lawmakers in at least 47 states have passed laws regulating deepfakes, or the use of AI to create a false but realistic audio or video of people doing or saying things they did not actually do.

The Trump administration has also addressed the issue of AI and free speech in proposing a National AI Legislative Framework to Congress in March 2026. “The federal government must defend free speech and First Amendment protections, while preventing AI systems from being used to silence or censor lawful political expression or dissent,” the policy states as one goal.

Of broader importance is the administration’s goal of having Congress pass laws that preempt state laws related to many uses of AI. “A patchwork of conflicting state laws would undermine American innovation and our ability to lead in the global AI race,” it argues. “Preemption must ensure that State laws do not govern areas better suited to the Federal Government or act contrary to the United States’ national strategy to achieve global AI dominance.”

Scott Bomboy is the editor-in-chief of the National Constitution Center.

• Funding for $5bn tour could be cut back

• Saudi focus now more on football and esport

The future of LIV Golf is in doubt, with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund preparing to cut funding for the $5bn rebel tour.

LIV executives were late arriving at the tour event in Mexico City this week after being called up to a meeting in New York, with uncertainty over the immediate future first emerging at the Masters in Augusta last weekend. Rumours that LIV could even be shut down had begun to circulate on social media on Tuesday evening, with officials from the tour declining to respond.

Snap is laying off about 1,000 employees, or 16% of its workforce, while closing 300 open roles as it tries to cut costs and push toward profitability with more AI-driven efficiency. "While these changes are necessary to realize Snap's long-term potential, we believe that rapid advancements in artificial intelligence enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers," CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in a memo, which was included in the company's 8-K filing (PDF). "We have already witnessed small squads leveraging AI tools to drive meaningful progress across several important initiatives." The Verge reports: The changes are expected to save Snap $500 million by the second half of 2026. Snap had about 5,261 full-time employees as of December 2025, and now joins the growing list of tech companies that have already announced significant layoffs this year, including Meta, Amazon, Oracle, GoPro, and Jack Dorsey's Block. "Last fall, I described Snap as facing a crucible moment, requiring a new way of working that is faster and more efficient, while pivoting towards profitable growth," Spiegel wrote. "Over the past several months, we have carefully reviewed the work required to best serve our community and partners, and made tough choices to prioritize the investments we believe are most likely to create long-term value."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Donald Trump says he is ‘working very hard’ with House Republicans to extend Section 702 without changes

• US politics live – latest updates

A controversial law that grants the US government sweeping powers for warrantless surveillance is set to expire next week. Replacing it has inspired fierce debate within the White House and Congress, including a scheduled vote cancelled the day of.

A coalition of progressive Democrats and far-right Republicans is pushing for reform of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa), but they face strong bipartisan opposition from lawmakers advocating for an 18-month renewal with no changes, in line with Donald Trump’s demands. House GOP leaders delayed a procedural vote on a clean extension of Section 702 on Wednesday, after the chamber’s rules committee approved the measure on Tuesday night. Republican leadership was expected to bring the measure to the floor on Wednesday but canceled the scheduled vote, amid dissent from privacy advocates in their own party. Legislative action on the bill could still occur later in the day, as Republicans address their internal disagreements.

Bandage off. It's proper mingin under there but healing fine. I'll spare y'all of the picture I took of it freshly peeled back 😅 At least that's one more bit of skin I won't have to shave anymore!

@Puzz360 I always mess up the left arm too. Just the nature of it being the leading arm lol. Just a ickle wickle graze though this time so no complaints here. Makes me feel like a real skater with all the scrapes 💅 Gotta work on my ragdolling though so I take more superficial damage and less... flesh woundy types.

@Lemur Yeah I'm pretty lucky it wasn't something like a break. That'd really mess up my ride vibes moving forward. Would tie me down to living vicariously through you all instead.
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Donors exceed funding target at Berlin conference but prospects for ceasefire remain distant

More than £1bn (€1.15bn) has been pledged for war-ravaged Sudan at a conference in Berlin, eclipsing the funding target organisers had set to help mitigate the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.

The financial commitments made on Wednesday will also help offset a chronic humanitarian funding shortfall in a country devastated by three years of conflict, where two-thirds of its population – 34m people – require assistance.

Locking in a mortgage interest rate prior to the Fed's April meeting could make sense for borrowers. Here's why.

Officials say charity fundraiser that flooded New York with drunk people in Santa costumes every Christmas was a con

A SantaCon charity fundraiser that floods New York City with inebriated young people in red and white Santa costumes every holiday season was true to its name: a con, federal authorities said as they arrested its organizer.

Stefan Pildes, 50, of Hewitt, New Jersey, was arrested on Wednesday and awaited an appearance in Manhattan federal court, where an indictment charging him with wire fraud was unsealed.

Guardian democracy reporters George Chidi and Sam Levine answered your questions about the dramatic implications of the Save America Act for US voters

The latest version of the Save America Act could, if it is passed, upend voting for all Americans in the middle of a federal midterm election year and create costly, chaotic changes for elections workers. George Chidi, the Guardian’s politics and democracy correspondent and Sam Levine, who has spent years focusing on voting rights in the US, including for our ongoing series The fight for democracy, answered questions about Save’s implications on everything from the midterms to overseas voting.

George and Sam have now finished answering your questions. Read the Q&A below.

George: I think the Kansas example is instructive. Kansas enacted a law in 2013 requiring voters to prove their citizenship when registering. Evidence presented in a federal lawsuit challenging the law showed that 18,000 people were blocked from registering – about 8 per cent of people trying to register. That statistic only covers motor voter registrations; another study showed the overall number was closer to one in eight voters. Only about a quarter of those who were initially blocked ended up registering. (And no, these were not non-citizens - they were by and large born Americans who couldn’t lay hands on their birth certificates.) The blocked registrants were disproportionately young people with no party affiliation. The federal court struck down the law in 2018.

Arizona enacted a similar law in 2005, with similar results. Elections officials attributed the large number of blocked registrants to people whose married names didn’t match their birth certificates, or people who couldn’t get their birth certificate. In 2024, the US supreme court blocked the use of documentary proof of citizenship to register for federal elections in the Arizona case.

George: The hard part here is making an argument that will be heard by people who believe the “mainstream media” exists to lie to conservatives. I think the best answer is to show examples of people who look and sound – and perhaps believe the same things – as the people demanding high levels of documentation to vote. One of the less-spoken corollaries to voting registration changes as proposed is that it will disproportionately affect voters with a propensity to vote for Republicans. Married women. Rural voters. People who have never drawn a passport and don’t have easy access to a county clerk who can send them a new birth certificate.

SHEFFIELD, England, April 15, 2026 — Iceotope, a global pioneer in precision liquid cooling for AI infrastructure, announced it reached a significant intellectual property (IP) milestone: more than 200 patents granted and pending. The achievement underscores the company’s technology leadership in solving one of the AI industry’s most pressing challenges: efficiently cooling increasingly powerful computing systems to maximize performance, energy efficiency and reliability.

As AI computing demands continue to escalate, thermal management has become a critical bottleneck. The global data center cooling market is projected to reach $40 billion to $45 billion by 2030, with liquid cooling accounting for $15 billion to $20 billion.

Iceotope’s technology reduces energy use by up to 40% and water use by up to 96% compared to traditional cooling methods while enabling higher rack density. Precision liquid cooling is positioned to be a key differentiator, as operators face mounting pressure to maximize utilization, cut costs and reduce their carbon footprints and as AI increasingly moves to the edge.

“This milestone reflects the depth of innovation and expertise of our team,” said Neil Edmunds, chief innovation officer at Iceotope. “Each patent represents a real engineering challenge solved, whether that is cooling denser chips and more powerful components, integrating into existing infrastructure, or reducing the environmental footprint of AI workloads. As demand on data center and edge cooling continues to grow, this IP is the foundation of what allows us to stay ahead of the industry.”

Early Innovation

Since its founding in 2005, Iceotope has been a visionary in understanding the need for advanced solutions to meet the growing thermal management challenge of high-end compute. Early on, Iceotope anticipated that the heat generated by ever more powerful, denser compute infrastructure would soon exceed the limits of traditional air cooling and began developing liquid cooling technologies long before AI infrastructure became a boardroom priority. This focus enabled Iceotope to build a differentiated intellectual property portfolio that is unmatched by competitors.

Iceotope’s patent portfolio spans every aspect of precision liquid cooling, from chassis design and dielectric fluid application to full rack-scale thermal management, and was built through deep collaboration with hyperscalers, silicon providers, and OEMs to address real-world deployment.

Central to the Patent Portfolio

Iceotope’s patented precision liquid cooling technology combines elements of direct-to-chip and immersion cooling by using a small amount of non-conductive, dielectric fluid to target and cool all heat-producing elements within a fully sealed server or component. It is fully compatible with existing data center infrastructure using standard racks and enables self-contained AI and HPC compute to be deployed at the edge, even in harsh or extreme environments.

Unlike cold-plate technology that works best on flat surfaces, Iceotope’s “direct-to-everything” method cools all components, including processors, power supply units, storage, and networking. This not only improves environmental resilience but also enables near-silent operation and comprehensive thermal management across the compute stack.

Looking Ahead

With 109 patents now granted and 99 pending, collaborations with major AI infrastructure OEMs, hyperscalers, semiconductor providers and global supercomputing centers have made Iceotope a leading force in scalable, reliable, and sustainable cooling for next-generation IT infrastructure.

Iceotope will continue to advance product and engineering development, expand its patent portfolio and accelerate ecosystem partnerships to bring solutions to market.

For more information, visit iceotope.com.

About Iceotope

Iceotope Technologies is a global pioneer in liquid cooling that began in 2005 as a research‑driven “green computing” venture and has since evolved into a specialist in precision liquid cooling for data center hardware and edge infrastructure. Today, with over 200 patents granted and pending, our unique precision liquid cooling approach replaces traditional air cooling with highly efficient liquid-based thermal management for all infrastructure components. Our solutions can be deployed in nearly any environment with near silent operation and minimal water use.

Source: Iceotope

The post Iceotope Surpasses 200 Patents for Liquid Cooling in AI Infrastructure appeared first on HPCwire.

President says he gave Britain ‘better deal than I had to’ but ally was ‘not there when we needed them’ on Iran

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Donald Trump has threatened to row back on the trade deal the US signed with the UK last year, in his latest salvo against the British government over sharp differences about the US’s approach to the Middle East.

The US president said the economic deal struck with the UK, which cut some of his tariffs on cars, aluminium and steel, was “better than I had to” and that it could “always be changed”.

‘Palestine’s Mandela’ suffers three recent attacks including assault where prison guards set a dog on him, lawyer says

The jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti is at immediate risk in Israeli jails, where he has been attacked three times in as many weeks, including in one assault last month where prison guards set a dog on the 66-year-old, his lawyer has said.

Barghouti is often called Palestine’s Nelson Mandela. He is respected across otherwise feuding Palestinian factions, has broad popular support across occupied Palestine, repeatedly engaged with Israeli officials before his detention and long backed a two-state solution.

Standing desks are a great in-office or at-home choice for working, gaming and hobbies.

Allbirds made a surprise announcement this morning: it's pivoting from sustainable shoes to AI compute infrastructure, rebranding as NewBird AI after selling its brand assets and closing its U.S. full-price stores. The move sent shares soaring more than 700%. CNBC reports: The move boosted shares of the miniscule market cap company -- it was valued at about $21 million at Tuesday's close -- by more than 700%. The shares, which were under $3 a day ago, jumped to above $17. [...] The new company, which expects to be called NewBird AI, announced a deal to raise up to $50 million in funding, expected to close in the second quarter of 2026. Allbirds announced a deal with American Exchange Group to sell its intellectual property and other assets for $39 million last month. "The Company will initially seek to acquire high-performance, low-latency AI compute hardware and provide access under long-term lease arrangements, meeting customer demand that spot markets and hyperscalers are unable to reliably service," the company said in the announcement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

House Democrats introduced articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, claiming he has "demonstrated a willful disregard for the Constitution."

The spy tool, known as FISA Section 702, expires Monday. But it currently has opposition from several House factions.

Trump national security aide Sebastian Gorka has signaled his interest in becoming the next National Counterterrorism Center director, two U.S. officials said.

Mormon Wives star was accused of domestic violence by her former partner Dakota Mortensen

Prosecutors in Utah have declined to press charges against Taylor Frankie Paul, star of the reality show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, after she was accused of domestic violence.

In a statement on Tuesday, the Salt Lake county district attorney’s office said it would not be pursuing charges against Paul following a pair of domestic violence investigations stemming from allegations by Paul’s former partner Dakota Mortensen.

Cut through the hundreds of available desk options by choosing one of the best desks recommended by CNET experts.

Miami Fire said crews were called to the corner of 9th Street and South Miami Avenue in Brickell after getting reports of a possible overdose of a 20-year-old man.

Dr. Erica Schwartz has emerged as the White House's top pick to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to current and former officials.

Lelia Doolan, who finished 220km trek at parliament gates, says use of Shannon airport violates Irish neutrality

A 91-year-old peace activist has crossed Ireland on foot and arrived in Dublin to petition the government to bar US military flights.

Lelia Doolan completed a two-week, 220km (138 mile) trek on Wednesday, ending at the gates of parliament accompanied by throngs of supporters.

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Meanwhile, Nato chief Mark Rutte urged members of the military alliance not to “lose sight” of the Ukraine conflict, and to boost their backing for Kyiv to $60bn in 2026, AFP reported.

His comments came at the start of a meeting in Berlin of defence ministers from Ukraine’s key supporters, including Germany and Britain, with the conflict against Russia now in its fifth year.

Can Mikel Arteta's Gunners make it to the UCL semifinals for the second season in a row?

The Bavarians look to get the job done against Los Blancos at the Allianz Arena.

The time is long overdue for members of Congress to listen to the American people and end US military aid to the extremist Netanyahu government

I am a proud Jewish American. My father fled Poland in 1921 to escape poverty and antisemitism. Those in his family who stayed were murdered by the Nazis. Since childhood, I have known very well where antisemitism, racism, fanaticism and demagoguery lead.

So let me be clear. Speaking out against the horrific and inhumane actions of Israel, and its extremist leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, is not antisemitic. Speaking out about the dangerous and destructive role that Israel plays in shaping US foreign and military policy is not antisemitic. It is, in fact, what every member of Congress and every American should be doing.

Protecting your devices and data takes a lot more than antivirus software.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Rivian is joining with Redwood Materials to reuse EV batteries for energy storage -- the largest repurposed-battery energy storage system for an automotive manufacturer in the U.S., executives told The Wall Street Journal. Redwood Materials is a battery-recycling firm started by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel. Once completed later this year, Rivian's plant in Normal, Ill., will draw electricity from more than 100 Rivian EV batteries in an area the size of a small parking lot. It will reduce Rivian's dependence on the power grid during peak demand hours. "It saves Rivian money on what it takes to run the plant. It reduces the demand on the grid, which is great," Rivian Chief Executive Officer RJ Scaringe said in an interview. In the Rivian project, the batteries will come from either its test vehicles or from vehicles that have viable batteries but can no longer drive. Those batteries get sent off to Redwood, which integrates them into power storage units. Both companies declined to specify the cost of this project. The setup is expected to initially provide 10 megawatt-hours of energy, equivalent to about 1,000 home-energy battery storage units linked together, Redwood's Straubel said. "These batteries are already built," he said. "We need to integrate them and connect them together, but that can happen quite fast. They don't have to get imported from some other place." [...] Scaringe said that while branching into battery energy storage systems is "not a focus for us as a business right now," Rivian hopes to do more at its sites with Redwood. "There's hopefully a lot more, and there's going to be a lot of batteries we'll have access to," he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Airport body has asked for power to suspend EES checks requiring personal information and biometrics

Travellers going through some European airports are reportedly waiting up to three hours at border checks because of the EU’s new entry-exit system (EES).

Passengers in airports in countries such as France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Greece are waiting several hours at border checks, the Airports Council International (ACI) body has said.

Brian Cole Jr. faces new charges of attempting to use weapons of mass destruction and committing an act of terrorism while armed.

Cuts by Snapchat’s parent company come in response to a declining stock price and pressure from an activist investor

Snapchat’s parent company plans to lay off 16% of its employees, around 1,000 people, citing “rapid advancements in artificial intelligence”, the social media company told staff on Wednesday in an internal memo. The staff reduction is part of a wave of tech industry layoffs in the past year, with many firms blaming AI for the cuts.

Snap Inc’s layoffs follow demands last month from Irenic Capital Management, an activist investor whose portfolio manager wrote a letter to the Snap Inc CEO, Evan Spiegel, calling on him to reduce costs and headcount while criticizing the company’s current strategy. In Spiegel’s memo to staff, he claimed that the layoffs would move Snap towards profitability and suggested that artificial intelligence could fill the lack of human labor.

Lifestyle influencer died while on vacation with boyfriend, who local officials say has since had his passport ‘withheld’

Ashly Robinson, a US lifestyle influencer, died last week while on vacation in the Tanzanian islands of Zanzibar with her boyfriend, Joe McCann. Robinson’s death on 9 April, just days after her birthday and a marriage proposal from McCann, has sparked suspicion on social media, with users doubtful of the current narrative surrounding her death.

No arrests have been made, and police previously said that McCann was not suspected of wrongdoing. But officials in Zanzibar released a statement on Tuesday saying that McCann’s passport has been “withheld”.

Another Haiku monthly activity report, but this time around, there’s actually a big ticket item. Haiku has been in a pretty solid and stable state for a while now, so the activity reports have been dominated by fairly small, obscure changes, but during March a major milestone was reached for the ARM64 port.

smrobtzz contributed the bulk of the work, including fixes for building on macOS on ARM64, drivers for the Apple S5L UART, fixes to the kernel base address, clearing the frame pointer before entering the kernel, mapping physical memory correctly, the basics for userland, and more. SED4906 contributed some fixes to the bootloader page mapping, and runtime_loader’s page-size checks.

Combined, these changes allow the ARM64 port to get to the desktop in QEMU. There’s a forum thread, complete with screenshots, for anyone interested in following along.

↫ waddlesplash

While it’s only in QEMU, this is still a major achievement and paves the way for more people to work on the ARM64 port, possibly increasing its health. There’s tons of smaller changes and fixes all over the place, too, as usual, and the team mentions beta 6 isn’t quite ready yet, still. Don’t let that stop you from just downloading the latest nightly, though – Haiku is mature enough to use it.

Once you start noticing “it’s not X, it’s Y” as you scroll online, you can’t fail to register it. I’ve become so hypervigilant that it has seeped into my subconscious thoughts

If you’ve never seen Jim Carrey’s 2007 psychological thriller The Number 23, then congratulations. It is a film about a man who sees the number 23 so many times that he ends up going bonkers. I used to think this film was stupid. However, now I appear to be living it.

My own personal number 23 is a rhetorical device: “It’s not X, it’s Y.” Everywhere I look, there it is. Whenever I hate myself enough to scroll through Facebook’s wilderness of algorithmically suggested posts, I find myself being smacked in the face with sentences such as: “Self-improvement isn’t a trend, it’s a lifestyle shift,” and “The small wins aren’t just moments, they’re the majority of your life.” Once you notice it, it becomes impossible to ignore. This weekend during a Peloton class (I know, shut up), I heard an instructor bark a variation of “this isn’t X, it’s Y”. Yesterday, a character did the same during a TV show I was reviewing, and I dropped a star from its score in retaliation.

Appointment of Roelf Meyer seen as attempt to improve relations amid false US accusations of ‘white genocide’

South Africa has appointed a former apartheid government chief negotiator during the talks that ended white rule in the 1990s as ambassador to the US, in what is seen as an attempt to improve the deeply strained diplomatic relationship between the two countries.

Roelf Meyer replaces Ebrahim Rasool, who was expelled in March 2025 after he criticised the Trump administration.

Six lenders, including Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan report jump in first-quarter earnings

Big US banks raked in nearly $50bn (£37bn) worth of profits in the first three months of the year, as they benefited from stock market turbulence triggered by the US-Israeli war on Iran.

Wall Street’s largest lenders have reported a jump in first-quarter earnings, reflecting the surge in demand for trading services as investors dumped risky stocks and bonds and sought safer havens for their cash.

Traeger launched the Westwood series, a new line of more approachably priced pellet grills with plenty of premium features.

I've been collecting people into my human zoo and conducting social experiments. Tell me this is OK.

A 63-year-old man in Norway appears to be cured of HIV after receiving a stem cell transplant from his brother, who turned out to have a rare mutation that makes immune cells resistant to HIV. "Four years after the transplant, and two years after the man stopped antiretroviral therapy, he still appears to be free of the infection," reports Gizmodo. From the report: According to the report, the man was first diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, a type of cancer that weakens blood cell production from bone marrow, in 2018. Though he seemed to initially respond to treatment, the cancer returned after two years, and doctors decided to perform a stem cell transplant. Because the man also had HIV (diagnosed in 2006), the doctors were hoping to treat both conditions at once, though they knew their chances were low. Most of these cases have involved the use of stem cells taken from people with two copies of a particular mutation in their CCR5 gene, which regulates the CC5R receptor on white blood cells. This mutation, named CCR5-delta 32, makes immune cells naturally resistant to infection from strains of HIV-1 (the most common type of the virus). However, only about 1% of the population carries two copies of the mutation. After initial screening failed to find someone who both possessed the mutation and had compatible bone marrow, the doctors decided to move ahead with the man's brother, who was already known to have compatible bone marrow. But to everyone's surprise, testing on the day of the transplant showed that the brother also had the mutation. Though the man did experience some complications from the procedure, his body successfully started to produce new blood cells with the mutation. The doctors decided to take him off antiretroviral medication two years after the transplant. And in the two years since then, regular follow-up tests have failed to show any signs of the virus in his system. [...] According to AFP, there have only been roughly 10 cases worldwide involving an HIV cure through stem cell transplantation. This is the first to involve a family donor.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A 15-year court battle costing millions of dollars ended in a partial defeat for the tycoon. Will she now bury the hatchet or double down and keep fighting her children and rivals?

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Gina Rinehart does not like to lose.

Engaged in bitter legal battles for most of the past 35 years, Australia’s richest person has shown her propensity to fight tooth and nail to retain control of her family’s iron ore empire – and the riches that flow from it.

Tech company has signed on to nine deals as it aims to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2040

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Amazon has entered power agreements with nine new renewable projects in New South Wales and Victoria, as the technology company seeks to source renewable power for its datacentre operations in Australia.

The nine deals, including one windfarm and 10 solar and battery projects, will take the amount of renewable energy Amazon is sourcing in Australia from 430MW to nearly 1GW.

Price of jet fuel has climbed by 125% since start of Iran war – giving Qantas and Virgin a big challenge as fuel accounts for a fifth of expenses

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Thanks to the US-Israel war on Iran, filling up your car with petrol costs about 40% more than it did in February, and for diesel vehicles it’s closer to 80%.

But even those painful increases pale in comparison to the extraordinary rise in the price of jet fuel, which has climbed by a 125% since the start of the Middle East conflict.

SINGAPORE and INNSBRUCK, Austria, April 15, 2026 — Horizon Quantum Computing Pte. Ltd., the wholly-owned subsidiary of Horizon Quantum Holdings Ltd. (Horizon Quantum), a pioneer of software infrastructure for quantum applications, and AQT (Alpine Quantum Technologies), a leading European provider of trapped-ion quantum computers, today announced a strategic collaboration to advance the development of real-world quantum computing applications via increased hardware-software integration. By combining advanced hardware capabilities with scalable software infrastructure, the two companies aim to accelerate users’ ability to build real-world quantum applications.

The integration of Triple Alpha—Horizon Quantum’s integrated development environment—with AQT’s trapped-ion quantum processors—a leading modality known for high gate fidelity and low error rates—is intended to enable developers with and without specialised hardware expertise to harness the power of AQT’s systems at various levels of abstraction. Using Triple Alpha, developers can write, compile, and deploy quantum programs directly onto AQT’s processors, accessing the hardware via the cloud.

“AQT’s trapped ion systems provide low error rates and long coherence times, potentially increasing the scalability and reliability of quantum computing,” said Horizon Quantum CEO Dr. Joe Fitzsimons. “Through this collaboration, Triple Alpha users will gain access to AQT’s processors, expanding their options for cutting-edge hardware designed to solve difficult computational problems.”

Horizon Quantum and AQT will engage customers as equals, working together to solve computational problems and achieve joint technical firsts in the fields of quantum computing and software development.

“The Triple Alpha software development environment navigates the diversity and complexity of today’s quantum stack, providing developers with access at multiple levels of abstraction to deliver both programming freedom and fine-grained precision,” said Dr. Thomas Monz, CEO of AQT. “The collaboration with Horizon Quantum provides broad and easy access to AQT’s hardware and leverages synergies between the two companies, which share the common goal of advancing quantum computing in practice.”

Horizon Quantum’s objective is to build the most capable hardware-agnostic software infrastructure. Horizon Quantum believes the collaboration with AQT is an important step towards further broadening the range of hardware architectures supported in Triple Alpha. To accelerate its research and development efforts and further advance Triple Alpha, Horizon Quantum recently listed on Nasdaq under the ticker HQ.

About Horizon Quantum

Horizon Quantum (NASDAQ: HQ) is on a mission to unlock broad quantum advantage by building the software infrastructure that empowers developers to use quantum computing to solve the world’s toughest computational problems. Founded in 2018 by Dr Joe Fitzsimons, a leading researcher and former professor with more than two decades of experience in quantum computing, the company is bridging the gap between today’s hardware and tomorrow’s applications through the creation of advanced quantum software development tools. Its integrated development environment, Triple Alpha, enables developers to write sophisticated, hardware-agnostic quantum programs at different levels of abstraction. Learn more at www.horizonquantum.com.

About AQT

Building on decades of experience in experimental and theoretical quantum information processing in Innsbruck (Austria), AQT develops and builds quantum computers. The company offers ion trap-based quantum computers that fit seamlessly into conventional IT infrastructure and can be operated from any PC or laptop, regardless of location. AQT enables its customers to install quantum computers on site or to explore use-cases via a convenient cloud solution. Researchers and developers are supported by both quantum hardware components as well as complete systems that significantly accelerate the development of quantum solutions. Learn more at www.aqt.eu.

Source: Horizon Quantum

The post Horizon Quantum and AQT Integrate Software Stack with Trapped-Ion Quantum Hardware appeared first on HPCwire.

US president says he has ‘held back’ on firing the head of the Federal Reserve leading up to end of Powell’s term in May

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Donald Trump threatened to fire Jerome Powell if he stays on as US Federal Reserve chair past the end of his tenure and doubled down on a criminal investigation into renovations of the central bank’s headquarters.

As the White House pushes Trump’s new nominee to take charge of the Fed, Kevin Warsh, Powell has a month left in the role. The possibility of Powell staying on as chair past 15 May, the official end of his term, has grown amid mounting scrutiny of Trump’s approach to the Fed in the Senate, which is required to approve Warsh’s nomination.

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More than 1,000 people were in shelters across Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands as Sinlaku moved away

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Super Typhoon Sinlaku hammered the Northern Mariana Islands, flipping over cars, toppling utility poles and ripping away tin roofs.

Authorities were just beginning to assess the damage left behind by the typhoon, which first hit the islands on Tuesday night local time and continued with a barrage of fierce winds and relentless rains for hours on Wednesday. So far, there have been no reports of deaths.

Seconds after a gunman opened fire at an Oklahoma high school, the school's principal was seen racing into the hallway, pushing the suspect onto a bench and holding him down.

The Dolby Atmos receiver includes improved streaming support and extra gaming features.

Rumors about the reporter and New England head coach Mike Vrabel flew all week. The conclusion to the saga was all too predictable

Dianna Russini, one of the NFL’s most high-profile reporters, is photographed holding hands with New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel at a fancy resort in Sedona, Arizona. Rumors fly. Vrabel and Russini, who are both married to other people, issue statements denying the assumptions of something untoward. But the firestorm only grows. Russini resigns from her post at the Athletic, Vrabel continues with his job as usual.

The female reporter’s career is in shambles. Meanwhile, it’s business as usual for the male head coach.

Péter Magyar’s stunning victory in Hungary is a boost for liberal democracy. But don’t bank on similar upsets in upcoming European elections

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When future historians come to write about the stunning electoral overthrow of Viktor Orbán on 12 April 2026, let’s hope they devote at least footnotes to zebras and golden toilet brushes. The zebras were spotted by drones on the sprawling grounds of a countryside palace belonging to Orbán’s extended family. The 72 gilded toilet brushes were said to have been bought at a cost of almost €10,000, for a lavish renovation of Hungary’s central bank. For Orbán’s opponents, such excesses became symbols of the rampant corruption among cronies of Orbán’s ruling party Fidesz, which drained Hungary’s economy and earned its ranking as the most crooked country in the EU, as Ashifa Kassam and Flora Garamvolgyi reported.

In the end, it was disgust with corruption and how that corruption affected people’s livelihoods that were the main factors behind Sunday’s election rout. But the landslide achieved by Peter Magyar’s Tisza party – despite an electoral system designed to favour Fidesz – suggests that these eye-popping details were merely the last straws for a population desperate to reclaim their country as a functioning democracy.

Narwhal Labs ad for ‘AI employee’ contains strapline: ‘She outworks everyone. And she’ll never ask for a raise’

A British AI company that recently secured millions of pounds of investment has been accused of running a misogynistic and sexist advertising campaign.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has received at least seven complaints about the campaign by Narwhal Labs, which includes an advert depicting a woman next to the strapline: “She outworks everyone. And she’ll never ask for a raise.”

More than 2,200 ants were found in Zhang Kequn’s luggage at Nairobi airport, with baggage destined for China

A Chinese national has been sentenced to a year in prison and fined by a Nairobi court for attempting to smuggle thousands of ants out of Kenya, a lucrative trade in east Africa that was exposed last year.

The insects are mostly destined for China, the US and Europe, where they become pets and can be worth about $100 each.

U.S. Army Sgt. Celestino Chavez enlisted in the military when he was 17, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

The editor in chief of this blog was born in 2004. She uses the 1997 window manager, Enlightenment E16, daily. In this article, I describe the process of fixing a show-stopping, rare bug that dates back to 2006 in the codebase. Surprisingly, the issue has roots in a faulty implementation of Newton’s algorithm.

↫ Kamila Szewczyk

I’m not going to pretend to understand any of this, but I know you people do. Enjoy.

JENI NANCE
Co-Managing Mosaic Editor

The first time I heard about “People We Meet on Vacation” by Emily Henry was at a bookstore with one of my friends. She mentioned it as we passed a section of the author’s books, telling me how the movie was coming out soon. I had never heard of the book or author before, but suddenly, my social media became flooded with trailers for the upcoming movie. 

After watching the initial trailer, I circled back to the topic with the same friend, who told me it was the book that got her out of a reading slump. Being in somewhat of a slump myself, I was excited to pick it up at the bookstore during our next trip, with the goal of finishing it before the movie dropped on Netflix. 

While I didn’t quite make the deadline, finishing the book about 21 hours and 30 minutes post movie release (I’m a slow reader and had work), I still managed to trudge through without encountering any spoilers. 

My initial impression of the book is that it was a fun, cute beach read. It’s an easy read and, depending on how you take corny rom-coms, can have you hooked. While I was cringing almost every other page — and also frustrated with the main female character, Poppy Wright, and her male counterpart, Alex Nilsen — I still was very much entertained. 

I had a few criticisms of the book itself, but most of them were technical errors in the writing. I personally think it could have been polished a little bit more, but I also want to give grace to the author, who clearly has talent. 

My other criticism was that it was hard for me to understand the characters’ personalities. It wasn’t until I watched the movie that I got a clearer picture of their behaviors. In the book, it felt more like a telling, rather than showing. 

With that being said, that’s the only thing the movie had that trumped the book. Working with multiple timelines and moving back and forth between the past and present was interesting and I wondered how all 12 summers were going to be consolidated into one movie. 

Spoiler: they weren’t. 

I honestly expected this, considering what the maximum length for a rom-com typically is, but I expected more from what was shown. Only four past vacations are merely skimmed over and key events are switched to the vacations that are shown. 

This was really frustrating because, as a viewer, how am I supposed to understand how their relationship evolves without seeing the majority of it? It seemed like the producers were more concerned about certain events happening rather than how the characters develop throughout the timeline. 

The little intimate moments between the two main characters were lightly grazed over, if they were even shown at all. Longer, more emotional scenes throughout the past summers would allow the viewer to get a better understanding of how their relationship develops over the course of this decade, even if it means cutting some of the present-day timeline. I’ve said this before about other book-to-movie adaptations I’ve reviewed and I’m starting to see a pattern with all of them: they’re just long trailers for the book.

My biggest problem with the film was how its title didn’t reflect the lesson from the book. In the novel, it’s all about the random people you meet on vacation — the fleeting friendships, yet impactful connections that make the time special. This is displayed in some of the people the main characters meet on their journeys — a water taxi driver, newlyweds, a Norwegian couple, an angry motel owner and a couple of giant dinosaurs (if you know, you know). 

While a couple of these encounters were shown on screen, the rest are simply alluded to, or have disappeared entirely. What’s the point of “People We Meet On Vacation” if one of the book’s main focuses is being taken away? 

While there are holes in the movie adaptation, it is so incredibly funny and one I’d watch again. It’s one of those bad yet guilty pleasure rom-coms that you can’t help but put on for a light movie night. It’s kind of a shame this movie wasn’t in theaters — it deserved its box office moment. However, since it wasn’t featured on the big screen and considering how many elements of the book were missing, it would have done better as a limited series. 

The actors were amazing, and this review is not a reflection on them; they all did an amazing job and arguably saved the film. I’d never seen any of Emily Bader’s (Poppy Wright) projects, but she was perfectly cast. Tom Blyth (Alex Nilsen) is also an incredible actor. 

The one thing that stood out to me was that I was rooting for Alex and Poppy the whole time. In the past, when I was watching rom-coms, I was always thinking, “I wish I were them” or “they’re so lucky,” jealous of the characters’ romance and aware of the fact that I’m chronically single. 

With this movie, I didn’t feel any of that. That tells me that this was one heck of a movie. To watch a romance movie without a twinge of yearning or envy is another level of somewhat uncharted territory for me — opening a door I didn’t know existed — and it felt good. 

I’ll definitely be reading more of Emily Henry’s books because, even though I’m not a big fan of her writing style, the stories she comes up with are nothing short of amazing. Henry also mentioned that all of her other books are being adapted into movies, which I’ll also be watching — I look forward to seeing their outcome. 

I recommend this book for people who need a quick and easy read and are suckers for cheesy romances (and don’t mind cringe). I recommend the movie to people who like good but also kind of crappy rom-coms, that either haven’t read the book or don’t intend to. As for me, I will absolutely be watching this movie again (I’ve already watched it twice).

‘Unc’ (short for uncle) is meant to disparage older players, but the industry should make games for all generations

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While researching women’s experiences in multiplayer video games recently, I came across this thread on the subreddit about Bungie’s latest live shooter, Marathon. “I’ve played a lot of shooters, and as a feminine-presenting player tbh it’s often a struggle,” it reads. “I’ve heard all the ‘get back to the kitchen’ jokes … ​But Marathon has been completely different, guys. I haven’t had a single issue, people have been incredibly kind and helpful… ​The community feels genuinely welcoming to everyone.”

The top-voted reply? “Benefit of being an unc game.”

Rapid data analysis powered by ALCF supercomputers is enabling APS users to adjust experiments on the fly, refine hypotheses, and make the most of their beam time.

April 15, 2026 — At the upgraded Advanced Photon Source (APS), a powerful X-ray light source at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, new analysis capabilities are changing how experiments unfold. Instead of waiting until an experiment ends, researchers can now use near real-time feedback from the X-ray beamlines to guide their next steps.

APS staff members Suresh Narayanan, Dana Capatina and Matt Spilker monitor live data from the XPCS beamline. Credit: Argonne National Laboratory.

“Coming back to the APS after the upgrade was a completely different experience,” said Ryan Poling-Skutvik, assistant professor of chemical engineering at the University of Rhode Island. ​“Based on the early signals we were getting from our experiments, we were able to bring materials to the wet lab and make new samples to better target the dynamics we were studying. That’s something that’s impossible to do if you don’t have the real-time data.”

After its recent upgrade, the APS produces X-ray beams that are up to 500 times brighter than before, enabling researchers to study materials with higher resolution and at time scales that were previously out of reach. But those enhanced capabilities are also producing more data than its local computing systems can handle.

“When I started using the APS around 2015, the fastest time scales we could probe were on the order of milliseconds,” Poling-Skutvik said. ​“Now we’re collecting data on microsecond time scales, which opens up a much broader view of material behavior. At that rate, you can imagine collecting 10,000 frames in less than a second, which would completely swamp everything. Having analysis proceed at a comparable speed allows us to fully realize the potential of the upgraded beamline technology.”

To make this possible, APS experiments are now tightly integrated with supercomputers at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF). Building on years of collaboration between APS and ALCF, Argonne researchers created an automated pipeline that streams experimental data from the beamlines to ALCF systems for analysis as it is being collected. The APS and ALCF are DOE Office of Science user facilities.

The Argonne team’s work is helping to advance DOE’s Genesis Mission, a national AI initiative to build a powerful scientific platform for accelerating discovery science, strengthening national security and driving energy innovation. In particular, the rapid data analysis capabilities have prepared the way for new efforts under the American Science Cloud (AmSC), a cornerstone of the Genesis Mission. AmSC is an integrated, federated platform that connects AI models, curated scientific data, workflows and computing resources across DOE laboratories.

Linking Light and Compute

The connection between APS and ALCF is powered by the APS Data Management System and Globus. The APS Data Management System provides a uniform way to connect to data from the approximately 100 unique instruments at the APS. It also keeps track of information about data and experiments at the facility. Globus, a research automation and data management platform developed at Argonne and the University of Chicago, handles the movement of data between the APS and the ALCF’s Polaris supercomputer, automatically running analyses and returning results to the beamline while experiments are still underway.

“The actual data collection is triggering all of the data movement — the storage, the access permissions, the processing on Polaris and the transfer back to the APS,” said Thomas Uram, ALCF data services and workflows team lead. ​“All of this is happening without any intervention by the scientists.”

Bringing all the pieces together required extensive collaboration. Teams spanning X-ray science, beamline operations, data management and scientific software worked alongside ALCF staff and Globus developers to map out how each beamline collects data, when to launch processing workflows and how to best integrate APS control systems with Globus and remote supercomputers.

“By combining the expertise of multiple teams with powerful computing resources, we were able to build reliable data processing pipelines that can return analysis results quickly enough to guide experiments as they happen,” said Hannah Parraga, a software engineer at the APS developing scientific data workflows that run on supercomputers for many of the facility’s beamlines.

With this infrastructure in place, researchers visiting the APS are now using the analysis tools across many of the facility’s beamlines, taking full advantage of the brighter X-ray beams and faster detectors provided by the upgrade. While Polaris is the primary system currently supporting APS experiments, researchers will also be able to tap ALCF’s Aurora exascale system and next-generation supercomputers for increasingly data-intensive work.

One of the first beamlines to employ the enhanced computing capabilities is the X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy (XPCS) beamline. XPCS enables scientists to observe how materials behave over time and under different conditions at the nanoscale.

“We’re already seeing how the faster analysis is helping researchers steer XPCS experiments in ways that weren’t possible before,” said Suresh Narayanan, APS physicist and group leader. ​“Our users can adapt their experimental setup on the fly, adjust their hypotheses as new data comes in and make more efficient use of their beam time.”

Probing Soft Materials with Experiment-Time Feedback

Poling-Skutvik’s team is using XPCS to study soft materials, a broad class of materials found in everyday products like shampoos and paints as well as biological systems such as cells and tissues. Understanding their dynamics is essential for designing materials that move and respond predictably under stress.

“What we’re really asking is how can we design these materials to be more functional,” Poling-Skutvik said. ​“One of the biggest challenges is that we don’t have a good understanding of the dynamics that are present inside of these materials.”

The XPCS beamline at the APS enables scientists to probe the nanoscale dynamics of materials, such as liquids, gels and glasses, by measuring how their structure evolves over time. Credit: Argonne National Laboratory.

XPCS is uniquely suited to tackle such problems, allowing researchers to probe motion deep within materials at the length and time scales relevant to soft matter. With faster analysis, Poling-Skutvik’s team can now get early insight into those dynamics while an experiment is happening, rather than reconstructing them after the fact.

This rapid feedback is particularly useful because many soft materials can be synthesized quickly by adjusting physical parameters like salt concentration. During recent experiments, Poling-Skutvik’s team brought a range of candidate materials and used early measurements to guide what they tested next.

“We could make new samples with different molecular weights and concentrations, put them on the beamline to see the dynamics, and then go back to the lab to modify the next samples,” he said. ​“With the ability to process the dynamics really fast, we were able to iterate through multiple designs within a day.”

Making Beam Time Count

Researchers from the University of Texas and the University of Michigan are taking advantage of the rapid analysis capabilities in XPCS experiments involving metal oxide nanocrystals. Their work aims to shed light on how nanocrystals assemble into gel-like networks with tunable optical and electronic properties.

“We have a very good plan going into our experiments, but we like to treat the beam time as this living and breathing thing because XPCS allows you to see things you cannot see anywhere else at conditions you cannot measure anywhere else,” said William Brackett, a graduate student at the University of Texas. ​“You want to be flexible because the data often reveals unexpected or interesting results worth deeper investigation.”

Using the XPCS beamline and rapid analysis, researchers tracked how tin-doped indium oxide nanocrystals form dynamic, covalently linked gels as the material cools from 144 degrees C to 19 degrees C (g² = intensity correlation; q = scattering vector; Δt (s) = correlation lag time). Image credit: William Brackett, University of Texas.

Before the APS-ALCF integration, the team typically collected data that would be analyzed long after beam time ended. Now, each dataset triggers an automated analysis on Polaris, with results returning to the beamline in minutes. That speed proved especially valuable when studying gel systems that evolved at very different rates.

The team was able to quickly identify whether a gelation process would be fast or slow, enabling them to adjust their experimental plan accordingly. ​“The name of the game when you have beam time is to maximize your efficiency,” Brackett said. ​“We were able to group gels by their gelation time and achieve much higher experimental throughput during our allotted time.”

The quick analysis also helped the team zero in on a narrow temperature window where a material rapidly switches between liquid and gel states. With immediate feedback, they were able to refine their measurements on the spot.

“We needed to figure out how the dynamics evolve in a quickly arresting gel, and that wouldn’t have been possible unless we could have seen the data right then and there,” Brackett said. ​“That allowed us to tweak some of the experiments to isolate the temperatures and get a more resolved idea of what’s going on around that gel point.”

Adapting Experiments as Data Comes in

In another XPCS experiment, researchers from the Olsen Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are using the beamline to study complex, disordered materials.

“Our research bridges the realm between protein and polymer dynamics,” said Brian Carrick, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. Gaining insights into the behavior of these materials could help inform the design of recyclable plastics and self-healing materials.

“We deal with a lot of systems with reversible bonds,” Carrick said. ​“You can think of it like Silly Putty. You can rip it into two pieces and put them back together, and it kind of heals. We’re trying to understand the molecular characteristics of these healing processes so we can make better recyclable materials.”

Before the APS upgrade, experiments often came with limited feedback during beam time. Without the ability to analyze data quickly, Carrick’s team had less visibility into how samples were responding during experiments, including whether the X-rays were altering the materials.

“We’ve tried running these exact same materials on XPCS in the past, but we could never analyze the data in real time,” he said. ​“So, everything we collected was either damaged by radiation, or we just couldn’t get a good enough signal. And since we couldn’t reduce the data on the beamline, we couldn’t really quantify any of it.”

With the enhanced data analysis capabilities in place, that constraint has been removed. ​“We were able to perform a measurement and less than three minutes later get our data back,” Carrick said. This allowed the team to screen samples for stability, tune exposure conditions and decide what to measure next while their experiments were still underway.

“With this kind of real-time analysis, you can start with a hypothesis at point A and then evolve the questions you’re trying to probe as your understanding grows,” Carrick said. ​“Because you have that flexibility and can see your data in real time, you can push the frontier a little bit faster.”

A New Model for Experiment-Driven Discovery

Argonne continues its work to extend these data processing capabilities to more APS beamlines and other experimental facilities, enabling scientists to integrate high performance computing seamlessly into their workflows to speed up the pace of discovery.

At the APS, that shift from delayed analysis to near-instant feedback is already changing how experiments are designed, executed and refined. With computing infrastructure operating smoothly in the background, scientists like Poling-Skutvik can concentrate on their experiments rather than data management and processing.

“The fact that it was so frictionless allowed me to focus on the science I wanted to go after rather than the details of how to manage the data and run the analyses,” Poling-Skutvik said. ​“That’s the best-case scenario — when the infrastructure exists to let you do what you need to do without limiting your ability to do it.”

This work was supported in part by the DOE Office of Science’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) and Basic Energy Sciences programs. Access to ALCF computing resources was provided through the DOE ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge award, ​“Enhancing APS-Enabled Research through Integrated Research Infrastructure,” led by Argonne’s Nicholas Schwarz. Additional funding was provided by DOE’s AmSC project.

Source: Jim Collins, Argonne Leadership Computing Facility

The post Argonne APS Upgrade Links Beamlines to Supercomputers for Real-Time Experiment Feedback appeared first on HPCwire.

Modern laptops promise a kind of magic. Shut the lid or press the sleep button, toss it in a backpack, and hours, days, or weeks later, it should wake up as if nothing happened with little to no battery drain. This sounds like a fairly trivial operation — y’know, you’re literally just asking for the computer to do nothing — but in that quiet moment when the fans whir down, the screen turns dark, and your reflection stares back at you, your computer and all its little components are actually hard at work doing their bedtime routine.

↫ Aymeric Wibo at the FreeBSD Foundation

A look at how suspend and resume works in practice, from the perspective of FreeBSD. Considering FreeBSD’s laptop focus in recent times, not an unimportant subject.

Several shots – including flu and Covid – lost their CDC recommendations under overhauls from the White House

Several shots lost their recommendation from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) after a judge’s stay against changes made by the Trump administration – which may affect access to the shots in some states. And no new vaccine recommendations may be made as long as the vaccines committee is halted.

Access to existing vaccines – and the future development of new vaccines – has been increasingly called into question under the second Trump administration, as the now-halted Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) made controversial recommendations and health officials made unilateral changes to routine vaccines, with long-term and global implications.

Adobe's Firefly AI is getting a new agentic assistant.

Ari Hodara initially thought it might be a hoax after winning raffle he found out about by chance while dining out

A Picasso painting worth more than €1m (£870,000) has been won in a raffle by a software engineer from Paris who thought the whole thing might be a hoax.

Ari Hodara learned he was the winner of the raffle on Tuesday when he answered a video call from Christie’s auction house in Paris. “How do I check that it’s not a hoax?” the 58 year-old asked when he was told he was the new owner of the 1941 work by the Spanish master.

Conflict is pushing up price of energy and food, fuelling higher borrowing costs and hitting growth, report says

• Iran war escalation could trigger global recession, IMF warns

The Iran war risks triggering a rise in global debt levels, forcing governments to choose between cushioning a cost of living shock and maintaining sound public finances, the International Monetary Fund has warned.

Against a volatile backdrop of the Middle East conflict, the Washington-based fund said the war could add to the already strained position of government finances throughout the world.

Amazon announces plans to acquire satellite service provider Globalstar in its quest to provide connectivity from space.

Amazon says the slimmer, faster device will start shipping by the end of April.

New AWS and Google Cloud frameworks enable customers to modernize digital infrastructure by making mission-critical software as easy to consume as the cloud itself

LUXEMBOURG, April 15, 2026 — SUSE, a global leader in enterprise open source solutions, has updated its Cloud Elevate Program, a pillar of the SUSE One Partner Program, to simplify buying enterprise software. Customers can now buy SUSE mission-critical software directly through AWS and Google Cloud using their existing cloud credits.

“By expanding the Cloud Elevate Program, we are easing the procurement and consumption process that often slows down new projects,” said Hayley Wienszczak, global head of ecosystem programs, SUSE. “This is about choice: giving our customers and partners the flexibility to buy and run SUSE software wherever they do business, without the headache of traditional billing.”

By introducing new commercial frameworks for AWS and Google Cloud, SUSE is removing the traditional barriers of complex procurement, allowing customers to modernize their digital infrastructure with the same speed and ease as the cloud itself. These changes enable SUSE’s partners to help customers transition to the public cloud while continuing to use their preferred technology stacks and providers.

Modernizing How Enterprises Buy Software

As organizations transition to cloud-native environments, traditional procurement processes create bottlenecks. The expanded Cloud Elevate Program addresses these hurdles directly through two key updates:

• AWS Private Offers through Distributors: Authorized distributors can now manage custom pricing while keeping billing consolidated under a single AWS account.
• Google Cloud Marketplace Channel Private Offers: Partners can push discounted, tailored terms directly to a customer’s Google Cloud console.

Using Pre-Committed Cloud Spend

The program also addresses the challenge of managing annual spend commitments with cloud providers. The Cloud Elevate Program allows customers to use pre-committed cloud credits to fund infrastructure projects using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and SUSE Rancher Prime. This eases the procurement process for all parties and accelerates Time-To-Value (TTV) for customers.

Key benefits of this streamlined approach include:

• 40% Faster Sales: Deals move from initial intent to closing significantly faster.
• 66% Less Admin Time: Standardized contracts eliminate the need to manage hundreds of individual vendor payments.
• 20 Days Earlier Deployment: Software is ready for engineering teams nearly three weeks sooner than through traditional channels.

About SUSE

SUSE is a global leader in enterprise open source software, across Linux operating systems, Kubernetes container management, Edge solutions and AI. The majority of the Fortune 500 rely on SUSE to provide resilient infrastructure, enabling IT leaders to optimize cost and manage heterogeneous environments. SUSE collaborates with partners and communities to provide organizations with choices to maximize their current IT systems and innovate with next-generation technologies across traditional on-premises to cloud native, multi-cloud to edge and beyond. For more information, visit www.suse.com.

Source: SUSE

The post SUSE Expands Cloud Elevate Program to Simplify Cloud Procurement on AWS and Google Cloud appeared first on HPCwire.

Here are our top picks for devices that pause, record and stream free over-the-air television with an antenna.

• Ball appeared to trip Bam Adebayo in Tuesday’s game

• Hornets went on to win play-in game in overtime

Miami coach Erik Spoelstra said LaMelo Ball should have been ejected for tripping Bam Adebayo, leading to an injury that knocked the Heat’s star center out of Tuesday night’s 127-126 play-in tournament loss to the Charlotte Hornets.

Ball fell to the floor after missing a shot on a drive to the basket early in the second quarter, and appeared to reach out and grab Adebayo’s left leg, causing the center to fall on his back. Ball was not called for a foul, and Adebayo remained on the floor as play continued. He eventually walked to the locker room under his own power but did not return.

The European Commission's new app is "technically ready and soon available," says President Ursula von der Leyen.

Lebanon–Israel talks must be given a chance Expert comment thilton.drupal 15 April 2026

Rare direct talks are unlikely to succeed in the long-term without Hezbollah disarming, but they are a welcome opportunity for the Lebanese state to regain its authority in foreign policy and pursue confidence-building measures with Israel.

The US hosted direct talks between Lebanon and Israel in Washington this week against the backdrop of Israel’s ongoing strikes targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The Lebanese and Israeli ambassadors to the US, along with the US ambassador to Lebanon, met in Washington on Tuesday. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio chaired the meeting, which he hailed as a ‘historic gathering that we hope to build on.’ 

The State Department said that both sides agreed to ‘launch direct negotiations at a mutually agreed time and venue.’

While significant hurdles remain, most notably the issue of Hezbollah’s disarmament, these talks should be welcomed as an important initial confidence-building measure that lays the ground for much-needed future negotiations. Importantly, this reasserts the Lebanese state’s independence and authority in foreign policy. 

New cast, same plot?

The talks bring back memories of when the two sides met directly and signed a short-lived accord during Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war. 

In 1983, a year after Israel launched an invasion of Lebanon with the aim of expelling Palestinian militants, Lebanese President Amin Gemayel entered into negotiations with Israel. On May 17 of that year, both parties reached an agreement that briefly ended the state of war between the two countries.

However, the agreement lasted only a short while due to opposition from Syrian President Hafez Assad and pro-Syrian factions in Lebanon. 

Today, the threat to Israel from Palestinian militants in Lebanon is gone. So is the Assad regime. But Hezbollah remains a formidable security challenge to Israel. This is despite the group having been severely weakened over the past two years due to Israel decapitating its leadership, penetrating its ranks and degrading much of its military capacity.

But Israel cannot simply oust Hezbollah – a Lebanese party with Lebanese fighters, parliamentarians, ministers and supporters – from Lebanon like it did with the Palestine Liberation Organization in the 1980s. Nor can it disarm Hezbollah without launching another deep and costly ground invasion, with severe consequences for Lebanon.

Instead, Israel says it is trying to create a buffer zone in southern Lebanon – like it did in 1985-2000 – to push Hezbollah away from the border and reduce the threat of missile attacks or ground infiltration. Hezbollah restarted drone and missile attacks against Israel following the US-Israeli war on Iran, the group’s main patron.

These Israeli strikes and evacuation orders have created a dire humanitarian situation in southern Lebanon. More than 80 towns and villages have been emptied and more than 15 per cent of Lebanon’s population displaced. 

Last week, Israel bombed more than 100 targets across the country in 10 minutes, killing hundreds of people. The wave of strikes came despite the US-Iran ceasefire, which Tehran and Islamabad said included Lebanon (a claim rejected by the US).

Hezbollah’s opposition